With Purpose Success, part 44

I've also talked about a new "cyclic" life, one where you distribute your longevity bonus throughout your adult life. You work longer but take extended sabbaticals along the way. You retire from one job, and then start a whole new career. Along the way you might take the time to go back to school, fall in love again with your spouse or someone new, discover new passions, and generally reinvent yourself over and over again. "Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before," said Joseph Campbell, the mythology expert. That is what your bonus years can be all about. With good health and more time you may enjoy a virtually ageless middlescence, where instead of learning, working, retiring in chronological order you move in and out of these life phases as it suits you. 

The world hasn't yet wrapped its arms around this bold new life-cycle concept. Longevity is still portrayed as a demographic and economic force, and as a physical phenomenon. You hear about people living longer (weatherman Willard Scott became famous with his quaint vignettes of centenarians), how the graying population will destroy the pension system (which is at the heart of the debate over entitlements around the world), and how certain foods (organic) will let you live more healthfully or how vitamins will extend your youthfulness. Yet we fail to grasp that longevity is psychological and spiritual as well. It goes to the core of who you are because your bonus years cry out for an answer to questions like, where am I in the journey of my life? Am I near the end or only in the middle? How far have I traveled? How much farther do I have to go? 

Historically, life has been like a climb up a mountain-on the way up every step is a struggle, but one that improves your skills and brings you closer to your zenith. It's exhilarating as you ascend the mountain and your hard work is rewarded with an ever widening view. But then you reach the top and there is nothing more to look forward to. That's what happens to a lot of people when they hit age sixty or so-they have reached their top and feel that they have achieved all they likely will. 

From there life is a long walk down the mountain; with every step the view contracts. Life's thrills are at an end. No matter how you sugarcoat it-"the golden years"-this kind of descent ultimately proves depressing because your achievement is behind you and you have nothing to look forward to. You are winding down. 

Today, though, more and more folks are rejecting this model. They want to stay on top longer-or find new mountains to climb, and longevity lets you do it. Your bonus years aren't about being old for a longer time-they are about new achievement; second, third, and fourth acts; and making a difference in ways that you might never have imagined. 

Four Views of Life 

Amazing rebirths and transformations are quite common in nature. "A drop of water becomes vapor, which is invisible, yet vapor materializes into billowing clouds, and from clouds rain falls back to earth, forming river torrents and eventually merging back into the sea," writes Deepak 

Chopra in Life after Death: The Burden of Proof. "Has the drop of water died along the way? No, it undergoes a new expression at each stage . . . 

Any drop of water in my body could have been ocean, cloud, river or spring the day before." The potential for dramatic change exists throughout nature, and within you. 

With Purpose Success, part 43

To encompass this broad new vision for a full life after your primary career, the definition of retirement is changing radically-even though the term itself appears too sticky to shed. For better or worse, "active retirement" seems to be entering the lexicon to describe this new stage of life. But I prefer middlescence. Just as the new life stage of adolescence- the period between childhood and adulthood-emerged about a hundred years ago; middlescence-a period between adulthood and old age, say ages fifty to seventy-five-is surfacing today. 

For six million years humans didn't live much past twenty-five or thirty years of age. But in the past two hundred years our life span has tripled. 

Extraordinary breakthroughs-in public health, penicillin and other antibiotics, early immunizations for polio and other diseases, modern surgical techniques, and new pharmaceutical compounds-mean that more and more of us wake up each day with the idea that we just might live to ninety or even a hundred. And here's the thing: the best is yet to come. 

The longevity revolution is not over; it may even be picking up steam.

Just 160 years ago the elderly were a tiny fraction of the world population.

Back then, less than 5 percent of Americans and Europeans reached age sixty-five. The figure remained well below 10 percent as recently as 

1930. Now, projections have the number of sixty-five-year-olds globally doubling by 2050, at which time there will be more people over age fifty than under age fifteen, and the average fifty-year-old will be able to expect to live another forty-plus years. 

How far might this all go? One notable extremist, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a computer scientist at Cambridge University in England, thinks we can extrapolate recent longevity gains far into the future. It may be possible for the human body to live several hundred years in an optimal environment, he believes. 

