Chapter 6

Knowledge and Skills You Need Along the Way

Navigating the uncertain takes planning as you’ve learned in earlier chapters. All the plans are predicated on your ability (and willingness) to pay attention, think, articulate, and learn.

In my own case, I frequently feel inarticulate and a bit like someone from another galaxy when I visit the modern/contemporary art of the wonderful new Whitney Museum in New York; yet I am completely at home and entranced in the museum’s new building itself. In that case architecture speaks to me more loudly than pieces of art. By contrast, I am fully at home and connected to the portraiture and other art in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., yet I am usually oblivious to the building itself. How about you? What most regularly draws and keeps your attention? What are the most representative of your daily thoughts? Which have the most impact on you and others? In which situations do you feel most and least able to articulate? How aware are you that learning is truly a lifelong process?

Five-year-old Irwin was on his first sleepover at his friend Billy’s house. In the middle of the night he awoke crying. Billy’s mother came to comfort him and asked him what was the matter. Through his tears Irwin said, “I didn’t know it would be so much darker at night at your house than it is at mine.”

Kelly, age 12, was wildly enthusiastic throughout the religious holidays. Suddenly she was glum. Her dad came to check on her. “Why,” she asked plaintively, “does time go so much faster when we’re happiest?”

Christopher, age 21, was about to graduate from college, the first in his family to do so. “What are you going to do now?” asked his grandmother. “I’m not sure,” he said. “My whole life has been about getting good grades and graduating. I don’t think I know, yet, how to live any other kind of life.”

Maria was 40 years old and her daughter, Manuela, was 17. “I had the teenage girl mood swings, too, Manuela. It felt totally out of control for me, too. And I never did figure out what stopped or started them other than hormones. I still don’t know. I just had to ride it out, like being in tall waves, until they finally flattened out. I wish I had an answer for you but I don’t.”

Martin, age 63, and Andrea, age 61, had been married for 41 years. During that time, they both had jobs, went to school at night, raised five kids, supported their church, took care of both sets of aging parents, participated in community and volunteer activities, and completed the hundreds of tasks it takes to keep such a life together. At breakfast one morning Andrea said, “I’ve been noticing that all these years we’ve been like two horses in parallel harness, pulling whatever was the day’s load. Usually it was about what other people needed and our roles in making that happen. Along the way we stopped talking; we were such a good team together that we didn’t need to. This Retirement Thing is starting to scare me. For the first time we’re going into unfamiliar territory where we have few examples. We can’t afford to not work at all. We are both tired of demanding more-than-full-time jobs and ready to be done with that. I don’t think we know what our options are. We’re going to have to start talking with each other again and differently. That’s scaring me, too. Do you think we can do it?”

Eighty-four-year-old George was really sick for the first time in his life. He looked up at his family from his hospital bed and said, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

Lollie, age 101, loved to sit in a rocking chair on the porch where she lived. Her 21-year-old great, great granddaughter, sitting in the adjacent rocker, had just asked Lollie about the secret to living so long. Said Lollie, “Don’t smoke, a thimble of the best bourbon every day, and kiss and hug as often as possible. That’s what worked for me. I don’t know what will work for you, sweetheart.”

Raise your hand if at any point in your life so far you already had all the skills and expertise you needed to last for the rest of your life. Anyone?

Raise your hand if at some point in your life a change came along, either chosen by you or imposed on you without permission, and you found you had to scramble to figure out what to do because previous experience hadn’t perfectly prepared you for that moment. Everyone, right?

Raise your hand if you already know that the language and images you have to work with regarding both retirement planning and life planning are currently inadequate to the total task of After 50 imagining, planning, action, and adapting because so much has changed that the word “retirement” is no longer adequate for the many possibilities, situations, and needs. Do I see a sprinkling of hands?

In our society and educational systems, it’s my experience that for the most part someone in authority identifies what we don’t know but need to learn, creates a curriculum and syllabus, and we proceed to learn it and pass the test. Of course, we write papers and conduct experiments, among other activities, but the crowning evidence of our success is our test scores. In my opinion, this has led to an exaggerated focus on passing the test, solving the problem, and our strong, national bias for action over reflection.

