Do you really care if you live to old age or not?

Please forgive me for taking a shortcut this week. We have spent an exhausting week moving to another home and I haven’t had the energy or bandwidth to push any creative content buttons.

 

 

I’m reposting an article I submitted a few weeks ago to a question on Quora.com that has been garnering some attention. Hope you find some value in these ramblings.

The question was:

” Do you really care if you live to old age or not?”

My response:

Sure I care if I live to old age, whatever that is. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve been given the gift of life, so why not try to take it to the max. I’m 79, intend to live past 100, and try to gear my lifestyle to doing the things that will enhance my chances of getting there.

Will I get there? I don’t know. My “front nine” lifestyle would say that getting there on my “back nine” might make it tough. Nonetheless, what I do know is that I’ve got today and I’ll live it out and do the same tomorrow. One day at a time trying to do the right things to and for my biology and moving forward with a mission and a sense of purpose.

What is old age?

Can you define it for me? Is it 60 or older as most people would still be inclined to say? Is it 79, like me? To a 50- or 60-year old, I suppose I would be considered old. But to a centenarian, I’m still a “young adult.”

My point is, age is a mindset. It can be either chronological – which is where most people come from – or it can be functional, which is a much healthier perspective.

For most folks, the prospect of getting old is fearful and disturbing. Theirs is a vision of nursing homes, walkers, oxygen tubes, wheelchairs, and drool cups. For others – a minority still – it’s a time of continued growth, vitality, creativity, and contribution, up to the point of true old age where we do a 180 back to total dependence.

Fate vs choice.

There was a time, not long ago, when we considered our lifespan a matter of “fate”, God’s will. We knew little about how to do the things that could affect our longevity. We now know that it’s no longer “fate” but “choice” that can play a big role in determining both the years in our life and the life in our years.

So, I’m going on this ride as long as I can. I know I will need resilience along the way because there will be setbacks, be those losses of loved ones, illnesses, or other calamities. But I know that continued engagement in the form of work will contribute mightily to how well I live out the final chapters.

I started a business at age 60 and am starting another and different one at age 79. I’m truly inspired to get up each morning and, frankly, don’t dedicate any mental bandwidth to thinking about whether I’m old or not. I’m having too much fun.

You Are “Rare and Valuable” – Don’t Waste It By Retiring!

I’ve been pigging out recently on young, contrarian author and Georgetown University computer science professor, Cal Newport, rereading two of his books and watching lots of his many YouTube podcast interviews. The podcasts provide a welcome and productive relief of the boredom of my daily visits to the treadmill and upright bike.

I guess you could say I’m exercising a bit of “reverse generativity” and trying to be more of a “modern elder” by being willing to listen to and learn from someone less than half my age. Cal is only 38, looks 25, and talks like he’s been around forever, at least in the technology space.

As a late-stage septuagenarian, I’m not supposed to like millennials because they are so impudent, impatient, immature, uninformed.

Bad mantra! Bad idea!

Cal will bend your thinking in a very productive direction if you choose to engage and try but a few of his central messages.

Credibility? Yeah. He’s one of the youngest yet most published professors at Georgetown, has written six books, has a family, doesn’t have a social media account despite being in the technology business, doesn’t work past 5:30, and never works on the weekends. Oh, and finds time to respond to lots of requests for interviews.

Someone asked him in a podcast why he writes books and who they are for? I loved his response: “I write them for myself.” He builds them around what he wants his life to look like. What seems to fall out of his research and writing are some very powerful, insightful, and useful principles.

Passion versus Craftsman

In one of his earliest books, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, Newport takes an unpopular stand by advocating that pursuing your passion is bad career advice despite what nearly every self-help book and self-development guru would have us believe.

I’ll admit I’ve handed out that “bad advice” to a number of career coaching clients. Newport changed my thinking. He builds a very convincing, research-based argument that it is rarely passion that is the genesis of people becoming great but rather their commitment to developing “rare and valuable” skills and becoming “craftsman” through the accumulation of “career capital.”

It turns out that very few people begin careers in pursuit of their passion because (1) very few people even have a passion and (2) if they do, it is usually not related to work-life or career.

So how do people become “great?”

They get really good at something and the passion finds them.

They get so good, they can’t be ignored.

It’s Steve Jobs turning his back on being a Zen master and becoming so good at something that it produced one of the most world-changing events in history – the introduction of a music player that can make and receive phone calls.

It’s Steve Martin performing, experimenting, testing routines for 10 years in front of often-hostile audiences until he got so good that we couldn’t ignore him.

Retirement steals craftsmen.

I doubt that Steve Jobs would have retired had cancer not taken him early.

Steve Martin hasn’t shown any signs of stopping to delight us with his weirdness. Too much accumulated career capital; too many “rare and valuable” skills; too much of a “craftsman.”

Yet, thousands each year take their accumulated career capital, rare and valuable skills, and craftsman qualities and let them atrophy by buying into off-the-cliff traditional retirement.

Is that fair to a younger generation that could use the direction that years of accumulated wisdom can deliver?

Bigger yet, is it fair to the owner of that career capital and those rare and valuable skills to let them go to waste after investing thousands of hours acquiring them.

I realize that many, if not most, folks entering retirement are leaving a “job” – a way to pay the bills. They don’t acquire much career capital and no craftsman status. Some are leaving a career, the constant striving to increasingly better work not taking the time to stay put in a channel long enough to develop rare and valuable skills.

But, there are those who have pursued their work-life as a calling, an important part of their life, and a vital part of their identity. They’ve become true craftsmen.

Yet they let that identity fade away.

That can be an unfortunate consequence of succumbing to the traditional retirement mindset – career capital, deep craftsmanship, and rare and valuable skills relegated to the trash heap.

Enter – Capstone Career

Last week, I introduced the idea of a Capstone Career, a fitting way to celebrate craftsmanship, deep career capital, and those rare and valuable skills to preserve identity, stiff-arm boredom, maintain relevance, and maintain better health.

We can’t all be either of the aforementioned Steves, but we can still be “so good they can’t ignore us” in our own unique way – and make the world a better place during our post-career life.

