OK, you’re over 60 – what do you know now that you’d like to tell your 40-year-old self?

Recently, a questioner on Quora.com asked me to answer this question:

“For people 55 and older, what would you tell your 40-year-old self? What do you wish you knew then that you know now.”

I’m deep into the demographic so I took a shot at it. I found it hard to keep it short.

So, if you know a 40-year-old that is patient enough to listen to an insufferable septuagenarian, here’s what they would hear from me:

1. Get healthcare literate and take control of your health.

Since you are living in the U.S., there is a good chance that your lifestyle has already done some damage to your long-term health. That is unless you are one of the few outliers that have lived a disciplined life of good diet, exercise, low/no stress, and have chosen to understand how your biology works and how best to treat it.

I grew up in an era in the 50s and 60s where our health habits were marginal at best. We lacked the knowledge, awareness, and access to the healthy living information that we have today. I smoked for 18 years until age 37. In the 1950′s, smoking was considered healthy and promoted by doctors, dentists, and movie stars. Diet was built around meat and potatoes. We knew little and lived accordingly.

Although I’ve been a gym rat for 40+ years since then, I didn’t pay attention to my diet and continued on the S-A-D (Standard American Diet) until into my late 50s.

At age 73, a routine heart scan revealed I was in the high-risk category for cardiovascular disease with significant artery calcification. But, I’m lucky. Mine appears to be distributed because subsequent echo and nuclear stress tests showed normal blood flow (my left ventricular artery – the widow maker – is clear).

My six-day-a-week exercise program continues and I have radically reduced my intake of meat, dairy, and C-R-A-P (calorie-rich-and-processed), the major components of our S-A-D still today.

My point is that if you choose to live a normal American lifestyle, you likely:

  1. Are too sedentary.
  2. Are eating badly.
  3. Are stressed out.
  4. Have a 65% chance of being overweight, 25% of being obese.
  5. May be one of the 50% of our American population that is pre-diabetic and one of the 70% that don’t know it.

We know all we need to know to take full advantage of our birthright of good health. But, as a society, we choose to continue to remain naive about how our bodies and minds work and choose to abuse our immune system with poor health habits, failing to appreciate the slow, insidious damage that is being done until, often, it is too late to stop or reverse.

Consider a few important facts:

  1. We have a food industry that doesn’t give a rip about our health and a healthcare industry that doesn’t care what we eat.
  2. Our antiquated healthcare system does not spawn practitioners that know or care about nutrition. They are trained in “cure” (as in drug it or cut it out) and not “prevention.” That’s on us.
  3. It’s also important to understand that the bio-pharmaceutical world is not built with your good health in mind, although they would lead you to believe it. They come forward with few solutions or drugs for “preventative health.” The pharmaceutical industry would collapse if everybody took care of themselves. It’s built on the cure concept, in alignment with the similarly trained physician community.

Once I understood how my biology worked at the cellular level, I began to change up many things in my life: increased my exercise, changed my diet, and radically reduced stress in my life. I recommend you read the source that kickstarted my increased awareness and motivation:  the best-selling, transformational book “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond.”

The authors convinced me that I inherited a magnificent immune system of some 35 trillion cells that works 24×7 to keep me healthy. It doesn’t ask for much to do its job and will reward me if I follow the simple guidelines of what it needs i.e. good glucose, oxygen, fewer harmful stress hormones in my bloodstream, and rest.

Knowledge is power, especially in protecting your health. Take charge on your own, be distrustful of a profit-driven medical, pharmaceutical, and food industry to be doing what is right for your optimal health. Believe me, they are not.


2. Discover/rediscover your strengths and talents.

Most of us “olders” are a product of the 20th-century linear-life model that looks like this:

We were squeezed into a learn-earn-retire model built on conformity and heavy cultural expectations: getta degree; getta job; getta wife, house, kids, two cars and a golden retriever; getta title; getta 401K; getta gold watch.

Here’s where that has ended up happening for many of us from that era:

I’ll confess to having drunk this 20–40–20 Koolaid, spending 35 years operating outside my essence and my deepest talents and strengths in the corporate world building someone else’s dream and doing the “normal” accumulation and conformity thing. While I did OK, it took separation from that and a venture into my own business to slowly begin to reveal that I was wired for something different.

I ignored several personal/psychological assessments and personal experiences that were telling me that my core strengths were in learning, writing, teaching, speaking, coaching.

I’ve arrived where I need to be, but late in my life. So my suggestion to you at 40 is to start, or restart, thinking about what you are really, really good at, what you really, really enjoy doing, and what the world needs and ask yourself if that fits what you are doing now. If not, it’s a good time to start thinking of where you can best use your talents, skills, and experience and fill that hole that I’ll call “lack of purpose.”


3. Plan for a “third-age” with a sense of purpose.

The level of disengaged employees in the workplace is at an all-time high. I was there for years in the corporate world. Few people enter their careers with a solid grasp of what their deepest core talents, strengths, and desires are. Or if they had a sense of what those were, they entered the system that our culture expects of them where those innate inner drivers get shuttled to the background in favor of accumulation and conformity, meeting cultural expectations.

For many, these drivers never resurface. And they plod on through an unexciting, unmotivating career with the expectation of reaching that nirvana stage called “retirement” mostly unaware of the downsides of that decision.

This sense of “lack of purpose or meaning” tends to surface at mid-life, usually in the 40s and 50s when one faces the reality of more days behind than ahead and struggles with questions like “Why am I here?”; “What will be my legacy, what footprint will I leave?”

Here the one that really hit me hard: “Is it really true that the number of people that will attend my funeral will largely be determined by the weather?”

At 40, I suggest it’s a time for serious reflection on where you are, how that aligns with your deepest desires and talents and begin to think in terms of a “third age” and what you want it to look like. And 40 certainly isn’t too early to start. That “third age” is the period between end-of-career and/or end-of-parenting and true old age where we come full circle back to full dependency. You’re “third age” isn’t that far off.

That life-stage today is extending, for many, to as much as 30–40 years. That’s a long time to function without purpose which is where many in the self-indulgent retirement model find themselves discovering that 30 years bingo, bridge, and boche ball isn’t healthy or fulfilling.

Fortunately, we are seeing a rising tide of mid-lifers beginning to grasp the importance of a plan for the third-age that involves continued work, contribution, and sense of purpose as opposed to the traditional narcissistic, self-indulgent, consumer-only concept of retirement.


