14 Life Lessons in 14 Years
What’s on the other side of 65? Wisdom, life lessons, and the best time of your life.
March 1, 2010—It was moving day, and one of the worst snowstorms in Maryland and Washington, DC Metro halted all movement, even by foot. How would a moving van reach me when the "snowmageddon" brought 55 inches of snow?
March 1, 2024—Today marks the 14th anniversary of the day I left Maryland, triumphing over immobilizing weather, and embarked on a journey to Texas with my husband and business partner, Tom, and our two Norfolk Terriers. The moving van, carrying everything we chose to bring, arrived several days later.
How did the movers navigate through four acres of deep snow and successfully load all the boxes and belongings into the van? The answer lies in their methodical approach, using a relay of all-terrain vehicles to transport items one by one from the house to the van, which patiently waited in a street that had been specially plowed for the van. I still don’t know how the moving company convinced the highway department to clear our street, but they did. While others were trapped indoors for days, unable to open their front doors without risking an avalanche of snow, we witnessed the power of perseverance and resourcefulness.
Was this the beginning of the end or the beginning of amazing?
35 years prior, I arrived in the Washington, DC metroplex as a hot, not yet 30 professional, recruited by headhunters. It was a remarkable journey, filled with entrepreneurship, grand adventures, meeting the love of my life, and forging countless connections and deep friendships.
Within a year of our move to Texas, I would turn 65. What does that number mean to you? Life is rife with transitions. According to Bruce Feiler, author of "Life Is In The Transitions," there are 52 different sources of upheaval or stress that individuals can face, ranging from weight loss to the loss of a loved one. On average, one can anticipate experiencing around 36 disruptors throughout adulthood, equating to one every 12 to 18 months. Sometimes, multiple disruptors converge, leading to profound disorientation and aftershocks that can endure for years.
For some of us, 65 is just another number. For some organizations and businesses that’s a number that qualifies you for medical benefits, discounts on everything, and special considerations.
14 life lessons and wisdom learned in 14 years and offered to you
“I don’t know if it’s true, I just know it.” Bill Maher
1. Even if someone asks for your advice, they don’t want it.
Even if a company hires you as a consultant, they don’t want your recommendations. Instead, they want offerings. They want multiple options and secrets they can’t get on the Internet so they can empower themselves through their transitions.
2. 90% of people can’t focus long enough: mastering your attention and concentration skills will enable 5X results.
3. Play the long game and focus on small daily wins.
This matters with health, love, money, and career growth. Learn how to complete an annual plan in one hour, how to journal for 20 minutes a day to sort out the intermediate feelings and choices, then pick not more than five things you absolutely, positively can, and will get done today.
Every time you feel a moment of stuck or slowed down happening and you did not mean to stop and rest, that’s your sign that you must put your big want into some smaller steps, so you can keep moving without doubting yourself.
4. Reframe obstacles and embrace them as opportunities.
Life is loaded with joy and opportunities to delight, which often show up initially as barriers or someone else’s beliefs about you. Everyone will experience deep pain and grief, including you. Often the best thing you can do is keep showing up and remain open to asking someone for help or giving generously when someone trusts you to help them.
5. Work each day to be the very best version of yourself.
You are the CEO of your life and there is no such thing as retirement. Your main job is to grow in some way, every day. Death starts when growth stops. You have everything inside of you to do anything and there’s no reason for those “change your life” books, courses, or foolishness. What you can achieve is continuous “upgrades” in many parts of your life if your eyes open after a restful sleep and you get another shot at today.
6. Focus on making something people want.
Are you a taker or a maker? By embracing the mindset of a maker, you can shift focus from consumption to active creation. Ultimately, being a maker empowers you to leverage your skills and creativity to positively impact both yourself and others you need to keep living, learning, and creating.
7. Do what you’re genuinely interested in and try to play to your natural strengths.
Have you noticed your rate of change? When you go through transitions and multiple changes in your life, are you noticing that everyone else is changing too? It’s tempting to point to external factors such as technology, markets, weather conditions, or politics as reasons why something doesn’t work as well as it did back when you first created it or offered a professional service. People are changing as fast as you are and that’s why the most important element is knowing the truth about yourself, your values, your interests, and your natural strengths.
8. Productivity increases as you learn to say no or ignore distractions.
This is wisdom that comes with getting real about the choices you made and the results you achieved. You cannot learn this from people in their 20’s or 30’s. They have not made enough mistakes or wasted enough lifetime on shiny objects and unhealthy decisions. Younger you fixated on tools and processes and hacks. Elder you will see distractions and small talk relationships for what they are—unaffordable, unacceptable time hijackers.
