What did you love to do when you were 10 years old?  What do you love to do now?  What do you do that makes you lose track of time or skip a meal or wake up in the middle of the night with an idea?  Those are the things you’re passionate about.  

Step 1: Identify your passions

Step 2: Turn them into actions

I’ve always loved books and everything about them—reading, hanging out in a library or book store, attending author events.  And I had always had somewhere in the back of my mind, “Why don’t you write a book?”  

In November 2005, I was sitting in a dugout during a senior baseball tournament in Fort Myers, Fla. I was pursuing another of my passions, baseball. People back home were shoveling snow. The game was being played in the stadium where the Boston Red Sox played their spring training games—dark green grass, immaculately trimmed basepaths, real dugouts, palm trees swaying beyond the outfield fence, Ann in the stands, and surrounded by other old farts like myself, who were still loving and playing the game of our youth.

“Someone should tell the story of this senior baseball community,” I thought to myself. On the way back to the motel after the game—no, I don’t remember who won—I declared to Ann, “I’m going to write a book.”

Eighteen months later, Baseball: Never Too Old to Play the Game, was published.  

Now, 10 years after that first declaration, my fifth book has been published, and it’s my first novel—Body Not Recovered.  

I have been fortunate to be able to identify and pursue my passions, baseball and books, in retirement.  And I’ve enjoyed writing about another of my passions, University City High School and my class of 1964.  Book two is Hail Hail to U City High, the story of my class.  Book four is University City Schools: Our First 100 Years.  And I couldn’t resist—Body Not Recovered begins in the U City cafeteria just before graduation in 1964 and ends in the gym at the class’s 10-year reunion.

What are your passions?  Have you turned them into actions?