The 100-Year Life

So this is the new one that she's done.

So you've got The Hundred Year Life, which was the first book that she wrote over 10 years ago now.

And then she's got the newer book, which is Living the Hundred Year Life.

And I think this assessment is particularly useful because it encourages you to zoom out from work and careers.

So it goes way beyond your job.

And if I had focused too early, if I had sprinted that first mile of the marathon, I would be out of gas by mile 20 rather than finally hitting my stride.

I would strongly urge you to listen to the conversation with Linda Gratton on The 100 Year Life.

One specific insight that stayed with me was that as we take stock of life, it's important for us to focus as much on our intangible assets as it is for us to focus on our tangible assets.

And by intangible assets, I mean our health, our friendships, our vitality, and so on.

She's a global authority on the future of work and longevity.

She's also the author of 11 books, including her latest, Living the 100-Year Life.

decades she's explored how longer lives are reshaping the way we learn the way we work the way we build relationships and ultimately the way we find meaning today linda joins us to share how her mother and grandmother shaped her steady optimism why living longer requires curiosity and reinvention and how we can move beyond the traditional path of education work retirement that three-point approach You learn, you work, and you slowly fade.

Instead, she invites us to see life as a tapestry, woven from one of experience and relationship and giftedness and choice, with each season offering new possibilities.

One thing that I learned from that, looking back and looking at what's happening now to people's lives and to the work that they do, is that This idea of the ladder served us well, I think, because the idea was that you went up the ladder and if you didn't go up, you fell off, but that was sort of okay.

And the ladder showed you where you were in comparison to others.

Part of the reason I wrote this book, Living the Hundred Year Life, is that I wanted to help people to make sense of their lives now.

And a ladder doesn't really help them to do that anymore because most people aren't going up ladders anymore.

This is a distinct possibility.

Well, 10 years ago, Andrew Scott, who's an economist, so he wrote all the finance bit, uh, I'm a psychologist, wrote The 100-Year Life, and it really put out the whole story about the probability that you'd live to 100, what it meant for your finances.

And more than a million people around the world read that book, and it became a pretty influential book.

And what we basically showed is that if you think you're going to live to 100, then you have to think seriously, as your listeners do, about how to finance that.

If that was the roadmap, this is the workbook, right? I think you said something like that.

Yes, that's exactly right.

So, so what The 100-Year Life did is that people read the book, especially in Japan and China, and they said, "Okay, yeah, now I'm sort of getting it." But 10 years later they're saying, "Okay, how do we actually do it?"

[laughs] What do I do?