Get the answer to your question from Coach John G. Agno. What we all want is interaction with others to clarify our thoughts before taking action and to allow our perceptions to evolve over time.
Privacy Policy We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.
For example, Google, as a third party vendor, uses a DART cookie to serve ads on this site based upon your visit to our sites and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting Google ad and content network privacy policy at: www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, please contact the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) at (207) 467-3500 or www.networkadvertising.org.
Have you ever stumbled over your destiny in one unpredictable meeting?
One moment you don't know where you are heading and then you do?
I did. It happened to me.
She came into my world like a butterfly landing on my sleeve. Fluttering there for just a second in all her beauty without a clue how she had and would change my life. One moment I didn't know what love was and then I did.
Have you every met someone for the first time and something deep inside you told that you had known her many lifetimes ago?
One moment you don't believe in love at first sight and then you do.
Her smile, her presence, her soul have made such an impression on you that you wondered where she would take you?
One moment, you are fully in charge and the next someone else is.
When you stumbled over your destiny you knew everything would be different but not specifically different until much later. One moment you stumble on to a new heading and fifty years later you cherish every moment of the adventure.
One moment can mean so much to one's life that you pray such moments will continue to bubble up and change everything.
What would it be worth to you if your friends, family and business associates were:
Living a life with more joy? Improving their productivity and communication? Gaining freedom from fear? Developing self-awareness and self-acceptance? Improving their health and vitality? Creating satisfying and mutually supportive relationships?
Living a more wonderful life is about knowing who you are and what you are meant to do with the energy to polish your natural talents. A happy life is knowing your natural talents (talents you were born with) and developing them into strengths.
Research tells us that geniuses of all kinds shared one mental trait, despite the wide range of their individual brilliance: they possessed an exceptional capacity for sustained voluntary attention.
Knowing who you are and what you are meant to do, gives you the energy to transform your life.
NASA is already planning for the day when parts of the Kennedy Space Center, on Florida’s Cape Canaveral, will be underwater.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century. The United States Army Corps of Engineers projects that they could rise by as much as five feet; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts up to six and a half feet. All these projections are probably low.
Many geologists, are looking at the possibility of a ten-to-thirty-foot range by the end of the century.
The amount of water on the planet is fixed (and has been for billions of years). Its distribution, however, is subject to all sorts of rearrangements. In the coldest part of the last ice age, about twenty thousand years ago, so much water was tied up in ice sheets that sea levels were almost four hundred feet lower than they are today. At that point, Miami Beach, instead of being an island, was fifteen miles from the Atlantic Coast. Sarasota was a hundred miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, and the outline of the Sunshine State looked less like a skinny finger than like a plump heel.
As the ice age ended and the planet warmed, the world’s coastlines assumed their present configuration. There’s a good deal of evidence—much of it now submerged—that this process did not take place slowly and steadily but, rather, in fits and starts.
As temperatures climb again, so, too, will sea levels. One reason for this is that water, as it heats up, expands. The process of thermal expansion follows well-known physical laws, and its impact is relatively easy to calculate. It is more difficult to predict how the earth’s remaining ice sheets will behave, and this difficulty accounts for the wide range in projections.
In April of 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold launched their infamous attack on Columbine High, in Littleton, CO, and from there the slaughter has continued. The architect of the Columbine killings, Eric Harris, was a classic psychopath. He was charming and manipulative. He was a habitual lawbreaker.
School shootings are a modern phenomenon.
Since Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, there have been more than a hundred and forty school shootings in the United States.
A school shooter, it appears, could be someone who had been brutally abused by the world or someone who imagined that the world brutally abused him or someone who wanted to brutally abuse the world himself.
In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.
But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them.
Finally, Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model—to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?
Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.
Larkin is describing the dynamics of Granovetter’s threshold model of group behavior.
In the world before Columbine, people played with chemistry sets in their basements and dreamed of being astronauts.
In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.
