Jung Said Life Begins at 40. My Grandfather Started at 50.

Amplified Insights | Alan McKee

A story about reinvention, second acts, and why your best chapter might still be ahead of you.

“Life really does begin at 40. Up until then, you are just doing research.”

— Carl Jung

I love that quote. But I want to make the case that Jung may have been a little conservative.

My grandfather, Allie McKee, didn’t really hit his stride until he was well into his 50s. And by the time he was done, he had built something more meaningful than most people manage in a lifetime.

His story has been rattling around in my head for a long time. I think it belongs here, with you, because if you’re an encore entrepreneur, or thinking about becoming one, Gramp’s life is a road map.

Research Phase: Smyrna Mills, Maine

Allie McKee grew up in Smyrna Mills, Maine. Population: small. Weather: brutal. Family size: thirteen children, of whom he was one.

(A quick aside: my name, Alan, is a nod to his. My parents wanted to honor him before I’d done a single thing to earn it. I’ve been trying to live up to it ever since.)

He dropped out of school after the 8th grade. Not because he wasn’t smart, that became obvious later, but because life in rural Maine in the 1930s had other plans for a kid who needed to work. He took up carpentry, the way a lot of boys from that part of the world did: out of necessity, with his hands, learning by doing.

He was good at it. Really good.

Gramp had married Nana (Harriet) back in the mid-1930s. Nana, all four-foot-nine of her, was the responsible adult in the equation, the one who kept Gramp’s sense of fun and adventure from going completely off the rails. She was steady where he was spontaneous, practical where he was imaginative, and somehow perfectly matched to a man who was always dreaming up the next thing. They made a great team.

Their son Richard, my dad, was born in 1937, and my Aunt Sheila soon after. So by the time World War II broke out, Gramp had a family that would soon be waiting for him to come back home.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, he took his building skills to the United States Navy as a member of the Construction Battalions, the Seabees. The nickname comes from the initials “CB,” and it fit: these were the “fighting builders,” the men who went into hostile territory and built the infrastructure that made everything else possible. Roads, runways, bridges, bases. They built with one hand and were trained to defend with the other.

Allie McKee spent part of the most consequential conflict of the 20th century doing exactly what he had always done: building things under pressure, in difficult conditions, making something from nothing.

Back home, life was hard. Nana held things together while Gramp was overseas, the way millions of women did during those years. My dad has told me that Gramp used to mail his military chocolate bar rations home to him and Sheila. Think about that for a second. A man serving abroad, in a combat zone, mailing his chocolate home to his kids because he knew it was a luxury they couldn’t get in rural Maine. Dad remembers it to this day: the anticipation of those packages, and the gratitude. That one detail tells you almost everything you need to know about who Allie McKee was: he was always thinking about other people first.

A man will reveal who he is in a hundred ways. But the chocolate gets there first.

And when he finally came home from overseas, somehow, only Gramp could have pulled this off, he brought a monkey with him.

Nana was mortified.

Dad, Sheila, and every kid in the neighborhood were absolutely thrilled.

I offer this story with no further commentary, except to say: if you’ve ever wondered where Gramp’s sense of adventure came from, or why Nana had that look she had, now you know.

That’s the research phase. Paid for in years, not tuition.

The Build-Out Years: Wallingford, Connecticut

After the war, the family eventually settled in Wallingford, Connecticut, in the early 1950s. Gramp started a small construction company. Post-war America was booming, suburban neighborhoods were sprouting everywhere, and young families needed homes. He built them. Lots of them. He knew his trade cold, he had earned the trust of his community, and people wanted to hire a man who showed up, did what he said he would do, and left the job right.

Here’s the thing about Gramp that made him different: he had a natural, sincere charm that you couldn’t fake. People simply liked him. They trusted him. And he never, ever took that trust for granted. He didn’t just want to earn it; he worked to keep it. That’s a harder thing than most people realize.

Earning trust is a transaction. Keeping it is a practice. Most people only bother with the first one.

That trait, trustworthy, genuine, easy to be around, eventually led to a door opening that no one could have predicted.

The Adventure: On the Road with Lifetime China

A company called Lifetime China came calling. They needed a traveling salesman. A man who could drive across the country with a station wagon full of plates and cups and saucers and gravy boats, walk into a home, and make people feel good enough about him to buy a complete set of china.

Gramp was their guy.

By this point, Richard and Sheila were grown and had families of their own, so Nana climbed into that big station wagon right alongside him, and the two of them hit the road. Not for a summer. Not for a year. For years.

