It’s True; Life Does Get Better After 50!

By Perry Douglas,

February 16, 2020

As I wake this Saturday morning at my usual 5am my wife sings the same old song with love and care, “why don’t you stay in your bed, its Saturday”.  My response is the usual, just a smile, as I head down for that first blissful cup of coffee and look forward to the excitement and discovery of the day.  Sleep is for young people.  I’m 51 and feel great, but I can certainly stand to lose a few pounds, well, to be honest, maybe more than a few.  Nevertheless, we are all judged by the same time clock and personal scoreboard.  And as my boyhood friends who played basketball with me will tell you, I like to put points up on the board,  so got to get on with improving my game.

This particular morning I’m inspired to write after reading an article in the online publication, “Pocket Worthy – Stories to fuel your mind.”  The article was titled, “An Ode to Being Old. On the harder-to-measure benefits of age and experience.” It caught my eye because of the black and white photo of a 50 something male with a firm chest and solid abs, well-groomed grey beard, holding a surfboard.  Coming off Valentine’s Day last night, I said, “Man, this big-belly thing must end.”  But, I digress.  The article posed the question, “What age is someone most likely to achieve their peak performance?”  The question was an extremely appealing one to try and find an answer too.  At 51, I feel in my prime, in business, and in life in general.  Cognitively, I’m extremely flexible in my thinking, I find it easy to think outside the box, manage multiple concepts and solve multiple problems simultaneously.  My business partner would call it polymath; I call it sharpness, and I feel sharper than ever before.  I’m more fearless now than when I was 25; however, my fearlessness is more refined, a more controlled aggression, underpinned by knowledge and experience.  

Let’s get the science of all this over with.  An MIT study which analyzed 2.7 million people who started companies between 2007 and 2014, found that among the fastest-growing tech companies, the average founder was 45 at the time of its founding.  It also discovered that a 50-year-old was twice as likely to have enormous success, as defined by the company performing in the top 0.1 percent, instead of a 30-year-old.  I’ve always said that the idea or view of the young hoody wearing tech entrepreneur, as the key image of success, is an ill-informed view.  As the authors of the study put it, “The view that young people produce the highest-growth companies is in part a rejection of the role of experience.” The scientific findings strongly reject the emphasis on youth as the core attribute of successful entrepreneurs.

In my view, the fast-paced world of a start-up is better suited for the “older-folk”, with those aged 45 to 55 being the peak performance period to find your groove.  At 51 I don’t get too caught up with so-called “smart-people”, wisdom and experience have a way of cutting through the noise or calling bullshit immediately.  Wisdom and experience are a deeper kind of knowledge and intelligence that can only be ascertained through experience, setting a path to directly identifying and solving the problem.  It’s like a top athlete who can slow things down, see the entire field and anticipate better; experience allows you to see the developing patterns the young rookie would never see.  I don’t get too excited when people talk about big ideas and how to achieve them. Experience has taught me it’s not about being smart, it’s about putting in the work.  The questions become; can you do the work? Can you take the short-term failures? How resilient can you be when all the useless doubters are circling? Can you put aside that doubt, fear, and worry and continue to push your plan and climb that steep hill? Success requires effort, persistence and the relentless pursuit of self.  Are you prepared to write your own story, knowing it might never get published?

Seven-time mountain bike world champion Rebecca Rusch, who, at age 47, and one of the few to ever reach the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro via bike, stated, “I’m still improving and having some of the best days of my career.  I may not be as strong or have the same VO2 max as when I was younger, but wisdom is the great equalizer. I’m smarter about things like nutrition and race tactics, and I have a special self-knowledge that only results from years of experience.”  Alpine climber, Jimmy Chin, says, “Youth is wasted on the young,” he points out that often, only time can provide true and deep experience, and the reality is, whatever experience younger folk have, can easily be outweighed by their brashness and impatience. Please note I am not negative on the young what so ever! I’m just positive on the more seasoned individuals, at the peak period of time in their lives.

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.”  I can tell you personally, I’ve had more failures than successes, but for me, failure is just temporary, periods where you need to take those lessons of failure and just get better.  Failure can be positive, depending on your attitude, it can prepare you for eventual massive success.  Failure simply provides you with more information to process, the more data you have, the more you can recognize future patterns, and the more patterns you recognize and begin to connect the dots, the better you will become at assessing things. Your decision-making gets better, sharper!

Think about all of this from the perspective of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In May 1997, Garry Kasparov, then chess world champion, who once bragged he would never lose to a machine, was beaten by Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer.  Once he got “slammed” by the machine, he then said, “…a human could never beat a machine, whatever the human can do, the machine can do better.” Kasparov went on to say, essentially, how could a human compete with a machine that can compute two hundred thousand moves a second? Now, take a moment, and think about it for your own “second”; a human can acquire and process significant amounts of information over time.  From a purely academic perspective, the process is Undergrad, Masters, Ph.D., more research, and lifelong learning. Therefore, real “Intelligence” is acquired (academically and non-academically) over a long period of time, through information processing and decision-making.  A human’s AI is Wisdom.  In all practical sense, you are simply better from a computational decision-making perspective at 50 than you are at 25.          

Achieving peak performance is complex, however.  You can have all the experience in the world, be as sharp as a Samurai sword, but if you’re 50+, out of shape, and trying to scale Mount Kilimanjaro, you’ll probably drop dead.  Hence, success comes down to a combination of variables, in particular preparation, and finding your logical sweet spot. Regardless, at 50 you can still kick-ass! It’s not easy, you still have to do the work, and put it all together, but you can do it if you get your mindset right.  I’m headed to the gym now, I still need to look like that 50 something dude in the picture, and I’m starting with my health!

Perry Douglas,
Entrepreneur, Innovator and
Believer in Social Responsibility, and the
Good in Progressive Capitalism