It’s Time to “Take Back and Own” Your Elderhood

How did you react when you received your AARP card just before your fiftieth birthday?

Were you:

  • Surprised and shocked.
  • Flattered
  • Excited
  • Ambivalent
  • Pissed

Surprised?  We probably don’t want to know how much they know about us.

Flattered?  Just a thought – you might want to raise the bar.

Excited?  You love those weekly Bed Bath and Beyond 20% discount coupons also, don’t you?

Ambivalent?  Good choice.

Pissed?  Good –I’m not alone.

In one trip to the mailbox, I was slammed, culturally and without my permission, into an insulting, miscast category entitled  “elderly”.

I refuse to contribute to this insurance-company-in-disguise.

Yes, it defies all logic that I would pass up a 12% discount on ParkRideFly USA airport parking. Or a 15% discount on Philip Lifeline medical alert service or save on an eye exam at Lenscrafters.

But, I’m sorry.  I just haven’t gotten over the insult that arrived twenty-eight years ago with that AARP letter.

I guess that kinda makes me seem like one of those grumpy, crass, hard-headed ol’ farts I swore I’d never become.

I’m working on fixing that.


So it was that when I got a mere one chapter into Chip Conley’s new book “Wisdom at Work” (reference my 10/21/19 article) that I got affirmation that my resistance to that premature elderly tag will have served me well.

If you’ve been hanging around my weekly diatribes for a while, you’ve no doubt detected that I seem to have a new hero every week or so.  Well, this week – and I think for a good while longer – it’s Chip Conley.

I wrote two weeks ago about his Modern Elder Academy, a “boutique resort for midlife learning and reflection” and his coining of a new cultural portal he labeled “middlescence”.

My intrigue with his inventiveness motivated me to Amazon Prime his book and dig in.

So glad I did.

I didn’t need to go past Chapter 1 to know that Conley’s is a voice and message that needs to be heard – across generations.  He is saying so much more eloquently and authoritatively what I’ve been waltzing and bumbling around with for most of my two years with this blog.

At the heart is the message that it’s time to:

“liberate the ‘elder’ from the word ‘elderly’.  ‘Elderly’ refers solely to years lived on the planet.  ‘Elder’ refers to what one has done with those years.  Many people age without synthesizing wisdom from their experience.  But elders reflect on what they’ve learned and incorporate it into the legacy they offer younger generations.  The elderly are older and often dependent upon society and, yet, separated from the young.”

Conley reminds us that the average age of someone moving into a nursing home is eighty-one vs sixty-five in the 1950s and that this leaves a lot of people not yet elderly but as elders.

He encourages us to “take back the term elder” and own it as a modern definition of someone with great wisdom especially at a time we need it.

I loved this choice of words:

“Let’s make it a ‘hood’ that’s not scary.  Just as a child stares into adulthood with intrigue, wouldn’t it be miraculous if an adult peered into elderhood with excitement?”

Count for me how many, amongst your family, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, that you think will “peer into elderhood with excitement”.  I’m guessing you didn’t need the fingers on both hands.

While you are at it, count up the number of millennials and GenX’ers you know (if you know any at all) that are excited about the same thing i.e. about us being anything more than irrelevant “elderlies.”  Even fewer fingers, right?

Conley brings a different but refreshing, evidence-based perspective on how and why this all can change; on how generativity can close the gap; on how we need those digi-head millenials as much as they need us wisdom keepers.

It’s time for you and me to become more intentional about our “wisdom worker status” and to redefine our third-age as one of “mature idealism.”

Consider Conley’s perspective on this:

“For many of us, the baseball game of our career will likely go into extra innings.  So maybe it’s time to get excited about the fact that most sporting matches get more interesting in the last half or quarter.  By the same token, theatergoers sit on the edge of their seat during the last act of a play when everything finally starts to makes sense. And marathon runners get an endorphin high as they reach the final miles of their event.  Could it be that life gets more interesting, not less, closer to the end?”

I’ll wrap with these two powerful quotes from the first chapter of Conley’s book.

“If you can cause maturity to become aspirational again, you’ve changed the world”.  Ken Dychtwald, Age Wave

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”  Edith Wharton

Anybody up for joining this “elder revolution” and become Modern Elders?  There’s a lot of room.

Be Part of the “Modern Elder” Movement

Photo by Esther Ann on Unsplash

A couple of years ago, while one with my now-deceased iPod Classic during a workout,  I listened to a very stimulating podcast interview with Chip Conley, who, at the time, was a few years into an executive management position with Airbnb.

His is a very intriguing story of how he came into Airbnb, at age 52, as “an award-winning hospitality veteran with a disruptive entrepreneurial streak” and ended up as “an intern surrounded by smart, passionate employees half his age, with twice the digital smarts.”

He was both humbled and inspired by the experience.

From it, he coined two new terms for himself at Airbnb:  “modern elder” and “mentern” (part mentor, part intern).

The Airbnb experience appears to have inspired Chip in yet another interesting direction, further igniting his entrepreneurial fires, but this time applying them in more of a not-for-profit, social activist vein.

Conley was recently selected as one of the top 12 “2019 Influencers In Aging” by NextAvenue.org, a subsidiary of the Public Broadcasting System.  He is amongst an elite group of “advocates, researchers, thought leaders, innovators, writers, and experts that continue to push beyond traditional boundaries and change our understanding of what it means to grow older.”

Mr. Conley popped up on my radar screen again this week via another interview, this time published in Forbes and conducted by Next Avenue Managing Editor Richard Eisenberg (who I had the good fortune to meet and spend some time with last month at a Retirement Coaches conference in Detroit.)

I encourage you to link to the interview here.

Middlescence – a new cultural portal

In just the last year, Conley has released a new book “Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder”  and founded a “boutique resort for midlife leaning and reflection” in Mexico called the Modern Elder Academy.

Tagged as the “ first midlife wisdom school”, it has already been attended by 500 students from 17 countries.

Conley’s efforts are inspiring to me, on several levels.

From it, a new and better “cultural portal” classification has emerged – middlescence.

On 7/2/18, I published an article Time For a New Cultural Portal  that spoke to how we have, with the help of creative social scientists and enterprising capitalists, expanded from two cultural portals 150 years ago (childhood – adulthood) to seven today (newborn, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, and old age).

Now, with Conley’s help, we have a better term for that clumsy portal called middle-age and its offspring, the “mid-life crisis” with its sexist, trophy-wife, bling, sports car symptoms.

I think – I hope – Conley and The Modern Elder Academy and the response to it is a sign that we are starting to acknowledge that this phase of life – i.e. elderhood – is beginning a comeback where ageism diminishes and elders are once again held in respect and their wisdom leveraged back into our culture.

Middlescence makes sense in its more definitive description of this (now) extended period of our lives – what I have been calling and will continue to call, the third age.

As the article points out, it generally happens in the fifties and is a time we move from:

  • Accumulating to editing
  • Less ego, more soul
  • Less interesting, more interested
  • Less achieving and attaining, more creating a legacy and attuning.

Chip Conley is singing my tune.

I hope he is singing yours.  I wish I had thought all this up.  But I’m OK just being a courier.

I’m a late-stage septuagenarian with a middlescence mindset.  Without it, I haven’t got a prayer of getting to my target of living to 112 ½.

My wife of 49 years is, and always has been, a trophy in so many ways; I look terrible with bling and an open shirt collar;  a convertible in Colorado just makes an ego trip way too obvious.

“Middlescence” is just what the doctor ordered for my quest.

Are you a “comeback elder”?

How are you preparing for elderhood?

How will you stay relevant?

How will you survive your new longevity?  Drifting? Or with purpose?

Important questions for us all as we break through as “modern elders”.

 

Extend Your Healthy Longevity – Twelve Things That May Be Accelerating Your Aging – Part Two of a Three-part Series.

Thanks for your feedback on the first article in this three-part series.  A special thanks to loyal reader, Roger Knisely, for suggesting that I “flip the script”.  So I’ve changed the headline and will try to put a more positive spin on the next eight items over the next two weeks.

