Table of Contents
For my parents, Anita and Bernie
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The path that leads to success, passion, and new meaning may be found intentionally or serendipitously. But the ability to follow it, to endure its tests or apprehend its lessons, comes from faculties aided and nurtured by others. I doubt that I could have ever completed this book without the consistent and selfless encouragement and collaboration of others. And I am grateful to everyone who helped me with priceless cooperation, insight, and enthusiasm. This book would not exist without their conversations and critiques.
Many people suggested subjects and leads for the book, but I would be remiss not to single out Jim Emerman of Civic Ventures, Marcie Schwarz, Nancy Emerson Lombardo of Boston University School of Medicine, Cathy Pokines and Cecelia Taylor of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Mary Gergen, who publishes The Positive Aging Newsletter, Dick Goldberg of ComingofAge.org, and Margaret Newhouse of PassionandPurpose .com. In some cases, their suggestions led directly to the inspiring people in this book; in others, their interest and the queries they sent out on their email lists on my behalf buoyed me at an important juncture.
I am profoundly grateful to Jim Jerome for his unstinting friendship and his many valuable suggestions. Susan Dalsimers clear-sighted critique helped firm an early draft and relieve some anxiety. Thanks, too, to Pam Barr. I am grateful to Jean Brown for her speedy transcriptions when I was in a crunch. Abundant thanks to the editorial team at Avery/Penguin, including copy editor Allison Hargraves and copy chief Elizabeth Wagner, who caught my errors and fixed my prose as best they could, and to Miriam Rich, for her cheerful efficiency. It has been a delight to have Lucia Watson as my editor. She has been unfailingly gracious, upbeat, sensitive, and thoughtful. Her improvements to the manuscript were uniformly deft and clarifying.
I owe a special appreciation to Ryan Fischer-Harbage, my agent. Before he had any vested interest, he kept after me to pursue this book. From the time we met, in a workshop he gave on how to write a book proposal, he lived up to my impression of him as an ideal agentexcited about books, knowledgeable about the business, and poised to represent the authors best interest. I feel lucky to have him in my corner.
I could not have written this book without the nurturing and encouragement of friends and loved ones. Special thanks to Marisa Galisteo, who gave me a compass and taught me to use it. I am eternally grateful to Liz Mintzer, the mother of my children, for her years of love, devotion, and support. Thanks to Linda Nettekoven and Larry Wallack for putting me up in Portland; to Kevin Roche for lunch in Nashville; to Rik Kirkland for sage advice; and to my brother Geoff and sister-in-law Maria, Doug Brandt, Kathryn Grody, and Lenore Hecht for cheering me on. I owe a huge debt to Leslie Shafer Koval, whose love lifted me when my writing got me down. She helped unknot my thoughts when they became tangled, pulled me out of my chair to dance when I sat too long, and shared her paradise with me.
Throughout, I have been fueled and humbled by the faith and confidence of my sons, Alex, Zach, and Isaiah. They can only be a fraction as proud of me as I am of each of them.
I owe supreme thanks to my parents, Anita and Bernie. Before his death in 1996, my fathers business life was a roller-coaster ride. Regardless of how low its dips, he remained an exemplar of cheerful resilience who never spoke a word of envy. He delighted in knowing people and the stories of their success, the more humble their origins the better. Part of what my mother taught me is found in the introduction, but there was much she breathed into me long before she reached her eighties. In one of the earliest sound bites of childhood, I hear my mother say convincingly, You can become anything you wish. Her resolve and her willingness to risk failure to achieve beauty when she finally began painting again was a happy beacon. But nothing was as good for me as the enjoyment she took from having me read chapters to her over the phone as I completed them.
Lastly, I offer my abiding admiration and gratitude to the astonishing people in this book, who opened their lives, homes, and souls to me. It has been my honor and privilege to watch them at work in a world they continue to enrich and illuminate with their active presence, and to tell their inspiring stories, which, I hope, will endow readers of this book with the inspiration and courage to achieve what can scarcely be imagined or foretold.
Introduction
I am now in the final year of my sixth decade. If I were a generation older, I would be anticipating the finish line of my working life and the greeting Happy 60th! would loom above it like an anvil waiting to drop on my surviving dreams and aspirations of youth. It was not long ago, after all, that novelist William Styron, in the grips of a depression that began on that same birthday, called sixty that hulking milestone of mortality. Gratefully, the prospect of turning sixty has improved significantly. The age at which we imagine limitation encroaching on our abilities to perform mentally, physically, and sexually has been receding rapidly. But far too often the old beliefs cling to everyday language, attitudes, behaviors, hiring practices, and, perhaps most important, to the conversations we have with ourselves.
In recent years, neuroscientists have been providing news that is a powerful antidote to negative views of aging. In one of the most optimistic developments of our time, a scientific revolution has found that the brain is plastic and that what we do, think, and experience changes it throughout our lives. Moreover, a groundswell of research has been confirming that our brains can remain fit, like our bodies, for a quarter of a century beyond sixty and, increasingly common, longer still.
Such good news could not come at a better time.
With devastating speed, the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has destroyed hopes for early retirement entertained by many of the nations seventy-eight million baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964. A once-in-a-century economic eventas former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called the recessionhas depleted savings, devalued homes, and ravaged stock portfolios, college savings, and retirement accounts. Even if economic recovery takes place in 2010, people are likely to have to work years longer than they ever dreamed to regain lost financial ground.
This will further stoke the already growing trend of longer work lives. With average life expectancy surging beyond seventy-seven, the potential for boredom and the expense of living two or three decades of idle life were already making retirement less alluring. Even before the economic downturn, when they were feeling considerably more flush, 79 percent of boomers between fifty and fifty-nine did not intend to voluntarily retire from full-time work at the traditional age, according to a MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures Encore Career Survey. Rather than pursue the life of leisure their parents generation had, they intended to find meaningful employment, at least part-time. About half of those already in second careers have chosen to remain as consultants in familiar professions, while nearly a third have chosen to enter new careers in education, health, and nonprofits.
