Starting a business has never come with a age limit but with a lot of “buts”, “I wish”s and “do you really think”s. Mid-life crisis brings with it a dozen problems and you sure don’t want another problem called “starting anew”. The excuses to put off the plan are more likely to occur than starting a flame of entrepreneurship. Also research findings show, once you hit 30, change is unwelcome. You’d rather drink the same old filter coffee than explore where you can find a Java chip Frappuccino!
Pushing aside all the “buts”, if you believe cruising out to find that exotic Frappuccino is any day better than sitting around for the ever known taste of filter coffee-then entrepreneurship is your cup of tea! Really, starting a new venture has never had an expiry date. Thinking you’re too old for it has! For it has to stop now!
It’s hard for you to believe, especially when 20 something’s like Mark Zuckerberg have now taken over the start-up empire, even 30 seems old. There are 2 major questions that may haunt you:
“Don’t you think I’m too old for it now?” and “What if I fail?”. Fair enough. These 2 questions have already been answered for us by all those entrepreneurs who we worship now.
“Don’t you think I’m too old for it now?” Entrepreneurship is about inventing an idea and sticking to it like gum. If you have a life changing idea that will help public at large, you’ve the keys to The hall of fame. As they say, age is just a number.
What really matters how old your thinking is.
Col Harland Sanders was 65 when he started KFC. Ray Kroc was 52 when he founded Mc Donald’s and 60 before he actually started making money. Ray Kroc did blue collar jobs until he founded Mc Donald’s. Arianna Huffington gave her “not more than 40” peer publishers a run for their money by starting Huffington Post at 54.
Achievements don’t come with deadlines and life hacking ideas don’t stop till you’re dead. J K Rowling, a single mom, living on welfare, on a train to Manchester dreamt about a little wizard and a school called Hogwarts – made a fortune selling Harry Potter. She was rejected by the biggest publishing houses in London. They laughed at her foolishness in writing about this fantasy boy with a scar excelling in witchcraft. Daniel Radcliff and Emma Watson solely live on the movie’s success. Who’s laughing now?
So there’s never a bad time to start a good thing. All you need is the belief to keep you in the race and the persistency to endure big setbacks for a lifetime of achievement.
“What if I fail?”
When you toss a coin, there are 50:50 chances of getting heads or tails. The same way when you decide on something new – you have equal chances of it clicking and flopping. But our brain is trained in such a way that negative thoughts reach your mind faster than it’s positive counterparts.
“Provide for future unexpected losses and ignore future unexpected gains” is one core principle of accountancy, isn’t it! So that’s how it’s been for a long time. But there are a pack of new age entrepreneurs who defy these age old standards.
The praises of creating Facebook have drowned the losses Mark suffered in his maiden ventures like Coursematch and Facemash which bombed. Chad Hurley started Youtube, a famous venture which did not stop him from exploring his other options. He later started Zeen and MlxBit which were failures.
Richard Branson is a perfect example of “fearless”. In the dozen enterprises he started, he’s succeeded only countable times. Between Virgin Galactic, Virgin Airways and Virgin Records- there’s a spectrum of different industries he entered only to deplete his income by funding his loss making ventures!
Someone rightly said, “Do not let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game”
Entrepreneurship is a chance to create something of value from nothing. An idea and a fearless heart is a terrific combination for success. Money isn’t even a factor to drop a revolutionizing thought, because if your idea is “out-of-the box” and you are willing to forgo many luxuries – someone will somehow fund you.
Even a research conducted by Vivek Wadhwa, an academic and tech entrepreneur, and the Kauffman Foundation, the average age of successful start-up founders in Silicon Valley was 40. And high-growth start-ups are almost twice as likely to be launched by people over 55 as by people 20 to 34. [Source]
Quality is long remembered after the price is forgotten!
[source: Shutterstock]
Absolutely. I agreed.