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With Purpose

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Are You Using Your Life—or Is Your Life Using You? There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down and the other is pulling up.
—Booker T. Washington

A few years ago I was winding down work on my last major book, The Power Years: A User's Guide to the Rest of Your Life, when a series of peculiar events, which I'll describe, overtook me. These events changed the way I look at the world and ultimately led to the book you now hold in your hands. But this book is not about me—it's about you. It's about why your worldview may be changing, how you can better understand the shift and find purpose in everything you do. It's about how you can finally set aside, or at least temper, your focus on personal gain in order to identify with a different kind of success—one that centers on meaning and satisfaction. It's about doing something significant with the rest of your life, something that will help others and at the same time fill a void you may not even be fully aware of. For many years I wasn't fully aware of my void. But I knew something wasn't right. So let me start by explaining what changed that.

The Power Years, which I coauthoredwith Daniel J. Kadlec, was a new kind of project for me. I've made a career out of studying the lifestyles, needs, and aspirations—and the related spending and savings patterns of baby boomers. For three and a half decades, I've been writing and speaking both about the lifestyle of maturity and about boomer habits and consulting with global companies eager to capture the attention of this highly influential and wealthy generation. In The Power Years we wanted to fast-forward to gaze into the future. So we set out to examine what boomer lifestyles might look like in the traditional retirement years, which were approaching fast. In the end, we attempted to put forth a groundbreaking vision for what people might become in their fifties and beyond. The message was fairly simple: later life is evolving into an extraordinary period of good health and extended opportunity for people to do whatever they want to do. So what would they do? I loved exploring the future of relationships, leisure, learning, and work, and making sense of how people are going to pay for it all. But for me, the heart and soul of that book was the final chapter, which was called "Leaving a Legacy."

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.

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Excerpted from With Purpose by Ken Dychtwald Copyright © 2009 by Ken Dychtwald. Excerpted by permission.
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