9. The greatest lesson of college was how to learn and understand your relationship to knowledge.
Remember all of the time spent in the library, for knowledge or for a quiet place to think? Then came the Internet and Google and abundant resources for learning on your own or with cohorts. Self-directed learning is a superpower in the age of knowledge abundance. Artificial intelligence, for example, is only a tool and one tiny piece of your total relationship with knowledge, curation, note-taking, reading, writing, and communicating with people, animals, nature, and more. Every day that you get up and learn something new and then apply it, you are another day ahead of everything else, including robots.
10. Action is the antidote to overthinking.
When in doubt, get to good enough, release it into the world (hit the publish button), and gather feedback for the next iteration. The most healthy obsession you can develop is listening. This can take a lifetime and certainly, more than 50 years because it can take that long to learn listening is complex, a skill that needs constant work, and loaded with dangerous detours. I strongly recommend the book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg. Beyond that, I strongly recommend you accept massive unlearning and relearning. For example, you can never “put yourself in someone else’ shoes.” That is impossible. The best you can do is ask questions.
11. Listening is active and some of the hardest lessons you will unlearn and relearn.
All conversations are shaped by emotions. We have way too many reasons and massive misinformation around why we think feelings and emotions are not professional, not logical, and not useful.
I had formal training as a journalist, then decades of practice with questions and finding better questions. I had the benefit of great mentors and thousands of professional leaders who taught me tons about questions, better questions, and the rhythm and patterns of connecting. For example, is someone quietly looking at you while you go on and on? They are not listening because you lost them already.
It’s never too late to learn to listen, ask more questions, and notice the change in your quality of life, support, and eagerness in others to see you show up again.
12. Context is everything. Perspective is everything. It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Do you want understanding from others? Context provides necessary background information and situational details that help others understand. Above all, connection is the key. Everything can be a massive waste or problem without a connection. Context gets you to relevance. You need relevance to connect in a way that is meaningful, relatable, and intended.
13. Learning to take a break more often helps you make better progress. Respect your downtimes as much as your uptimes.
Younger me had too many excuses for not taking vacations or even dialing back for a weekend. For the overthinking and highly ambitious professional, there’s joy in learning that taking breaks can take even more energy and resources than you thought. Hooray—another challenge for the curious you. Going for a week without the Internet and learning how to do one new thing that seems “out of your range” can open up new paths to greater progress and enjoyment.
14. All you need is love.
How can you possibly know the depth and importance of love until you lose everything or someone who also signed on to the “until death do us part” contract? How can you value love above all possessions until it is time to downsize to what you will take with you into an assisted living arrangement?
That’s why loving what you do and doing what you enjoy always accelerates progress. That’s why repeating or doubling down on what works, even when it feels unconventional is the best use of your remaining time on earth.
Learning to love means noticing all the ways love can show up. Respecting the brilliant ideas of people from different backgrounds, without any judgment, and for the joy of learning something that connects you—that’s love.
Combining hope and a realistic approach to solving life and career goals—shows love for yourself and others.
Your Turn and Questions for You
Please use the comments feature of this newsletter to poke around these questions with me:
What’s the life lesson or bit of wisdom you gained in recent years and feel it is worth sharing? Just too good to keep to yourself?
Can you recall a time when someone showed you profound love or brought you immense joy and you may not have told them so?
Have you ever been at a loss for words or was it that you were not sure if anyone wanted to hear you?
We’re on a mission to feature stories about professionals who are initiating meaningful conversations with other gifted minds and storytellers – and who they serve.
If you enjoyed this article, the greatest compliment you can offer is to share this article with a few friends and encourage them to subscribe. Maybe it’ll start an important conversation. It’s super simple and your friends (and I) will thank you. You can make sure I keep writing and focusing on what matters to you by sending people to the main website. There you see how to collaborate and work with me, professionally (beyond free).
Learn more about Gifted Professionals and Communicators via:
👉 Our community: https://communicators.com/gifted-professionals-and-communicators-community/
👉 This Substack newsletter—please tell others about it
👉 Our blog (GPC Journal): https://communicators.com/certification-journal/
Thanks Joyce. I'm glad I learned that lesson sooner than later. I could help clients more when I realized the truth behind why they hired me. It's so hard to stuff your ego when people are hiring you to be "the expert" and that never was real. It was a lot of miscommunication until I understood what I could do to help them more than even they thought possible.
Life lessons worth reading, and re-reading.
Thanks, Georgia!
One thing that's changed my life in the past several years is early morning journaling. I've journaled at different points in my life and have kept some, which can be fun, weird and many other things when you read what your younger self was thinking/doing. My earliest journal is from the second year I moved to New York City. I was in a creative freewriting group in Seattle for about five years. Some of my journals were used for that purpose as well as journaling. Of course, The Artist's Way Morning Pages journaling practice is a good way to do a just upon awakening brain dump.
Two books for anyone to pick up if they want to just begin writing regularly, The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron, and Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow.
And, of course, The War of Art, Steven Pressfield.