Starting Over Gets Safer with Age

Starting Over Gets Safer with Age

A 60-year-old's new business fails less often than a 30-year-old's. The rule about starting over runs backwards.

As we get older, we start making decisions based on the assumption that the time for starting things has passed. It happens quietly, and in most cases without us even noticing. It shows up in small ways: the class we do not sign up for, the idea we always wanted to work on, the instrument we always wanted to learn but now think we are too old for. We hear ourselves saying "at my age."

The stories about starting things all star the young. Magazines keep score with lists, 30 Under 30, 40 Under 40, and the lists run in one direction. Underneath sits a belief so familiar nobody bothers to check it. Starting new things is for the young, because the young can afford to fail. The rest of us are supposed to protect what we have built.

The problem with the belief is that research does not support it. JPMorgan Chase Institute followed 138,000 small businesses through their first year to see which ones survived. Businesses started by 30-year-olds had a 35% higher chance of closing than those started by 60-year-olds.

People with decades of experience tend not to make the mistakes a 30-year-old would make. Yet, the results surprise a lot of people. The evidence loses to a feeling every time.

In 1938, an art collector passing through Hoosick Falls, New York discovered a few paintings by 77-year-old Anna Mary Robertson Moses hanging in a pharmacy window. Anna suffered from arthritis, forcing her to pick up painting since she could not work on her embroidery. The needle was too painful for her to hold. Two years later her pictures were hanging in a New York gallery and at 93 she was on the cover of Time magazine. By then the world knew her as Grandma Moses.

TIME, Dec. 28, 1953. Cover art: Boris Chaliapin.

People might dismiss the story as Anna getting lucky, and there is some truth to it. But her 77 years of farm mornings and the memories she lived were the key to her paintings.

Harland Sanders went all in on what is now known as Kentucky Fried Chicken after his Kentucky restaurant failed when he was 65 years old. He had licensed his first franchise back in 1952. A newly built highway bypassed his restaurant, traffic dropped, and he sold it at a loss. He was left with a $105 monthly Social Security check. He packed his car with a pressure cooker and the spice blend he had perfected over the years, and drove from restaurant to restaurant, cooking his chicken. Legend has it he was turned down 1,009 times, a number nobody has ever verified. A few restaurant owners gave him a chance, and then many followed. By 1963, more than 600 restaurants were selling Kentucky Fried Chicken, and he was able to sell the company for $2 million, about $20 million in today's dollars. Sanders's success later in life was built on the decades he spent in his Kentucky restaurant perfecting his recipe.

It is fair to point out that inspiring stories of Grandma Moses and Harland Sanders are not the norm. For every Grandma Moses, there are hundreds of painters nobody ever discovered. A team of economists led by Pierre Azoulay studied Census records of 2.7 million Americans who started companies. The average age of founders of the fastest-growing companies was 45. Founders in their early 20s, the ones on the magazine covers, had the lowest success rate of all. The data was clear. A 50-year-old founder was 1.8 times more likely than a 30-year-old to build one of them.

Higher odds of success for people who start things later in life are not just for people who start businesses. In a 2015 survey by the American Institute for Economic Research, a self-reported 82% of people 45 or older who decided to reinvent themselves were successful in starting a new career. About a quarter of American retirees go back to work, and most had planned to before they ever retired.

Psychologists Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine measured how different mental abilities change with age. They found that although raw processing speed peaks around 20 and fades from there, vocabulary and accumulated knowledge keep climbing into the late 60s. Psychologists call this crystallized intelligence. The young brain is faster while the older brain can better predict how things usually end.

The 50-year-old founder starts with three decades of watching an industry from the inside, and the higher success rate for older founders shows how important this lived memory is.

Sometimes you have to start over out of necessity. A common catalyst that forces people to reinvent themselves is losing a partner or divorce. Divorce or losing a partner disproportionately impacts women's finances. In many situations, you need to start over. But the mistake often made is thinking you are starting from zero. A woman who ran a household budget for thirty years has been doing applied economics for thirty years. Nobody handed her a title for it. The judgment came with her anyway.

Carol Gardner was 52 when her divorce left her in serious debt. She photographed her bulldog Zelda for a local Christmas card contest and won. The cards became Zelda Wisdom, a licensing business valued at an estimated $50 million. Before the divorce, Gardner had spent her career in advertising. She was not starting from zero either.

Starting over is not easy. You have less energy at 60 compared to when you were 30, and less opportunity to recover if you fail. And yet that accumulated judgment helps people who start older make fewer mistakes, and have a higher chance of success.

If you hear yourself saying "it is too late" or "it is too risky," you are expressing a feeling. The experience you have accumulated through the years is the asset compounding quietly in the background, increasing your odds of success.

Sources

• JPMorgan Chase Institute analysis of 138,000 small firms, reported by AARP, "Small Businesses Run by Older Founders Most Likely to Survive," 2019: first-year failure probability 11.1 percent at founder age 30, 9.6 at 45, 8.2 at 60. The 35% figure is 2.9/8.2, authors' calculation. https://www.aarp.org/work/small-business/older-owners-study/
• JPMorgan Chase Institute (primary), "Gender, Age, and Small Business Financial Outcomes," February 2019: predicted probabilities of firm exit by founder age, year one: 11.1 percent (30-year-olds), 9.6 (45), 8.2 (60). https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/all-topics/business-growth-and-entrepreneurship/report-small-business-financial-outcomes
• KFC, "Our History" (official timeline): first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise 1952; Corbin restaurant sold 1956. https://global.kfc.com/our-history
• Smithsonian, on Grandma Moses beginning to paint at 77. https://www.si.edu/stories/grandma-moses-started-painting-age-77
• National Museum of Women in the Arts, on Moses turning to painting when arthritis made embroidery too painful. https://nmwa.org/art/artists/grandma-moses-anna-mary-robertson-moses/
• TIME, December 28, 1953 cover (Grandma Moses at 93; cover art Boris Chaliapin). https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19531228,00.html
• Yahoo Finance / Business Insider, drawing on William Whitworth's 1970 New Yorker profile of Harland Sanders: highway bypass, restaurant sold at a loss, the $105 monthly Social Security check, 600+ restaurants by 1963, the $2 million sale in 1965. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kfc-founder-colonel-sanders-didnt-204759487.html
• "$2 million, about $20 million in today's dollars": authors' calculation from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U (annual average 31.5 in 1965; 333.95 in June 2026). https://www.bls.gov/cpi/
• Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda, "Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship," American Economic Review: Insights, 2020: mean founder age 45.0 for the fastest-growing 0.1 percent of new firms; a 50-year-old founder about 1.8x more likely than a 30-year-old to reach that tier; the youngest founders had the lowest success rates. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180582
• American Institute for Economic Research, "New Careers for Older Workers," 2015: 82 percent of surveyed career changers over 45 reported a successful transition (self-reported). https://www.aier.org/new-careers-for-older-workers-2/
• Nicole Maestas, "Back to Work: Expectations and Realizations of Work After Retirement," Journal of Human Resources, 2010: about 26 percent of retirees return to work; most returns were planned in advance. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4004604/
• Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine, "When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak?", Psychological Science, 2015: processing speed peaks in the early 20s; vocabulary and accumulated knowledge climb into the late 60s. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4441622/
• Fox Business, "How the Underdog Won," on Carol Gardner: divorce at 52, serious debt, the Christmas card contest, Zelda Wisdom valued at an estimated $50 million. https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/how-the-underdog-won