Futurist Alvin Toffler, who way back in 1970 warned of the shock of accelerating change in the future, once said:
The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
With the rate of change accelerating each year, and new technologies such as artificial intelligence certain to change your work environment, it’s a necessity that we periodically reset our thinking and behavior.
The good news is, our generation has mastered this essential unlearning process our entire lives, and we’ve persevered with remarkable resilience.
From our origins as latchkey kids all the way to our “sandwich generation” role providing support for our children and aging parents at the same time, the one constant has been change.
One thing we unlearned early on is the traditional idea that a job was for life. We’ve known since we entered the job market that employers have no loyalty to us, and we’ve largely treated them the same way.
And yet, most Gen Xers are white knuckling employment in their 50s, praying that they can maintain a steady income until reaching a retirement that most can’t really afford. This is perhaps the most dangerous time to start thinking that a job provides security.
Getting laid off in your 50s is more likely than not due to entrenched ageism, and getting rehired in your 50s or 60s isn’t easy. Roughly one in five job seekers aged 55 and older is long-term unemployed, which means they’ve been looking for work for at least six months.
And that brings us to our next topic for unlearning – retirement.
Our modern idea of retirement was created by marketers based on a temporary set of circumstances that hasn’t existed in over four decades. And now, Generation X will be the first group that can’t afford to retire en masse in our 60s, thanks to the death of pensions and the forced overreliance on the 401(k) for retirement savings.
These two realities put us in a terrifying spot.
Employers think we’re too old and are pushing us out the door, and yet most of us can’t afford to retire and coast for 30 years without working. Meanwhile, losing your job for an extended period of time further reduces your savings and stunts the amount of income you generate to eventually retire.
And then we arrive at perhaps the most significant bit of unlearning of all.
We must unlearn the belief that the country we were born in is the best place for us to remain. Whether it’s the general cost of living, outrageous healthcare expenses, gun violence, political division, or all of the above, the reality is that you can better thrive in many another places in the world.
Doing nothing is not an option.
Taking control of your income and working from where you want for how long you want is the only rational move. And just as this time in your life is the worst time to lose your job, it’s also the best time to start your own business.
Now is the Time to Start Your Own Thing
Entrepreneurship is all about 20-something founders in hoodies, right? Except that’s not true. We have a skewed view of entrepreneurship thanks to false media narratives.
Take the idea of the young 20-something drop out. Too many people think that’s who starts successful businesses.
They think of people like Bill Gates, who cofounded Microsoft when he was 20 years old, Steve Jobs, who was 21 when he cofounded Apple, or the 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg or the 25-year-old cofounders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Truth is, the average age of a successful startup founder is 45. What we don’t hear as much about are these people:
Eric Yuan created Zoom at 41, Bill Porter founded E-Trade at 54, Bernie Marcus founded Home Depot when he was 50, Bob Parsons founded Go Daddy at 47, Reed Hastings started Netflix when he was 37, Robert Noyce started Intel at 41, Leo Goodwin founded Geico at 50, Vera Wang designed her first dress at 40 and Workday was cofounded by Aneel Bhusri at 40 and David Duffield at 65.
But let’s step away from these high profile examples and look at the vast number of successful small businesses that you won’t read about in a business magazine. This is the real heart of entrepreneurship, and the numbers reveal that it’s dominated by people aged 40 to 60.
The study shows that the likelihood of success as a founder increases with age until the age of 60. The older you get, the more likely your chances of success are. A 50-year-old founder is twice as likely to build a thriving enterprise that has either an IPO or a successful acquisition as a 30-year-old founder.
Most of these people start a business for the first time at midlife. Successful founders generally work in corporate and other jobs before starting their ventures. And it doesn’t end there. People over the age of 50 are starting businesses at an accelerated rate:
According to figures compiled by the Kauffman Foundation, about one-quarter of new entrepreneurs were ages 55 to 64 compared to nearly 15% in 1996.
These are mostly self-funded solo or small businesses, not venture-backed unicorns. In other words, these businesses are more about changing the life of the founder than changing the world.
The motivations vary, says author Kerry Hannon:
Some, admittedly, have been elbowed into opening a business after a corporate downsizing or an early retirement package. Others have been drawn into it by burnout, or the desire to pursue a dream or return to a childhood passion.
The good news is you have a comparative advantage over your younger peers — notably your accumulated experience. This allows you to tap into your unique creativity and wisdom to solve problems for customers and clients.
In fact, the particular type of intelligence we develop as we get older is ideal for the types of businesses that most people start with. And that’s an expertise-based service business in the form of freelancing or consulting.
A Different Kind of Intelligence
It’s true that our mental processors slow down a bit as we age. This is a diminishing of fluid intelligence, which is the abstract problem-solving ability we relied on when we were younger.
But what we’ve gained is called crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is defined as the ability to use the vast set of knowledge and experience you’ve acquired over the years, and it tends to increase with age through one’s forties, fifties, and sixties. Plus, it doesn’t diminish until quite late in life, if ever.
Basically, when we’re young, we have raw processing power. But now we have the wisdom to do more than simply generate and process facts. We know what those facts mean and how to use them.
This is why you’ll see college professors older than 65 who are still going strong. More interestingly, a study in The Chronicle of Higher Education shows that the oldest college professors tend to have the best teaching evaluations.
That’s because their crystallized intelligence allows them to be much better teachers than their younger colleagues. A younger professor may have a powerful processor, but lacks the ability to synthesize and explain complex information as well as their older counterparts.
In his book Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, Arthur C. Brooks explores what we lose and gain at midlife. In discussing the diminishment of fluid intelligence and the power of crystallized intelligence, he offers this advice:
There always exists the ability to redesign your career less on innovation and more on instruction as the years pass, thus playing to your strengths with age.
Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important. Excellence is always its own reward, and this is how you can be most excellent as you age.
I’m of the opinion that you can start any type of business you want in your 50s and beyond. If your dream is to open a coffee shop, then you should absolutely do it.
But there’s a particular business strategy that caters specifically to those with crystalized intelligence, while providing the ideal location-independent freedom that makes our version of unretirement so appealing. We’ll explore this approach in coming lessons.
Do It for the Money?
Yes, you can make a lot of money with your own business. Add in location independence, and you can live an amazing life.
Personally, I’ve made more than I ever really aspired to make. And the ability to travel the world, live wherever you want, and avoid the economic disruption that so many others will soon face are all key benefits.
But when it comes down to it, freedom is what we all want.
We don’t want someone else telling us what to do, what to create, where to live, when to work, or when to play. This has been my primary motivator over the last two decades, and as an added bonus, it’s paired with a healthy income at the same time.
There are plenty of people who have lots of money, but no true freedom.
That’s not what we’re aiming for with what I call the “personal enterprise” approach that we’ll explore next. Make lots of money, yes –– but design things from the start for maximum freedom, creative control, and growth into the best version of yourself.
