It's Never Too Late!

No matter where you are in your career, if this is a new beginning or if you’re a seasoned veteran, still looking for that big break…just remember, its never too late for “it” to happen.

Here are few of my favorite bios and real life success stories. I’m sure many of you know these stories but I’m almost certain, there’s something in it you didn’t know. They all had a price to pay. Enjoy!


Colonel Sanders created the KFC fast food chain at the age of 66. He was the eldest of three children, Sanders was only five years old when his father died. His mother, a homemaker, had to take a job peeling tomatoes in a factory to make ends meet; she would sew at night to earn extra money. Sanders learned how to cook so that he could raise his younger siblings, he took his first full time job at the age of 10 and dropped out of school in the sixth grade to work full time on a farm to support the family.

Sanders held a variety of jobs. He sold insurance in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Then he started a steamboat ferry company that operated on the Ohio River between Jeffersonville and Louisville, Kentucky. Eventually, Sanders took a job as secretary of the Columbus chamber of commerce. There he met an inventor who discovered how to operate natural gas lamps on a gas derived from carbide.

While working on the railroad in Illinois, Sanders took a correspondence course that allowed him to earn a law degree from Southern University. A local judge permitted him to use his law library and local lawyers helped his studies by explaining law terminology. When he lost his job with the railroad, Sanders began practicing law. He had some success in the legal field working in the Justice of the Peace courts in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sanders ruined his legal career, however, by getting into a brawl with a client in the courtroom. Although found innocent of assault and battery, Sanders' legal practice was through.

In 1929, Sanders moved to Corbin, Kentucky, and opened a gas station along U.S. Route 25. When tourists and traveling salespeople asked Sanders where they could get something to eat nearby, he got the idea of opening a small restaurant next to the gas station. The restaurant had one table and six chairs and specialized in Southern cooking such as pan fried chicken, ham, vegetables, and biscuits.

In 1937, Sanders tried to start a restaurant chain in Kentucky, but his attempt failed. Two years later, he opened another motel and restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, but this too failed.
Sanders continued to alter his chicken recipe to get the seasonings just right. In 1939, he devised a method to cook chicken quickly because customers would not wait 45 minutes for a batch to be fried up in an iron pan. Sanders used a pressure cooker, a new invention at the time, to cook chicken in nine minutes.
Some time later, Sanders began sending his spices to other restaurants in an agreement that he would make five cents on every chicken sold that was seasoned with his spices.

And I reiterate; he was 66 by the time KFC as we know it today, was created.


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Berry Gordy, Founder, Motown Records. Gordy dropped out of high school his junior year to pursue a career as a feather-weight boxer. His fighting career ended when he was drafted to fight in the Korean war, after serving for two years he was discharged and returned home to Detroit and started the Three-D Record label but that business soon failed.

Gordy worked for his father for a short period and then as a chrome trimmer on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company. The monotony was formidable, and Gordy's way of overcoming it was to write songs in his head, some of which were recorded by local singers.
Decca Records bought several of his compositions and when Gordy compared his royalty checks to what Decca made from the modest hits, he realized that writing the hits wasn't enough. He needed to own them.

At the suggestion of a friend, teenage singer William "Smokey" Robinson, Gordy borrowed $700 from his father and formed Motown.


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Maya Angelou, Author & Poet, was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was only three and she was sent with her brother Bailey to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas.

At age seven, while visiting her mother in Chicago, she was sexually molested by her mother's boyfriend. Too ashamed to tell any of the adults in her life, she confided in her brother. When she later heard the news that an uncle had killed her attacker, she felt that her words had killed the man. She fell silent and did not speak for five years. Maya didn’t speak again until she was thirteen.

She dropped out of school in her teens to become San Francisco's first African American female cable car conductor. She later returned to high school, but became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook, but she had not given up on her talents for music, dance, performance and poetry.

When she began her career as a nightclub singer, she took the professional name Maya Angelou. She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 1954 and 1955. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and recorded her first record album, Calypso Lady (1957).

During her years abroad, she read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti.

Maya Angelou returned to America in 1964, with the intention of helping Malcolm X build his new Organization of African American Unity. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and his plans for a new organization died with him.

Angelou involved herself in television production and remained active in the Civil Rights Movement, working more closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who requested that Angelou serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated. With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, she found solace in writing, and began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book tells the story of her life from her childhood in Arkansas to the birth of her child. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1970 to widespread critical acclaim and enormous popular success.

Her screenplay, the first by an African American woman ever to be filmed, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.


"Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be.”