Checking email less often may reduce stress in part by cutting down on the need to switch between tasks. An unfortunate limitation of the human mind is that it cannot perform two demanding tasks simultaneously, so flipping back and forth between two different tasks saps cognitive resources. As a result, people can become less efficient in each of the tasks they need to accomplish.
It has been said that thinking is what separates you and me from all the other people in the world. Thinking is unique to each of us, somewhat like a fingerprint.
The question is, how do we embrace all the wonderful opportunities that the world has to offer and at the same time be a unique individual?
Your passion is what drives you and moves you to your finest moments. This personal movement creates success and fame, and the resulting output is wealth in all of its forms.
It is vital to respect our thoughts as a creative force for our future. Everything ever made in the world came from a thought. We can take control of our natural gifts and power to make our hopes and dreams come true. Your thinking is what will guide you to your destiny.
The ability of the individual to think is his ability to act upon the Universal Mind.
Super consciousness is the consciousness of a higher self, transcendental reality, or God. It is "the part of the human being that is capable of transcending animal instincts." Super consciousness is a pervading nonphysical consciousness that willingly and eagerly chooses to flow in when invited into our personal consciousness.
The creation equation: first came the desire (passion), then came the thought (imagination) and then came the physical expression (manifestation).
The unlimited creative power of the Universal Mind is within control of the conscious mind of the individual. You must recognize your higher nature and regularly turn your attention directly toward this inner source of infinite creation if you want to access creative vision and manifest your higher desires.
When the individual mind touches the Universal Mind it receives all the power it requires. This happens in the world within.
"First, analyze yourself. Know yourself and your purposes. Know what you believe, physically, mentally, spiritually. Know the sources of your beliefs. For in such an analysis you may find your true self." Edgar Cayce reading 2583-1
Find out how at the 4th Annual Social Mood Conference
By Elliott Wave International
Robert Prechter forecasted more than 10 years ago that the War on Drugs would become more violent, leading eventually to the decriminalization of the possession and sale of recreational drugs. The Socionomist followed up in 2009 with an in-depth story by Euan Wilson called "The Coming Collapse of a Modern Prohibition." We published an update in November 2013, "Marijuana: The Mood Shifts, and Decades of Prohibition Go Up in Smoke," that was a timely reminder just before marijuana stocks exploded in early 2014. The recent rush of new state laws to decriminalize pot bears out these forecasts.
Enter Alan Brochstein, a pioneer in the Green Rush by way of his groundbreaking website, 420 Investor, which provides investors information about how to invest in the nascent cannabis industry. He will be just one of the speakers from around the globe at the upcoming 4th Annual Social Mood Conference on April 5, 2014. Join the many people already scheduled to attend who are also interested in understanding how socionomics makes it possible to understand changes in the world -- before they happen.
Here are the topics of five of the nine researchers and business people who will present their ideas in Atlanta.
* * * * * * * * * *
Capitalizing on Cannabis: The Transformation of an Industry and the Creation of a New Investment Bubble
Alan Brochstein, CFA, Founder of 420 Investor.com
Mr. Brochstein has seen the herding impulse up close on a consistent basis through his investing service. The rapidly changing landscape for legal and medical cannabis presents opportunities for many stakeholders, including patients, consumers, entrepreneurs and government entities. Investors, whether through publicly traded companies or privately, are poised to capitalize on cannabis as well.
He will discuss how the combination of a rapidly changing industry and a political dynamic that touches many investors on a deeply personal level is already attracting substantial capital that might even be characterized as a bubble in the publicly traded stocks. At the same time, a highly uncertain financial regulatory environment has left the cannabis industry without ample access to traditional funding sources. Mr. Brochstein will discuss the opportunities ahead for investors who can navigate what will likely be a volatile environment.
Predicting Human Behavior with Internet Data
Suzy Moat, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the Warwick Business School, UK
Our everyday Internet usage generates huge amounts of data on how humans collect and exchange information worldwide. Dr. Moat's recent research asks whether this data can be used to measure and to even predict human behavior.