4. Get rid of the mental junk. Never stop learning.

By 40, you’ve been exposed to – perhaps succumbed to – many harmful, life-inhibiting myths and messages. Such as:

  1. I will automatically lose cognitive ability as I age.
  2. Or, my DNA is my destiny.
  3. Or traditional, leisure-based retirement is good for my health.
  4. Or work in older age is harmful.
  5. Or my creativity declines as I age.
  6. Or my physical decline is automatic and irreversible.

It’s a long list of disproved messages that we allow to entrench in our minds, much of it junk that holds us back. Ignore them – go the other direction.

We’re learning that our creative powers don’t diminish as we age unless we allow it. They may slow, but we can build brain power and create as well as when we were younger. So, don’t buy the line that says senescence is automatic. It isn’t.

We start dying slowly when we allow our dreams and desires to fade in the face of the myths about aging.

Henry Ford had it right:

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning today is young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. “


5. Get strong, stay strong.

Aerobic exercise should be keystone in your lifestyle. Optimally, from age 40 forward, your week should include six-days-a-week of aerobic exercise of 30 minutes or more with your heart rate in an aerobic zone of 220 minus your age x .65 and .85.

But it shouldn’t stop there. It’s vital to have a strength training component along with your aerobic exercise – at least two days a week.

Here’s why. Beginning in our mid-30s, our bodies begin to lose muscle mass at a gradually accelerating pace. The clinical name for the condition is sarcopenia and it really accelerates when we reach our 50s and ends up becoming one of the major causes of early frailty and premature death in our culture unless compensated for. The only antidote is strength-training – there are no drugs to effectively treat sarcopenia/loss of muscle mass.

Failure to compensate for loss of muscle mass is a major contributor to the “live short and die long” referenced above. Falls and broken hips, which are major contributors to early frailty and premature deaths, are a consequence of lost muscle mass.

Get a gym membership (if they are able to come back after COVID) or build an at-home gym (here’s a photo of my current in-home set up – treadmill, upright bike, Bowflex, weight-bench and assorted free-weights). Boring but effective.

Get with a trainer to get started properly and to avoid early injury that may discourage you from staying with the program. Put heavy emphasis on your core, quads, and ankles – keys to avoiding falls later on and for avoiding back problems as you age.


6. Rethink retirement.

You may have bought into the Euro-American concept of leisure-based retirement and perhaps are convinced that retirement is an entitlement and a nirvanic end-goal filled with exotic travel, golden sunsets, and total freedom. And it can be all that but at the risk of experiencing some of the subtle, hidden downsides of a self-indulgent, leisure-based retirement.

There is an encouraging, but slow, shift taking place in our awareness of the downsides of the traditional, off-the-cliff, labor-to-leisure retirement model that we have cherished for decades and is so effectively marketed by the financial services industry.

Part of it is because we know so much more about what comprises good health and the growing awareness that our biology offers us only two choices, regardless of age: growth or decay. There are many aspects of the traditional retirement model that violate this biological principle and can accelerate our physical and mental decline.

Historically, there has been a tendency for retirees to become more sedentary and move less. Satisfying the dream of spending less time in the kitchen promotes a lifestyle of eating out more where food content is less healthy – 30–40% higher calorie content and generally heavy in sugar, salt, fat.

Netflix, voice-activated remotes, and the Laz-y-boy become increasingly tempting.

Continued learning diminishes.

Social isolation is a major concern post-retirement and is said to be equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

The new trend for this “third age” is away from self-indulgent, leisure-based retirement and more toward continuing to stay engaged with work of some sort, be it volunteer, part-time, full-time, or by starting a new business. The largest number of new businesses over the last decade or so have been started by folks over 50.

In my coaching practice with folks over 50, I encourage them to consider their third age as a time to strive toward achieving a balanced lifestyle of labor, leisure, and learning.

I believe it is a healthier formula and can lead to “living longer and dying shorter” versus our current predominant “live short, die long” model.


7. Connect and commit.

A recent random survey by Cigna revealed that nearly half of those surveyed “sometimes or always feel alone” and that 40% “feel their relationships are not meaningful and that they feel isolated.”

These are alarming numbers because of the health and mental health risk associated with social isolation and loneliness. AARP recently revealed that the health risk of prolonged isolation is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

There is substantial evidence that social isolation and loneliness increases the risk of early death. Social isolation is a threat as many retirees exit from the work environment and lose the major part of their social life. They often find themselves without much of a social network outside of that environment.

We are wired to connect, to be in community.

Let me wrap by quoting Chris Crowley, co-author of the aforementioned book “Younger Next Year.” As a successful attorney, he offers up the following which I feel is golden advice for a 40-something that is considering “what’s next.”

“It was nuts to immerse myself so completely in my old professional life before retirement. In particular, it was foolish not to have other hobbies, communities and commitment – things I care about and people who care about me- when my work life ended. If you’re going to do well in this country, you have to make a massive commitment to your job. No question about it. But don’t make your job your only commitment, because it will go away. You need to get a life that will last a lifetime. It makes sense to start on that project as early as you can. Today would be good.”


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If you haven’t joined our growing list of readers, you can do so at www.makeagingwork.com.  Sign up for my weekly blog there and receive my free e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential:  Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

Change Your Four-letter-word Selection to Get Through This Mess

I’m watching more movies these days than ever. I suspect you are too.

We’ve never been movie-goers/watchers. Watching a half-dozen movies a year is a busy year for us.

I’ve watched more than that just this month. End-of-day, late-night surfing the wasteland of HBO/Showtime/Epix, etc. and settling on one from the endless selection of mind-numbers.

Occasionally Shawshank or an equivalent will be available and I’ll ride it to the end, for the umpteenth time.

More times than not, it’s falling asleep to today’s’ fare of incessant gunfire, explosions, and f-bombs.

F-bombs are no longer bombs – it’s now just regular dialog mixed into virtually every sentence. I hope I never get comfortable with it.


I’m also continuing to read a lot during this crazy time -keeping my daily commitment to read at least an hour each day.

I decided to save the expense of buying more books and have gone back to my bookshelf and re-reading – in some cases for the third or fourth time – books I consider to be five-star in terms of impact.

Thus it is that I’m into the third reading of another of Steve Chandler’s many books, this one entitled “Time Warrior: How To Defeat Procrastination, People-pleasing, Self-doubt, Over-commitment, Broken-promises and Chaos.”

Whew! Any of those energy-drainers resonate with you? They all do with me. So it’s back into the book looking for that life-changing magic pearl.

Chandler is a long-time favorite. He’s a renowned business and life coach, coacher-of-coaches, author of over 30 books, sought after speaker, and a recovering alcoholic now over 30 years sober.

