Have You Started Your Second-half Reinvention Yet?

 

The January-February 2018 issue of the AARP Bulletin included a nine-page article entitled “Great Second Careers”  Sub-title:  “Good news:  You CAN Find Success, Security and Happiness After 50 With a New Job.”

Not totally boring.  Kind of a band-wagon article.  An eclectic collection of stories of people who made late-life pivots to jobs or businesses earning themselves from $0 to $250K per year.

I love how AARP has changed its tune.  It’s like the tiger has changed its stripes.

You remember them, don’t you?  Used to be the American Association of Retired Persons, the highly-profitable, “non-profit” insurance seller disguised as a crusader/advocate for the retired and the “elderly-in-training.”

Now it’s just AARP.  An acronym with no words behind it.

You have to hand it to them.  They were smart enough to get off a slowing train and get on a faster moving one, wisely repackaging/rebranding/retreating to a more appropriate moniker. Got that word retirement out of the name – and changed their tune. They don’t talk retirement so much anymore.  In fact, not one article in the aforementioned 56-page bulletin about retirement.

Could there be a much stronger statement to the evolving nature of traditional retirement?   As in, going away.

DISCLAIMER

Please know that I don’t have an AARP membership nor do I subscribe to the Bulletin – nor will I ever.  It was sent to me by a friend who knows of my passion for “pivoting” people’s view of retirement.

In fact, I’ve never liked AARP since they started invading my mailbox, a quarter-century ago, with promo materials six hours before my 50th birthday, hinting strongly that I was now over the hill,  fast approaching senior status and deserving of discounts on restaurants and travel destinations where other elders-in-training hung out.

Didn’t sound like fun at the time – still doesn’t.

But, despite my disdain for the organization, I applaud the nature of the article because it draws attention to the growing awareness that work promotes vitality, that creative energy doesn’t die with age, and that over-50 is far from over-the-hill.

Oh, and without saying it, that traditional retirement kinda sucks.

It’s a collection of tales of personal reinvention.

Have you started your reinvention yet?

Reinvention is a hot word these days, especially in business circles.  It seems if a company isn’t reinventing, it will soon be toast, like a Blockbuster or a Borders or Kodak or a Blackberry.  Who’s next?  Macy’s?  GE?  Healthcare giants?  It’s likely to be a bloody trail of business bodies over the next ten years.

But what about us mere mortals?  Do we run the same risk?  What happens if reinvention isn’t part of our short- or long-term perspective?  Is there a chance that we can be similarly Netflixed, Amazoned or I-phoned?

From my perspective, it’s a pretty easy yes to that question.  The recruiting business immerses one in lots of transition stories.  I meet people who are aware of, accepting of, and acting on the fact that the pace of change has never been faster or more profound than what we are experiencing today.  They are sensing the need to reinvent, augment, pivot or re-career to stay ahead of, or up with, the change curve.

Unfortunately, I meet far more who are late to the party.  As in having the rug pulled out from under them and not seeing it coming.  Or pro-actively leaving a dead-end job only to find that they are ill-equipped to re-enter at another point.

What worked five years ago doesn’t work today.

What is reinvention anyway?

I’ll borrow a few thoughts and mix in a few of my own as to what “reinvention” means for someone moving into the second half of life.

If you follow James Altucher (NOTE: proceed with caution if you start following him – he is a wonderfully strange, esoteric, transparent dude!), you know that he has a best-seller entitled “Reinvent Yourself”.  This is a guy who tries to reinvent himself every day.

That would be a  stretch for those of us who are new to the idea but here’s his view of reinvention, from a guy who has reinvented himself in major ways 15-20 times in his 50 years.  To Altucher, reinvention is:

  • Finding new sources of income. Money is important – it buys freedom.  He reminds us that multi-millionaires have, on average, seven distinct sources of income.
  • Finding well-being – from within. It’s three things: freedom, relationships, and competence.
    • Defining freedom in different ways e.g. reducing expectations, increasing sources of income so no one source controls you.
    • Improving relationships. Find mentors to teach you and friends who challenge and build you up.
    • You are the average of the five habits you do; for example, what you eat, ideas you have, the content you consume.