Her talk will aim to show how large-scale patterns of communication can indeed help us to understand large-scale patterns of behavior. Dr. Moat will describe a number of illuminating case studies that link data (from sources such as Google, Wikipedia and Twitter) to collective behavior in the economic domain and beyond. For example, her team tested a hypothetical investment strategy based on big data about Google searches for financial terms such as "debt," "portfolio" and "stocks." It earned a 326% theoretical profit from 2004 to 2011, compared with 16% if the model had simply purchased the same stocks in 2004 and sold them in 2011.
From Individual Decision Making to Collective Dynamics
Thomas Brudermann, Ph.D., Researcher at the Institute for Systems Sciences, Innovation and Sustainability Research, University of Graz, Austria
How do ideas go viral on a large scale? Decades of research on human decision making have yielded rich insights on psychological biases. We are well aware of the power of social influence, conformity pressure and herding. At the same time, suitable methods have been developed to keep track of collective phenomena. To get an idea about ongoing processes in markets and society, we may analyze Twitter tweets, track Google search trends, observe sales figures of certain products or look at stock market indexes.
What is still missing is a comprehensive understanding of the underlying collective dynamics, that is, the missing link between decisions happening on the individual level and emergent phenomena occurring on a macro level scale. This talk will address prospects and challenges of this research as well as possible links to socionomics, and discuss under which circumstances thoughts, ideas and preferences might go viral on a large scale.
How to Use Socionomics in Real Time
Peter Atwater, President of Financial Insyghts, a U.S. consulting firm
Using examples from his own socionomic applications � ranging from huge unexpected wins to failed applications � Mr. Atwater will discuss the valuable lessons he has learned, some the hard way, in his years as a social mood researcher and finance professional.
He will share some of his real-life experiences with socionomics, such as what happens when he challenges money managers to view what is happening outside the markets as equally important as, if not more important than, what is happening inside the markets. He will also discuss how some pioneering business leaders have adopted socionomics as an indispensable tool for strategic planning.
The Socio Edge: Making Socionomically Informed Decisions in an Era of Dynamic Change
Matt Lampert, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, UK
Despite the availability of information in the Age of Big Data, we are consistently blindsided by game-changing events. Mr. Lampert's thesis is that, in a world marked by constant change and fluctuation, being able to see around the corner before others gives you the opportunity to prepare early. Socionomic analysis can cut through the noise to identify the signals that matter most. It can also generate a strategic advantage -- from forecasting entirely new industries to recognizing the potential for swift trend changes. He will explore how the socio edge has allowed analysts to anticipate and adjust for changes in the social landscape that catch most of the world off guard.
Book Your Seat: The 2014 Social Mood Conference Registration is now open
Join these five exciting speakers at the 2014 Social Mood Conference, April 5 in Atlanta, GA.
We can learn a lot about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine.
Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the most important were a new way to measure the energy output of engines and a micrometer dubbed the "Lord Chancellor" that could gauge tiny distances.
European Pressphoto Agency Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Such measuring tools, Mr. Rosen writes, allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There's a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, Mr. Rosen writes, invention is "doomed to be rare and erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace."
In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal—in a feedback loop similar to the one Mr. Rosen describes.
This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right. Historically, foreign aid has been measured in terms of the total amount of money invested—and during the Cold War, by whether a country stayed on our side—but not by how well it performed in actually helping people. Closer to home, despite innovation in measuring teacher performance world-wide, more than 90% of educators in the U.S. still get zero feedback on how to improve.
An innovation—whether it's a new vaccine or an improved seed—can't have an impact unless it reaches the people who will benefit from it. We need innovations in measurement to find new, effective ways to deliver those tools and services to the clinics, family farms and classrooms that need them.
I've found many examples of how measurement is making a difference over the past year—from a school in Colorado to a health post in rural Ethiopia. Our foundation is supporting these efforts. But we and others need to do more. As budgets tighten for governments and foundations world-wide, we all need to take the lesson of the steam engine to heart and adapt it to solving the world's biggest problems.
