Over-50

You Didn't Get Rich - So

The current Gilded Age has created a myth: Chasing wealth will bring BigInfluence.

That's mostly wrong.

Sure, moneybags Michael Bloomberg could run for U.S. president (and afford to finance all that himself).

But it will be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who will have the more profound impact on just about every system, and not only in the U.S.

Her secret sauce is that she doesn't chase wealth. Probably never will.

After all, the freedom to be BigInfluence really comes from having nothing to lose.

Remember how rumpled-look Ralph Nader brought in the consumer movement via the courts, Nader Raiders, and a bookouting the unsafety of GM cars.

Nader didn't give a damn about money for himself. He cared about having consumers spend their own money wisely - for safe products. 

Matt Drudge established his BigInfluence conservative site Drudge Report in a studio apartment. He may have money now but he is likely more focused on his digital reach than his lifestyle.

Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington, who quite enjoyed and still enjoys the good life, is a fading presence. Her HuffPost, which she invented to compete with Drudge Report, has become yesterday. Huffington's recent shot at getting back onto the radar has been the sleep movement. Good metaphor for where she is.

In 2003, I stopped chasing money.

In fact, I took a vow of poverty.

Those reading my blog posts describing my lifestyle as a type of medieval monk corrected that term. They indicated I had adopted a mindset of renunciation. Today that's called radical saving or minimalism.

Since then, I had four years (2005-2008) as a kind of celeb pontificating about the legal concept of public nuisance.

Yeah, I really had acquired enough BigInfluence to get ordinary people thinking about public nuisance. Here is my recent article on the subject, published in Odwyerpr.com.  

BigInfluence has a long tail.

In May 2014, I perceived that four former college classmates had done me very wrong. I shared that with my followers around the world. Here is that chronicle and pain, insight, and residual PTSD.

Later it was even more satisfying to shake off the rest of that miserable past at a all-women's Roman Catholic College with my post, which went viral and still is taking on steady traffic, "Pedophile Nuns & The Fat Girl from Jersey City."

However, not chasing wealth can be monetized (although you will never be rich.)

Once I opted out of being an obedient scribe for the ConservativeElite, I adopted an out of the box mindset and style for communications.

Enough marketers saw the value in taking that path less traveled. There has been a steady stream of assignments for risk-takers who have a product, services, cause, or themselves to sell.

Of course, there will always be those chasing money. They will assume they are the movers and shakers.

Their public relations staff will arrange photo ops for them as Davos Man and Davos Woman at the World Economic Forum.

Smirk Smirk.

Ocasio-Cortez is The Disruption.

Not since Steve Jobs gave the world a user-friendly personal computing apparatus will human beings again gain such new options about every facet of their work and personal lives.

Takeaway: Take the money or go for the impact.

Get amazing results through out of box communications strategies/content. Complimentary consultation janegenova374@gmail.com. I help, not sell.

Hey, Remember When We Used to Do Facebook ...

Facebook can't catch a break.

In so many circles of influence it's been the night of the long knives. Those range from regulators in the EU to thought leaders in the U.S.

The latest blade aimed at its heart is the new book by former insider Roger McNamee. The title is "Zucked." Here it is covered by Axios. And, here is an excerpt in Time. Here it can be ordered from Amazon pre its February 5th official publication date. Already on Amazon it ranks 6,584.

Among the most damning assertions McNamee makes about Facebook is that, overall, it is responsible for more bad than good.

After all that has been alleged about Facebook's machinations during Campaign 2016, McNamee might be, well, on the money. 

In addition, there is the issue of the supposed increase in narcissism and decline in the ability to interact in-person, especially on job interviews. How many of us felt forced to unfriend a friend who posted way too many selfies and photos of cutes their grandchildren were up to!

The future of Facebook will be shaped by how much reach hatchet jobs like McNamee's have. If Congress and regulatory agencies are all-ears, Facebook could be nearing the expiration date on its shelf life.

Get amazing results through out of box communications strategies/content. Complimentary consultation janegenova374@gmail.com. I help, not sell.

War on Phonies - Sound Contemporary?

Like Owen Labrie and Brett Kavanaugh, Holden Caulfield had attended prep school. That's where the likeness ends.

The first two were and probably still are achievers eager for traditional success in a white man's world of privilege.

Caulfield considered that tribe a bunch of phonies.

His archetypal journey occurred after he had given up on what prep school had to offer.

Caulfield, as baby boomers will recall, is the protagonist in J.D. Salinger's classic novel "The Catcher in the Rye." Published in 1951, it sold 65 million copies.

