Good News Hunger

1 Reply

How often does a good news rise to the top of the list? Well, today it did in New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof’s wonderful piece on Beatrice Biira, for whom the gift of a goat through Heifer International was the transforming event of her life. The fact that the column was #1 on the most emailed list was an indication of how much we hunger for good news in a time when it is in short supply. This is not only that rare occurrence, but a reminder of how relatively easy it is to make a huge difference in the life of someone who is heading into the oblivion of “one more illiterate African woman, another of the continent’s squandered human resources.”

At 2young2retire, we are often asked for ideas about community service by members of our 50 and older audience. The both good and bad news is: there are more social problems crying out for our help than there are people looking for them. Mature volunteers are in great demand for their life experience and dedication. Just look around your own community, look at the schools, see where and how the other half lives. And if you need a place to sift through the available volunteer opportunities, here are two. Idealist and Volunteer Match.

In the meantime, when you next need a gift for someone who has everything — and that is an awful lot of us in this country — consult the Heifer catalog. As little as $20 can send chicks to a family in Africa or Asia. You get a beautiful card to send to your friend or family member, along with your own message to appreciate the abundance in which many of us live by a happy accident of birth. Make you own good news; satisfy that hunger for uplift.

Much Ado About Retirement Savings

As if economic news wasn’t depressing enough, this week Hewitt Associates, “a global human resources consulting and outsourcing company,” got some press with a report that is sure to fuel money worries in all but the most financially secure Boomers-and-beyond. Quote: When factoring in inflation and increases in medical costs, Hewitt predicts that employees will need to replace, on average, 126 percent of their final pay at retirement—significantly more than the traditional targets of 70 to 90 percent pay replacement. Yikes!

But all is not lost, the report goes on to say. Small changes in behavior, e.g. increasing one’s savings, smarter investing, lower fees, and delaying retirement, can “enable more people to achieve a more comfortable standard of living once they retire.” The Motley Fool does the math differently, factoring out the ‘costs that evaporate once you leave the workforce’ — Retire Well for Less That You Think — to show that you need to replace much less income than is commonly supposed.

Both miss these points: 1. You can choose to reduce your standard living in any one of a number of ways, of which clipping coupons is the least creative and downsizing your living space perhaps the most disruptive, and 2. Opting to retire in the traditional sense will almost guarantee that you’ll be increasing your medical costs, so the choice to keep working in some capacity (pro bono, if you can and wish), actually positively impacts your bottom line.

For other fresh thinking and great tips you won’t find anywhere else, get yourself a copy of the new edition of Retire on Less Than You Think by Fred Brock, former Seniority columnist of The New York Times. Accessible as a Dummies book, it includes right-on personal anecdotes like how Brock cashed in a house in Montclair, NJ for a much less expensive one in Manhattan (Kansas, that is), and not only reduced his expenses but pocketed the difference.  By the way, he also ‘retired’ from Times job to become a journalism professor.  Read this review.

Prune That Resume!

One of advantages of being an older worker (lots of experience), can also play havoc with a resume, especially in a field that typically skews to younger people.  The good news: recruiters tend to prefer older workers over younger for their stability (average length of stay for younger worker is 26 months).  Here are a few tips from an IT specialist on how to create a resume that brings out your best for the job you’re after in any field.  

  • Prune that resume down to the essentials!  If you’re 50 or better, it probably reads more like a book than a document designed to get you that interview.  You’re likely competing with younger folks, so let the points be crisp and compelling.      
  •  Focus on 3-4 core skills that are directly relevant to the job you’re seeking.  Think of your resume as a work in progress and be prepared to customize it quickly.  Obvious point: check grammar and proof for typos every time you change and reprint it.
  • Skip any certifications, expertise or accomplishments that ‘date’ you.  After you get a feel for the work at hand, you can always bring them up during the interview. 
  • Smartest tip we’ve seen anywhere: ask people in the field you’re interested in to critique your resume.  They’re much more likely to see the red flags that could mean your resume winds up in the trash.   
  • Be confident.  The workplace is changing in your favor.  According to AARP, by 2012 almost 20 percent of the U.S. work force will be 44 or over. Americans are predicted to work longer than ever before. There were 5.5 million people 65 and older in the labor force in 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a number which is projected to reach 10.1 million by 2016.
Read more:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=515

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Careers/Tips-for-Older-IT-Job-Seekers/

 

Paradigm Shift?

You know something is changing in the culture when you start to see full page ads with words and images that deliver a new message. When I was contemplating a next career as a yoga instructor 10 years ago, it still seemed a rather esoteric, out there endeavor. Today, Yoga Journal is fat with advertising for retreats, schools, yoga products of every description. Moreover, images of toned people striking yoga poses or sitting in smiling meditation are commonplace in mainstream media.