Here are four more age accelerators for your consideration:

  1. Sticking to the S.A.D – Standard American Diet. I’m a bit of a snit when it comes to how bad our nutrition awareness is in our culture.  I fear that our abundance is killing us, especially in the food area.  I believe we can argue that we are, literally, eating ourselves to early deaths.

Let me have better authorities than me do the talking about this since you may be tired of my tirades.

Food journalist and author, Bee Wilson, published this article in The Guardian that says it better than I can. It’s a long article so just in case it’s more than you want to read, here are a few extracts that get to the core message (bolding is mine).

“For most people across the world, life is getting better but diets are getting worse. This is the bittersweet dilemma of eating in our times. Unhealthy food, eaten in a hurry, seems to be the price we pay for living in liberated modern societies. It makes no sense to presume that there has been a sudden collapse in willpower across all ages and ethnic groups since the 1960s.”

“What has changed most since the 60s is not our collective willpower but the marketing and availability of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. Some of these changes are happening so rapidly it’s almost impossible to keep track. Sales of fast food grew by 30% worldwide from 2011 to 2016 and sales of packaged food grew by 25%. Somewhere in the world, a new branch of Domino’s Pizza opened every seven hours in 2016.  You can measure this life improvement in many ways, whether by the growth of literacy and smartphone ownership, or the rising number of countries where gay couples have the right to marry. Yet our free and comfortable lifestyles are undermined by the fact that our food is killing us, not through lack of it but through its abundance – a hollow kind of abundance”

One of the most vocal critics of our food system is physician Dr. Michael Greger of Nutritionfacts.org.  In an article just this week he wrote the following:

“Most deaths in the United States are preventable and related to nutrition.  According to the most rigorous analysis of risk factors ever published, the Global Burden of Disease study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, our diet is both the number-one cause of death and the number-one cause of disability in the United States, having bumped smoking tobacco down to number two. Smoking now kills about a half-million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills thousands more.”

As in so many health-inducing solutions, the resolution is simple, but not easy. Renowned food author Michael Pollan’s now-famous seven words illuminate the path:  “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”  You’ll find those pithy words, along with 80+ other life-saving nutrition-focused suggestions in his wonderfully simple and readable book “Food Rules”.

Our taste buds have been taken and held captive for decades by carefully engineered and designed combinations of sugar, salt and fat, designed by our global food industry to promote cravings rather than satiation.  Our bodies are called on every day to fight a battle against this invasion.  Maintaining the Standard American Diet is to lose this battle insidiously before our time should be up.

A largely plant-based diet can be the age decelerator.

2. Limited or no aerobic exercise and no strength training.   “Aerobic exercise will give us life; strength training will make it worth living.”  So says the late Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the life-altering best-seller “Younger Next Year”.

Last week, I suggested that we become better at understanding our biology.  Fundamental in that understanding is that our cells need and crave oxygen. The only way to increase the amount they get naturally is by getting our heart rate up.

Voila!! Exercise.

Dr. Lodge does a masterful job of bringing that complex process down to an understandable level.  It was his explanation that motivated me to move a modest, sporadic exercise schedule to a six-day-a-week aerobic exercise routine of 45 minutes per day. If I miss it, I envision my cells shaking their fists.  That motivates me to get on a boring upright bike or treadmill.  Thank goodness for my Kindle!

Most people north of fifty shun resistance training/weight lifting.  That’s for the younger set, they say – the tattoo and tanktop and lululemon hard-body crowd at 24-Hour Fitness.  Dr. Lodge takes the opposite position.  Strength training in your 30s or 40s is optional.  At 50 and beyond it is imperative.

Why! There’s this condition that we all begin to contract in our late thirties called loss of muscle mass (commonly referred to as sarcopenia) that really accelerates when we reach fifty.  There is no drug to treat it – you can only counter it by doing resistance training.

I hope you’ll take this seriously. None of us want to end up that stooped, shuffling old person.  I get it – exercise, especially strength training, is inconvenient, usually painful starting out and you won’t feel like the in-crowd at the local fitness shop or rec center.  But without the strength-training component, we face extended morbidity and early frailty.

Be sure to consult with your physician before starting and I suggest starting with a professional trainer who has worked extensively with mid-life and older clientele.

3.  Being a hermit. A recent article in Medium.com contained an attention-getting sub-title:  “Lonely people are 50% more likely to die prematurely than those with healthy social connections.”

In 2016, the AARP Foundation announced that the health risks of prolonged isolation are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Our wi-fi connections are getting better but our personal connections are going south, especially when we enter into the post-career phase of our lives.  The promotion of full-time, leisure-based retirement steers starry-eyed retirees into “golden years” that often evolve into “lonely years.”  We retire, we move away from our roots, friends move away, we become generally less-socially active. The expectation that our “work playmates” will “stay in touch” doesn’t happen. Health issues may cause us to restrict our ability to travel to maintain our social engagement.

The AARP study revealed:

    • 17 percent of American adults 65 and older are isolated
    • Research shows a 26 percent increased risk of death due to a subjective feeling of loneliness
    • 6 million adults 65 and older have a disability that prevents them from leaving their homes without help
    • 51 percent of people 75 and older live alone

Building and maintaining an active, positive, sustaining, and available network of people requires a pro-active approach.  Here’s a link to a brochure that has a self-assessment checklist to gauge your risk of isolation and its effects.

4.  Be done with learning.  Some time ago, I did some research for a Toastmaster speech on the “state of reading” and was surprised by what I found.

    • Approximately 39% of high school never read another book after graduation.
    • Approximately 42% of college graduates never read another book after graduation.
    • 95% of books read in the U.S. are read by 5% of the population.

I have a college-degreed, septuagenarian friend who proudly boasts of having never read a book since graduating from college.  For him, and the many like him, I offer up this wisdom for consideration:

“In a world that is constantly changing, there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve you for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn” John Naisbitt

“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. ” Henry Ford

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner of 40 years, says there’s one quality of Buffett’s that he holds in especially high esteem: his ability to be a lifelong “learning machine”.  At 89, Buffett still spends 5 hours a day reading – often up to 500 pages a day.

Today, we are the benefactors of new knowledge about your brains.  Dr. Roger Landrey, preventive medicine physician, former Airforce flight surgeon and author of  “Live Long, Die Short: A Guide to Authentic Health and Successful Aging points out that

” Atrophy of the brain used to be viewed as a side effect of aging. Now, we know this may simply be a lack of use.”   

If we don’t use it, we lose it.

Dr. Landry goes on to say:

” When we use the skills and knowledge we have, the many connections in the brain remain in the best shape they can be. Don’t use them, and they become more difficult to use through a process known as synaptic pruning, in which the brain atrophies in areas where these functions are rarely used.  Neuroplasticity and effective neurogenesis can only occur when the brain is stimulated by environment or behavior.”

It’s encouraging to see the trend line in adult learning turning up.  Boomers are awakening to the benefit of continued learning.  The evidence of this is showing in the increased enrollments in adult learning classes at universities and community colleges and the many online learning communities such as Senior Planet, Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI), Coursera, Udemy, and others.

The choice to stop learning is a choice that says “I’m done.”  As Strategic Coach founder Dan Sullivan says: “It’s a signal to the universe that you are preparing to send your parts back.”

Four more aging accelerators to come next week.  Thanks for your feedback.  Please let me know your thoughts on these four – or on the series so far – by scrolling down and leaving a comment.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our 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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Extend Your Healthy Longevity – Twelve Things That May Be Accelerating Your Aging – A Three-part Series.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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

This is a quote from Dr. Walter Bortz, one of my favorite authorities on maintaining good health in our third age.  Dr. Bortz is an 89-year old former Stanford University geriatric physician and author of seven books, my favorites being “Dare to Be 100” and “The Roadmap to 100”.

While his quote has a bit of a fatalistic tone, his written and spoken advice takes a much more optimistic tone about delaying the “fatal disease” part of life.

Dr. Bortz convinced me, when I read “Dare to Be 100” the first of three times in 2013, that I needed to ratchet up my own longevity expectations.  Prior to reading his reasoned and experienced position on successful aging, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought and was pretty fatalistic in my longevity expectations.

