Why 48 Was Not Too Late

I have heard people write themselves off at 26. Not out loud, not in those words, but in the shrug that comes when you ask what they are working on and they say they missed their window. They have decided the story is already written. They are wrong, and I have proof sitting across from me.

The man I was talking to did not start the work that would define him until he was 48 years old. Thirty plus years later, that work had moved millions of dollars toward a mission and touched more people than he can count. Nobody looking at his life today would call it a late start. They would call it a career. But the record says he was 48 when the real thing began, and everything before that looked, from the inside, like a man taking whatever door happened to open next.

That is the part I wanted to slow down on. Not the success. The 25 years of ordinary decisions that made the success possible.

The Year He Quit and Called It a Win

He graduated in 1968, got married the same year, and took a job teaching general business and business math to ninth graders. I asked if he loved it. He said he loved it when he quit.

Ninth graders, it turns out, did not care about writing checks or balancing a bank account. He lasted a year. One whole year, and then he was looking again.

There is a version of that story where a young man decides he is a failure. First real job out of college, gone in twelve months, no clear direction, a new marriage and no plan. But that is not how he tells it. He tells it as information. He learned something true about himself, and he moved.

I think most people would rather stay in a job that is quietly killing them than admit the year was a mistake. He admitted it in twelve months and kept going. That is not indecision. That is a person willing to be corrected by reality.

A Joke That Turned Into a Phone Call

The next door was a health insurance company with a Medicare contract, auditing hospitals and nursing homes to make sure they were doing what they were supposed to do. It moved him and my mom to Philadelphia. She taught typing there, back when a mistake on the top copy meant correcting every carbon sheet underneath it.

They stayed two and a half, maybe three years. Then they went back to homecoming at the college they had graduated from, Evangel, and ran into friends who had settled in Indianapolis. One of them asked when they were going to move to Indy. He said, whenever you find me a job. He meant it as a joke. He had no intention of moving.

Two weeks later a CPA firm in Indianapolis called. They had a stack of nursing homes to audit and needed somebody with exactly the background he had spent three years building in Philadelphia.

He did not set out to be a CPA. He was a business major who had never taken an accounting class. But he had done audits, and somebody needed audits done, and the phone rang. That is the whole mechanism. He kept saying yes to the next reasonable thing, and the next reasonable thing kept turning out to be preparation.

The Room Where Nobody Was Watching

Here is the part of the story that does not make the highlight reel.

Taking the job meant becoming a CPA, which he was not. So he took accounting and tax classes at night while working a full day. He also did not know, until he arrived in December, that the firm had a rule. During tax season you worked eight to five, went home for dinner, and came back for another two hours. Everyone. Even the new guy with nothing to do yet.

And my mom was not there. She had to finish out her teaching year in Philadelphia. So he sat in an office in the middle of an Indianapolis winter, dark outside by five, nothing on his desk, nobody he knew in the building, hunting for something to read to fill the hours.

He told me what went through his head in that room. What have I done.

I asked what kept him from retreating. He said they had friends there, and he knew that once they got settled in, it would work. Then he added something that I did not expect to be the hinge of the whole conversation. It was a new experience.

What One Shift at the Ketchup Factory Settled Forever

He has told me the ketchup factory story my whole life. He worked one shift, and the lesson was immediate and permanent. This is not what I want to do for the rest of my life.

One shift. Not a year of soul searching, not a personality assessment, not a five year plan. He put himself in the room, the room answered the question, and he took the answer seriously.

That is the pattern under everything else. Teaching, gone in a year, same reason. Philadelphia, three years, useful, then over. He was not waiting for certainty before he acted. He was acting in order to produce certainty, and he was honest enough to accept the results even when they were inconvenient.

Most of us do this backward. We try to think our way to clarity before we move, and then we call the paralysis discernment.

The Math That Keeps Getting Run Wrong

When I asked whether he actually enjoys new experiences, he said, if you look through my history, you will probably find out that I did a lot of that.