Chapter 24 in Time Warror (his book chapters are rarely more than 2-3 pages) jumped out at me where Steve encourages “risking your identity” and “letting your cherished, built-up personality fade away“, suggesting that egos and personalities “are finished being made up for most people in junior high school. Therefore, they are just full of adolescent fear, worry, and anxious hope.”

See those two four-letter gems in that last sentence – fear, hope.

Is there more than a little of both of those around right now?

Well, yeah. Huge doses of the former, too much of the latter.

Too much hope? Really?

I side with Chandler on this. I put “hope” and “wish” in the category of useless, harmful four-letter words that are a wasted response to the most damaging four-letter word of all – fear.

Here’s why – and I’ll quote Steve again:

“Here’s the problem with hope. Hope is always producing a longing .. a longing for external circumstances to change while ignoring the beautiful internal resources already there.” He quotes another source, attorney and high-performance business coach, Fernando Flores, who once wrote: “Hope is the raw material of losers.”

Yikes – pretty strong, counter-culture, contrarian, anti-religious stuff.

But does that make it wrong?

Not when you think of where “hope” and “wish” take us. They take us to a place that doesn’t exist – the future. They take us to a place over which we have no control other than what we do today – the future.  They take us to a place where fear is the main resident – the future.


“Hope” and “wish” and “fear” are made-up words that keep us from the two four-letter words that will render all three of them invalid and useless.

Drum roll, please.

WORK & LOVE

If I’m hoping and wishing, I’m also fearing. And I’m stuck, frozen.

If I’m working, I’m moving. And I’m in the only place where fear can’t exist.

Drum roll, please.

THE PRESENT

We have hope and fear, fear and hope. Back and forth.

Interchangeable.

Unsustainable.

But when we take some form of decisive action, right here, right now, fear has no place to reside. That’s called living in the present moment.

The regrets of the past and fear of the future cannot exist in the present moment.

One of the other five-stars that came off the shelf this last month was Steven Pressfield’s quick-read classic: “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.” The book is about an unwelcome but always present companion we all have – the “Resistance”, that thing that freezes us, the author of procrastination, that small voice that questions us at every turn.

In his chapter entitled “The Ego and the Self”, Pressfield believes “angels make their home in the Self, while resistance has its seat in the Ego. The Self wishes to create, to evolve. The Ego likes things just the way they are.”

To Pressfield, the Ego believes:

  • “There is no God. No sphere exists except the physical and no rules apply except those of the material world.”

The Self believes:

  • “God is all there is. Everything that is, is God in one form or another. God, the divine ground, is that in which we live and move and have our being. Infinite planes of reality exist, all created by, sustained by and infused by the spirit of God.”

All the great religions of the world encourage us to bring ourselves to the present moment. Jesus reminded us that “today has enough problems of its own.”

These times will test the theory.

Will we freeze in hope or will we create in love? Will we wait and hope for the revealing of a “master plan” or will we create one of our own.


Making good use of hard times

That’s the title of Chapter 36 in Time Warrior. Chandler reminds us that “sometimes hard times and recessions can return us to the principles we always wanted to live by anyway. The principles that give us pride and satisfaction. Like this one: a penny saved is a penny earned. Or, self-reliance.”

It’s been quite a ride over the last 10 years, hasn’t it – riding these multiple rising tides?  And now comfort, complacency, convenience, conformity have been interrupted faster and deeper than ever in history.

What are we left with? Simple. The same things that got us here before: work, love, creativity, self-reliance, principles.

Donald, Nancy, and Mitch are not coming to save us – let’s stop waiting for them.

Let’s climb back into the present moment, create, work, and resurrect the uniqueness God gave each of us and shed the barnacles that accumulated on that uniqueness as we “enjoyed” the aforementioned four C’s.

And leave hoping and wishing with their sidekick, fear, in the devil’s toolbox.

 


Your comments are important. They help us stay on track.  Scroll down and let us know your thoughts about all this.

If you haven’t joined our growing list of readers, you can do so at www.makeagingwork.com.  Sign up for my weekly blog there and receive my free e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential:  Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

 

 

So, You’re Over 60 and COVID Sucker-punched. Now What?

We’re alike right now, I’m guessing.

Lots of time to think. Thinking like we’ve never had to think before. Maybe even thinking about our thinking.

What now? What if? What’s next?

Can things possibly ever be the same again? (Can we say a collective “no” on that?)

There are some who say that this is just accelerating things that were already in motion and inevitable. Like changes in how we do healthcare and education, the two industries where costs have zoomed up while the quality has gone down and the two most in need of disruption.

Because it’s where my heart is, I think a lot about what happens now for those of us who are at or past mid-life point and still healthy. What is this final stretch run going to look like? What are we going to (have to) do differently?

We had enough uncertainty dealing with a possible longevity bonus of 20-30 years before this hit. Just as we were beginning to develop some roadmaps for this “third age”, the territory gets changed.

Financially, we weren’t going into this “post-career” phase in great shape to start with. Nine months ago Yahoo Finance claimed “64% of Americans Aren’t Prepared For Retirement — and 48% Don’t Care”.  Forty-five percent had zero retirement savings.

But what about the more fortunate, the better planners?

Most have taken another nasty hit after a great run following the 2008 crash.

More folks are going to have to re-think retirement; many will be forced to make mid-life career pivots.

I dropped and shattered my crystal ball at birth, but this one isn’t too hard to predict.

Some jobs just aren’t going to come back. Some industries will be unalterably changed. Skillset requirements were already changing rapidly. This will accelerate that change and hasten the elimination of many that were just hanging on.

If you saw this coming and planned for it, go to the head of the line while the 99.999999% of us behind you sort this out and try to figure out “what’s next.”

How do you pivot at 60?

Maybe you are being forced into a pivot because your job isn’t coming back.

Or, maybe you see that you are unfortunately ensconced in an industry or business that won’t survive in the long term or will never have for you what it has had for you in the past.

Or maybe, this is a wakeup call that’s telling you it’s time to be “rethinking” your post-career plans and to plan on working longer.

