Change

Forget about retirement! Consider reinspirement. Based upon my past three years, mostly in Mexico, I heartily recommend an international destination as a new habitat for re-inspiration. It allows you to start fresh with a beginner’s mind, learn a new culture and a new language. Maybe even save some money. Here are my top ten spots for you to consider:

As morning follows night, ending often foreshadows a new beginning. The John O’Donohue poem below has proven to be a catalyst for many of our Modern Elder Academy grads. Hope it proves to be inspiring to you as well.

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.” So says Dan Gilbert in his TED talk video (included below). People—at all ages—vastly underestimate how much change they’ll go through in their next ten years.

Life used to be so simple. We learned till our early 20s, earned till our mid-60s, and then retired happily to our La-Z Boy. We paid our dues early in our career so we could coast with our three-martini lunches (especially if we were male and pale). Society’s outdated three-stage model (learn, earn, retire) taught us...

We learn in our teens. We earn in our twenties. We yearn in our thirties. We burn in our forties. We discern in our fifties. And, we adjourn in our sixties. But, what if we lived life as a mash-up? Maybe we ought to “unlearn and return” to new subjects and experiences throughout life. Live by the “learn, earn, yearn, burn” rule and I promise you heartburn and a midlife crisis. The Game of Life was created by Milton Bradley in 1860. Isn’t it time you deviated from that linear, one-size-fits-all board game?

Want to see what massive change looks like? Check out the table below, which depicts how economic power has evolved in the U.S. from an industrial to a high-tech economy. No surprise, right? What is a surprise is how little we are prepared for that change. How does learning keep up? More accurately, where do people repurpose themselves to keep up with the changing times? “Life-long learning” may be a trendy phrase, but they’re hollow words without a home.

A wise person can distill down the essence of a business or a person’s mastery. Long ago, we created an exercise in my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre, in which we asked management theorist Peter Drucker’s favorite question, “What business are we in?” five times in sets of dyads (you sit two people facing each other). The value of this repeating question meant the answerer, who couldn’t repeat an answer, needed to act like a miner in digging deeper into what’s their core differentiator. This approach led us to discover...