With Purpose Success, part 1

Are You Using Your Life- or Is Your Life Using You?
There are two ways of exerting one's strength:one is pushing down and the other is pulling up.
-Booker T. Washington
A few years ago I was winding down work on my last major book, The Power Years: A User's Guide to the Rest of Your Life, when a series of peculiar events, which I'll describe, overtook me. These events changed the way I look at the world and ultimately led to the book you now hold in your hands. But this book is not about me-it's about you. It's about why your worldview may be changing, how you can better understand the shift and find purpose in everything you do. It's about how you can finally set aside, or at least temper, your focus on personal gain in order to identify with a different kind of success-one that centers on meaning and satisfaction. It's about doing something significant with the rest of your life, something that will help others and at the same time fill a void you may not even be fully aware of. For many years I wasn't fully aware of my void. But I knew something wasn't right. So let me start by explaining what changed that.
The Power Years, which I coauthored with Daniel J. Kadlec, was a new kind of project for me. I've made a career out of studying the lifestyles, needs, and aspirations-and the related spending and savings patterns of baby boomers. For three and a half decades, I've been writing and speaking both about the lifestyle of maturity and about boomer habits and consulting with global companies eager to capture the attention of this highly influential and wealthy generation. In The Power Years we wanted to fast-forward to gaze into the future. So we set out to examine what boomer lifestyles might look like in the traditional retirement years, which were approaching fast. In the end, we attempted to put forth a groundbreaking vision for what people might become in their fifties and beyond. The message was fairly simple: later life is evolving into an extraordinary period of good health and extended opportunity for people to do whatever they want to do. So what would they do? I loved exploring the future of relationships, leisure, learning, and work, and making sense of how people are going to pay for it all. But for me, the heart and soul of that book was the final chapter, which was called "Leaving a Legacy."