Regardless of where you are, here’s a suggestion for three things to consider doing right now:

  1. Get in shape. Any kind of life-pivot at mid-life was tough enough before.  It’s gonna be tougher now. You’ll need stamina. You’ll want to have a physical presence that says energy, vitality, zip. Ageism isn’t going away with this crisis. It will only intensify. Looking like you take your body and your health seriously says loads about you and can give you an edge. Make a renewed commitment to being the CEO of your health, take control, and transform your health if you allowed it to slip.
  2. Get your “paperwork” updated. By paperwork, I mean your resume and your online presence. If your last resume is still on floppy disk, don’t even think about using it. Call me. I had decided to add executive resume writing to my service offering a few months before COVID hit. It’s now looking like a smart decision. I’ve been dealing with resumes for 18 years as an executive recruiter so I know a good one from a bad one. There are very few good ones. I can help you turn it into the type of marketing document you, as a mid-lifer, need.  Your online presence on LinkedIn needs to be A-grade as well. I do that also.
  3. Start networking your arse off. It’s important to know that less than 20% of jobs, at any age, are filled through job boards and applying to posted jobs online. Eighty percent are filled through referrals and networking. Chances are you are better networked than you realize but haven’t felt a need to massage that network.  Now’s the time to resurrect it and reconnect with people you know and respect. Not to be asking for a job, but to find out what is happening in their lives and how you might be able to help. Remember, chances are they are in the same physical and mental boat you are and will appreciate having a chance to reconnect and exchange thoughts and ideas. Use your network to identify trends and to stay ahead of developments in and out of your area of expertise. Crazy and exciting things can come out of being an ongoing, active networker.

Do these things even if you are gainfully, securely positioned. Protecting your health speaks for itself. But, don’t get caught having to do catch up with your resume and networking. I see it a lot, especially in the healthcare space where I spend much of my time. It’s smart to have your resume professionally done and done in a form that enables you to update it with each change.

Networking is a big differentiator. Folks who end up in protracted career pivots have typically failed to build a network or to keep their existing network alive.  Effective networkers make it a weekly objective to connect with people in their network or to connect and add someone new.


Meet Steven Pressfield

I just reread Steven Pressfield’s highly acclaimed book “The War of Art” for the third time. You might consider it if you are feeling overwhelmed with doubt and with worry taking the front seat. I needed his reminder that the “Resistance” we are feeling is powerless against our boundless imagination.  The last page says this:

“Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end, the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don’t do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

Creativity doesn’t die at midlife. I’m thinking COVID is going to help us prove that.


Let me know your thoughts with a comment below. Also, I am making my resume service available to subscribed readers at a huge discount ongoing. If you are interested, email me at gary@makeagingwork.com to set up a free 15-30 minute consultation.  Or call me directly at 720-344-7784

If you haven’t joined our growing list of readers, you can do so at www.makeagingwork.com.  Sign up for my weekly blog there and receive my free e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential:  Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

 

 

 

 

85/15, 8 of 10, and 114 Years

What’s in a number?

Meet Ron Benfield, Vancouver, WA.

Numbers are a big deal for Ron.

He has been swimming in them for over four decades as a finance executive with several prestigious hospitals and health systems.

I met Ron last fall on the phone while doing business development work with an executive healthcare outplacement and career transition firm, Wiederhold and Associates.

Ron is a previous client of W&A.  My call was a courtesy “catch up” call to nurture an important networking relationship.

In my pre-call prep, I sensed this might not be a typical call.  My first hint was the background picture on his LinkedIn profile (shown above). From database records, I knew Ron had just entered his seventh decade (he’s 61).  Reaching the top of Mount Rainier at, or close, to that age hinted that this could be an interesting conversation.

It turned out to go beyond interesting.

A “third-age” poster child.

Ron is now on my “Wall of Fame” for modeling a purposeful, productive, fulfilling post-career third age.

(Newsflash: There is still a lot of room on the wall for anyone interested).

Starting new at 59

Ron’s four-decade W-2 career is quite notable. He had earned a reputation as a stellar turn-around financial specialist while serving in various C-level (COO, CFO) roles. Pulling hospitals back from the brink of insolvency became his calling card.

Despite his mastery over numbers, there was one that was out of his control.  One that forced his most serious life-pivot.

In his last corporate C-level role, he “had begun to feel the presence of an unwillingness to value a 60-year-old who has seen more things over the fresh views of someone in their 40s.”

He harbored no enthusiasm for the uphill battle to get hired at his age.

Despite being financially set to age 114 (I’ll come back to that number), Ron drop-kicked the idea of retirement, booted his W-2 job (with an ageism-based boost from his last employer) and took his deep expertise and reputation forward into his own business at age 59.

Thus Millwood and Associates was born a year and a half ago, leveraging his team-building and financial turn-around skills to form a consulting firm with seven virtual specialists.  Each has unique skill-sets that enable Millwood to do essentially what he did as a W-2 employee – building and directing a team to find and fix the causes of the financial ailments that beset most hospitals and healthcare systems.

Immediate success? No, but close. It took four months to generate customer interest, a time in which Ron discovered what it was like to put on a selling hat.

Meeting expectations at this point? Ron is blown away with their results.  They have all they can handle and soon may have to turn away business.  And they haven’t reached outside of the state yet!

Ron’s goal with his business is straightforward: to provide his customers with solutions they can carry forward without Millwood being entrenched for the long term.  He wants to hand off the knowledge.  It’s a philosophy that has his existing customers returning for more help in other areas and the high-class problem of having his team and resources stretched.

His vision is to build a company that will sustain itself “post-Millwood and post-Ron” providing his clients with problem-solving skills to find and permanently plug the plethora of financial leaks that exist in the hospital environment.

I could stop here and have a pretty good article, don’t you think?

But that feel-good story isn’t what excited me most about my conversation with Ron.

It was the life perspectives that Ron brought to the story that I found most profound and helpful. I’ll share three.

Time: 85/15 versus 15/85

Long ago, Ron realized one of the trade-offs of working in the corporate world meant giving up control of a very large portion of your time – as much as 80-85% by his estimate.  Meetings, recurring monthly activities, lots of low impact stuff.   The 15-20% left over was where one tried to make a difference.

Enough was enough.  As he evaluated “what’s next” at 59, he knew he had to reverse that and that would only happen outside the W-2 world.

He has reversed that with his new business.  Every day is in his control and virtually every hour within it.

8 of 10 

Ron longed for a setting where he looked forward to going to work 8 out of 10 of his workdays, something that happened more rarely in the W-2 world. Starting this business has become a 10 of 10.  He can’t believe he gets to do what he does each day, get paid for it and move a needle that badly needs moving.

I suggested to him that it sounds like he has achieved the Japanese concept of “ikigai” which translates to “a reason to get up in the morning” or a “reason  for being.” Graphically, it looks like this.  He appears to be in that green-shaded sweet spot.

 

114 years

I was surprised when Ron told me he plans to live to 114, exceeding my goal of reaching 112 1/2.  Ron decided, at 57, that he wanted that to be his midpoint so he doubled it for his longevity goal.

