On Creating Your Encore Career, I looked over two books that have been very helpful for me in my encore career. They are great resources for anyone considering an encore career. The books explore many of the things that go on when building a business in your retirement-age years.
The first book is Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the Second Half of Life by Marc Miller and Susan Lahey. I interviewed Marc on episode 111 of the podcast so you can hear more about him there.
One of the top lessons Marc talks about in this book is that, in our encore careers, we must work on our mindsets. We have to prepare ourselves to face the fact that work now is different than it was when we started in our corporate careers. We’ll face new things such as ageism that we must learn to combat with confidence.
On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that our skills can go stale. One of Marc's quotes is, “We were raised, through education and life, to be an employee.” Now, if we want to work into our 50s, 60s, or even 70s, things will be different. We're going to have to adopt some different “operating systems” to do the kind of work we want to do.
SMAC
Marc also lays out an acronym in his book: SMAC. It stands for:
S: You have to consider things like social. Who are the people you need to know?
M: The world is more mobile now. If your picture of life is sitting at a desk, you may have to learn to think differently.
A: You have to figure out what analytics means to you. The world is creating a lot more numbers now. You need to develop an awareness and appreciation for all the new numbers that are available to us. The other piece of this is asking the right questions. Maybe you can make your biggest impact by helping people ask the right questions.
C: cloud. Whether it be your personal work or corporate work, it's going to be happening in the cloud. You must hold this idea in your mindset as there’s no getting around it anymore.
The second book is Boomer Reinvention: How to Create Your Dream Career over 50 by John Tarnoff.
Five-Step Methodology
In this book, John lays out a five-step methodology. In short, it is:
1. You’ve got to reframe.
2. You’ve got to sharpen your listening.
3. You have to accept that some things in life will be different than they were in your corporate world.
4. You need to express things and do the inner work of getting clear about what's going to be different this time around.
5. Learn to harness the power of connecting.
Present Yourself as a Thought Leader
John also talks about how the way we present ourselves is very important. In your encore career, you're going to be marketing yourself. This means you need to have a LinkedIn profile that portrays a compelling vision of who you are and what you do.
Ask yourself, “How can I continually, day after day, share things either from my experience or things that I've been learning? How can I share things with others that they might find of value?” This will allow you to present yourself as a thought leader.
All in all, both of these books have really helped me in my thinking. Obviously, I'm not the one who invented the idea of an encore career. However, I've been on the journey myself and, if you have any interest in creating an encore career, I recommend each of these books as valuable resources.
