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Old in Art School – Nell Painter

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Retirement Wisdom · Aug 27, 2018 ·

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In this conversation on our retirement podcast, our attention turns to adult learning and ongoing adult education. We talk with Dr. Nell Painter, a distinguished historian and retired professor from Princeton University, about her latest book Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (named one of Time’s Best Memoirs of 2018 So Far).

She shares her insights about her experience in returning to school for a BA and MFA in a different field, the challenges and obstacles she overcame, and what she learned about reinventing herself along the way. It’s a compelling story because of the adversity she faced along the way, from people you’d expect would be encouraging and supporting her pursuit of lifelong learning. If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of returning to school, you’ll benefit from hearing the inspiring story of her adult learning journey – and her practical advice and wisdom on how to get started on your ongoing adult education.

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Dr. Nell Painter:

Nell Painter’s Website

Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over on Amazon

(Note: Named One of O: The Oprah Magazine‘s Top Books of Summer)

Follow Dr. Painter on Twitter: @PainterNell

Dr. Painter’s complete bio

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About Retirement Wisdom

We help people who are retiring, but not done yet, discover what’s next.

A long retirement is a terrible thing to waste. And a meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

We help you design the life in retirement that’s uniquely right for you.

Retire smarter. Schedule a call today to discuss how we can help you make yours great.

Retirement Wisdom · Aug 6, 2018 ·

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Companies are in various stages of being ready for an aging workforce. For example, only 9% offer formal programs for phased retirement, even though flexible work options are plentiful for other life stages. In this conversation on our retirement planning podcast, Joe talks with Paul Rupert, CEO of Respectful Exits about trends in the workplace for seasoned workers. Paul offers his views on what smart companies can do to attract and retain talented older workers. Paul also shares valuable advice on how individuals can approach negotiating phased retirement as part of flexible work options and tells us the story behind his new advocacy organization.

Bio

Paul Rupert is Chief Executive Officer of Respectful Exits. Paul has forty-five years of nonprofit management and consulting experience. He founded and managed innovative nonprofits in healthcare, legal services, mediation, publishing and advocacy campaigns. He played a pivotal role in promoting the practice of flexible scheduling and staffing throughout the economy. His firm Rupert Organizational Design has consulted to more than a hundred companies implementing creative flexible staffing and scheduling initiatives. His firm currently leads in the development of flexible and phased retirement programs.

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Wise Quotes

On How Companies Can Help Employees Prepare for Retirement

“…begin to get rid of that notion of people having reached their ‘Sell-By Date’. A lot of companies are moving in that direction. I think there are organizations that are beginning to recognize the need for ongoing financial wellness counseling. We promote very strongly the idea, that companies, primarily in the private sector, got rid of defined benefit pension plans. They have sufficient resources to provide ongoing, what we call financial wellness counseling to their employees. We call on employers to do that. There are examples of employers who essentially provide for annual financial checkups for this, on company time, and on the company dime. It’s a very modest investment and it makes an enormous difference, because as you probably well know, the failure to understand early in your career, the need to save, and to take responsibility for your own 401K, et cetera, is terribly important. Companies have a captive audience to whom they can, in an affordable way, provide that invaluable service. I was talking to a client the other day and they said, “We have a program in which we require our employees to have an annual automobile safety check, and we pay for it.” I said, “Well, do you do that with finances?” They said, “Well no, not really.” I said, “Well, you should.”

On Making An Effective Proposal for Phased Retirement

“Phased-retirement is just another form of flexible work. If you’re going to make that proposal then, talk to your manager about what’s in it for the company for you to do this. Don’t talk about what’s in it for you…Just focus on, “If I work this way, these are the following benefits to the company. We suggest in the framework, show the general benefits that can accrue to the company, but also the specific components. A very concrete suggestion: ‘Here’s what I’m doing now and how. Here’s how I would work in a phased or a partial retirement setting.’ Secondly, and most importantly, it’s easy to talk about things like mentoring, and knowledge-transfer, and those are grand ideas. What knowledge do you have that is valuable for the company to retain? How do you qualify and quantify it?