His alienation could have been the platform for our embracing the counterculture ethos. My journey was out of a prestigious doctoral program to become an expat in Barcelona, Spain. Eventually, unlike Caulfield, I stumbled back to America to chase traditional success.

However, as the SFGate points out, the character of a Caulfield wouldn't resonate with today's youth. After all, they are digital natives, born into the world of social. Many struggle for the outstanding grades and to participate in the right extracurricular activities to be admitted to prep schools, ivy league universities, and the T-14 law schools. 

But what Caulfield and iGen have in common is a propensity to suicide. Caulfield didn't actually commit it. But he sure thought a lot about it. The CDC reports that suicide among those 10 to 17 increased 70% from 2006 until 2016.

It could just be that, despite social, the current gen feels as fed up with the world as it is as had Caulfield. It might be useful to the national mental health of youth if middle school teachers would re-introduce "The Cather in they Rye" into the curriculum. Caulfield might mirror more of the minds of iGen than it's been assumed.

Incidentally, more and more of my gen has returned to alienation. Our fantasy of the life worth living is the cabin in the woods or the tent pitched in the desert, off the grid. The success we wound up chasing transformed into monsters who often got the upper hand. 

According to the CDC, suicides among those 45 to 64 increased 45% from 1999 to 2016. Among the high profile ones were the dozen suicides among trial lawyers in Kentucky during a brief timeframe and, more recently, that of designer Kate Spade. Here, free to download, is how aging professionals can find the ramp out of their comfort zones. 

At college reunions (which I no longer attend) a mental health professional might conduct a workshop about "The Catcher in the Rye."

Out of the Box Communications = Unexpected Results

Complimentary Consultation janegenova374@gmail.com – I help, not sell.

Does Retirement "Kill?"

A slowed-down economy can mean a labor force. That means even professionals in big jobs could be forced into retirement. 

The dominant meme has been: Retirement kills. Those championing working until one drops dead cite studies documenting how retirees tend to die soon after leaving their jobs. 

However, as MarketWatch hammers, other studies have found the opposite: Retirees live longer than those who don't retire.

Also, some studies purport that those for whom retirement was not their idea tend to have reduced longevity. 

Actually, the real issue for professionals such as executives and middle managers used to enjoying status, influence, and power is that there is a tendency to become invisible after there is no title attached to their names. After all, America is the global headquarters for capitalism and we are what we work at. Also, professionals become irrelevant when they no longer are active participants of BigBrand networks. 

Go to any of the supposed paradises developed for older professionals. One of them is Oro Valley, Arizona. When I visited former disability expert - Kathleen Huebner - there what I bumped into were yesterday's people. Most focused the conversation on their former career paths. Not one was building something new in terms of human effort, paid or unpaid.

The hedge after retirement, voluntary or involuntary, is to continue to labor at something that brings in income. It's not the money which is so important. It's the work identity.

Also, the old adage is on the money: Nothing gets you a job like having a job. Here, free to download, is my guide on how to get, hold, and move on to better work, at any age Download Outwitting ageism. New worlds can open. 

Out of the Box Communications = Unexpected Results

Complimentary Consultation janegenova374@gmail.com – I help, not sell.

Patron Saint of The New Aging

Global media outlets, establishment and digital native, have been publishing memorials for public relations giant Jack O'Dwyer.

Here is the send-off from the influential The Washington Post. 

As part of this tribute, I am presenting, free to download, my book on aging dedicated to him last August. Jack's signature was: Never retire. And he didn't. He worked full-time at J.R. O'Dwyer until a short time before he died this month at age 85. Here you can click open the book and print it out, at no charge. 

Increasingly, retirement is being experienced as a punishment inflicted on aging professionals by a biased brand of capitalism.

Usually, it's not welcomed. And those forced into that no-work zone can't afford the loss of earned income.

This financial horror is especially the situation as the Dow plunges, houses are tough to sell at the price owners want, and eight million older professionals are either without work or in jobs that pay peanuts. Jack O'Dwyer might be considered the Patron Saint of the struggling New Aging. 

Out of the Box Communications = Unexpected Results

Complimentary Consultation janegenova374@gmail.com – I help, not sell.

 

Trapped in Loop of Catastrophic Thinking

Stuck. 

That's where so many in the investment community, media, and near retirement/semi-retirement have been this December.

The Dow kept on plummeting.

Economic indicators such as housing sales showed a slowdown.

And the visions about the future hardened into flashbacks of The Great Depression. 

But there are alternate ways of perceiving what is happening and creating just-in-time solutions. Essentially, that's what American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron makes accessible. Her tool in opening us up is the lightness of humor.

Here is a video of her talk "The Freedom to Choose Something Different."