Kind of the “what will be, will be” – with a sprinkling of naivete about the non-role of genetics in my longevity.

So with a fresh understanding from Dr. Bortz that there is no biological reason that the human body shouldn’t last well past 100 years, I began confessing to the goal of living to 100.  I’ve since revised that to 112 ½ years because, at 75, I decided I need another third of my life to catch up for what didn’t get done in the first two-thirds.

Yes, my friends and family still think I’m nuts but no longer roll their eyes – probably out of boredom, deference, and pity.  Candidly, I am probably nuts to think it will happen.   With mild hypertension, hypothyroidism, atrial flutter, and statin-controlled cholesterol, I’m probably not the best horse to bet on in this race.

But one thing is certain.  Like anything else,  if I don’t set the goal, I for sure won’t get there.  So what if I miss it by 5 or 10 years?  It beats buying into only living to the average U.S.male lifespan of 78.69 years.   Especially when you are 77.5, which I am.

No, I’m not going to be a part of the statistic.  Too much to do in my quest to instill sageism and fight ageism.

Yeah, we aren’t going to get out of this thing alive.  But we don’t need to hasten the demise. Culturally, we’re really good at building age accelerators into our lifestyles, often innocently and due to lack of knowledge, more often just out of laziness, lack of discipline, capitulation to convenience and a refusal to acknowledge the insidious nature of habits.

How might you be accelerating your aging?  Here are the first four of a dozen accelerators I’ll toss out over the next three weeks for you to consider and check yourself against :

  1. Attitude with no gratitude or altitude. Bortz turns the word DARE into an acronym for longer living: Diet – Attitude – Renewal – Exercise.  Of the four, he considers attitude the most important, by far.  He reminds us that “attitude facilitates the biological steps, the planning, the decision making that take us to true old age.  It’s possible to get there by chance, but not likely.” The research studies of centenarians have revealed that they think health and don’t dwell on sickness and death.  They expect to foil the doc and live.

William James wrote: “Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help make it so.”  Tony Robbins reminds us that it’s impossible to be grateful and depressed at the same time. Think lofty thoughts and be grateful for each day.

  1. A past bigger than your future. I learned the other day that the highest increase in suicide in the U.S. is in males 50+ and that suicide rates for males are highest among those aged 75+.  Certainly, illness is a big factor in this.  But also contributing can be a lost sense of purpose, a loss of personal identity brought on by retirement, or a living in the past without a vision for what could be a bigger future in the third age.

Culturally, we’ve been taught to wind down as we age, to come in for a landing after several decades of flying high.  A mindset that suggests another take-off and moving into a future that could be bigger than a high-achieving past is foreign to us when, in fact, we are in an ideal position to make our future bigger.  Maybe not in title; maybe not in money; maybe not in culturally-perceived prestige.  But we can bring and pay forward our talents and acquired skills and experiences to serve others in transformational ways that exceeded what we did in our past.

  1. Seeking comfort and security. Nothing significant develops in a comfort zone.  When we seek comfort, we unconsciously seek complacency. Any progress made in our first half or two-thirds only happened when we stepped out of the comfort zone that was holding us back. Yet we strive for comfort within the illusion that there is a thing called security. The pursuit of comfort and security is not how we grow and is not the real world we live in. We’ve bought some bad intellectual goods.

Brianna West, author and blogger at Thought Catalog offers up some insight in both areas:

 “There’s no such thing as real comfort, there’s only the idea of what’s safe. This one is a big one to swallow, but there’s really no such thing as “comfort,” which is why comfortable things don’t last, and why the best-adjusted people are most “comfortable” in “discomfort.” Comfortable is just an idea. You choose what you want to base yours on.”

“There’s no such thing as true security. We seek comfort believing that it makes us safe, but we live in a world in which there is no such thing as true security. Our bodies were made to evolve, our physical items are temporary and can be lost and broken, etc. To combat this, we seek comfort, rather than accepting the transitory nature of life.”

  1. Ignoring our biology. I certainly was naïve about my biology in my first half: smoking for 18 years, extended periods of limited physical exertion, poor nutrition – just a few of a plethora of bad habits.  Had I been more informed of how my body is designed to function, perhaps I would have overcome the peer pressure and cultural influences that put me in those habit patterns. Will I pay a longevity price for that?  Most likely. But I grew up and matured in an era when we knew relatively little about our biology.  For instance, in my teen years, doctors, dentists, and actors encouraged smoking!  Our knowledge today of how the body parts all work together and what it takes to keep them healthy is unparalleled.  We know all we need to know to virtually eliminate the five major killers in our culture (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and dementia).  Yet none of the five is receding!

Lori Bitter of The Business of Aging.com  and author of “The Grandparent Economy” found, in extensive research she recently conducted, that “baby boomers know what they should be doing – they just don’t do it.  It generally takes a crisis to provide the stimulus to make the changes they know they should be making.”  We choose to ignore what we know that can slow age acceleration.

Let’s keep it simple.  We are 35 trillion cells, give or take a few trillion.  Give those cells the oxygen they crave (exercise), the right type of glucose (nutrition) and less cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine (stress reduction), and they’ll do their job to slow the age acceleration.

 

In addition to either of the two books by Dr. Bortz mentioned at the top, I suggest a trip through a great transformational book on this topic entitled “Younger Next Year”, a must-read for anyone wanting to push that endpoint further out.

These four age accelerators get us started.  Eight more to follow over the next two articles.  Tune in next week.  Please leave your comments below about this quartet of accelerators.

Have You Put An Expiration Date on Learning?

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem.  That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily, and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.”

So says Thomas Szasz, Hungarian-American academic, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst.

Mr. Szasz’s statement sort of pissed me off.  Cannot learn at all?   C’mon, I’m learning something new every day at 77.

I’ll bet (I hope) you are too.

I’ll confess, it’s a tad harder.  Well, maybe more than a tad. My brain’s CPU seems to be stuck at Windows XP and the hard disk could use a partial download to the cloud to free up some space.

But not at all, Mr.Szasz?

My nine-year-old granddaughter and her six-year-old brother this week seemed to fuel Szasz’s argument.

They just finished a full-week of drama camp and both had significant roles in the play that wrapped up the week.

My wife and I weren’t able to attend the play.  During their visit this week, my wife asked them to do their parts for us.

Our culture hasn’t gotten to them with the “self-importance” thing yet.  With these two, you always get a bit more than you bargained for – in energy, enthusiasm, craziness.  With this request, they didn’t disappoint.

They did THE WHOLE PLAY for us!!

That’s right – their parts and everybody else’s part.  Dances included.  And with some of their own improvisation sprinkled in.  A full week after the performance.

 

That same day, I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember a quote I had read earlier that I wanted to capture.  Nor could I even remember the book I read it in (I have four books going right now).

So maybe Thomas has a point. But I’m not willing to concede on the “at all” part.  I’ll concede on the speed thing, both in learning and retrieving, but not on my ability to continue to learn, and learn deeply.

In fact, since I’ve lost my sense of self-importance (please, don’t cross-check that with my wife), I’m learning at a faster clip and in more volume than I was 20 years ago when I was in the middle of building self-importance in the corporate world.

With titles, position and the opinion of others now in the back seat, I’m highly motivated to continue to learn what I want to learn.

My reading is more focused on my life quest and has shifted to more non-comfort-zone reading.  Best selling author, Stephen J. Dubner , author of “Freakonomics” and “Superfreakonomics”, was right when he said: “most ‘important’ books aren’t much fun to read.  Most fun books aren’t very important.”

I’ve read several un-fun books this past year and have been stretched in the process.

I’m also trying to write something daily that pushes me outside my comfort zone – like this article.

My Toastmaster Club gives me an opportunity weekly to stretch, test, and refine my speaking skills, both prepared and impromptu.

I wish all this was coming up roses.  I will admit to continued frustration with the failure to retain the information I read and with the fits and starts of my progress in both writing and speaking.

After reading over 500 books over the last decade, I confess that I have retained very little of what each book said. I can look at the cover of a book on my “favorites” shelf and honestly not be able to tell you much of what I learned from it that was significant.

