Colonel Sanders ran a gas station, not a kitchen.
He spent years in a wide mix of jobs, opened a service station in the 1930s, started feeding his customers on the side, and built a following for his chicken. Then the state moved the highway and killed his traffic. He was in his 60s.
Most people file that under the end. He filed it under next. He took the recipe on the road and franchised it, one restaurant at a time.
That is not a story about chicken. It is a story about what a wide, winding resume actually gives you: the range to see an asset where other people see a dead end.
If you have carried a mix of careers and side pursuits, you are not behind and you are not too late. You are holding parts most single-track operators never collected.
What is the asset hiding in the chapter you keep apologizing for?
Transcription:
Gas station shuts down, but he takes his recipes. Remember, guy’s not a chef, he’s not a cook. He’s been a longtime business owner of a gas station, and he now sets out on a mission to reach more people and to franchise this great thing that he has, which he does in the 1950s era.
He is in his 60s when he does this. That’s polymath. That’s a great example of a polymath. He’s just taking things and evolving and taking things that he knows and applying it and moving forward and continuing to grow. In the end, building a very successful franchise and business. I see it often with clients.
What I also notice is if they’re not aware of this, one of those beliefs I was talking about earlier is a score- that scoreboard that they’ve been keeping applied by other people where they’ve thought, “I must not be enough.” This is really weird. Other people… One of my best friends in grade school knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life when we were in grade school.
She’s like, “I’m gonna become a vet. I love animals. I’m totally gonna become a vet.” Guess what? She’s a veterinarian now, a very successful, thriving veterinarian. She knew, and I remember when she’d talk about it, I’m like, “Wow, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Is that okay that I don’t know what I’m gonna do?”
And then as the years went on and I watched her thrive, succeed, like have this lane and really get into it, I thought… I judged. I judged myself, and I saw it in multiple people I graduated with and was friends with. They went off and they knew their, their one lane, and they did their one lane, and I’m out there going, “Well, maybe it’s the…”
You know, like, I wanna learn this. Oh, I wanna learn that, and, and always making sure I was getting paid for what I was learning, and always making sure I was safe as I was learning those things, but definitely always exploring kind of new horizons and different avenues. That’s why my business has flourished so well, is because I look at new opportunities, I explore new things, and they just get woven into the experience that my clients have and how my business moves forward.
So let go of the judgment. I- if you have been looking at a variety or have done in your lifetime a variety of things that don’t look connected, let go of any judgment that you have about that. And if you are a young person just starting out in the world, just graduating from high school and you’re like, “I, I don’t know what I wanna do.
Like everybody else kinda has this lane and I’m not sure,” you’re okay. You’re okay. My best Best, best advice to you is go figure it out. And you do that by doing things. So what are you interested in right now?