Time For a New Cultural Portal

 

“We either ease into age or we’re disrupted by age.  I don’t like the fact that I’m 82, but I can’t fight it – it’s better that I am 82 than I didn’t make it to 82.  I keep going.  I’m not going to stop.  I still go to work every day.  If I didn’t have to sleep, I’d work 24 hours a day!”

********

“You can be old at 30 or young at 90 – it’s all up to you.  I’ve always been in a hurry. I know I’m racing against time, and now more than ever. But I have not lost my competitive spirit, and, in some ways, it’s personal. I still keep an active office and go there every day. Retirement isn’t an option for me. When you retire you have time to do what you love, and I love to work. “

The first quote is from Ken Langone, the billionaire businessman, investor, philanthropist and one of the founders of Home Depot during his appearance in a podcast with James Althucher.

The second is from a recent LinkedIn article posted by T. Boone Pickens, also a billionaire business magnate and financier, hedge fund chairman and former corporate raider, on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Different capitalistic routes to fame and fortune – one central late-life message:

Don’t stop – retirement isn’t an option.

Well, if we are going to splash around in the billionaire pool, then shouldn’t we see where the daddy-of-the-elder-billionaires, Warren Buffett, stands on this retirement thing?  Now 87, he doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down.

A little Google research reveals Warren’s “playbook” on the topic of retirement.

His clarifying position on reasons to avoid retirement is simple:

  1. You’re healthy
  2. You won’t have a fixed income
  3. You stay engaged and productive
  4. You’ll continue to mentor
  5. You can leverage your knowledge

We can all agree that not one of these three “elders” needs to work to subsist.  They all could have stopped at the traditional retirement age, but blew past it completely ignoring the signpost.

So what? They’re billionaires!

I personally don’t know any billionaires – never have, most likely won’t, ever.  Like you, it’s difficult for me to relate to what it must be like to be a billionaire.  Also, like you (I’m assuming), it’s not a pinnacle that I will experience.

But what I can relate to is a late-life stage of continued work,  productivity, and contribution and the effect that has on the individual and society.  I don’t see billionaires having a corner on that.

But it is this kind of story that just adds to my amazement at how pervasive and deeply rooted the concept of traditional retirement remains in our culture.  These billionaires represent but a tiny sampling of the vast evidence we have that work is a key factor in longevity and good health.  Given that, where is the sensibility in striving to hasten away from it at an age where natural talent, acquired skills and valuable experience can be mixed together and deployed for the greater good of society?

Time for a new portal?

In previous articles, I’ve referred to traditional retirement as adherence to an outdated, politically-inspired artificial finish line, the model for which has no relevance to our current world.

Permit me to coin another term for it: Wasted Cultural Portal.

Cultural portal?  Whaasat?

Neuropsychologist Dr. Mario Martinez defines cultural portals as:  “culturally defined segments of expected beliefs and conduct.” Martinez offers up a cultural portal list that includes: newborn, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, and old age.

Quite a contrast.  One-hundred-fifty years ago, we had two portals: childhood-adulthood.

Changing technology, longer lives, creative social scientists and enterprising capitalists have stretched the portal list, in Dr. Martinez’s eyes, to seven.

But something happened on the way to the 21st century.  Baby boomers and technology came along and started redefining the gap between portal six and seven, presenting a strong argument for the need for another portal between middle age and true old age along with a clearer definition of true old age.

This new portal is where we find Langone, Pickens, Buffett.

They aren’t wasting it.  Most of us, as we enter or move through this new portal, will.  It’s called traditional, vocation-to-vacation retirement.

They are outliers.

We are safely within the confines of our comfort zone of conventional wisdom, cultural expectations, and comparison.

They have chosen to push all those aside.

A simpler portal concept.

Perhaps rather than expand the portals to eight we should simplify the portal concept altogether.  That’s what Marc Freedman, founder of Encore.org and author of a seminal book on this topic, “The Big Shift, Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife”, advocates.  Drawing from his relationship with and studies of the 1990’s research done by Peter Laslett, eminent British demographic historian, Freedman has championed Laslett’s solution to “the oxymoronic years, the longevity paradox and to much of what ails us today.”

Laslett predicted, because of declining births and longer lives, an emerging life stage he called the “Third Age.”  With it comes a much simpler and appropriate four-portal alignment which Freedman advocates:

  1. First age – childhood/age of dependence.
  2. Second age – adulthood and mid-career jobs.
  3. Third age – new territory between the end of mid-career jobs and parenting duties and the beginning of dependent old age.
  4. Fourth age – age of dependency and ill health, the doorstep of demise.

It’s important to share Laslett’s prescient view on this.  Laslett foresaw a need to clean up some fundamental mistakes resulting from failure to recognize this third age. Mistakes that impact you and me.

“In his view, lumping everyone with grey hair under the same umbrella, and assuming this population in the future will look like and live like those of that age in the past, produced both a miscasting of reality and miscarriage of justice.  And it led to everything from damaged lives to bad policies.  Laslett saw the conventional wisdom – that this population would be a vast burden to society, a huge drain on the medical establishment, an unproductive class inevitably focused on their own narrow needs  – to be a result of ‘the persistence into our own time of  perception belonging to the past.’ In other words, it was scenario planning through the rearview mirror.” (extracted from Freedman’s book).

Voila!! Yet another definition of traditional retirement

There you have it.  Another appropriate definition for traditional retirement:  planning through a rear-view mirror, following an 80-year old script applied to a hugely changed longevity and promoted by an industry largely unchanged from a late-1970’s model of insurance and securities salespeople promoting a labor-to-leisure retirement model based purely on dollars and cents and insensitive to the wastefulness that model encourages.

Beware of being consigned to “mass indolence”

Laslett’s “third age” represents a liberation of those of us in our (in Freedman’s words) “ – sixties, seventies and beyond from the psychic strain and misclassification and from the very real  consequences of being assigned to ‘mass indolence.'”

Laslett writes: “The waste of talent and experience is incalculable.”

We need look no further than to our cratering healthcare system, the massive expansion of elder warehouses, the unchanged message of the financial planning industry, rampant ageism, and our youth-oriented media and culture to realize that Laslett was spot on.

What’s your third age going to look like?

At 76, I’m about five years into my true “third age”.  Yep, about a 20-year late start following 40+ years of thrashing around in mismatches in the corporate and self-employment world, operating according to cultural convention instead of my essential self.

Not recommended.

There are days when the regret over a late start and thoughts of what more I could have done will occupy more mental bandwidth than I should permit.  But with a strong belief that my fourth stage will be beyond 100 (see my earlier blog on this topic)  and each day functioning at a higher energy level and with more motivation than I recall from any other stage of my life, I feel my third age holds much promise as it slowly unfolds.

At this age and stage, you learn that today is what you’ve got, nothing else – and that success in life ultimately emanates from gratitude, a quality you will hear expressed frequently by the aforementioned billionaires.

That stirring you feel might just be your third age trying to move from cocoon to butterfly.  My encouragement to you is to listen, not hasten it, or cover it over with cultural constructs, comparison, and comfort-zone living and thus kill the butterfly.

We are anxious to hear what thoughts you have about a “third age” sequence in your life.  Email me at gary@makeagingwork.com or scroll down and leave a comment.

You can still access my free e-book “Achieving Your Full-Life Potential” by subscribing to my weekly newsletter articles at www.makeagingwork.com.

 

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

 

“ If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going.”  Terry Pratchett, “I Shall Wear Midnight”

I struggled this week to come up with meaningful content that would be a fitting and meaningful cap to this three-part series on avoiding becoming a Bored Boomer.   Then this quote jumped on me.

It works that way sometimes – the Universe drops something in my mental path out of nowhere.  Many have said that’s the way it works.  You just have to be open and paying attention – which I’m not, a lot of the time.

The quote is a bit like the interchange between Alice and the Cheshire cat I guess i.e. “any road will do!”  But what grabbed me was the first part “If you don’t know where you come from- – “.  It reminded me, as I’m reading it, that we all are nothing but stories.

