Too late to change things up?

Turns out there’s still plenty of room for business innovation later in life

Second Act A series about Pittsburghers who prove it’s not too late to pivot

Ray Kroc, Colonel Sanders, Julia Child, Grandma Moses: What do they have in common?

They’re just a few prominent examples of people who achieved success late — sometimes very late — in their lives.

Mr. Kroc, a milkshake machine salesman, bought a hamburger stand in California at age 52 and transformed it into the fast-food icon McDonald’s. Harlan David Sanders didn’t start his Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise until the age of 62.

Ms. Child was 49 when she published her first cookbook and 51 when she began her own television cooking show, “The French Chef,” while the celebrated American painter Anna Mary Robertson Moses didn’t pursue her passion until her mid-70’s.

In a country that seems obsessed with prodigy entrepreneurs — think Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, for example — it might be easy for ordinary folks to feel washed-up if they haven’t “made it” by age 40.

But in a year when lives have

been disrupted and many career plans changed, the Pittsburgh PostGazette’s business staff will take the next two weeks to share stories of Pittsburghers who have managed to find new opportunities later in life — people who have had a second act. Some of them might be called late bloomers, while others just decided to try something entirely different part way through.

So what finally gives these older career changers their edge?

Penn State assistant professor Roger Beaty, who specializes in studying creative thinking and cognitive neuroscience, suspects

some people who achieve success later in life share certain traits with younger stars but circumstances hindered them. Maybe they misspent their youth; experienced racism, sexism or early academic failures; or simply had too many bills to pay.

“They probably always had a creative mind but didn’t have the opportunity or take the opportunity until later in life,” Mr. Beaty said.

Grandma Moses, who began working on farms at 12, simply had no time for most of her adult life for frivolous pursuit of the arts. Luckily, she lived to be 101.

No matter what age, there are certain qualities that successful people often share, Mr. Beaty said.

Chiefly, they tend to have openness and risk-taking traits associated with creative thinking.

Creative people have the ability to “think divergently, the ability to think flexibly. These are people who come up with a lot of ideas and varying ideas,” he said.

In general, creative people have special brains, he said. They have strong connections between the more spontaneous default network — which involves imagination and mind-wandering — and the control network, which is associated with focused thinking.

“Those who are creative have more communication between those networks. You can see that on brain scans,” Mr. Beaty said.

One of the traits most strongly linked to creativity is openness to experience, he said.

“These are people who have an active imagination, they enjoy the arts, they like trying new things like going to new restaurants or artistic venues or just kind of going on different types of vacations — anything that is new. They are curious about it and will be open to that experience.”

That openness tends to decline with age, Mr. Beaty said, which means late bloomers generally won’t be people who just suddenly

Associated Press photos Julia Child, who changed the way Americans look at food and the way women looked at cooking and themselves, was 49 years old when she published her first cookbook and 51 when she began her own television cooking show — just one example of how you don’t have to “make it” by 40.

Ray Kroc was a 52-year-old milkshake machine salesman when he bought the franchising rights to a small California-based burger restaurant chain, which he transformed into the global fast-food icon McDonald’s.