Colonel Sanders’ Secret Recipe

No, not the chicken recipe– I’m talking about what Sanders did with his life.

Harland David Sanders was born in 1890 to a poor farmer in Kentucky. When Harland was five, his daddy died, and as the oldest child, he was left to look after his siblings and keep house while his mother got what jobs she could. By all accounts he quickly became a great cook, but of course, his formal education was limited.

When he was ten, he got a job as a farm hand, and at age thirteen he left home to paint horse carriages.

Harland Sanders never really stuck to a job. In his youth, he was a streetcar conductor, a teamster, a blacksmith’s helper, and a railwayman.

While working on the railway, he studied law by correspondence and eventually set himself up as a lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas. But in three years his legal career blew up when he got into a courtroom brawl with his own client.

After that, he sold insurance, and then he sold tires, and then he ran a ferry boat. He married, had children, and divorced. He ran a service station, but that foundered in the Great Depression. By now he was forty.

Given a chance to run another service station, he accepted. He began serving meals in the adjacent residential quarters. Before long he opened a restaurant and did well enough that food critic Duncan Hines gave favourable mention in his restaurant guide. He also found time to get involved in a fatal gunfight which he survived without being shot or getting a criminal record.

By the time he was fifty he was eking out a living, but then the restaurant and motel fell on hard times. To make ends meet, he took a string of side jobs, a little of this and a little of that. Now he was sixty, and just getting by.

However, during his restaurant years he had been determined to create the perfect fried chicken, trying this, then trying that. Eventually, he found just the right combination of pressure cooking, coating, and spices, and realised he was on to something that was very different and very special.

When he was 62, he sold his first “secret recipe” franchise. The product didn’t even have a name until a freelance sign painter came up with “Kentucky Fried Chicken”.

So, at age 65, with not much but Social Security and some small savings, Harland Sanders hit the road selling fried chicken franchises, often sleeping in the back of his car. Running the business on the road while his wife mixed and shipped the secret spices, he grew the company to over 600 locations, and in 1964 sold the business for two million dollars. “The Colonel” and his image were recognized around the world. Finally, at age 74, he had become a success.

You’re never too old to succeed. Harland Sanders figured out his unique genius and worked it for all he was worth, persisting until he became an overnight success seven decades in the making.

So, what’s your chicken recipe?