Can You Start Life Over at 60? It May Be the Best Time!

It’s a question that gets asked a lot, especially by men since we’re the ones that inflict ourselves with the pressure to “perform.”

I wrestled with this question at that age two decades ago.

My simple answer is “yes” – but – – – –

– – – you may want to consider “pivoting” rather than “starting over.” “Starting over” is too heavy mentally. It suggests dropping everything you’ve done and your accumulated life experience and starting with a completely fresh slate. That’s pretty daunting and impractical.

A pivot, on the other hand, suggests a change in direction but from a base of knowledge, experience, and understanding.

We see a lot of terms thrown around these days that imply starting over: re-invention, re-careering, re-wirement, renewal. It’s a pretty popular concept as our boomer generation hurtles into their sixties and seventies in a volatile, uncertain global economy.

Reintegrate

When considering a pivot, I favor a more practical term: re-integration. I borrowed the term and idea from Marc Freedman, CEO and President of Encore.org and one of the nation’s leading experts on the longevity revolution.

Freedman makes some very valid points in his argument for re-integration (the bolding is mine):

“Isn’t there something to be said for racking up decades of know-how and lessons, from failures as well as triumphs? Shouldn’t we aspire to build on that wisdom and understanding?

After years studying social innovators in the second half of life — individuals who have done their greatest work after 50 —I’m convinced the most powerful pattern that emerges from their stories can be described as reintegration, not reinvention. These successful late-blooming entrepreneurs weave together accumulated knowledge with creativity, while balancing continuity with change, in crafting a new idea that’s almost always deeply rooted in earlier chapters and activities.”

Career- or life-pivoting has never been more common than it is today, driven by rapid technological change, increased volatility of corporate employment, global competition, and a higher-than-average entrepreneurial spirit amongst baby boomers.

I have personally “pivoted” three times since turning 60. I left the corporate world at age 60 and started my own recruiting business. That was a major pivot and came close to a full start-over. However, I found that my 35+ years of sales and marketing “integrated” reasonably well with the recruiting business because it’s a difficult business built on the ability to sell.

I then did a gradual pivot to more career coaching as a supplement to my recruiting business as I found I was more effective in a coaching role and enjoyed helping people find their way in their careers.

I pivoted again, at 77, away from recruiting and focusing more on career- and retirement coaching for people over 50. I also have discovered that I have a love and knack for writing.  I write daily and this weekly blog is now 5 1/2 years and 275 published articles old.

That pivot continues as I’m now enjoying being able to combine my ability to write creatively with meeting and helping executive-level professionals – particularly healthcare executives – develop career marketing documents along with providing career transition coaching.

I believe I’m an example of how re-integration works because nowhere along the way since age 60 was it a complete start over for me. I was acknowledging my core interests and talents and bringing forward skills and experiences that support them.

If you find yourself in what you feel is a “start over” situation, here are a few things you may want to consider:

  1. Find your true self. Most people have suppressed their deepest desires and talents in favor of a paycheck, building someone else’s dream. Start your “pivot” with some deep reflection and strive to “re-discover” your true self. What are you really, really, really good at? What do you really, really, really want to do with your life? I would suggest some personal assessments such as Strengthsfinders or Enneagram or DISC to help you discover your true self. And do some serious reading such as Martha Beck’s “Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” and “Transitions” by William Bridges.
  2. Take the long view. If you are 60 and in relatively good health, you may have a runway of 30–40 years ahead of you with easily more than half of those years having the potential to be highly productive and fulfilling. Above all, don’t succumb to the cultural pressure of needing to be “retired” at 65. That number is a relic established 86 years ago for political reasons when the average life span was 62. Retirement is a killer of creativity and dreams, not to mention bodies and minds. Think about what you have experienced in terms of changes around you in one generation (18 years). It’s staggering but speaks to how much can be accomplished in a single generation. And technological changes are accelerating that. With the possibility of a two-generation runway ahead of you, the possibilities can, and should be, exciting.
  3. Take a hard look at your cultural beliefs. You have some (maybe many) that are holding you back, guaranteed. Tony Robbins has transformed the lives of thousands by helping them understand that much of our lives are driven by our beliefs and many of them are harmful. Here’s a couple that I see a lot: (1) retirement is good, and I’m entitled to it. I’ve heard retirement referred to by high achievers as “the ultimate casualty”, “statutory senility” “a signal to the universe that you are getting ready to send your parts back”. Traditional labor-to-leisure retirement has few upsides and many downsides. It’s an unnatural act that goes against our natural biology; (2) you are “over-the-hill” at 60 and your brain and body are automatically going to atrophy. Totally false. We can grow brain cells until we die by maintaining a healthy lifestyle and continuing to challenge ourselves mentally through continuous learning. And we can maintain vitality and delay frailty through an active lifestyle that includes exercise and a good diet.