Managers are trained to review and consider business proposals. So, whether it’s an equipment proposal, or a supply proposal, or a process, you come to them, say, ‘Here’s the package with my current offering, here’s what I’m suggesting as a replacement package. I think these are the benefits’ Then you put it in the framework that managers are comfortable deciding in. It’s not about, ‘Gee, I love Joe. He’s been wonderful,’ or, ‘This guy’s always been prickly, I really wish he were gone.’ You can set some of that stuff aside and say, ‘Hey, this actually will be good.‘

This is the other final point I’d make, there’s a tremendous mythology that what managers will do is what’s in the company’s interest. That is not necessarily the case. Companies may have lofty goals about how they want to support their aging workers, but it’s the manager who has to make these things work. So, if you, in the course of proposing, aren’t developing a win-win with the manager, how is he going look better? How is his work unit going to produce more and better work? What’s going to make his life easier? Then they’re not going to necessarily say yes in order to support lofty company goals. They might, but in my experience, the more you recognize that managers have a very, very tough job and lots of pressures on them, and if you’re going to make their life harder, there better be a good reason for it. If you’re going to make their life easier, they’re much more inclined to say Yes.”

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For more on Paul Rupert:

Website: Respectful Exits: The Voice of Aging Workers

Twitter @RespectfulExits

GAO Report to the Special Committee on Aging, U.S. Senate:

Older Workers – Phased Retirement Programs, Although Uncommon, Provide Flexibility for Workers and Employers

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Stay around for the Noteworthy segment on an article worth your time

This week’s selection is The Big Changes Ahead for Boomer Workers

by Richard Eisenberg – Next Avenue

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Balance Your Retirement Planning with Wisdom

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About Retirement Wisdom

We help people who are retiring, but not done yet, discover what’s next.

A long retirement is a terrible thing to waste. And a meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Retire smarter. Schedule a call today to discuss how we can help you make yours great.

Retirement Wisdom · Aug 2, 2018 ·

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What you achieve the freedom to retire, but find that you’re allergic to retirement living? What if life in retirement just isn’t for you? In this episode of our podcast about retirement and career switches, Joe talks with Nicole Maestas, Ph.D., an economist at Harvard Medical School, about the interesting trend of unretiring, the notable benefits of working longer and what women need to think about in planning for retirement. Her research is showing that a sizable number of people are retiring – from retirement – and returning to work within the first five years. And in many cases, it’s not financially driven. It’s about the intangible things we get from work beyond a paycheck – and miss when they’re gone. Retirement living isn’t for everyone. There are ways you can reinvent yourself, including unretiring, perhaps even to rejoin your last employer ina new way.

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Bio

Nicole Maestas, Ph.D., is an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. Her research studies how the health and disability insurance systems affect individual economic behaviors, such as labor supply and the consumption of medical care.

Dr. Maestas’ research in disability economics has shown how the federal disability insurance system discourages employment by people with disabilities. Applying a causal research design to newly developed administrative data, her work showed that the work capacity of disability insurance beneficiaries with less severe disabilities is substantial. Furthermore, individuals lose additional work capacity the longer they stay out of the labor force pursuing a disability determination.

Her work on the economics of aging has demonstrated significant shifts in labor supply patterns at older ages. She showed that one-half of all retirees pursue a retirement transition path that involves partial retirement or labor force re-entry (“unretirement”) and that re-entry was largely predictable ex ante, and not a consequence of economic shocks. She has also argued that labor supply at older ages is likely to increase still further, even absent policy changes to promote employment at older ages, due to increased labor demand for older workers. Indeed, her work shows that the rise in employment at older ages was driven in substantial part by an increase in labor demand by firms in the professional services industries. In current work, she is examining how these labor force trends, and population aging more generally, affect economic growth.

Dr. Maestas has testified before Congress about her research on two occasions, once before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, and once before the Senate Finance Committee. She recently completed service on a national disability policy panel convened by the Social Security Advisory Board.

Dr. Maestas graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College. She received her MPP in public policy UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in economics also from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Harvard, Dr. Maestas was a senior economist at RAND.

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Wise Quotes

On Unretiring

“…This is exactly why I started looking into this question of what is unretirement? Is this a response to bad financial problems? It really just is not that for most people. It is about being able to achieve something they want, maybe they’re not ready to stop working and there’s even a variety of research that suggests there can be health benefits to working longer if you’re in the right kind of position, but things that people talk about here are the benefits of social engagement, even the benefits of physical activity. There have been benefits associated with the mental activity of jobs and some people find that a job, you have a way to exercise the creativity, to express themselves creatively at work by solving problems and helping people. Then I’d say another thing that you really can’t underestimate is that a lot of us derive meaning and sense of purpose from our work and these non-financial aspects really can’t be underestimated.”