Life is a series of choices and the stories that follow.

For a long time, I didn’t much care for a lot of my story.  Kinda modest, mottled and messy.  Small town Wyoming upbringing, grandson of homesteaders, a late bloomer in nearly every phase of the first half (50 years or so).  No notable titles, trophies or tributes.  Pretty much a top-of-the-bell-curve sort of story.

But then someone somewhere in some book or podcast or webinar on writing – can’t remember who or where or when  – said: “your mess is your message.”  I think, I hope, it was Ann Lamont, whose last chapter in her classic book on writing “Bird by Bird: Some Instruction on Writing and Life” rocked my world with this admonition (bolding is mine):

“Write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique.  Don’t be afraid of your material or your past.  Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you.  Be afraid of not getting your writing done.  If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting.  Risk placing emotion at the center of your work.  Write toward vulnerability.  Don’t worry about being sentimental.  Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent and fraudulent.  Risk being unliked.  Truth is always subversive.”

We need to know your story

We all have a story that the world needs to know. We all have a story that will benefit others but runs the risk of being untold as we succumb to the cultural expectation of “winding down.”  This third stage of life i.e. the span between middle age and true old age is where the power of your story can best manifest itself.

I’ve come to realize that the story I was inclined to apologize for and hide for years has led me to discovery of my true passion and purpose and that my messiness can be a big part of my message.

That can be the same for any of us third-stagers.  It should be.

With that as a backdrop, here are the final three Boomer Boredom avoidance suggestions:

#7: Write your memoirs.

Whaaa?  My memoirs, you say?  Who would read it?  Who would care?

Maybe nobody – maybe millions. That’s not the point.  Call it part of self-discovery.  Call it part of legacy preservation.  Call it a letter to your progeny. Call it a thank you to your spouse or partner. Call it boredom avoidance.  Call it whatever.

As Ann Lamont points out in “Bird by Bird”:  “– -it is an honorable thing to have done.  And who knows? Maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution.  You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing in the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper likes its own little lighthouse”

Maybe what you have written will help others.  Maybe that won’t be a big part of the result.   But what will happen is that your true story will emerge – or, more truthfully, re-emerge and gain more salient meaning.

My ever-helpful friend, Pat McClendon, is a Ph.D. nurse and former nursing executive who has now “retired” into working harder than ever to help nurses find meaning through her writing and speaking. (Visit her site at www.makingcaringreal.com).

She took seriously someone’s advice that if you want to learn about yourself, write your memoirs.  My sense is that writing her memoirs was a gut-wrenching yet exhilarating experience that enabled her to confront the truths about what went well and what didn’t in her nursing leader career.  This has deepened her perspective and passion for helping nurse leaders and is turning into a soon-to-be-published book to complement her weekly blogs and speaking on the topic of nurse leadership. The nursing leadership community, which is huge, stands to be the benefactor of that memoir effort.

#8:  Develop and commit to a longevity plan.

Chances are you are going to live longer than you expected.  For some, that’s good news.  For many, it’s a fearful proposition, beset with visions of wheelchairs and walkers, nursing homes and needles, osteoporosis and oxygen bottles, dementia, drool and Depends.

The reality of that grim vision is enhanced by the lifestyle choices we make throughout life, but that intensify in importance as we move through the second half.

Generally, we remain a pretty naïve society when it comes to good health despite all the advances we’ve made in the last century in understanding our biology and how to treat it optimally.

Or perhaps, lazy is a better word.

We’ve been hijacked into a disease-care system where our health maintenance has become a reactive, $35 co-pay experience that comes into play only when the annual physical roles around or when the train leaves the track with an illness or health crisis.

In the face of major advances in understanding how our biology works, we continue to fail to take control of our own health.  And the manifestation of that intensifies as we age.

But it doesn’t need to be that way.  We can – actually, must – be in control of our health if we expect to achieve our full-life potential and live healthy up to, or very close to, the end.  In other words, live long and die short.

I do believe that we can be “Younger Next Year”.  The book by the same name inspired me to put together a longevity plan to support my goal of living past 100.  I was also inspired by the wisdom and experience of Dr. Walter Bortz and his books “Dare to Be 100” and “The Roadmap to 100.”  I heartily recommend all three books as a foundation for moving to a longevity plan for the balance of your life.

I see such a plan having three parts”

  1. Become knowledgeable about your biology, down to the cellular level. Know what you are doing to your body when you do, or don’t do, certain things.  No, I’m not suggesting becoming a molecular biologist – just read what they are already telling us. Frankly, even if you just digested the three aforementioned books, you would be light years ahead of the masses and on a good track to realize a health longevity bonus.
  2. Put together an exercise, diet, social engagement and spiritual enlightenment plan. Here’s mine:

    Aerobic exercise for 45 minutes, 6 days a week. Strength training 3 days a week.  (Borrowed from the recommendations in “Younger Next Year” and inspired by Dr. Lodge’s quote: “Aerobic exercise will give you life.  Strength training will make it worth living.”)

    I “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”. Inspired by this quote from Michael Pollan, author of “Food Rules” and other inspiring books on eating right

    Expanding my social circle to be surrounded by positive, encouraging friends and to include more people 10-30 years younger than I am.

    Daily meditation. It starts my day and helps center me.

  3. Fix your longevity plan on your calendar. What gets scheduled gets done.  And no more so than with these longevity components.  It’s very easy to slide away from each of them.  It takes 66 days to firmly embed this type of good habit.  It won’t happen without a disciplined, scheduled approach.

#9:  Start a project that would positively impact 1 million people.

You may have heard of the “X Prize”.  It’s a concept started by Peter Diamandis, engineer, physician, and entrepreneur.

At the XPrize website,  https://www.xprize.org/about/what-is-an-xprize it is described as:

“- – a highly leveraged, incentivized prize competition that pushes the limits of what’s possible to change the world for the better.

It captures the world’s imagination and inspires others to reach for similar goals, spurring innovation and accelerating the rate of positive change.  The goal is to push the boundaries of human potential by focusing on problems currently believed to be unsolvable, or that have no clear path toward a solution.”

For many of the X Prizes, the solution must be able to positively impact at least 1 billion people.

It has proven to be one of the most powerful tools for world-changing innovation on the planet.

Do you think you could come up with something, drawing from your life experiences and acquired skills and assets, that could possibly impact 0.001% of that? Something that could impact 0.003% (1 of every 326 people) in the U.S.  Just a million people.

What do you know, have experience with, are highly accomplished in, feel passionate about that you just know a million people could benefit from?

Then define it and go share with them, starting with one.

We all have them – those experiences, talents, successes that are our story.  Stories that others need to hear.  Yet, we sit on them when others could grow because we’ve grown.

I’m choosing to take my “messy” story to the 80+million Boomer and pre-Boomers to encourage them to rethink the use of this period between mid-life and old age i.e. the third stage.  To inspire them to leverage this time for good, not lose it to the cultural expectations of park benches and Lazy-boys and Leisure World.

Will 1 ¼ % of that crowd hear my messy message?  Hopefully, in time.  But maybe not.  But today, I’m thinking maybe one will, and that’s a feel good.   It all starts with one.

Thanks for taking the time to slog through this series.  Hope it has some pearls for you.  Let us know your thoughts regarding the suggestions by scrolling down and leaving a comment.  Or better yet, let us know what you do to stay inspired, motivated and active as a Boomer.

Get a copy of my free e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential” by subscribing at www.makeagingwork.com

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

 

Last week, the first article of this three-part series on avoiding boomer boredom focused on (1) finding your essential self, (2) reintegrating yourself and (3) starting a lifestyle business.  This week, we’ll take a look at three more boomer boredom fighters.

Why all the concern about boredom?

Boredom can lead to the development of non-healthy habits and erosion of the good habits that contributed to previous life and career successes.  Stagnation and even narcissism are by-products of boredom as is the threat of a slide into depression.