Are you using your career capital in this second half or third age? What are your rare and valuable skills? Are they still vibrating – or getting stale?  What are you doing to maintain your craftsman status?

Share your stories with a comment below.

Is There a “Capstone Career” in Your Future?

My “9-to-5” these days is writing resumes, developing LinkedIn profiles and networking strategies, and providing career transition assistance for mid-to-late career professionals, mostly in the healthcare space.

I’m fortunate to be able to connect with some very committed and talented folks on a pretty deep level as I help them with these components of their “career marketing campaigns.”

It’s not unusual to slide into a conversation about the “R” word, as in:  “What are your thoughts about retirement?”

These folks usually have a time frame for the start of their retirement, either a specific year or a certain number of years beyond where they are now.

Not surprisingly, it almost always involves the number 65, reminding me of the strange entrenchment that number has in our collective psyche.

Even with a prospective date in mind, when asked what they expect to do with their retirement years or what retired life will look like for them, I invariably get the equivalent of a blank stare on the phone.

Few have a clue or have taken the time to think about it beyond the financial side – even though, for some, the decision is looming.

We’re stuck in 1935

I was reminded recently that “we created the clock and now it’s our master.” In the past, there was only the sun, moon, and stars and whatever creative notion about time that the priests and prophets came up with. Along the way, we came up with number boundaries with the 20th century producing 21 and 65 as the entry and exit points for participation in the adult world.

We get lots of guidance and advice and direction leading up to the first gateway. We drift out of the second gateway with little or no roadmap and a dearth of advice on what to do with the years that follow. We just know we need to do something resembling retirement at, or close to that number because that’s what “they” have been telling us now for 5-6 decades, keying off an irrelevant number established 86 years ago for political expediency.

A few decades ago when we typically only survived a handful of years beyond that second boundary, it wasn’t that big a deal. A commitment to a full-stop, leisure-based retirement made sense. But we screwed that up when we figured out how to live another 15-30 years beyond that.

We’ve technically invalidated the number 65 as a boundary but haven’t removed it from our heads.

Ignoring reality

If you ask these folks what concerns they may have about retirement beyond money, it typically will fall into one or more of these four categories:

  1. Boredom.
  2. Loss of identity.
  3. Becoming irrelevant.
  4. Deteriorating health

Yet, having identified their concerns, few have considered a plan designed to address them – all of which are addressable.

I’m committed to doing something about that.

How about a “Capstone Career?”

Mike Drak is a friend of mine,  a self-proclaimed “retirement rebel” and author of two really good books on the topic of retirement: “Victory Lap Retirement: Work While You Play, Play While You Work” and “Retirement Heaven or Hell: Which Will You Choose. Nine Principles for Designing Your Ideal Post-Career Lifestyle.”  I regret that Mike thought of “Victory Lap” first because it describes a great mindset for a post-career life.

I’ve been brainstorming for an equivalent term and came up with “Capstone Career”, with help from executive career coach, Helen Harkness, founder of Career Design Associates, who introduces the concept in her book “Don’t Stop the Career Clock: Rejecting the Myths of Aging for a New Way to Work in the 21st Century.”

I think a “Capstone Career” is a great solution to the aforementioned retirement concerns.

Why “capstone?”  What is it?

Capstone has a couple of definitions:

  1. a stone fixed on top of something, typically a wall.
  2. the high point; a crowning achievement; a culminating experience.

Much like Drak’s “Victory Lap”, a Capstone Career could be that “crowning achievement and culminating experience” that celebrates the bringing together of dormant dreams, resurrected talents, accumulated skills, and experiences to create a life-enhancing, purposeful antidote to the hidden pitfalls of full-stop retirement.

Helen Harkness puts it this way:

“We can do this by concentrating on functional age – ignoring chronology and learning a new way to tell time, re-careering and rethinking retirement, moving from career crisis to career quest, creating and activating what I call a capstone career. By knowing what we want and doing what we love, we can continue life’s journey with creativity, wisdom, power, and purpose.”

Landing strip or launch pad?

Our culture says it’s time to land.

Our biology encourages a re-launch.

I’ll risk sounding like a broken record with the reminder that our biology offers us only two choices: growth or decay. Doesn’t 65 sound a bit like a decay-producing landing point or “use-by” stamp. It certainly has never carried the suggestion of a re-launch.

It’s interesting to note a 2018 report by the New England Journal of Medicine that found the most productive age in a human’s life is – drum roll, please – between the ages of 60 and 70.

It gets better. the second most productive age is between 70 and 80 and the third most productive decade is 50-60.

The “u-curve of happiness” study done by author Jonathan Rauch revealed that our happiness track hits bottom at around 47 and rises to its peak in the 70s and 80s.

Who knew?

I don’t need no stinkin’ job!

I get it – we can’t seem to rebrand “work” as anything other than a negative four-letter word. For the vast majority of us, work represents something that is a mismatch to our deepest skill set that we don’t truly enjoy and tolerate and endure for the money. We long to get away from it and do – what? Anything but work. Beyond that, the definition for most is fuzzy at best.

You aren’t going to be told by your financial planner or your government the truth that work is pivotal to achieving a longer, healthier life. We are encouraged to move to the wrong side of the biological ledger, become consumers rather than producers, and wind down at a time that the combination of our talent, wisdom, skills, and experiences may be at a peak. That puts us on the down-slope and accelerates the “live too short and die too long” model that characterizes the majority of our retired population.

A capstone Career is not a job. It’s a response to a “calling” or satisfaction of a “quest.” It doesn’t even need to be designed to make money although it can be. Above all it combines three simple principles:

  1. Doing what you really, really want to do.
  2. Doing what you are really, really good at.
  3. Providing something the world needs.

 

 

 

Making money at it may be necessary for some. But the heart of a Capstone Career is to retain or recover relevance, to avoid boredom, re-establish identity, and to place oneself on a track that avoids the deterioration of health that accompanies a purposeless retired life.

Stay tuned. More to come on this topic. Share your thoughts on this concept with a comment. We value your input.

A New Model for Aging: Subtract 20 Years From Your Chronological Age.