It’s an old story now that long-standing, traditional white- and blue-collar jobs are succumbing in droves to globalization and the impact of digitization.  With that comes sob story after sob story from those caught in this transformation.

I don’t see any signs of this pace and magnitude of change abating.  In fact, with advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, genomic testing, 3-D printing, nano-technology to name just a few, all signs point to this transformation continuing at an accelerating pace.

Finding your essence

If you are an AARP fan and have read the article, you will have detected a common theme running through nearly all the stories – the pursuit of a dream or a passion.  All of these “second-careerers” reinvented themselves by regathering their skills and experiences and stirring them into that passion to achieve a dream.  And they plugged that dream into a need in the marketplace.

I liken it to a rediscovery of the “essential self”, more or less a resurrecting of that 6-year old in each of them that had been tamped down with 30 years or so of cultural social expectations.

A favorite quote that I repeat every morning speaks to transformation by identifying your essential self.  It comes from Martha Beck’s fantastic book “Finding Your Own Northstar, Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live.”

“Freed from rigid social expectations, focused firmly on your essential self, you stop conforming to any of the pre-designated patterns of your cultural environment.  Instead, you turn your life into a work of art, an absolutely original expression of your unique gifts and preferences.”

Each of our lives can be a work of art.  My sense is that most of the folks in the AARP article are heeding the call of their essential self, scaping off the social barnacles, stepping out, taking some risks and striving to make their lives their own work of art.

We all have access to all the riches of the universe to do the same.  None of that changes because we hit a certain number.

Please don’t stop learning

I had a conversation recently with a C-level healthcare executive who had just worked his way out of a consulting job after successfully transforming the operations of a large mid-western healthcare system.  In his late-50’s, he has a fearless excitement about what his next challenge will be as he puts himself out there for another position.

It was obvious from our conversation that this successful exec “gets it” when it comes to staying ahead of the curve of developments in his area of focus. I asked him what advice he would have for anyone making a mid-life or later career transition.  He answered without hesitation:

  • Be active in the virtual space
  • Be active in the face-to-face space
  • Read, read, read!
  • Learn the skills to navigate change while knowing that you can’t or won’t learn everything and knowing that things will be different in six months.
  • Consider a coach

Sage advice from a guy who knows what he wants to do and where he wants to go and has learned how to maximize his chances of getting there through continuous learning and reinvention.  After hearing him talk, I have little doubt he will have lots of attractive options presented to him.

That’s what it takes today.  To not reinvent is perilous.

I’d love to hear your reinvention story. Scroll down and tell me what you’ve done, why you did it and how you did it.   Or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.  Share your story and so we can share it with our readers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yippee!  Soon, a pill to replace your treadmill! 

 

 

 

Folks, did you know that squooshy thing at your midriff we cover up with oversized blouses and untucked shirts is just plain, simple old white fat.  Well, you probably did, but for you Oakland Raiders fans (hey, I’m in Denver!!), it’s scientifically called white adipose tissue (WAT) and it stores surplus energy.

Over the last several decades, we have gotten really good at storing LOTS of surplus energy.  CDC says 65% of us Americans are overweight, almost 25% of us are seriously obese.  And it appears we’ve exported this characteristic.  A Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation study published in the Lancet has revealed that 40% of the global population is overweight or obese. Yuck!  Bad stat.  Good stat for the Raiders interior offensive line, however.

I just learned that there is a different colored fat – brown.  Aren’t we all glad our squishy middles don’t show up brown?  This brown fat is called BAT,  brown adipose tissue (brilliant!). It burns energy and generates heat.

White adipose makes up most of our fat, especially as we age.  And that’s not a good thing.  Especially when it accumulates, creeps over your beltline, alters your wardrobe and makes shoe tying an aerobic experience.

