Especially for those of you who are in their 40s and 50s, but also for the young adults, here comes a copy of Michael Schrage’s eye-opening article on the consequences of the developed countries’ demographic go-down for all of us. And most importantly, what mindset we had better adopt in order to adapt to the new reality of our career paths.

The 15 Minutes that Could Save Five Years

If you’re over 60 years old and reading this post, it’s probably too late. Good for you if you’re under 30. You’ve got a better chance if you’re younger.

Age discrimination? No. The end of retirement as we know it — an emerging unpleasant reality that will (re)shape the quality of life and standard of living for billions. Start dealing with it. Now.

If you are a knowledge worker, cognitive capitalist, or a Reichian symbolic analyst, you will not be retiring at 65. Period. Even if you are in a protected public union with cosseted pension funds, you are at extraordinary risk. Just ask the Greeks, the Californians, or the Japanese. This is a global phenomenon. Demographics and structural deficits don’t lie. Unless the global economy comes roaring back in ways that stimulate sustainable growth in OECD countries, even the most talented professionals had better expect to work for at least another five years.

Of course, with stimulating careers, good health, and longer life spans, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it is surely not what most mid-career executives and professionals have planned. (Indeed, there’s no shortage of optimists who still expect to enjoy the fruits of early retirement.) Forget the “saving for retirement” shibboleths. Strategically addressing those 60+ months after age 65 may be the most significant long-range planning investment in your human capital portfolio. Charles Handy’s “portfolio careers” and “How Starbucks Saved My Life” scenarios notwithstanding, the simple reality is that retirement planning as we know it is obsolete.

Everyone reading this should take 15 hard minutes to ruthlessly reassess the reality of the “new” final years of their future career. The finish line has become elusive; the goal posts have been pushed back. Based on your current skill set and competences, what do you think your workday will look like when you’re 70? Are you comfortable with the probability that you will be managing employees younger than your grandchildren? Temperamentally, do you think you’ll add more value as a mentor, a partner, or part-timer? More important, what will your (much) younger boss think?

Do you honestly believe that, when you have to work five more years than anticipated, you can get away with not being more facile, adept, and productive with emerging technologies? The inevitable aging of the (for now) wealthier Western economies guarantees a surge of innovative device interfaces more compatible with slower fingers and tired eyes. You will, of course, be taking web-enabled professional/technical development courses at 58 or 62 or you will be fired for cause.

Whatever your 70-year-old workday scenarios may be, what new or novel skills or experiences do they demand? Do they demand more travel or less? More time immersed in digital environments or less? More interactions with people within a decade of your age or fewer? Are there personal or professional development initiatives you should be undertaking now precisely because those five years present opportunities that the earlier deadlines don’t?

The most important slice of those 15-minutes-for-five-more-years should focus on role models. Who are the 70+ year olds whose presence, energy, and effectiveness might profitably serve as the benchmarks for your own? Who are the two 75-year-olds who you would professionally emulate? Write them down. I know my two and why I picked them. But why have you chosen yours? What do your choices say about the kind of person you want to be at the end of your professional life?

To be sure, there’s no shortage of 70+ and even 80+ seniors — Warren Buffett, Sumner Redstone, Pablo Casals, Louise Nevelson, Agnes de Mille, Lee Kuan Yew — for whom advancing age has not been an obstacle to productivity and professionalism. But the braver and bolder way to interpret this challenge is the recognition that, just as you can’t run or swim as fast as your 25-year-old self, your 70-year-old self will have to manage and add professional value differently than you did at 40 or 50.

You don’t have to know — you can’t possibly know — the answer to that right now. But it’s not too early to ask those questions and select those role models. (You’ll be fascinated to see how those selections evolve as you age). The future of “five more” doesn’t quite make a mockery of the clichéd “Have you saved enough for retirement?” and “What will you do in retirement?” questions dominating most end-of-career discussions. Make no mistake: Calculating the value of career-enhancing investments at 53 when expecting to retire at 65 requires different NPV or DCF computations and professional assessment than when making such a bet knowing you will not be retiring before 70. That’s a greater than 40% gap; it can’t be ignored or finessed. The changing structural economics of retirement almost completely overturn conventional cost/benefit calibrations for human capital investment.