I pulled another book at random off my “A” shelf this week as I wait for Amazon to deliver my latest new book purchase. It turns out the book’s kind of an oldie, published in 1999. As I began my reread, I quickly realized why it was on the “A” shelf even with that publication date. It sat ignored since my first reading in 2013.

It’s worth a second read for me, chock full of timeless wisdom and still-current advice on making something of the second-half of life.

It’s entitled “Don’t Stop the Career Clock: Rejecting the Myths of Aging for a New Way to Work in the 21st Century” and the author is Helen Harkness, founder and CEO of an executive coaching company in Dallas called Career Design Associates.

harkness_allen_lib

I recall placing a call to Helen after reading her three books because I was so impressed with the process she had developed to help executives successfully find their “capstone career” in their second half.

I believe Helen was 81 or 82 when I spoke with her in 2013.

She’s still at it.

Do the math.

Shouldn’t she be doing something other than – gasp! – working?

Ms. Harkness, as you might expect, has some strong feelings about attitudes toward aging. In the late-1990’s, she was at the front of the parade calling for us to “break the mindset that chronological age, the age on your birth certificate, is your real age.”

Twenty-plus years ago, she took to task our bent toward using the calendar to determine our age, saying:

“In contemporary urban society, we have the notion that a precise chronological age marks the transition from one stage of life to another, which is highly questionable. Today, the chronological ages of twenty-one and sixty-five define the lower and the upper boundaries of participation in the adult world, as well as the cultural definition of full humanity. Unfortunately, as it is today, those over sixty-five have no defined active roles in our society. So what are we to do with our highly extended long life.”

“This is an outdated but strongly established system that maintains tight control over our destiny. Yet there is absolutely no expert on aging today who holds that chronological age is a preferred or valid way to determe our actual age.”

Ahead of her time, Harkness was suggesting then that, with our advances in nutrition, fitness, medical services, and scientific breakthroughs, we should expect mid-life to start at sixty, not forty.

We’re still stuck – –

-with a chronological mindset. We’re trending away from it but at a snail’s pace.

Because of our “- social and cultural expectations, we program ourselves to begin to fall apart at a certain designated age, and we oblige.”

We are still dogged by this irrational concept of full-stop retirement as something obligatory and entitled, refusing to acknowledge that the chronological component of age 65 spawned 85 years ago wasn’t relevant then and is totally irrelevant today. And, history is showing us that this outdated concept can put us at the top of a downward slope and accelerate the slide.

Yet, it persists.

Can we perhaps admit that with our average lifespan now beginning to recede and the average American living with over 10 years of multiple, debilitating chronic illnesses that it’s well past time to consider a new “aging model?”

What if – –

-you subtracted 20 years from your current chronological age? Knowing what you know about yourself and the world around you, what would you do? Harkness suggests that if you know what you would do, then go do it now, adding: “Move on with your life. Take action. Forget who or what you are supposed to be because you are a certain chronological age.”

I believe it was Satchel Paige, Major and Negro League Baseball pitcher, who asked: “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

Many of us remain frozen in our thinking about what we want this extended period of lifespan to look like without realizing that our chronological age is unconsciously and automatically blocking our thinking about our future.

Harkness goes further to say (bolding is mine):

“We grow old, not by living a certain number of chronological years, but by becoming idle in mind, body, and purpose. We decline and decay by abandoning our flexibility, our ideals, our talents, our life’s mission, and our involvement in our community. We grow old and retire by buying into society’s story that we can be surplussed, junked, and discarded. The most deadly assumptions related to aging are that retirement and old age are directly connected to the chronological age of sixty-five, that mental decline begins at age twenty-one, and that senility is inevitable if we live a long time.”

What do we have left if we abandon our chronological age?

Functional age, which Harkness describes as combining and integrating biological, social, and psychological measures into one active package and the answer to shaking ourselves loose from our fear of aging.

Next time someone asks you your age, ask them “Do you want my functional or chronological?”  I assure you, it gets some interesting responses.

The “live long, die fast” model for aging:

You may know by now that I’m an advocate for all of us  “dying young, as late as possible.” Harkness calls it “living long and dying fast” and she created her own aging model.

I’m adopting it.

Here it is:

  • Young adulthood: 20-40
  • First midlife: 40-60
  • Second midlife: 60-80
  • Young old: 80-90
  • Elderly: 90 and above
  • Old-old: 2-3 years to live

At 78, I like the sound and feel of still being in my second mid-life. It feels right since I’m finding a surprising reserve in the old gas tank.

I also like the brevity of the “old-old and 2-3 years to live”  except that I favor 2-3 minutes instead of years.

I still envision going face down in a trout stream having just fooled a 20″ rainbow. At somewhere around 110.

I may have to rent a walker one of these days and see how it would work in a river.

Does this aging model resonate? What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below or email me at www.makeagingwork.com.

Stay safe. We’re getting our vaccinations tonite at 7:30! Yay – maybe a taste of normalcy around the bend.

Escaping Your Cultural Captors – Your Portal May Be Pooping On Your Potential!

Have you ever thought of yourself as being in a “cultural fishbowl?”

News alert! You’re in one!

If you’re 16, you are in a cultural fishbowl with the world watching to see how well you manage your rebelliousness and bone-headedness.

If you are 60, your cultural fishbowl is being watched by a crowd with a bias that favors the young and cloaks you in all sorts of portal-based expectations.

You know the type of expectations I mean. They’ve been pounded into you by the powerful “P’s” in your life: parents, peers, professors, physicians, politicians, pundits.

Expectations like:

  • Act your age
  • Don’t go beyond the pale, stay in the pale
  • Getting old will be difficult
  • Your DNA is your destiny; you’re a slave of your genetics
  • Longevity is fixed, not learned
  • Expect decline
  • Wind down, not up
  • Take it easy, don’t push yourself
  • Don’t start a business
  • Senescence is automatic and guaranteed
  • Don’t over-exert yourself
  • Don’t fall in love again
  • Be silent, be hidden

Portal? What’s a portal?

