Your Attitude Is the Difference Maker.

Coincidence?

IF . . . 

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z

EQUALS . . . 

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22-23-24-25-26

THEN . . . 

K+N+O+W+L+E+D+G+E 

11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

H+A+R+D+W+O+R+K

8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

BUT . . .

A+T+T+I+T+U+D+E

1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

Raise your hand if you’ve seen this clever formula 700 times?

I thought about it today as I watched the views on one of my six-month-old Quora answers suddenly shoot up – from zero views when I wrote it in June to nearly 5,000 views over the last two weeks.

The question I answered was:

“I’m 57, have no savings, and am unemployed. Is it too late to turn my life around?”

It apparently got shared into a group that relates to the nature of the question. And, I suspect, that COVID has boosted the interest in the topic considerably.

Here’s my answer to the question:

Absolutely not!!!

I’ll invoke an overused cliche:

It’s never too late to start but always too early to quit!

Consider that you likely have 20–30 years ahead of you – maybe more if you have been taking care of yourself physically. That’s 1–2 generations. Think of how much we have progressed in that amount of time. You can make lots happen in that amount of time also.

While I don’t know your life situation, I feel safe in saying that you got to 57 with some successes along the way. It’s only in your head that it’s disgraceful to be unemployed and with no savings. Frankly, virtually nobody is thinking about you or really cares – you just think they are and this will erode your self-image and make the road ahead harder.

So start by reminding yourself of what successes you’ve had and what it was that made you successful at it. As all of us do, you have innate talents that you can continue to build on.

Ask yourself: what do I like doing and what am I really good at? When you have that figured out, then get aggressive about finding a match for that combination. Let the match with your talents be the guide to your decisions and not money. When you have your talents aligned with your work, you’ll see the rewards come.

In step with this, maybe a change in self-discipline is in order as well. As in, spend less than you make. With a 30–40 year runway, you have the opportunity to make a solid financial recovery. Plus when you are doing what you love, you aren’t likely to succumb to the social pressure to “retire.”

So think of it as being 2/3 done with 1/3 left with the advantage of being able to leverage accumulated life skills, work experiences, wisdom into a lifestyle of work that can be more gratifying, purposeful, fulfilling and financially rewarding than the first 2/3.

You are uniquely gifted and far from a slug. Recognize that, change your self-talk, get into motion, get help, and launch your restart. And remember that our society needs you being a producer and not another “hanger-on” or someone on the dole.

Good luck – and thanks for putting yourself out there. Beginning is half done!!

 COVID + POLITICIANS . . .

3+15+22+9+4+16+15+12+9+20+9+1+14+19 = 168% = off-the-charts funk!

No question, it’s tough to stay positive. I don’t know about you, but the walls are starting to come in.

I gassed up my car this week for the first time in 11 weeks. Who could have imagined a “quarterly visit to the gas station?”

Or a Thanksgiving on the back deck with space heaters? Cold mashed potatoes are OK, but only with family.

 

An illusion of leadership

It really does come down to attitude, doesn’t it? Something over which we have near-total control.

I suggest we pay attention to another time-worn adage:

“We can’t control our circumstances. We can only control how we respond to those circumstances.”

I ran across another quote that seems appropriate for the times we are in. It’s by the late Henri Nouwen, Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer, and theologian. He said:

“The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”

As we wrap up four years of illusory leadership and head into another four with the scant chance for improvement, it comes down to generating our own leadership. Our leaders are lost, confused, hedonistic, greedy, and  – – – don’t get me started!

We are being tested, and we are leaderless. Something greater than the circus on the Potomac is in charge and that’s what we need to tap into. And it starts between our temples – with our attitude.

The maturity, wisdom, grit, integrity, and attitudes we “modern elders” possess can face this crisis down and help us come out the other side new, different –

– and better.

Hope you are safe during this madness. Let’s make the most of what will be the weirdest holiday season ever. Turn each day into its own miracle. And know that this desert will be traversed. Join our tribe if you haven’t already at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a free e-book “Achieving Your Full-life Potential.” And leave us your thoughts below.

 

Happy Thanksgiving – I guess?

Well, COVID, the Feds, and our Governor say no to a conventional Thanksgiving this year. Then the weather says we can’t even do it on the back deck with space heaters.  So, it’s each family component on their own.

Hmmm – a 14-pound turkey for two?

It is what it is.

Our family’s best to you for your Thanksgiving, whatever form it may take.  Thanks for being a reader and for all your feedback.

P.S. This will end!

 

 

Over 60 and “Acting Your Age?” STOP IT!!

