"If you haven't made it big at 40+..." What, exactly, do you mean by "made it big"? Rock star giving TED talks? Keynote speaker at major industry conferences

"If you haven't made it big at 40+..." What, exactly, do you mean by "made it big"? Rock star giving TED talks? Keynote speaker at major industry conferences? Cashed out your fully-vested options for a startup that did well? I'm 45, I manage a small team of bright, motivated people at a Fortune 500 retailer. Team ranges from late 20s to one of our Oracle DBAs who's in his 60s; most of our colleagues are late 20s-late 30s. It's a good team, at a chill place to work, and we put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears over the last few years to deal with a lot of the technical debt that was making things like on-call such a miserable experience. Making that experience better has been a huge motivator for me. It helps our team, and it helps our business partners help themselves. One thing about being older is that a lot of younger developers have a different set of skills they consider "table stakes", and they may be overlooking older skillsets that could really help them out, like tuning SQL queries. The other thing that helps me keep the fire is learning new stuff. For an old-school Enterprise guy like me, things like AWS, DevOps, Docker / K8s, seemed scary. But technologically, they are fascinating, awesome things that are allowing people to do things we couldn't have imagined before. I want to learn about them because maybe we, too, can do awesome tech things, if we got experienced people who at least understand the value proposition of these newer technologies and can make the case for them. It is a very cool time to be in IT. I'm learning C# by writing a crappy 4X Civilization knock-off, I'm going to try setting up a kubernetes lab on my linux box, and I've got O'Reilly and Pluralsight on speed-dial.