Are those extra five years being tacked onto an appreciating or depreciating asset? Even adjusting for age discrimination lawsuits and legislation, how will organizations accommodate a psychographic, demographic, and economic shift every bit as profound as the rise of women in the workplace?

The fact remains that older professionals and managers tend to be the most expensive items on the payroll. You know this. What on earth justifies the value of keeping them — or you — for five more years? Or, alternately, are those additional years spent in the murky realms of partial, part-time, or contingent employ with nervous 60-year-olds working almost as hard and creatively for two-thirds or three-quarters of their previous compensation? How about half?

The pace of change in the most vibrant post-industrial sectors is such that the technical expertise of one’s 40s has decayed into anachronistic obsolescence by one’s 50s. Knowledge may be power but it is also perishable. Yesterday’s hot mark-up language is tomorrow’s Sanskrit; last decade’s breakthrough medical procedure is next year’s malpractice. The cliché about the distinction between “five year’s experience” and a “year’s worth of experience five times” has seldom been more apt or more bitter. Then again, cultivating and harvesting one’s socio-professional network for five more years can also yield disproportionate value.

Perhaps, as some Kauffman Foundation fans have suggested, we’ll see an explosion of “silver entrepreneurship” or Tom Malone’s “e-lancing” as an industry’s most experienced practitioners launch start-ups or consulting shops to manage their transitions. Enterprise dynamics of internal competition, promotion, and mentoring will be revolutionized if the median age skews up and 60-year old executives who had planned to vanish into the Bermuda triangle of retirement in five years now push hard to stay for 10. If market forces and healthier lifestyles make 65 the new 50, then everyone now working in their 40s or 50s better revisit their most fundamental assumptions about what investing in their career should mean. When you know that being on the job 60 more months is inevitable, you have to have the courage and character to ask: How can I make them the most pleasantly and professionally productive of my life?

www.cipe.org/essay

The Center for International Private Enterprise invites young people to share their ideas on how to create opportunities for youth to strengthen democracy and the private sector in their own countries.

Who can participate:
Students and young professionals aged 18-30.

Contest Deadline:
June 18, 2010

Winners Announced:
Fall 2010

Essay Length:
2,000 – 3,000 words

Essay categories:
Democracy that delivers
Enterpreneurship and society
Women and participation

For each category, CIPE will publish first, second, and third place essays, and authors will receive a $1,000 honorarium.

Contest Sponsors:

For full guidelines, helpful resources, and to submit essays, visit:

www.cipe.org/essay

The Clenching Fist is another one of my short stories, bordering on an essay. Its history is funny. I wrote it for a photo-challenge contest of the Menda City Review e-zine earlier on this year. They challenged a number of their women contributors to write a short-short story based on the photo of an old man’s fist, similar to the one you see below. My story didn’t win the competition (whose award was publication) but The Canary Islands Magazine published it a few months later, in their May, 2009 issue!

I wrote it while I was on Tenerife island and The Canary Islands Magazine were kind enough to send me the magazine itself later to Germany. As they don’t have an electronic version to quote, here comes the story itself:

THE  CLENCHING  FIST

However happily I may live now, it is my hand that he pines to hold.

I hate the haunting image of my grandfather’s solid callous fist. He still longs for a dog to hurl a stick to, to run up wagging its tail to the familiar call “Bobcho! Come here, boy!” and roam the family fields with him. Now the land and house are sold to strangers. ¨Too old to live far from doctors, ¨ grandma persuaded him, ¨town´s safer, higher status.¨ But if you look closely at the deep lines on his palm and in the crevices of his fingerprints, you will find dust — still not washed away by liquid soap, nor wiped off by cotton towels.

He should never have sold the house, his mother’s house. Should never have married to feed and mourn a son. He wished he had remained the boy who ran carefree with his dog in the watermelon fields, who waded through the creek and in the chill water scrubbed the rugs together with his good old mother.