This is an admittedly radical prediction. But it points up just how much progress is taking place before our eyes. There is right now a wide and stunning range of promising research in medicine, from stem-cell breakthroughs to new pharmaceuticals to new hormone therapies and organ replacement and rejuvenation techniques. This work promises to lengthen your life for years beyond what you probably expect. Molecular biologist 

Cynthia Kenyon was able to double the life span of a worm by tweaking a single gene. She believes her work will eventually eradicate Alzheimer's and other age-related diseases. Scientists simply will not rest until they've found the fountain of youth, or at least the fountain of health. 

People commonly living to ninety or more will represent a challenging new frontier for mankind. We are explorers by nature, accustomed to harnessing our courage and resolve to cross a river, a continent, an ocean-the heavens-to discover new lands. Yet the longevity frontier poses a new kind of challenge. It's about exploring the space in your head and in your soul, not necessarily in just the world at large. What are you to make of your longevity bonus years? Do you tag them on at the end of life without changing what comes before? Why not distribute this longevity bonus at intervals along the way? Does your life cycle remain unchanged-learn, earn, retire-with the last part, old age, simply lasting longer? Or is a more interesting model beginning to surface-learn, earn, return? In this model you may use the "return" years to have and pursue new dreams and set energizing new goals for how to give something back. 

With Purpose Success, part 42

If it doesn't come naturally, you may not know where to start.understand the correlation between having goals and achieving their dreams. They think just trying to keep moving forward is sufficient. But it usually is not. Setting a goal-and identifying checkpoints-allows you to monitor your progress and adjust your plans along the way. 

Early success and popularity have a way of making you complacent, which if you can't shake it will catch up with you. goals because they do not want to stand out. They feel safe when they conform. 

Maybe you're reluctant to set new goals at this age. Don't be. Try to understand your feelings and correct your thinking. It's not too late. 

It's never too late. In fact, in the context of living to eighty-five or one hundred-and-five-it's quite early in the game, and the fears and excuses 

I've described can be easily overcome through the wisdom and experience of maturity. 

A whole new period of productivity and engagement is opening before you. In recent years I and others have tried to put a name on this period when you may be done focusing on your career but be far from resigned to playing golf or bridge every day. You will most likely stay active in your family and community, and possibly even engaged in some sort of paid work. No word or term for this new phase of life has quite captured the public consciousness. Rehirement had legs for a while. Jeri Sedlar's clever word rewire gets used here and there. Neil Young asserted, "I won't retire but I might retread." In The Power Years, we wrote about freetirement and unretiring. 

Rehire. Rewire. Retread. Re-hmmm. As I said, none of these has really stuck, even though all of them get at the essential point that in the new life stage I'm describing you'll need to keep setting new goals and having big dreams. You will not retreat or withdraw, which is the literal meaning of retire. Instead, as you cross into maturity you'll likely want to reboot and reengage, and find ways to apply your skills and hard-won insights to new endeavors and to learn new skills and tackle old problems as you infuse purpose into the many years still before you. 

Now, as you reach your sixties and beyond you may have reached the critical point of economic freedom; having saved in your 401(k) plan, paid down the mortgage, and watched your youngest child leave the nest. 

You'll be able to use your time however you choose, and hopefully you'll have the good health and longevity to possibly do something grand. You may write a book on a subject that fascinates you. You may turn your love of music into a new career organizing concerts that benefit a cause. 

You might study scripture and lead a congregation. Maybe you'll decide to mentor a child, manage a book drive, or raise money for a third world business that needs help getting off the ground. 

With Purpose Success, part 41

But grant money is starting to roll in, which will help her expand, and after several years of working long hours for no pay she expects to begin taking an annual salary of $40,000 or so in the next year or two. Ironically, even though most grantors insist on low overhead they also insist on the presence of some paid staff at the charities they support. Paid staff is perhaps the best signal that a program is functioning and will be around for a while. "I just feel grateful that this passion came to the surface," Ginsberg says. "It wasn't something that I was intentionally seeking. I just feel really lucky and fortunate. A lot of people have said to me 'I wish I had a passion like that. I wish I had something that I felt so dedicated to that I could identify a way to spend time and make a commitment like this.' I think you just reach a point in your life when you're old enough to have the perspective of looking back and starting to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Maybe this is the benefit of age." 

What does Ginsberg get from her efforts? Like so many of the people I have interviewed, who have found a larger purpose for living and invested their time and energy into learning how to spark meaningful change, she believes she now possesses knowledge that is just too valuable to go unused. "What I get is knowing that I am making a difference to some kid, somewhere, and to some teachers' ability to bring these lessons into their students' lives. I feel like I'm making a difference for the future, and that's what keeps me going. If I didn't do this, knowing what I know, it would just be irresponsible." 