“Too many people believe that at age 64 you are a productive, contributing member of society. And then, at 65, you’re supposed to retire, go on Social Security and Medicare, and overnight you become irrelevant and become dependent. What we really need to say is that at 65 keep it moving. I like to say it’s not aging in place. It’s thriving in motion.”

That’s a quote from Dr. Charlotte Yeh, Chief Medical Officer of AARP Services, Inc. extracted from Dr. Ken Dychtwald’s new book “What Retirees Want: A Holistic View of Life’s Third Age.” Dr. Yeh is making an appeal for us to “reframe aging, in both our language and our imagery.”

“Thriving in motion” has a nice ring to it, don’t ya think? But it doesn’t fit the ageist stereotype that our culture continues to harbor – inactive, cranky, frail, frumpy, childish, helpless, senile, over-the-hill.

As I’ve written about before, ageism is the last “ism” that hasn’t gotten significant attention. Research suggests that it is more prevalent than sexism and racism, although you won’t get far with that argument in our current culture.

Maybe we won’t make the progress we need against ageism unless we reframe aging. Dychtwald and his co-author and fellow researcher, Robert Morrison think so and devote an entire chapter in this outstanding book to that idea.

I’m taking it personally.

You can call me Gary, you can call me Papa or Grandpa, you can even call me “an ancient insufferable p****k” (which a few folks have), or even “older adult.”  But DON’T CALL ME A SENIOR OR ELDERLY.

However, you CAN call me an elder. Or, better yet, a “modern elder”, the new term coined by author/entrepreneur Chip Conley which, IMHO, is the best reframing term going. In his best-selling book “Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder,” Conley describes a modern elder as “someone who marries wisdom and experience with curiosity, a beginner’s mind, and a willingness to learn from those younger.”

I’ve written more about Conley’s modern elder concept at these links:

Don’t Let Yourself Become a Senior Citizen. There’s a Better Alternative.

Be Part of the “Modern Elder” Movement

Kinda sounds like you don’t dare “act your age” if you intend to be a “modern elder.” That would be a good thing because it’s no longer about a number. We should have legislated the number 65 out of existence long ago for all the counterproductive decisions it’s spawned.

Most retirees today don’t want to be characterized by their age, certainly not by a number.

Karyne Jones, CEO of the National Caucus and Center on Black Aging, says: “I own my age. I have never gone for this ’70 is the new ’50 stuff because it says that you shouldn’t be proud of where you are in your lifespan.”

I’m 78 and don’t want to be the new 58. I wanna be the new 78.

Did you know –

-that the experience of “fun” dips in mid-life and then rises to a peak in the retirement years? Share that with the next irreverent, arrogant, whipper-snapper millennial that dishonors your modern elder status.

Here’s what “fun” looks like at various life stages, according to an AgeWave/Merrill Lynch study entitled “Leisure in Retirement: Beyond the Bucket List”

Age        Happiness/Fun Level (on 1-10 scale)

25                        6.4

35                        6.0

45                        6.0

55                        6.4

65                        7.3

75                        7.1

 

That same study revealed that most retirees are turning out to be living their best years with contentment and relaxation both in the 70+ percentile and anxiety in the under-20 percentile while 25-35-year-olds are in the 30-50 percentile in all three categories.

And all along you were thinking “getting old is a bitch” or “aging isn’t for sissies.”

Wrong self-talk! Ageist language!

So, there you have it. We “modern elders” are having more fun despite the fact that we face discrimination, derision, disrespect, and disparagement.

BUT – – 

-maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to point fingers.

Are we acting our age and inviting this invective by:

  • Looking and acting old in our dress, gait, posture, attitude, and language.
  • Being inflexible in our thinking and not entertaining new ideas.
  • Not proactively adding millennials and GenZ’ers to our networks and spending time and learning from them.
  • Stopping learning and not staying current with national and global developments and new technology.

There are many ways we bring ageism to ourselves.

We’ve all got some work to do.

Chip Conley learned that. Despite his reputation and phenomenal entrepreneurial success, when he accepted a position at Airbnb to counsel CEO Brian Chesky and to be a mentor to Airbnb top performers, he found himself humbled as he engaged with people half his age and with twice his digital smarts. He learned that he needed to become an intern before he could mentor. From that experience, he coined the term “mentern.”

How about if we crawl out of our ideological, theological, age-stamped bubbles, stop listening to our own echoes and try a beginner’s mind, get curious, and go learn something from junior?

Maybe be a mentern. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

 

I’m Starting a “50 to 100” Club – Wanna Join?

 

Ten or so years ago when I started publicly declaring that I intended to live to 100, invitations to dinner parties – or any social event, for that matter – experienced a noticeable drop.