Oh, did I mention that it’s also killing us slowly? More on that further down.  Keep reading.

Science to the rescue

Well, fret not.  Science once again seems to be on the trail of a quick-fix.  A no-sweat, no-effort, keep-your-Lazyboy solution.  It’s only proven out on little white furry creatures so far, but it’s looking like they may be able to develop yet another receptor blocker.  This one magically increases the conversion of WAT to BAT.

There you go – stored energy to burned energy.  Sounds simple enough. The payoff: reduction in obesity and improved sensitivity to insulin.

You can read about this research here.

You can also read about WAT vs BAT here.

Craig’s List and eBay are gonna get hammered!

I can see it now.  This magic potion hits the market and you will be able to negotiate incredible prices for used treadmills, upright bikes, ellipticals, Bowflexes, etc. on Craig’s List and eBay.  Most of these, fortunately, will have lots of life left because most of them will not have been used much in the first place.

Many basements will be creating much needed new storage space.

When this pill is announced, I’m selling my Lifetime Fitness stock and moving the money over to Lazyboy, Burger King, and Netflix.

Can we get real here?

Have I plastered enough sarcasm into this diatribe yet?

I guess I should be grateful that we have the money and the brains to be working on all these marvelous remedies for self-inflicted maladies.

But, if we honestly peer deeper into this accumulated adipose, we have to admit that most of the accumulation is due to a crappy lifestyle.  Don’t we know all that we need to know to prevent WAT accumulation without a pill – or a scalpel?   Haven’t we known it practically forever?

Well yeah!!  It’s called exercise – and sensible nutrition.

Let’s pass some legislation

No, I didn’t really mean that.  To turn to Comedy Central on the Potomac for anything promoting healthy, non-pharma lifestyle would be like expecting Kim Jong-un to start a nationwide bible-study initiative.

We can’t legislate a mindset.  And mindsets and beliefs guide our lives.  Tony Robbins has transformed millions of lives by emphasizing the importance of evaluating and questioning our beliefs.

Is it a stretch to say that a 50” male midriff or a 40” female midriff is a product of a belief or mindset?  Perhaps.  It may be a belief that “it comes with my genetics or my body-type or it’s what happens as we get older.”  But we’ve known for a long time that none of those are the real truth.  We do know that the condition is correctable in nearly every case.

I posit that the 50”/40” condition is more a product of naivete or the biggest killer on our planet – healthcare illiteracy –  mixed in with laziness, instant gratification, comfort-seeking.

 

Become a student of metabolic syndrome

I’m not qualified to dispense medical advice, nor is it my intent.  But what I want to share is information on what we know that is harming us.  WAT and bulging waistlines is a biggie (sorry, pun intended).  We’ve known that for a long time.

Waistline size from adipose white fat collection is killing us slowly and is one of the key components of metabolic syndrome which Mayo Clinic describes as follows:

“ – a cluster of conditions — increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels — that occur together, increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

Having just one of these conditions doesn’t mean you have metabolic syndrome. However, any of these conditions increase your risk of serious disease. Having more than one of these might increase your risk even more.”

Enough rant!  Solution, please.

The medical literature is pretty clear on waistline size and the need for WAT reduction:

  • Men: ideal waist size:  under 36 inches.  Above 40” is high risk.  Note: the measurement is at the navel. It’s not your pant size.  Pant size will typically run 2-4 inches less than your actual waist size.
  • Women: ideal waist size: under 32 inches.  Above 35”is high risk. Same measurement method applies.

Getting there?  Please, don’t wait for the aforementioned pill.   Three steps will kickstart the WAT to BAT conversion:

  1. Give up your Lazyboy to your golden retriever. Take the batteries out of the remote.
  2. Dust off the bike/elliptical/treadmill or renew your gym membership and find 30 minutes a day for at least five days a week to get your heart rate into your exercise range (220 minus your age times .85 and .65). If you’ve been glued to your now relinquished Lazyboy for a long time, work your way up to that to avoid injury.
  3. Fat begets fat so ditch the meat. OK, that’s tough in our culture but you can wean your way off.  Think this way.  If your source of protein walked or flew at some point before you ate it, some of it’s going to your belt line.  If it stood on one leg most of its life (OK – let me help you Oakland Raider fans here – plants), it’s not converting to adipose.