One of the greatest successes in terms of using measurement to drive global change has been an agreement signed in 2000 by the United Nations. The Millennium Development Goals, supported by 189 nations, set 2015 as a deadline for making specific percentage improvements across a set of crucial areas—such as health, education and basic income. Many people assumed the pact would be filed away and forgotten like so many U.N. and government pronouncements. The decades before had brought many well-meaning declarations to combat problems from nutrition to human rights, but most lacked a road map for measuring progress. However, the Millennium goals were backed by a broad consensus, were clear and concrete, and brought focus to the highest priorities.
When Ethiopia signed on to the Millennium goals in 2000, the country put hard numbers to its ambition to bring primary health care to all of its citizens. The concrete goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds created a clear target by which to measure success or failure. Ethiopia's commitment attracted a surge of donor money toward improving the country's primary health-care services.
With help from the Indian state of Kerala, which had built a successful network of community health-care posts, Ethiopia launched its own program in 2004 and today has more than 15,000 health posts staffed by 34,000 workers. (This is one of the greatest benefits of measurement—the ability it gives government leaders to make comparisons across countries and then learn from the best.)
Last March, I visited the Germana Gale Health Post in the Dalocha region of Ethiopia, where I saw charts of immunizations, malaria cases and other data plastered to its walls. This information goes into a system—part paper-based and part computerized—that helps government officials see where things are working and to take action in places where they aren't. In recent years, data from the field have helped the government respond more quickly to outbreaks of malaria and measles. Perhaps even more important, the government previously didn't have any official record of a child's birth or death in rural Ethiopia. It now tracks those metrics closely.
The health workers provide most services at the posts, though they also visit the homes of pregnant women and sick people. They ensure that each home has access to a bed net to protect the family from malaria, a pit toilet, first-aid training and other basic health and safety practices. All these interventions are quite simple, yet they've dramatically improved the lives of people in this country.
Ethiopia has lowered child mortality more than 60% since 1990, putting the country on track to achieve the Millennium goal of lowering child mortality two-thirds by 2015, compared with 1990. Though the world won't quite meet the goal, we've still made great progress: The number of children under 5 years old who die world-wide fell to 6.9 million in 2011, down from 12 million in 1990 (despite a growing global population).
—Mr. Gates is the co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the co-founder of Microsoft. This piece is adapted from the foundation's annual letter from Mr. Gates, to be published Wednesday, January 30, 2013.
Q: I am not happy at work and this is affecting my personal life. What can I do to improve my situation?
A: You are not alone. Many people are seeking to be happy. Even students at the university are attempting to discover, “What is happiness?”
One of the most popular courses at Harvard teaches happiness. Positive Psychology, a class whose content resembles that of self-help books but is grounded in serious psychological research, has enrolled over 800 students, who learn about creating, as the course description puts it, "a fulfilling and flourishing life," courtesy of the booming new area of psychology that focuses on what makes people feel good rather than the pathologies that can make them feel miserable. "Positive Psych may be the one class at Harvard that every student needs to take," said Nancy Cheng, a junior majoring in biology.
After decades spent focusing on the psyche's dark side, now there's the emerging field of scientific research into what makes people happy. One happiness researcher attracting attention is Stanford's Brian Knutson. He is a professor of psychology and neuroscience who uses brain-image technology to measure satisfaction. Some of his research is designed to track how money affects the brain. In one study, he had subjects play a video game that involved, at certain points, the anticipation of winning money, and, at other points, actually taking possession of that money. He measured the difference in oxygen flow in the brain between those two activities. His conclusion: gearing up to do something can make you happier than actually doing it.
"Anticipation is totally underestimated," says Prof. Knutson, whose work is funded in part by the National Institute on Aging and the MacArthur Foundation. "Why do slot machines have arms? You could just have a button--but the arm heightens the anticipation." ‘I'll be happy when....’ is the way many people think they are living their lives. Yet, happiness is not something that happens to you. Happiness is inside you now. You are motivated from within. You only have to allow happiness to surface.
Happiness is being aware, not only of the positive events that occur in your life but, that you yourself are the cause of these events--that you can create them, that you control their occurrence, and that you play a major role in the good things that happen to you. Happiness, said Benjamin Franklin, "is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by the little advantages that occur every day."