That’s not really painful for me because, as an introvert, I’m not empowered by large gatherings and am a boor at dinner parties anyway. But it’s really unfair to my bride of 49 3/4 years who can, and does, enliven any get-together with her enthusiasm for banter and selfless interest in other people’s stories.

I’m not sure what it says about my personality to become rather immune to this sort of repulsion. Maybe it’s part of the reason I did OK in my sales career where rejection was a key component of the “game.”

Nonetheless, undaunted and displaying yet another layer of arrogance, three years ago –  at age 75 –  I decided to up the “ante” and declare my end goal to be 112 1/2. There was simple (delusional?) logic behind the decision: I wanted to have 1/3 of my life left to make up for things I hadn’t gotten done in the first 2/3. (Writer note: Don’t probe – they are painful items and never to be publicly revealed. The victim recipients know what they are).

The response to my announcement? Yawns, mostly.

Probably because the weirdness had already been established and tolerated. The eye-rolls were shorter or the conversations changed quicker.

Or maybe – just maybe – it was because there’s an increasing acceptance of the possibility of living healthfully to 100+ versus the prevailing mental picture of wheelchairs, walkers, nurses, needles, dementia, drool, and Depends that prevailed in earlier (albeit brief) conversations.

What if –

– there was a roadmap that increased the possibility of sneaking up on 100 with vitality, vim, and vigor?

– you fell short by a handful of years but beat the average (80) by a decade or more?

-you were able to not only put more years in your life but more life in your years?

-you could make your future, at 50+, bigger than your past?

-you could face a second-half/third age with enthusiasm rather than fear and trepidation?

Pipe dream? Maybe.

This is an idea that has been rattling in this aging noggin for a long-time. In fact, a few years ago I reserved the domain name 50to100club.com with a vision in my head of providing a resource for those interested in learning more about how the second half of life can be the most meaningful and productive period of their lifespan.

So, I guess I’m sort of testing the waters a bit here. Short of a formal survey, which may follow, I’m hoping to gauge reader interest in having access to a resource that collects and repurposes content from new science and trends on aging, health and wellness, second half careers/retirement and building and connecting a community with similar interests through articles, podcasts, forums, live conferences, webinars, and the like.

Maybe I’m misreading the interest and the need – but I don’t think so. A simple “yay or nay” by way of a comment below, or to my email at gary@makeagingwork.com,  would be helpful, especially if your “yay” offered up a suggestion or two on what sort of content would be most helpful to you.

Thanks for your help!

COVID Message: “No More Parking Lots!”

Image by xaviandrew from Pixabay

“We have bigger houses but smaller families; more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgment; more experts, but more problems; more medicines but less healthiness.

We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble in crossing the street to meet our new neighbor.

We built more computers to hold more copies than ever, but have less real communications.

We’ve become long on quantity, but short on quality.

These are times of fast food but slow digestion; tall men but short characters; steep profits but shallow relationships.

It’s a time when there is much in the window, but nothing in the room.”

Authorship unknown.

I borrowed that quote from a chapter heading in a new, thought-provoking book I’m plodding through entitled “Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition”  by Charles Eisenstein. It’s not a book – or author – that offers up much in the way of conventional thinking. I guess that’s why it appeals and keeps me plodding.

As near as I can tell from being through only a third of the book, Eisenstein is saying we are at, or rapidly approaching, the end of the money system that we’ve become enslaved to over the last several centuries.

My good friend, smart business guy, and Tuesday morning mastermind/accountability partner, Bryan Peck, turned me onto Eisenstein with an article entitled “The Coronation”  a 9000-word, 35-45 minutes read that’s worth the time and effort. The article inspired Bryan to buy the book which he has finished and is encouraging me to continue my plodding.

Here’s just a snippet from the article to give you a taste of where Eisenstein comes from which I offer up realizing it may or may not inspire you to read the entire article:

“When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of?”

Will COVID help us come to our senses, finally?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been conflicted for some time now having been a staunch, life-long advocate of capitalism but trying to square it lately with the glaring exploitation of the planet.

At the risk of sounding like an environmental whacko, I confess to a growing concern of how much more we can exploit in the interest of supporting a global economic system driven to achieve never-ending growth and consumerism. That’s a core question that Eisenstein tackles.

I’ll know, I suppose, when I finish the book where he comes down. It’s clear, from what I’ve read so far that he’s headed for a suggestion of something to replace the money/interest/usury system that we know and love (maybe a “not” on that love part).