That’s pretty simple, don’t you think? Certainly, not very original on my part.  This mantra has been out since like forever.  But big pharma, big food, and the meat industry prefer you forget or ignore it.

At your peril!

Personally, I can’t stand to have an untucked t-shirt touch my adipose.  That’s my signal that my waistline has started to creep back up and it’s time to ditch the snack foods and get the heart rate a little higher a little longer.

At age 75 and at 5’ 11”, I’m holding steady at a 36″ waistline.  Easy?  Nope!  Fact is, WAT accumulates faster and is harder to get rid of as we age.  Put that together with gravity and you have a significant challenge to hit the healthy numbers. For me, it takes a commitment to 45 minutes of aerobic exercise six days a week supplemented with three days of aggressive strength training a week to maintain.  I marry that regimen to a “flexitarian” diet of mostly plants in which “meat is a treat” that we experience maybe once or twice a month. I confess that the one thing I won’t give up, but should, is my one early-evening micro-brew before dinner.

We know all we need to know

I’ll wrap with a repeat of a quote by Dr. David Katz, a physician at the Yale School of Medicine, and founder of an organization called the Academy of Lifestyle Medicine.  I heard him say the following in a presentation to a large group of his peers:

“We already know all that we need to know to reduce, by 80%, the five major killers in our country.  We don’t need any more fancy drugs or equipment or more Nobel Prizes.  We know all we need to know today.”

Maybe I should send that quote to the research team working on the brown-fat pill.

Nah!  Let them have their fun.

What’s your solution for converting white to brown?  Scroll down and leave your thoughts on this issue.  What are your thoughts on the state of our healthcare literacy in this country?

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t subscribed to our weekly newsletter, go to www.makeagingwork.com and sign up.  We’ll shoot you a free ebook on living longer, healthier and more productively.

The “$400 Trillion Time Bomb” and “An Unnatural Act”

 

 

 

 

Quartz, the digital global business news publication, recently published an article entitled “The world is sitting on a $400 trillion financial time bomb.”

Solid fear-inducing stuff, this reporting.  Globally, we are going to be short on retirement savings by a mere $400 trillion (with a “t”) by 2050.  $137 trillion in the U.S. alone –   once again we lead in a dubiously distinctive category.

And it’s all because of an unnatural act.

The unnatural act is the “R” word that pervades our psyche like no other – retirement.

From the moment we start our first job – and often even before – retirement becomes a subtle, silent partner in our thinking and many of the decisions we make.  As we move through our 40’s, 50’s, 60’s it takes a progressively larger share of our mental bandwidth and decisions, with anxiety over a false premise at the core –  a concept based on an arbitrary, unnatural, artificial, politically-inspired finish line.

Were we really meant to do this?

I’m sorry, but I just have difficulty getting my head around the idea of a creator/universe that would equip us with all the chops and opportunities to wind ourselves up and then not be miffed when we decide to wind it all down and throw it all away based on an irrelevant number.

Do we really have a reasonable rationale for its existence in the form to which it has evolved – that is, vocation-to-vacation, off-the-cliff from work to leisure.  And at an age, determined by politicians,  that has no relevance today because we are living longer and had even less relevance when established.

The average life expectancy was around 58 when the magic number of 65 was set.  As some have pointed out, it set the stage for the greatest Ponzi scheme ever.

Can we agree that retirement, as we’ve come to define it over the last 100 years, is an unnatural act?  Where do we see it in nature? We don’t see it in the animal world.  We didn’t see it in the human world either until the concept of “social security system” emerged in the late 1800’s when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck injected a version of it into the German economy, primarily to stave off a threat from Marxism.