The evidence is overwhelming that depression and other dark-side elements are becoming significant factors in the lives of retired boomers. For instance, these sobering facts are emerging:

  • It is expected that, by 2020, the number of retirees with alcohol and other drug problems will leap 150%.
  • The National Institutes of Health reports that, of the 35 million Americans age 65 or older, nearly 2 million suffer from full-blown depression. Another 5 million suffer from less severe forms of the illness.
  • Depression is the single most significant risk factor for suicide among the elderly with the highest increases among men in their 50s and women in their early 60s.
  • A recent New York Times article noted that the overall, national rate of divorce in the United States is trending down. Except for one group: the 50-plusers, who have seen their rate of divorce surge 50% in the past 20 years.
  • One in four couples divorce after age 50.

 

Here are three more anti-boredom suggestions for you to consider:

#4: Adopt generativity as a goal.

Deep down, don’t we all want to check out having left a footprint of some sort?  Generativity is one path for accomplishing that.

Erik Erikson, Pulitzer Prize-winning developmental psychologist best known for coining the term “identity crisis”, put forth a life model with an adult stage that includes the task of “generativity.”  Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines generativity as “a concern for people besides self and family that usually develops during middle age; a need to nurture and guide younger people and contribute to the next generation.”

Erikson considered generativity equivalent to paying-it-forward, saying “I am what survives me.”

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a Harvard professor and preeminent expert on the importance of relationships in the development of young people.  As an advocate of generativity, she underscores the importance of boredom avoidance by stating that those who fail to be generative in this late adulthood period “ – are prone to stagnation and narcissism.  They often begin to indulge themselves as if they were their one and only child.”

We’ve all seen friends, family members, acquaintances or former workmates slip into roleless, goalless lifestyles in retirement. Invariably, the results are an accelerated physical and/or mental decline.  Conversely, we’ve all likely known those who have sustained a vibrant vitality and perhaps an extended longevity through their commitment to volunteerism or other methods of generativity.

The opportunities for generativity are endless and varied.  Maybe it’s being a tutor for underprivileged, inner-city kids; or providing resume writing and interview skills training for new tech school graduates; or participation in a Big Brother program.

Whatever form it may take, it is guaranteed to kill boredom when it’s aligned with a passion and a skill set.  Personally, I never achieved the level of motivation and daily enthusiasm in the corporate world that I do now in my own version of generativity.  I’m striving each day to craft an effective message and process to help the one or two generations behind me to overcome ageism and the negative voices around them about aging and to unleash the power and impact they can bring forward in their second half of life.

#5:  Become a mentor

Hand-in-glove with #4, becoming a mentor is a concentrated form of generativity. Bringing forward skills and experiences gained in the first 40-50 years of life and career can provide advice and connections that can help a mentee, or group of mentees, reach heights otherwise not possible alone.

But there is also a serendipitous, anti-boredom component to mentoring.  Mentorship benefits are shared by both mentees and mentors.  In a successful mentoring relationship, the mentor gains new perspectives and experiences growth along with satisfaction by providing guidance to the mentee.

Being a mentor helps one to become a more understanding human being and helps keep skills fresh and minds young.  To not mentor may mean losing touch with our own excellence.

Author, speaker, and coach John Maxwell reminds us in his book “Intentional Living: Choosing a Life That Matters” that “- significance and selfishness don’t go together.  You cannot be a selfish, self-centered person and live a life that matters.”  He also reminds us that most people who don’t add value to others do it, not out of hate or self-centeredness, but out of indifference.  Indifference and a life of significance cannot coexist.

I wonder.  Could indifference be a first cousin to boredom?

#6:  Craft a new 25-year life plan

One of my favorite “virtual mentors” is Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach, the most successful entrepreneur coaching program on the planet.  Sullivan has coached over 18,000 successful entrepreneurs in his 40+ years as a coach.

He has a number of fundamental rules that have guided his success and that he teaches his coaching students.  He has a book entitled “The Laws of Lifetime Growth” in which the first law is “Always make sure your future is bigger than your past in terms of what you are interested in and what your goals are.”

How’s that for a boredom antidote?

Accompanying this rule, Sullivan has, for years, kept a rolling 25-year plan out in front of him with progressively bigger and more aggressive goals built on what each succeeding year has brought him in terms of new learning and technology developments. His life and impact get bigger every year.

Dan is not a bored – or a boring – guy.

At 74 (in 2018) and with a goal of living to 156, I have a hunch he will be around longer than most and will continue to rack up successes in transforming lives much longer than others in the coaching professions.

Antithetical to the core!

Yup, it’s all antithetical and totally contrarian.  It flies in the face of what we’ve been led to believe that this final phase of life is destined to be:  a time to land, not launch; a time to wind down, not wind up; a time to kick back not kick-off; a time to ebb not flow; a time to decline, not develop; a time to retire, not rewire.

Social expectations will tell us a 25-year plan at 55 or 65 or 75 is nuts. Certainly, I’ve grown accustomed to the raised eyebrows when I reveal that, at 76, I’m refining my 25-year plan.  And it is a work-in-progress.  But I’ve come to realize that a goal to live past 100 or develop a lifestyle business that will outlive me will never happen if I don’t articulate it and plan for it in my mind.

A goal unarticulated is never achieved.

 

What would you like your life to look like 25 years from now?  Can you visualize it as vibrant, active and highly mobile, devoid of dementia, drool and Depends?  What would you like said of you at your funeral?  You might even try writing your own eulogy to kickstart your 25-year plan development.  Or write a 100th birthday speech.

Don’t be ordinary!

Next week, we’ll wrap up the series with three more boomer boredom antidotes.  Let me know what you think about 1-6.  Scroll down and leave a comment or a criticism.  We welcome your feedback and suggestions.

New to this blog?  Subscribe at www.makeagingwork.com.  We pass along a free e-book when you subscribe entitled “Achieving Your Full-Life Potential.”

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

 

A Certified Financial Planner friend of mine shared a story over breakfast recently.  One of his long-standing clients – let’s call him Jack –  who had fully retired six months earlier called out of the blue with a plea for help.  Having entered his retirement in great financial shape, his call went something like this: “John, you’ve got to help me.  I’ve got to go back to work doing something.  I’m going crazy not having something important to do.”

A “Bored Boomer Retiree”

Jack appears to be another captive of an irrelevant retirement model – a casualty of an off-the-cliff leap from labor-to-leisure, vocation-to-vacation.  An emerging rebel against the archaic, politically-inspired artificial finish line called traditional retirement.

Seventy-eight million strong and hitting this artificial finish line of 65 at the rate of 10,000 per day, Boomers everywhere are beginning to discover that retirement, as we’ve known it for decades, needs redefining.

A 2016 Federal Reserve Study revealed that a full 1/3 of retirees eventually reconsider retirement and return to work on either a full or part-time basis.

Another study published in 2019 by the Rand Corporation revealed that 39% of workers 65 or older who were currently employed had retired for a period but decided to return to the workplace for more of their “golden years.

A share of this trend can be attributed to the fact that 2 of 3 retirees enter retirement having given little or no thought to the non-financial components of retirement life only to discover that those “soft side” elements play a much larger role in retirement than the “hard-side” financial elements where the major planning effort is focused leading up to retirement.

Unfortunately, this discovery often comes later than it should.  Much of early, prime-time retirement is wasted as a result of this lack of non-financial planning.  New retirees typically experience a 1-5 year ”retirement honeymoon” period, during which the mental, social, physical, and spiritual challenges emerge that were never discussed or planned for in the offices of their financial planner.

Issues such as:

  • Overcoming a loss of identity.
  • Divergent post-retirement interests between spouses.
  • Boredom due to lack of challenge and social engagement.
  • Depression and physical deterioration because of reduced activity and social interaction and lack of a sense of purpose.

NOTE: My 5/14/18 blog provides additional insight into the dark side elements of retirement.

How do you avoid becoming a “bored boomer?”  A three-part series. 

This article is the first of a three-article series on this topic, each with three suggestions for avoiding this plight.  You don’t have to be retired to consider these.  In fact, considering them at the pre-retirement stage will bring even more benefits.

Suggestion #1:  Unmuzzle your “essential self”.