On Reinvention

“Sometimes, for some people, I think unretirement allows you to find a job that better meets the working conditions you’re looking for at this particular time in your life. Maybe you can achieve the hours you want, or you’re out of a very fast-paced environment, or maybe you actually want that. It gives you a chance to reconfigure your working life and I would say too that for some people, employers won’t allow them to slowly reduce their hours over time, this idea of phased retirement, and in that case, unretirement is … it kind of results from having to stop working for your current employer and either go back to work for them or somebody else in a different capacity. It almost becomes a do-it-yourself phased retirement. Yes, it is actually a way to achieve a phased retirement without doing it through the same employer. I think for a lot of people, that do-it-yourself aspect lets you even kind of reinvent yourself. Some people will say that the thing they do after they retire is the thing they always wanted to do or the thing that really, really drives their interest now. But people work longer in a lot of different ways, it’s not just about having to stop and then restart something else, many people, in fact, will volunteer as a way to get some of the benefits of being in a workplace without actually working.”

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Follow Nicole Maestas

You can keep up with Nicole’s work by following her on Twitter @NicoleMaestas2

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About Retirement Wisdom

We help people who are retiring from their primary career – and aren’t done yet – discover what’s next.

A long retirement is a terrible thing to waste. And a meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how we can help you make yours great.

Retirement Wisdom · Jul 23, 2018 ·

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Are Purpose & Meaning Better Than Happiness?

In this episode of our retirement life podcast, we talk with Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning.

Emily shares her insights on why purpose and meaning offer great fulfillment and how they can be cultivated in a culture that’s obsessed with happiness.

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Bio

Emily Esfahani Smith is a writer in Washington DC. In her writing, she draws on psychology, philosophy, and literature to write about the human experience—why we are the way we are and how we can find grace and meaning in a world that is full of suffering. Her book The Power of Meaning, an international bestseller, was published by Crown and has been translated into 16 different languages. The Wall Street Journal called the book “persuasive,” “elegant,” and “valuable” while the Prospect (UK) dubbed it “an intelligent page-turner.”

She is also an international speaker who has delivered dozens of keynote addresses and workshops at corporations, conferences, non-profit organizations, libraries, universities, and high schools around the country and world. In 2017, Smith delivered a talk called “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy” on the main stage of TED, which was based on her book. It’s been viewed over 9 million times.

The former managing editor of The New Criterion, Smith’s articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and other publications. Her articles for The Atlantic “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy” (about the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl) and “Masters of Love” (about romance and marriage) have reached over 30 million readers. In 2017, the New York Times published her article about rethinking success called “You’ll Never Be Famous—And That’s OK.” And her profile for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine of Joe Rago, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who tragically died at the age of 34, was shortlisted for a Folio magazine award in 2018. In 2019, she was a Poynter Journalism Fellow at Yale University.

Smith is also a reporter for the Aspen Institute’s Weave project, an initiative founded by the New York Times‘ David Brooks to address the problems of isolation, alienation, and division. At Weave, Smith finds and tells the stories of people who are working to rebuild the social fabric.

Smith studied philosophy at Dartmouth College. She received her master’s degree in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she continues to serve as an assistant instructor in positive psychology.

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Smith grew up in Montreal, Canada. She now lives in Washington DC with her husband, Charlie.

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Wise Quotes

On Purpose

“What it is I wanted to do with my book was, as you suggest, bring purpose down to earth a little bit, because if it’s so grand and so out of reach, like going to the Himalayas, then that means that few of us can actually accomplish it. But that’s untrue. There are ways to find purpose just all around us. I think that a way to think about purpose is just that people find purpose in doing whatever it is that they’re doing well. So, if you’re a parent, doing a good job at parenting. If you’re washing the dishes, doing a good job with that. And realizing that these small acts of purpose, what makes them purposeful is that they connect to something beyond yourself. I think parenting is an example. When I talk to people and ask “What gives your life purpose?” children is the thing that comes up again and again, because it’s this project that’s bigger than you are, and it is making this major contribution to society by raising people to kind of be citizens. And also, it makes a contribution to their lives, because you’re investing in the growth and development of your kids. Stepping away from relationships, there are also kinds of tasks and the projects of daily life, whether it’s work or our hobbies, that we can find purpose by again understanding how those tasks connect to something bigger.”

On Transcendence

“So when I was writing my book, there were some kind of intelligently named topics that seemed obvious to me, like belonging and purpose. When you talk to people about their experiences, about what makes their life meaningful, they mention their job, their relationship, things like that. But then there was a whole other category of experience that seemed to share something in common. That commonality, I call transcendence. So these are experiences like being in nature and feeling a sense of oneness walking in the woods, or seeing the Grand Canyon and feeling a sense of awe and wonder, and your own sense of self is smaller because what lies before you is so big. Or, going to a church service, praying, meditating, these moments that kind of still your mind and that again connect it to something bigger. What they all share in common, I found, was that they’re all about doing something or having an experience where your sense of self feels smaller, all the noises in your head, all your daily concerns kind of become less significant as you feel connected to something much bigger than yourself. Whether it’s the universe or God or nature or humanity, there’s this feeling of kind of oceanic expansion.”