I first wrote about cultural portals a couple of years ago (go here) referencing the work that neuropsychologist Dr. Mario Martinez has done on the power of cultural beliefs in his two excellent books “The Mindbody Self: How Longevity is Culturally Learned and the Causes of Health Are Inherited” and “The Mindbody Code: How to Change the Beliefs that Limit Your Health, Longevity, and Success.” (pd links).

According to Dr. Martinez, a cultural portal is a “– culturally defined segment of expected beliefs and conduct.” He offers up a list of cultural portal with the following categories: newborn, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, and old age. With the help of social scientists and clever, exploitation-minded marketers, we’ve moved to seven from the two (child-adult) we had 120 years ago.

Every portal has it’s own degree of acceptance and it’s own set of constraining rules. In the middle-age and old-age portal, the acceptance and the rules can take on a nefarious tone, especially when it comes to self-acceptance.

In Dr. Martinez’s words, the old age portal “— defines what you can longer do in the present and future that was allowed in the past portals. For example, strenuous physical activity, falling in love again, good health, physical strength, good memory, and expectations for a bright future are redefined based on the premise that aging is a process of diminishing returns.”

Dr. Martinez makes the point that we can step out of a portal but first have to recognize that there is life beyond the cultural fishbowl. He evens suggests that a touch of rebellion needs to be applied to overcome what we are expected to do.

Alas, in the sixth and seventh portals, we are not so much into being rebels, more into acceptance and have, perhaps, used up our ready reserve of rebellion.

And that’s where we may just poop on our potential.

We ain’t done yet!!

Here’s a 10-point plan for exiting your “old-age”  cultural fishbowl – and continuing to realize your potential.

With loads of help from Dr. Martinez  – – – – –

1. Be an outlier and defy cultural restraints and move on to self-discovery. Get serious about letting your true self out.

2. Be patient and don’t give in to the admonitions from family and friends that say “it’s for your own good” or “relax and enjoy your retirement” or “you’re not as young as you think.” Remember, they are co-authors of the cultural belief and are, Dr. Martinez reminds us, “responding from their own fishbowl and are unable to see beyond their culturally imposed limitations.”

3. Find co-authors and other rebels or outliers your age and watch how they thrive outside their fishbowl.

4. Refuse senior discounts and other entitlements for being “old.”

5. Bypass family illnesses and don’t let family talk you into believing they are inevitable. After age 65, genetics plays virtually no role in what may afflict us.

6. Move from entitlement consciousness to resource consciousness. Be a font of wisdom and share it with others.

7. Maintain a sense of humor. Don’t take yourself or life too seriously – you’re not getting out alive. Laugh along the way. Make what you have left a game.

8. Look surprisingly younger. It starts with attitude and how we carry ourselves and convey energy. And a consistent dose of aerobic and strength-training exercise coupled with current dress won’t hurt either.

9.Rethink your retirement. Entering the culturally defined retirement portal means embracing the limitations therein i.e. the retirement consciousness, the trap that says not to plan beyond the actuarial tables. We can turn this portal into a purpose-driven, meaningful time that leverages dreams, talents, skills, and experiences into something that impacts the world around us.

10. Explore going beyond the pale. We can seek paths that can lead to our individuation.

Dr. Martinez wisely reminds us:

“Since our biology is influenced by our cultural beliefs, our mindbody conforms to what we are expected to be in each portal”  and that “- we need to be mindful that cultural portals influence our identity and we unwittingly co-author the process.”

Our cultures mold helplessness or empowerment.

Which fishbowl do you want to be in?

Leave a comment below and tells us how you’ve avoided the cultural portal trap. Thanks for being part of the growing “tribe”. Tell your friends about these free weekly articles and refer them over to www.makeagingwork.com where they can receive a free 25-page ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full Life Potential”  for signing up.

 

 

Five Critical Steps to Thriving Within Your Longevity Bonus

You’ve heard it a thousand times.

We’re living longer. Yay!

We extended our average lifespan more in 110 years than we did in the previous 100,000 years. That’s quite a hockey-stick performance.

Makes you wonder why we waited so long. What was so magic about the 20th century? I guess you could say that a few folks woke up and started picking low-hanging fruit that was killing us early, and let it accelerate from there.

Like:

  • Washing hands before surgery. DUH!
  • Better sanitation.
  • Finding cures for most of the infectious diseases that dominated the early part of the century.
  • Improving education – availability, methods, and content.
  • Better food – quality and distribution.
  • Cleaner water.
  • Safer work environments and implements.

Medicine and technology teamed up and hockey-sticked it for us.

Then we hit a wall. It turns out that the progress stopped – and that longer doesn’t always mean better. The average lifespan in the U.S. has turned down each year since 2016.

It’s self-inflicted!

There’s only so much that medical science can do to maintain the acceleration. The fruit is now high in the tree and hard to get to.

We know that longer isn’t always better because Americans spend an average of ten years in ill-health, more than any other developed country. That’s a long time to feel bad – and it’s incredibly expensive.

It appears that it can only get worse as our population continues to shift to a higher concentration of over-65:

Source: AgeWave

As I wrote about last week, many of us get to the back-nine of life having double- or triple-bogeyed the front-nine with our marginal lifestyle habits and facing an accelerating downward slope that results in “living too short and dying too long.”

What’s the lifespan downturn telling us?

Could it be that we don’t give a darn about this gift of potential healthy longevity brought on by research, science, medicine?

Do we still buy the 20th-century myths, models, and messages about automatic senescence, fate versus choice, genetics versus habits?

Maybe. Probably.

But the scoreboard doesn’t lie. We still seem to choose not to flatten the back-nine slope and live longer in health and shorter in chronicity. Rather, we seem to be given to waiting and hoping for government, science, big pharma to find more miracle life-extenders when the best life-extenders have been around forever and are free.

But inconvenient. And sometimes uncomfortable.

Here are five things to consider while you wait for the next scientific/pharma miracle.

You’ll feel and look better while you wait. Oh, and BTW, you might save yourself and our society a lot of money.