One thing seems certain – and foundational in Eisenstein’s position. A global economic system based on taking the common (or divine, if you wish) “gifts” of the planet, extracting them, repackaging them, and selling them back to us on a never-ending growth platform has to have an endpoint. What happens when we have no more fish to catch, trees to cut down, oil to extract, clean water to drink, molybdenum to mine, topsoil to destroy, etc., etc., in order to sell “stuff” back to ourselves?

Are we close to that endpoint? Big questions, tough answers.

Is COVID-19 – or the one that follows it – going to accelerate our awareness of this?

For sure, 19 is laying open more awareness of the gap between the haves and have-nots. One has to wonder if we haven’t been close to a revolution tipping point even before COVID and if this might be the spark that lights the tinder.

If I were Matt Damon, I’d maybe rethink coming out of hiding to reveal being “forced” to quarantine with family in a palatial seaside estate on the coast of Ireland. Or maybe I’d think twice before insisting publicly that I’m entitled to my $7 million a year even though MLB is shut down and I can’t throw my fastball like Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell did this week. Or, certainly, Nancy’s classic ice cream collection and well-stocked royalty-class refrigerator demonstration didn’t help (other than to confirm that Washington is not a drawer full of the sharpest knives).

Take a gander at this photo:

This is hole #10 at Arrowhead Golf Course, one of the more notable golf courses in the Denver area. The view is from the patio deck of the clubhouse.

Now, envision some 50 yards or so above and to the left of this patio deck, the construction of what has to be a 10,000 SF home that has this view every day. I discovered this as I was searching for my usual wayward drive on this fairway last week and heard what sounded like a nailgun. I turned to discover this house which is not visible from the clubhouse or the drive to it.

Secluded, separate, isolated, magnificent, palatial, incredibly expensive.

A “haves” expression of “I’ve got mine.”

I’m happy for the owner – honestly. A testimonial to hard work, creativity, no doubt some good breaks in the capitalist system. I feel no resentment or jealousy Just the thought of what it takes to maintain properties of this magnitude convinced me long ago that modest digs are more sensible for us. If there is truly a hell, I’m sure it would have to be an eternity of doing home maintenance and yard work.

But the irony of the situation stayed in my head throughout the rest of the round. While this house is being built, chances are high there is a single-mom, bartender/waitress at the same club that is out of work and in constant fear.  It didn’t escape me, as well, that I was playing on a $100/round course (a friend gifted me or I wouldn’t have been there) while these same people struggled.

Do we really want to get back to “normal?”

We’ve been faking sustainability and socially-conscious capitalism for some time now. It all makes for nice PR, but scrape all that off and we are still pillaging this mudball at a rate that may have caught up with us.

Genesis 1:28, states: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'”

Subdue means to ” to conquer and bring into subjection; to vanquish.”

I suspect, as the author of all this, God really meant “sustainably subdue” and wishes He had been a little clearer and taken it beyond just the animal realm. Obviously, lacking that and in light of our “fallen nature”, we’ve taken it beyond “every living thing” to include every non-moving thing and to “unsustainably vanquished” – or close to it.

So maybe God now says: “Here’s COVID-19. Chew on this for a while and start rethinking. Oh, BTW, I’ve got a series of these COVID-like things lined up until y’all come to your senses and start treating my creation sensibly and come back into community. Bottom line? I don’t like the long-term ROI I’m seeing with these gifts I granted you. Enough with the concrete parking lots – try a community garden  and get rid of those food deserts!”

Can we afford to keep up “the normal?” Do we really want to go back?

I’m open to a cogent argument that says there is no peril to us continuing to open the “have and have not” gap.

Doesn’t your mind go a little crazy with this extra time to think about what might be next?

Couched in the context of our current political climate and an interest-based money system, it’s pretty hard to depart from a “what’s next” that isn’t further exploitation.

I’m confident (at least, this morning) that our eyes are being opened a bit to this and that some modicum of change will happen that inches us in a different direction, hopefully without a revolt.

I expect we will be hearing from more thinkers like Eisenstein – and that might be a really good thing. Maybe that thinker is you.

I’d like to know. Leave a comment.

 

 

 

 

A Life Lesson Learned from a Thomasville Chair

2019 contained a lost summer for my wife and me.  We decided to move from home-ownership to the rental world temporarily, in defiance of all conventional advice regarding balance sheet/net worth/equity/tax benefits, yada, yada, yada.

For a couple of months, we battled the remorse of leaving a large comfortable home on the 10th fairway of a semi-private golf course with this as a “backyard”:

We bought the house new 19 years ago, the 10th house built in what became a 400+ home golf -course-centric subdivision.  It was a nice stay.

But we faced an expensive upgrade or go.  We decided to go – let the next owners endure the inconvenience and expense.

We’ve both been surprised at how quickly we got over the remorse as we’ve finally settled into a very comfortable home 2/3 the size of the one we left.