They visited nearly every state in the union.

For us kids, my siblings and our cousins on Aunt Sheila’s side, this was one of the most exciting facts of childhood. Packages and postcards would arrive from places we could barely find on a map. A bolo tie from Arizona with an actual scorpion embedded in amber. A piece of petrified wood. A miniature toy pistol from Texas. A “gold” nugget from California. Each one felt like treasure, like a dispatch from some impossibly exotic world. We were all enamored, every one of us.

They’d find their way back to Wallingford a couple of times a year, and that’s when the real magic happened. Sleeping over at Nana and Gramp’s house. Fishing with Gramp at the crack of dawn. Building woodworking projects out in the garage. All of us kids gathered around, listening to his stories, his travel stories, yes, but also his tall tales about growing up in Maine, which got taller with each telling and more outrageous with each audience. Nana would roll her eyes. We would beg for more.

The man was a born storyteller. You could trace that particular gift through the whole family like a thread, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about why I’m the one sitting here writing this down.

The Reinvention: Elsa, Texas

In the early 1970s, having fallen in love with the southwest United States during their travels, Gramp and Nana settled in Elsa, Texas. He was in his mid-50s.

A lot of people in their mid-50s start thinking about winding down. Gramp started thinking about what was next.

He missed building. It was his first love, his core identity: the thing his hands knew how to do before his brain had even caught up. But he was also realistic. Getting back out on a job site at his age, doing the physical labor, probably wasn’t the play.

So he thought about it differently. What if he didn’t build the houses himself? What if he taught young men how to build them?

A local high school was starting a building trades program. Gramp went after the job.

Here’s where the story gets good, and where it matters most to you, if you’re someone who thinks age or credentials might be working against you.

The school had a list of required qualifications for the position. Gramp had dropped out of school in the 8th grade. By any conventional measure, he was not qualified.

So he got qualified.

In his 50s, with no high school diploma and more practical knowledge of construction than most academics would accumulate in a career, he went back to school, attained the required credentials, and got the job.

He was 50-something, going back to school to qualify for a job he already knew how to do better than almost anyone. He didn’t find this remarkable. That’s what made it remarkable.

He became a beloved teacher. His students learned how to build houses from the ground up. Fellow faculty loved him. The program thrived.

He did it for about fifteen years.

The Coda: Back to Wallingford

Eventually, after a brief stint in Florida, Gramp and Nana retired back to Wallingford to be near family and, finally, to actually rest. They moved into an independent retirement community.

He started a woodworking program for the residents.

Of course he did.

Allie McKee passed away in 1990. He had lived a life on his own terms, not because circumstances were always easy, because they weren’t, but because he never stopped asking himself what was next, and then doing the work to get there.

I believe, with complete confidence, that if you had asked him which part of his life was most fulfilling, he would have told you it was those fifteen years in a Texas high school, teaching young men a trade and sending them out into the world better equipped to build something.

Jung said life begins at 40. For Gramp, it really started at 50. And it was magnificent.

The Long Game

An MIT study of 2.7 million startups found that a 50-year-old founder is 2.8 times more likely to succeed than a 25-year-old founder. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 Annual Business Survey found that 52.3% of business owners are 55 or older. Experience is a competitive advantage. The research confirms what Gramp already knew.

But his story isn’t really about a business. It’s about something bigger: the idea that the work you’ve done in the first half of your life is not wasted. It’s not just background or resume bullet points. It’s the raw material for everything that comes next.

He’d built with his hands and sold with his personality, served his country and roamed with his wife. By the time he settled in Texas, the man had lived more than most people fit into two lifetimes. And then, at 50-something, he figured out the one thing that let him bring all of it together: teaching others.

Your reinvention might look like starting a business. Or it might look like consulting, coaching, teaching, building something new out of everything you already know.

Whatever it is, the research phase prepared you for it. You just have to be willing to close the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

Gramp did it. At 50. With an 8th-grade education and a lifetime of earned wisdom. Jung said life begins at 40. Maybe the better question is: when does yours?

Working on your own second act? Drop a comment below. And if this story brought someone to mind, send it to them.

Keep rocking.

Alan McKee is the author of The Amplified Entrepreneur: Building a Business That Rocks, an Amazon #1 Hot New Release in Business Education. He helps encore entrepreneurs transform decades of corporate experience into thriving businesses, using the timeless lessons of classic rock as the soundtrack. Learn more at AmpMyBiz.com.

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