Over-50

"The Man Who Quit Money" - Could we pull that off, we Baby Boomers again wonder

Back in our counterculture days some of us Baby Boomers actually did simplify our lives to the point that very little money was required.  Today, as we got used to getting by with less money during the worst of the downturn, we are back to wondering if we could possibly quit the system and just live out there in nature. 

Well, Daniel Suelo tried doing that in 2000.  Right now he's 50 years old and still at it.  He's free, highly social, and healthy.  Earlier in his life he made a serious suicide attempt, along with enduring bouts of depression.

His journey from being a job-holder to making it without a dime is told by his friend Mark Sundeen in "The Man Who Quit Money."  The story is compelling in itself.  What might be most useful is that it clearly shows how much work living outside capitalism demands.  Daily Suelo has to find food, ensure he can have a roof over his head, be hyper careful about not getting sick, keep himself clean, go to the public library to use the Internet, and get where he needs to be by walking or hitching a ride. 

"The Man Who Quit Money" convinced me to continue to earn a buck.  Today I had a birthday.  I couldn't imagine having to do what Suelo does just to stay alive.  Maybe when I was a younger woman I would have considered that lifestyle an adventure.  At my age I require continuity in the availability of my creature necessities and comforts.

Charisma: Are we Baby Boomers tired of all that?

From JFK to Lee Iacocca, we Baby Boomers lived with leaders who stood large.  They were like brightly colored birds who captivated our attention.

But today is a different time.  Do those kinds of men and women wear us out?  I take a look at that issue for the financial information company Motley Fool.  Here you can take at look at what I have come up with.

Zen of Interviewing: Don't care (so much)

Desperation.  Over-eagerness to close the deal.  Resentment about having to interview at all.  And simply trying too hard.  Any or all of these cause us to blow interviews.  I know.  I did that for six "sure things."  Then I reverse engineered what I was doing and not doing.  It was so obvious that I was being overly aggressive.  Since the person with the most power - that is, the one doing the interviewing - sets the tone of that process, not me, I was not viewed in a favorable light.

To get help I consulted a Buddhist monk.  Essentially what he recommended is to detach from the outcome, just focus on being in the now in every minute of the interview.  That would free me up to speedread the cues the interviewer was giving off about the tone, pacing, and what was expected in the way of content.  The layman's way of describing that is not to care, at least not too much.

With practice comes calm.  Or at least a calming down, at least during the interview itself.  We may not sleep the night before.  We may feel like we are walking to the gallows on the way to the interviewer's office.  But once inside, we stay in the moment.  We rivet our attention on  the interviewer, not ourselves.  We watch for signs that the conversation is shifting or that the interviewer is telling us through body language that it is time to wrap it up.

With my new mindset I am not only doing better on each interview.  I am getting more of them because I am also calm on the phone.

"Hazard Yet Forward" - Should Seton Hill University change its meme

Hypomanic America gives the message that action, preferably quick, is the way to succeed.  Yet, experience and research both show that often the shrewd move is no move.  There's that old story about test pilot Chuck Yeager, famous for having the right stuff, who survived breaking the sound barrier.  Many other pilots had died in the process because they overcorrected when the going got tough.  Yeager passed out.  Therefore he did nothing.  That saved him.  Also he emerged a hero.

At 18 we are impressionable.  We now know that humans aren't full formed in the gray matter until about age 25.  When I arrived a first generation college at Seton Hill, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, I was introduced to the institution's slogan: "Hazard Yet Forward." Of course, the earnest blue collar kid who wanted to get ahead, I figured I should pay attention to that.

It's a puzzle that the meme still is part of Seton Hill's ethos.   We know deep in our bones how long it often takes to figure out the next step, even in our thinking, never mind actually translating that into action.  A new meme?  "Hazard, Be Wicked Smart."

Over-50 Career Paths: Whistleblower?

Should the over-50, restless for a new career path, press that "send" button?  That one act could turn them into a whistleblower.  They might be transmitting an opinion-editorial critical of their former company to brandname media such as THE WALL STREET JOURNAL or TECH CRUNCH.  They might be providing a memo that has been leaked.  Or, they might be sending a video they made of the lousy working conditions at Company X.

Whatever.  That could be interpreted as whistleblowing. 

Recently, some whistleblowers have done well for themselves.  For example, there has been former Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith who now has a $1.5 million advance from Grand Central to do a book.

On the other hand, the fate of other whistleblowers is up in the air.  Former Fox employee Joe Muto got paid $5,000 by tabloid GAWKER to give a not-like to  the place, including a photo of the drab surroundings.  Fox canned him.  It also hired a law firm to warn him to stop and to inform him that his activity could be construed as criminal and civil wrongdoing.  GAWKER also was warned.

Whistleblowing has become a legitimate career path.  But it is a risky one.  I take a look at what the whistleblower can signal about the dysfunction of a company for financial information site Motley Fool. Here you can read about it.

Baby Boomers Falling from Middle Class: So?

We Baby Boomers were the generation who attended college as a rite of passage which just used to be for the elite.  With that came an expectation that we would become middle class.  Maybe that's where we went wrong.

The global downturn has toppled some of us out of the middle.  And that was that.  The house, nest egg, white collar job - gone, likely never to return.