What was your 6-, 8-, or 10-year-old-self good at, passionate about, naturally drawn to, and undeterred in pursuing before parents, peers, professors, politicians, and pundits tamped it all down and out?  There are clues to your essential self in all of that.

In her seminal book “Finding Your Own North Star, Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live”, Martha Beck reminds us that most are “- – responsible citizens who have muzzled their essential selves in order to do what they believe is the ‘right thing’”.

For most of us that “right thing” has been 30-40 years of “cubicle nation” building someone else’s dream believing that a fuzzily-defined, nirvanic, rewarding escape waiting at the end will be worth it.

For some, the “right thing” is in step with the “essential self” – for most, not so much.  Why else would we covet getting away from it and  “give up” or “withdraw”?  Which, by the way, is the definition of “retire.”

When the “right thing” goes away or morphs into that “rewarding escape”, we can find ourselves face-to-face with that uncomfortable question: “Who am I and why am I here?”

There it is – the perfect mental launching pad for resurrecting what really lit you up before social expectations locked you down.

I’m slower than most.

I chased the “right thing” across four different industries for over three decades and traveled deep into my sixties before finally unmuzzling my essential self and honoring my bent toward writing and teaching/coaching.

A couple of retired friends of mine are integrating their essential selves, passions, and their natural and acquired skills and leveraging them back into the marketplace where they will continue to do good.

For a recently retired hospital CEO in Missouri, it is choosing to broaden and deepen his passion for civic and community involvement through board-level positions to pay forward his executive administrative experience as well as satisfy a passion to serve.  To satisfy another passion, he builds and refurbishes black-powder, muzzle-loader rifles.

For a retired nurse executive friend, it’s taking her doctorate in nursing and decades of top-level nurse management experience back into the marketplace to help nurses cope with the pressures of today’s broken healthcare system and be more caring patient advocates.  She’s doing it through a childhood passion for writing and teaching, using the internet, social media, and book publishing.

Suggestion #2:  Reintegrate yourself

I was tempted to suggest “reinvent” instead of “reintegrate.”  The idea of reinvention is omnipresent these days, especially in the self-help world and particularly when it comes to those of us in the second half of life.  Retirement itself has become a deserving target of reinvention.

I was persuaded to reject reinvention in favor of reintegration after considering the position taken on this by Marc Freedman, CEO and President of Encore.org and one of the nation’s leading experts on the longevity revolution. In a Harvard Business Review article “The Dangerous Myth of Reinvention”  Freedman makes the point that reinvention is too daunting and not practical because it infers discarding accumulated life experience and starting over from scratch.

Freedman makes a very valid point in the article:

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

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

Reintegration dovetails nicely with point #1 above.  Combining accumulated skills and life experiences with a forgotten or long-suppressed passion won’t give boredom a foothold. And it lifts away the intimidating idea of a reinvention.

More and more Boomers are finding this to be a path to an energizing, inspirational second career in which income, new meaning and contribution and service intersect.

Suggestion #3: Start a lifestyle business

Can you imagine a greater boredom antidote than taking #1 and #2 above and putting them together into a lifestyle business?

What is a lifestyle business?  Three components:

  • A level of income that you desire in your life.
  • Time freedom. Work when you want, as much as you want.
  • Location independence.

But wait, I’ve busted my hump for 40 years to get away from business.  Plus starting a business at any age is too risky.

Well, let me take some air out of this instinctive negative reaction.

In 2016, new entrepreneurs 55-64 swelled to over 25% of new businesses started according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurship.  Check out these two Kaufmann graphs and note how over 50% of business startups happened by Boomers

Those figures didn’t change much in 2020:

 

 

Source: https://indicators.kauffman.org/indicator/rate-of-new-entrepreneurs

And according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, Self-Employment in the U.S., the self-employment rate among workers 65 and older (who don’t incorporate) is the highest of any age group in America: 15.5 percent. In sharp contrast, it’s 4.1 percent for ages 25 to 34.

Consider this: Boomers with experience have an entrepreneurial edge in today’s knowledge-based economy.  And start-up costs and risk levels have been mitigated like never before by digital technology.

Still skeptical?  Here’s a Youtube video by Miles Beckler,  internet marketing and entrepreneurship guru (an apparent Gen X’er) with ten ideas for lifestyle businesses just to prime your thinking pump.

I’ll list them here in case you aren’t into Youtube or just want the cliff notes.  Go to his video for details.

  1. Information products
  2. Become an author
  3. Affiliate marketing
  4. Print on demand (t-shirts, fine art, coffee mugs, a virtual store with no inventory, photography/online gallery, etc.).  Pairs well with F-B marketing
  5. Selling services – WordPress training, hosting, web design, graphics services, copywriting, etc.
  6. Drop shipping – selling other people’s products without owning inventory
  7. FBA – fulfillment by Amazon.  You find products send them to Amazon and they do the fulfillment.
  8. Coaching and consulting
  9. Selling advertising
  10. SAAS (software as a service )

This list barely scratches the surface of the types of businesses being started by enterprising – and formerly bored – boomers.

Stay tuned.  Next week, we’ll jump into three more tactics to save ourselves from Boomer Boredom.

How have you avoided Boomer Boredom? Would love to hear about what’s kept you out of that abyss.  Scroll down and leave a comment or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Don’t forget the free e-book “Launching Your Full-life Potential” available when you subscribe to this weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com.

Your Second Half Should Be Filled with These Four-letter Words

 

 

 

The second half of life (I’ll optimistically call it the 50-to-100 phase) is rife with both opportunity and challenge.

It’s a time when social expectations expect us to begin to “wind down” rather than “rewind”; to “land” and not “take off”; to retire and not rewire; to retreat and not advance.

It’s a time often referred to with four-letter words like slow, idle, aged, gray, shot, worn, gone, beat, done.

I suggest we boomers and pre-boomers replace those with more appropriate four-letter words.   Here are fifteen to fold into your thinking and vocabulary to overpower the aforementioned:

Work

Work keeps us alive.  We abandon work at our own peril. A study of 83,000 Americans 65 and older published in Preventing Chronic Disease, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that being unemployed or retired was associated with the greatest risk of poor health.

Plan

Retirement can mean getting away from the planning, discipline, and routine that made us successful during our careers.  Why is our later life undeserving of working from a plan, especially when we bring forward so many acquired skills and wisdom?  Find your “essential self”, uncover your deepest passion and put together a plan to put both to work.

Meet

One of the threats to longevity and good health in the second half is social isolation.  Don’t let your social network atrophy.  After retirement, we expect that we will be able to maintain meaningful relationships with former co-workers.  That rarely happens.  It’s vital to replenish those connections with new relationships that are uplifting, stimulating and supportive.

Jim Rohn,  entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker, reminds us of the vitality of our closest connections:: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

 According to AARP, social isolation is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day ( see this blog).

Seek

Continue to seek wisdom and knowledge and new experiences.  The brain is a muscle and will atrophy just like any other muscle.  Push the envelope on new experiences and force yourself out of your comfort zone, which will magnify as you move into retirement. Never stop learning.

Give

Deep down, we are wired to serve. These later years are an opportunity to be deeply grateful and to pay forward what we learned and earned.

Muse

Seek a source of inspiration.  Whether its meditation or prayer, finding a way to connect to the higher power that is the source of all energy, creativity, and imagination is fundamental to maintaining vitality and sense of purpose in the second half.

Move

As in exercise.  A sedentary lifestyle is a major contributor to poor health in the second half.  Keep moving.  Replace the LazyBoy with a treadmill and the TV with yoga lessons.  Oxygenate your cells every day with an aerobic exercise of some form.

Lift

In two ways: (1) lift others up through example, engagement and encouragement and (2) lift weights to maintain good health.  The late Dr. Henry Lodge said it well in the bestseller “Younger Next Year”:  “Aerobic exercise will give you life, strength training will make it worth living.”

Love

It still makes the world go ‘round.  And that love should include – actually start with – loving yourself.

