this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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I’d say he lived a pretty remarkable life before that;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien
He was constructing his own languages and scripts in his teens, after having learned Anglo Saxon and Latin (and seeing how those fed into modern English), plus Esperanto.
He traveled all over Europe in the summers between university semesters, taking in the different landscapes, cultures, and languages.
He was a British Army Officer for World War I, leading units consisting of men from different backgrounds (class, education, trade) from his own. He devised a code system to bypass Army censors to keep his wife updated on his location and movements. And he experienced the horrors of being in the front lines of one of the most horrific wars in history.
Then after the war he became an accomplished academic, worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, specialized in Middle English and Old English translations, and translated several major works (including the definitive translation of Gawain and the Green Knight).
So by the time he started formally working on Lord of the Rings, he had built up such a rich set of experiences, skillsets, and knowledge that everything he knew was going into that world building.
No way a 25-year-old could have written Lord of the Rings. He needed 20+ years of adult experience to get to the point where he could write it.
And honestly, this is just as encouraging. Some of this is stuff you cant exactly list on a CV for a job application. A lot of people have interesting experiences, hobbies and special interests under their belt and still feel bad about themselves because their unique skills/knowledge isn't exactly marketable or something your mum would brag about to other parents. And the stuff that actually does fall under the category of classic success (being in academia, working on the dictionary) isn't at all what he's famous for. If it's cool when Tolkien has a life like this, your unique experiences and skills are cool, too.
You can list all of those things in a resume, besides maybe the traveling.
There's a book I read, Range by David Epstein, that really reinforces the idea that lots of experiences that don't cleanly fit into a CV are still very valuable. The core idea is that late specialization makes for better specialists, because very few fields stand alone. Having contextual background makes it so that you can better mix and match cross disciplinary skills, with your own experience and knowledge of yourself, to be better at whatever it is you're doing.
The examples used in the book are Roger Federer (played many sports and didn't specialize in tennis until much later than the typical pro), Django Reinhardt (never formally schooled in music but an amazing jazz guitarist even after he lost 3 fingers), Van Gogh (many failed careers before finding success as a painter), and a bunch of others.
But the core principle is the same: the real world is messy and doesn't boil down to simple factors, so having breadth is important when the system you come up in changes underneath your feet. The book also uses the counterexamples of Tiger Woods and the Polgar sisters who were dominant chess players, to describe how the fields of golf and chess give immediate, true, and objective feedback in a way that most of the world doesn't.
I genuinely believe the real hurdle future generations will have to solve is this: chances are you will never be as bored as Tolkien likely spent the majority of his life. Being bored today is a choice; before the information age it was a reality. When people are desperately trying to escape boredom it makes the incentive to do crazy shit like make up your own language considerably more tangible.
Hops off soapbox