Dec 12, 2025 Dec 12, 2025 2025-12-12

Spoiler: you can. You already are.

Traditionally, old age was always a mark of wisdom, or at least useful experience. Something has changed, though, and, if you are over 50, chances are that your career is considered done in many Western countries. Add to this the systemic shift of AI, and you get a pretty grim picture.

It’s 3 AM somewhere on the northern shore of Lake Balaton. I’m at kilometer 170 of a 222-kilometer race, and I’m not sure I can finish. The summer rain has stopped and the road is cutting through wet cornfields. I have the eerie feeling that my steps don’t make any sound: my soles are raw—blisters the size of my fist, already burst. Every single step sends brutal pain up my spine.

I stopped running a few hours ago. Now I’m walking, alternating 30-second running sessions with 5-minute walking sessions, anchoring myself to the reflective vest of the runner ahead of me – disappearing and reappearing in the dark fog. The math is unforgiving: 52 kilometers left, less than eight hours until the cutoff. Normally, I would finish this with a smile on my face (even including a nap break, honestly), but now, after 170 painful kilometers and 24 hours of continuous effort, my body screams to sit down. My mind wants a reason to continue.

So I made a deal with myself. Don’t think about the finish line. Just get to the next aid station. It’s 8 kilometers away. That’s all. Crawl if you have to, but keep moving until you see the lights. Then, when you get there, make the same deal again.

I finished UltraBalaton that day. Not super fast, not in good shape—but finished. And something from that night stayed with me, became a kind of operating system for life: you don’t need to see the end. You just need to see the next checkpoint.

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I think about that race often now. The world feels similar—dark, foggy, uncertain, hard to see what’s ahead. AI has arrived not as a gradual shift but as a systemic change, the kind that reshapes our world in months instead of decades. If you’re over 50, you’ve probably felt the question poking relentlessly: Am I still relevant? Can I keep up? Is there a place for me in what comes next?

Here’s what I’ve learned. After 50, you hold three assets that only compound with time—and none of them can be automated.

1. Experience Still Matters

We’ve seen the dot-com go bust. We’ve seen Lehman Brothers crash and witnessed the rise of the crypto world. Then saw NFTs crashing to the ground. When you’ve watched trends die so many times, you develop a quiet instinct for what lasts. You don’t need to chase every new thing—because you’ve earned the right to ask better questions first. Does this solve a real problem? Will it matter in five years? This pattern recognition isn’t nostalgia. It’s sane judgment. And sane judgment is what people pay for when the hype fades. And this AI hype will fade too.

2. Ethics Is Irreplaceable

When you’re younger, you look at integrity as something that drags you down. You watch how everyone else seems to be cutting corners and getting ahead. But corners catch up, eventually. They always do. By 50, you’ve seen hundreds of reputations traded for speed and watched the repayment come due. You’ve also learned that trust takes years to build and seconds to lose. In a world flooded with AI-generated content and shortcuts, being the person others can rely on, no matter what – well, that isn’t old-fashioned, it’s rare. Rare is valuable.

3. Mindset Outlasts Everything

That night in Hungary taught me something no business workshop ever could: keep moving until the next aid station. Not forever—just until the next checkpoint. This is the mindset that gets you through uncertain years, difficult projects, the long middle stretches when nobody’s clapping. AI can work faster than you, that’s true. But it can’t decide when to push through and when to rest. It doesn’t know that most people quit in the third hour after midnight – and the ones who don’t are the ones who finish.

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I sold my first company at 38. I thought I was clever – and for a while, I was. But then I watched almost all of the money disappear into bad timing and lessons I hadn’t learned yet. So I had to start over. I had to accept the chapter was closed entirely – and it was up to me, and only me, to start writing the next one. To move to the next checkpoint. Crawl if I had to, but move forward.

The world keeps telling you that 30 is the new 50, then that 50 is obsolete. Ignore it.

AI is just a tool. A remarkable one—I use it daily. But it doesn’t have scar tissue on its soles. It doesn’t remember pushing through at 3AM through wet cornfields. It doesn’t carry the crushing weight of a lesson learned the hard way.

We’ve survived dial-up internet, the 2008 crash, and the whole cryptocurrency ups and downs. We’re still here. That’s not a disadvantage. That’s a hard-earned place at the table.

Pack light. Move first. Finish the loop.

The lake is still there. You got this.