He’s quite serious – and confident.  His confidence is buoyed by an Adventist upbringing and lifestyle.  Raised a Seventh-day Adventist, Ron continues to abide by tenants of the faith which includes a number of things that bode well for extended longevity.  For instance.

  1. He is mostly vegetarian.
  2. He’s a committed exerciser with mountain-climbing, hiking, and biking his favorite activities.
  3. He honors the Saturday sabbath which is devoted to restoration through family time, church, no work, no shopping, and a well-deserved nap or two.
  4. Socially connected – through his business, with his family, church, and within his community.

You may recall that Loma Linda, California – predominantly a Seventh-day Adventist community – was one of the five societies in the world with the highest concentration of centenarians featured in the best-selling book “The Blue Zones” by National Geographic explorer, Dan Buettner.

Ron is still part of a decades-long study of the Adventist lifestyle.

I like his chances of hitting that number.

But most of all I like the model that Ron is following: a balanced lifestyle of labor, leisure, and learning as he moves into his third age.

Ron checks the box for purposeful, fulfilling labor with Millwood.

The leisure box is temporarily not fully checked as business momentum builds, but he has an African trip on the books and several countries selected that he and his wife Joyce plan to visit.

The learning box was checked long ago.  Ron is an avid reader, stays on top of changes within healthcare and does sudoku daily.  He also is an accomplished cello player which he admits he needs to spend more time with because of the mental challenge it presents.

The last box that Ron checks is the “generativity” box.  He is devoted to helping others by sharing what he has learned, in business and in life, with those coming up behind him, whether it be his adult children, friends or aspiring healthcare professionals.  Ron is one of the most active and appreciated networkers in the Wiederhold and Associates executive network, never denying an opportunity to share his experience and knowledge with another W&A network member seeking career counsel.

I came away from my conversation with Ron with a greater appreciation for paying attention to the numbers in my life – especially those involving time.  Our casual treatment of time overlooks its irretrievable nature, a fact that really squeezes in as we pass the mid-point.  I don’t get the sense that Ron is feeling squeezed on that front.

I also have appreciated Ron’s humility.  As I do with anyone that I want to feature, I had him review a draft of this article. Although he agrees on the accuracy, he feels it’s a bit too flattering.  I don’t.  His story just has too much of the message I’m advocating for me not to share details, professional and personal. Sixty isn’t a time for a landing but is a great spot for another take off leveraging acquired professional and life skills and experiences to pay forward and leave something that lives on when the parts are sent back to the universe.

Underneath that humility, Ron is making that happen.

With a 17 year difference in our ages, my 112 1/2 won’t have me around to see if he makes the 114.  Would one or more of you out there make a mental note to check on Ron in 2073 to see if he makes it and send me a text?  Who knows – by then, we may have that capability.


Do you know anybody like Ron Benfeld (maybe it’s you)? Let me know by email to gary@makeagingwork.com.  I really want to feature more stories like Ron’s that draw attention to what we “modern elders” can bring to the table.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

Enough of this “Life Purpose” thing! Can’t We Get Over It?

Do me a favor. Google “life purpose.”

Go ahead – I’ll wait.

Did you come up with the same number I did: 5,680,000.

Is it really THAT important?

Some would say it’s in the “woo-woo”, “touchy-feely” category crafted to sell books, workshops, and coaching services.

Others would say it’s essential to a life well-lived.

I’ll go with the latter.

The former and latter are working well for Richard Leider, founder of Inventure – The Purpose Company. He’s written three books on the topic and is ranked by Forbes as one of the “Top 5” most respected executive coaches on the planet.

Influential Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan, maintains that people die early for three reasons:

    1. No money
    2. No friends
    3. No purpose

Having coached over 18,000 successful entrepreneurs to success over 40+ years, Dan has observed the power of purpose and knows of what he speaks.

There must be something to it.

What is it anyway?

The University of Minnesota website Taking Charge of Your Health and Wellbeing  describes it this way:

Purpose can guide life decisions, influence behavior, shape goals, offer a sense of direction, and create meaning. For some people, purpose is connected to vocation—meaningful, satisfying work. For others, their purpose lies in their responsibilities to their family or friends. Others seek meaning through spirituality or religious beliefs. Some people may find their purpose clearly expressed in all these aspects of life.

OK, if it’s that important, why do so few end up with one?

Approximately 45% of U.S. employees are not happy in their jobs, according to a 2019 survey by The Conference Board.  Maybe building somebody else’s dream isn’t the most fertile ground for finding a life purpose.

Some find it there – many don’t.

In this era of Bernie, Elizabeth, Peter, and AOC, we seem to be thinking there’s hope in having it found for us.   Just get in line – D.C has the solution to your angst.

Then again, maybe not.

This caption from P. 259 of the book “Younger Next Year” by co-author Dr. Henry Lodge unpacks some interesting insight into that solution (bolding is mine):

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, enormous numbers of Russian men lost the only structure they had known.  With nothing to replace it, many of them lost their sense of place, of belonging, of matter, of simply being needed or relevant to their families and to their society.  What happened? Within just a few years, life expectancy for Russian men plummeted from sixty-four years to fifty-seven years.  They died limbic deaths. Heart attack and cancer rates soared as did depression, alcoholism, suicide, accident and violent deaths – all cries of limbic agony.  In some ways, what happened in Russia is happening to many of us in retirement, and it’s scary as hell.”

Hmmm – a forced sense of purpose doesn’t seem to have legs.  And the loss, however shallow, is devastating.

We’re sandwiched in a no-sense-of-purpose system.

OK, I may be going off the rails here – please let me know if you think I am.

I’m thinking we lack a “front-end system” that comes anywhere close to broaching the topic of life purpose.

We’re plopped into a classroom with thirty others, told what to learn, how to learn within a system that hasn’t changed in a hundred years.  Conformity is paramount, originality is often unrecognized, stifled.

Harry Chapin – the greatest troubadour ever – picked up on this and put it together in one of his greatest songs: “Flowers Are Red” – enjoy and ponder it here. 

We carry the conformity forward into the 40-year phase of this 20th-century life-cycle model and getta job, getta wife, getta family, getta mortgage, fenced yard, 2 1/2 kids, two cars and a labrador retriever, getta title, getta 401K, and getta gold watch.

A sense of “life purpose” in there? Maybe – evidence says usually not.

Then we back-end it with a wrap-up system called retirement that’s fully encumbered with an 85-year-old process whose purpose is to move us out and into a purposeless life of leisure and self-indulgence.

And then we die young.

Lacking a beginning, middle, and end, life-purpose development doesn’t have much of a chance it seems.  So we “live too short and die too long” in our society.

