Now, Discover Your Strengths

I've been reading Now, Discover Your Strenths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. It has to do with identifying strengths in our lives. Here are a couple of examples of people who postponed using their talents / stengths.

The Booker Prize-winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, burdened by the demads of providing for her family without the help of her alcoholic husband, wasn't able to honor her urge to write until well into her fifties. Once released by their permanent seperation, this urge proved as irrepressible as a teenager's. Over the last twenty years of her life she published twelve novels, and before her recent death at eighty, she was widely considered... "the best of all British novelists".

[p. 70]

Anna Mary Robertson Moses... began sketching as a young child and was so intent on incorporating every nuance of her surroundings that she mixed the juice of berries and grapes to bring color to her drawings. But her ardent sketching was soon pushed aside by the demands of the farming life, and for sixty years she didn't paint at all. Finally, at the age of seventy-eight, she retired from farming, allowed herself the luxury of lettings her talent loose, and, like Penelope Fitzgerald, was quickly borne aloft by its pent-up energy. By the time of her death twenty-three years later she had painted thousands of scenes remembered from her childhood, exhibited her pictures in fifteen one-woman shows, and became known around the world as the artist Grandma Moses.

[p. 71]