People are “pivoting” in large numbers and realizing tremendous successes, even in the face of these volatile, rapidly-changing times. So gather up your talents, skills, and experience and put them to work doing something that you are really good at and that society needs. When that comes together, you’ll forget all those numbers that our culture throws at us and has us second-guessing ourselves.

Good luck – pivot on!

Got a “pivot story?” Love to hear about it. Leave a comment with your story.

Open Letter to a 27-year old – Get It Together, NOW!

 

A curious young whipper-snapper posed this question recently on Quora.com.

What is the average or expected life expectancy for someone born in 1996?

 

I took a swing at it.

How would you predict it?

There are too many variables at play in longevity to say with certainty how long someone born in 1996 will live.

Speaking as a U.S. citizen, I’m confident in saying that if lifestyles and our treatment of the ecology don’t change in our culture soon, there is a good chance that the average 27-year-old today won’t do any better than the current average life span of 77 for men, 81 for women.

The average longevity in the U.S. peaked and began to turn south several years ago after over a century of meteoric change – from an average of 47 in 1910 to around 80 today. And, by the way, that downturn started well before COVID appeared on the scene.

But that rapid change in the 20th century came from picking the low-hanging fruit – improved infant mortality, reduction/elimination of infectious diseases, better water, food, education, etc.

With that done, we now are up against a new reality and, as COVID-19 is showing us, we aren’t particularly well prepared, biologically.

Know thine enemy.

Our lifestyles, terrible farm/food industry/system, broken healthcare system, and opportunistic/exploitive pharmaceutical industry are assembling a combination of dire threats to our health and longevity going forward.

So, born in 1996 and 27 years old, what can you expect? Consider a couple of choices:

1. You can adopt the prevailing lifestyle that consists of consuming the dangerous Standard American Diet (SAD) of chemically-engineered, food-like substances (C-R-A-P, calorie-rich-and-processed), sedentary living (limited movement, Facebook, voice-activated remotes, and video games), working in a stressful work environment building somebody else’s dream and doing something outside of what you are wired up to do, all while seeking comfort and convenience.

That will put you on track for a life expectancy of 80 years or less, joining a population that is experiencing lifestyle diseases such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes.  The top five killers in our culture are all preventable lifestyle diseases that haven’t changed in decades. Poor diet passed smoking as the #1 cause of early death in America long ago.

You can remain ignorant of, and succumb to, the powerful profit-motivated forces in our culture that are counter to your health and longevity – named earlier – or you can take charge and be the CEO of your health.

If you choose not to take charge, you are likely to end up with an average lifespan with a poor health span.

2. You can wait for a “miracle drug” to pop out from the bio-medical field and “save you” from your marginal lifestyle and guarantee you a long healthy life with no effort.

Just a hint: nobody is coming to save you!

3. You can become a student of how your body and mind work at the cellular level and understand and appreciate the amazing, intricate, and powerful nature of the ecology you live in and the role it plays in your health and longevity. You can learn how to support the amazing 24×7 immune system that is your body and how it is impacted by what you do and don’t do to it and what you put into it and don’t put into it.

You will learn that your biology gives you only two choices – growth or decay. You can strive to appreciate the “use it or lose it” principle that is at play with your biology and thus reject a sedentary lifestyle for the duration of your life. You can become a student of nutrition. You can commit to life-long learning, understanding the importance of applying the same “use it or lose it” principle to your brain.

If I were 27 today (I’m 3x that in six weeks!) knowing what I know now, I would become a revolutionary and be a vocal (not with signs or in the streets), knowledgeable, and persuasive opponent against these forces that are teaming with other unfettered industries collectively destroying both our health and our ecosystem.

Honestly, I fear that a 27-year-old today has a slimmer chance of reaching my age because of the trend line of what we are doing to our bodies by succumbing to the corporate forces working against us and what we have already done to our own ecosystem, particularly the microbiome.

The solution is to get knowledgeable, understand what is being done around you, get outside of it, and choose to eat right, be active, and be discerning of the messages coming from the media, corporations, and the government.

Your longevity hangs in the balance.

Hi, readers! Thoughts on this topic? Love to hear from you. Leave a comment.

