60 years of work. Just take a second to get your head around that.
Sure, you might work less, you might work more; that time might feel like a life sentence or maybe a brief blur - but that’s not the point.
60 working years is like 26.2 miles in marathoning or 200 feet in ice hockey - it’s the full length of the playing field, the size of the frame around the operations.
Your working career is this ever-unfolding narrative, full of arcs, dives, distractions and the complexity of life, all playing out across this 60 year canvas.
60 years.
Allow yourself one moment to step back from the immediate and think about your own. Imagine if it was fully populated with everything in and around work, in and around you. Think about how much happens, even in a day, and then look at that 60 year canvas.
I’ve been working for 30 years now and I really do have an image of that canvas, so full on the left but, gratefully, half complete. It took me a longest time- decades- to reach the convergence of opportunity, lived experience, courage and good luck to start to figure out what was directionally correct for me. The past is the past, to be honoured even if sometimes through gritted teeth. It’s all part of that long arc, but knowing that there is a long future to play for makes all the difference.
That’s 60 year thinking. Please give it a try. Actually, give it much more than a try because the differences and benefits that come from a 60 year mindset are significant.
For instance:
- (That) Pressure is off: So many of us feel this unrelenting pressure to have figured out our careers and mission. You can call bullshit on this. The 60 year race is definitely not to the swiftest. Invest your time, self-compassionately, in learning and experimenting. So many of us spent the first 10 or more years just doing something that we’d kind of randomly fallen into out of school. No problem with that per se, so long as you don’t sleepwalk and mistake random events for predestiny or, worse, your only calling.
- Think Long: We hit a roadblock, smash into a wall, whatever the metaphor, it’s all going wrong. We shrink into the immediate, can’t see past the moment, its pain and limitations. This is our new reality, our permanence. Bullshit once more, and we can disrupt this by thinking long: over 60 years wow are we going to hit a lot of walls, but that’s all just a small part of this huge floating, ever unfolding narrative whiteboard. We just need to step back and literally check our perspective.
- Skill up: Just a small improvement in some skills - like dusting off skinned knees, or giving feedback- is going to have a huge impact when deployed over 60 working years. It pays to invest in yourself, it pays to Professionalise your self management. If you want to understand more about that just DM me.
- Our circular economy: when you start to think in 60 year terms, you see that in addition to having massive opportunities to learn, similarly there are amazing opportunities to give back and help others. You can find such extra meaning in pain or challenge if you’re thinking about how you can help others with it. Over time you see that there is this circular economy, certainly among HPNAs, people helping others to then help others in the unfolding future.
60 years. Make them count.
Be well
Carl
