You’re Too Young — Now You’re Too Old

When you are young, they say you are too inexperienced to lead. When you are old, they say you are just ‘past it’, and not in touch with the modern world to achieve anything. And at both ends of this spectrum, and in between, they are just wrong. Success has nothing to do with age.

Active Knowledge Question:

In building your business, how do you see past the bias that some cultures engender around age, and select people for who they are?

Age is used by many to define who someone is and what their capability and capacity may or may not be. It’s applied at both ends of the spectrum, young and old, and probably in between at times. It’s a bias, and with all bias often operates below the surface at the subconscious level and is rationalised as ‘best decision-making’. However, it reflects poor decision-making and lost opportunity.

Age is never a barrier to your ability to achieve unless you allow it to be. People of all ages achieve extraordinary success, and in many cases just simple success. As an individual, and as a business leader, you should never allow generalisations about age to restrict your business’s or your individual success.

Your business’s success is dependent upon the combined talent and effort of everyone working within and with it. And therefore, you want the best working with the best at their best, irrelevant of their age. You want them for who they are, not how long they have been on this earth.

Selecting the best people to work in your business rests with the culture of your business. Your business will have a paradigm, an attitude, towards age and how it influences performance. You want to ensure as best as you can that this attitude says, ‘it’s not about age, it’s about character and we are looking for people with the right character regardless of their age’.

When it comes to being an achiever and being successful, attitude is the starting point. In fact, attitude is everything. And attitude arises from character.

Two simple examples from a book titled ‘Edgy Conversations’, by Dan Waldschmidt, where he cites age relative to success:

• ‘At 2, speed skater Bonnie Blair began skating. She would go on to win five Olympic gold medals.
• At 96, Harry Bernstein published his first book, The Invisible Wall, three years after he started writing to cope with the loneliness after his wife of 70 years Ruby, passed away.’

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An entirely new level of performance.

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All the best in the success of your business,

Richard Shrapnel