Your Most Fulfilling Work is Ahead of You.
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright completed one-third of his most famous work between the ages of 80 and 92. Business author Peter Drucker wrote two-thirds of his forty books after the age of 65. Morris Chang started the influential Taiwanese chip company, TSMC, at 55 and ran it for thirty-five years.
What if your most productive and inspiring years of work are ahead of you? At age 50, after I’d sold my boutique hotel company that I’d run for a quarter century, I couldn’t imagine my career life getting more interesting.
In the movie “The Intern,” Robert DeNiro is the “senior intern” to young CEO Anne Hathaway and says, “Musicians don’t retire. They quit when there’s no more music left inside of them.” I came to realize that my “music” was wisdom and that’s why I experienced seven and a half years of my 50s as the “modern elder” at Airbnb.
In my late 50s, I could have felt like I’d squeezed all the music out of me, but instead, I listened to a persistent “call” (the cosmic phone didn’t stop ringing) suggesting I should co-create the world’s first midlife wisdom school. And, as much as I’ve loved the past 40+ years of my career, I’m feeling more fulfilled now than I ever did before. My painful life lessons of the past are the raw material for the wisdom I’m channeling today.
How might you tap into your music - your wisdom - to feel a deeper sense of purpose in the latter part of your career? My co-founder Jeff Hamaoui has a “Cultivating Purpose” workshop at our Baja campus May 27-June 1.
-Chip
