The Sabbatical: Not So Academic

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The sabbatical is one of those traditions of college teaching that grants a period of time away, usually with full salary, to an individual with the expectation that he or she will spend it doing research, possibly in a different but related field, and thus return refreshed and renewed to the classroom. At the very least, it permits the grantee a way of avoiding burnout. That the sabbatical has never made any serious inroad into the business world is self-evident. Midlife overwork and burnout are two crippling problems that dare not speak their name. Some 70 percent of workers long for time-out that is longer that the usual two-week vacation.

If you are among those who have been downsized or encouraged to take early retirement, or whatever euphemism you’d care to apply to an untimely exit, you might reframe this often traumatic life event in terms of being granted a sabbatical, time-out that you’ve earned.

While you let that sink in, here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • How much time do I want for myself?

  • What has stood in the way of my taking it, beyond the obvious answer that I’ve been working x hours?

  • How much time can I afford to take without an income?

  • What have I not done that I’ve always wanted to do?

  • If I were to die tomorrow, what would I have missed?

  • What would improve my life or the lives of others that I could take on?

  • Who is doing work that I am attracted to?

  • What issues in my town (country, state, country, the world) could benefit from my involvement?

  • What do I envision for myself at the end of a sabbatical?

Six Months Off: How to Plan, Negotiate, and Take the Break You Want Without Going Broke or Burning Bridges, by Hope Dlugozima, James Scott and David Sharp, offers some other good ideas.

In Business For Yourself

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A few things converged in the last two days that make this a timely topic.

First, AARP Bulletin’s cover story, You Be the Boss which reports that half of all entrepreneurs are baby boomers, 7.4 million of them. Whatever your age cohort, if you are considering joining the ranks of business owner, Questions for the Self-Starter are helpful, as are the notes on franchises. Business Week’s article about Second Acts is also worth your time.

Terri Lonier, founder of Working Solo, offers Top Ten Trends for Solo Businesses in 2007. One that caught our attention, green businesses. With global warming now unequivocal, the smart money is betting on all kinds of opportunities to address the growing need to reduce one’s carbon imprint. You don’t have to be a soloist to benefit from Lonier’s insights, both practical and visionary.

Many soloists and couples in business together, start out — and sometimes remain — in a home-based office. If the idea of working out your home appeals to you, here are a few thoughts on the subject based on our nine-year experience.

What to tell your kids…

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Everyone is encouraged to write a last will and testament. But lately, there has been a great deal of interest in the ethical will, a document that passes along something more important than property and tangible assets. An ethical will can be a summary of what you hold sacred. It can be a manual for living, a ‘moral compass’ for your children and theirs, an ultimate act of generativity. Here are a few things we plan to tell ours:

  • Never stop learning. It will bring you more than knowledge. Learning will keep you curious and engaged in life. It will open your heart as well as your mind. It will bring you friends. It will bring you joy.
  • Take nothing for granted, not your spouse or partner, your children, your parents, your job, your health, your political system, the planet. Whatever you value needs tending. Attention must be paid.
  • Give freely: acknowledgment, eye contact, forgiveness, kindness, laughter, thanks, touch, and yourself.
  • Everyday, put yourself in another’s shoes; listen better; keep the peace; move your body; enjoy food; work well; play much; sleep enough; ask nicely; save something; tell the truth; cultivate stillness.
  • Don’t look back in anger or regret. Everything is a lesson. Learn it and move on.

Best Places

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You’ve had it with shoveling snow, long commutes to work, paying too much in real estate taxes. The grandkids moved to another state. Your elderly parents need your help across the country. One or more of these can trigger questions about relocation as we cross the threshold into the second half of life. As we age, we become a nation in search of the ‘best place’ to live. Suppose you find, as we do, the usual list of location must have’s inadequate. You know, the lists that assume you’ve hung up your spurs as regards making a living: affordable housing; plentiful leisure activities; cultural options; sunny weather; good health care access.