OK. I have spilled a bit of ink on Robert Chambers and Katie Gins- berg. Why? After all, they aren't headline grabbers like Bono or Angelina 

Jolie or Bill Clinton or Warren Buffett, all of whom are contributing to meaningful change in the world through their celebrity and riches. 

While interesting and noteworthy, though, celebrity contributions are a trifle compared to the cumulative good that people of ordinary means can bring about. Robert Chambers and Katie Ginsberg are just such ordinary people-perhaps like you-and they show us that it's not too late to discover your calling; that you too can set new goals at any age and pursue new dreams and reach for something grand. "Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations," wrote Louisa May Alcott. "I may not reach them. But I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they lead." 

New Goals for a New Life Stage 

Prior to this stage of life your goals were all about meeting needs and doing well at work. Yet it is imperative to have new dreams and chase them in order to keep from being stagnant. You have a responsibility to keep yourself vital by thinking about what you want to be and by thinking about how you want to use your life. Remember, as Professor Shoven said: if you are not going to die soon, then you are not old. If you are not old, you have many years left and you must decide what to make of them. 

This is a new challenge presented by our new longevity. Embrace it.

People who have dreams and set goals are more likely to find achievement.

Yet many folks never do set goals, either personal or professional, not while they are young and not even after they mature. Why don't more people set goals? In general, psychologists point to seven reasons: 

Many of us go through life doing as we are told-trying to live up to other peoples' expectations instead of creating our own. goal that others see as lofty, they will surely try to bring you down and recite many reasons why you'll never reach your goal. know, and you may feel foolish. 

With Purpose Success, part 40

Among friends, Ginsberg would bring up her concerns and get mostly disinterested nods. They thought she was turning into an insufferable tree hugger. "I was feeling very frustrated," Ginsberg says, and that's when she decided that, as a society, we need to start educating kids so that they grow up aware of environmental dangers-much as baby boomers grew up aware of the nuclear threat, in part owing to drills at school that instructed us on how to take cover. 

The first thing she did was investigate her own school district to see what was being done to teach kids, not just about environmental issues, which are generally acknowledged, but also about full-scale sustainable living. "There are all these issues with the world-scarcity issues, resource issues, human-health issues," Ginsberg says. They are interconnected and ultimately must be viewed as one. Say, for example, you're a company manufacturing environmentally safe detergents but your suppliers are clear-cutting the rain forest to get ingredients; the whole effort is worse than pointless-it's counterproductive. Yet the well-intentioned manufacturer may not even know the adverse impact of his efforts. 

Connecting the dots in this way, Ginsberg found, was a new concept in schools, and so she set her sights on educating school districts about how to integrate lessons on the economic and social impact of environmental problems and solutions into their core curriculums. There, she believed, lay the master solution. 

Ginsberg's school district welcomed her involvement. So she began attending conferences and researching the issues. That was in 2002, and within a year she and a small group of individuals with backgrounds in education, corporate environmental affairs, and environmental law had launched the Children's Environmental Literacy Foundation (www.celfoundation. org). Their stated mission: educate children about sustainable living practices by integrating the lessons into everyday subjects like math, English, and science. 

How does it work? In choosing a book to study, an English teacher might choose The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken or The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson or Collapse by Jared Diamond. These are modern classics dealing with the vulnerabilities of the natural world and human societies. A math teacher might cite algebraic equations based on carbon emissions and what it takes to offset them. Students might learn, for example, that in the United States the average citizen uses up about fifty-five acres of Earth in their lifetime, a devastating burn rate-but one that can be neutralized by changing certain consumption habits. Somewhere in all of that sits a whopper of a math problem! 

Ginsberg's organization is starting to get traction; the ideals that she champions are already being incorporated in about twenty-five school systems. She believes that through annual forums and classroom work her organization's programs have already reached some 15,000 students. 

With Purpose Success, part 39

Unilever and other packaged goods companies. She later helped build a family business in leather goods and supervised the marketing and design of several product lines. But with the birth of her third child, and her husband's legal and investment career on track, she decided to stay at home full-time and now treasures the years she spent as a homemaker. 

Yet Ginsberg, forty, always knew that as her kids grew older she would want to do more with her life than spend countless hours at the mall or country club with her affluent friends and neighbors in the northern suburbs of New York City. She has the highest respect for mothers who build their lives around their children, husbands, schools, and communities. 

