From Success & Wisdom, our YouTube channel · about 9 weeks left in 2026
Chain check first: how many X's this week? Reply with the number. (New here? Draw 7 boxes on a card. Do one small thing toward your goal each day and put an X in a box.)
For the rest of this year, these letters go after one thing: the quiet beliefs that stop good people from starting again. And for most people reading this, the loudest one is five words long.
"I'm too old for that."
Maybe you've never said it out loud. But you've probably thought it about a business, a skill, a new line of work, a trip, or a dream you put away twenty years ago. So let's put that sentence on trial.
What 2.7 million founders tell us
A few years ago, economists from MIT, Northwestern University and the US Census Bureau looked at the founders of new businesses across the United States, about 2.7 million people, and asked a simple question: how old were the people behind the fastest growing ones?
We all have the picture in our heads. The 22 year old in a hoodie.
The real answer: the average founder of the fastest growing 1 in 1,000 new companies was 45 years old. And a 50 year old founder was about 1.8 times more likely to build one of those top companies than a 30 year old.
Their age wasn't the obstacle. It was the advantage: the experience, the contacts, the savings, the judgment.
The man who lost almost everything at 47
In 1957, the Osaka credit union Momofuku Ando helped run went bankrupt. He lost almost everything he owned except the rented house he lived in.
He was 47. Instead of giving up, he built a small shed behind that house and started working on one idea: a noodle anyone could make at home in a couple of minutes. He failed again and again, for about a year.
In August 1958, at 48, he launched Chicken Ramen, instant noodles you only had to pour hot water on. At 61 he did it again with Cup Noodles. Today people eat billions of servings of instant noodles every year.
Hill saw it too
After studying thousands of people, Napoleon Hill wrote this in 1937:
"Men who succeed in an outstanding way, seldom do so before the age of forty, and more often they do not strike their real pace until they are well beyond the age of fifty."
Hill wrote "men" because of his time. The 2.7 million founders were men and women. The lesson is the same. Your forties and fifties are not the end of the road. For many people, they are where the road really starts.
What to do this week
Finish this sentence on paper, honestly: "I'm too old to ______."
Cross out "too old" and write "just the right age" above it.
Under it, write the smallest first step you could take this week. One phone call. One class. One page. Fifteen minutes.
Take that step before next week's letter, and keep the chain going.
A question to carry this week
What is the one thing you gave up on because you decided you were too old?
Reply and tell me. I read every reply.
Talk soon,
P.S. Next week: why your brain is not finished growing. Researchers taught people around 60 to juggle and scanned their brains before and after.