Task

Have a challenging task facing you each day.  Take on something scary, something you’ve never tried before.  Have something that stretches you mentally and physically.  Task yourself with challenging goals and projects focused on paying forward your wisdom, acquired skills and passion.

Idea

Creativity doesn’t die with age unless we allow it.  Idea creation is a great way to keep our cognitive abilities alive and well.  That lifetime of experience is a great petri dish for developing new ways to do things.  What can you create that would benefit others drawing from your experiences, your passions and your core skills/essential self?  Just know that when you do this, you rebuild and add new neuronal connections and contribute to your brain health.

Zeal/zing/zest

Don’t be a “geezer” or a “hag.”  Add zeal, zest, and zing to your persona.  Don’t act your age. Dress young.  Break the rules for someone your age.  Make people want to know what you are up to because your attitude, your appearance, and actions are so far outside “convention” for someone in your demographic.  See elan below.

Lead

Somebody somewhere needs your help to lead them out of some form of darkness, be it in life, business, health, relationships.  Be available.  Be necessary to somebody.  Pay forward what you’ve learned.

Star

Be one by helping others shoot for theirs.

Elan

These synonyms say it all:  flair, style, panache, confidence, dash, energy, vigor, vitality, liveliness, brio, esprit, animation, vivacity, zest, verve, spirit, pep, sparkle, enthusiasm, gusto, eagerness, feeling, fire, pizzazz, zing, zip, vim, oomph.  These aren’t typically used to describe someone in their later years – but you are an exception!

This quote from author Lillian E. Troll is a fitting end to our list:

“To be young is to be fresh, lively, eager, quick to learn; to be mature is to be done, complete, sedate, tired.  What if we consider a different perspective:  To be young is to be unripe, unfinished, raw, awkward, unskilled, inept; to be mature is to be ready, whole, adept, wise.  How valid are our glorification of youth and our shame about having lived many years?   Lillian E. Troll

Scroll down and leave us a comment – or your own favorite, positive four-letter word.

You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a free e-book “Achieving Your Full-life Potential” as a thank you.

Are You a Fugitive From Yourself?

 

“Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves — we can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people, and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within — by middle life, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”  John Gardner

Accomplished fugitives from ourselves?

Ouch! I kinda wish I hadn’t run across that quote again.

I bumped into it on my third trip through a favorite book, “Life Launch: A Passionate Guide to the Rest of Your Life” by Pamela McLean and Frederic Hudson.  That quote is highlighted, underlined, asterisked and the page paper-clipped.  In my lexicon of weird reading habits, that means five-star important – stop, listen, reflect.

Reflection tends to reveal truth. Truth can hurt but truth is reality.

Reality is, I’m still a fugitive.

Feeling better about my fugitive status

Currently, I’m a fugitive with mostly misdemeanors – no new felonies.  A quarter-century ago, at that 50-year middle-life point, I was guilty of felonies, a handful of them, all inter-related.  I’m not going all-naked, but here are a few of the more serious felonies:

  • Suppression of my essential self
  • Succumbing to culturally-defined external roles (aka building someone else’s dream)
  • Thinking only in an ideological/theological bubble, hearing mostly echoes
  • Comparison

It wasn’t enough that I ran into the Gardner quote.  Then Martha Beck stepped up 18 months ago with her book version of a groin kick called “Finding Your North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” to remind me that, although I may have expunged some of the felonies, some remain, along with far too many misdemeanors. Much work is still to be done to uncover and release my “essential self.”

I have a paragraph from Beck’s book that I’ve memorized and try to proclaim every day:

“Freed from rigid social expectations, focused firmly on guidance from your essential self, you will stop conforming to any of the pre-designated patterns offered by your cultural environment.  Instead, you will turn your life into a work of art: an absolutely original expression of your unique gifts and preferences.”

Hmmmm. “-unique gifts and preferences.”  “-the fearful and wonderful life within.” “- life into a work of art.”   Ever think about these things?

Maybe (hopefully) you aren’t an off-the-chart, introverted, reclusive, grand –poopah of information gathering like me and have broken out and found those unique gifts and that wonderful inner life.  But I’ll stick my neck out and say you probably haven’t.

It’s a tough journey, this self-discovery trip.

Those unique gifts and wonderful inner life get pretty plastered over by the mid-forties/ the early fifties.  By that point, we’re saying I couldn’t possibly:

  • leave this job to write those books I know are inside me
  • start my own business
  • dig wells in Africa
  • give up my healthcare insurance
  • sacrifice my 401K match
  • betray my hard-won image

So, we crank along suppressing our own dreams in favor of building someone else’s, succumbing to the grip of comparison, maintaining a “look good, smell good” image at all costs, seeking life-sapping comfort instead of life-affirming risk, all the while denying that time is slipping away ever more rapidly.

In the court of life potential, these are all felonies.

Then at mid-life, we create our own internal prisons.  And the prison guards/interrogators in there are cruel, incessant, with questions like:

  • Really? This is all you’ve got to show for your life?
  • Why do you think you are here?
  • How do you feel about just taking up space and using up oxygen?
  • What part of “you can’t take it with you” do you not understand?
  • You’re concerned about what gossipy Joe and Emma next door might think if you break out? What’s up with that?
  • When are you going to let the “real you” come alive?
  • How much longer are you going to refuse to admit that you are uniquely gifted and off purpose?
  • Would a remedial class on having an impact and leaving a legacy help?

The dying have a message

Australian hospice nurse, Bronnie Ware, for many years has spent time with patients who are in the last few weeks of their lives and who have gone home to die.  In her article “Regrets of the Dying, she shares the five most common regrets that they expressed in their final days:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Regret #1 was by far the most common.

For many, the call to break out and be true to oneself while progressing into the second half/third stage of life intensifies and, at the same time, becomes increasingly difficult.

Most of this inertia is rooted in – wait for it – F-E-A-R.

 

False Expectations Appearing Real.

Want a few of those false expectations?  How many of these have NOT run through your mind?

  • I’d like to have my own business, but 90% of new businesses fail.
  • I have a voice, but who would be interested in what I have to say?
  • There’s already too much competition for what I want to write/sell/teach/build/consult.
  • I’d be foolish to put my retirement nest egg at risk.
  • I’m not sure I have the energy to break away and do what I really want to do.
  • My age is too much of a disadvantage in this youth-oriented society.
  • I might lose all my friends.
  • I’d be putting my family at risk.
  • I have no idea how to find this “purpose” thing.

In my free ebook “Achieve Your Full Life Potential”,  I relate a story about my own hard-headedness in this area.

The condensed version is that 30+ years ago, in my mid-40’s, I participated in a “spiritual gifts” analysis with a Bible-study group I was part of – a series of questions that purported to isolate what one was best “wired-up” spiritually to be doing with his or her life.

Mine came back as “pastor.”

My response.  Repulsion and sarcastic laughter.  C’mon! I’m a successful sales guy in telecom knocking down a comfortable six-figures.  No way – but thanks for playing!

Humility can be a b*^ch!

Years later, I ran into a thing called “Strengthsfinder”, developed by the Gallup organization and explained and administered through a book entitled “Now Discover Your Strengths”.  I took the test.  The analysis of my strengths was equally repulsive and, in my state of mind at the time, as off-mark as the pastor tag.

But, surprisingly similar.

Not accepting the results, I took the Strengthsfinder test again a year later – same results.  Still pastory.

Same derisive, sarcastic rejection on my part.

It’s an embarrassing confession, but I took the test a third time, this time following the publication of their new book, “Strengthsfinder 2.0”, assuming that they had gotten smarter with their testing.  It was a time when I was battling a debilitating sense of being off-purpose.

Same results. Still sounding an awful lot like “pastor.”

 

OK, God.  Got my attention.

The organized-religion community is fortunate and grateful that I didn’t pursue the pastorate.  And so am I.  But I am grateful that my tree was finally shaken enough to begin to acknowledge and move in the direction of my strengths/calling/purpose – pick the word that works best for you.  It was all three for me.