June through August was lost to making the move, a lot of which we did on our own in the midst of one of the hottest Colorado summers on record. (Note to self: don’t EVER try that again!).

We anxiously waited for offers to come in on the house as we began the move, risking having to pay rent plus mortgage for an extended period.

We were lucky –  the overlap was minimal.

We came close to catching the peak of a hot real estate market that we sensed was running its course, missing the absolute peak by about six weeks.  So we did OK in maximizing our “equity capture.”

A moving experience

You’ve heard or read the stories of what it’s like to downsize, purge, declutter, etc.  We are not, and never have been extravagant or major accumulators.  But 49 years of marriage and family-living creates a mind-warping collection of “stuff”.

Un-stuffing is tough – and not a lot of fun.

NEWSFLASH: Nobody wants or needs your “stuff”.

Our purge was spread over 45 days of innumerable trips to Goodwill, ARC, Salvation Army along with numerous large curbside collections of “un-donatables”.  Somehow we made what remained all fit into this smaller home.

It’s still way too much stuff.  It’s hard to imagine another 1/3 to 1/2 downsize for our next – and likely last – move.

Did we learn anything?

This morning, in my cramped office, I found myself reflecting back on the experience and wondering:  “Was there a life lesson in this drawn-out event?”

Don’t ask me to explain it, but my thoughts went to a Thomasville chair – a white-on-white, $1,200 (Y2K dollars), 4’x6’ chair-ottoman combination (the picture at the top is the real thing) that sat in our master bedroom for 19 years.

We estimate it experienced either one of our behinds less than 20 times in those 19 years! Seriously.

How hard was it to let go of emotionally?  Near zero!

Was it hard to get rid of physically?  Yep.  No Craig’s List responses.  Upscale consignment store laughed us out the front door: “Uh, 4’x6’, white-on-white?  What century are you from?”

Oh, and you may already know that ARC, Salvation Army, Goodwill, et.al  aren’t keen on taking furniture.  We got creative at finding alternate access and dumping some lesser stuff at night.

We considered putting the chair curbside with a $50 sign on it, thus ensuring it would be stolen in the night, but our egos and a sliver of respect for our neighbors killed that idea.

So, in her perennially persistent manner, my wife found a “lesser” consignment store who agree to take it.

It went on the consignment floor for $199 with a written contract that stipulated a declining price each month along with a usurious percentage of the proceeds and the agreement that if not sold within three months, it would be given away or otherwise disposed of.

Well, surprise, surprise – it sold!  On the day it hit the final reduced price on the floor – from which our proceeds were zero!

Scammed. Hoodwinked. Gullible. Hijacked.  These are just a few of the words that came to me when we received the notice.

But then I rethought those retorts.  What made me think I needed a $1,200 name brand chair that got sat in maybe once every six months for 19 years anyway?

You’ve come a long way – maybe!

As I looked around our current digs with its reduced footprint but still way too much “stuff”, my thoughts drifted to my maternal grandparent’s 1200 sq.ft. concrete house that they built by hand when they homesteaded in southeastern Wyoming 110 years ago (the real house pictured below).

They lived in a dugout for a year while they built the house. During much of that building year, they carried water by hand from a neighbor’s well a half-mile away as they dug their own well.

They occupied that house until they died.

They delivered four children there (one lost to scarlet fever as a teenager) and scratched out a bare subsistence on 160-acres of hardscrabble land granted them by the government to attract them to come further west from Nebraska.

I spent lots of time in that house growing up although our family lived in town ten miles away.  I remember grandma pumping water by hand in her modest kitchen and cooking and baking on a coal-fired cast iron stove.  Gramps was dawn to dusk, 7x, keeping animals alive and tools working and taking from the animals what they innocently relinquished.

The house was heated, quite poorly, by burning coal in a pot-belly stove in a small living room. Winters were an adventure.

Entertainment was a radio. Social life was all about church in a nearby settlement with a population of 6 by day and 4 by night – the pastor and his family of four and two grain elevator workers who showed up daily for work.  The grain elevator sat by a small railroad we called BF&E – Back and Forth Empty – which it mostly was.

No indoor plumbing at my grandparent’s concrete house until 1958 (my sophomore year), the same year President Ike started building the Interstate highway through the state.

Refrigeration was an icebox that literally had a block of ice in the top and, at best, just kept things cool.  But if you grow, kill, extract, or fetch most everything you eat on a near-daily basis, you don’t concern yourself much with refrigeration.

Maybe all this is at the root of my mild embarrassment over my riches.

