Over-50

Friends: Baby Boomer starts making them again in her 60s, talks about good old days shopping at Talbots

The last time I had made friends was in graduate school.  Pursuing rigorous academic excellence was never really for me but I hung in there with the doctoral program because of the lifestyle: having friends and having the time to hang out with them.  Then came the emotional dislocation of having to make a living, then the hunger for more and more.  I bulked up on professional success.  At the top of my game I owned a This Old House in Fairfield County, Connecticut and a cottage at the Jersey Shore.   I just assumed having friends was in the past.

 Then, beginning last May, I started to make them again.  Last count, I had two.  F0r the first time since the early 1970s, I can be myself.  Given that we're Baby Boomers and not Generation Y, we call each other on the phone, not text and leave messages on Facebook.

Last night, one of my two new friends called me.  She told me her troubles (linguist Deborah Tannen identified that as a standard bonding experience among women).  I told her some of mine.  I wasn't going to do a dump share for fear of driving her away.  Yeah, I never bought into the Oprah era of complete disclosure. 

Then she confided that a major retailer was interested in the jewelry she was designing.  Yes, we Baby Boomers are still succeeding big time.  I confided that financial information powerhouse Motley Fool was posting my deconstructions on the value of sundry companies.  I read her word for word my post on Talbots - which you can read here.  Both of us had shopped there, as had the lion's share of Baby Boomer mid-level female professionals.  Since the economic downturn, we prided ourselves on identifying the best consignment shops, the right day to hit the racks in them, and especially picking up used Talbots-label pants suits.  Yeah, we were Hillary Clinton kind of conservative dressers.

How did I re-learn how to make friends?  I returned to the artsy, anything-goes girl I had been before I chased success with all I had.  It's funny.  Along the way of that return to a self that didn't fly with the Establishment, my third career - as a content-provider in social media - took off.

Yeah, It's Like Being Back in Graduate School

We think that with experience we are mostly on the right track when it comes to doing work projects.  Well, with all the change going on, we might find that assumption is dead wrong.

Tonight I got thrown for a loop.  The editor for a buyer's guide I am researching and editing very diplomatically informed me that the first part was jolly well fine.  It was the other four parts that needed work.  Not since graduate school have I felt so much a newbie.

We will probably bump into this deja vu situation quite a bit if we intend to stay in the work force.  To pay off my debt and be able to live comfortably on passive income, I probably have to work about 10 to 14 more years.  That means I will be continuing to learn a great deal. 

Baby Boomers: We still have those "oh, shit moments"

It's kind of scary.  Here we are in our sixth decade and we get that "oh, shit moment" that we are again screwing up.  I guess I should be grateful that I had that moment but I still feel sheepish that it was necessary.  After it, my business got hot and my personality got less angry.

Maybe it was because I never was cool.  So, I set out as an early adopter of digital media to, well, pass myself off as cool.  Unfortunately, it worked. I got to blog for AOL and hip tabloid Abovethelaw.com linked to my post.

Then it dawned on me that I had lost my voice as a writer and my sense of self as a woman who had learned a lot from adversity.  I stopped chasing what was cool on the web and on mobile.

What will be the next "oh, shit moment?"  I suspect it will be related to all those I had been angry with for at least four decades.  I might find out all that they weren't so bad.

 

Read Help-Wanted Carefully, Twice: Then you'll know whether to send a resume

Of course, we all want to stand apart from the competition when we apply for a job or assignment.  However, there is no one unambiguous way to do that.  With so much change in the work world and so much new technology going mainstream, we have to figure out how to present ourselves so that we are communicating: hire me, I am the best fit for your needs.

The first clue for that is in the tone and content of the help-wanted ad.  We have to read that carefully, probably twice, including between the lines.  Of course it will spell out some things such as whether to send a resume or not.  In THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, there's an article about alternate ways employers and prospects for our business want us to present ourselves.  Instead of the old-fashioned resume, it could be through a video we make of ourselves, what's in our social media, ranging from our blogs to our LinkedIn account, and the passion we transmit in the transmittal.

More often, they want both - the resume and all the rest, especially the enthusiasm for the mission, vision, and actual job tasks.  The challenge is to be concise.  A laundry list of credentials and accomplishments - that's boring and no one has time for it.  What might help us to develop the art of brevity that packs a punch is the book "Made To Stick" by the Heath Brothers. 

And way back in the 1970s, when "What Color Is Your Parachute" first came out, the reality was outed that the person who gets the job is not necessarily the best fit or the most talented.  It's the person who's best at applying for jobs.  The game is to speedread what's needed and then present that, no more and no less.  With practice, most of us can get better at being the best presenter for the job or assignment.

