Don’t Put Deadline on Your Dreams – Age is Just a Number

Published: 16th of September, 2022

Today I received a call from an acquaintance of mine who was in her sixties. Some time back, she had told me that she was studying for her driver’s license theoretical exams. I gave her a few tips and wished her good luck. This woman suffered from several medical conditions, but that didn’t deter her from moving forward with her dream of becoming a licensed driver. When she called me this morning, she was overjoyed. Bursts of giggles saturated her speech and she exclaimed, “Yayy!!”

She told me that she had passed her driver’s license theoretical exams, and she is excited about the next step forward in becoming a licensed driver. What else could I say but, “congratulations, I’m so happy for you!”?

A friend of mine from the USA called me a few days ago and said he was suffering from midlife crisis. He was nearing his forties. He told me that he was struggling to own his own home before he hit forty years of age. My response to him was, “don’t think about the age because age is just a number. Enjoy life and let it flow naturally.” And I reminded him not to put deadlines on his dreams. “Remember, if you think about your age that way, you may start to panic which can in turn cause you to make bad decisions.”

Society can sometimes pressure you into keeping abreast with a certain timeline. Society may sometimes make you feel that if you don’t finish university by X age, don’t buy your house by Y age, or don’t get married by Z age, then you’re a failure. But that is absolutely not true. We must remember that everyone’s story is unique. Everyone matures differently and everyone ages slightly differently. Two persons born on the same day may have different “real ages” twenty or forty years later. Everyone shines in their own time, and everyone bears fruit in their own season. Some win early and others win late.

Remember that if you didn’t do well in something this year, you can always do well next year, or even ten or twenty years later. Can you imagine what kind of world we would be living in if we all gave up because we didn’t keep up with the status quo? The world would be dull and boring, and grossly unproductive. We’ve achieved so much greatness in the world because of men and women who never gave up on their dreams, no matter how late it seemed, or how old a dysfunctional society made them feel.

Don’t get me wrong. We all have to leave this plane of existence one day, and age indeed is a limiting factor. There are things, for example, that we can do in our teens that we can’t or wouldn’t want to do when we are much older. But most of us let age limit us “way beyond” what it actually should!

Here are some stories that inspire:

• A high school dropout who aced his high school exams in his forties and went on to become an executive.
• The man who worked as a janitor at a school to put his wife through college, and then studied part time, wrote his exams and later became the principal of the school at which he once worked as a janitor.
• The man who built his house in his seventies while enjoying good health, because he didn’t get the opportunity to do it earlier.
• The young woman who found love in her forties.
• The couple who found love in their sixties.
• The man who found the love of his life in his fifties.
• The amazing doctors and scientists who found cures for diseases in their late 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Life is full of success stories like these. Perhaps one of the most well known is the story of the creator of the world famous Kentucky Fried Chicken. We wouldn’t be enjoying KFC today if Colonel Sanders gave up because society made him feel like a failure! After many setbacks and failures in life, Sanders launched the super successful Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant Chain at the age of 65. He died at the ripe old age of 90.

One of the greatest lies you can be told is that you’re too young for this or you’re too old for that.

Patrick Carpen