I said that must be where his son gets it. He said yes. And in that one exchange I understood something about myself I had never named.

Here is what I keep coming back to. If you had interviewed him at 30, or 40, or 45, there would have been no story. A CPA in Indianapolis with a good family and a solid practice. Findable to his clients, invisible to everyone else. The thing that made him worth putting a microphone in front of had not happened yet.

But it was being built. Every open door he walked through, every job he was honest enough to leave, every night class after a ten hour day, every winter evening in an empty office wondering what he had done. None of that felt like preparation while it was happening. It felt like a life.

So when somebody tells me it is too late for them, I want to ask what they think they are disqualified from. The 48 year old in this story was not qualified either. He was just available.

You Are Closer Than the Number Suggests

You are not behind. You are accumulating.

The expertise you think is too ordinary to talk about is the same kind of expertise that made a phone call worth making two weeks after a joke. Somebody out there is looking for exactly what you have already lived through, and the only reason they have not found you is that you have not said it anywhere they can hear it.

If you have been running the math on whether your voice is worth the effort, I would love to help you check the numbers. That is what the Content Clarity Audit is for. No pitch, just a clear look at what you have already built and what it would take to make it findable.

Create your art. The world is waiting.

#createyourart

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Full Transcript

Darren: So you’re 48 years old when you start this, and I love bringing that point out, because a lot of people go, oh, it’s too late for me. I haven’t done anything significant, it’s too late for me. And at 48 years old, you start out on a journey that 30 plus years later is millions of dollars to mission, successful, the whole thing from start to finish. And some people at 26 are going, oh, I’m washed up.

Dave: No, you got plenty of time. Plenty of time.

Darren: Anyway, let’s go back. Let’s go back a little bit before 48. You started out as a CPA, right? And you kind of went the safe road. You worked at a firm, right?

Dave: That’s not real. If you want to really go back to the beginning…

Darren: Okay, we’re going back a step before then.

Dave: Graduated from college. Now, I always had a part-time job from the time I was in tenth grade, so we don’t need to talk about those.

Darren: Oh, you’ve had some good part-time jobs though.

Dave: That’s true. Maybe we’ll talk about that.

Darren: We might get there. The ketchup factory. The hotel. We may want to talk about those.

Dave: But in 1968, I graduated. We got married that year. My full-time gig started out as a ninth grade school teacher.

Darren: Oh.

Dave: Teaching general business and business math to ninth graders.

Darren: Did you love that?

Dave: Well, I loved it when I quit. I learned real quick that ninth graders didn’t really care about learning how to write a check and balance a bank account and all that. It was a real struggle for me. So I lasted a year.

Darren: One whole year. And were you a CPA at this point? You hadn’t even taken that, or even thought about being one at that point. Ah, gotcha.

Dave: So when that year came up, I was looking for a job. Well, I found a job. There was a health insurance company that had a contract with the Medicare program to audit hospitals and nursing homes, to make sure that they were doing what they were supposed to do. And so I took that job. Karen was teaching school at the time, and so we ended up having to move to Philadelphia.

Darren: No.

Dave: So we moved to Philadelphia and she got a job there. She taught typing. You know what typing is?

Darren: I was in the last of the typing classes, I believe.

Dave: Yeah. And if you needed copies, you used carbon paper.

Darren: Oh, wow. Carbon paper. That’s taking me back.

Dave: Yeah, but don’t make a mistake on the top one, because you’ve got to correct them all.

Darren: Oh.

Dave: So we moved to Philadelphia, and we were there, I think, about three years. Two and a half, three years. And we had gone to homecoming at the college we graduated from, Evangel, Evangel University now. We had gone there and run into some friends from when we were in school who lived in Indianapolis.

Darren: Okay, that was the connection to Indy.

