My friend, MarketWatch Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Olshan, posed the following inquiry that I found provocative: “Laura Carstensen at Stanford’s Center on Longevity has argued that we should abolish retirement and spread periods of work, education and sabbatical throughout our lives, abandoning the old school/work/retirement timeline. She recently asked me if I’d be willing to give up the chance to retire in the future in exchange for a four-day workweek now.”

Thurgood Marshall once said, "None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots." This is just one quote that marks him as a Modern Elder.

I learned this concept in business school and can still recite the definition: “the present value of the future cash flows attributed to the customer during his/her entire relationship with the company.” While I appreciate the premise as it suggests a long-term, less transactional approach to our customer relationships, it also has fueled Madison Avenue’s fixation on marketing to young people because they have more years ahead of them.

I came across a piece of paper on my desk with words that referred to three personal memories: “Rear Window,” “Catcher in the Rye,” and Patti Smith. What had happened in each instance that I wanted to remember? Was there a connection? It took a while, but I figured it out - the theme is “discovery.”

Tom Morris is a former University of Notre Dame philosophy professor who left to champion practical philosophy via books and seminars. He was one of 23 interviews that my partners Jeff Hamaoui and Skylar Skikos performed last spring around the subject of regeneration. The title of today’s post comes from Tom.

Today is my 69th birthday and I am jolted in ways that continually serve as signposts along this path of modern elder-ism. Yesterday, a dear friend, who became a collector of my photographs over the last 12 years, informed me he was closing his office and wanted to return all the images he procured from me due to no space.

Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” urged workers of the world to unite: “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Today’s rally cry is a shout out to older workers, and it’s loud and clear: “We have everything to gain from your brains!”

Today’s blog post title comes courtesy of this article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version (and, if you don’t know what that means, you’re probably not over 50):

This question affects a growing number of mid-lifers who feel like a brown banana in the produce stand—well past its sell-by date. And, yet a publication in the New England Journal of Medicine (2018) found that the most productive age in a human’s life is not in our 20s or 30s, but between the ages of 60 and 70.

I recently told our MEA team that they didn’t have to work as hard as me. It was an odd statement. What I meant to say is they don’t have to work as much as me, partly because I feel like I’m living my calling and love what I’m doing.