The meme is the possibility of getting unstuck from habitual ways of experiencing events - for example, catastrophic mindsets. From the get-go she is funny in a gentle way. That contrasts with the high earnestness of the typical spiritual teacher or management change agent.

For example, she notes that nobody comes to a retreat seeking for life to become more stress-filled. And she indicates it's so typical for us to be totally shocked and disappointed in ourselves when we feel jealousy, even after a whole week of meditation.

Where I bear witness to stuck the most is among aging professionals. Most lack Chodron's lightness of humor when putting together fresh ways of earning a good buck. They take a reversal of fortune seriously, therefore get trapped in that loop. If they had perspective they could position and package the next few jobs or gig assignments as raw material for the Next. Not the forever. Here, free to download, is my book on that path for scaling back up Download Outwitting ageism.

The second most common example of stuck is the marketing communications campaign with diminishing returns. The focus is on how it used to work great. That situation is beyond a muted haha. It elicits a belly laugh about the absurdity. 

Of course, the expression "wound too tight" comes to mind. That might have been a tip off that former "Today" head Matt Lauer had been creating a toxic force field. 

Here, also free to download, is my book on shaking off comfort zones. 

Out of the Box Communications = Unexpected Results

Complimentary Consultation janegenova374@gmail.com – I help, not sell.

Retirement Doesn't Exist, Not Any More (or not for long)

Even The Wall Street Journal is defaulting to the platitude that retirement will be more expensive than we had planned for. 

Just about everyone - both retired and those considering retirement/semi-retirement - has become filled with angst about making ends meet. 

Actually, the conversations we are having have become downright specific on the expenses we should be most concerned about. 

For example, this week as the Dow tumbled, a tenured humanities professor I coach cut right to the chase. He saw the world as binary: locations in which he would need a car when he stopped working and those he wouldn't. He was considering the latter, in particular towns in Mexico. What he was focusing on in our coaching session was what kind of small online business he could launch now to prepare for generating income during retirement.

It's become financial common sense that there are too many variables involved in funding retirement to assume we can assume anything. According to the latest numbers from the Federal Reserve, one-third of those who have retired have returned to the workforce. There is even a label for that: reverse retirement. 

So unpredictable is paying the bills during retirement as well as semi-retirement that I recommend to clients to think of themselves as Gen Scramble.

We don't know what expense will emerge and when. If it can't be absorbed in a current budget, then off to work we go - forever or for a while.

Here, free to download, is my book on survival work that can scale to well-paying employment opportunities Download Outwitting ageism.

Thank you, The Wall Street Journal, but no one needs to be warned of the growing unknowns associated with ending a career path. We see it played out all the time among our family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and clients.

In my coaching, I have never had anyone come to me and boast that he or she is "sitting pretty."

No surprise, more of my clients are already officially retired. But, that won't be long. Along with downsizing expenses more, they also scramble for additional income. If the Dow plunges further, that pattern will dominate. Sadly, with sinking portfolios, what becomes the reality is that very old adage: Humans plan, the gods laugh. Currently, that laughter sounds quite cruel.

Coaching and Thought Leadership Ghostwriting about Issues Associated with Careers.

Complimentary consultation, sliding scale fees. Please contact Jane Genova at janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

Yes, It Feels Like Old Times

It's 9:34 A.M. (ET) Christmas Eve. 

The Dow is down triple digits. On the low side, admittedly - 106.7. Not the high side of the 500s. 

But what's becoming obvious is that 'twas the night before Christmas, and most of the money was gone.

We have to think simple and regard the little we have left as a tool, not a symbol of a lifestyle our neighbors, colleagues, and enemies will envy. 

And, we are even grateful we had the few bucks to purchase a small tree and put some simple ornaments on it. 

It has been the operation of the Invisible Hand, the dynamics of the marketplace, that has brought us redemption from materialism. Not pontification from whatever or whomever. Actually, who has listened to those voices, including those from the Vatican, during the past several years.

What shall we call the psychic shift? 

Oh, the concept folks have been busy coming up with monikers.

There are:

Minimalism

Radical Saving

FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early)

Living Off the Grid

Simplification

Enoughness.

Those are the words.

The associated behavior has been kicking in for a while.

Prospects for services and employers who are hiring want evidence of results, not theory of what should happen. Show them what you have achieved, provide detailed proposal of what you can pull off for them.

No one is being discouraged from uprooting from all they have known in major metro areas to plug into an affordable cost of living in central Alabama or a small town in Ecuador. What a difference.

In 2014, when I did something similar - relocated to then-cheap Tucson, Arizona (no longer cheap) - I was vilified as a failure. The tone of my former college classmates seemed, once I thought about it, to be condescending. Here is that backstory.

