With Purpose Success, part 2

It is my heartfelt belief that living a longer life, as we certainly will in an age of advanced medicine and unprecedented information about healthy living, isn't simply a matter of playing longer or working longer-but of reaching a place where you have gathered enough life experiences and perhaps the financial freedom to dedicate the decades of life still before you to doing good things for your family, community, country, and the world. What use could you put your skills to that might give someone else, whether you know them or not, an otherwise missed opportunity to better their life? This was the parting challenge that we presented in our new way of looking at a reinvented retirement.
Not many years ago, when people reached their fifty-fifth birthday they were pretty close to the end of their days. They were concerned mostly with putting their affairs in order and maybe trying to have a little fun before their last sunset. But someone who reaches that age now can look forward to twenty, or thirty, or even forty more years of life. What might be the most satisfying way to spend all of that time?
We concluded that leaving a legacy-not necessarily the financial kind; but doing something memorable to lift others-would emerge as a retirement revolution. Today there are hundreds of millions of men and women around the world approaching a period of life when they'll have unprecedented amounts of discretionary time and are looking for a new challenge. Maybe they haven't achieved what they thought they might in their career and are now looking for someplace totally new to invest their energy. Maybe it's the opposite: they have achieved more than they set out to do and now find at age fifty-one or fifty-seven or sixty-three that they want a fresh purpose for getting up in the morning.
In my travels and conversations I don't often hear anymore about people in their fifties or older focused on making another $1 million.
Certainly, greed, deceit, and ambition haven't vanished from the globe.
Corporate scandals, glass ceilings for women and minorities, identity theft, Internet fraud, and other forms of lying, cheating, and stealing are as prevalent as ever. And a lot of us are still rightly concerned with making a decent, honest living and finishing the job of raising happy and prepared children. You may not be financially secure at this point in life.
Yet what I increasingly hear are people talking about what's next; about what's in store in the next stage of life. They wonder how they might get past their routines and do something that makes their heart sing, that reminds them of their humanity and gives them a chance to reboot from the hard-driving work and family pursuits that have preoccupied them for decades.
Life can certainly be draining, whether you are managing a career and paying the bills or seeing to your kids' health, education, and moral grounding-or, as is increasingly the case in modern societies, doing both. Past a certain age, though, you can loosen up on the reins and let yourself be led down unknown trails. This can be an exciting and liberating time as you begin to think about your life not as a mission accomplished-but as a time for finding a new purpose that will give your life meaning and just might become your most joyous and nourishing time on earth.