Success Doesn't Have an Expiration Date

Ultimize. David Brooks wrote a piece in The Atlantic called "You Might Be a Late Bloomer," and it pushes back on one of the most damaging lies our culture tells us about success and age. The lie is this: if you haven't made it by age 30, eh, you probably never will. We're obsessed with young success. Forbes publishes a 30 Under 30 list every year. Silicon Valley treats founders over 40 like they should be applying for AARP membership. Mark Zuckerberg once said, in what is genuinely one of the dumbest sentences ever uttered by a billionaire, "Young people are just smarter." Hmm. This from a man whose own platform is now considered uncool by actual young people. But that's a different conversation. The point is, we've built an entire mythology around the teenage genius in a hoodie who drops out of Harvard at age 18 and changes the world by 25. And that mythology does real damage to the other 90%+ of people, the ones who are 35, 45, or 55, still trying to figure it all out, who have quietly absorbed the message that the window is closed and the message— and they missed it. That's the problem. The message is wrong, and the data proves it. According to research cited in The Atlantic, A 45-year-old is twice as likely to produce a scientific breakthrough as a 25-year-old. The average successful entrepreneur is not 18 but 45. A tech founder who is 50 is twice as likely to build a successful company as one who's 30. Nobody puts that on a magazine cover. Bernie Marcus got fired from his job at a home improvement chain at age 49. He and his partner sat in a Los Angeles coffee shop for a year and hatched a new idea. They called it The Home Depot. By 1990, it was the largest home improvement chain in America. When Marcus died in 2024, his net worth was around $10 billion. Hey, that's not bad. He was nearly 50 when he started over. You don't hear that story nearly often enough. Brooks distinguished between early bloomers, prodigies who execute a big idea fast, and what he calls the masters, people who aren't impressive, or at least that impressive when they're young, people who wonder, who fail, who keep accumulating experience until late in the game, or at least relatively late in the game, everything clicks. Momofuku Ando was 48 when he invented instant ramen, tinkering behind his house in Japan. Today it's consumed 100 billion times a year worldwide. Vera Wang was a figure skater and magazine editor before designing her first wedding dress at age 40. Linda Weinman founded Lynda.com at age 40. LinkedIn bought it for $1.5 billion a number of years later. These are not flukes. Late bloomers often build more durable things than prodigies because they've had more time to fail. Learn and develop what Brooks calls diversity, diverse curiosity, the ability to pull from wide experience that early specialists simply don't have. Now, I want to get personal, if that's okay with you. From the age of 25 to 39, I personally failed at virtually everything I tried— television shows, radio shows, consulting ventures, website businesses. More than 100 projects that either never launched or launched and failed and failed miserably and disappeared. My net worth at the age of 39 was zero. The only reason I never went bankrupt is I had nothing worth protecting. Then I turned 40, not magically, but years of accumulated failure and learning finally came together. I started building online courses in communication, doing training services, public speaking. Today I've got 12 million student enrollments and I'm arguably the most followed online communications trainer in the world. Now, none of that was possible at age 25. I needed the failure. I needed the internet, which I didn't have. I needed the wandering. I needed 15 years of trying things that didn't work. To develop the judgment to build the things that came. Brooks calls that the Matthews Effect. Knowledge begets knowledge. The more you fail, the better you understand what success actually requires. But here's the trap. The biggest enemy of the late bloomer isn't age. People think it is. It's not. The biggest enemy is inertia. It's so easy to do your one job, come home and spend every remaining hour on autopilot. Netflix, sports, scrolling, nothing wrong with any of those in doses. The problem is that for millions of people, it's now 100% of their non-working time, which means you're not learning anything new. You're not building anything, not getting better at anything. If you're not learning, you're stagnating. And if you're stagnating, your chances of being more successful 5 years from now are essentially zero. Here's what I'd suggest. Cut 1 hour of Netflix, learn something, build something, create something someone would pay for. It could be an app, it could be a website, it could be a lemonade stand. I don't care. We live in an economy that rewards creators above everything else. You're not too old, but you do have to show up. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives." Brooks' entire article is a rebuttal to that sentence. Cézanne was considered a failed painter well into middle age. His best friend wrote a novel with a character based on him, a failed artist who commits suicide. Cézanne read it, stopped speaking to the friend, went back to his studio, and spent the next decade painting the same mountain over and over until he produced work that both Picasso and Matisse called the foundation of modern art. He did his greatest work after people had written him off. You might be a late bloomer. If you spent years trying things that didn't work, wandering, failing, accumulating experience without clear direction, that's not evidence that you don't have it. It might be evidence that you're building towards something that actually takes time to get right. But yet to protect that hour or 2 or 3 every day from the algorithm that wants to keep you comfortably, passively entertained until you run out of time. Don't give it that hour. That hour is yours. So please, if you are no longer 18 or 20 or less than 30 and think you can't be successful or even wildly successful on your own terms, don't buy into that myth. But it's not going to come just from doing the same old thing you've been doing every day the last 5 years. If you're unhappy with what you're doing, carve time out. Everybody has some free time. It may be that bus ride to the factory where you work a 12-hour shift. Use that bus ride time instead of watching silly videos, Watch it where you're learning something, or spend that time writing or creative. You're not too old, it's not too late. Ultimize.