With virtually nothing, they got along just fine. They were happy, God-fearing and dedicated family folks that never harmed a soul and helped many.   They did die early, literally worn out – but at peace.

Disposal, after they were gone, didn’t involve anything resembling a 4’x6’ white-on-white unused albatross.  In fact, most of their belongings, from what I can recall of them, may well have fit in that same 4’x6’ space.

So, yeah, I guess there’s a life lesson in all this.  Don’t we all get there eventually? 

It’s just stuff; accumulation and an eventual headache; an unhealthy attachment to the temporal;  a keeping up with/ahead of the Joneses; a satisfying of a comparison complex.

Pick your psychic poison!

You’ve heard the cliché “you never see a U-haul behind a hearse”.  I’m asking whoever is left of my family, should any outlast my 112.5 years, to violate that “never”.  I want a small trailer to back up to my gravesite, tilt-up and slide a few items on top of my coffin:  my 1966 Gibson Hummingbird guitar, my 1990-vintage Sage fly rod and my Ping putter.  Oh, maybe I would include 200-300 books I’ve read that I guarantee, nobody else would bother with.

Because that’s really what I’d like to move my life to – that simplicity.  I recall when my dad died at 81, everything he owned took up only a 12×12 spot in his son-in-law’s airplane hangar.  I took from that modest pile his ubiquitous pocket knife, the weather barometer he looked at every day and a handful of antique carpentry tools that he had inherited from his father.

These round out the memory.

So if I ever am tempted to buy another $1,200 4’x6’ name-brand anything, I’ll simply grab Dad’s pocket knife and nick myself with it to return me to sanity and simplicity.

Thanks, Dad, for the simplicity mindset – and the antidote.

Best wishes for 2020!

Thanks for being a loyal subscriber and reader in 2019!  

Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons.

Gary Allen Foster

www.makeagingwork.com

 

Living a Regret Free Life

This post was originally published on Booming Encore and republished with permission.

By Susan Williams

Over the last year or so I have talked with many people who shared with me that how they currently were living was not what they really wanted to do.

Whether it was pursuing a different profession that would allow them to be more creative or wanting to help other people more or even a desire to feel that they were making a bigger difference in the world – they all had one thing in common.

They were talking about doing something different but we’re not actually taking steps towards doing anything about it.

It made me wonder – what stops us from pursuing what we say we really want to do? 

Here are just a few things that I think can get in the way;

Fear

Fear of failure, fear of what other people would think, fear of changing relationships, fear of not having enough time are just some examples of the fear that can stop someone from making a significant change.

Financial

In some cases – especially changing careers – I think that facing a potential financial impact may sometimes be even a bigger challenge than facing fear.

As we get older to think about changing from a comfortable lifestyle to possibly something less secure can be a real challenge.  It may not only affect you – in many cases, it can affect an entire family.

Easier Just to Talk About It

Let’s be honest.  It’s easier to just talk about what we would like to do in our lives rather than actually doing anything about it.

If we think about all the people who talk about losing weight, getting more exercise, seeing friends more often – but don’t – this is the same type of thing.  It takes time, work, dedication and commitment to actually pursue something new.

Support

To make a significant change can often require support – family, friends, colleagues – especially if your decision could impact others.

So why bother?  If we have to get over some of these hurdles is any significant change really worth it?

As I thought about this question, I was reminded of a TED video I watched a while back presented by Kathleen Taylor, a mental health counselor who worked with people in their final days of life.

In her presentation, Kathleen shared what was discovered as the number one regret at the end of a person’s life.  She shared the following thought that was voiced by many in their final days;

“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life that others expected of me.”

Based on this, I think the answer to make a change or not make a change is truly a very personal decision.

The “follow your passion” or “pursue your dreams” advice looks great on Facebook and Twitter images but any significant change is a very personal decision with many different facets to consider.

I think the big question is to ask ourselves how we think we will feel at the end of our lives.

Will the choices and decisions that we have made allowed us the opportunity to live the life we really wanted to live?

I think if we can answer this question honestly and have made decisions based on this question then the choices as to whether we decide to undertake a significant change becomes easier.

Our lives will then be something to look back on with both joy and satisfaction – and without any regrets.

Here is the TED Talk given by Kathleen Turner – Rethinking the Bucket List;

Susan Williams is the Founder of Booming Encore – a digital media hub dedicated to providing information and inspiration to help Baby Boomers create and live their very best encore. Being a Boomer herself, Susan loves to discover ways to live life to the fullest. She shares her experiences, observations and opinions on living life after 50 and personally tries to embrace Booming Encore’s philosophy of making sure every day matters. For daily updates to help you live your best encore, be sure to follow Booming Encore on Twitter and join them on Facebook. (Link for website: www.boomingencore.com / Link for Twitter: www.twitter.com/boomingencore and Link for Facebook: www.facebook.com/boomingencore.