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us:

“Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.”


It’s not too late!

I’m encouraged.  I believe we are beginning to see the emergence of a focus on “life purpose.”  From this seat, it seems to be coming from those at the mid-life point – that uneasy time of tough questions (Why am I here? Does anybody care?); of waning career interest or opportunity; of empty-nesting; of a deepening sense of life’s finite nature; of a sense of not wanting to waste the acquired wisdom, skills, talents, and experiences on a cruise ship,  beach, golf course or pickle-ball court.

Maybe even a sense of having better answers to the mess the country finds itself in.

We have the tools.

Permit me to link two phrases that we should be pondering in the face of the messiness around us:

“Life purpose” and “Active wisdom”

Unless terminally infected with the narcissism our current culture promotes, we are drawn to serve, to pass on what we know, to lighten a better path for those behind. It’s called “generativity.  It seems to surface the drive for a life purpose.

It provides the “why.”

“Active wisdom” is a term coined by anthropologist, activist, and writer Mary Catherine Bateson.  She calls it a “new stage” where “wisdom is reaped from years of experience and living.”  She calls it the “most acceptable and positive trait associated with longevity.”

“Active wisdom” brings the “what.”

Not as I did.

I’ll be your poster-child for the wrong path.  I drank the 20th-century Koolaid and barnacled-over my innate talents or any chance for life-purpose immersion for 6 1/2 decades.

But it came, gradually, grudgingly – slowly removing the last vestiges of conformity and the cultural expectations and beliefs that were in the way. It feels right to try to bring forward the mere modicum of my life’s accomplishments and acquired wisdom, season it with legions of mistakes, challenges, and trials and to share it as a light for somebody.

Is there certainty in it all? Not even.

But neither was there on the other path.

I’ll confirm that there’s lots of room on this “road less traveled”  – and that the need is great.

Hop on – you’re wired to make a difference.


Your thoughts, criticisms, compliments, complaints all mean a lot. Leave any or all below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

 

Beware the Accidental Leap into Your Third Age

“Restless, nearly retired, discarded, and bewildered.”

I found that phrase in Barbara Hagerty’s book, “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife.”  It describes many in the baby-boomer generation and the tone of numerous conversations I’ve had with prospective career or retirement coaching clients.

If you are at that mid-life point, you’ll be an outlier (or just plain liar) if you haven’t had some or all of these feelings.

 

Marc Freedman is CEO and founder of Encore.org, an organization that created the Encore movement linking middle-aged and older people with meaningful work that serves the social good.  He refers to it as “passion, purpose, and a paycheck.”  He has his arms around the challenges boomers face as they move into and through mid-life.

One of his core messages is “that we have not passed our expiration date.”

I became a Freedman fan  in 2014 after reading his book “The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife.”  He offers a lifeline to the many who find themselves in an “identity free fall” on a dispassionate career path full of uncertainty, wrestling with the question “what’s next.”

Ms. Hagerty quotes Freedman in her book, saying:

“A lot of people have identity very much tied up in their working lives beforehand and then they find themselves in an identity free fall. Society treats them as if they are a ‘step away from being the walking dead.'”

I relate to this life phase and the awareness that there are fewer days ahead than behind.  I hit that wall in my mid-fifties. It was the start of an agonizingly slow pivot to finding my life quest, resulting in three changes in career direction.

So far, that is.

I’m probably not done and may not be until it’s time to send my parts back to the universe.

I relate to Freedman when he says we reach “the realization that there’s probably enough time ahead to do something significant, and in many cases, it’s an imperative.”  We’re dealing with longevity bonuses of 20-30 years that previous generations didn’t have.  That’s almost two generations of time.  Think back to what you have seen develop, even in just one generation.

Two generations are a lifetime of potential growth, development, and contribution.

That is unless we buy the retirement schtick where we’re inclined to let decay take the front seat and put growth in the back.

But I’ll get off that soapbox early- I admit to being grindingly guilty of whipping that horse dead.

How to avoid becoming a bored (or trapped) Boomer

I decided against “remaking the wheel” this week and am providing links to a three-part series I posted in June 2018 entitled “How to Avoid Becoming a Bored Boomer.”

The series speaks to this topic and offers up nine suggestions for avoiding this bewildering phase.  It has been one of my most popular posts and was the top post on PBS’s Next Avenue popular blog site for several weeks running.

How to Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part One

How to Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part Two

How To Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part Three

I hope the series brings you value.  Let me know your thoughts by scrolling down and leaving a comment.

Thanks for your consistent support and for spreading the word.  If you haven’t joined, trip on over to www.makeagingwork.com, join the list and receive a copy of my free ebook “Achieving Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

Are You the Author of Your Life?  Probably not.

 

Author: The person who originated or gave existence to anything and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created. (Wikipedia)

Last week, I finished an excellent book by NPR journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife.” One page received my personal trifecta treatment for importance and follow up – totally highlighted, paper-clipped, and tabbed with a blue tab.

A comment by an Israeli psychiatrist, Carlo Strenger, earned the page that status:

“To become the author of our own lives, we need to accept that we have not chosen the base materials of who we are.  We can only choose to shape them with a clear view of our strengths and weaknesses.”

It was the “author of our own lives” and the “base materials” part of the sentence that snagged me.

It took me back two quarter-centuries. Egad! What does it say when you can begin to think of your life in quarter centuries?

That was my college graduation year -1969.

After nine years and runs at three different majors, I made it to the stage to receive the faux-leather-bound document that is now God-knows-where. Enough credit-hours for at least one Master-degree illogically spread across civil engineering (one year), journalism (1 ½ years) and, finally, a B.S. in Business Administration (3 years).

OK, I’m sure you did the math: 9 years minus 5 ½ years = 3 ½ years.  Yep – a full third of a decade between college stints spent in aimless wandering and squandering while I confirmed that the male brain doesn’t reach maturity until around age 24 which was when I returned to campus for the final run.

 

Base materials?

I may be a crowd of one, but I don’t recall a professor or advisor in my final months before graduation ever uttering anything resembling “author of your life”, “base materials” or “strengths and weaknesses.”

Conventional counsel at that point was to sign up for as many campus interviews as you can with the companies that offered the best combo of salary and location.

Look for a fit with my “base materials”?  Uh, say what? Who knew I had any, least of all me.

So, I ended up leaving Wyoming for Pennsylvania and a career-launch selling ceiling tile.

Try that one on for excitement!!