Dave: Yeah. And the one guy says to me, when are you guys gonna move to Indianapolis? And I just said, whenever you find me a job. I didn’t plan on moving there. But about two weeks later, I get a call from a CPA firm, and that’s where it all started. They called, and they had a number of nursing homes that they did audits for and all that. They needed somebody that had the background, and since I did audits, they thought that I would really love to do that.

Darren: Oh yeah. So in Philly you’re working for a company that does audits.

Dave: Correct.

Darren: And then you make this joke with a buddy, find me a job. They call with literally a job in Indy for a company that does audits. That’s what ends up bringing you here, is that job.

Dave: That’s where it all started.

Darren: Okay, so it’s not like you set out to be a CPA. You were, again, kind of following the steps of what life was having for you. You always told me, when you worked in the ketchup factory, you were like, I at least learned what I didn’t want to do for the rest of my life.

Dave: That was the lesson that I learned. After one shift, this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Darren: So you just continue. Now school teacher, and then it’s like, all right, that wasn’t really for me, not what I want to do. Next door’s open, let’s step into that and kind of see how that flows. And so there’s an interesting parallel as you’re starting to unfold some of these stories, of just kind of taking the logical next step that’s in front of you. And you make a joke to a buddy about, get me a job in Indy, next thing you know you’re here in Indy. Wow, that’s cool. So you’re working for a CPA firm now, doing audits for nursing homes.

Dave: Right. And one of the requirements of me taking that position was I had to be a CPA, which I was not. I was a business major in college, had nothing to do with accounting. Part of that requirement was that I had to get my CPA certificate. So I had to take classes at night at the college. I had to take accounting classes and tax classes and all that, and then work a full-time shift.

One of the other things, just kind of an off on this, was I did not realize when I took the job, we moved here in December, I did not realize that this firm had a rule that during tax season you came to work at eight o’clock in the morning and worked till five, and then you went home for dinner and came back and worked from seven to nine.

Darren: Oh my goodness.

Dave: Even if you weren’t involved in taxes or anything. And I’m new to this job, so when you’re new to a job, you don’t have a whole lot to do. So I’m sitting there. And back up a little bit, she didn’t come with me, because we had to move and she had to finish her school and teaching job. So I’m sitting there, dark outside, just trying to find something to read and all that. And I’m going, what have I done? And so I made it. She finally moved out. I don’t remember when we moved, but anyhow.

Darren: Let’s talk about that for a second. So you move here, you guys are in separate states now, and you’ve taken this job after a buddy of yours has gotten you the job. You move state lines, and now all of a sudden you find yourself sitting in an empty office. Probably. You knew some people, but did anybody that you knew work at the business?

Dave: No. The guy that got me the job was the administrator of the nursing home, at the church.

Darren: At the church, okay. So you had some friends per se, but not necessarily somebody that worked with you. And you find yourself sitting in this office, it’s dark outside in the middle of an Indianapolis winter. What’s going on in your mind in that? Are you going, how do I go back? Mom’s still there back in Philly. Do you just retreat? What ended up keeping you to push through that season?

Dave: Well, we had a lot of friends there. We did have a lot of friends there. Not just the guy that used to be my friend that got me the job.

Darren: Yeah, he’s no longer a friend.

Dave: There were a lot of, we had a lot of friends, and I knew that once we got settled in, it would work. And it was a new experience.

Darren: Do you like the new experience? Like something new to try to do and figure out? Is that something you enjoy?

Dave: As you look through my history, you’ll probably find out that I did a lot of that.

Darren: That must be where your son gets it too.

Dave: Yes.

Darren: So it must be. Now I understand so much about myself all of a sudden in that one question.

Darren: And thanks for listening. Thanks for being here. And before you go, I want you to remember this, that you are an artist, and that your voice is needed in this world more than you know, and you are loved more than you could ever imagine. So go out and create your art, and we’ll see you here next time on the next episode. See ya.

Create your art. #createyourart