With this in mind, I have to mention a full page ad that appeared in PLAY, a magazine section of last Sunday’s New York Times, that is emblematic of the zeitgeist as regards older people and the choice of meaningful second acts. The ad is for a new partnership between the Times and Monster.com, the career site. The headline copy is: FIND A JOB YOU’D DO FOR FREE…THEN LET THEM PAY YOU. “When you do what you love to do,” continues the body text, “it’s not really work at all. Now you can find the job you love, when you love to live. Your calling is calling — find it at nytimes.com/monster.” Good enough (and I love the idea of a job one loves), but the image should resonate with all of us 50 and beyond. It shows a mature male face, a hand holding a piece of chalk at a blackboard, the suggestion of a classroom. A teacher who loves his job?

As it happens, teaching is, like nursing and nurse-training, a profession where there are more jobs than people to fill them. These are also jobs where maturity and life experience give one an unusual advantage, and where we can exercise the ‘give back’ desire than grows stronger as we pass midlife and begin seeking our life’s work. Our calling, which we may have ignored to attend to the business of building a career and family, calls more loudly and clearly. How each of us answers can shape the rest of our lives. If enough of us in later life choose work that makes a positive impact on society, we can shift the paradigm*.

*Once used only in the scientific context, “paradigm shift” has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought-pattern — a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing (Source: Wikipedia)

Six Million…

seems an impressive figure (about 2% of the U.S. adult population), but Randy Pausch, the 47-year-old Carnegie-Mellon professor who is dying of pancreatic cancer, deserves a bigger audience for his Last Lecture, created as a legacy for his young children. So, we’re doing our bit to get more people to tune in. (Here’s Randy’s website that contains all the links to his various appearances, and translations in Chinese (yes!).

Published in April, The Last Lecture is #3 on Amazon and prominently displayed at airport book stores (I saw it in Chicago and Denver last week). Co-author Jeffrey Zaslow’s report in the Encore section of the Wall Street Journal is a fine preview. This is the Tuesdays with Morrie of this decade, and its success is evidence that many of us are eager to read messages about making the most of every moment of life, from someone on the verge of losing it all. The important question is: what do we do next?

Update: Randy Pausch died July 25, 2008.  Here is more about his life.

God’s Waiting Room

Last week, as I visited my mother (91 in June) in a nursing home in Western Canada, the reality of what lies ahead for our elders and perhaps for ourselves was so in-my-face, I found myself hyperventilating (yoga training notwithstanding) and struggling to keep my spirits up, for her sake and mine.

In truth, I have a lot to be grateful for. My mom’s facility is as good as it gets: dedicated, kindly staff (if too few of them in oil boomtown Edmonton); clean, comfortable, well-equipped rooms; carefully calibrated meds for pain and depression; and lots of what we used to call extracurricular activities to help residents be more independent and social. Today, for example, a neighboring animal shelter had brought in puppies for petting. Sometimes, it’s nursery school children who are wonderful with old and disabled people. Last week while I was there, they had pub night when residents enjoy some wine and live entertainment.

When it was clear that my mother’s medical needs had become beyond our ability to provide for (geography didn’t help much), we choose this place also for the mix of age groups and levels of disability. So, my mom can socialize with a lovely 50-something woman named Sherry who suffers from MS, but who is also bright, friendly and also interested in jewelry and clothes. There are residents who play Scrabble and cards. And recently, a beautiful nurse-trainee from Brazil in body-hugging uniform, with fashionable haircut and great personality, was assigned there for a few weeks, and everyone perked up. All this costs about $30K/year, or less than half for a comparable facility here in Florida, and some of the expenses are tax-deductible.

But most of the population there are elderly so you can’t fight the God’s Waiting Room atmosphere, and I’m no better at staring that in the eye than the next person. So I spend most of my time amusing my mom: she adores Scrabble and Rummy 500, pizza and sushi, and a new brightly-colored dress. I can focus on these things because she already has her so-called affairs in order: personal directive and living will are all set; she gave me power of attorney a couple of years ago. I know what she wants for final ceremony and exactly where she wants her ashes strewn. Sure, she would rather be traveling to visit her great-grandchildren and spending the winter where it’s warm. But she has found a was to be happy in the moment. If you think about it, that is all we really have.

Being Downsized

Last week, a young friend got the ax. She was one of 8,000 people downsized by a large investment bank with reported losses of $10 billion in the first quarter. If that figure boggles the mind, it’s only because few of us can conceive of it in any real terms. How many tall skinny lattes would $10B buy? How much human misery does downsizing cause?

It didn’t matter that she had been at this firm for 10 years and had been assured when the last round of layoffs occurred that she ‘had nothing to worry about.’ She is single and turns 40 next March, so time is certainly on her side. Also, she has credentials in another , completely different field that could soften the loss of income. But that will take time to develop, just as it will take time to recover from the blow.