When a good friend recommended a book called “Peak. Secrets From the New Science of Expertise” by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, I did my usual thing – I bought the cheapest used paperback copy on Amazon.

As is often the case, it was a timely injection into my reading stream.  I read it in five days of early morning reading time.  It is replete with highlights, margin notes, paper-clipped pages and colored tabs protruding from the side that mark the mega-important pages.

It’s the quirky way that I attack books.  It’s also why I NEVER lend them out or why I can’t recycle them to a used-book grave because they are such a marked-up mess.

But I’ve been doing that with books forever, and I still can’t remember much of their content.

Ericsson’s book may be the catalyst that will change all of that for me – and perhaps for you if you are experiencing similar frustration with retaining and applying what you’ve learned.  Ericsson’s research appears to have the key to unsticking me from a handful of stuck areas in my life – reading retention, writing and speaking with impact, frozen golf handicap, plateaued guitar playing – to name a few in my life.

Ericsson’s extensive research and human experiments on memory retention reinforce the point that, like a computer, our brains have short-term memory (RAM) and long-term memory (hard drive).   We’ve known for decades that there is a limit to what our short-term memory will retain.  It’s designed to hold small amounts of information for a short time.

That’s why you forget the new neighbor’s name fifteen minutes after you met them unless you do something to move it out of short-term to long-term memory – such as repeating the names over and over again until the transfer takes place.

Our brains have a strict limit on what they can hold in short-term memory.  The average limit is seven items, which explains why we have to write ten-digit phone numbers down rather than expect to remember them  (it doesn’t get easier as we get older, have you noticed?)

Ericsson’s experiments and research confirmed that, unlike short-term memory, long-term memory doesn’t have an upper limit, but takes much longer to deploy.

He provides examples throughout the book of truly amazing feats of memory to illustrate this quality of our brain.  His cornerstone experiment involved working with a bright, young Carnegie Mellon grad student testing his ability to present digits that were read to him at the rate of one per second – too fast to transfer them to his long-term memory.  Repeating them back to Ericsson, the student continually hit the wall at number sequences eight or nine digits long.

But, over two years and two hundred training sessions, the student successfully remembered eighty-two digits read to him one per second.

Eighty two!!

He did it by refining a mental process for moving the digits to his long term memory.

Using other examples of exceptional performance throughout the book – blindfolded chess players, record-holding cyclists, typist exceeding 200 words per minute, basketball free-throw shooters – Ericsson concludes that “no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.”

It’s not about genetics or innate talent.

Wanna be a “grandmaster?”  I know, few of us do because we don’t think we have the “innate talent.”  But if we did want grandmaster status, we would have to accept that high achievement is not rooted in intelligence or inborn talent.

It’s rooted in practice, deep deliberate practice.

In Ericsson’s words: “The answer is that the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step by step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible” and that “- all truly effective practice techniques work in essentially the same way.”

I had read other similarly-themed books about deliberate practice, the secondary role of talent versus effort, the significance of 10,000 hours to master something (Geoff Colvin’s “Talent Is Overrated”; Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”, Daniel Coyle’s “The Talent Code”) and have had the “head knowledge” of what separates the great from the good from the mediocre.

Ericsson’s book caps that little library and is providing a eureka moment that, as I write this, is inspiring me to move what I’ve learned from my head into practical application, starting with forgiving myself for the years of wasted surface-level practice along my vocational path.

My braggadocious posture about reading 75 books a year is now not only embarrassing but also reveals my naivete about meaningful learning.  It represented “notches on the gun”.  It was get-that-one-on-the-shelf-and-get-on-to-the-next-one, searching for that magic quote, sentence or paragraph that will turn my success ship.

Previously, I would finish every book, even if it wasn’t reaching me.  I’m over that.  I’ve learned that many books are fluff and a waste – and that not every book has its time and space in my world.  If it isn’t reaching me but there is a hint of something valuable, I will now shelve it and maybe come back to it and see if its time has come.

Before, if I finished a book that really reached me, I’d finish and shelve it on my “A” shelf, only occasionally coming back months or years later to reread it.  No more of that either.  I now stay with the book and try to move as much of the really important content to my long-term memory by rereading the highlights/paper-clipped/colored-tab pages and then (I know this seems nutty!) writing the really, really good stuff on 3x 5 cards to keep in the book.

Those are my cliff notes for further review down the road.

Four levels of practice.

Reflecting on “Peak”, it is clear that we can choose the level of expertise or mastery that we want, independent of innate talent.  Colvin, Gladwell, and Coyle also said that in their books.

And we can do it at any age, even as a third-ager.

We have four practice choices as we move forward in life:

  • No practice
  • Practice
  • Purposeful practice
  • Deliberate practice

No practice

This is the default and where many of us end up.  Accepting our fate; maintaining the comfort of the status-quo; conceding to our inherent laziness; not understanding how our brain/body works at its best; being goalless, drifting and led, not leading.  Then we hit the death bed and express regrets for never having taken any risks – or worked hard at getting good at something worthwhile.

Practice

This is “naïve practice” which is essentially just doing something repeatedly and “expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance”, according to Ericsson.  It’s practice without clear goals, no feedback mechanism, no stretch. This too is comfort-zone territory.

This is me for the last twenty years on the driving range with  $7 buckets of balls hitting them with no sense of what needs to be fixed, no one to give me feedback on why most are mishits, deepening the defects in my swing and making it harder for a coach to coach them out of me.

It’s “doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results” defined by Einstein as “insanity”.  That shows up often in my guitar playing where I sit and entertain myself by playing stuff I already know well and not pushing myself to add a new tune, technique, new rift, or extending my hand stretch.

It’s doing a sales call using the same script/pitch over and over and wondering why prospects aren’t converting and thinking that “they” will eventually get smart and change if you just stick with it long enough.

My instincts and the immutable Pareto Principle of life tell me that 80% of us fit in these two categories.

 

 

Purposeful practice

In contrast, purposeful practice is more purposeful and focused.   According to Ericsson and Poole, purposeful practice has the following characteristics:

  1. Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Without this, there is no way to judge whether the practice session has been a success.  Permit me to give you an example from my own life.

I love golf.  My 22 handicap has not moved in ten years.  The last few years, I’ve been tracking several components of my game: fairways hit, greens-in-regulation, chips/pitches, putts.   The glaring deficiency in my game is greens-in-regulation – my ball is invariably on the green one or more shots more than it should be to make par.  I average a paltry two G-I-R’s per eighteen-hole round.  No magic here.  My approach shots stink, meaning that’s where my problem lies.

I’m setting the goal for this season of an average of six G-I-Rs and a handicap of 18.  I’ve already taken lessons from a pro and know what to do – learn to make a freaking approach shot!

  1. Purposeful practice is focused. I know I have virtually no chance to change my handicap or G-I-R unless I focus my attention and effort on that missing component of poor approach shots. So my practice is focused on improving that shot selection.
  2. Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know what you are doing wrong.  That’s where the golf pro comes in.  He can watch a few swings and know what needs to change and instruct me accordingly.  I have also enlisted the help of my weekly playing partner on what to watch for in my swing and to let me know when I’m doing it wrong.
  3. Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This may be the most important part of purposeful practice, according to Ericsson.  It’s a fundamental truth about any kind of practice: if you don’t push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.  “Try harder” should give way to “try different.”

Deliberate practice

Most of us would do well to get from “naïve” practice to purposeful practice.  That move alone can produce amazing results.

But there is yet another level of practice, according to Ericsson, that is the “Gold Standard”.  It’s called deliberate practice – it’s purposeful practice on steroids.

Here are a couple of examples:

  1. It’s Tiger Woods dropping 20 golf balls into a sand trap and stepping on each one before he hits it out.
  2. It’s the planet’s best acoustic guitar player, Tommy Emmanuel, committed to “being better tomorrow than I am today” and learning a new tune or rift every day, or working with another artist in a different music genre as often as he can. In his sixties, he performs 300 days a year around the world.
  3. It’s my first jazz guitar teacher in the mid-sixties who looked at my self-taught technique and said “we’re starting over.” He stuck me into a violin book for weeks to teach me the fretboard and to correct a dismal right-hand technique before we even started a dialog about playing jazz guitar.   It was miserable, boring practice that had the most profound impact on my playing for the next five decades.