Others of us decided that struggling to hold onto a middle class lifestyle reduced our ability to take the risks we needed to operate our businesses during volatile times.  We embraced frugality and let go middle class habits like shopping for food in upscale supermarkets.

There were also a growing number of us who had to temporarily return to our blue collar roots and liked what we rediscovered.  A friend who used to work for a global corporation now drives a truck.  He likes his new employer and the employer likes him.  End of story.  No corporate politics.  He feels young again.

Middle class?  Why did that become our generation's goal?  The values I found there were superficial.  The lifestyle expensive.  The shame factor for not totally conforming high.  For 5.5 years I have lived in a blue collar neighborhood.  It provided me what I have needed to heal (Download Geezerguts).  With healing returned a middle class or better income level.  But, no, I will never return to where I maybe never belonged.  On the other hand, who really does belong to the vulnerable entity called "middle class," here in the U.S. and in emerging economies?

Baby Boomer: When it all came our way & now 1 part-time job doesn't come through

The drama queen in me wants to treat this like high tragedy.  The reality - I know and will embrace in a few days - is that I didn't need the part-time job.  I only wanted it.  The Baby Boomer I am expected to get what I wanted, especially since I threw myself into the two interviews and follow-ups. 

Why I wanted this part-time job is that it would be assured income in the roller-coaster world of self-employment.  I had it all figured out.  Since business for my communications firm had been good the past several months, I had a reserve.  I could put that toward paying off a nice chunk of debt.  Then with the regular income, I could retire the debt in about 3 years.  That would free me up to relocate to Spain or Ecuador. 

Yeah, I had it all planned out.  Then came the "no." late this afternoon.  Why does disappointment hurt so much?  After all, I didn't lose anything except a fantasy.  It's just that I didn't gain what I figured I was entitled to.  Until the economic crash and my aging, just about everything came my way.

I know, I know.  A door closes and a new 1 opens.  I am afraid to think about any new door.  My thoughts about all that interesting part time work and continual pay checks got me into the emotional pickle I am now in.

Baby Boomers: We r becoming invisible

Sure, we may still have a good job or a successful business.  But, we begin to notice that in group gatherings, attention drifts to the young, even if they had not accomplished all that much, at least not yet.  There is deference to potential. 

The notion of the very late bloomer, brought mainstream by University of Chicago professor David Galenson, hasn't gotten traction.  The phenomenon of paradigm shifts accomplished by Hillary Clinton, Clint Eastwood, Betty White, T. Boone Pickens, and the late Christopher Hitchens is ignored.

After being the center of attention from the media, our confused parents, and bug-eyed employers when we made demands at work, we are now being ignored. So, what do we do?  Accomplish more so that we're noticed?  Sure, that's possible.  But another option is to relish the invisibility to try out what we want to do in our work.  After all, no one is really watching any more.  All eyes are on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Baby Boomer Intensity: Time to rethink that generational signature

It's the kiss of death in the professional marketplace to "act old."  But we Baby Boomers are also losing out on getting jobs and plum assignments and orders with customers and clients because we are too intense.  We have to rethink that in a world which is already overstimulated.

A client I coach is very successful.  But at age 60, he wants to shift gears from being so hands-on in his work to being more the elder statesmen who is quoted by the media, paid to deliver keynote speeches, author books which sell, and be a middleman who refers business to others.  What had been getting in the way is his intensity.  He's simply too hot.  Incidentally, Judy Garland's TV career went down the tubes because she was too hot for that particular small screen medium.

Like most important realizations I came to this one from my own pain.  C.S. Lewis observes that experience is a brutal teacher but we learn, by god, we learn.  My intensity stood between me and getting the assignment.  It was too much for the overwhelmed to absorb.  Also some perceived it as trying too hard and therefore annoying.  Worst of all, others perceived as my being desperate.  Years ago, I had flagged that as a problem in both my personal and professional life Download Geezerguts.

How to tone down the intensity? Simply slow down.  Slower transmits the aura of being a confident, successful authority.  Don't provide more value than you're getting paid for.  Less is always more.

Baby Boomers Who Cared Too Much: The zen of not caring at all

Not cool and conservative like our Eisenhower-generation parents, so many of us Baby Boomers became red hot with caring about just about everything.  Of course, when it came time to grow up and go to work, we cared way too much about that.  That probably gave rise to the booming career-advice industry.

Then, so many of us lost it all.  The good job or the thriving business, the nest egg, the irrational optimism about being way too smart and educated to fail.  Piece by piece we put together a new world view.

That took time, of course.  And pain.  Here's where I was circa 2003 Download Geezerguts.  Now I am a late bloomer who's in demand in fields of communications that I never anticipated being in.  Those include financial writing and copywriting.  How did I break free from caring?

In my 12-step group, across the table from me was a middle-aged American man who was canary-yellow.  I asked him if he was new "in the rooms."  He said yes and then asked me how I knew that he was new.  Just hadn't seen you around, I answered.  In telling his story at a speaker meeting he told us that the nurses at the hospital observed that all the attempted suicides they had treated he had made the most comprehensive attempt.  Somehow he got the epiphany not to care.  His recovery was so dramatic that he emerged as a leader in the 12-step program.

Now, I just don't care.  The biggest freedom is not giving a damn about my daily professional mistakes, big and not so big.   What a shock to realize that we can survive our own myopia and even wind up thriving.