A 75-Year-Old Beginner
What My Friend Ken McArthur Taught Me About a Life Well Lived
When my friend Ken McArthur posted his “short” biography on Facebook, it read like three lifetimes.
By the end of his twenties, he had already:
Written code for a company calculating orbits for NASA
Hauled boxes of punch cards between PhDs and keypunch operators in Princeton
Bought and rebuilt a rundown pet store with snakes, monkeys, and tropical fish
Played in a rock band and built his own recording studio
Recorded a record with Tiny Tim
Driven from Tampa to Pasadena in one sleepless run across the country
That’s just Act One.
Ken is 75 now. Still building. Still experimenting. Still on a five-year plan.
And underneath all the stories, there’s a philosophy that’s surprisingly simple.
The Question Most People Dodge
Ken has a question he asks people he mentors:
“What do you want to do when you get up in the morning?”
Not what will pay the most.
Not what your parents wanted.
What do you actually want your days to look like?
Most people never really answer that. They just fall into a job, stay there out of fear, and try to make peace with it.
Ken didn’t.
He had “respectable” roles — computer programmer, pet store owner, police officer, music teacher, corporate software guy for Pepsi — but every time he hit a crossroads, he asked:
Do I want to do this for the rest of my life?
If the answer was no, he moved on.
Not dramatically. Not with a big “I quit” speech. He just pivoted and followed the next thread that felt alive.
Find Something. Make It Better.
One of my favorite stories starts in Princeton.
After the Army, Ken ends up at a temp job walking punch cards between a building full of PhDs and a building full of keypunch operators. Human middleware.
He gets bored and asks the mainframe guy to teach him some programming.
His first program? A tool to print out the card contents so they could catch syntax errors before sending jobs off to a big computer and waiting three days for them to fail.
That’s classic Ken:
See friction
Make it lighter
Use tech to actually help humans, not just show off
He later summarized it as:
“Find something, make it better. Then do it faster for more people.”
That same pattern shows up everywhere in his life.
He buys one pregnant black molly from a pet store… wakes up to hundreds of baby fish… and instead of just saying “that’s cool,” he studies fish farming and ends up buying an entire pet shop.
He rebuilds the store, upgrades everything, and ends up selling fish to people like George Jones and Tammy Wynette.
He loved it. He could have stayed in that world forever.
But when someone walked in and offered to buy the store for double what he paid, he hit the question again:
Stay safe?
Or take the exit and see what else is possible?
He sold. The buyers gutted the place and let it die. On paper, that’s a sad ending.
In reality, he’d proved something to himself: he could enter a world he knew nothing about, make it better, and walk away with experience and options.
Security vs. Aliveness
Ken’s done this over and over.
He became a police officer in Lakeland, Florida, working the night shift, alone, covering half the city. Real danger. Real responsibility. At one point, he and a Black officer answered a call in a tense neighborhood and found themselves surrounded by a crowd pressing in on the police car.
He could have stayed. Made a career out of it. A lot of people do.
But he noticed that turning point again:
“There’s a point in a job where you can say, ‘I’m going to make a career out of this,’ or you can switch now because it’s getting too secure.”
Security, for him, is not automatically good. It’s a signal.
If it starts to feel like a cage instead of a choice, he moves.
So he leaned back into music, built a recording studio, played in bands, and eventually went back to school for music. He hacked the university system to take double the normal course load, worked multiple jobs, and knocked out a degree and a master’s.
And when the PhD door opened — the path to becoming “Dr. McArthur” — he turned it down.
Not because he couldn’t. Because he didn’t want to marry that path for life.
That’s a theme: he goes deep… but not blind.
The Power of Bringing People Together
With all that experience, you might assume his proudest achievements are the big, visible things:
His viral Affiliate Showcase software that hit the top 3,000 sites on the internet
His social site Tobri that grew fast before a partner’s health issues forced a shutdown
His feature film, produced on a shoestring budget everyone said was impossible
But when I asked him what felt most impactful, he didn’t mention any of that.
He talked about his live events.
For about 20 years, Ken ran small, scrappy events like JV Alert — the place I first met him back in 2005. Those rooms were packed with people who would go on to build big businesses, create products, and form friendships that have lasted decades.
He said the magic wasn’t in what he did on stage, but in putting the right people in the same room.
“You could look to the left, look to the right and say,
‘That person is smarter than I am… and they’re doing something. I can do something too.’”
That’s what he considers the most impactful work of his life: throwing a handful of “amazing people” together and letting the sparks fly.
Still on a Five-Year Plan at 75
You’d think at 75, after all that, he’d be done starting new things.
Nope.
Right now his obsession is ConnectLab, a new platform built to map how we’re all connected — people, podcasts, businesses, events — in a smarter, more visual, AI-powered way.
He’s preloading it with tens of thousands of entities so it doesn’t feel like an empty room. Then he’ll invite people to come in, claim their profiles, and see how their relationships actually map out.
It’s ambitious. Bootstrapped again. Lots of bugs. Long roadmap.
And he’s clear about it:
“At 75, I’m on a five-year plan. Then maybe another five-year plan after that.”
If it becomes huge, great.
If it doesn’t, he’s still winning — because he wakes up excited to work on it.
What We Can Learn from Ken
Here’s what I’m taking from his story:
Ask the real question.
What do you want to do when you get up in the morning? If your honest answer and your actual life don’t match, something has to move.Start where you are.
Punch cards, pet fish, choirs, code, events, film, software… none of these were “perfect niches.” They were just the next interesting thing.Notice when security turns into a trap.
The longer you wait to pivot, the harder it gets. Ken moves while he still can, not when he has no choice.Impact comes from connection.
His biggest ripple wasn’t a product; it was the rooms he created and the people who met because he bothered to gather them.You’re not done unless you decide you’re done.
If a 75-year-old Vietnam-era vet with a lifetime of careers is still on a five-year plan, we’re out of excuses.
Ken’s life isn’t neat. It’s not linear. It’s not “on brand.”
It’s alive.
And that might be the real definition of success:
Not the title you die with, but how many mornings you woke up genuinely curious about what you were building next.
Great piece, Joel. Thanks. And I can't remember the last time I saw a Tiny Tim reference. Brought me back to when I used to watch Laugh In as a kid.
Love this, Joel. It's nice to see you again, and follow your blog, too. 🥳