I really love that song, “Happy,” by Pharrell. It came out in 2013, and every time I hear that song, it really does make me happy. It’s got a great beat, it’s easy to get in to, and I just love the way it makes me feel. It reminds me of being happy all the time, not just when something like a song comes on or some other outside influence.
You might remember the show where Carl Reiner interviewed Mel Brooks as the 2000-year-old man. It was funny listening to him talk from a perspective of being that old. While it’s certainly not as many years, it is sort of like what baby boomers, or those turning 60, are looking at as far as life expectancy. Medical science, depending on who you listen to, has us now living to age 120 to 160, so longevity is now one of the biggest challenges facing those who are retiring today. Now I know that age range sounds outrageous, but if it’s true, how do you approach this?
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” That phrase is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and it reminds me of something I learned a long time ago: When my life is complex, I can’t get anything to be simple. I first have to take the complexity and reduce it down to something simple, otherwise, I can’t move forward. I end up feeling like a hamster on a wheel going around and around, nothing is really happening, and I end up very frustrated.
Back in the 1970s, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychologist at the University of Chicago, came up with the concept of “flow”. Flow is a highly focused mental state. It’s like watching Michael Jordan when he gets in to the third and fourth quarter, getting the ball in the basket no matter what happens, and it’s just a thrill to watch him operate because he’s in that flow. It can be amazing to watch anyone at work when they are in their flow.
In our human existence, we have a couple of things that are universal. We all get 24 hours in a day, we all have certain abilities unique to us, and we all get certain amounts of money, although some have more, and some have less.
I knew a gentleman that passed away a few years ago who seemed to do more in life after he retired than he did during his working years. He retired from the active workplace about 20 years before he passed, but during those 20 years, he became a sculptor, painter, author, and learned a new language. I was simply blown away by everything he’d accomplished during his retirement, but what it really showed me was the fact that he was not afraid to fail, since he hadn’t learned any of these activities prior to his retirement.
The late, great, George Carlin had this funny routine where he said, “Have you ever noticed that their stuff is s*** and your s*** is stuff”. When we start looking at things in our life that we’ve accumulated, we need to be honest with ourselves: a lot of it is just plain junk.
Retirement is a big life change for everybody. It’s important to try to get clear about it, and I recently came across an article that had three simple questions to ask yourself about what retirement is going to look like for you.
The other day I was interviewing Danielle, a 28-year-old woman I know, about her student debt. When I arrived, she had just finished crying because once again she had gotten off the phone with a debt collector who’d been pestering her to make a payment on her student loan debt. Her debt is so large that it’s like making a home loan or rental payment with her $160,000 of debt accumulated over four years of college. Not fun at all!
What are the real facts about student debt?
On August 28th, 1990, my wife and I were hit by a Level 5 Tornado in Plainfield, IL which killed 29 people and injured 353 others. The community was devastated, our first home was destroyed, and we lost several people in our neighborhood to this storm. This tornado became known as one of the worst on record, and there was almost no time to prepare for the destruction this storm wreaked on the southwest suburbs of Chicago.
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