However, it was through that initiative that I took the leap out of debt, not like so many of the older professionals The Wall Street Journal profiles as really in a financial pickle. 

The wised-up among us are finished with careerism. The strategies we cook up and implement are about making a good buck. Not getting ahead. Ahead might not be there. Industries, companies, and the players are changing too rapidly. Here is the book, free to download, which captures that survive-to-thrive approach to work Download Outwittingageism. When I published it, the target audience was the over-50. Now, it's documented that age bias starts at age 35.

The irony is that, more relaxed, we will probably live to 100. That means we have to have the funds to support ourselves. The good news for those of us who champion innovation is that to accommodate longevity we are evolving into The Scramble Generation. Soon enough the Millennials and iGens could join us in The Scramble.

Yes, we may have returned to the values of the period before the post-war boom. That was the ethos we Baby Boomers anointed as The Old Neighborhood.  

Back then, 'twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house we knew we were loved. That was plenty.

Out of the Box Communications = Unexpected Results

Complimentary Consultation janegenova374@gmail.com – I help, not sell.

You Have 12 Months to Prepare to Lose Your Job

Let's face it. In an economic downturn - and many investment experts are expecting one - older workers have a target on their back. 

There are a number of reasons why.

At the top of the list is their relatively high salary. In the media, for example, a seasoned editor can be replaced by an editor with only a few years experience at a fourth of the salary.

Another reason might be the need to make significant changes, ranging from the technology to procedures. There is fear the aging worker will be slow to pick up on all that. 

Also, there are those medical insurance premiums employers pay. In hard times, employers can reduce them by not having so many older employees on the payroll.

That's the bad news.

The good news, explains financial expert Jonathan Clements in MarketWatch, is that you have 12 months to prepare to lose your job. Unemployment is a lagging indicator. Employers are slow to lay off at the beginning of a recession and slow to hire after it's over. 

None of his suggestions for getting yourself in the right financial shape before the ax falls are new. They range from paying off credit card debt to assessing your fixed costs and fingering those you can cut.

What I recommend to those clients I coach about their careers is more radical. After all, age could prevent their landing a comparable job. 

I hammer that they use a layoff as an opportunity for The Next. The severance and unemployment payments can fund that. The Next could be retirement/semi-retirement, a career change to what's more marketable, starting a business, and/or relocation outside the U.S. where you are allowed to get a job or be self-employed.  

Here, free to download, is my book on how to exit your comfort zone. 

Coaching, auditing, lecturing, and writing/ghostwriting thought leadership content on ageism.  

 

For individual coaching – sliding scale fees. Complimentary initial consultation. The displaced over-50 get back to work. Mature professionals who are working advance their careers. Contact Jane Genova janegenova374@gmail.com.

 

For Us, The End Is Near - But Clueless What's Next

A Christian, George H.W. Bush had a firm belief in an afterlife.

What seemed to ease his transition from living to the dying process was his conviction that he would join his wife Barbara in heaven. It worked. According to close friends, he had a peaceful death. 

But that was Bush. That's not the majority of us who have veered off from formal religions and are left to sort through old-line myths about the Next. So, there's the book "Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia." The author is Michael Schermer, columnist for Scientific American. Here the book can be ordered from Amazon.

From the get-go, Shermer shows he doesn't buy Christian mythology. For example, he observes that no one has returned from the dead to tip us off about the Next. Obviously, he rules out Jesus Christ's. According to religious ideology, Jesus came back to life post his death on the cross. 

However, Shermer does point out that 74 percent of Americans believe in heaven (Source: Pew Forum). The rub, of course, is that no one will have this confirmed until death. So, both during this best time of the year and more routine days and nights, we have to live on with no proven-out answer - only our little individual mindset.

Oh, there have been scientific studies. But, science has lost our allegiance. Remember what "they" said about taking antidepressants forever if we had had one clinical depression. Smirk smirk. And what about the firm faith in psychoanalysis? Analysts such as David W. Harder were positioned and packaged for the so-called sophisticated as the Secular Shamans. 

Consequently, what's Next remains a mystery. The upside of that is that we can unleash our imaginations to play out the kind of existence we can enjoy after how difficult life has become on earth.

I envision being in a field surrounded by all my pet children who have died.

We have no time commitments. We just are, together.

There is no more clinical depression. No more earnest therapists like David W. Harder. 

No former college classmates who caused us so much pain.

No more disappointments about client assignments we anticipated which didn't come through.

And, no more regrets.

Those, in my realm of make-believe, are days of heaven. I have much to look forward to. That hope will keep me going. 

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