He shouldn’t have let his mother die.

Shouldn’t have let his son die before him and leave him…

How could he have lost the land where he grew up, too? The only thing which doesn’t die — he traded it. And then he held on to me.

I grabbed the avocado tree as I climbed it yesterday. The bark cracks were dusty.

I ran my fingers over the bubbly texture of the volcanic rocks lying on the beach. Dust coated my fingertips as I took them out of the rough holes.

I shook my grandfather’s massive hand when I left Bulgaria. Mine was sweaty, his — dry and parched.

Dust settles all over the Canary Island farm where I live now. Huge dusty banana leaves, dusty farmer’s sneakers with tongues ripped off, dusty hoe handles. Or is it my hands that are dusty? My grandfather’s hand-shaking – enchanting, imprinting, initiating me? Is he alive now, back in Bulgaria? His dusty hands have been passed on, I’ve got to tell him! His blood is living off the land again!

But however happily I may live, it is my hand that he pines to hold now.

No granddaughter, even the only one he’s got, and as much as she would like to, could really fill his withered fist… But I can stand to look at it now, through the pain. The old man’s fist is not healed. But I am.

To satisfy the curiosity of a few of you, I’m finally posting  two of my own stories written in English. They both got published by one magazine or the other. I may also share with you my lighter, funnier and more peppery recent writings soon, if you should be interested.

The Eldest Princess is a gruesome short story that I wrote a couple of years ago. It got published in the American e-zine Menda City Review and you can read it there still at this link.

Do you, guys, also have these moments, when studying English or working on something else, feels like just too much of an effort? Your energy is so low and the task seems to require Alexander of Macedonia to come and conquer it?  Or you’ve been sweating over your task for ages, boring, difficult and exhausting ages, yet success is still out of your reach?

• Then do one more small step and go to sleep. – Mariyana Georgieva

• To bring one’s self to a frame of mind and to the proper energy to accomplish things that require plain hard work continuously is the one big battle that everyone has. When this battle is won for all time, then everything is easy.
  - Thomas A. Buckner

• Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.
  - Newt Gingrich

• Too many of us wait to do the perfect thing, with the result we do nothing. The way to get ahead is to start now. While many of us are waiting until conditions are “just right” before we go ahead, others are stumbling along, fortunately ignorant of the dangers that beset them. By the time we are, in our superior wisdom, decided to make a start, we discover that those who have gone fearlessly on before, have, in their blundering way, traveled a considerable distance. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don’t know now, and that you will not know next year, if you wait. – The William Feather Magazine

• Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. — Calvin Coolidge

• If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying, “Here comes number seventy-one! — Richard M. DeVos

Do you have any problems with your parents? If you don’t, and you’re under 25, please call me — I’d like to know such genuinely enlightened people personally. I’ll probably ask you for an autograph.

The rest of us, however, face many conflicts with our parents: concerning what we should do, when, with whom, exactly how, and how often to report the results to them. We want to live our own lives, yet they are responsible for us (“as long as you live under my roof and I give you money, you’ll do what I say” — sounds familiar?). What the heck to do?

Here is a very good article written by Steve Pavlina, on his blog “Personal Development for Smart People”. I’ve been reading his blog for a few months now and find it quite intelligent, inspiring, and abundant in practical pieces of advice. Be prepared for a long, revealing article — take your time, open your on-line dictionary, and read through it.

When I read self-development articles, I usually take notes for later reminders and inspirations.  I also love writing right away about one or two points in the article which have impressed me  — of course, in English. Thus I digest the contents, and begin the process of applying the new info, while using my English.

What helps you, guys, deal with stubborn or panicky parents? How do you maintain a healthily friendly relationship with them? Which are you tactics? Try to share them with us in English!

Möchten Sie gerne gut Englisch sprechen?

Hat Ihr Kind Schwierigkeiten mit Englisch in der Schule?

Referenzen:

GESCHAFFT!!! Abschluss einiger meiner Schüler am Sprachgymnasium

Lesen Sie was meine Schüler über das Lernen mit mir bereits geschrieben haben. Dort können auch Sie Ihre persönliche Meinung kundtun.

