There is a moment when you realise the timeline was always a fiction. Ray Kroc was 52 when he transformed a small burger operation into McDonald's. Colonel Sanders was 62, broke and collecting Social Security, when he began franchising his chicken recipe. Frank McCourt was 66 when he wrote "Angela's Ashes" and won the Pulitzer Prize. Each of these men understood something that escapes most of us: experience is not a burden to carry but fuel to burn.
We treat age like expiration dates on milk, as if decades of accumulated wisdom suddenly turn sour at some arbitrary point. Society whispers lies about peak performance, telling us our best years are behind us, that we should have figured this out by now, that the game belongs to the young. But the entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators who reshape the world in their later years operate by different rules entirely.
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