THE IMPORTANCE—AND SOMETIMES INADEQUACY—OF OUR WORDS

As human beings one of the ways we communicate is through words, which are really symbols that allow us to think and speak and our listeners to hear and interpret for themselves. Without these symbols and fluency in them, we are rendered both inarticulate and isolated as if we were suddenly transported to another planet with an alien language and culture.

Some of these words are written. Think stop sign, poetry, meat-loaf recipe, love letter, news headlines on your smartphone or tablet, and receipt for dry cleaning.

Some of these words are spoken. Think election campaign speeches, family meeting conversations, news broadcasts, an elevator that tells you what floor you have reached, and commercials on TV and the Internet.

We use lots of other symbols such as facial expressions, open or closed doors, images, music, and gestures to communicate, of course. These all combine with our word usage to form our daily language.

But for our purposes, I’ll stick to words. Our interpretations of word symbols can vary wildly. Some of them are images such as photos and other forms of art and visual commerce.

Here are six examples of how our language symbols have failed to keep up with or stay ahead of current realities and usage:

1.Job. A form of work for pay in which the employer and employee agree that in exchange for skills and performance within certain hours at certain locations, a permanent or semi-permanent arrangement is created. We have failed to craft language that matches the emerging reality of work for pay. For all the hoopla about the number of jobs created (which seldom mentions whether or not they pay enough to keep a middle-class family afloat), the fact is that we are leaving the purely job-dominated era and moving toward freelancing, self-employment, entrepreneurial work, project-based work, and other forms of work for pay that may end up challenging jobs for preeminence sooner than we expect.

2.Family. Mom or Grandma, Dad or Grandpa, the kids, Fido the dog and Fluffy the cat. Despite overwhelming statistics to the contrary, many of us still consider any configuration, that is different unqualified to be a family. We don’t have a word for what that other configuration is, but it isn’t a family to many of us. Our language has failed to keep up with the new, already well-established norms of our country.

3.Retirement. A later period of life based on a previous extended work life, which, through programs, fully funded the ability to not work at all for the rest of our lives. We have failed to create language that matches the emerging reality of retirement: “retiring” much later, the necessity to keep working, taking a job to get health-care coverage and other benefits that are more important than the actual compensation, leaving full-time employment to buy into a business or start a venture or accept other full- and part-time employment. Retirement is no longer the broadly shared golden dream of yore.

4.Permanent. We have failed to create language that matches the current truth about levels of change. We’re still talking Career Path in a world in which work is continually being reinvented, departments and companies come and disappear and reorganize with amazing regularity, and leadership is an increasingly distributed function. Long-term employment is no longer universally a guarantee of respect, admiration, and wisdom. In fact, permanent or long-term employment can now be seen as a measure of a lack of ambition and adaptability.

5.Elderly. We have failed to create language that adequately grasps sophistication about aging beyond chronological age. When is “elderly”? What are the criteria? How can one 80-year-old person seem elderly while someone else the exact same age is obviously not? How can someone age 65 seem really old and his uncle so young at age 78? It isn’t that we need to drop the term elderly. It’s that we need to understand what we mean when we use it and create additional language that captures the nuances of aging today. Otherwise we simply have an inaccurate category into which to throw most people, ourselves included, over a certain age.

6.Plan. We have failed to create language that matches the reality of short-term, adaptable planning in contrast to long-term, map-like plans. Why is this important? Because when it comes to After 50, planning is an essential but very different exercise and awareness than it was in the days when you created a plan, put it in a drawer, and pulled it out a few years later to use as a basis for a new plan.

FOCUS ON LEARNING, NOT JUST ACQUIRING A LIST OF THINGS YOU HAVE MEMORIZED

I’m convinced that when it comes to learning, knowledge, and skills, many, if not the majority, of us go straight to memorization and repetition, passing the test or solving the problem, and moving on to the next item in our attention queue. Eventually we can even come to assume that our previous experiences and solutions will automatically apply to and resolve our current and upcoming situations.

Earlier in this book, I distinguished between knowledge and skills. In truth it takes both because having the skill without the knowledge means we can mechanically act but fail to grasp any of the strategic importance or implications of what we are doing and why. Conversely, having the knowledge without the skill means we can understand but not act effectively in our own or others’ best interest.