  • Adopt WFPB instead of CRAP. Yes, my needle is stuck on the record – and you’re tired of hearing it. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is killing us slowly – and now, more and more of the world. It’s simple in concept, tough in practice. But we know moving to a Whole-Food-Plant-Based diet and away from Calorie-Rich-and-Processed will slow the slope.
  • Cancel Netflix. Or Hulu. Or Prime. Or whatever may have you, along with the average “down-sloper/retiree”, watching 49 hours of TV a week. Divert 15% of the 49 hours to getting your heart rate up and your muscles stronger. That’s only an hour a day of slope-flattening activity.

  • Get connected – and care. Don’t be a hermit.

Here’s an untold secret of longevity. Mary Zaraska spells it out in her powerful new book “Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100.” (paid link). It’s called having a strong network of family and friends as we age.

Zaraska states that what she learned through research and personal experience is:

” – building a strong support network of family and friends lowers mortality risk by about 45 percent. Exercise, on the other hand, can lower that risk by 23 to 33 percent. Eating six servings of fruit and veg per day can cut the danger of dying early by 26 percent while following the Mediterranean diet by 21 percent. For volunteering, it’s 22 to 44 percent.”

We already know that social isolation is a significant killer, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to AARP.

  • Renew your library card.

Did you know that 40% of college grads never open another book after graduation? It seems still too many of us have decided that those first 20 years of learning were enough, failing to acknowledge that our brains are like a muscle that we’ll lose if we don’t use.

Research is making a direct connection between continued learning and dementia. Curiosity is important for mental health. We’re fully capable of high levels of creativity during the “retirement” years. Never stop learning. Stretch your brain.

  • Unretire. It’s happening a lot. Many who bought the “full-stop retirement” Koolaid are experiencing the downsides and altering their retirement lives back to something more than relaxation and rest. Leisure-based, self-indulgent retirement has exposed itself as detrimental to long-term physical and mental health – a definite “slope accelerator.”

Simple, but not easy. The jury has returned with a verdict that our lifestyles are guilty for the deep slope and the big pile at the bottom of the hill. For us “back-niners” it’s a choice between a fence at the top of the slope or an ambulance at the bottom of the hill. We can wait for government, science, or big pharma to build a fence or we can be knowledgeable about our biology, team with our doc, and take charge.

And then that curve just might start turning back up.

Thanks for being a reader. Please scroll down and leave a comment below.

You’re Over 50 and On The Back-Nine. How Are You Going to Play It?

For the last few summers, I’ve been playing golf in a senior men’s league at a local muni. It’s a mid-week event, so this group is mostly retirees mixed with a few business owners who can step away from their businesses for a day.

This is truly a geriatric bunch – the average age is probably mid-70’s.

I help raise the average.

I truly believe, on any given Wednesday morning, it is the biggest concentration of 50″ waistlines and artificial knees and hips in the Denver metro area. Oh, and perhaps, the highest overall golf handicap average on any given golf course in the area at that time of the week.

A few of us walk the course.  Most of the fellas ride, turning a non-aerobic experience into a deep non-aerobic experience.

It definitely is a collection of guys well into the back-nine of life.

Since the groups change each week, there isn’t an opportunity to get to know individuals on a deep level. Plus, COVID prevents us from the 19th hole experience where a personal connection can develop. So, I’ve gotten only a few snippets of front-nine stories from weekly playing partners.

Can I please have my front-nine back?

This week I found myself thinking about life as two nines. I was helped along with the idea after a one-on-one Zoom conversation with exercise physiologist and author Dan Zeman and while reading his book “You Are Too Old to Die Young: A Wake-up Call for the Male Baby Boomer on How to Age with Dignity.” (paid link).

Dan was on the front edge of the exercise physiology profession, an early pioneer in the world of health, fitness, and sports medicine.  He has worked with notable athletes and sports organizations, including Tour de France winner Greg LeMond, the Minnesota Vikings and Timberwolves, and with professional athletes in the National Hockey League.

Dan aims his book at MBBs – male baby boomers. He’s on a life quest to raise the awareness amongst male boomers of the health and wellness impact of decisions made in the back-nine or second half of life, reminding us that we don’t get to play our front nine over.

His “front nine” reminder was poignant for me. I’ve shared in previous writings about my “wake up call” in 2015 at age 73 when I had my first-ever heart scan that revealed I was in the high-risk category for cardiovascular disease (CVD) despite having been a gym-rat and avid aerobic and strength-training exerciser for 3 1/2 decades.

I’m very lucky. Following normal nuclear- and echo-stress tests, we concluded that the calcium build-up in my arteries is spread around so I don’t have any significant blockage and can continue my aggressive exercise regimen.

That changed my back-nine choices.

My doc made it clear that the CVD was likely the result of front-nine choices. He didn’t use those terms but that was the message. My front-nine was pretty deplorable from a health and wellness perspective. As a child of the 40’s and 50’s, I grew up in a world void of health and wellness knowledge and interest.

Doctors, athletes, and celebrities advocated and advertised smoking. I started smoking seriously the minute high school sports were done (truth be known, I smoked the same day I competed in the half-mile run at the state championship track meet – I came in 16th out of 16). DUH!

Diet back then was pretty much what you killed and grew so it was meat and potato fare. Exercise stopped once high school was over.

My smoking habit continued for 18 years until age 37 and then gave way to the gym rat. But the diet didn’t evolve except to take full advantage of the more ubiquitous, tasty, junk-style C-R-A-P (calorie-rich-and-processed) food. The diet didn’t shift to plant-based until the heart scan wake-up call.

Call me “Dan’s Poster Child”!

I’m the poster child for Dan’s message.

The back-nine begins the down-slope as age accelerates its processes. The decisions during the front-nine highly impact the type and intensity of the decisions that need to be made during the back nine. We can’t stop the slope, but we can do a lot to slow it and reduce the severity.

Dan reminds us:

“It is never too late to change an unhealthy habit because the human body is capable of recovering from self-imposed trauma.”

My equivalent to “self-imposed trauma” showed up on that heart scan report.

My decisions to change to a more plant-based diet and to further intensify my exercise with increased emphasis on strength-training, along with continuing to stretch myself intellectually through my work, is my slope-flattening strategy.

Is it fun? Not so much. It’s about awareness of the importance of the upside of action and dread of the downsides of inaction.