Here’s what I learned from “Peak” about “deliberate practice” and how I will be applying it:

  1. Develop clear mental representations (visualization) of what I want to accomplish.
  2. Narrow, refine and make my five-year goals more specific
  3. Develop baby-steps toward each five-year goal
  4. Get more focused, eliminate the distractions that rob from full attention (can you spell “smartphone” and “Facebook”?)
  5. Expand my sources of feedback – find out from others if I’m doing things right. (Many thanks to those of you who have been sending me comments on my blog – I take them seriously)
  6. Get out of my comfort zone. “Trying harder” will now become “try different”.
  7. Involve coaches – both live and virtual
  8. Be consistent – write daily, publish weekly
  9. Be kind to me and patient with the speed of development

It’s revelatory to track the path followed by some of the world’s greatest achievers and learn that “prodigy”, “innate talent”, “genius” rarely applies.  Time and practice mark the path of high achievers.

And that they don’t stop learning as they age.

So Mr.Szasz, with all due respect, I’ll keep learning – because I can.  And I must.  My string, and that of my compatriots in this “older person” category hasn’t run out.  If we’ve stopped learning, we’ve made one of the most unfortunate mistakes we can make if we wish to live a longer, healthier life.

Your thoughts are welcome – please scroll down and leave a comment.

August Is An Important Month On Your Life Calendar

August in Colorado.  Hot, dry, rather boring except for Palisade peaches and Olathe sweet corn.  Asking ourselves: “How did another summer slip through our fingers?” Browning lawns, back to the dreaded school zone speed limits and regretting the time wasted watching pre-season NFL games.

I  signed up to speak at my Toastmaster club last week.   The theme for the meeting was “August”, so I pulled together this eleven-minute presentation.  It was good enough to win the best speech for the evening, a nod that my sympathetic Toastmaster friends have given me several dozen times over the past six years of membership.

As I scrambled to prepare (I never start soon enough) it came to me that just like our 12-month Gregorian calendar has a beginning in January and an ending in December, so do our lives have a January and a December.

And we all have had, or will have, an August.

All of us started on January 1 of the calendar of life and each of us is at a particular month based on how long we’ve been on this planet relative to how long we will live.

It becomes a bit subjective when we do that because (1) people’s life spans can vary a lot and (2) we have no idea how long each of us may live.

We can look at a thirty-something millennial and say perhaps that she is in April on her life span calendar.

We could take someone mid-forties and say he is somewhere around June or July.

Or we could look at me at seventy-seven.  Based on today’s average life span of seventy-eight for men – egad, I’m at New Year’s Eve!

And the ball should be about to drop, statistically!

Don’t fret – I intend to stick around for at least another 100 articles. (BTW, this is #97)

August is the two-third point of the annual calendar.  In terms of age against our average life span in this country, that would be equivalent to 51 years for men 55 for women.

In my career and retirement coaching business, I’m dealing mostly with folks who are in the August/September period of their lives based on the current average life span.  My focus is helping people at that point make a career transition or move into the post-career phase of their lives – the final three to four months of their life calendar.

I refer to it as the third age – that period between the end of parenting or end of career and true old age.

I use my personal journey in my coaching. I’m admittedly a bit strange in how I view my life calendar.  Some time ago, in my 50s, I began to feel the calendar squeezing in – that realization that there may be more days behind than ahead.  I was feeling like I was in August, maybe even September.

I didn’t like that feeling.  I had too much that I hadn’t done.  The thought of being in August/September compelled me to think differently.  Hey, there’s only one-third left – and I’m not happy with what I have to show for it.

So my choice was to really kick it up and start doing more of what I wanted to do for this final stage of my life calendar – or find a way to extend my calendar.

I decided to try to do both.

Doing more – that I have control over.

Extend my calendar – not as much control.

But I decided I have nothing to lose by at least resetting my calendar because if I didn’t set that as a goal and change some things, chances are that I would likely live out just an average life span.

So about 10 years ago, I began to confess to myself and others that I was going to ignore average life span and live to 100.  I backed up that proclamation with a lot of research that said there isn’t any reason, biologically, for that not to happen.

People thought I was nuts then – and still do.  Even more so now, because at age 75 I changed my target to 112 ½.  I wanted to have a third of my life left because I had so much I wanted to accomplish.

I learned that, regardless of age, all of us can play a proactive role in extending our life span through our attitude, habits, and lifestyle.  I undertook a significant change in lifestyle and adopted more life-extending habits.

Let’s take a look at what that does to my calendar – at least psychologically.   At 77, instead of being at New Year’s Eve,  I’m back into August with 32% of my life left.

Think about where you would fall on your calendar if you adopted the same approach.  Now I’m sure few of you here spend much time thinking about how long you will live – or have projected a date for your demise.

But if you were, say,  forty-six and in the July of your life, but decided to live to 100, psychologically you’ve now moved that back to late May or June.

More time to get things done; more time to reach your life goals; more time with those you love.

The list of possibilities is endless.

Here are three things to think about in all this:

  1. We are learning that we can, in all likelihood, extend our life calendar by understanding how our bodies and minds work and treating them properly. We have more control over our life span than we realize because of how much more we know about how this two-legged transport vehicle works. I encourage you to learn more about your biology, exercise more self-care and to work against the healthcare illiteracy that pervades our society.
  2. Each decision you make today has consequences in later months on your calendar, especially in the fall and winter months of your calendar. Think today about what you are doing to protect your mind and body for the long haul.  We still live too short and die too long in this country because of the habits we developed earlier in our lives.
  3. Getting old and aging are not the same thing. We all are going to get old.  All of us has a midnight December 31st in our future.  But how we get there is called aging.  Despite all the forces against it such as ageism, youth-oriented society, myths about aging, we are beginning to discover that this third age – or fall/winter months of our calendars – can truly be the happiest, most fulfilling and productive months on our life calendar.

August on our life calendar – however long our calendar may be – is an important transitional time.  Rather than hot, dry, and boring and sliding us into a time of despair, deterioration, and depression as our culture would lead us to believe it’s going to, it can be a launch point to a new takeoff rather than a landing.  A time in which we all can bring forward our accumulated experiences, talents and passions and pay them forward to help those that follow us.

Maybe you have some thoughts about all this.  If so, share them below with a comment.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our 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.”

Are You a Career Tenant – or a Career Landlord?

My wife and I made a highly disruptive decision recently.  We decided to sell our golf course home of 19 years and move into a rental.

It’s the first time we have rented in 46 years of our 49-year marriage.

Right or wrong, the decision was based on trying to catch the top of the wave of a hot Denver real estate market that is starting to soften.  We’ll rent for a while as the market corrects with an eye toward a downsize when we re-enter as owners.

Prescient?  If we are, it will be the first time.  We may end up on the pile of bodies with others who have tried to time either the real estate or stock market.  Nonetheless, it’s full steam ahead,  tolerating the inconvenience of house showings and maintaining two households.  (Yes, we signed a rental agreement without the house being sold – craziness  prevails!)

After 46 years of home-ownership, this simply feels weird, moving into something that someone else built and put their own personal touch on and not being able – or wanting – to fully put our own personal touch on it.

Becoming a tenant is going to take some adjusting.  Which bring me to a curious question.

Are you a career tenant or a career landlord?

It occurred to me that there is a parallel here to career decisions.

I’ve been self-employed for the last 17 years, much of it as a career coach.  Renting feels like going back to work for somebody, building someone else’s dream.  I’m paying the mortgage for this landlord, helping him/her build a real estate portfolio.

I was a career tenant for most of my working life – for 33 years before deciding to be a career landlord.  For much of those three decades, I was never crazy about “renting space” on someone’s payroll to build something that I didn’t define or have much control over.

Like most, I did it for the money and the perks.  I drank the kool-aid that said it was the only real secure, stable place to be.  And when I jumped into it fifty years ago that held true.  But that changed radically over time to where working for a corporation today is one of the least secure places to be, career-wise.