The 20-40-20 Plan

I, and every campus compatriot I hung with, jumped on the same wagon and life-cycle plan. The one that prevailed then and still does. The one we had been indoctrinated into by parents, professors, and peers: 20 years of learning, 40 years of earning, 20 years of retirement nirvana.

Aside from some basic and mandatory IQ and basic skills tests in junior high and high school (which, BTW, suggested I should remain on my uncle’s Farmall driving in circles), I don’t recall ever being challenged to determine what my “base materials” were back then.

So the author for the first 20 years (27 for me) was cultural expectations: getta degree; getta job.

For the next forty, it was the same author but with the expectations ratcheted up: getta wife; getta house; getta family;  getta mini-van;  getta Labrador retriever; getta title; getta 401K; getta retirement.

Base materials, strengths and weaknesses be damned! Onward we marched because, well, that’s what we were expected to do. If latent, closeted desires or dreams tried to surface along the way, we tamped them down in favor of the model.

That is until we could no longer.  For some, and increasingly common today, the model collapsed with a job loss.

For others, it was an existential thing such as an internal force that calls for something with more meaning or realizing that we were at a professional dead end.

Strenger brings an interesting perspective to this.  He says that “changing courses in midlife is not a luxury but an ‘existential necessity.’”

I’m a career coach working with professionals wrestling with a mid-life course correction – some by choice (internal), some not (external, as in blindside gut-punch).  I’ve never suggested to a professional that has been gut-punched that they are going through an “existential necessity.”

Nor have I suggested that it’s time that they become the author of their life.

Maybe I need to get some guts about suggesting both.  I think Strenger is onto something from his years of working with clients in transition.

He makes the point that if people are to thrive and not just survive in midlife, they must make the change.  To fail to do so will exact a price.

Strenger states: “If people don’t take a hard look at what kind of changes they want to make, in the end, those changes are going to be forced on them.  The basic idea is: Don’t wait until the changes are forced on you.  Be proactive.”

What is that price if we don’t?

If life authorship has been relinquished to cultural expectations, there is a risk, in Strenger’s words, “of resigning ourselves to our growing limitations and throwing in the towel at 65” and “trudging on to retirement, something that almost no one can afford to do.”

In other words, succumbing to retirement – that ultimate casualty – when it’s likely there are 20-30 years of productive life left buoyed by an accumulation of assets built over forty, fifty, sixty years.

At mid-life, we have enough biography to know ourselves, what we’re good at and where we stink, what empowers us and what doesn’t.

Our choices become (1) letting that biography author us into the next phase honoring our essence (Strenger calls it our “thus and no other”) or (2) remain authorless, captive of cultural expectations, and accepting that we haven’t chosen the “base materials” of who we are.

Slow starter

Strenger’s words were “déjà vu all over again” for me.  My “base materials” were closeted until I reached my 60s and, even then, slow to emerge.

Thirty-five years of meeting cultural expectations in the corporate world gave way at age sixty to an attempt at entrepreneurism by starting my own healthcare recruiting business.  Within that experience came a gradual evolution that surfaced my “base materials” and “strengths and weaknesses” and the authoring of the life that I’ll finish out with – writing, coaching, teaching, speaking on issues involving achievement of a meaningful, fulfilling post-career life.

I can relate to how difficult it is to accept your “base materials” when they don’t line up with cultural indoctrinations. Despite what a plethora of personality and strengths assessments that I took through my 40s and 50s told me about myself, I rejected their consistent message and remained outside of my “base materials”  for nearly four decades in favor of the cultural mold I stepped into in 1969.

Steering between Scylla and Charybdis 

Strenger invokes the idiom from Greek mythology of sailing the strait between Scylla (six headed rock monster) and Charybdis (dangerous whirlpool) to make the point that a mid-life effort to recapture authorship and resurrect “base materials” calls for some careful steering.

He refers to Scylla as the choice of “resigning ourselves to our growing limitations and throwing in the towel at 65” (retirement) and Charybdis as “the illusion that, in midlife, we can enjoy ‘boundless change’ which requires a ground-up radical transformation” (the lawyer who becomes a chef or the doctor who becomes an organic farmer), the latter being “more seductive and more likely to flame out.”

Successfully steering between the two can come from putting accumulated skills and experiences up against innate – and perhaps, closeted – talents and dreams to see“how these can be reconfigured in a way that would be more appropriate to your needs today, that will be more satisfactory to you”, as Strenger suggests.

This can be tough!

This last year, I’ve had the good fortune to engage several mid-life C-suite healthcare executives who are in transition, most from an unexpected gut-punch that is common in this eternally volatile industry. Being laid-off unexpectedly at 52 or 55 or 58 and facing an increasingly difficult and competitive C-suite job market brings considerable angst.  A lofty lifestyle combined with being sandwiched between kids in college and aging parents places “provision” ahead of “aspiration” for most.  It’s rare for a conversation to head toward a discussion of “base materials” and anything other than hanging in with more of the same until time to throw in the towel, at or around 65.

It reminds me again of how much of a thief the number “65” is.

 

 

Why Your Free Time In Retirement Doesn’t Feel Right.

 

What are the chances that the following statement would be found in any of a financial planner’s training manuals?

“Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.  Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”

This little slice of advice comes from Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (henceforth, for obvious reasons, referred to as Mr. C), considered one of the co-founders of positive psychology and originator of the psychological concept of “flow”, a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity.

When you’ve been hanging out in the self-development world for multiple decades and plowed through several hundred books in that genre as I have, you are bound to bump into Mr. C repeatedly and his concept of “flow”.

You may be more familiar with another common description of “flow”.  It’s often called “being in the zone”.  It’s Michael Jordan going off for the playoff record 63 points; it’s a pro-golfer shooting 59; it’s you when you become so immersed in something you love that time disappears and the work just simply flows without much effort.

In Mr. C’s words, flow is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it”

He went on to say: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

That’s the “flow” mental state.

When he published his book “Flow” in 1990, his findings pushed back against conventional wisdom.  That conventional wisdom, which still prevails today, is that relaxation will make us happy.  Less work and more leisure are what we want.

Mr. C’s research revealed that we have that wrong.  He found that people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected.  The more “flow” experiences a person has in a week or month the higher the person’s life satisfaction.

He takes this perspective further:

“Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.  Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”

Human beings, it appears, are at their best when engaged deeply in something challenging.

Boredom ahead

As I’ve engaged soon-to-be-retired executives with my retirement coach hat on, many express concern about becoming bored.  They know that going from 110 miles an hour to a near full stop isn’t going to work for them.  Several post-retirement execs have confirmed that it’s a legitimate concern.

Steve, a newly retired hospital CEO, found his new free time a nice change.  But after a year he began to miss some of the challenge, identity, and structure that came with his high-profile management role.

