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Is it too late to start?

All I want to do is be more like me and be less like you...

This article is dedicated to my girlfriend, I think both of us need to read this...

Last night I was reading about all the successful entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley and their ages: when they started their business.

It was quite depressing that most of those geniuses started their entrepreneurial hustle in their early twenties.

Those data are dejecting, especially for new entrepreneurs. Initially, I thought I am too old to start a new business. I started searching for expert opinions in the internet writing:

‘Am I too late to be an entrepreneur?’

Most of the suggestions you’ll find online have a common genre like: ‘Age is just a number; you are never too late to start. If you follow your heart, destiny will follow you back.’

It takes time to build something from the scratch, Photo by Rodolfo Quirós on Pexels.com
However, I always hate trite. Motivational speeches work when we tend to relate those with our personal lives. But for people like me, common advice seems hackneyed most of the time. We need customized suggestions, something tailored exclusively for us. It’s hard to align netizens’ opinions with personal lives.

But this time, Google didn’t disappoint me. I have found an article, which is in fact full of general advice, but a single paragraph describing a person’s life story has caught my eyes-

‘…when I was 13. I was obsessed with music — spent the money from my part-time job on new records, stayed up late to listen to the best late-night radio shows, read all the music magazines — and I felt like I was always reading about these fantastic guitarists who had started at eight, seven, even five years old. It would be fun to play the guitar, but at 13 with no skills at all, not even a guitar, I felt like it was already too late. The ship had sailed.

Even your 40 isn’t late to start learning guitar! Photo by Ethan Jones on Pexels.com
Luckily, I fell into a deal to get an electric guitar from a friend of mine. Now, in my early 40s, I’ve been playing for 30 years, and the fact that I started at 13 instead of five is meaningless. Life is long, time passes either way and if we try, we learn and improve.

We talk to lots of great businesses that are being started and run by first-time entrepreneurs in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. In fact, 28 strikes me as relatively young to start your own thing. So don’t worry about being behind. Don’t worry about the prodigy kids who started their first business in middle school. Don’t worry about the folks who went straight from their MBA to their first business. Just start your thing, and work, and learn, and in no time you’ll be an old hand at it.”

Life is long, time passes either way and if we try, we learn and improve.

If someone starting at 13 can be bogged down with the ‘Right Time Fallacy,’ considerably this problem has nothing to do with your age. It will succumb to any newbie entrepreneur or someone who is trying to start anew. But the point is, we tend to extrapolate from our past data. Our sample size is always retrospective. If we picture ourselves right now, we shall connect some dots based on our available information.


You never know what is holding in the future, Photo by The Lazy Artist Gallery on Pexels.com
In this process, we underestimate the potential we have got in the future. Do you remember the richest or most successful person in your peer group 10 years back? Perhaps you don’t. But if I had asked you to draw your success 10 years back, most probably you would have benchmarked him in your imagination.

Tomorrow never comes. You will never be happier tomorrow because every day you have got a new ‘tomorrow’ in your bucket. It took me more than three years to chase my ‘tomorrow’ to start my business. Even worse, it took 26 years to find my ‘tomorrow’ to wake up early, do morning exercise, and have a healthy breakfast.

All we have is a ‘today,’ and we shall keep having that ‘today’ till our death. There is no ‘I am too late to start in this universe. Instead, the replacing phrase should be ‘I am too lazy to start,’ or ‘I don’t yet have the courage to start.’

If today is my last day, till now, I can die in peace thinking: I had a fairly good life. If there is any God, She/ He was so merciful to me. I only wish I could pay back my society all the privileges that I have been provided from my childhood.

That’s all for today folks!

Before I end, let me share another thought-provoking quote that I came across:

‘You are free to choose, at least most of the times, but you are not free from the consequences of the choice.’

- Unknown

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Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh

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