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Gone are the days when people work for the same company their entire careers (if those days ever existed in the first place). We now bounce around like charged protons in an open system, moving from company to company, sector to sector. Career-reinvention is electric right now, but it’s not an entirely new phenomena. Below are some of greatest career-switchers of the last 150 years.

Vincent Van Gogh. The Dutch Master was not master of any domains until his early 30s, barely five years before his death. Before then he painted in broad brush strokes of dilettantism – inventing and re-inventing himself as a schoolmaster, art dealer, student priest, and missionary. Luckily for us, he harnessed his talents just in time to influence Western art for the next several hundred years.

Arnold Schwarzenegger. Love him or despise him, it’s hard to argue that Ahhnold hasn’t switched careers successfully on more than one occasion. The seven-time Mr. Olympia retired from competition only to dominate another realm; he eventually became the highest-grossing actor in movie history. And when the Terminator series ran its course (arguably two movies too late), Schwarzenegger cashed in on his personal dynamism and became Governor of the State of California, at the age of 56.

Kurt Warner. The Iowan holds a unique place on this list because his goals never wavered; they were merely temporarily derailed. Warner was not drafted by the NFL coming out of college. He then found himself stocking shelves at the Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa for $5.50 an hour before spending three seasons in the fledgling Arena Football league. In 1998, he finally caught on with the St. Louis Rams of the NFL. He was a backup until the starter went down with an injury in the preseason. Warner responded by having one of the best seasons in NFL history, leading the Rams to a championship, and getting named Super Bowl MVP in a storybook season for the ages.

Julia Child. Mrs. Child was successful in many endeavors throughout her career; she just didn’t become a public gourmand until the age of 49. Before then she worked as advertising writer in New York, until she joined the Office of Strategic Services(!) in the run-up to WWII. She and her husband settled in Paris after the war, where she started taking classes at Cordon Bleu. And the rest is culinary history…

Charles Bukowski. The author famously spent most of his young professional career in a post office, an experience he chronicled in a titular memoir that continues to touch late bloomers everywhere. A confluence of bad luck, alcoholism, and quiescence caused in large part by adolescent acne that was treated incorrectly, Bukowski’s hermetic lifestyle kept his talents from the world’s eye until he published his first novel at the age of 49.

Sojourner Truth. This American hero was first limited by tenebrous history, not from misdirection or a lack of focus. Born into slavery, she couldn’t read or write until she was 30, when she learned Low Dutch from her parents and masters. After gaining freedom shortly thereafter, she served as a maid in Manhattan for the next 15 years, during which time she had a vision which told her to share her experiences. At the age of 53, she published The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which articulated the degradations of slavery in sparkling prose. In 1864 she was invited to the White House to meet President Lincoln.