All good, but suppose you want or need an income. Suppose you want to live near your grandchildren or elderly parents in an environment that is business-friendly. While it is true that technology has enabled many of us to work remotely, what if your dream is to become a minister, or open a dog grooming business or launch a practice as a professional organizer, to name three on our Top Ten? Through this lens, we took a look at information that is available for the asking on the web and here are our best picks. Who knows? When you start researching your personal best place, you may find that your own hometown has more going for it than you realized.

Rightsizing Your Life

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“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” said Sir Winston Churchill. That is a good preface for a review of Ciji Ware’s new book, Rightsizing Your Life: Simplifying Your Surroundings While Keeping What Matters Most (Springboard Books 2007). This is a well-organized, lively manual on creating an environment that supports our choices in the second half of life. It includes relocation – whether to, where, when, and how – which, after money and health, is a major concern for many of us as we grow older. This is due, in part, to the size of the continent we inhabit, and our propensity for moving for work or family. Sometimes those moves take us far from our homes of origin, for better or worse, and sometimes on the periphery of what we value most.

The other factor the book tackles head on is our possessions. To stretch the Churchill quote just a little, we have become possessed by our possessions. How to maintain, preserve, protect and store our stuff have become industries in their own right. So Rightsizing Your Life is, among other things, an exhortation to simplify in the second half of life, to pare down to what we consider the essentials (a revealing exercise if there ever was one!), and thus create space for self-discovery, creativity, an exhilarating new freedom, to name a few benefits.

Following an excellent Foreword by Gail Sheehy, Part I covers just that. Part II is where the rubber meets the road: a seven-step how-to that makes rightsizing sound, if not easier, than doable and necessary. I was particularly taken with Chapter 6, “Identify Your Favorite Things,” a discussion that goes far beyond the thing itself. You will no doubt recognize yourself somewhere in the list “Ten Reasons We’re Prisoners of Our Possessions.”

If you feel yourself more than ready to rightsize and simplify but feel overwhelmed by the task, go directly to “Call in the Professionals” – yes, there is a small army of people who can help you declutter, sort, organize, move, retrofit, remodel. Great resources throughout, including websites and other readings.

Not So-New ‘Retirement’

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A study from the Vanguard Center for Retirement Research released recently is further evidence that retirement is more marketing concept than reality. “Worried You Don’t Have Enough for Retirement?” (from AARP The Magazine) is pretty typical of the advertising for financial advice and portfolio management that targets our age group.

The Vanguard survey of 2,474 individuals age 40 to 69 indicates that “The conventional view of retirement — working full-time until a set date then shifting to full-time leisure –- does not match the experience of many older Americans.” Ergo, the so-called “New Retirement” of baby boomers that blends work with leisure is not so new. Some other nuggets of interest from the study:

  • According to the Social Security Administration, 45% of people 65 to 69 are earning income from work, as are 25% of people 70-74.

  • Downshifting, as in changing one’s relationship to work, is more typical than an abrupt end to work.

  • 6 in 10 people define the word “retirement” as some combination of work and leisure.

  • Self-employment is the second most popular option among the “Never Retire” group.

  • Implications for financial advisers: more complex and customized help needed.
  • Implications for employers who want to hang on to their experienced talent: phased retirement in demand.

Our choice and recommendation is for a balanced portfolio of work, service and leisure in later life. For more on this, contact a 2young2retire Certified Facilitator in your area and ask about the 2young2retire course. For listing by state, scroll down on right.

Saving Too Much?

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Huh? When was the last time you heard that in this country? It is certainly an attention-grabber, which explains why A Contrarian View: Save Less, Retire With Enough is the number one emailed article in today’s New York Times. Naturally, the surprisingly consistent conclusion of a ‘loose confederation of well-regarded economists’ is getting a frosty reception from the folks who profit the most from managing large retirement portfolios. And critics of the research have a point in arguing that it could be a disincentive to save, which is a tough sell as it is.

We are squarely in the contrarian camp ourselves on this subject, if for a different reason. In fact, one book we recommend to people 50+ and older is Retire on Less Than You Think written by Fred Brock, former Seniority columnist for the Times, now ‘retired’ as a professor of journalism and author. Brock’s case is not for saving less, but for cutting expenses, and he offers specific and compelling examples of how to do that, including his own.