Dan raises a global concern that we all should take seriously. Our devotion to seeking conveniences that make our lives easier and more comfortable and sedentary come with a price.  Have I mentioned Netflix, voice-activated remotes, and the fact that retirees now watch 49 hours of TV per week? Combine that sedentary, convenience-seeking lifestyle with poor diet, the #1 cause of early death, and we have a country headed for a financial calamity.

Over 60 million boomers are on the back nine, many carrying forward a really bad front-nine wellness score. Graphically, it looks like the “live short, die long” graphic I’ve included in articles before.

Suppose you are 45,50,60. An important question to ask yourself is: “How steep do I want that slope and how long do I want to stay at the bottom of the hill?” With chronic-illness treatment costs skyrocketing and assisted living/nursing home care already at $120,000 per year on average, it’s a question that merits early back-nine consideration.

Recent research by the AgeWave organization on post-retirement healthcare costs revealed this sobering news:

The evidence is already upon us. That same AgeWave research report revealed that the World Health Organization has flagged the U.S. with the longest average years in poor health of any developed country, despite spending more per capita than any other country.

That all validate’s Dan’s message and his encouragement to consider that our decisions at mid-life can flatten that slope and minimize – or eliminate – that time piled up at the bottom of the hill in the care of $13/hour orderlies.

Team this book with “Younger Next Year.”

As I’ve shared repeatedly, I have been heavily influenced by the book “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond” (paid link). I believe Dan’s book is a great extension and supplement to the YNY book. Dan provides a solid 12-step “dirty dozen” plan for avoiding an extended and expensive time at the bottom of the hill. It’s no-fluff, deeply-experience-based advice that every MBB should be taking seriously. Check it out at www.iamdanzeman.com.

Consider adding both books to your library. It could lead to this:

To my many female readers: thanks for listening and tolerating this male-oriented message. If you have one of those MBBs in your life, I sympathize with your having to deal with a fragile ego.

Buy him both books and be patient with his slow understanding of the consequences of his front-nine lifestyle decisions – and his unwillingness to admit to them. Please understand that it’s hard for us to admit that you get it and we don’t and that until we do, you will always live at least 5 years longer than we do.

We welcome your comments – leave us one below or drop us a note to gary@makeagingwork.com. Oh, BTW, you’ll see “paid link” with each book mentioned. I have an Amazon Affiliate account and earn a paltry sum if you buy the book – or anything – after clicking on that link. It doesn’t change the price to you, it just earns me about 5% of the cost of a cup of Starbuck’s awful coffee.

 

Work Yourself to Death? Not a Bad Idea!

I happened across an old article recently about “the oldest working CEO in the United States.” It was about Jack A. Weill, founder and CEO of Rockmount Ranchwear, a Denver-based manufacturer of western wear. Jack died in 2008 at 109. He was working as the CEO of Rockmount at 106, showing up daily for four hours and then retiring home to watch Andy Griffith reruns. He was admired and respected for his philanthropy and service to his community and became a Denver institution with a street named after him.

It reminded me that there may be something to this research telling us that work is a major factor in longevity – and that not all careers give in to a culturally-dictated endpoint.

I wrote about this idea almost three years ago when my subscriber list was mostly friends and family – with only 1/3 of them paying attention. I still think it’s a pretty good article so I’m reprinting it this week, with a few tweaks.

George Burns was guilty of some really fabulous quotes, most of them quite funny, some deadly serious. Many had to do with his advancing age (he died in 1996 at age 100).  Here are a few:

  • Retire? I’m going to stay in show business until I’m the only one left.
  • People are always asking me when I’m going to retire. Why should I?  I’ve got it two ways – I’m still making movies, and I’m a senior citizen, so I can see myself at half price.
  • How can I die? I’m booked.
  • As long as you’re working, you stay young.

Michelangelo died at 89 – at a time when the average lifespan was less than half that – still working as the architect for the replacement of a 4th-century Constantinian basilica that became St. Peter’s Basilica, called by some as the “greatest creation of the Renaissance.”  He also worked on a sculpture (the Rondani Peita) up until six days before his death.

Steve Jobs was widely reported to have worked up to the last day, yelling about something not being exactly perfectly correct.

 

Einstein never stopped.

 

Revisiting vocāre

Today we treat folks who choose to “work themselves until death” as some sort of wunderkinds or anomalies when a mere 150 years ago that was the norm.  That was before the Industrial Revolution changed the landscape of work and injected the concept of the artificial finish line called retirement.

In the process, it seems we’ve redefined, convoluted, and distorted an important word.

That word is “vocation.”

Vocation is rooted in the Latin vocāre, meaning to call, which suggests listening for something that calls out to you, a voice telling you what you are.

Today, we relate vocation to specialized training into a “career track” or a “job” via a vocational or trade school. Not likely the pursuit of a “higher calling” but more a decision based on need and what may be trending in the “job” market.

Grammarist.com defines a vocation as:

 “a calling, an occupation, or a large undertaking for which one is especially suited. It can be roughly synonymous with career or profession, though vocation connotes a seriousness or a commitment that these words don’t always bear.” 

Today, we tend to mix vocation in with two other words – career and job – when their distinctions are quite different.

Career

A quick look at the definition of “career” shows a big difference. Career has its origin in the Latin word “carrus” or “wheeled vehicle” denoting a “cart” and then later from the French word “carrier” denoting a road or racecourse. The dictionary defines career, as a verb, to mean “move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.”

Careers for many are just that – a mad rush for a long time that ends up going nowhere with that disappointment coming late in life. Or maybe it’s going somewhere in terms of provision and accumulation, but not in a way that fits the definition of a “calling”.

The checkered flag at the end of this racecourse is that coveted pot of gold called retirement, a finish line the desire for which may have impeded pursuit of a true calling.

Job

A job is the most immediate and relatable term as it’s what we do every day to produce income, the fuel that keeps us on the aforementioned racecourse. The dictionary defines job as “a lump, chore or duty.”  For some, that lump is a “lump of coal.” Consider that the average job is around 3.2 years and that during the average lifespan, most of us will have had a dozen or more “jobs.”