Celebrating #100!!

Well, dear readers.  This is blog #100. 

My thanks to those of you who have endured my iconoclasm, sarcasm, rants, wanderings, mild plagiarism, and occasional drivel for the last two years and still open the weekly email.

I never imagined getting this far down the blogging road.  According to one source I came across, most people who start blogs quit within 3 months.

My ego would naturally take that and say that I’m 8x better than most, but we all know that’s garbage.  I’m just afraid to quit because once in a while some of you give me a stroke that hints that someday I may grow into being a real writer.

Given that there are over 600 million blogs in the world today and that 77.8 million blogs are published each month on WordPress and that 2 billion blog posts are being published each year worldwide – well,  my sanity is up for question.

But some of you knew that even before I  put my keyboard to a blog.

 

In recognition of #100, and to relieve you having to sort through and decipher another mini-epistle, I’m doing something a bit different this week.

I collect quotes.  Hundreds of them.  It helps me maintain my reputation as someone who can “cliché you to death.”

In our recent move, I uncovered a couple of forgotten boxes crammed with 3×5 cards with notes and quotes from books and articles I’ve read as far back as 20 years.

Hundreds of cards.

I’ve begun an 80% gleaning, narrowing my arsenal of clicheic hammers.

From that gleaning, I decided to share a few humorous and pithy quotes that I felt you might enjoy.  Most of these came from a single Forbes article.

Thanks for being a reader.  I’m looking forward to the next 100!

Thoughts on work 

  • “ I have never liked working. To me, a job is an invasion of privacy.” Danny McGoorty
  • “Hard work never killed anybody, but why take the chance?” Edgar Bergen
  • “I’ve been promoted to middle-management. I never thought I’d sink this low”  Tim Gould
  • “No man ever listened himself out of a job.” Calvin Coolidge
  • “There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something.”  Thomas Edison
  • “The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.” Richard Bach

Thoughts on ambition 

  • “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.” Edgar Bergen
  • “Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap vigors of the mind.” Leonardo DaVinci
  • “Life, as it is called, is for the most of us one long postponement.” Henry Miller
  • “A lazy man is never lucky.” Persian proverb
  • “What use is a good head if the legs won’t carry it?” Yiddish Proverb
  • “A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will condemn himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-hand friends.” Cyril Connolly
  • “The lazy are always wanting to do something.” Anonymous
  • “Life is the classroom; death is graduation.” Anonymous
  • “Nothing is ours but time and choices.” Anonymous

Thoughts on health 

  • “Old people shouldn’t eat health foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.” Robert Osborn
  • “Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.” Redd Foxx
  • “I get my exercise acting as a pallbearer to my friends who exercise.” Chauncey DePew
  • “Flies spread disease. Keep yours zipped.”  Anonymous
  • “When I told my doctor I couldn’t afford an operation, he offered to touch up my x-rays.” Henny Youngman
  • “I knew a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the time he killed himself.”  Johnny Carson

Miscellaneous

  • “The only advantage of being a pessimist is that all your surprises are pleasant”
  • “Always do right because that will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”  Mark Twain
  • “Smile – the shortest distance between two people.” Victor Borge

See you next week

Seven Reasons We Should Be Amazed About Getting Older

“Getting old is for the birds!”

That’s one of the dozens of ageist statements tossed out casually when a group of seventh-, eighth-, or ninth-decaders assembles.  Each is usually followed by a litany of the issues that can make it seem so.

Nary a conversation goes by without multiple mentions of knee/hip/shoulder replacements, this or that type of surgery, arthritis, back pain, bunions, hearing aids, loneliness, ad infinitum.

What if one flipped the conversation and started brainstorming what is amazing about getting older?  While I suspect the audience would thin pretty quickly (physically or mentally) and the instigator tagged as beyond strange, isn’t the idea worthy of consideration?

After all, what is there to lose?  What’s the worst thing that could happen?  The worst thing would be that some would simply continue in their funk, incapable of a change in mindset.  And you or I, as the instigator, will have weakened a relationship that wasn’t helping us move forward anyway.

Call me pollyannish, but I think it’s worth a try the next time you find yourself with a group of naysayers.

Some people just won’t want to hear that there is a positive channel of thought about growing older. Should you choose to accept this assignment, be prepared for pushback.

Here are seven amazing things about aging that you can toss into a sagging, ageist conversation to turn it into one more uplifting and worthy of your time.