At first, she was more upset about the way it happened than that it happened. If you’ve been downsized, you recognize the circumstances. You are called in, given the news, and never return to your desk. Your things are mailed to you. If you are lucky, you will get assigned to an outplacement firm which helps you sort out COBRA, severance (if any) and so on. Sometimes, you get some career counseling. But it’s all pretty cut and dried. For the pain of separation, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

In some ways, the abrupt nature of downsizing is like retirement, even when it is voluntary. Endings are wrenching, especially if you’ve been with an organization for any length of time. You grow accustomed to health care coverage, colleagues and familiar faces, work you know how to do, perhaps even enjoyed, a sense that you are needed. Suddenly, THEY don’t want you any more. How do you not take it personally?

These days, people change jobs frequently and downsizing is so much a fact of corporate life, that your resume will not be blighted by this event. And, as we all know, retirement is not irrevocable. But even the most self-confident among us needs some time to process the separation, to let the shock subside, and even to grieve, if that feels right. If there’s no financial pressure to find another position, it could be an ideal time for a sabbatical.

Unless you are in academia, chances are an opportunity to take a break won’t come around again. Why not take advantage of the breathing room, the time to think and reflect? Perhaps you will find yourself asking Big Questions, like: What am I here for? What can I do to improve my community, society, the world? What kind of impact am I making in the larger sense? And if money were no object, what kind of work would I be doing? Such a shift in perspective could be just what you needed, and never had time for.

One Thing Leads to Another

I was walking with my friend and yoga student, Mary, up from the beach after finishing a class and she said she had been thinking more about how one thing leads to another, and whether that might be a good topic for the Small Group Ministry at the Unitarian congregation we both belong to.

We agreed that it was. It was also too intriguing a statement not to pursue, so I asked her to describe what she meant. And she told me, in brief, how she found her life-long passion because when she graduated from college, she went out knocking on doors looking for a job and found herself at the Library of Congress where they were looking for someone to work with the blind. All she wanted was a job, and it turned out to be a job that led to other jobs, in Beirut where she later lived, and then in Geneva, one thing leading to another, and in the process she found the work she was meant to do.

Why does this resonate with me? 2young2retire, the mom-and-pop I founded with my husband, Howard, ten years ago, helps people at midlife and beyond transition from work they did for a living, to work they do for love (and sometimes for money). Our book (Too Young to Retire: 101 Ways to Start the Rest of Your Life) and course on which it is based, use provocative questions to get at what really matters to people, where they feel they could make a contribution — a different motivation from making the mortgage payment — and then how to proceed to find that next work. This work, usually found in one’s late 50’s or 60, has been called a Next Chapter, a Second Act, an Encore career, but what characterizes this new work is that it feels like a calling, something you simply cannot resist doing.

Transition is never easy because we tend to be creatures of habit. And it’s good to have a plan, a goal, a sense of direction. But perhaps we’ve not given enough weight to the value of just getting started, taking that first step, as Mary did long ago, and then simply letting one thing lead to another. Because it most certainly will.

They Flunked Retirement, and the World Will Be Better for It

What do John Kanzius and Dr. Jose Antonio Abreau have in common, beside being featured in two back-to-back good news segments on a recent 60 Minutes (April 13)? Although motivated by very different causes, both 60-somethings came out of retirement to make contributions to humanity that will be felt for generations, perhaps forever. Here are the summaries of their stories.

Unable to sleep one night during a recent bout of chemotherapy for leukemia, John Kanzius, a retired businessman and radio technician, had a brainstorm: was it possible that radio waves could kill cancer? Months of tinkering in his own garage and thousands of dollars of his own money later, he produced the Kanzius Machine which, combined with nano technology, zaps cancer cells in experimental animals, leaving healthy tissue intact.  Kanzius’ invention has been deemed promising enough to attract research funding.

El Sistema, founded by retired economist Dr. Jose Antonio Abreau in 1975, is rescuing hundreds of thousands of young Venezuelans from lives of poverty and neglect, by teaching them to play a musical instrument and introducing them into youth orchestras. The Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra, the flower of eL Sistema, now plays to packed concert halls around the world. Says Raphel Elster, one of the leaders, “We work hard. And they love it!”

Staying On the Job: Open Dialogue Needed

All research on older workers indicates that a significant number will choose to become free agents of one sort or another, some swelling the ranks of entrepreneurs 50 and older. But many who are retirement-eligible would prefer to remain in their jobs, renegotiating terms of employment with their current employers. Phased retirement and consulting gigs are among the many options most sought after, if employees could find a way to broach the subject without jeopardizing their positions.

As it happens, the more enlightened companies are willing to listen (see A Longer Goodbye). These employers know that talent shortages are not going away any time soon. This means they are much more amenable to new ideas on how to retain valuable employees of a certain age. Sounds like a win-win, provided there is frank and open dialogue on the subject.  And a new bill before Congress now will certainly add some fuel to the discussion.

Regardless of which side of this question you find yourself, check out the Retention Connection, a collection of thoughtful articles on the subject from The Herman Group, “futurists specializing in workforce and worplace trends.” While you’re at it, you could sign up for the free Herman Trend Alerts, which arrives in my emailbox every week. There’s invariably a tip I find useful.