 

Does sound like a racetrack doesn’t it?  Perhaps that old word denoting a calling is what is missing.  As we zip past mid-life into our second half, it would be a good time to re-evaluate, resurrect, and reapply vocation in its true, traditional meaning.

 

But I’m passing 50 – isn’t it too late to find my “calling?”

It’s a pretty common question amongst mid-lifers. There’s that uneasy stirring going on deep in the gut. More days behind than ahead; lost enthusiasm for the chosen “racetrack”; a growing sense of aimlessness and emptiness; accumulation no longer important; the “who am I and why am I here”, “is it too late to make a difference?” questions that won’t go away.

It’s a critical fork-in-the-road time of life. One road gives in to the “social self” that has indoctrinated us into an artificial age-related culture and encourages us to remain a part of the crowd and stay-the-course to a landing called retirement.

The other road acknowledges a long-suppressed “essential self” that is insensitive to age and puts us on a trail that can enable a new takeoff rather than a landing.  Only this time the takeoff is launched through a re-discovery and resurrection of our deepest dreams and desires but applied using our deepest talents and acquired skills.

Warning!

The second fork may mean you could willingly work yourself to (until) death.

Second warning!

You may:

Evidence has been in for a long time. Work is necessary for longer, healthier living.

Polls of centenarians have revealed that an astonishingly high percentage of them continue to work and that they rank working alongside being able to walk as one of the keys to their longevity.

The universe doesn’t want your parts back yet

I’m a fan and follower of Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach,  considered to be the most successful entrepreneurial coach on the planet. In a  podcast from a series entitled “Exponential Wisdom” that he does with Peter Diamandis, Dan stated that he feels he has successfully “disenfranchised” most of the 18,000 entrepreneurs he has trained from the idea of retirement.

He and Diamandis have tagged retirement as the “ultimate casualty.”

Together, they emphatically emphasize that “stopping and retirement means you are ready to retire your bits back to the universe.”

Not sure about you. I’m in no hurry.

“R” Words Are Important – Here’s Five That We Need For Our “Second-half”

In June 2018, I posted a blog that became one of my more popular posts. It’s entitled “Your Second Half Should Be Filled With These Four-letter Words” – click on it and become enlightened (How’s that for a dose of arrogance?)

It even became one of the more popular blogs on Next Avenue for several weeks.

Ah, the power of words. Words have meaning. They count. We often treat them too lightly and fail to acknowledge the damage they can do if the wrong ones become a part of our continuous self-talk.

Lately, I’m conscious of a lot of “R” words in my world of reading, study, webinars, Zoom sessions, etc.

The most common, as you’d expect,  is RETIREMENT. One, because that’s a world I’ve immersed myself in – as in, don’t, or at least rethink or redefine it (see, there are those “R” words again). Second, because retirement remains one of the most prevalent words embedded in the middle brain of members of our western culture. As illogical and irrational as it is, it stays firmly entrenched in our psyche.

It occurred to this scattered brain that it might be helpful if we took a look at some of the “R” words I see a lot and position them relative to their merit or lack thereof.

So, here goes. One man’s opinion of five “R” words we should incorporate as we move through the second half of life.

Five “R” Words We Need In Our Life

Resilience – “the ability to recover quickly from setbacks”

  • A trait of healthy centenarians is their ability to not only overcome trauma and travails but actually thrive and find gratitude in the midst of adversity and expect a better future following it. In the words of neuropsychologist Dr. Mario Martinez who has done extensive global research on centenarians: “Despite the initial physical and emotional pain of trauma, they maintain a sense of humor and hope for recovery.  More important, their positive expectations enable them to learn from the negative experience.” I take from all this that being a “cultural outlier” with a “centenarian consciousness” can position us to compress our morbidity, delay our terminal frailty and thus live a longer, healthier and happier life while saving our society billions in late-life healthcare costs. The tough part is to shake off the cultural expectations and be an outlier.  It takes some thick skin and a strong self-image.

Reintegrate – “recombining parts that work together well”

  • I was tempted to suggest reinvent instead of reintegrate because reinvent is so omnipresent these days, especially in the self-help world and particularly when it comes to those of us in the second half of life. I’m rolling with reintegrate after considering the position taken on this by Marc Freedman, CEO and President of Encore.org and one of the nation’s leading experts on the longevity revolution. In a Harvard Business Review article “The Dangerous Myth of Reinvention”   Freedman makes the point that reinvention is too daunting and not practical because it infers discarding accumulated life experience and starting over from scratch. He writes:

“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.”

Routine – “something unvarying and repetitive”

  • Lots of research on this. Certain repetitive actions benefit our physical health (such as regular exercise, meditation, nightly flossing), but they can also improve our mental health by reducing our stress levels. In the work world, there was an element of routine ( get up, shower, dress, eat, commute, work, etc., etc.). One of the downsides of retirement is that structure and routine can be too flexible and mundane.

Relevance – ” having some sensible or logical connection with something else”

  • It’s my scary guess that a large number of us get up in the morning and go to bed at night without being necessary or relevant at all. If so, why live? One of my favorite wisdom sources on the aging process is Dr. Walter Bortz, retired Stanford geriatric physician who, in his book “Dare To Be 100” advises us to “be necessary.” He points out it doesn’t have to be an elite role. Being older and having the gifts of experience to offer makes it easier to be necessary or relevant to someone or something. His tough but sage advice is clear:

“When we stop mattering in this world, our continued consumption of resources becomes senseless.”

Renewal/Rejuvenation – “to restore something to make it more vigorous, dynamic, and effective”

  • Writer and coach Steve Chandler, in his book “17 Lies That Are Holding You Back & The Truth That Will Set You Free” offers this insight on renewal as we age:

“It’s not your age that determines what you can learn, it’s your energy. Your energy does not depend on your age, it depends on your sense of purpose. It comes from a self-generated sense of necessity. What needs to be done?”

It occurred to me that maybe we should consider some “R” words that we can do without. Here’s a list that immediately came to mind.

Retirement – as in the traditional, self-indulgent, leisure-based, beaches, bungalows, bridge, bingo, and bocce-ball type. It’s dying – none too soon.

Resistance  – to change. To not change is to die.

