In this section from the introduction to PG-40 I outline my thinking on some of the people who have made it late in life:

Many books promise to reveal “The Secret for Success”. But how many of them deliver on that promise? How often have we read the blurb and bought the book only to end feeling swindled and asking “Is that it?” So I’m going to be very clear about PG-40 upfront – there is no one “secret” of success, no one magic formula and no one reason why people “make it” later in life.

So, if I’m not giving you “The Secret”, if I’m not going to be pulling the rabbit out of the hat, what am I giving you?

There are as many “secrets”, formulas and reasons for success as there are people who have enjoyed or are journeying to success. Those journeys have been undertaken in every field of human endeavor and involved many different routes, not all of them as the crow flies. No bookstore could hold all their stories. Even if it could who would have time to read them and still be a success themselves?

Just as there is no one secret, so there is no single definition of “making it”. Just as you will undertake your own journey to success so you will define your own destination, write your own definition of success, of making it. The twenty-four “late makers” featured here make it in very different endeavours and have literally sung, joked, cooked and photographed their way into the pages of this book while others have sold their way in with vacuum cleaners, Big Macs, soap, sex toys and skinny Venti caramel lattes with double shots – to go.

From writers to actors to entrepreneurs to inventors, there is no practical limit on how people make it late in life and very few rules that we need to abide by. (Although I do take a shot at distilling a few principles that worked for them later in the book).