My extended Strengthsfinder trip revealed, each time, these five dominant talents:

  • Learner – I’m energized by the steady, deliberate journey from ignorance to competence. Hence the insanity of having read over 600 books over the last 12 years with less than a half-dozen novels in the mix.
  • Input – I find lots of things interesting, collect factoids and don’t throw any of them away, physically or mentally. (Please never come to my home office!  And now you can understand why I seem to be in perpetual confusion, flitting around like a fart on a hot skillet.)
  • Intellection – I like to think, stretch my brain muscles in different directions. I’m my own best companion and I’m constantly discontent comparing what I am doing with all the stuff rattling through my head.  (All you ADD/ADHD’s out there can relate, huh?)
  • Connectedness – things happen for a reason and I’m part of something much bigger than lil ‘ol me. MUCH bigger.
  • Includer/Harmony (seem to tie for a spot in the top five) – I steer away from confrontation and toward harmony and I rest on the conviction that fundamentally we are all the same.

So, what does one do with all this?  Well, for starters, few will be this unbalanced and long in their search, thankfully.  But for me, it turned on the lights and helped me acknowledge the “essential self” Martha Beck writes about.  I’m meant to write, teach, coach, encourage, speak, share my accumulation and perhaps, in a small way and on a rare occasion, inspire some to move to the truth of that “fearful and wonderful world within”.

It’s a journey started slowly in my mid-sixties, intensifying in my mid-seventies.  And I recognize it as one with no finish line.  My choice is to be excited about it or to be frustrated by it.  The culture-induced path of least resistance is to simply say “it’s too late to be growing” and settle back into comfort, convenience, comparison and complacency and wait for the end, which I now know would come sooner were I to succumb.

So, as I write, I’m a confessing “bad-ass, obnoxious, sarcastic, audacious-ager” intent on sliding home at 100 or later like Pete Rose slid into second!  My ”fearful and wonderful life within” means I have a voice and the messy story that has been my life is my message, warts and all.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a pearl in that mess that will spark a mid-lifer to seek, or acknowledge, their essential self and take it to the marketplace and leave a footprint.

Hey, I get it if not much of this resonates!  Thanks for enduring the trip.  But if you took this diatribe this far, I’m thinking something is stirring.  I hope you won’t stuff it back in.

 

Avoiding Retirement Chaos

 

 

Wouldn’t it be terrible to find out that retirement can really suck?

After all, you’ve shouldered through a grinding 30-40 year journey filled with marginally-motivating jobs and totally marginal bosses to get to this point.

You’ve sacrificed most of your “today’s” for the “tomorrow” that your financial advisor’s constantly changing charts, graphs and strategies say is out there for you.

In the 3-5 years leading up to the coveted date, your excitement has built, with plans for recreation, hobbies, travel, R&R.  You will be amongst the 91% who expect to be happy and the 80% who expect to be able to achieve their dreams.

You see your retirement as part or all of a remedy for unhappiness.

The numbers are there; the financial risks are isolated and covered and contingency plans are in place. The only thing left is to slide into the new lifestyle and reap the rewards of the sacrifice.  You’ve paid a big price for this third-stage-nirvana.

You’re entitled.

The date arrives.  Jubilation! Liberation!

Average duration:  One year

 

These numbers are courtesy of research done by the AgeWave organization headed by Dr. Ken Dychtwald, gerontologist, psychologist and one of the world’s foremost authorities on aging-related issues.  Dr. Dychtwald’s extensive research of 55,000 Baby Boomer retirees exposed many of the hidden realities of retirement.

AgeWave’s research revealed that there are five stages of retirement.

(I unpack this in my January 6 blog entitled the “The ‘$400 Trillion Time Bomb’ and ‘An Unnatural Act’”. )

Liberation is Stage 3.  The sucky part of retirement emerges and intensifies in stages 4 and 5 – Re-orientation and Reconciliation.

In a nutshell, AgeWave’s research revealed that the retirement honeymoon lasts 1-5 years and wears off with the discovery that retirement is more challenging and less satisfying than anticipated.  Other research has revealed that 75% of pre-retirees expect life to be better after retirement while only 40% of actual retirees report that to be the case.

Clearly, people discover that they hadn’t planned well for their retirement.  Often times, couples are not on the same page.  Boredom sets in.  Relationships diminish.  Health issues begin to accelerate.

In his free booklet “The Darkside of Retirement”   Financial Planner and Retirement Coach Robert Laura reveals some disturbing but important facts about the realities of retirement.

He writes:

“There is a hidden epidemic taking place in the shadows of retirement. It’s a chilling reality that will impact baby boomers and their families more deeply than any economic recession or market crash. It’s the dark side of retirement, where addiction, depression, and even suicide are quickly becoming so prominent that new and soon-to-be retirees must become more aware of the impact these powerful influences can have during retirement and develop a plan to avoid them.”

Here are just a few sobering facts:

  • It is expected that, by 2020, the number of retirees with alcohol and other drug problems will leap 150% to 4.4 million – up from only 1.7 million in 2001.
  • The National Institutes of Health reports that, of the 35 million Americans age 65 or older, nearly 2 million suffer from full-blown depression. Another 5 million suffer from less severe forms of the illness. Women are at a greater risk for depression because of biological factors such as hormonal changes and the stress that comes with maintaining relationships or caring for loved ones or children who are ill.
  • Depression is the single most significant risk factor for suicide among the elderly. Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed a dramatic spike in suicides among middle-aged people, with the highest increases among men in their 50s, whose rate went up by nearly 50% to 30 per 100,000; and women in their early 60s, whose rate rose by nearly 60%.
  • A recent New York Times article noted that the overall, national rate of divorce in the United States is trending down. Except for one group: the 50-plusers, who have seen their rate of divorce surge 50% in the past 20 years. In fact, one in four couples divorce after age 50.

So, what else does your financial advisor know that he/she hasn’t told you?

Whoa – hold up!  Let’s not hang this on your CFP/CIMA/CPWA/AIF/CMFC/CRPC/AAMS (NOTE: you might want to consider a change if your financial advisor has all of these initials after their name!)

It’s not their job to guarantee you a happy, fruitful retirement.  They are just there for the numbers, the “hard side” of retirement.  And they’ve likely done a pretty good job for you in that regard.

Roger Whitney is a highly credentialed and successful financial planner with 25+ years of financial services industry experience.  In his refreshingly candid book “Rock Retirement” he provides some perspective on why you should only expect “hard number” assistance from your financial planner:

“The professions of financial planning and retirement planning came from the investment and insurance industries.  Until the recent advent of the financial-planning-degree programs at the university level, financial planners came from the sales forces in these industries.  Pause for a second: sales force.  They created the industry; they set the standards.

The truth is, although almost all advisors are well-intentioned and capable, they don’t have the skill set or training to think beyond investment solutions.”

In other words, most financial planners (i.e. salespeople) are not trained to go to the soft side of retirement and discuss the critical emotional, social, mental, psychological issues that emerge in any retirement. Theirs is a world of numbers, not counseling couches.

We’re on our own to prepare for the potential pitfalls of retirement.

We know that, unfortunately, 2 of 3 retirees enter their retirement with NO semblance of a non-financial plan.

Like an iceberg, most of what goes on in retirement is below the surface and outside of the conversations and planning that goes on with most financial advisors.

Serious non-financial considerations such as the mental, social, physical, and spiritual adjustments accompany every retirement. Just as a good, sturdy stool will have four strong legs, a fulfilling retirement will need attention to these four pillars to succeed. And most retirees go into retirement with little or no consideration of those “soft side” elements.

The “soft side” elements – mental, social, physical, spiritual – will raise their heads in any retirement.  But, if anticipated and planned for, they can help lead to a longer, fulfilling and healthier retirement and don’t need to be dark side elements.

But it’s important to get out in front of them.

That’s where a retirement coach can play a vital role.

Robert Laura, mentioned earlier, has been a retirement coach to pre- and new-retirees for years and has combined this experience and his financial planning background with the skills and experience of two psychology Ph.D.’s to develop a new Certified Professional Retirement Coach (CPRC) program.   I have completed the program and received that designation to add Retirement Coaching to my coaching services.  It’s a logical complement to the Career Coaching that I do.