Not to be outdone, we Americans took the idea, over the course of the 20th century, to the sublime and entrenched the idea of leisurely final chapters so deeply in our psyche that it drives many of our major life decisions  – many of which end up being harmful.

Disagree with me?  Check the collective cortisol level in this country when the stock market slides 5 or 10%.

Yet, in the face of damning statistics of shortened lifespans, we push forward with fury, fervor, and fantasy in the pursuit of that nirvanic leap into leisurely bliss.  Then, once achieved, we discover too late that our biology doesn’t hold up well when unchallenged physically and mentally.  And anxiety levels increase as we fret over outliving our money.

I often wonder what our world today would be like if Michelangelo, Socrates, Newton, Einstein (pick your own intellectual, pioneering hero) would have had a 401K/403B to distract them.

Five stages of retirement – proceed with caution.

Ken Dychtwald, the founder of AgeWave, is the foremost thought leader on issues related to aging.  His organization has done extensive research on retirement, using a database of over 50,000 retirees.  They concluded that retirement has five stages:

 

  1. Imagination – 5-15 years before retirement
  2. Anticipation – 5 years before retirement
  3. Liberation – retirement day, anticipation realized. Average duration: one year
  4. Re-orientation – 1-15 years after retirement. Critical life questions surface; post-partem depression is common; growing concerns about health and finances; boredom; unstimulated
  5. Reconciliation – late 70-80s; trying to come to terms with who they really are; friends and family dying; money concerns intensify; concerns about legacy

Click this link to see Ken’s talk at the American Society on Aging Conference in 2013 for a more detailed presentation of the research starting at minute 26:00 of the video.

I’ll bet you know someone in stage 4 or even stage 5.  Hopefully, you see this in time to avoid either.

Don’t be in a rush to give your parts back

I love the quote from one of my favorite virtual mentors, Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach.  In my 12/18/17 blog, I referred to comments he made on retirement in one of his “Exponential Wisdom” podcasts with Peter Diamandis.  In addition to referring to retirement as the “ultimate casualty”, he also emphasized that “stopping and retirement means you are ready to retire your bits back to the universe.”

I’m in no hurry – are you?

Suggestion:  Don’t participate. Don’t retire

To quote the article:

“Financial disaster is looming, and not because of the stock market or subprime loans. The coming crisis is more insidious, structural, and almost certain to blow up eventually.” (my underline)

So now we’ve got a $400 trillion dollar impending apocalypse to layer onto our worries about N. Korea, climate change, ISIS, nuclear threat, Trump, #metoo, etc., etc.

It’s becoming quite a “chicken little” world.  CNN is salivating.

But, participation is optional.

There’s much “gnashing of teeth and ripping of robes” about how we avoid this latest disaster.  But no one, interestingly, suggests not retiring.  Imagine that!  Rather it’s all about extending retirement ages/finish lines, increases in taxes or cuts in benefits.

The retirement mindset really does seem to own us.

Call me idealistic; call me arrogant; call me pollyannish; call me what you like (and I know some will) but I’m not going to participate in this prediction of our eventual demise.  I could lie and base my non-participation by claiming to have all the retirement savings I need to avoid being blown up. Truth is, I don’t – it’s not a number I think about because I jettisoned the idea of retirement a decade-and-a-half ago.  I’m going to work until I can’t and am confident the money will be there to support my lifestyle business.  I sense more and more others are opting out as well.

Have you looked up the word?

Do you agree that creative marketing and opportunistic financial services and leisure industry, uncontested by a greedy political system, have created the illusion of turning something that means “retreat” or “withdraw”  or “to disappear” into a positive, dreamy even?  Marketing so effective that we now believe that going backward is a positive movement.

Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong – and unnatural -about that?

Perhaps I’m a voice in the wilderness, but I don’t think so.  What are your thoughts?  Scroll down and leave a comment (or salvo, as the case may be!)