As career tenants, we are subject to eviction at any time, at the drop of a hat and for any number of landlord-centric decisions. And those landlord-centric decisions have become more common and less compassionate.

My friend Rick, a polished laboratory sales professional for 25 years, found himself on the street unexpectedly, at 58, following a merger of two hospital systems.  The landlord changed, rendering all tenants subject to eviction without cause.  He was replaced by two junior, lower-cost tenants.

It’s a story repeating itself daily in today’s ruthless environment of mergers and acquisitions, private equity buyouts and companies adjusting to rapidly changing and disruptive technologies.

How to become a career landlord

How can you protect yourself against becoming a vulnerable career tenant?  I suspect you aren’t prepared or interested in going out on your own or starting a business.  I get it.  Most people aren’t.

But you can become a career landlord and still be on someone else’s payroll.

It’s really about mindset.

Become a “Business of One”

J.T. O’Donnell is an experienced career counselor, coach and founder and CEO of Work It Daily, a private online career coaching platform.  As a former HR professional and recruiter, she talks with authority about the importance of a career mindset.

One of J.T.’s compelling arguments is that our cultural programming conditions us with “career bias” wherein titles or “what we do” becomes a personal identity.  Job titles affect our perception of people and people’s perceptions of us. Thus, too often we build careers to earn approval from others, a track that can lead to career dissatisfaction.

By shedding the “golden handcuffs” of traditional employment with its overemphasis on the title and a spot on the org chart and by becoming a “business of one” we can become career landlords instead of career tenants.

As J.T. says: “Working ‘for’ companies implies they’re in charge and you are being held hostage by the pay and benefits. Instead, you must see yourself as a business-of-one who wants to partner ‘with’ employers to create a mutually beneficial and respectful relationship.”

By viewing yourself as a “business of one”, you become the employer and the company becomes the employee in which you “partner” with employers to bring them the skills and experience you have acquired that can create a powerful relationship.

It’s really a key to survival in today’s volatile business world if one chooses not to be self-employed.

Recasting yourself as “employed landlord”

With the new “business of one” mindset, you are positioned to essentially reverse the typical employer/employee relationship by taking ownership and becoming the landlord of your talents, skills, and experiences.  As the landlord, you take control of many of the employment variables that were conceded under the traditional employment model.

Rent and lease terms are now salary and benefits based on the quality of the property – you.

As an “employed landlord”, you avoid becoming a hostage to the pay and benefits that come with “working for” a company.  It’s now the company working for you and paying a rental for what you bring to the table.

Three key steps to becoming an “employed landlord”

Warning:  this isn’t easy or automatic.

Adopting a landlord mindset and making it happen isn’t a casual occurrence.  And it’s not just a “time in grade” thing.  Earning and maintaining career landlord and business-of-one status requires a commitment to becoming the best you can be in the field you choose.  Without the credentials to back up your position, you aren’t likely to achieve the rental payment you want.

Here are five steps that will help you avoid a career lifetime as a tenant, shed the “golden handcuffs” of traditional employment and put you in the driver’s seat as the landlord of your career.

  1. Know what you are good at and really want to do. Become a specialist. In other words, know your strengths and specialties.  Being a jack-of-all-trades may have worked in a previous era, but not today. Your prospective employer-partner already has lots of folks who are simply after a paycheck and lack a clear focus on what they do well.  Employers want highly skilled specialists where their return-on-investment is high.  That is your bargaining chip because it’s a select few that show up at an employer’s doorstep with highly developed skills and an attitude of “let’s partner up – I can help you.”
  2.  Stay ahead of emerging, disruptive technologies. Once you’re clear on your strengths and specialty, it is essential to be on top of changes taking place within your specialty.  One of the bargaining chips you have to extract higher rent for your services is to show your tenant company that you are ahead of the changes in the industry and are a special resource that can help protect them from technology disruptions that can undermine their core business.

That means ongoing investment in deepening your expertise through reading, study, additional education and/or certifications, taking leadership positions in associations or forums dedicated to your specialty.  Your rental price depends on your ability to be a key problem-solving resource by bringing leading-edge resources to the problem.

  1. Build a brand around your expertise. Your commitment to becoming a “business-of-one” requires that you develop a brand that focuses on the value you bring. That involves two key components for conveying a clear, consistent and compelling message that focuses on the value that you bring:
    1. A resume that is built on quantifiable achievements in our area of expertise.
    2. A LinkedIn profile that is consistent with the resume and makes it crystal clear what your specialty is and what you have been able to do with it.
  1. Invest in building your network.  J.T. O’Donnell is correct when she says that “your network is your net worth.” She is also spot on by reminding us that “every job today is temporary.”  Making a meaningful career transition without a robust network is difficult.  Consider, for example, that 80% of jobs are filled through referrals and networking and the other 20% through job boards and recruiters.

As a career coach, I’ve worked with very talented, experienced professionals that have neglected this area of their professional life.  There is a natural tendency to downplay the value of networking when they are ensconced in what feels like a safe, secure position that is very demanding of their time. When the fit hits the shan and they suddenly find themselves unemployed, that failure to nurture an active network hinders their ability to re-enter the job market on a timely basis.

Networking and building key professional relationships should never stop.  In fact, with the “career landlord” mindset, continually building a robust professional network should be a priority activity.  LinkedIn today provides an excellent platform for building a network.  But just getting your LinkedIn connection count up is not sufficient by itself.  The network needs to be “worked” and that means phone conversations and emails to maintain and cultivate the relationship.  It means sharing helpful information with network partners and being a resource for them.  What goes around comes around – the network will respond in kind.

  1. Own your professional identity. As a business-of-one and career landlord, you are integrating all of your acquired skills, experiences, education and network to bring unique value and problem-solving ability to an entity in need.  Learn how to effectively communicate your passions, your deep skill set and solutions as you work to continuously refine and expand your abilities within your specialty.

 It will be helpful to also adopt a new perspective on mobility.  With this new mindset, mobility within an organization is secondary to going wherever or to whatever is the right next step in your continuing professional development.  Titles are secondary to how the job fits your overall growth as a landlord.  You are taking ownership of your career destiny and building your own dreams, not someone else’s.

In 1964, Bob Dylan popularized his song “The Times They Are A Changing”.  It should be the theme song for a career landlord.  Changes that two decades ago took years to evolve are now happening in months, even weeks.  And it’s catching career tenants by surprise daily.  When that shoe falls for an over-50 career tenant where ageism gets stirred into the equation, job re-entry can be extremely difficult and grueling.

If you are in your mid-to-late forties or into your fifties and feeling super secure in your position, I suggest doing a deep dive into evaluating just how safe and secure you are, with questions like the following:

  • How aware are you of the top three key initiatives that are propelling your company forward and driving top management decisions? Can you articulate them right now?  If not, you are too far away from the core that protects and defines your career path.  You are entrenched as a career tenant.
  • Having defined the key initiatives, how entwined are you in their development? Are you a participant or a spectator? Are you involved day-to-day in pro-active contributions to these initiatives?  Or are you viewed as a bit-player, a “delegatee” and not a “delegator”?
  • How does your current skill set align with the company’s key initiatives? Are there identifiable gaps between what you can offer and what the initiatives call for?  If the gaps exist, it becomes pretty fundamental.  Is the company worth the time, money and effort to close the gap?  Or is your current skill set better deployed with a company where key initiatives align better with your current strengths?

Either way, this process moves you to a career-landlord mindset.  Maybe you are where you should be even if it means a skill-upgrade. Consider that top management worth their salt will appreciate and support an attitude that portrays a commitment to get better and get more in line with key initiatives.  If they don’t, perhaps you have the clue that it’s time to look for another spot to lease your services to.

Be so good they can’t ignore you

Early in his career, comedian Steve Martin decided to “become so good they couldn’t ignore him.” Through years of experimenting with crazy, off-the-wall acts, he achieved his goal.

You, as a “business of one” have the same opportunity. And never has it been more critical to work toward a Steve Martin type goal.

As a moderately-skilled, out-of-date career tenant you are extremely vulnerable. Unlike Steve Martin, few are going to be willing to adopt a “business-of-one” mindset and become “so good they can’t be ignored” with their skill set and problem-solving ability.  Your willingness to do so is your edge.

