Introduction

Bob and Debbie seemed to be a couple who were living what people think is the final act of the American Dream. Bob retired in his early sixties after a successful career in a Fortune 500 company. About the time his retirement came up the company was sold, so he was financially set for life. Bob and Debbie had two wonderful children and two wonderful grandchildren, and had been married for over forty years. They bought a house on the east coast, and for the first decade after Bob’s retirement they split their time between their home in California and their home in Virginia. They had plenty of time for their grandchildren and going on cruises to exotic places around the world. Bob had some involvement on a nonprofit board and they attended church.

After ten years of living what Bob thought was his dream, he was feeling increasingly dissatisfied and empty because of the needs he had learned about around the world, needs that he could meet. Recently he had an “Aha!” moment, and said to himself, Wait a minute, this is not all there is. He told Hans, “I need to quit doing all this stuff that’s filling my life with fun—but is not fulfilling. I want to make a difference with the years I have left. I have to make room to make a contribution.”

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On January 1, 2011, baby boomers began turning sixty-five. Between seven and ten thousand of us will celebrate that milestone birthday each day for the next eighteen years. Seventy-six million of us boomers are moving into our sixties and seventies—more than a quarter of the US population. The last wave of boomers turned fifty on January 1, 2014. At every stage of our lives, we have been a national focus for the entertainment industry, the media, and marketers. Our late-life transition will again rock the world. By 2050, according to Pew Research projections, about one in five Americans will be over age sixty-five, and about 5 percent will be ages eighty-five and older, up from 2 percent in 2010. These ratios will put the United States at mid-century roughly where Japan, Italy, and Germany—the three “oldest” large countries in the world—are today.1

Statistics show that we are living on average twelve years longer than the previous “builder” generation. And in the process we are redefining what is known as “the retirement years.” Dr. Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, says, “The culture hasn’t had time to catch up. The enormity of this hasn’t hit people.”2 We, the authors, are coming to grips with the bonus of these added years, and this book is aimed squarely at helping our aging generation in this transition toward a meaningful and purposeful later life.

As authors, we have pondered our fate approaching this post-career life stage. As a result, we came up with the idea of the “60–80 Window.” We have a lot of plans to be productive during our sixties and seventies, and don’t plan to retire to a beach or a golf course. Sure, we will do some of that—we have earned it—but we want much more out of these approaching years than the traditional view of retirement. We believe that boomers need to be intentional about finding meaning and purpose in this older stage of life, which brings up a number of key questions. Where will we find significance in the 60–80 Window? How do we find that new place as we leave our main careers? How do we launch a fulfilling encore?

During our journey of writing this book, over a two-year period, we both floated the word retirement time and again. We mentioned to strangers and friends alike that we were pioneering new ways of looking at retirement years for boomers who don’t really like that “R” word. The comebacks were at times hilarious, chilling, confusing, and enlightening. Most of all, they underscored our observation that for most boomers and younger people there is not much serious thought or preparation for getting ready for this important life transition.

Retirement is many different things for each one of us. One older retired gentleman we ran into said, “My retired friends either love it or hate it.” So we asked, “Why do they hate it?” He replied, “Because they have not figured out what to do and they are bored stiff.”

Here is just a sampling of other things we heard in our informal survey.

Question: What comes to mind when you hear the word retirement?

We found some interesting contrasts:

If we had a chance to ask you, how would you fill in this blank? “For me the word retirement means _________________.”

Getting old is happening to all of us, even to our favorite movie stars. “But I’m kind of comfortable with getting older because it’s better than the other option, which is being dead. So I’ll take getting older,” says George Clooney.3 That fact being obvious, we want to add that we believe that growing old can be dangerous. The trail is treacherous and the pitfalls are many. One is wise to be prepared. We know it’s coming. It’s not like God kept the aging process a secret from all of us. It’s not like we are blazing a new trail that no one has traveled before. But, like every life stage we have gone through as boomers, from Kennedy’s assassination to Woodstock, from Watergate and Vietnam to 9/11 and our two recent wars, it does seem that we are walking “the road less traveled.” Why is that? Because, as a generation, we have always thought of ourselves as “different.”

Imagine the journey of life like an escalator in your local mall. We get on as infants and start riding up the journey of life. First floor is infancy and childhood. Then we get back on and ride up another floor to land in the stage of adolescence. On up we go, to college and our careers. Probably most of us gather up spouses and children as we keep going up the escalator to new floors. As we ride along, just like at the mall, we can peer down and see what we are leaving behind and look up to see what is coming next. For generations, the final stop on the escalator of life was retirement and death, often in our sixties. But today there is so much more as we stay on the escalator. Today we rise up and reach what we call “the encore floors of elderlescence.” We view it as a stage of life filled with just as much prominence and adventure as adolescence. Or you might prefer our newly coined phrase that is easier on the tongue, the 60–80 Window. Whatever you want to call it, a whole new floor—or life stage—awaits most of us boomers right now as we move into our sixties and beyond.

Bottom line: The word retirement should not be an exit sign, but a door into something fresh, new, and exciting. We are in a massive generational changing of the guard, and boomers will redefine the traditional notion of retirement as they reach that top floor in the mall of life. Frankly, retirement is a four-letter word for us, if you listen to most boomers you ask about it. The word smacks of lying on the couch or beach and doing nothing. Dr. Richard Luker, a social psychologist and expert on how Americans spend their leisure time and money, says that this trend of a new view of retirement is dramatically accelerating. “People who are now in their fifties are far more vital in their outlook than people in their fifties were even ten years ago.” He goes on to say, “People are saying, ‘I’m up for it. I’m game, I want to do more.’”4

Most of us do not want to follow the path of our parents, who might have lived long enough to land on the beaches of Florida and drive golf carts. Sure, we want some of that, but along with having more fun and leisure time we also hope to seek meaning and purpose in new, uncharted ways. As we move out of our main-act careers into the encore of our lives, we will most likely want to find roles of influence and purpose that are not based on positions or professions we held in the past but on a lifetime of accumulated experience.

Both of us have a deep passion to mobilize our aging generation for significant impact on the world at this stage of our lives. We believe that our final act might just be our greatest contribution. We have earned the right in “retirement” to pursue the joys of golf, grandchildren, cruises, and collecting seashells. But we think that these fun adventures should be coupled with activities and commitments that make a contribution back to society. In the words of Max Lucado, “Your last chapters can be your best. Your final song can be your greatest.”5