Regrets – letting our past remain bigger than our future.

Rigidity –“that’s the way it’s always been; it’s the way I’ve always done it.”

Remorse – continued growth has no room for self-condemnation.

Scroll down and leave a comment or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com. If you aren’t on our weekly email list, you can join at www.makeagingwork.com.  It’s free – we publish a new article every Monday.

Post COVID, Can We “Be Better Than Before?” Yes! Here’s How.

Last week was an interesting and somewhat grueling week for me, attending back-to-back, multi-day virtual conferences for two separate organizations I’m affiliated with. These were high-level conferences that one would normally fly to and pay dearly for hotel, meals, et. al.

Both were amazingly effective – the technology, with a few minor hiccups, worked amazingly well considering there were around 200 attending one and over 80 attending the other.

This is not news that a resort hotel wants to hear. Or the airlines. Or the liquor industry. Or the – well, you get the point.

Perhaps my biggest take away was that I experienced a better learning experience as a result of this being virtual than if it were across the country in a (typically) frigid hotel ballroom. The individual sessions were recorded and made available for further review. The participants provided .pdf’s of their presentations. In all, an opportunity to take the learning deeper than being live.

The obvious downside is the diminished ability to develop relationships with other attendees, although we did the best we could with “breakout rooms” the conferencing technologies provide.

The conference attendees were resume writers, LinkedIn strategists, coaches of all sorts, writers, wellness practitioners – a mix of folks dedicated to providing some level of service to others, all with the same thing on their minds:

Where is COVID taking us?

In the end, I believe everyone came away, at worst, neutral about what the COVID impact will be. Many, including myself, came away still enthused, encouraged, and unchanged in our commitment to get better at our craft, whatever that may be.

COVID doesn’t mean we can’t be “better than before.”

I want to share one little snippet of content from one of the conferences that I hope will be helpful and encouraging for you. It came from a young lady, half my age, who is a Master Certified Coach with a Master of Positive Psychology degree. She runs a very successful coaching business at The Flourishing Center.

Her name is Emiliya Zhivotovskaya, henceforth just Emiliya for obvious reasons.

Dealing with VUCA.

Trained in the powerful principles of Positive Psychology, Emiliya provided a “container” or a “framework” into which we can put what we are experiencing along with the suggestion that having this framework can help us move forward.

The container is V-U-C-A:

Volatility – Uncertainty – Complexity – Ambiguity

This is the first exposure I had to VUCA and it made a great deal of sense, not just for COVID, but for the changing world we are trying to negotiate.

The concept of VUCA goes back to 1987 with military origins as a strategy for operating in the cold war environment. It was later adopted by business and continues as a framework today.

Emiliya used VUCA to illustrate the need for resilience, for the ability to overcome the challenges we face as the pace of change accelerates and our world becomes increasingly unpredictable.

We weren’t born with it.

Resilience isn’t natural – it’s a mindset, a learned skill. Generally, most of us do pretty well with our resilience, but these are times calling for even more.

The field of Positive Psychology – and Emiliya – teaches that there are three internal skills that can help us get to resilience and beyond:

Purpose – Presence – Positivity

There is much talk these days about “finding your purpose.” What Emiliya revealed is that purpose without meaning is equivalent to “wheel spinning.”

The two are strongly correlated and important but very different.

In simple terms, meaning is the “why” of life. It is in her words:

“the subjective experience of feeling that life fits into a larger context and has significance; it connotes a sense of comprehension and that life, as a whole, makes sense. 

On the other hand, purpose is the “what’s next” of life:

“an overall sense of goals and direction in life and has to do with directionality.”

This may sound a little “woo-woo” and new age, but it isn’t – it’s backed by substantial research.

I don’t want to take this into the weeds, so let me summarize just as Emiliya did. I think there is substantial fodder for some serious deep thinking surrounding this for all of us as we continue to look VUCA in the eye.

  • Meaning is what makes us resilient.
  • Purpose, once we are at baseline (i.e. with meaning), is that thing that makes us grow and flourish.
  • Meaning is about comprehension e.g. “I can get my head around my life.”
  • Purpose is about action e.g. “I know what I am about and how I can make an impact in the world.”

Before we can get to purpose, we need to get to resilience through meaning, answering the questions “why is this happening?”; “where am I?”; “where do I want to be?” That’s the baseline – then we can move to purpose and set goals.

Learning presence.

With a sense of meaning and purpose, the next important skill is being present, being “in the moment.” We’ve all heard how important it is – and if we’ve tried it, we’ve discovered how it seems nearly impossible. Emiliya reminded us why.

We are equipped with a “meaning-making brain” which, left to its devices, will be ruminating about the past or the future. It goes into the past to comprehend the future. When COVID or other disruptions hit, that “meaning-making brain” goes into overdrive reaching forward and backward trying to figure it all out. Being in the present moment can be a very frustrating experiment.

Mindfulness, or surrendering to the present moment, however, is an important internal skill that VUCA forces us into. It’s a superpower that narrows the gap between stimulus and response.

It’s an important component worthy of attention – be it through meditation or prayer or whatever device works best for you to get there. Without some way to be in the present, we face struggles brought on by being caught up in future-thinking and past-thinking and will likely experience knee-jerk responses to things going on around us.

Adopt positivity

Emotions impact us differently but this much we know from positive psychology research:

  1. When we are in a positive emotional state, we tend to be more “broadened” in the way we think about things, how we come up with ideas, how we notice more good things around us. Positive emotions create upward spirals.
  2. When we are in a negative emotional space, we tend to be more narrowed and more focused. Fear and pain narrow and focus us. Negative emotions create downward spirals.

As we face COVID and future VUCA, we should strive to broaden and build and get into a more positive state where we can be more creative.

I was reminded this week in my reading that order exists in all chaos. Order will return. What it looks like is hard to say, but resilience is how we prepare.

 

Thanks to Emiliya for this awakening. Please take the time to check out her website at https://theflourishingcenter.com/. She has great resources. We’d love to hear your thoughts about this as well.  Leave us a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Not on our list? Go to www.makeagingwork.com and sign up for our weekly articles.