But it wasn't right for her. Just what was her calling? Once she started thinking about it, several years passed before she figured it out. 

Ginsberg knew a few things, for sure. Going back into advertising was out of the question, and she didn't want to do anything that would require resuming her long daily commute into the city. She contemplated trading stocks full-time. But for her that seemed like an emotionally empty pursuit. 

Gradually, the daily headlines in the newspaper started her thinking about some of the world's massive problems. This was post-9/11 and post-Enron. Global warming was starting to stir a lot of discussion, and the gap between the rich and poor was widening. "These problems seemed so massive," she says. "I just started really thinking about what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century. What struck me was how our habits and perspectives are so skewed by our culture. You must be rich and successful. Being successful means you make a lot of money; that you are in the corporate world, or a doctor or a lawyer." This ingrained mind-set seemed so powerful in adults, she thought, that the only way to change it was to reach out to young students and try to get them to think differently on a daily basis. 

She still wasn't sure what she might do. But she began tilting toward environmental concerns, which were reinforced by conditions and events in her own home. Her youngest son, Gregory, and to a lesser extent his sister, Madeline, were both extremely sensitive to sunlight. Gregory also had an allergic reaction to sunscreens. "He's usually painted like a white ghost with zinc oxide," Ginsberg says. It dawned on her that this skin condition might be at least partly the result of some ecological imbalances. "I looked around on my street and the streets in our town and took note of all the little signs on lawns that warned 'do not enter: pesticide application.' 

We were using a service too, to spray the trees and lawn at our house and I started thinking maybe this stuff isn't so great for my kids. 

That's what made me start thinking about environmental health issues."

With Purpose Success, part 38

Here's how used-car math typically works: the dealer takes an old car with 90,000 or so miles in a trade, paying, say, $1,000 for it. The dealer spends $500 to give the jalopy a face-lift, and then places it on the lot with a $5,000 sticker price. The sales staff is offered a $1,000 incentive to sell it. So that car, which is certain to start costing the new owner big money in repair bills within months, nets the salesman a hefty bonus and the dealer a profit of $2,500-double or even triple the profit on a new car that may sell for $25,000. Meanwhile, the unsophisticated buyer may have been put in a high-rate auto loan as well and stands a chance of defaulting on it and tarnishing his or her credit rating. That, in turn, has the effect of furthering this individual's downward financial spiral. 

Seeing this happen time and again, Chambers recalled the faces of those poor Philippine children he saw as a sailor. Before his eyes, unscrupulous salesmen were preying on the working poor in his hometown. Not only were these problem-beset people buying even more problems-they were also certain to suffer additional economic pain when their car broke down and they were unable to get to work, missing out on a day's pay. 

So Chambers took matters into his own hands. He decided he would quit the car lot and start a service that would negotiate fair car prices for the working poor, help them with their overall finances and see to it that they get fair loans. It was a leap of faith. In five years as a car salesman 

Chambers had learned plenty about wholesale and retail prices-and how to spot a lemon. But he was in over his head when it came to partnering with banks and offering financial counseling to the poor. 

But Chambers charged ahead anyway, calling to mind the words of Ernest Hemmingway in The Old Man and the Sea: "Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is." Chambers talked a few banks into backing him and in 2001 launched Bonnie CLAC (Car Loans and Counseling; www.bonnieclac. org), a nonprofit dedicated to getting the working poor of New England into reliable vehicles and helping them shore up their credit rating. 

Since launching his firm Chambers has underwritten more than $10 million in car loans, and his clients have each saved an average of $7,000 over the life of their loan. The banks are thrilled because Chambers's referrals collectively have a better-than-average repayment record. "It's a win-win," Chambers says. "I get people who come up and give me hugs, saying, 'I never thought I could get out of debt.' I believe that most individuals really do want to do well. It's just that the system has built a circle around them that they can't escape." 

Chambers takes a comfortable annual salary ($72,000) for his do good efforts. But that's a small reason for him to be in the game. "It's changing people's lives," he says of his loan and counseling service. By making reliable transportation affordable, he helps clients hold a job and also build their credit. If more folks can afford to get to work, more will, he reasons. That's how he's living with purpose and making a difference. 

Teach about the World's Needs 

Just out of college, Katie Ginsberg began a promising career on Madison Avenue, where she worked in account management and served clients, including