The Advice We Finally Took

For most of my career I sat on the other side of the desk, telling young people to be brave with their lives. Follow the thing that pulls at you. Notice what you keep coming back to when no one is grading it. Do not wait until the path is obvious, because it never is - you find it by walking. I believed every word. I had watched it come true for thousands of students. And for a long time it did not once occur to me that the advice was also meant for me.

Curiosity is patient, but it does not sit still. It tugs. Mine tugged at a successful, settled time in my life — family, home, and career all in alignment — when I gave myself permission to go back to school and study something that was, at the time, only a topic of interest. Nothing about the timing was convenient. The world was upended not long after I started, and I did the work in a corner of my bedroom while a toddler slept and the days ran impossibly long. But that is the thing about curiosity: it does not check whether you are ready. It grows into interest whether or not the calendar agrees.

And interest, if you let it, keeps growing. It becomes belief. Belief becomes action. I have said that ladder out loud to students more times than I can count — curiosity to interest, interest to a path you can actually name and walk. What I did not fully understand until later was how much harder it is to climb it yourself than to point at it for someone else.

That is the honest part, and I want to name it plainly. Giving the advice is easy. Taking it is not. When you are older, when people are leaning on you from both directions, children still growing, parents beginning to need you, being bold does not feel like freedom. It feels like a risk you are choosing on purpose while everyone is watching. That is exactly the fear we ask eighteen-year-olds to walk through. It is a great deal to ask. I know now, because I finally had to ask it of myself.

Founding Sum Total, later than anyone would call the right time, was me climbing my own ladder. My partner Brandi and I had each spent decades inside enrollment offices, following our curiosities into interests into work we cared about. Building something of our own was the next rung, the one that asked us to be brave with our own lives the way we had always asked students to be with theirs. It was not easy or fast. It was neither. But it was the truest version of the thing we had been counseling all along.

I think this is the quiet gift of doing it later. When you follow the thread as an older person, you are not just chasing a passion; you are proving, to yourself and to the young people watching you, that the ladder is real. That curiosity does become a path. That boldness is not a thing you age out of. My daughter has a small desk that once held all my late-night, half-formed possible, and she will grow up having watched her mother climb the exact ladder her mother describes.

So here is what I would say to any parent who reads this and feels the tug of some unfinished curiosity of their own. You are not too late, and you are not too old, and the fact that people are counting on you is not the reason to wait, it is the reason to show them. Follow the thread. Name the interest. Take one real step toward a path you can walk. Your children are learning what boldness looks like from you, not from a lecture.

We take our own advice now, out loud, on purpose. That is the whole idea behind how we counsel families at Sum Total — the same courage we ask of students, we ask of ourselves and of the parents in the room. If a curiosity of yours, or your child's, is looking for its next rung, schedule a Free Conversation with us: 20 minutes, no commitment, no pressure. And if this reaches a family standing at the bottom of that ladder, that is exactly who it is for.

Robynne Lofton is Co-Founder of Sum Total Consulting.