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Harland "Colonel" Sanders was 62 when he started Kentucky Fried Chicken. Rodney Dangerfield started writing jokes when he was 15. He finally hit it big when h
by edw519 16y ago
Harland "Colonel" Sanders was 62 when he started Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Rodney Dangerfield started writing jokes when he was 15. He finally hit it big when he was 52.
Ray Kroc was 52 when he started McDonalds.
Orville Redenbacher was 58 when he founded his popcorn business.
Ronald Reagan was a B-List actor who was 56 when he became Governor of California and 70 when he became President of the United States.
Grandma Moses was 78 when she started painting.
Tina Turner was 44 when she recorded her first #1 hit.
- cheez 16y agoGreat examples (Reagan in politics as "success" is iffy though.)
- count 16y agoHe was elected President of the United States - I'd say that should count as successful in anybody's book. The metric isn't 'effective' :)
- viggity 16y agoyeah, because causing the collapse of the USSR is a trivial accomplishment?
- stray 16y agoI'm pretty sure decades of mismanagement, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and a broken oil pipeline caused the collapse of the USSR. Ronny Ray Gun just happened to be in office at the time. But becoming president of the US is huge! Only a few dozen people have ever managed to do so :-)
- martythemaniak 16y agoYeah, It wasn't the unsustainable economic, political, social and environmental system that was Soviet totalitarianism. It wasn't the thousands of political dissidents in Easten Europe who were active, organizing and being persecuted before Reagan was even elected. No, it was all because your Actor-President gave a nice speech and ran a deficit.
- nir 16y agoHello Reddit! :) (If I was American I'd probably vote for Democrats most of the time, but it's funny how users seem to know exactly what did or didn't cause the fall of the Eastern Bloc)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Florin_Andrei 16y agoYeah, he also caused the return of the Halley comet. I mean, he was in office when it happened, right? He must have caused it.
- Locke1689 16y agoPost hoc, ergo propter hoc
- timwiseman 16y agoReagan was elected as a two term president and remains one of the more popular presidents in recent history. Reasonable people may respectfully disagree about whether or not he was a good president and whether or not he took the country in the right direction, but I think anyone saying he was not a successful person is using a very different definition of "success" than the common meaning.
- run4yourlives 16y agoI'd count achieving something less than 50 people in the world have achieved as a success regardless of politics.
- cheez 16y agoI was referring to being a political leader as something positive, being iffy. Nothing against the man specifically.
- 6ren 16y agoAdobe was founded by two guys in their 40's
- rubashov 16y agoThey were already quite successful, to be fair.
- akshat 16y agoSam Walton started Walmart at age 44
- brudgers 16y agoKant was 57 when Critique of Pure Reason was published.
- GeoffreyHull 16y agoSamuel L. Jackson was 46 when he was cast in his breakout role in Pulp Fiction
- frading 16y agomakes me think about Morgan Freeman. Its pretty hard to find pictures of him young.
- gnaritas 16y agoHe was already quite famous by that time, he'd done nearly 30 movies before that.
- GeoffreyHull 16y agoNone of which garnered anywhere near as much acclaim as Pulp Fiction did. Unless you consider Jungle Fever a cinematic masterpiece
- gnaritas 16y agoSuccess isn't measured in critical acclaim. He was in many popular movies including some blockbusters like Jurrassic Park and was quite successful long before Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction was far more notable for reviving John Travolta's career than doing anything for Sam Jackson.
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- staunch 16y agoSupposedly Julius Caesar was worried about this same thing. When he was around 30 he came upon a statue of Alexander, who at his age had conquered the known world. Caesar had very little to show for himself at that point. He was in his late thirties and early forties before he had any remarkable success or power.
- d_r 16y agoHere's a decent collection I recently came across. (Sorry, kinda ad-filled site link.) http://www.11points.com/Personal/11_Famous_People_Who_Were_in_the_Completely_Wrong_Career_at_Age_30 http://www.11points.com/Personal/11_Famous_People_Who_Were_i... Who knew that at 30, Julia Child was a spy and Martha Stewart was a stockbroker?
- kevin_morrill 16y agoRay Kroc's book Grinding It Out is a fantastic account of his work creating McDonalds. He definitely did his best work later in life, and proof that you can make your mark at any point in your life. It's a great read. Frank Lloyd Wright, though successful early in his life, had all kinds of rises and falls in his career. He's also a terrific story about Renaissance in your own life.
- htp 16y agoThank you for this.