Happiness isn't off in the future, but in living in the "now" and loving the moment of our daily experiences. We form an impression in every business or personal interaction. In the business world, we don't speak much about the heart. Yet, the purpose of doing our life's work should come from the heart---since all businesses are ultimately people serving people. We all need connection, belonging and meaningful contribution.
Viktor E. Frankl in “The Will of Meaning” states the paradox of happiness, "To the extent to which one makes happiness the objective of his motivation, he necessarily makes it the object of his attention. But precisely by so doing he loses sight of the reason for happiness, and happiness itself must fade away. Success and happiness must happen, the less one cares for them, the more they can."
The circumstances in life have little to do with the satisfaction we experience. Health, wealth, good looks and status have astonishingly little effect on what the researchers call "subjective well-being" according to “The Science of Happiness" by Geoffrey Cowley (with Anne Underwood) in Newsweek, September 16, 2002.
Psychologists have amassed a heap of data on what people who deem themselves happy have in common. Mood and temperament have a large genetic component. In a now famous 1996 study, University of Minnesota psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen surveyed 732 pairs of identical twins and found them closely matched for adult happiness, regardless of whether they'd grown up together or apart. Such findings suggest that while we all experience ups and downs, our moods revolve around the emotional baselines or "set points" we're born with.
Q: My employees aren’t performing well. Many seem to get easily frustrated, complain, waste time in trivial pursuits and become skeptical of other employees. What can I do to get employees more engaged in the work that needs to be done?
A: You are describing a dysfunctional work environment that could be headed toward employee burnout. Burnout is a familiar term these days: it's the physical or emotional exhaustion that results from long-term stress or frustration. Chronic fatigue is a major symptom of burnout: one feels physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted. Behaviorally, the burnout worker becomes cynical, indifferent and increasingly ineffective in the job.
According to Herbert J. Freudenberger, the New York psychologist who coined the term in 1972, burnout describes a specific condition. It is an emotional state characterized by an overwhelming and enduring feeling of exhaustion or aggravation. Burnout is a condition that develops gradually as the person's creativity and effectiveness erode into fatigue, skepticism and an inability to function productively.
Traditionally, the worker is the one who gets the blame but research shows that the cause of burnout lies mainly in current economic trends, the use of technology and management philosophy within organizations. As managers become de-energized and lose confidence in themselves, these emotions are transferred to employees. Employee engagement and long-term improvements in corporate performance can't be accomplished with a burned out, low energy and low confidence leadership team.
Leaders can turnaround a failing work environment by helping employees move from the language of "blame" to the language of "personal responsibility.” The first step is to instill confidence in the employee’s ability to meet and overcome workplace challenges. Experience tells us that confidence precedes competence. A person must first believe they can succeed by developing a winning attitude reinforced by skill-building training.
As each person’s unique signature talents are built into demonstrable strengths and then merged with other team members, a positive energy emerges. This energy force builds and reinforces each individual’s confidence to create a critical mass within the team. This critical mass is often referred to as “momentum” or “being in the zone.”
Here is an illustration of how this process works on the basketball floor and is easily transferred to the shop floor:
Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court.
Great basketball coaches, military commanders and business leaders know that practice of the rules of engagement coupled with split-second decisions in execution by their team can make the difference between winning and losing.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his bestseller, "blink" (Little Brown), tells us that leaders know that if you can create the right framework (by everyone knowing the rules and practicing them), when it comes time to perform, your players will engage in fluid, effortless, spur-of-the-moment dialogue and action. The leader provides the overall guidance and intent to the team, coaches them in mastering tools and general techniques through practice and then allows them to use their own initiative and be innovative as they move forward.
Placing a lot of trust in your subordinates has an overwhelming advantage:
Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves within the rules of engagement, focuses their energy and opens the possibility for extraordinary leaps of insight and instinct in decision-making. When the team is "in the flow," split-second decisions are unconscious flashes of insight that drive extraordinary performance on the basketball court, battlefield or shop floor.