Afraid of getting old? We’ve Got an New Acronym For You.

There’s a popular acronym that is thrown around a lot these days – FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. It causes people to stop thinking and be susceptible to the latest fashion, fad, or false promises.

Now there’s a new acronym on the block – FOGO – Fear of Getting Old.

It’s understandable. Our global population is swinging toward “old,” however you may choose to define that. We have a mystical mental tie to the number 65 as the point where “old” seems to begin to settle into our self-perception – hence FOGO.

FOGO is a choice-

-as is any fear.

FOGO is a projection into the future where fear is the chief resident.

It’s unfortunate, but not surprising, that this time travel into the future is creating sadness and adversely affecting our moods. However, it is a condition of our choosing because our thinking is the one thing in life over which we have total control.

I suspect we are drawing some of this sadness and fear as the result of observation of how “old” has affected others. We tend not to age well here in the U.S. The average American only lives to around 80 but with 12–13 of those final years in poor health with multiple morbidities. If we cast ourselves into that expectation, sadness is predictable.

Embrace the inevitable-

-and find the good in growing old.

I love the quote from Dr. Walter Bortz, retired Stanford geriatric physician, in his book “Dare to Be 100.”

“Life is a fatal disease. Once contracted, there is no known cure.”

You, me, and everyone you know are going to get old and die.

We have the choice to agonize our way through it or embrace and revel in it and leverage the good that exists in it.

Live in the moment.

FOGO is rooted in time travel. By that I mean, traveling to and wallowing in the regrets and guilt of the past or casting into the future where fear is inevitable.

The most effective antidote to our sadness and mood issues is to take today and make something of it using our talents and accumulated skills and experiences to be of service to someone.

Then rinse and repeat.

Fear and regrets cannot exist in the present moment.

Yep, I’m “old.”

I’m a chip shot from number 81 and officially qualify as “old” by cultural standards. I’m having the most productive time of my life continuing to create daily and being of service to someone somewhere with something.

I’ve learned that today is all I’ve got. My intent is to just string as many of them together as I can without worrying about whether tomorrow is even going to show up.

I’m not that much of an outlier.

Perhaps you aren’t aware that for the vast majority of people, the later years are the happiest. Research has revealed that, for most, there is a u-curve of happiness in which happiness is greatest in the early and late years, and hits bottom at mid-life.

It looks like this:

By avoiding time travel, staying in the moment, leveraging my talents and skills forward to help somebody, and embracing aging as inevitable, I’m finding it to be the most exciting time of my life – creaky knees and back stiffness notwithstanding.

The choice is ours. It starts between the temples.

Who’s the Arbiter of Your Health? Please Tell Me It Isn’t Your Doctor.

Can I share some non-news with you?

This was published in the Becker’s Hospital Review on 1/31/2023 (I subscribe to try to stay ahead of the out-of-control craziness in healthcare today since I deal daily with execs in the field.)

“The U.S. spends two to four times as much on healthcare as most other high-income countries, but the health outcomes lag behind, a new Commonwealth Fund study found.

“U.S. Healthcare from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes” is an ongoing report by the Commonwealth Fund that compares healthcare spending and outcomes, health status and healthcare usage in the U.S. with 12 other high-income nations and the average for all 38 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development members.

The U.S. remained the only nation within the OECD that does not offer universal health coverage despite spending nearly 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare, according to the report.

Here are five other findings:

  1. The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at 77 years compared to the 80 years average for other wealthy nations.
  2. The U.S. has the highest rates of avoidable deaths from causes such as diabetes, hypertensive disease and certain cancers.
  3. The U.S. has the highest COVID-19 death rate among high-income countries, at 3,000 deaths in every 1 million cases between Jan. 22, 2020, and Jan. 18, 2023.
  4. Physical assault, which includes gun violence, is seven times higher in the U.S. than in other high-income countries, except New Zealand.
  5. U.S. infant and maternal deaths are more than triple the rate of most other high-income countries.

“Americans are living shorter, less healthy lives because our health system is not working as well as it could be,” lead author Munira Gunja, senior researcher for the Commonwealth Fund’s International Program in Health Policy and Practice Innovations, said in the report. “To catch up with other high-income countries, the administration and Congress would have to expand access to healthcare, act aggressively to control costs, and invest in health equity and social services we know can lead to a healthier population.”

I bolded the last part of Mr. Gunja’s comment because it’s the same ‘ol, same ‘ol chant that we hear from everyone jumping on the “let’s fix healthcare” bandwagon.

