It’s Never Too Late: The Courage to Chase Your Dreams at Any Age
It was an early, rainy morning in Chicago and I was at another business conference drinking cold coffee and a stale breakfast. I took a seat in the ballroom, half-listening to a banking executive deliver the kind of career advice that gets repeated so often it stops meaning anything.
“Even if you’re not passionate about your work,” he said, “put your all into it.”
Nose to the grindstone. Make yourself indispensable. Work is life. I’d heard it. I’d lived it. I nodded along the way you do when you’ve accepted something as truth without ever examining it.
Then a voice cut through the room.
“If I could just make a comment — I completely disagree. If you’re not passionate about your work, take the time to figure out what you are passionate about. And then pursue that.”
I felt jolted awake.
The woman who said it was Maria Pinto — a Chicago-based fashion designer whose work has captivated Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama. When I later sat across from her as part of Project Legacy, my storytelling project featuring women living on their own terms, she told me a story I’ve never forgotten.
Maria grew up in a large Italian Catholic family and spent her early adult years working in the family’s five-star restaurant in Chicago’s River North. She had a gift for design from childhood, but family expectation had a different plan. So her passion went on simmer.
Then, at 30, she enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In the world she came from, this was not a small decision. There were raised eyebrows. Shouldn’t you have it figured out by now? But Maria is not a woman who abides by other people’s timelines.
What followed wasn’t a straight line to success. There was an embezzling bookkeeper. Economic downturns. Multiple business closures. When the economy crashed in 2009, she closed her doors entirely, traveled through Spain, and tried a stint in the corporate world before realizing — that’s not mine.
So she rebuilt. Again. Her current company, M2057, is the result of every pivot, every crash, every hard lesson accumulated across decades.
She described it this way:
“Out of that experience, I know what to do next. If you live in a fluid way, the dots connect themselves. We all get down a path that just keeps pushing us — and sometimes we need to get off the treadmill for a while.”
She also told me that some of her closest friends are in their twenties, and others are in their eighties.
“Age is just a number,” she said. “You can rebuild at any point in your life.”
So let me ask you this:
What dream have you convinced yourself you’re too old for, too far behind on, or too practical to pursue? What passion went on simmer because life had other plans?
Maria Pinto didn’t become who she was meant to be by following the checklist. She became it by finally choosing herself — at 30, and again after 40, and again after that. The dream doesn’t have an expiration date. But it does require courage. Pick one small step toward something that lights you up and take it this week. That’s where the rewrite begins.