Finden Sie heraus ob ich Ihnen helfen kann. Ich freue mich auf Ihre Anmeldung:

Handy: 0049 1522 325 14 97

E-mail: mariyana.purple@gmail.com

With camera or without, come and speak in English!

Now here whoever is eager to Skype to another one of my students in English, with my help or in private, please share your Skype nick and basic info about yourself.

This blog is viewed by teenagers and adults from Bulgaria and Germany, so you could easily find a new speaking-buddy or even a foreign friend!

If you still don’t have Skype, you can download it for free from the Internet, for example here.

My nick is mmmariyana and soon I’ll set a time when I’ll be regularly on-line and available to speak to in English And I will dare you!
Now it’s your turn!

There are 2 amazing on-line travel clubs where I’ve been a member since 3-4 years. They’re:

Backpacking in Belgrade, Serbia

Hospitalityclub.org and Couchsurfing.org

! To become a member, you must be over 18!

Through them I’ve had the unique chances to:

1) Host foreigners at my home for as many days as I could, show them around town, help them find their way around Bulgaria, and speak English with them. Some were native speakers, some — not. I’ve learned a lot about cheap travelling, adventurous places and volunteer organizations, and a lot about their home countries. And I gave those strangers in my land a helping hand — this feels quite good

2) Stay overnight at other members’ flats, when I travelled in Bulgaria, Austria, Serbia, and Germany. I paid nothing, had a friend in a strange city who showed me around, and spoke English to them again. It was wonderful! With some we’ve become long-term friends who visit each other over and over again. A friend in a new country, once you’re there, suddenly feels like a real treasure, especially if you’ve exchanged e-mails for a few weeks beforehand and know each other a bit.

3) Find the answers of specific travel-related questions, which couldn’t be answered by Bulgarians. For example, I was heading to Hungary and Austria and wanted to buy a pair of good hiking sandals, so I asked in the Hiking Forum about recommendations and shop locations. It’s quite helpful to find out a world-wide-known great brand, that you may not have heard about in your country, or couldn’t buy there. Teva sandals, for one.

4) Research the city where I’m going to in advance by e-mailing members from there or reading and writing in the city’s forum. This is cheaper than travel books and more personal.

Fulfilling my mother's dream: a steamer trip on the Danube in Vienna, just before Christmas. We couchsurfed for 5 days together!

5) Find a travel-buddy. People arrange joint trips, especially single girls unwilling to travel alone.

The 2 best things about Couchsurfing and Hospitalityclub are – it’s all FREE! People just help each other to be safe during their adventures in a foreign country.

And it is safe. You can get to know another member by: reading comments on their profile by other people that stayed overnight with her/him, or read the comments of people who hosted him/her, or read what he/she says about him/herself on their profile, and check their security level. All these sources of info I’ve found enough to make me feel safe visiting a certain person.

Of course, you can use common sense, too. When I travel alone, I mainly stay with couples or women. When I travel in a couple, we stay with whoever is nice, a boy or a girl. When I host people, I read their profiles thoroughly and decide to say “yes”, “no” or “I’ll only show you around town, find a place to sleep”.

A few more pluses:

+ You don’t have to host everyone who asks you for accommodation. You can also just have a drink and chat with them, or say you’re busy.

One of the awesome Canary Pines on Tenerife Island

+ You can specify you’re hosting only girls, or only boys, or only couples, and only non-smokers, etc.

+ You can be hosted by people practically all over the world!

+ There are other people from Bulgaria and Germany already members of the clubs. You can visit them, too, or go to the club parties, or travel with them, etc. There’s a pleasant community spirit to it.

I’ve found those 2 clubs wonderful for all the experiences I’ve had with them. I’d recommend them heartily to any adventurous and English-learning or soul out there. If you have more questions or comments about them, feel free to comment now

Eligible: everyone

Entry fee: none

Prizes: BGN 500 for each category

Deadline: 1st August, 2009

More info:here

]]>