Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

Other people have found success after changing careers many times: Rodney Dangerfield didn’t succeed in comedy until his forties. One of the funniest guys ever, he was an aluminum siding salesman. And then he had to start his own comedy club, Dangerfield’s, in order to actually perform as a comedian. He chose himself to succeed! But not until his forties. Ray Kroc was a milkshake salesman into his fifties. Then he stumbled onto a clean restaurant that served a good hamburger run by two brothers with the last name McDonald. He bought McDonald’s when he was fifty-two. Henry Miller wrote his first big novel, Tropic of Cancer, at age forty. Raymond Chandler, the most successful noir novelist of all time, wrote his first novel at age fifty-two. But he was young compared to Frank McCourt, who won the Pulitzer for his first novel, Angela’s Ashes, written when he was sixty-six. And, of course, Julia Child was a young fifty when she wrote her first cookbook. One of my favorite writers of all time, Stan Lee, created the entire universe for which he is known—the Marvel Universe—when he was forty-four, inventing Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and others along the way. If you don’t like to kill people but still need a weapon to immobilize them, consider the Taser, invented by Jack Cover when he was fifty. He didn’t sell a single one until he was sixty. If you like restaurant reviews you might have read Zagat, started by Tim Zagat, who quit his job as a lawyer in order to ...

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