Dedicate your life to learning…and don’t be a grumpy old person.
“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” –Sophia Loren
“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” — Mark Twain
Everyone knows the stereotype of the cranky old curmudgeon, fist tightened, shouting archaic curses at the neighborhood kids who cut through his lawn. No one wants to be that guy. But sometimes it’s too easy to fall into patterns of resistance.
Resistance, of course, is the enemy of all progress. In Steven Pressfield’s celebrated book, The War of Art, resistance is an invisible, ever-present internal force that prevents us from doing whatever our hearts desire. It can be an excuse we make or fear of failure or laziness. Whatever it is, it stops our ability to be productive dead in its tracks.
When you’ve reached the point in your life when resistance dominates the outcomes of your daily decisions, you are officially old. It matters not whether you are 25 or 80. Just that you’ve found reasons to not do things and started focusing instead on putting dreams or goals aside. A common lament of the complacent goes: “I’m too old for that.”
But more so than ever before, we live in a time during which such thinking can have terrible consequences, both professionally and personally.
Keeping Pace with the Future
In case you need a reminder of just how fast the world is changing, the past couple weeks alone saw Germany introduce legislation to regulate the self-driving car, and several data companies began testing use of the Amazon Echo — a voice activated digital personal assistant — as a business analyst. Only a few years ago, technologies like automated cars and artificially intelligent employees were still firmly considered science fiction. Within a few more years, we may take them for granted.
Seeing these technologies in use will be fascinating and more than a little scary, but more so as we prepare for their impact on our economy. Drivers, mechanics, insurance salesmen and business owners relying on drive-through services may be among the inestimable losers in the driverless car revolution. But the real challenge will be dealing with the speed at which such changes will take place.
In the past, when new technologies disrupted entrenched industries and business models, the disintermediation of the old ways took place over the course of generations. For example, the first fuel-powered automobiles arrived in the 1880s, but cars didn’t cut into horse-drawn transportation in major cities until assembly line production began 25 years later. It took another 20 years before cars disrupted the rural transportation scene.
This meant that anyone involved in equine businesses had roughly half a lifetime to understand and react to contemporary innovations in their field. Painful? Sure. Catastrophic? Far from it.
Today is different. We no longer have the luxury of easing into the adoption of a new technology. Disruptive changes are happening far too fast and require constant attention. Some of the more unexpected job-disrupting advancements have come about only in the past five to 10 years. See the tidal effects of Craigslist, Netflix and Uber for just a taste of how minimum investment startups can shake up billion dollar industries in a heartbeat. If you’re looking around the room and you don’t see any casualties, chances are you might be one.
In my own career, I’ve noticed the rise and fall of entire new job descriptions in only the past decade. After the start of the new millennium, for instance, the concept of SEO (search engine optimization) was virtually unknown. By 2007, an entire cottage industry within the tech/media sector had emerged, employing thousands of six-figure professionals. In the latter part of the decade, due in no small part to changes made by Google to its search engine algorithms, the fledgling profession itself underwent drastic changes that forced a new learning curve upon its practitioners. While the SEO arena has continued to grow, the discipline itself is hardly similar to what it was 10 years ago.
The Exorbitant Cost of Being Satisfied
Keeping up with such constant, forceful and unrelenting industry evolution is hard enough when you’re on the front lines fighting it every day. It’s even more difficult when you’ve spent time out of the game, or reached a point of complacency after a long career.
Unfortunately, not even experienced professionals can get away with slowing down their pace of tech adaptation. Financial analyst John Mauldin explains the whole situation quite adequately here:
As whole new industries develop, the advancing wave of technology will continue to create jobs, but generally not jobs that will require old skills. Humans have always had to adapt, but the speed at which we must adapt is accelerating. In the past, it has been the young who have done most of the adapting as they have learned new skills for new jobs. In the future the young will still be part of the adaptation process; but, more and more, those in their 40s and 50s and 60s will be called upon to change as well.
Put more concisely, we cannot afford to let ourselves get old. Or, at least, not in our minds. Constant learning is now a prerequisite for a long career in any profession. This is unprecedented.
My friend told me relayed a story recently about how he was sitting at a coffee shop reading a book on entrepreneurship, when an older gentleman approached him to make small talk. Pointing at the book, the elder chap told my friend that reading what he called a “self-help” book was a waste of time. After all, he’d already done his time, gone to school and learned what he needed to know.
Given that Americans over 50 are out of work at record levels and for longer time periods than at any point in our history, this casual conversation strikes an ominous tone. And it serves notice for younger generations to be on their guard. Today’s 20 somethings may not have an expectation of traditional retirement.
Instead, regardless of age, we should revel in a lifelong quest to learn, inquire, create, experiment and reinvent ourselves. Constantly. But not just to keep our mind, body and spirit healthy. This is also a professional imperative. Whether it be learning to code at night or signing up for an interactive class on Coursera, Udemy or Lynda, powerful educational information is available for cheap or free. Taking advantage of it might create an unforeseen opportunity or make or break a career.
As a bonus, there has been some research emerging that connects lifelong learning to improved mental health and cognitive performance. Fighting the psychological war against feeling old may actually help save us from being old. There are plenty of real world case studies.
In a wonderful, wide-ranging interview with Esquire magazine, the spry, 86-year-old Clint Eastwood offered keys for looking good and being creatively productive despite his advancing age. “I never let the old man in,” Eastwood said.
Wise words from a legend.