(A 2 minute read)
- Anna Mary Robertson Moses was 78 years old when she pursued her passion for painting. Her first works were purchased for $3. The widowed farmer continued to paint, under her nickname “Grandma Moses”. In 2006, one of her paintings sold for $1.2 million.
- J.R.R. Tolkien published the first of his series, “The Lord of the Rings” when he was 62.
- Cancer survivor Barbara Hillary was the first black woman to reach the North Pole, and one of the oldest at the age of 75. Four years later, at 79, Barbara traveled to the South Pole.
- William Ivy Baldwin walked a 630-foot wire across Colorado’s Eldorado Canyon on his 82nd birthday, without a harness or a safety net.
- Nola Ochs graduated from Fort Hays State University in Kansas in 2007, along with her granddaughter. Nola was 95 at the time, the world’s oldest college graduate. In 2010, Nola earned her master’s degree, two years shy of her 100th birthday.
There is no age limit to pursuing dreams.
You can retire from a job without retiring from imagination. At L-Tron, we’re in the business of data collection technology solutions.
Technology is changing and improving at warp speed.
The device you bought a year ago is likely outdated. Every week, you’re bombarded with software updates and upgrades. And when you’re looking for advice on the Web, you probably discount anything older than two years, because it feels and is obsolete.
While the technology may become obsolete; the creative and the innovator inside each of us does not have to.
Read on for inspiration!
Max Schlienger retired from his career as an engineer, a career in which he continually innovated with high-performance materials for the aerospace, nuclear, and other industries. He holds 30 patents, for inventions that do things like feed toxic waste drums into a treatment chamber.
Max has a vineyard in northern California, where he harvests about 500 tons of grapes each year. He sells his cabernet, sauvignon blanc, merlot, and syrah fruit to wineries.
Farming is not his passion. Engineering remains his steadfast pursuit.
He’s 89 now and is working on a lifelong project: a train that uses a unique, vacuum-powered and magnetic propulsion system. He has a one-sixth scale prototype of the VECTORR traveling the railway around his vineyard, not with the loud chugging of a conventional train, but the soft whoosh of this powerfully smooth technology.
Max’s invention could revolutionize travel. He has some distance to go to fine-tune the technology for mass transportation and to answer the myriad questions about the infrastructure needed to support it.
Before Max’s father died in 1993, he told his son to “just keep going on it.” He’ll soon be 90 years old, but he isn’t stopping.
I have been privileged to have the same type of role modeling within my own family. My Dad is, was and always will be a creative. His degree is in engineering and he was not an A student, but boy did he like to invent. It was fun watching and listening to him and his mind at work. He was inventing stuff all of the time that we used at home; this was the norm for us and we thought all Dads were quirky inventors. Leland passed away one year ago at the age of 89, and right up until the week prior; he was creating; innovating and using his unique skill set. I plan to be doing the same thing…..
What if we all “just keep going”?
After all, we are never too old to think big!
