3 reasons your 40s are the perfect time to start your side business

When I was in my 20s, I was in such a hurry.

I thought I would be rich, famous, and working for myself by age 30, and anything less than that would be an abject failure.

As a sports journalist who would occasionally appear on TV and radio, I suppose I was somewhat locally famous by 30, but that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

And I was most certainly not rich or working for myself.

My 30s were pretty much sacrificed to the all-consuming little kid phase, so I hit 40 not really anywhere near where I wanted to be.

But now, as I approach my 42nd birthday, the stars have finally aligned.

I now regularly generate four figures per month, and I’m just getting warmed up.

In some ways, it’s disappointing that it took this long.

But in another way, I’ve come to realize it COULDN’T have happened until now.

I wasn’t ready, and my life wasn’t conducive to it.

Now? Now we’re cruising.

Let me walk you through the 3 reasons your 40s are the perfect age to start a side business.

Your 40s are the perfect time to chase your business goals. (Photo licensed under the Unsplash+ License)

Life circumstances

I know this is going to vary a lot for people, but the further away you get from the baby and toddler phase, the more time and freedom you have to pursue the things that once mattered to you as an individual.

Now, I’m not suggesting you ignore your kids to chase your moonshots.

I make $40-$50 per day on the side as a content creator while still being on the ice every night coaching my kids’ hockey and traveling to their tournaments.

But the amount of time, effort, and energy it takes to parent a 9 and 13-year-old versus babies and toddlers are worlds apart.

Yes, kids still need you a lot at that age, but things like changing diapers, literally spoon-feeding them their meals, getting them dressed, getting their snow gear on and off, cleaning up after their whirlwinds of mess, literally just watching them so they don’t hurt themselves, spending hours sitting through playdates and parties and park trips and other little kid activities … on and on it goes.

Those days are long gone for me, and that has freed up my early mornings (and sometimes evenings and spare weekend time) to work on my business.

When the weather’s nice, my kids will take off on their bikes and be gone for hours.

Consider this: my kids sleep in until almost 9 a.m. on weekends, which gives me hours and hours of quiet time to focus on getting things done.

Compare that to when my youngest, from baby years until age 2+, would wake up screaming every morning at 4:45 a.m.

Not only does that usurp your entire morning, but you’re also too exhausted to do anything beyond, like, surviving.

The reality is that, when you have very young kids, your life apart from them is virtually non-existent.

There’s really no way around that. You have to just wait it out.

But when you walk back into the light in your 40s, the world is once again your oyster.

The “little kid phase” is very rewarding but also very time-consuming. (Photo licensed under the Unsplash+ License)

A wealth of knowledge and skill, built over time

When you’re in your 20s, you only think you know everything.

The reality is I could fill a 100-volume set of books with everything I didn’t know at that age.

Although the audacity of youth can propel great accomplishments for some people, more often than not we spend most of our 20s floundering around, trying to figure out who we are and what we actually want to be.

But as we go through those early career and personal ups and downs, we are learning a ton about ourselves and building skills that will one day be very valuable (even if we don’t know it yet).

Take me for example.

I started out as a simple staff reporter at a newspaper. I learned about how to interview, how to do document research, and, most importantly, how to write clean, accurate copy on deadline. When I moved to the sports section, that got pumped up even more as I wrote on drop-dead night deadlines.

I also worked in the nascent online section of the paper in the early 2000s. I helped build out a strategy for expanding our presence on the internet and tracked and reported our analytics to senior management.

At the time, the web stat tracking was brand new and it was just a little side project at work that I found fun.

But it wound up being one of the most valuable tasks I ever did.

It pulled back the veil covering what kinds of content people actually like to read, versus what the editors at the paper thought people liked to read.

To this day, as a part-time content creator, I still draw on the lessons I learned some 15 years ago when I’m deciding what to write about and how to write about it.

I was also an early adopter of Twitter, which gave me a massive following and later got me a job running social media for a large organization.

In that job, I developed my graphic design skills a ton, teaching myself Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro to make our content that much better.

Now, I use all those skills on my early-stage YouTube channel.

All of that experience coalesced and allowed me, finally at age 41, to be a multi-platform, multimedia creator with an exceptionally high hourly wage.

All the while, I should also mention, I was reading personal development books that were helping me shape the kind of mindset you need to succeed in business and life.

Maturity and wisdom

This is perhaps the most important part. I’m starting to find success now because I know who I am.

I think one of the reasons we fail is that we don’t really know what we’re trying to achieve.

For all the skills journalism gave me, I freaking hated being a journalist.

I think I’ve told this story before, but I remember driving to the paper in the slushy rain just a month or two into my career and thinking, “I’ve made a HUGE mistake.”

It’s a visceral memory because I knew even then it would shape the rest of my life. And it did in one bad way in particular.

But I didn’t really have a strong grasp of what I wanted to do instead, which led to me running in a bunch of different directions and finding dead ends in each.

I never got anywhere because I wasn’t really trying to achieve something, I was trying to ESCAPE something — that is, a job I hated and a lifestyle I found suffocating.

It wasn’t until I rejigged my career and habits that my mind was freed up to pursue something I actually cared about.

The older you get, too, the more pragmatic you become about time.

As I mentioned at the top, when I was young, I wanted success and I wanted it NOW.

When it didn’t show up right away — literally sometimes within even just two weeks — I’d give up.

Now, at 41, two weeks is the blink of an eye.

A month is a few deep breaths.

A year is a walk around the block.

Yes, what age gives you is perspective and patience.

I’ve heard a lot of creators talk about how it takes at minimum 2–5 years to really achieve success.

When I was in my 20s, that length of time would have been unfathomably long. Now? It feels satisfyingly short.

That breeds the kind of confidence you need to push through early-stage resistance.

Get to work

If you’re in your 40s and thinking about starting your own side business, there’s only one thing left to do.

Get to work.

It’s tempting to think it’s too late to get started on something. Pop culture would have us believe we’re dead when we hit 30.

But take it from me: your 40s are the perfect time to start chasing those dreams you’ve been putting off!

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