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Don’t worry

At 46, Samuel L. Jackson got his first movie role.

anxietySometimes, you have to be willing to play the long game, and to possibly be misunderstood for long periods of time. A  prerequisite to inventing or creating art is having the willingness to fail and hang in there.

In any sort of a mental or physical quest it’s an enormous advantage to have opponents who quit easily or who’ve found it useless to even try. So don’t give up your day job and don’t worry too much. It’s never too late to achieve your dream – consider the path of these people you know:

At 23, Tina Fey was working at a YMCA.

At 23, Oprah was fired from her first reporting job.

At 24, Stephen King was working as a janitor and living in a trailer.

At 27, Vincent Van Gogh failed as a missionary and decided to go to art school.

At 28, J.K. Rowling was a suicidal single parent living on welfare.

At 28, Wayne Coyne ( from The Flaming Lips) was a fry cook.

At 30, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.

At  30, Martha Stewart was a stockbroker.

At 37, Ang Lee was a stay-at-home-dad working odd jobs.

At 39, Julia Child released her first cookbook, and got her own cooking show at age 51.

At 40, Vera Wang designed her first dress.

At 40, Stan Lee released his first big comic book.

At 43, Alan Rickman gave up his graphic design career to pursue acting.

At 46, Samuel L. Jackson got his first movie role.

At 52, Morgan Freeman landed his first movie.

At 57, Kathryn Bigelow reached international success with The Hurt Locker.

At 76, Grandma Moses started painting.

Louis CK said, “I definitely have huge benefits to how well I’m doing, but you do find yourself missing the climb. It’s a little like Mount Everest. When you summit, you spend about 20 minutes up there, and you do a little dance. But if the 20-minute dance was really it, would you really risk your life for the amount of work it takes to get up and down? So every time I feel like I’ve found a clearing, I try to find something else that I don’t know how to do yet. That’s just much more interesting to me.”