Your Past Does Not Disqualify You

I had a conversation with a friend not long ago who just lost his job, and is overwhelmed by the thought of starting over. He shared with me that he didn’t know what he was going to do now, since he’s getting older. That made me think of Colonel Sanders. Bear with me, it’ll make sense in a minute.

Most people know about KFC but not many know the real story of Harland Sanders. Before he changed the entire fast-food industry: he painted horse carriages at thirteen. He tried the Army and washed out in six months. He practiced law for three years in Arkansas until a courtroom brawl (with his own client) ended that. He sold life insurance, then ran a ferryboat company. He started an acetylene lamp manufacturing business. He operated gas stations that went under.

That’s when he got into the restaurant business but… his first restaurant burned down and his second restaurant went belly up when a highway bypass cut off his customer base. At this point he was 65, divorced, and living on a $15 social security check. This man had accumulated more failures than most, but that also means he tried more than most.

That’s when he decided to start franchising his fried chicken recipe.

That takes courage. At an age when most people are retiring, when the world has essentially told you that your best years are behind you, when your past is full of very convincing evidence that maybe you’re just not the guy who makes things work, that’s the moment when he hit the road in an old Ford with a pressure cooker and his secret seasoning.

He went to restaurant after restaurant, cooking his chicken and pitching his idea. He even slept in his car.

Harlan Sanders was rejected 1,009 times.

One thousand rejections. One thousand times somebody said no. But on the 1,010th attempt, a restaurant owner in Salt Lake City named Pete Harmon said yes.

By 1960, Colonel Sanders had franchised his chicken to 400 restaurants across America and Canada. By 1964, at 73 years old, he sold the company for $2 million. By the time he died in 1980, KFC was a global empire.

Here’s what is so wonderful about this story, and what I told my friend: His past didn’t disqualify him, his age didn’t disqualify him. Not even his string of failures and wrong turns could disqualify him from what he was actually put on this earth to do.

We tell ourselves these stories about what we “have to” be. You have to be a certain age. You have to have the right background. You can’t have failed that many times and still be credible. You can’t have the wrong résumé and build something great.

Colonel Sanders proves that’s a lie. Your past doesn’t determine your future, God does. You just have to be willing to try.