Memorization and repetition as skills are very important and valid. As a primary method they work in an environment where everything is stable and reasonably unmoving. And they don’t necessarily guarantee understanding.

Primary reliance on memorization and repetition will be at odds with the world many of us are entering or will face in the future when we are doing our planning for retirement and life. I am endeavoring here to point out that adaptability and life pioneering may not come with familiar tools and we will have to seek them out. See Chapter 2, “Today’s New 50-plus Lives,” and also Chapter 3, “A Tour of the New Normal.”

The following are my recommendations for understanding and skills, but it is not meant to be all-inclusive or a complete checklist of everything you will need. Instead, I hope you will use it as a smart and strategic foundation upon which you can build all of the additional understanding and skills you will discover you need as you go along.

MY TOP 9 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE MOST IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS

All the types of content expertise required for you to be executive director of your After 50 life. We have discussed many of these throughout your life.

Skill Set: Everything it takes for full, active responsibility to plan, craft, adapt, and live your high-quality life After 50.

Phoebe, 62, had led a very successful life: bank VP, gourmet cook, grown kids, education, husband, and travel. When Bill announced he had found someone else and wanted a divorce, she was shocked. True, they hadn’t been getting along the way they used to, but for it to come to this now? “OK,” she eventually thought, “I’ve got to get my act together here and plan for myself.”

She immediately made two discoveries: 1) She was poor at planning for herself based on her unique needs and preferences. She had always built plans based on her family. 2) She had led a life of structures—everything that came with structured work, structured family responsibilities, structured weekends, and the repetition and patterns that performing in multiple roles for a long time can induce. She had no experience creating her own structures from scratch. Because her background was institutional banking and she was used to job descriptions, she decided to write one for herself as executive director of her life. This is what she came up with:

Under the direction and guidance of the Board of Directors (herself), the person in this position (Phoebe) is responsible for the planning, organizing, motivating, assessment, and directing the organization (Phoebe) for maximum effectiveness, satisfaction, and engagement with life. While the incumbent is free to aid and support others, at no time should their priorities indefinitely swamp her own. At no point, unless she is no longer able to do so, will she ask or expect anyone to take more responsibility for her and for her life than she does. She is responsible for all of her own retirement and life planning, although she may employ professional advisors as required. This person must have the ability to communicate effectively with diverse groups, knowledge of budgeting and bookkeeping, life program development, strategic and tactical planning in two- to three-year increments, and both program and overall effectiveness evaluation. She must be able to operate effectively as a single woman, a highly competent person After 50. She will also have the ability to maintain, renew, and upgrade networks of friends and contacts. She may also, according to current demands, from time to time be called upon to be the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Health Officer, Chief Marketing Communications Officer, Chief Materials Procurement Officer, the cook, chauffeur, and janitor. She must have reasonable curiosity and taste for adventure. Finally, she is responsible for forming a Board of Directors (her four closest friends) and holding a board meeting (dinner at her house—she would cook) where she will present to the board members evidence of performance and need for improvement in each of the items mentioned previously in this job description In this way, she will have ritualized having the important conversations regularly AND not become inadvertently isolated. Semi-annually she will be responsible for reporting to the board on her learnings about:

1.What she already knows that applies

2.What she realizes she must learn about

3.Her plan (with time-frame commitments) for items 1 and 2.

And also she is responsible for . . .

4.Updating this position description every six months, or more often, as required.

At least once a month she will have dinner with one or more people, ahead of her in the retirement/life process, whom she respects and admires. The dinner conversation must include high-quality questions about how they got to where they are, what they wish they had known earlier, what they would do differently, what has come as a pleasant surprise, and how they are planning their future. Finally, she must be able to adapt appropriately when things don’t go according to plan and reconsider/update the plan and herself as a result.

How to recognize and work with all forms of change from continuous to discontinuous.

Skill Set: Paying close attention, asking great questions, creativity and curiosity, asking for assistance from the right people at the right times, updating plans, staying cool, and personal adaptability.