It’s critical and important to start the evaluation process now and chart a path to becoming a career landlord that puts you in control of your career destiny.

Do you have a career story that illustrates either side of this argument i.e. have you experienced the effect of being either a career-tenant or a career-landlord? Tell us what you’ve experienced in this area, either via comments below or via email to gary@makeagingwork.com. We really appreciate your feedback.

Consider Being a Post-career Gadfly

Photo by Егор Камелев on Unsplash

Socrates once said, “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

This guy seemed to know “busy barrenness” without even having a smartphone, the internet, a Facebook account or a mortgage.

This was just one of many jabs that Socrates took at Athenian society, of which he was a reluctant part.  That is until they convinced him he would be better off test-driving a hemlock cocktail than continuing to be a pain in the arse of the Athens establishment.

Plato tagged Socrates as the “gadfly” of Athens.

A gadfly is a “fly that bites or annoys livestock” often “stinging the animal into action”.

Socrates is said to have referred to himself as a gadfly because he “bites and buzzes at the self-satisfied”, thus establishing himself as an unpopular social and moral critic.

Sounds like a great role for us “third-agers”!

The idea of being a gadfly in this third act of my life (without the prescripted hemlock) appeals to me.  Infected as I am with a personality replete with skepticism and iconoclasm, more “biting and buzzing” in a couple of areas of our culture might add more fun to my quest.

What part of being a third-age/post-career/retiree gadfly doesn’t make sense?

  • What have we got to lose? We’re a long way from hauling people off in chains – or scripting hemlock.
  • We’ve got lots of outdated and inauthentic myths, models and messages out there that need to be exposed.
  • Accumulated smarts and life experiences give us credibility and a voice worth listening to.
  • Our skin is thicker – other people’s opinions of what we think no longer guide our decisions.
  • The world needs our words and the truths gained through maturity, wisdom and life experiences.
  • Those behind us deserve “sageing”, a lost role ripe for resurrection.

I’ll bet you’ve got a handful of favorite areas you’d like to “gadfly”.

Here are three of my favorite candidates for “biting and buzzing”:

  1. An out-of-control healthcare system focused more on cure than prevention and profit more than patient care.
  2. A food industry that deceives us and cares little about our health (in lockstep with a healthcare system that cares little about what we eat.)
  3. Corporate ageist hiring practices and ageism in general.

I’ve been gadflying around these issues for some time now.

How to be a gadfly – three easy steps.

Moving right into “biting and buzzing” may be too far, too fast.  Consider three steps building toward becoming a legitimate, recognized gadfly.

  1. Be the change you want to see in the world. OK, I stole that from Gandhi.  He lived it and transformed the second most populous nation in the world.

Suppose you wanted to make a statement against our healthcare system and food industry and ageism all at once.   What would a Gandhi approach look like?

    • Look, act and feel “young for your age” by adopting a lifestyle built on healthy habits of hygiene, diet, exercise and social engagement that will limit your need to engage our reactive, disease-care system. You may inspire others to secretly make changes to “get what you’ve got.”
    • Cast your vote against the harmful fast food/fast casual restaurant business by cooking (and entertaining) at home with healthful, natural, non-animal ingredients.
    • Be conscious of how your own language and choice of words contribute to ageism. Train yourself to avoid using ageist words/phrases like those below.   This may be tough when hanging with your demographic peer group.  Whether directed at yourself or someone else, using this type of phraseology is practicing ageism, plain and simple.  And it engenders its use in others.
      • I just had a senior moment.
      • This aging thing is for the birds/is no picnic/sucks!
      • What do you expect at your age? (If this comes from your doctor, change doctors!)
      • You certainly don’t look your age.
      • You’re not retired yet?
      • When are you going to retire?
      • How’s it going, gramps?
      • Whaasup, old timer?
      • “Young lady” when addressing an older woman
      • Old dogs can’t learn new tricks.
      • Can you believe she’s 60 years old?
      • He is 80 going on 60.
      • You shouldn’t be doing that.
      • You could pass for much younger.
      • Good to see you are still up and around.
      • You’re still working?
      • You have a smartphone?
    • Don’t stop learning. Stretch yourself intellectually.  Read, take courses, attend conferences, sign up for seminars/webinars.  Stay current, keep up with technology.  Amaze your peer group and the youngers with your grasp of technology and the depth of your awareness.
  1. Become a student of that which you would like to see changed or righted. You’ll be surprised how shallow people’s positions are on most things.  Much of their knowledge is surface knowledge. One of the ironies of living in the information age is that we’re forgetting how to think critically.

Is it difficult to establish credibility on a topic of your choice?  Consider two powerful statistics :

    • The average number of books read annually is 12-15. Reading 15-20 minutes a day of an average sized book equals 12 days/ book, 30 books per year.  15 minutes a day and you are twice the average.
    • A Stanford University study indicated that if you read 30-60 minutes each day in your field of interest, in four to five years you will be a national authority.

We’re talking gadfly here, not national authority to start.  I think you get the point.  It’s not hard to set yourself apart to diplomatically and authoritatively put holes in suspect myths, models and messages.

  1. Ease your way into the conversation. Practice your way to the soapbox – or national authority, should that be your quest.
    • Test your new contrary position on friends.
    • Submit an editorial to your newspaper.
    • Comment on blogs written on your topic of choice.
    • Consider starting a blog.
    • Present your position at a civic organization like Rotary or Kiwanis.
    • Put yourself out there, build your confidence, learn and expand your argument.

“You’ve paid your dues to society by fulfilling the demands of career and parenting.  Instead of retiring to uselessness, you can now graduate into the global function of seership involved in the larger issues of life, the wider cultural and planetary concerns.  Become a sage, charged with the evolutionary task of feeding wisdom back to society and guiding its future development.”

Sounds kinda like a gadfly, don’t you think?  Those are the words of Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi in “From AGE-ing to SAGE-ing:  A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older”.

What are some of the issues out there that you feel need “biting and buzzing?”  If you are already biting and buzzing, let me know in a comment below what you are gadflying – and what is working best for you.

If you haven’t already, sign up for our weekly newsletter and article at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

And the Oscar for a Fulfilling Third Age Goes to – – – –

Image by analogicus from Pixabay

I’ve had some pretty deep conversations over the last six months with some successful, deeply-skilled execs who are looking at, or are early into, the retirement phase of their lives.  Each conversation is an adventure, each with uniqueness and depth that challenges my listening skills and my ability to inject something original or stimulating into the conversation.

Occasionally, I don’t add much to the conversation and I come away richer with the coaching role having been somewhat reversed.  When I remember to turn my humility meter up and move Mr. Ego aside, I end up growing.

Most of these conversations happen because these folks were referred to me or they found me because  I have hung out my “retirement coach” shingle.  I really don’t like the moniker so much because I’m not a fan of retirement as it has been defined and drilled into us for the last half-century.  But I stick with the distasteful (and confusing, for most) title because the entrenchment of the word retirement is so deep that I can’t expect it to be easily dislodged.

I toyed with different titles/brands that would be more appropriate for my quest and world-view on this topic.  Like “plan now for your post-career life before it kicks your ass coach” but it was too tough to come up with a logo – and try getting that on a business card.

If I could pinpoint some common themes that come from these stimulating conversations, three come to mind:

  1. Most have their financial s**t together, having been advised by their all-knowing, all-prescient financial advisors (tongue inserted in cheek as I write) that they can now “retire” and not have to be concerned about their income going forward.
  2. They are fearful, despite their advisor’s advice, of seeing that sumptuous portfolio go backward by even one nickel. In other words, they, like most, are more fearful of loss than motivated by gain.
  3. The road map into this phase of their lives is shrouded in fog. Or, as one recently-retired hospital CEO told me, “it’s fuzzy out there.”

Despite their successful track records, their performance under fire in high-stress environments, their ability to direct and inspire large groups of people and their ability to plan and achieve against those plans, nearly all these folks carry a significant level of uncertainty about “what’s next” for them, post-career.