He had no shortage of volunteer activities come his way but found most of them “shallow” in nature, lacking the type of “deep work” he had been accustomed to and that occasionally took him to a flow state.

We talked about a “middle-ground”, finding a project that he valued enough that he could see himself experiencing a taste of the deep work he retired from and balancing it with taking advantage of the new free time.  He has a shortlist of projects under consideration.

It occurred to me as I revisited Mr. C’s flow state theory that this is a concept that is non-existent in retirement conversations.  Can you imagine a financial planner suggesting to a client that s/he should consider remaining in some level of a “deep work” state while retired?

But then, that’s easy to understand why they wouldn’t.  Financial planning was started by insurance salesmen and they are trained to sell products.  At the core, their goal is to help people move away from that nasty four-letter word called “work”. I suspect there isn’t much training in psychology, the metaphysical, mind/body, or the understanding of the importance of flow in life satisfaction.

My inference is simple: traditional, vocation-to-vacation retirement takes us away from a proven life-sustaining activity – structured, goals-based, flow-state deep work – and into a world that erroneously links relaxation and shallow work to happiness.

The act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile.  Flow generates happiness.

Can We Become Age-agnostic? Do Your Part – Be a “Perennial”.

Image by Mabel Amber from Pixabay

The deeper I get sucked into this vortex of dialog about aging – older vs elder, saging versus aging, retirement versus rewirement, etc., etc., ad nauseum – the more I sense that we are creeping to the edge of an age-agnostic era.

What does that mean?  It means that instead of our identity being tied to a number it will be tied to how we choose to pursue our life.

Show of hands:  how many of you mid-lifers and beyond would find that refreshing?

Hey, Martha – I just met the coolest guy who retired from managing large medical practices.  He’s now working with health clinics in our community to organize activities to get people walking on a regular basis to combat rampant obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

How old is he?  I don’t know, Martha – I didn’t think to ask.  I suppose he may be 65-ish or more, don’t you imagine?  After all, he did say he recently retired.  For all I know, he could be 80. I just know he was really charged up about this quest.  Why do you need to know his age, Martha?

I’ve talked previously about having the choice to be older for longer or younger for longer as we move into and through the “third age” of life.  Older for longer is the conventional perspective, but I believe it is beginning to reverse.

Chris Crowley and Dr. Henry Lodge got on that theme twelve years ago with their highly-transformational book “Younger Next Year” (What? You haven’t read it yet? Oh my!) blazing a trail saying that the lifestyle decisions you make can lift you out of a number-related category, away from the “live short, die long” group and into the “live long, die short” category.

The book’s message is timeless.

Be a Perennial

Gina Pell is an award-winning creative director and tech entrepreneur.  In 2016, she coined the term “Perennials” to  “define the idea that people may be in their prime much longer, in ways that defy traditional expectation about age.”

Ms. Pell, age 49 at this writing, describes Perennials as people who are:

“- ever-blooming, relevant people of all ages who know what’s happening in the world, stay current with technology and have friends of all ages.  We get involved, stay curious, mentor others, and are passionate, compassionate, creative, confident, collaborative, global-minded risk takers.”

That kinda has younger-next-year and younger longer woven through it, don’t ya think?

Here’s a short video of Gina describing Perennials and how she came to coin the term:

How many in your similarly-aged circle of friends and family can you tag as a “perennial”?

Does it fit you?

Do you look at life as a time-line?  Are you “so 20th-century” that you look at your birth year as relevant?

But,how could you not, with our cultural bent toward putting people in categories?

One-hundred years ago we had two categories: child-adult.  Then demographers, statisticians, sociologists, marketers teamed up and we now have seven age-related categories:  newborn, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, and old age.

But that wasn’t enough. We decided we better break down that last category even further.  So now we have four stages of old:

  1. 65–74 = young old
  2. 75–85 = middle old
  3. 85–95 = old old
  4. 95+ = frail old

Enough already!!!  It’s bad enough that I have bunches of other archaic, irrelevant cultural beliefs that I’m still trying to shed that now I need to be dragging around “middle old” at 77.

The Thief Called “65”

Look at that first category of “old” and where it starts.  Yep, that eight-decade old artificial finish line of 65 – the FDR-era irrelevant relic that we just can’t seem to shake.

Maybe we should listen up with Gina and forget the birth year.

Let’s ignore a youth-obsessed culture that says our societal irrelevancy begins in our mid-40’s.

Let’s stop getting wrapped around the axle and anxious about what others might think or say if we’re not retired at 65.

Let’s pay attention to models out there that get it. Like Fred Bartlit, 87-year old Colorado attorney I wrote about earlier who still maintains a robust legal practice, skis the back-bowls at Vail, is a gonzo-weight lifter, just wrote a book about how to avoid frailty, maintains a website providing resources that combat aging and refuses to acknowledge the number on his birth certificate.

Fred is one of many that we can emulate.

Let’s ignore the “OK, Boomer” fad and actively engage and listen to these youngsters with an open mind and an understanding that we need them as much as they need us.

 

Be the one that will set the example that your birth date is irrelevant.

Be that ever-blooming Perennial.

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Share your thoughts below with a comment – I appreciate your feedback.

Also, if you haven’t,  you can subscribe to this weekly article at www.makeagingwork.com.  I publish Monday of every week.  I’ll send over a free ebook with your subscription: “Achieve Your Full Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

 

 

On Becoming a “Sage” – A Podcast

I had the good fortune recently to be asked to do a guest interview with Jann Freed, PhD, on her “Becoming a Sage” podcast.  Jann is a well-known business consultant specializing in strategic planning, leadership development, and life planning.

You can learn about her and her services at www.leadingwithwisdom.net.

Jann liked my guest post on Next Avenue entitled “Your Second Half Should Be Filled With These Four-letter Words” and asked me if I would be interested in an interview for her monthly podcast.

It was an easy decision to make.

It was particularly flattering to be included amongst the collection of Jann’s podcasts that included such notable names in the field of successful aging and life planning as Marci Alboher, VP, Strategic Communications at Encore.org; Ashton Applewhite, author of the best-seller “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism“; Chip Conley, AirBnB executive and author of an exciting new book “Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder“; George Schofield, designated a Top 50 Influencer in Aging by Next Avenue and author of “How Do I Get There from Here?: Planning for Retirement When the Old Rules No Longer Apply“, and others.

Jann and I covered a lot of ground.  Click on the podcast title below, listen and let me know what you think.

 

Becoming a Sage: Gary Foster

 

Thanks for listening.