He was 54 years old, and his father had just died. He inherited a modest rice farm business, with just two buildings on the company ledgers.
He was no rice farmer. He was a professor of economics. His whole life, he had taught economic principles to his students, and sent them off to go change the world. He had never had to apply them himself.
But, now, here he was, a new owner of an old business, and little idea how to run it.
He could have sold it, made himself a little bit of money and continued his life as an economics professor. Indeed, that may have been the sensible thing to do.
Instead, he quit the university and set about on a simple plan to reshape the family business, starting with those two buildings. He rebuilt them into steel structures, modernizing them, making them more sound and permanent.
Then he acquired other buildings and remade them in the same way. Eventually, with eighty-three buildings built over thirty-two years, this former economics professor was named the world’s wealthiest private citizen by Forbes magazine in 1991.
Takaichiro Mori had pivoted from more than half a century of one life to find unmatched success in an entirely different industry. And in the process, he remade central Tokyo into a modern urban metropolis.
At 46, I am eight years junior to Mori when he made his monumental course change, and I am faced with a similar challenge. In a little over a month, I am likely to be out of a job, surplus to requirement at a company which is closing more locations than it is opening.
I have options. I can continue to manage for another company. I could switch to another position in the current one, and bide my time. I don’t really have many doubts that I can move on to a new position somewhere else and more or less stay at the level I am currently, or maybe even improve upon it somewhat.
But is that what I want? Do I want to remain an economics professor for another thirty years? Or will I instead give real estate tycoon a shot? Metaphorically, of course.
Mori was no massive success story before he inherited his father’s business, and neither am I. But he made himself into something, even on the wrong side of fifty years old.
I know many people who are themselves facing similar questions and self-doubts. They are maybe not in their fifties, but many of them are in their forties, like me. They, too, are looking back on lives where they have yet to achieve much and wondering if it’s possible to change.
Mori was renowned for his humble lifestyle, wearing only a simple black kimono in his office, and living in a modest apartment not far from work. He was not a man of extravagance, and proclaimed himself merely lucky to have benefited from a post-war boom in Tokyo real estate values.
If Mori could do this, why can’t I? Why can’t you? At thirty? Forty? Fifty? Older?
It’s never too late to bloom.
I don’t accept that my past defines where I go in the future. The past is the past, unrecoverable and unchangeable. Therefore, I spend no time being concerned about it. My future lies before me, and that is all that matters.
If you find yourself in a similar spot and of a mindset that you cannot change, Mori’s story shows that you can.
The only person who can stop you from achieving your dreams—at any age—is you.