“I was forty-six when I started. Everyone around me had already finished. Turns out I was just preparing longer than the rest.”
— Pierre Trudeau
Trudeau entered Parliament at 46, became PM at 48. Before that: Harvard, LSE, Sciences Po, and years backpacking through China, India, the Middle East. His late start became his advantage.
1965. I walked into Parliament at forty-six. My colleagues had been building careers since their twenties. I had a backpack, three degrees from three countries, and ten years of articles nobody read. Three years later I was Prime Minister. Every detour, every year wandering, every book I read in a Paris cafe taught me something they could not learn behind a desk. If you feel behind, you are not. You are loading the weapon everyone else already fired empty.