[MrVandemar]

Never, ever, too late. Heard a story of an 80 year-old who said, "If I'd taken up violin when I was 60, I'd have been playing for 20 years by now."

Anything you can do that brings you satifaction or exercises your brain and keeps it sharp is a great thing.

[hinkley]

I did the math on the 10,000 hours theory once and concluded that this gives me permission to start something late in life. If you went as hard as you can you could reach expert level in a dozen things in a single lifetime, if that was your goal. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to expect to be able to achieve two or three. Even if they consider their youth 'wasted'.

Used to know a guy who was as old as I am now when he took up Go. Took him less than ten years to reach a 3 dan rating, which is on the edge of where common wisdom says you need to start as a child to achieve better than that. But any time he wasn't working, he was looking at Go games (and I suspect sometimes when he was working). If he started 5 years younger or lives long enough I expect he'll disprove that rule.

Of course it always helps if you're a polymath. There's a lot of social friction involved with picking up something that is expected of 14 year olds. If you can teach yourself you can skip over a lot of that.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

I met a woman who picked up painting after she retired. After a few years she got pretty good, and after a decade she got really good, and by the time I met her she was in her late 70s, happy as hell, and making more money painting than she ever did during her actual career as a teacher.

She was doing a lot more than 30 minutes per day, but it was pretty comforting for me to realize that nothing's really stopping most people from continuing to learn and grow deep into their twilight years if that's what they want to do.