Is It Too Late to Start Something New?
Who in the world would want to watch an old lady demonstrate a moose call?
That thought actually crossed my mind. Not about moose calls specifically, but about whether anyone would want to watch me. On camera. At my age. Talking about products I bought on Amazon or showing someone how to knit a blanket from leftover yarn.
It’s a real question a lot of us ask, usually somewhere around 60. And I’ve come to believe it’s exactly the wrong question.
The Question Underneath the Question
When we ask “is it too late to start something new,” what we’re really asking is: Does someone like me still get to try?
Does someone my age, with gray hair and laugh lines and a learning curve ahead of them, still get to show up and figure something out in public?
I’ve been asking myself versions of that question for twenty years. And I’ve been answering it the same way every time: by just starting anyway.
I Talked to Zero People for Weeks
In 2016, I decided to try livestreaming on Twitch. At the time, Twitch was mostly gamers, young men playing video games. But they had just opened a creator category for hobbies, and I thought: I could teach knitting there.
I had been teaching knitting at local craft stores for years. I was comfortable with the teaching part. The technology part was a different story.
For weeks, I went live and talked to nobody. Zero viewers. I narrated everything I was doing out loud. I asked questions and answered them myself. I kept going because I figured if someone stumbled in, they’d hear a voice and maybe stay.
Eventually, they did. Then more came. Then I built a real community.
That’s not a story about talent or timing. That’s a story about showing up to an empty room and talking anyway.
The Email That Arrived the Day Before Chemo
By early 2017, that community had grown into something I hadn’t expected. Real people who showed up regularly, who knew my name, who I knew by their usernames.
In February 2017, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The day before my first chemotherapy treatment, I got an email from Twitch telling me I had been accepted as a Partner. Back then there was no affiliate program, Partner was the only way to make money on the platform. It was a big deal. It meant my viewers could subscribe and support the channel financially.
I told my chat. We were so excited together. Weeks later, when the subscribe button went live, I had fifty subscribers within days. They wanted to be there for me.
I kept streaming through treatment. Not every day, some days I was too sick. They understood that. I went bald on camera. I made jokes about my own head. I showed up scared and then showed up again. Knitting was my escape, my way of feeling like a normal person during a year that was anything but normal.
My audience was there the whole time.
What Forty, Fifty, and Sixty Taught Me
I’ve noticed my thinking about “starting something new” has shifted with each decade.
At 40, I thought: This looks fun, I wonder if I can figure it out. That’s how I got into World of Warcraft, at 45, as a woman, joining guilds full of men in their 20s and 30s who probably thought I was an oddity. I learned to raid. I learned game strategy. I healed my guild through bosses on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and eventually I was doing it in my 60s. I started a local WoW meetup group so we could talk about mob kills with people who actually understood what that meant.
Most people my age didn’t even know what I was talking about. That never stopped me.
At 50, something shifted. I stopped caring quite so much what those people thought. The gap between “what if someone judges me” and “but I want to try this” closed considerably.
At 60, a different thought arrived: Life is too short to sit around.
That one has stuck.
The Income That Built Itself in My Own House
A few years ago, I started filming product reviews for Amazon’s Influencer program. Nothing fancy, I filmed kitchen items in the kitchen, cat products with my actual cats, pool items while I was in the pool. I cleared off the kitchen island and pointed a camera at whatever I was reviewing.
I was a little surprised it worked. Month after month, small amounts of money started coming in. Then those small amounts stacked into hundreds of dollars. Consistently.
I filmed things I already had. In rooms I was already in. Talking about products I had actually used.
It’s not a glamorous origin story. But it funds the rest of what I’m building, the knitting channel, the blog, the email list, all of it.
The Part Nobody Talks About
I spent a lot of years as a caregiver before any of this. My husband’s grandmother lived with us for years. Then my parents declined, and I spent nearly a decade traveling back and forth to North Carolina, helping them through illness, and eventually losing them both.
After all of that, the idea of going back to a 9-to-5 office job felt like a different kind of loss. I didn’t want a boss. I didn’t want a schedule someone else set. I wanted to figure something out on my own terms.
That’s not a small thing to admit. A lot of people in that situation feel the window has closed, that starting something new is for people who are younger, less tired, further from grief.
I don’t think that’s true. I think sometimes the window cracks open wider after loss. Because you stop pretending you have unlimited time, and you start doing the things you actually want to do.
What I’d Tell You If You’re Asking the Question
If you’re sitting with “is it too late,” here’s what I actually believe:
Trying rarely costs what you think it does. Most of what I’ve started cost me time and a learning curve, not money. The Twitch channel cost nothing but weeks of talking to an empty room. The YouTube channel started because a friend asked how to do something and I filmed myself doing it. The product reviews started with things already in my house.
The audience finds you if you show up consistently. This is the part people want to skip. They want to know the trick, the shortcut, the right moment to start. There isn’t one. There’s just showing up.
You don’t have to be young to be relatable. You have to be real. My viewers watched me go through cancer treatment. They watched me get excited about a subscribe button while my body was doing something terrifying. That kind of realness is not something youth gives you.
The people who think it’s weird that you’re trying are not your audience anyway. Let them think it. Go live to an empty room and keep talking.
The Answer
Is it too late to start something new?
I’m 65. I’m rebuilding YouTube watch hours, growing an email list around a knitting pattern I wrote, filming product reviews in my kitchen, and learning more about digital marketing than I ever expected to know at this stage of my life.
I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for over 20 years. I became a Twitch Partner while preparing for chemotherapy. I spent a decade caregiving and still managed to build something on the side.
The answer is no. It’s not too late.
The only question worth asking is: What’s the thing you keep almost starting?
Start that.
Jenny is a content creator, knitting teacher, Amazon Influencer, and the founder of JennyKnits.com. She documents her journey building income streams and creative projects at BigLifeSmallSteps.com.