Barry, age 60, fell off a horse and was badly injured. He was unable to return to work for more than a year. In that time his employer had been acquired by another company, the local office in which he had worked was dramatically downsized, and technologies had been brought in to replace a significant percentage of what Barry and his colleagues used to do. Clearly the company would have a job for him but not his old job that didn’t exist anymore. The injury and the acquisition of his employer Barry saw as Continuous Change. The injury and elimination of his job Barry saw as Discontinuous Change. “I’m too young to retire,” he said. “How much can you pay me for part-time work, where are the new jobs with the company, and what does your tuition reimbursement cover? I think I want to go back for retraining.”

Periodic, effective assessment of your professional and personal networks of the right connections. What do you need? Where are you oversubscribed? Where do you have holes? What do you need to do about it and how soon? How do your networks fit into your plan?

Skill Set: The actual work of building and maintaining networks of relationships: connecting, effective use of technologies and personal time, nurturing, exchanging value over time, requesting, balancing your time and energy among your various networks.

Rafael and Paloma, now ages 71 and 72, respectively, had lived in a large house on a tree-lined, old neighborhood street near the center of the city for years. Both had had big-time careers. The last of the kids had finally left. Paloma and Rafael knew that the big house was a magnet for their twenty-something kids. Eleven years ago, they hit on the perfect solution: retire, sell the big house, and buy a much smaller one in an After 50s community about two hours away in the rolling countryside. Golf. Tennis. Swimming. Shared Interest Clubs. All yards maintained by the homeowners’ association. When they moved in, just about everyone was in the same age group and had comparable, shared enthusiasms. Slowly their personal and professional networks in the city began to erode. Lots of people began to retire and two hours each way was too far to drive for a dinner or a lunch. Their network base slowly moved from work-related connections in the city to retirement-related connections in their retirement community. To their surprise, even though they think they are still very young in their early 70s, they began to see several of their neighbors begin to get sick or move to be closer to their kids or withdraw from many of the activities the community provided. Paloma and Rafael were faced with a challenge: In the face of erosion of both their professional and personal networks, where were they going to go or replace people to keep the networks fresh and vital? And what would it take to do that?

Remaining reasonably current in technologies and related awareness.

Skill Set: It isn’t that you or I need to know everything about everything technical AND keep our knowledge leading-edge current. However, if we can’t speak the language and understand what is still prevalent and what is emerging as hot, it will put us straight out of the conversation and leave us behind.

“I don’t own a cell phone,” Rick, age 66, the auto salesperson said proudly. “I want my grandkids to talk to me, not text me.” I must admit to having some empathy with that. “My job,” he continued, “is to have great relationships with my customers. I can outsource to one of my colleagues anytime the introduction of new car owners to all the techie possibilities that await them on the dashboard.” “If you don’t know what you are selling—features and benefits—why would someone buy from you instead of from someone else?” I asked. “My customers come back to me because they trust me, plain and simple,” he said. “What happens when all your current customers are dead and the only salespeople the new customers will want to see are the ones who can talk about the whole car, technologies included?” His response: “I guess that’s when I’ll have to retire.”

How to balance external validation from roles and goals with internal, grounded, and informed validation you provide to yourself.

Skill Set: As we age, many of us will experience our abilities gradually diminishing. Early on it can look like dropping the occasional, very familiar word out of the blue and not be a big deal at all. Much later it can look like greatly reduced memory or tolerance for chaos or mobility. Not all of us will suffer from the same things, of course, and some won’t at all, but for the majority of us it will, inevitably, be something. As things happen, our self-esteem can begin to plummet. Most of us have led lives of significant external validation from roles and achievement. Professional: We were a sports champion. Personal: We were known among our friends as the Thoughtful One, never forgetting birthdays. Family: We were always someone’s father or mother or granddaughter or sibling or aunt or nephew. If we were good at it, things worked in our favor. If not?

What’s my point? My point is that, as we age, even though we feel younger than our chronological age number, we will have decreasing opportunity to garner our self-esteem exclusively from our accomplishments and roles. Either we will have to make do with less OR we will have to learn to build our own self-esteem outside of roles and accomplishments. For many of us, this is a totally revolutionary and counterintuitive idea. We’re used to roles and problems and solutions and achievements and goals and more achievements. What else could we need?