We’ve developed a comprehensive program designed to help pre- and early- retirees avoid these dark side elements by focusing on the four non-financial pillars of retirement – mental, social, physical and spiritual – through a fun and enlightening eight-step process that culminates in a plan focused on achieving a “best-life-possible” retirement.

Curious?  Want to know more about the components and how it works?  Email me at gary@makeagingwork.com or call my office at 720-344-7784 and we’ll set up a no-cost consultation to see if it makes sense for you.

Good news!  Millennials Can’t Retire!!

 

 

Looks like the media and the financial planning industry is getting their knickers into knots about the prospect of millennials being unable to retire.  The headline for this article from Next Avenue  is certainly an attention getter: “The Bleak Retirement Outlook for Boomer’s Kids.”

If you are one who still clings to the time-worn tradition of checking out in the final third of life (aka retirement), the article will tug at you.  How could one not feel sad that this vilified generation may not be able to wilt away into silent oblivion and/or an elder warehouse and instead have to find a way to keep creating and be productive.

HORRORS!  What is a financial services executive or government entitlement bureaucrat to do????

Maybe these spoiled, self-centered, unloyal, independent, digital-soaked, experience-oriented brats are about to teach us something – again.

Maybe, just maybe, they aren’t gnashing their teeth and ripping their Lululemons over this because they don’t buy into the concept.  Maybe they are picking up on the hysteria that surrounds this “statutory senility” or “ultimate casualty” we call traditional retirement.

Maybe, just maybe, they’ve cast off this traditional 20-40-20 Linear Life Plan – – –

 

 

– in favor of this more sensible 21st Century Cyclic Lifestyle Plan

Source: Ken Dychtwald, Agewave.com

In last week’s blog, I wrote:   “When dying people in a hospice are asked about any regrets they had about their lives, by far the most common regret is “I wish I had pursued my dreams and aspirations, and not the life others expected of me.”

I was expected to follow the 20-40-20 plan, pounded into me by parents, peers, professors, and pundits. How about you?

Maybe, just maybe, these youngers know they are facing a 75% or better chance of living to 100 or beyond and are moving forward with a more salient perspective given the prospect of a longer lifespan – one that intersperses education, work/family, and leisure across the lifespan in a more meaningful, fulfilling “experiential” way.

Maybe, just maybe, a millennial will forego saving for years to go to Machu Pichu to claim the completion of a tiring walk with achy knees and 1,000 boring pictures in favor of moving to Peru, living amongst the Peruvians for two years, learning the language and culture and bringing it home to start a restaurant featuring Peruvian cuisine.  Sounds nutty to someone who drank the 20-40-20 kool-aid, I suspect.  But it’s happening.

I’ll refer you to a fantastic book that deals with this very issue:  “The 100-Year Life. Living and Working in an Age of Longevity.”  Written by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, both professors at London Business School, it was rated the Business Book of the Year in 2016 by McKinsey Corporation.  Gratton and Scott combine their psychology and economics background to bring a very profound perspective to the changes that increased longevity are going to have on our society.  Not the least of these changes is going to be changing attitudes toward retirement.

And none too soon, I say.

I may be completely off base

– but I don’t think so.  I don’t hang with a lot of millennials so I can’t speak for them.  But, as a recruiter for 18 years, I’ve experienced and heard and read a lot about how this generation’s attitudes have disrupted hiring and employee retention and development.

It seems that they want what they do to count, to have an impact, to leave a footprint for humanity.  Wealth and creature comforts for many are in the back seat – at least for a while as they explore, develop and mine their self-knowledge and search for their core, driving values.  If a company doesn’t line up with that evolving value system it’s bye, bye! They’re out of there – until they either find one in line with their value system or go create one themselves.

Unencumbered by a three-stage mindset, they are accepting their life as one with a longer span and multiple stages with the stages being a trail of exploration, development, and adventure with much less of the definition and predictability than we, their predecessors, find in the outdated three-stage model.

But why wouldn’t they?  They saw their progenitors sell out and then be kicked in the teeth by companies; they’ve watched us push our health to the margins in favor of accumulation and image maintenance; they have low tolerance for the planet destruction associated with this image-supporting accumulation; they realize that the least safe place today to build a professional life is with a large company “working for the man” and “building somebody else’s dream.”

Maybe, just maybe they just flat don’t want to be like us.

I recently read an online post by a millennial contributor in Inc.com named Nicolas Cole and found this comment that sums it up pretty well from the millennial’s perspective:

“This is the great debate, and the issues, to be frank, go much deeper than just workplace satisfaction.”Making an impact” doesn’t mean we need to be solving world hunger on a daily basis. But I know a whole lot of Millennials that would feel a hundred times more understood if their daily tasks were acknowledged and explained as part of a bigger vision. Millennials are doers. We want to do things. And if that daily habit of doing and being involved isn’t there, then we’re going to go find somewhere else to spend our time. Because we watched our parents plug and chug their way through life, only to get to the end and say, “Don’t forget to enjoy the journey. We didn’t do that very well.” 

That last sentence ought to make any financial planner sit up and take notice.  I’m optimistic that today’s millennials will do just fine financially.  It’s just going to be different and the money may follow a different route.

As Gratton and Scott point out, “this group is already responding to the prospect of a longer life and are keeping their options open and exploring new alternatives.”  Maybe, just maybe, one of those alternatives will be to skip retirement.   Maybe, just maybe, one of those choices will be to “die broke” having poured all their energy and money back into improving the human condition.

Refreshing thought – unless you are a financial planner stuck in the 20th-century mindset.

On Climbing the Himalayas and Eating a Cobra’s Heart

Don’t you hate it when someone says or writes something that you wish you had said or written? The more I research to write, the more it happens to me.  And it happened again today.

I surfed into an article this morning by Jonathan Look entitled “The Magic of Leaving Your Comfort Zones in Retirement.”  Look is a retired U.S. traffic controller who sold it all at 50 to “travel the world.” He now resides overlooking the Atlantic in Lisbon, Portugal.

Mr. Look has an important perspective on fulfilling retirement.  For him, it includes scaling Himalayan mountains and eating a still-beating cobra’s heart.

OK, stick with me here for a second – I’m not off the rails.  Nor is he.

Look’s point with the article has to do with the importance of, in his words, “pushing the boundaries and seeking new horizons to achieve a fulfilling retirement.”  In addition to the Himalayas and eating a beating cobra’s heart, his activities have included things such as swimming with whale sharks, running the London marathon, rescuing street dogs from the meat trade in Thailand and living for a time on the Mekong River in Laos.

While his activities seem more self-aggrandizing than doing anything to advance humanitarian causes, the principle of moving out to the edge and away from the comfort zone in retirement is the key takeaway from his lifestyle choices.

As I portrayed in last week’s blog, the dark side of retirement in terms of disease, decline, and debilitation is very real, and disturbing.

Comfort zones are so enticing and so – well – comfortable.  We are drawn to comfort which means we are drawn away from challenge.  And nowhere are comfort zones more apparent than in retirement, certainly in the earliest stages.

No more alarm clock, no meetings, no commute, Lazyboy available 24/7, favorite series on Netflix mid-day, multiple daily naps.  After all, this is why we busted the hump for 40 years, to get to this point.  That’s what all the ads tell us it’s supposed to be.

But, as it’s said, “man makes the habits and the habits make the man.”  Comfort zones have a way of holding us hostage.