  • Expand access
  • Control costs
  • Invest in health equity

All valid. All doable. All sensible.

ALL DOWNSTREAM!!!

Sorry, you’ve tolerated my rant on this before, but I’m not stopping even though I’m a voice in the wilderness.

We’re not solving the problem. We’re fixing the results of the problem. And threatening to bankrupt the country.

At some point, we need to turn off the spigot instead of spending society-crippling amounts of money mopping up the water.

There’s no end to gullibility!

Here’s another example.

I read an article recently in which a board-certified pediatrician is advocating bariatric surgery and diabetes drugs for overweight children, claiming that the main cause of child obesity has a genetic origin.

Do I smell an element of “follow the money” here? Does she really think we are that naive? Couldn’t she be bold enough to shed her “drug it or cut it out” indoctrination and advocate for that ghastly model-busting concept called – wait for it – PREVENTION.

How many kids were obese when you were in grade, middle, or high school? I remember two in my high school of 95 kids. And they weren’t really even obese by today’s definition.  But then that was pre-McDonalds.

What does it say that the average American woman today weighs the same as the average American male in 1960? Or that the average American male is 32 pounds heavier that the 1960 American male?  And neither of them is any taller. Or that we are now beset with epidemic levels of overweight children?

I’m not a scientist or a geneticist but I do know enough to say confidently that genetics don’t change in a 40-50 year span to make all that happen.

We know the problem and choose to ignore it.

We let the food industry get away with murder with their deceptive practices and food-like products. We provide them with cover with senseless government policies.

We provide insane subsidies to the industries that provide the food components that are killing us.

We build massive, monolithic healthcare institutions that know only “cure” and can’t or won’t learn to spell, pronounce, advocate, or train for prevention.

This is Sisyphean

Is it too big and too late to change? I believe so.

I’m guessing this will be a pivotal and disruptive year in healthcare. The big systems are shoveling money out the door by the trainload. Major disruption is starting and will intensify. Amazon, Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, Optum – all are circling like vultures over this wounded carcass looking for a way to swoop in and intercept the incredible cash flow the government doles out by using their technologies to get to that stream faster and at lower costs. Some of that lower cost may even be passed on to the victim – er, the patient. All under the guise of providing “better patient care.”

They’ll be able to increase the convenience and lower some of the costs of mopping up the water. Count on them being able to get us in and out faster and at a lower cost to allow us to continue on our life-sapping, unhealthy habits with not a modicum of advice like “get you arse out of Whataburger and over to Planet Fitness.”

That doesn’t fit the dying model nor the emerging one.

The solution? Avoidance!

It’s unfortunate and an anomaly, but the last place to go to get counsel on how to stretch your health span across your lifespan is your health system-affiliated physician. They are not trained,  equipped, or motivated to provide advice on the metabolic processes that enable that extended health span. And, if employed in a system, they are under pressure from a financially-strapped mothership to treat you as a number with a fifteen-minute visit limit.

My primary care physician is in his early 60s, has two artificial knees, is 30 pounds overweight, and is blind in one eye from an as-yet unexplained cardiovascular event. I love the guy – I’ve been seeing him for over 25 years. We have great conversations about the industry and his photography from his twice-a-year ventures to Lake Powell. He has helped me numerous times with the right solutions to my downstream problems.

I do my darndest to avoid seeing him. It’s usually just once a year for the blood panel review, a quick look in the ears, nose, and throat, and the rubber glove bit.

He’s never asked about my diet or exercise regimen – nor would I listen if he volunteered.

It’s nice to know he’s there and competent if my wheels skid off the rails.

He’s a partner in my health when I need him – not the arbiter.

I’m counting on my immune system to do the heavy lifting by giving it what it needs to perform optimally.

Nobody’s coming to save us.

We’re left with little else but to take responsibility for acquiring the knowledge of how to protect our birthright of good health, regardless of where we are on the age spectrum.

If you’ve tracked with me for a while, you know I’m a fan and advocate of “Harry’s Rules”, the appendix in the book “Younger Next Year”  (affiliate link) that was written by the co-author, the late Dr. Henry Lodge.

It seems a good time to resurrect them.

Harry’s Rules

Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.

Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.

Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.

Spend less than you make.

Quit eating crap!

Care.

Connect and commit.

Can you imagine these rules hanging in your doctor’s office?

Don’t hold your breath!

Are they hanging in your office?

Thanks for reading. What are your thoughts or observations on this topic? Love to hear from you. Also, if you haven’t joined our list for this free weekly newsletter, you can do so at www.makeagingwork.com.