Saul, age 68, advertised himself as a “retired salesman and proud of it.” His 70-year-old wife, Mimi, wanted him to slow down. He couldn’t. In retirement he was still looking for the next challenge, the next mountain to conquer, the next sale to make, and the next card game to win. It reminded Mimi of the days when he was on the roller coaster at work: He was only as good and as valuable as his sales numbers for last month, his most recent accomplishment. His ongoing search for Next regularly exhausted them both, but Saul didn’t have anywhere else to look.

Fifty-five-year-old Molly, a widow, often says, “I just love my grandchildren. All four of them. If it weren’t for them, I don’t know who I’d be. My favorite things to do are to bake with them and take them to the movies.” When they were little, she would have them come to her house, one at a time, for a special treat. At 13, her oldest grandchild revolted. He said he was too old to keep going to Grandma’s house. He wanted to hang with his friends. And whose need was this staying overnight really meeting at this point? “Don’t you understand, Grandma? I’m getting to be a man and that doesn’t mix so well with a constantly doting grandmother.” Molly hadn’t done the work of finding other sources of self-esteem, especially within herself.

Debbie, age 65 and a longtime divorcee, finally retired from a long-term job with a long-term employer. She loved her kids and grandkids. She even loved her children’s spouses. She loved her apartment and her friends. Somehow she knew, however, that she couldn’t just stop working without doing something radical. She decided she wanted and needed to get deeply involved with a group of people who were making a difference in the world AND exploring who they were and could be in the process. Radical for Debbie turned out to be joining the Peace Corps and teaching in Southeast Asia. Her daughter had a fit. Her son said, “Good for you, Mom.” Her sister said, “It’s always been called Your Life for a reason. Whatever you choose, I will support you.” Upon her return home after two years, Debbie found she still loved her children and her grandchildren and her apartment and her friends just as much as before but she didn’t need them in the same way she used to. She had taken a risk and gotten to know herself—and new forms of self-esteem—by being a safe adventuress for a while.

How to have and keep the right professional advisors on your personal team.

Skill Set: The worst possible time to go looking for professional support is right after you have gone into a crisis situation. Can you predict EVERY professional need you may have for the rest of your life? Absolutely not. Something will happen that never occurred to you in advance. Still, is that a good reason to not have an established and ongoing relationship with all the advisors you predict you are going to need as you move into retirement, whatever form you choose, and further into your After 50 life? Look at your retirement and life ahead as you imagine it. Carefully record, review, and think about the asset exercise you did earlier in Chapter 4. Then think about the professionals you will need around you for everything from taxes to health. What do you need to be good at? Anticipate, talk with friends and colleagues to see who they respect among the specialty advisors, meet with the advisors, make choices, and start a relationship with the expectation that it will be long term.

Doug, age 67, had been having chest pains off and on for a long time. Either he didn’t want to face it or he didn’t believe he was vulnerable because admitting vulnerability about this meant admitting to a number of other vulnerabilities he didn’t want to face either. As Ellen arrived home one evening from a meeting, Doug met her at the door with his hand clutched on his chest. “Don’t take your coat off. I think you need to drive me to emergency. It’s been much worse since this afternoon.” They went straight to the emergency room. Who was Doug’s primary care physician? He didn’t have one. Who was his cardiologist? He didn’t have one. Where were the medical history records that many wise people After 50 file with the hospital just in case they are needed? He hadn’t done that.

How to skillfully develop a short-term plan, a mid-range plan, and long-term intention that make sense and can be adapted as necessary based on new or updated information.

Everyone, in my opinion, would do well to have an incremental three-segment retirement and life plan. The first segment, as we have discussed, is for the next 18 months. It’s the most specific and focused because we stand a lot greater chance of being able to control or at least strongly influence what happens within the next 18 months than further out in time. The second section is the mid-term plan containing direction and steps, but not at the level of specifics that appear in section one. The third section is the longer-term plan, which often includes intentions and possible action steps but is the least-detailed and specific of the three sections.

Skill Set: Reviewing and updating your three-segment plan regularly, driven by a calendar cycle AND by responding to new information soon after it comes to you.