It is the leader's job to keep the momentum going; so as not to lose the flow. Insight is not a light bulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out by external means. Know that these kinds of fluid, intuitive, nonverbal experiences are vulnerable...and...your players/employees can drop out of the "zone" or "flow" when you, as the leader, start to become reflective about this rapid cognition process.
Confidence and energy are leading indicators of workplace performance. It is the leader’s job to build confidence and participate in interactive conversations that pull people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
Q: I have a retail business and need dependable employees that are willing to work part-time during our busy times of the year and peak selling hours. Where do you suggest I look?
A: For a number of years now, many companies have been replacing full-time employees with part-time or temporary workers in an attempt to reduce operating costs.
But an increasing number of firms are having second thoughts about their employment policies and are actively recruiting permanent employees or giving contract employees de facto permanent status. Some enlightened companies are hiring or retaining older workers with flexible work schedules and ample training. Driving this employment trend is an economic upturn and Baby Boomer retirements.
In 2011, the oldest of the 77 million Baby Boomers began turning age 65---the traditional retirement age. Now 10,000 boomers reach the age of 65 everyday.
For years, the surge of nearly 80 million Baby Boomers into the second half of life has been described as a great gray wave, moving inexorably forward, building in size and momentum with every passing day.
Boomers are likely to continue working, either part time or full time, as consultants or by setting up their own companies, surveys show. They want a “flexible” workplace that lets them take extended sabbaticals, then work intensely for shorter periods of time. They want to “phase-into” retirement by working fewer hours after 65 years of age.
Why do Baby Boomers want to continue working?
Baby Boomers are becoming aware that they are experiencing a different type of retirement than the previous generation. Compared to other generations, these confident and independent Baby Boomers admit that:
+ They need more money than their parents' generation to live comfortably.
+ Their generation is more self-indulgent than their parents'.
+ They will be healthier and live longer.
Back in 2001, in a survey of boomers, 80 percent said they were planning to work past 65, at least part time, according to AARP. Many will do it because they have to; they need the money. This generation has every expectation that they will live longer than the previous one. Yet, few have saved enough money for 30 years of full retirement.
A survey of boomers by AARP found that two in five workers age 50-65 were interested in a gradual, “phased retirement” instead of an abrupt cessation of work---and nearly 80% of those said that availability of phased retirement programs at work would encourage them to keep working longer.
Working part-time is associated with better health and longevity. Work requires you to have social contact, use your mind and get some exercise. Doing something you enjoy during the best years of your life contributes to better mental health. And a paycheck can help you take better care of yourself.
A study by researchers at the University of Michigan and National Taiwan University found that just 100 hours per year of work is all it takes in a phased retirement; leaving plenty of time for leisurely pursuits. Looking at a representative sample of 4,860 U.S. residents born before 1924, the Michigan and Taiwan researchers compared those who worked 100 or more hours in 1998 with those who worked less. They concluded that by 2000, "those working for pay were only half as likely to have reported bad health and one-quarter as likely to have died" as nonworkers, says Ming-Ching Luoh, co-author and associate economics professor at National Taiwan University.
Why would you want to hire older workers?
In many companies, there is an assumption that older workers are much less capable than their younger counterparts and this belief has led to an unintended consequence of age discrimination. The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) says 59% of members surveyed don’t actively recruit older workers and 65% don’t do anything specific to retain them.
However, more Americans reaching their 60s and 70s are going to want to work, at least part-time. And research has shown that high-level work is getting easier for older people and keeps them mentally and physically fit. Fewer jobs require physical demanding tasks such as heavy lifting. A survey by SHRM found almost seven in ten (68 percent) organizations say they employ older workers who have retired. Baby Boomers, with more education than any previous generation in history, can be a good match for retailers who need capable employees working only at peak periods.
It is common today to find older workers on the sales floor at retailers like Home Depot and CVS and there is a growing presence of older workers in high-paying, high-productivity careers. Older workers have the skills and abilities to solve ill-defined business problems, like dealing with a difficult boss or customer, and many have a good work ethic.