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For More on Emily Esfahani Smith

Emily’s TED Talk:

There’s More to Life Than Being Happy

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About Retirement Wisdom

We help people who are retiring, but not done yet, discover what’s next.

A long retirement is a terrible thing to waste. And a meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Retire smarter. Schedule a call today to discuss how we can help you make yours great.

Retirement Wisdom · Jul 9, 2018 ·

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Do your retirement ideas include the right pace of retirement life for you? In this conversation on our podcast on retirement, we interview Dr. David Ekerdt, University of Kansas professor and President of the Gerontological Society of America. He has found that for some people a slow retirement is the right fit, even though it flies in the face of our culture which prizes busyness. He shares his observations and findings from his research on what influences our views of retirement, how people should embrace different lifestyles in retirement – and how preparing for downsizing ahead of retirement can make you more nimble.

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Bio

David Ekerdt is Professor of Sociology and Gerontology at the University of Kansas. From 1988-1997 he was Associate Director of the Center on Aging and Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center. He directed the KU Gerontology Center from 2003-2016. He teaches the sociology of aging and research methods, and he has supervised graduate students on both campuses.

Dr. Ekerdt has three areas of research. (1) His funded studies of work and retirement have examined the retirement process and its effects on health, well-being, and the marital relationship, as well as behavioral expectations on later life. (2) He has used interview and survey methods to study the ways that older people manage and dispose of possessions during residential relocation. (3) He is one of an international team of psychologists and sociologists funded by the Volkswagen Foundation to compare older adults’ conceptions of aging, time, and the future in Germany, Hong Kong, and the U.S.

These projects have resulted in 100+ articles, chapters, reviews, editorials, and edited books. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Aging, a four-volume, one-million-word work published in 2002, a work with seven specialty editors that covers topics in biology, health care, social and behavioral sciences, humanities, ethics, and social policy.

A graduate of Boston University (Ph.D., 1979), Dr. Ekerdt has also been a member of the faculties of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and the Boston University School of Public Health.

Dr. Ekerdt is also president of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the nation’s largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to the field of aging. He was elected by GSA’s membership, which consists of more than 5,500 researchers, educators, practitioners, and other professionals.

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Wise Quotes

On Lifestyle Choices in Retirement

“The key task is to settle into some sort of lifestyle, and find that lifestyle, and find yourself running a new program for yourself. That can take some time, and I think people should be patient with themselves in getting to that new lifestyle that they might occupy. There are various classic lifestyles. A lot of men and wives that I’ve talked to, settle on really a lifestyle of family devotion, giving a lot of time over to their kids. They enjoy their kids, and their kids have needs, need help, and spend a lot of time with their family members. It becomes the main motor of their day Some people go into community service and political activism, community volunteering. Other people, their main story about their retirement is, how much they’re devoted to fitness, health, and engaging in sports. And for other people, it’s about self-gratification and leisure. You see this bumper sticker on the road, “We’re spending our children’s inheritance.” People conclude, this is my time, this is time for me now, and that’s what I’m going to do. Some people continue to work. They find second careers or they find part-time employment to occupy themselves. Some people continue to be occupied even with their same occupation. They find a way to remain engaged, either some sort of mentoring, consulting, or in some allied way.”

Article by David Ekerdt

In Defense of the Not-So-Busy Retirement – The Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-defense-of-the-not-so-busy-retirement-1524449520

https://www.facebook.com/wsj/posts/10157719895973128

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Stick Around for the Noteworthy segment where Joe & Denis discuss an article worth reading

This week’s selection is To Control Your Life, Control What You Pay Attention To

by Maura Thomas, an interesting piece on how we can benefit from Attention Management instead of Time Management.

https://hbr.org/2018/03/to-control-your-life-control-what-you-pay-attention-to

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Old in Art School – Nell Painter

Dr. Nell Painter:

Bio

Wise Quotes

For more on Paul Rupert:

Stay around for the Noteworthy segment on an article worth your time

Balance Your Retirement Planning with Wisdom

About Retirement Wisdom

Wise Quotes

Follow Nicole Maestas

Are Purpose & Meaning Better Than Happiness?

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Bio

Wise Quotes

For More on Emily Esfahani Smith

Bio

Wise Quotes

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