Phil, age 59, loved planning. Gloria, two years younger, almost always went along with his plans. He created a complete and concrete plan that ran like an unbroken ribbon from where he stood to way out in his future. He had it laid out month by month for the next 12 years. His plan included selling the house at the top of the market, renting an apartment for a while, retiring in two years, and buying a fifth-wheel trailer and a truck to travel around the U.S. for at least three years. That was his plan. What actually happened: Gloria became ill and now needs to be within a short distance of her substantial local medical resources, the market tanked and the sale of the house didn’t make sense for the moment, his daughter got a divorce and moved in with Phil and Gloria “for a few months” until she got her feet firmly on the ground. Phil is now hatching an 18-month plan and putting off the rest of the longer-term plan until his dust settles.

How to be an After 50 life pioneer and live with the risk and impermanence that’s a part of life today.

This doesn’t mean disaster is lurking around every corner and it doesn’t mean we need to avoid all risk. It doesn’t mean being foolhardy, either. It does mean that our lives—and the world—are not as stable as they used to be and are slowly changing. This also doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t plan. Planning is a crucial part of getting to our futures as we imagine them. Plans must be shorter term in each of the three perspectives and also adaptable. We can have all the long-term intentions we want, but confusing them with a part of an ironclad plan that means we will have failed unless they come true is beyond baloney.

Great plans proceed to where we want to go but have significant tolerance for risk, impermanence, and surprises over time. Success is that the plan adapted and so did we, not that we executed on a rigid, long-term plan flawlessly.

Skill Set: Creating and maintaining a balance between our short-term goals and our long-term intentions. Certainly we need both, but the reality is that the former can be much more concrete, specific, and timelined than the latter.

Laura, age 56, and Rick, age 59, had short-term goals and long-term intentions. Their short-term goals included:

1.Being debt free

2.Building the cash reserves necessary to purchase a piece of property where they could build a house and raise dogs

3.Finding more time for each other

Their plan included a debt-elimination section complete with a budget, a savings plan also included in the overall budget, and a commitment that Sundays were for the two of them only. They would take turns planning nice Sundays. The great trap for both of them was getting ahead of themselves. They loved to go look at property and, almost always when they found one they liked, they suffered through the tight loop discussion of how to make a purchase work now without waiting. Then they both felt disappointed. Their long-term intention to purchase a piece of property remained and they didn’t want to give up short-term window-shopping/looking. They agreed they needed an excellent, strategic step right after they went property hunting but before they went around the roller coaster again and become disappointed. They finally settled on going to see Laura’s father, in whom they both adored and believed. The man was enormously practical and he was willing to do this for them whenever they felt the need. In the end, the short-term plan proceeded beautifully toward their financial goals. They needed some assistance to stay grounded in the short term without giving up property window-shopping. Laura’s father was just the man they needed.

How to stay very healthy one day at a time.

Skill Set: These skills aren’t magic. They are common sense that takes action behind them.

Seventy-four-year-old Denise was recovering from gall bladder surgery. She had a choice, according to her partner. She could either get a short-term health plan together or she could expect unending grief from Susan. Actually, how she felt after the surgery was the first thing in her entire life that made Denise feel really, unquestionably old.

She decided that at her age and in her condition, the only reasonable plan would be a repeatable, scalable short-term health plan. The plan components included:

1.Joining a health club that was actually a part of the extended hospital/medical center in their area.

2.Building a personal health network of four to five people in her own age group who could be exercise buddies with her, hear her workout commitments, and show up together. Denise knew it was all too easy to blow it off if she was doing it alone.

3.Buying an hour of a great nutritionist’s time.

4.Walking to the local coffee hangout with Susan at least three times a week.

5.Minimizing alcohol intake.

6.Making an appointment with her doctor to ask, “What are the top five things you would like to ask me to do for my own good?”

What do you notice about these knowledge and skill sets? I notice that they are doable and require a combination of attention, discipline, patience, and adaptability. None of them will fit well inside a long-term, rigid plan. Like our lives, they must adapt to new realities—which doesn’t mean always rolling over and accepting them. It does mean being strategic and smart about how and what to adapt.