Here are three areas critical to a fulfilling retirement and optimized aging that comfort zones will hinder:

  1. Physical condition. The two greatest fears as we age are (1) running out of money and (2) experiencing extended frailty.  In retirement, our habits can easily make that second fear a reality far too early. We’re made to move, regardless of age.  According to a number of studies, the average retired male watches over 40 hours of TV per week.  The Lazyboy/TV partnership is the ultimate comfort zone. It’s so easy to skip the trip to the gym or to the treadmill in the basement when one is accountable only to his or her self.
  2. Mental acuity. Have I mentioned the brain-mapping study that showed that the watching TV generates the same level of electrical stimulation in the brain as contemplating a brick wall?  Unfortunately, the brain is very much like a muscle.  It needs exercise to stay vital.  Educational TV and crossword puzzles only go so far.  Life-extending mental stimulation calls for “pushing the boundaries.” Neurologists favor activities such as learning a new language or learning to play a musical instrument as examples of healthy brain-stretching activities.
  3. Social isolation. In my March 5 blog, I referred to the AARP Foundation study that claims that prolonged isolation is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  The AARP article points out that retirement is on the list of “Risk Factors for Isolation” while pointing out that there is a 26% increased risk of death due to the subjective feelings of loneliness.  New retirees often overlook the fact that they are faced with replacing workmates with new playmates.  Failing to push the boundaries and be proactive in rebuilding a social network is a major contributor to early deterioration.

Mr. Look says further:

“Retirement is the perfect time to explore and take advantage of new opportunities. Comfort zones should be places where we go to relax, reflect and rejuvenate. They should not become permanent retirement destinations where we passively allow time to slip away.”

I’ve had the pleasure recently to work with two very talented ladies, Judy, 77, and Jean, 64, who are thumbing their noses at traditional retirement and pushing boundaries.  Judy, a retired attorney, is passionately driving a non-profit that is improving educational opportunities for over 150 young girls in a village in Senegal.  Jean, a semi-retired veterinarian, is a central figure in the drive to outlaw the declawing of cats and to improve the nutritional quality of pet food.

I am humbled by the drive, energy and smarts these ladies demonstrate as they push their personal and professional boundaries. They reinforce my belief that senescence is not automatic and that vitality need not wane in our later years.  Their only reference to retirement is to say that they retired to something of greater importance.

What are you doing to push the boundaries?  Do you have a story to share with us?  We’d love to hear from you.  Scroll down and share your story with us – or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Pivot Your Retirement Before It Kills You!

A generation ago, IBM did a study of their pensioners and found that their average retiree didn’t make it past the 24th pension check.

John E. Lang, a petroleum engineer and 45-year employee of a single oil company, succumbed to a heart attack in his sleep 10 months after receiving his gold watch – and a few days after receiving a clean bill of health from his doctor.  He was my father-in-law – a great man and sorely missed.

Shell Oil studied thousands of its employee and found that retiring at 55 doubled the risk for death before reaching 65 compared to those who worked beyond age 65, challenging the notion that retiring early boosts longevity and, in fact, demonstrating the opposite – mortality rates improve with later retirement.

The National Institute of Health reports that 1 in 5 of the 35 million Americans 65 and older suffer from depression –  2 million suffer from full-blown depression and another 5 million suffer from less severe forms of the illness.

Men older than 65 take their own life at more than double the overall suicide rate and men age 75 and older have the highest annual suicide rate of any age group

OK, can I ask it?  Isn’t it time we redefine this retirement thing?

If you are in or approaching retirement, I suspect you weren’t aware of the dark side of this coveted late-life prize.  If you have been working with a financial planner, was this ever a part of your discussions with her/him?  Not likely – that’s all about the soft side of retirement and, with a few exceptions, financial planners only deal with the hard side of retirement – numbers.

The financial numbers are really important but not if they hasten you into a retirement for which you aren’t emotionally and psychologically prepared.  And that’s the rub.  Estimates are that 70% of retirees go into their retirement without a semblance of a non-financial retirement plan.

So where can it go wrong?

Ah, let me count the ways.  In fact, the husband and wife team of Jeri Sedlars and Rick Miners, veteran executive recruiters and authors of a really good book on this topic entitled “Don’t Retire, REWIRE!” did just that.  Following hundreds of conversations with retirees and uncovering this high level of discontent amongst retirees, they compiled a list of the “Top Ten Reasons People Flunk Retirement.”  Here’s what they heard the most.

  1. Retired for the wrong reasons.
  2. Didn’t realize the emotional side of retiring
  3. Didn’t know myself as well as I thought I did.
  4. Didn’t have a plan.
  5. Expected retirement to evolve on its own.
  6. I thought rest, leisure, and recreation would be enough.
  7. Didn’t stay connected with society.
  8. Expected my partner to be my social life.
  9. Didn’t know what I was leaving behind.
  10. Was overcome with boredom.

For better or worse, but not for lunch every day!

Take number 4 and number 8 on that list.  This combo illustrates one of the most dominant problem areas when it comes to retirement.  The fastest growing divorce rate in our culture is with couples over 50.  Couples often fail to plan and consider the impact on their relationship when retirement rolls around for one or both.

For example, the man comes home full-time and the spouse is burnt out on being home full-time.  She wants to go her own direction, perhaps even starting a late-life career doing something that has been suppressed for years running the household. The husband has an agenda for retirement, unarticulated until after retirement, and the spouse has different ideas. And gradual separation begins.

I recall a quote from a spouse with a recently retired husband:  “I have twice the husband and half the space, and he’s getting bigger.  If he rearranges my kitchen drawers one more time, I’m going to kill him!”

It is a little strange. 

Couples do quite a job of planning and working their way through other significant life transitions successfully.  But with retirement, which is a permanent resident on the top-10 list of life’s most stressful events, couples often ignore planning for it.

The aforementioned stats speak to the dangers of only planning retirement from a numbers perspective.  And it’s this evidence and my own personal observations of the dark side development amongst retired friends that have inspired me to become a Certified Retirement Coach to complement my coaching in the area of health and wellness and late-life career transitions.

Time to unwash the brain.

Most of us in the 50+ genre still operate with this linear life plan indoctrination – I call it the 20-40-20 plan that looks like this.

It has been the “social expectation” pounded into us by parents, professors, peers, and pundits:  get an education, get a job with a  good company, get a spouse, get a car, get a house and big mortgage, 2.5 kids, fenced yard and a golden retriever. Bust your hump for 40 years doing what you marginally enjoyed doing, stretching to reach that coveted final 20 so you can do what you really wanted to do back in the early stages of the first 20.  Only to find out that the 20 or so beyond the artificial finish line that our culture establishes isn’t as advertised.  In fact, for many, it ends up being a period of decline due to becoming sedentary, socially isolated and functioning without meaningful purpose.

This 20th-century traditional retirement model is a big part of what continues to keep us locked into the “living short and dying long” condition that taxes our health care system and has created a very profitable opportunity for the creators of the massive “warehouses for elders” that are proliferating nationally.

Oh, by the way, I understand there are few nursing homes in Okinawa where elders are venerated and “live long and die short” at home with family.

The solution, please.

Thankfully, the traditional retirement model is dying a slow death, thanks in large part to Boomers who aren’t willing to disappear silently into the night.  Research on 55,000 retired Boomers by the Age Wave organization found that only 30% had no intention of ever working again after retirement, while 70% engaged in some level of work, ranging from total volunteer to re-entering the workforce to starting their own businesses.

Successful “retirees” fit a pattern that Mitch Anthony calls the “Four Pillars of the New Retirementality” described in his book “The New Retirementality”:

—Vision – successful retirees retire to something; failed retirees retire from something.

—Balance – successful retirees find a balance between vocation and vacation; failed retirees move from bingeing on work to bingeing on leisure.

—Work is important – successful retirees keep themselves plugged into meaningful pursuits; failed retirees devolve into boredom and aimlessness.

—Successful aging is important – successful retirees focus on growing and well-being; failed retirees just take what comes.

Alas, for most going into retirement, this becomes an after-the-fact discovery where productive, healthful time is lost.  A Retirement Coach, or a financial planner that includes a holistic, non-financial retirement planning component in their service, can help prevent this dark side of retirement.  Dialog on these “soft side” elements should begin 3-5 years ahead of the anticipated retirement date.

Retired or anticipating retirement?  Let us help you get it on the right footing. Inquire about our “Retirement Wellness Plan.”  Email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

What’s your retirement experience been?  If close to retirement, how much planning on the “soft side” have you devoted to it?  We’d love your feedback – scroll down and leave us a comment.