To the person, they don’t need me to tell them that 30 years of golf, pickle-ball, bingo, bunko, or boche-ball will get old and lead to an early demise.

An Oscar for O-S-C-R

Just this morning, I had a very uplifting conversation with a freshly-retired hospital CEO referred to me because he was prime, according to the referrer, to have a “retirement conversation”, whatever that meant.

Following 30+ years of running hospitals, this exec decided, at 63, to voluntarily hang up his cleats, primarily because he was burned out and concerned about the impact of his job on his health and his marriage.

He too had been advised by his financial planner that he is “OK”.   I did sense this achiever was not totally comfortable with that prediction but proceeded nonetheless.

What I found different with this exec from most I talk with is that he was able to articulate a plan involving four different projects he wanted to undertake in this next phase, all built around the skills and experience from his 30 years of leadership and problem-solving.   They included hospital CEO mentoring, public speaking, a member on 2-3 boards, strategy consulting to 3-5 mid-sized hospitals.

In addition to this, he is taking his health more seriously (pre-diabetic, he has lost 30 pounds since retiring) and he and his wife are doing more things together, including periodic trips to Kansas City and Indianapolis to visit/babysit new grandkids.  They are also resurrecting some other travel plans that have been long-delayed.

As I listened and applauded this ex-exec for his forward thinking, I was reminded of something written by Mitch Anthony in his book “The New Retirementality” where he said (I’m paraphrasing slightly):

“Millions are in a mad rush to get to – –  the sidelines. Many of us, however, have already seen enough of our parents’ and forerunners’ retirement scenarios to know that this is not the life for us.  We have figured out that our lives will be full of challenge, relevance, stimulation, and occupational adventure.”

I like those four nouns at the end.  That’s what this exec is doing.  I moved the nouns around and came up with an acronym for which I can start awarding an Oscar for post-career/third age planning – Occupational adventure; Stimulation; Challenge; Relevance – O-S-C-R.

So I have my first Oscar recipient.  He doesn’t know he’s received the award – or that it even exists (it didn’t until I had the conversation this morning).  He signed up for my blog and maybe he will recognize he is the recipient if he reads today’s blog.  If not, maybe I’ll find time to get creative and craft up an Oscar-type graphic and surprise him with it.

I’ll keep it in reserve for the few others that I encounter that have ventured into the fog confident that something will happen – something more than a park bench on the sidelines with an occasional pickle-ball match or 49 hours of G-o-T and other assorted TV gems.

I’m looking for Oscar nominees.  Let me know if you know of any.  Or volunteer yourself if you think you fit.

A Story of Faith, Patience and Grace

 

Don Varey didn’t know his career was a lemon until he was forced to turn it into lemonade.

Don was a customer of mine 20 years ago.  I was a National Account Manager for MCI/Worldcom (remember them?  Bernie Ebbers, Enron era, cowboys and charlatans galore) and Don was an IT Manager for my largest account, a large, well-known Denver-based company.

Don was my favorite customer: likable, knowledgeable, doer, supportive.

I left the craziness of Worldcom just before it went “poof” and I lost touch with Don.  When we reconnected, as a result of him reaching out to me as a recruiter because his job had been eliminated, I found out that the dozen or so years that transpired had been very good to Don, culturally speaking.

He had moved up the ranks to the department’s top spot as VP, Information Technology.

High profile, high intensity, high salary, high stress.

Until, one day, on short notice, it wasn’t.

Seems new ownership and top management had their own person in mind for his job.  A younger, lower-priced model.

Heard that one before?

Don was on the street in his mid- 50’s, no severance.  Funny thing, lifestyle overhead doesn’t stop when the paycheck suddenly does.

Another mid-life casualty of M&A and ageism.

I recall a coffee meeting at Panera shortly after his termination to kick around whether me helping with career transition coaching made sense.  Don forged ahead on his own.  We reconnected by phone a few times following that meeting and it was obvious that the big title, high salary and some gray in the beard was making it tough to come anywhere close to what he had before.

Job search scorecard

No surprise, Don kept meticulous records during his 7 ½ month search:

  • Applications submitted: 239
  • Interviews: 10 (mostly phone interviews, including conversations with recruiters)
  • Networking meetings: lost count;  significant contribution to Starbucks and Panera bottom line.
  • Participation in executive outplacement group: good people, little help.
  • Offers: goose egg; nada; nil; nein; zip.

If you’ve never been in an executive job search in your 50’s or later while being “gainfully unemployed”, you might be inclined to scoff at those numbers and say “this guy didn’t know how to network/interview/sell himself, etc.”

You would be wrong.

I see it a lot.  Don was experiencing a malady common to seasoned execs at that age and salary threshold.

Don shared that the many, many hours, days, weeks, months of applying for jobs, interviews and receiving rejections really worked on his psyche, kicked his tendency to worry into high gear and brought him to lows he had never experienced.  These were the hardest and darkest months of his life.

His wife, Diana, became concerned that there was no joy in his life – this is a man with deep faith.

And then Montrose happened!

For you flatlanders and non-U.S. readers, Montrose is this terrific town of 22,000 on the “western slope” of Colorado.

I know the town, having been there several times to visit the Montrose hospital, a client of mine.  I have felt for years that Montrose is one of the best-kept secrets in Colorado.  Surrounded by Colorado’s most beautiful mountains, an hour from Telluride skiing, fly-fishing in your backyard, several highly-rated golf courses in town or close by and just generally a clean and very friendly community.

A photo from Don and Diana’s backyard

I was shocked three years ago to learn that Don had applied for and accepted a position as the Information Technology Director for Montrose County, a county with fewer people than the Denver suburb he and his wife, Diana, had left.

Right in his technology sweet spot; not exactly a resume enhancer (culturally speaking, of course).

He seemed happy when I contacted him a year or so into the job.  When I reached out to him again just this month, that “happy” had evolved to “ecstatic”.

That “ecstatic” might be hard for most of us to comprehend because the job involved a 75% salary cut and a “downgrade” to a relatively “plain Jane” title (culturally speaking, of course).

The huge salary cut, fortunately, still left them at a salary that supports a comfortable lifestyle in this smaller, less expensive community.

A powerful “second half” story

Don and Diana’s story has “feel good” throughout.

  • Don is satisfying a long-held interest in community and long-term strategic development. He’s now checked that box.  He’s involved in Economic Development, opportunity zone, and Social Impact community planning projects; he sits on the historical landmark board. More community involvement to come.
  • The positive social impact of this new phase has added to their mental health. They’ve deepened their church involvement – Don leads a men’s bible study; they are involved in youth ministry; Diana does a bible study in a homeless shelter.
  • High stress to no stress. Don is sleeping through the night – a new experience.
  • Quality of life has gone up by “several magnitudes.”

Retirement?  Maybe, maybe not.

I asked Don what their views were about retirement.  He emailed his response from Denver prior to them boarding a flight to Maui.

Not surprisingly, their views of “retirement” have changed since Montrose happened. Years ago, he and Diana (a breast cancer survivor) had planned to retire at 65 and stayed committed to that goal financially.  It’s interesting to note that were they to retire at 65, they could do so at a higher monthly income than what they have now, even planning in healthcare costs.

But it doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen that way.  I’ll let Don’s own words sum it up:

“Given our current situation, where we live, how much I enjoy what I do and the ability we have to contribute to our community, both through my job and through our volunteering at various organizations, I intend to continue to work for as long as I feel I am making a significant contribution to the County. I love working for the County and making a significant difference both within my official job responsibilities, but also just with my involvement with all aspects of County Government. As long as I can add significant value, I intend to continue working. My job responsibilities may expand beyond IT over the next year or so which excites me greatly as well. You know what they say, “When you love what you do, you never have to work a day in your life’. That’s me right now.”

Montrose gained. The Vareys gained by setting aside cultural expectations, comparisons, competition and are proving that mental, physical and spiritual health blossom when a servant’s mindset takes hold.  Shoulda, woulda, coulda disappears. Life takes on a daily meaning, lives are touched and transformed and second-half wisdom takes root.

The impact of being an outlier is once again confirmed.

And a community and a family get better.