Compared with young people, those in their 40s, 50s, or even 60s are more suitable for starting a business.
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Editor's note: Do you think you're too old to start a business? Scientific research shows that people in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s actually have unique advantages in entrepreneurship. This article is from a compilation, hoping to inspire you.
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Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook at 19, Bill Gates founded Microsoft at 21, and co-founder Paul Allen was 23; Steve Jobs co-founded Apple at 21, and co-founder Steve Wozniak was 26; Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Jensen Huang of NVIDIA were 30 when they started their businesses.
But they are exceptions, not the norm. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that the average age of entrepreneurs who start a company and hire at least one employee is 42. A joint study by the U.S. Census Bureau and two professors from MIT found that the most successful entrepreneurs are often middle-aged people, even in the technology industry.
After researchers sorted through 2.7 million founders who started companies and hired employees between 2007 and 2014, they found that the founders of the most successful technology companies had an average age of 45.
More intuitive data is:
The probability of a 50-year-old entrepreneur starting a super successful business is almost twice that of a 30-year-old entrepreneur.
The success probability of a 60-year-old startup founder is three times that of a 30-year-old founder;
The probability of starting a company with revenue in the top 0.1% of the industry is nearly twice that of a 30-year-old founder.
From a broader perspective, multiple research reviews by the National Bureau of Economic Research show that the age at which scientists and inventors have their "genius moments" is being postponed. In the past, the average age was younger, but now most people make their greatest contributions to their fields after the age of 40.
The researchers wrote:
Multiple studies have consistently found that people's performance peaks in middle age: the early stage of life is a stage of accumulation and learning, with few major creative achievements; then creativity rapidly improves and reaches its peak around the age of 40 or in one's 40s.
This makes sense. True mastery often requires time to settle.
The researchers also pointed out:
The relationship between creativity and existing knowledge depends not only on mastering existing knowledge through learning, but also on the nature and difficulty of the cognitive processes involved in integrating and expanding the knowledge system.
In plain language, it's not enough to just know the knowledge. You also need to understand how these knowledge fit together in a larger framework to make new connections and breakthroughs.
The same is true for entrepreneurship. No matter how good the idea is, execution is the key. When you lack experience, it's difficult to do things well, especially leadership experience. Even if you have a disruptive idea, if you don't have the ability to build a group of people into a team, you'll probably fail.
There's also a deeper reason: Most of the young and successful people rely on breakthrough innovations in concepts.
For example, Gates' "a computer on every desk and in every home" and Bezos' "everything store". Gates and Bezos didn't have the ability to operate a company worth hundreds of billions at that time, but they had breakthrough ideas and then gradually developed the required abilities. And people who start businesses after middle age mostly directly use their well-honed abilities, knowledge, and experience.
Ray Kroc had done many sales jobs before he acquired McDonald's at 52; Sam Walton's experience in operating the Ben Franklin chain stores enabled him to develop the ability to operate a multi-store retail system and gave him the breakthrough idea of opening Walmart stores in small towns rather than big cities.
In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, David Galenson calls these people "masters" : they weren't outstanding in their chosen fields or even any fields when they were young, but they developed real skills through continuous efforts. They achieve success later in life because they have the ability to implement ideas, such as turning scattered hamburger shops into a multinational group and transforming inefficient and decentralized retail into a logistics giant.
Of course, Gates, Bezos, and others not only had ideas but also achieved extreme execution.
But we're prone to survivorship bias: we only focus on successful people and ignore countless failed cases. So when we hear "successful founder", we instinctively think of "young".
But research shows that's not the case.
It's true that if you really make a conceptual breakthrough, you may achieve extreme success when you're young. But most of the time, older entrepreneurs have obvious advantages, even in the technology field, which has long been considered the domain of young people (consumer ability and creative ability are two completely different things).
So:
If you're in your 40s and want to start a business like Sam Walton did back then, just do it.
If you're in your 50s and want to start a business like Ray Kroc did back then, just do it.
If you're in your 60s and want to do a franchise chain like Colonel Sanders, just do it.
Ideas are important, especially truly breakthrough ideas. But execution is almost always more important.
Research shows that age is not a competitive disadvantage. On the contrary, your experience, ability, connections, and professional insights are the confidence that will make you successful. As long as you really put these abilities earned through years into use.
Translator: Teresa