Resumes: Many still want them, including the paper kind on interviews

Those in the hiring chair determine how we should apply for work.  Most of them still want the traditional resume, reports THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.  In addition, if they invite us for an interview in person, they expect us to have in-hand a copy of the resume.  And, yes, it's wise that the copy should be printed out on decent stock paper.  That shows we want to make a good impression and know how to that.

But there is also a growing trend in which those hiring tell the applicant to forget the resume and just write a few paragraphs why they are the best suited for the job or assignment.  And they mean that.  They will toss our application if it doesn't get to the point immediately and present our credentials concisely but passionately.

Baby Boomers: Our starter careers

This time we Baby Boomers are taking it slow.  And that's, shock shock, giving us a good shot at launching new careers.  Maybe we can think of them as "starter careers." Yeah, in our late 50s and 60s, we are starting out again professionally.  Influential NEW YORK Magazine has a piece on "starter apartments."  Soon enough it will publish, I bet, a major feature on starter careers for the Geezer crowd.

Eight years ago [Download Geezerguts] I was forced to start over again on how I made my living.  There were big successes and lots of road-testing new career paths and getting lost.  All together I worked at about three different lines of work.

My latest starter career has been paid commentator on the state of capitalism.  For example, I contribute as a freelance blogger to financial information powerhouse Motley Fool.  Here is my latest post, which deconstructs what could upend the global male grooming market.

This focus is fresh for me, at least for my own byline.  For decades I ghostwrote books and print opinion-editorials for the captains of industry.  For the past six years that broke open to a career path in assisting small business with blogging.  

Slow pans out because we give ourselves the time to absorb the feedback from the marketplace.  When we used to be in a hurry, we whizzed by that important data which could have made us contenders.  It's very possible our starter careers could break open to something bigger than anyone, including ourselves, expected.

Joe Paterno, Dead at Age 85

Joe Paterno is dead.  His suffering is over.  We will never learn the full story behind the scandal at Penn State which cost him his job and, in the eyes of some, his reputation.  Even highly detailed court trials don't disclose all.

What we do know is how fragile a career can be.  For decades a professional can be doing well, even riding high. Then, almost as in Shakespearean tragedy, that figure of power and often wealth is brought down.  Sometimes the reversal seems earned.  Sometimes it just seems bad luck.  Regarding the latter, it seems like bad luck for Steve Jobs that his boss at Apple John Sculley was too traditionally corporate to comprehend how genius operated.

Can this happen to us? Of course.  The odds of that are greater in a volatile economy continually disrupted by technology.

New York Winter Wonderland: Geezer Crisis

Here in Geezerville, the senior citizen complex I live in, no one has glowed amidst the winter wonderland which has overtaken the New York area.  You can include me among those.  Usually, I am perceived as "young old" because I get by without any help from the Scooter Store and am still putting in 60 hours a week running my own business.

Snow in Geezerville means worrying that your neighbors will fall if they dare go out.  If they don't dare go out then they are likely out of some creature comfort like Jewish rye bread with seeds. 

One of us walkie-talkies feels compelled to attend to that crisis.  As a result we have to dig out our cars and not relish the mandate that we get it washed on Monday.  The whole thing is a double pain in the ass.  Because of a comprised memory we probably go all the way to the store, spend too much money, and never buy the rye with seeds.  Disappointment hangs on our neighbor's face.

That leads to a fork in the road: we risk our safety yet again in the snow or add to the guilt which so many years on planet earth piles on.

The Dyer's Hand Turns the Color of the Dye: I learned to love capitalism

A cynic from a tenement in downtown Jersey City, New Jersey, I always figured that I make a good living writing and so could care less what I write about.  It all rolled off my back like water's off a duck's.  Until now.

Finally, as the cliche goes, the dyer's hand has turned the color of the dye.  For almost a month now I have been a freelance blogger for the financial information powerhouse Motley Fool.  During that month I have come to see that only one thing is really relevant in life: the stock price.  I follow it like, yes, a fool.

That has triggered one of the internal paradigm shifts in me.  I now love capitalism.  I will defend capitalism.  I will take on any critics of capitalism.

Here is my deconstruction of the positioning of News Corp, one of capitalism's great winners.

When Men Looked Like Men: P&G betting metrosexual look over

There was a time before the counterculture when men looked like men.  Then they started wearing pony tails.  Soon enough the metrosexual style was in. The genders strived to mask sexual secondary characteristics. 

Now that might be all over and men are back looking like men.  But maybe not like our dads.  Procter & Gamble makes it its business to pick up on trends and leverage them for profit.  It has just put out on the market a gadget men can use to style their facial hair.  I discuss the commercial side of that on my post on the financial information powerhouse Motley Fool.

Here you can read about the styler, developed by P&G's Gillette, which could disrupt the whole men's grooming products segment.