What isn’t at all new in the report is the persistence of the idea that people are retiring, as in ceasing to work, and therefore in need of adequate funds to keep them out of soup kitchens. This flies in the face of every survey conducted recently, and disputes the abundant evidence of people working past age 65, even if they can afford not to. Why older people in the workforce or starting businesses remains newsworthy, is a puzzlement.

Prisoner in Paradise

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A coach and certified 2young2retire facilitator tells us of an affluent, retired client who is struggling to find something meaningful for the next part of his life. He describes himself as a ‘prisoner in paradise.’ Sounds like a nice problem to have. You’ve heard the saying,we know that money won’t buy us happiness, but we want to find out for ourselves? The irony here is that the wealth many of us aspire to, that we imagine will bring us freedom and unlimited choices — not to mention material goodies — can have just the opposite effect.

There are any number of reasons we need to be challenged throughout life. Strength or resistance training comes to mind. When we contract muscles to lift progressively heavier weights, we are deliberately causing minute ‘injuries’ in the muscle fibers. The body’s healing response actually makes the muscles stronger. In humanistic psychology, resilience is the “human capacity and ability to face, overcome, be strengthened by, and even be transformed by experiences of adversity.”

“You gotta have heat in everything you do,” says Wynton Marsalis. Advised Eleanor Roosevelt: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” To live richly, whatever your financial status, make these your mantra.

The Not-So Silent Generation

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Between the Greatest Generation and much on-going ado about their children, the Baby Boomers, those of us born between 1925 and 1942 don’t get much respect. We are known as the Silent Generation, a term coined for us by Time Magazine in 1951, and we have been called “withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous” and of course, silent. According to a succinct Wikipedia’s entry, we are generally considered conformists, plagued by indecision, the “suffocated children of war and depression.” Personal note: Howard remembers the World’s Fair of 1939 and “Doctor, what brand do you smoke?” Marika remembers everyone in uniform, the jitterbug, and post-war rationing in England.

If you are a Silent (or even if you’re not), consider this:

Silents have been ignored by marketers (we’re good with that!), the popular culture (Elvis, ignored?), and employers (maybe, because we wore our gray flannel suits to work and did our jobs). We may also be the last generation to receive a pension from employers, and the majority of us are retired (not us!)

No Silent was ever elected to the presidency. To this we say, Martin Luther King, Jr., more influential than any president since Truman in changing the course of American history. We say: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, not-so-Silents whose music changed the course of politics in the 60s.

Celebrate Silents with Frank Kaiser. Read historian David Kaiser’s (no relation) blog History Unfolding on the impact of Silents in public life today. Check out Time Magazine’s 70s interviews of prominent Silents like Gloria Steinem. Tell us what you think.

50+ Health Tip for Men: Eat Your Broccoli!

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Better yet, combine broccoli with tomatoes, says a new University of Illinois study on the effects of diet on prostate cancer. According to study co-author, Kirstie Canene-Adams: “Older men with slow-growing prostate cancer who have chosen watchful waiting over chemotherapy and radiation should seriously consider altering their diets to included more tomatoes and broccoli.”

No problem in our pizza and pasta-loving house. With this quick, easy recipe, adapted from Andrew Weil‘s original, we even get our grandsons to eat tons of the green stuff.

Cut up one bunch of broccoli or use a packet of florets. Save the stalks for broccoli cheddar soup, another favorite around here. Place in large sauce pan.

Add 2-3 cloves of garlic, mashed, about 1/3 cup water, 1 tablespoon olive oil, a sprinkle of sea salt, and a dash of red pepper flakes.

Cover pan tightly and bring to boil, then lower heat and steam until crisp-tender. The broccoli should be bright green. Don’t walk away because the water boils away quickly. Overcooked broccoli (brownish) is what gives the vegetable its bad name. Ideally, you’ll have a small quantity of delicious garlic-infused broth to pour over the broccoli.

Enjoy with a tomato sauce pizza or pasta. Do it again tomorrow.