  1. Freedom of thought. Haven’t we reached the point, in our late-50’s and beyond, where our thoughts are fully ours and we no longer need to bend to other people’s opinions, to comparisons, corporate guidelines, policies, procedures, plans not of our making?

We bring forward credibility based on life experiences unique to us. We’ve paid significant prices and learned some deep lessons.  We’ve sorted out and rejected a lot of the dumbness of our culture.   We’ve made more than our share of silly mistakes but now realize that life is a series of experiments and there is no failure in life, only research and development.  It’s brought us to this unique and powerful place with the power to have our thoughts translate to gain for others.

We’re free to express ourselves knowing that we bring value based on our learning and our experiences but that we have no control over whether anyone else aligns with us.

We’re free to accept who we are which is little more than the thoughts we allow to take hold every day.  “As a man thinketh, so is he”.  We are free to either let our thoughts bring us down or build us up.   At this point, we have much more positive to build on than we may realize or acknowledge.

 

  1. Time freedom. At last, we are mostly in control of our time.  We can take Socrates’ advice and “avoid the barrenness of a busy life.” No alarm clock, no commute, no deadlines, no meaningless meetings.

We are more sage in our appreciation of time, having wasted so much of it in earlier decades.  We have better filters of what counts and what doesn’t.  We are less apt to worry about what others think when we say “no” – and we say no more often.

We say “yes” now to more things that are important and fewer things that are urgent.

And if an afternoon nap feels right, we can do it because, well, we’ve got the time and it matters not if someone says there are better things to do with our time.

 

  1. An opportunity to be generative. We can pay it forward and help the generations behind us.  We can do our part to extend the evolution of what’s right in life. We’re done with the selfishness of accumulation and comparison and can turn to the selflessness of sharing our wisdom and material wealth by helping those that follow.

We can turn this period of our lives from aging to sageing.  Thus, a backward glance is a good one, not one filled with regrets.   Someone – maybe even many – will say “s/he was a light on my path at a time that I needed it.”

 

  1. Live stress-free. Now we can relax into our worthiness.  We’re done striving to compete; other’s opinions of us no longer release unnecessary cortisol; we’ve learned that worry is useless and that few things that we worry about ever happen.   If they do, they are rarely as troublesome as we expected.

So we can settle into an experience-based mindset that responds only to those things over which we have control and don’t waste energy on the things we can’t.

We accept the inevitability of dying and that it is part of life. We no longer fear it.  We know it’s coming but that we don’t need to rush its arrival by stressing over it.

 

  1. We can help change the world. We’re sage now – we know the planet and the human experience are in trouble. And we know why.  With calmness and confidence and lack of concern about condemnation, we can take the right message about change to the world, one person, one encounter at a time.

We have an acquired appreciation for the state of our planet and have observed the damage that humans can cause.  We’re done accumulating, done with impression-motivated consumption.  Through our lifestyles, we can demonstrate that the planet doesn’t have to suffer for us to enjoy and appreciate life.

We can retest Gandhi’s guiding principle: “Be the change we want to see in the world”.  We’ve learned that we can’t change others and that motivation is an “inside job.”  But, by our example, we can be an inspiration to others to be what we are, want what we have and to kickstart that motivation.

 

  1. We can restore respect for the elderly. We’ve grown up in and endured the derision that our culture places on older people.  We’ve been on the receiving end of an evolution away from respect for the elderly that existed a mere 150 years ago.  We’ve witnessed the magnitude and folly of overemphasis on youth.

By our example of good health, vitality, shared wisdom, and our open stand against ageism, we can be a new light of reason and logic in an often dark, unreasonable, and illogical society.

 

  1. We can become “truth agents”. We’re good at filtering out the truth in situations.  We’ve got nothing to lose by exposing it and telling it like it is.  We can effect change by taking a stand on what we know is reality, the real truth.  In our wisdom, we know that “methods and techniques may change, but principles never do” and that a life worth living is guided by these ancient and immutable principles.  We are not afraid to stand behind them, live them and teach them. And watch truth change the world we live in.

Our experiences enable us to be “positively skeptical”.  We are good now at filtering the “wheat from the chaff” when it comes to truth.  We are skeptical about much of what evolves around us and push new developments through our well-developed filters.

We aren’t easily swayed from our position now when we know what is true.  We aren’t afraid to take a stand, realizing that it’s better to stand on the truth than to give in to public opinion half-truths.

Getting old is not the same as aging.

Growing old gracefully requires resilience. It requires an “attitude with altitude” that is grateful on a daily basis. It requires knowing that growing old is inevitable but that how we grow old is optional.

And, ultimately, it requires being in service to others, paying forward what we’ve learned, passing on our wisdom.

Therein may lie the true joy of growing older.