Beyond the Parking Lot: Reinventing Work, Life, and Purpose After 50

Most books about reinvention are written from a comfortable distance. The author already made it through. The story has been edited, the failures have been reframed, and the whole thing has been wrapped in the kind of clarity that only hindsight provides.This book is different.Beyond the Parking Lot is a real-time memoir of reinvention after 50, written while the transformation is still happening. Nico Ponce - veteran restaurant operator, AI consultant, and founder of Electric Eel Consulting - takes you inside the moment he looked out at a parking lot from a host stand and asked himself a question that changed everything: How do I get that view when I work?What followed was two years of building in public. Learning AI from scratch. Designing an intelligence system for restaurant operations. Launching a consulting company. And writing about all of it before knowing how it ends.This is the book for anyone who has spent decades building expertise and is now wondering what to do with it. For restaurant operators, entrepreneurs, and anyone at a midlife crossroads who suspects the second act is not smaller - just different.The future belongs to the curious. This is what that looks like in practice.