Are you ready for the 100-year life?

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With advances in health, London Business School professor Lynda Gratton believes we should plan for a 100-year life. That’s particularly true for younger people entering or relatively new to the work force, but having recently turned 70, she expects to work productively into her 80s because she could have a few decades of life left.

Preparing for the 100-year life may require jettisoning the three-stage work-life pattern that has been the norm: First full-time education, then full-time work, followed by full-time retirement. It has offered us clarity, stability and an easy way to describe our place in the world.

“Yet when stretched across a 100-year life, this pattern begins to show its cracks. A single front-loaded period of education leaves you vulnerable to becoming obsolete. Fifty years of continuous full-time work from your 20s to your 70s is unrealistic for most people – emotionally, physically and practically. And retiring at 65 when you may live into your 90s risks decades on a fixed income, decades in which contribution, growth and renewal can be prematurely set aside,” she writes in Living The 100-Year Life.

You may prefer the multi-stage pattern, in which there are more steps along your path, with perhaps a gap year, a sabbatical or two, as well as periods of parental leave, retraining and phased retirement. Your life still has a broad structure, roughly sequenced by age, but with pauses and flexibility built in. It introduces new complexity, however, as each stage requires navigation, with consequent implications for skills, identity, finance and well-being. It also still defaults to the notion of predictable order.

An alternative consideration, the portfolio pattern, doesn’t succumb to the sense of a life spent climbing organizational charts but instead spreads wide. Rather than completing one stage before beginning the next, you hold several roles at the same time. “The portfolio pattern reflects a world in which work, learning, caring and contribution no longer sit in tidy chronological boxes. It offers variety, autonomy and renewal – but also demands co-ordination, boundaries and constant rebalancing,” she says.

The gift of a long life, she adds, is you don’t have to follow a fixed model. You can create a pattern that is distinctly your own. You will weave it by paying attention to eight threads that run through a working life, four related to productivity and four to nurturing yourself and others.

The four threads of productivity are:

• Mastery: This is the practice and motivation of building the skills that enhance your productivity. In a long life, this matters more. Are you not just earning a living but also feeling alive, creating what you love?
• Knowing: Deep knowledge, insight and wisdom enable you to understand yourself and the situations you encounter. In the 100-year life, your knowledge can’t stay still. There will be new tools and trends to adapt to, and deeper wisdom about yourself and others to acquire.
• Co-operating: We don’t give this skill enough attention even though productivity involves working effectively with others and building connections. “As your working life stretches across decades, the ability to build meaningful collaborations and strong networks will be a constant source of strength,” she says.
• Amplifying: Technology can fragment and distract but it also can boost your performance and creativity. How can you partner with artificial intelligence and other technology to extend your reach?

The four nurturing threads deserve attention as they help us to maintain harmony and balance in our working lives:

• Friendships: These can be an immense source of happiness and satisfaction, a powerful antidote to loneliness. You must continually ask: Am I forging deep, sustaining connections?
• Intimacy: Partnerships, family friends and particularly close friendships sustain us over the course of our life. Ask:  Am I giving and receiving love?
• Calm: In the frenzy of today’s working life, moments of calm and reflection are vital for happiness and well-being. Ask: Can I slow down?
• Adventure: Your life needs excitement and interesting moments, to avoid it becoming mundane and dreary. Ask: Am I having adventures?

Weaving those eight threads throughout a 100-year life will involve choices, as opportunities and tensions arise. There is no perfect balance. But it helps to keep them in mind and the alternative pathways for addressing the 100-year life.

Quick Hits

• Author Mark Manson points out you have survived every single thing you thought you couldn’t handle up until this point. So why would the next challenge be any different?
• It can be daunting to find yourself alone in a room with nothing but a camera, microphone and screen as you prepare for a video presentation. Consultant Gary Genard advises you to imagine you’re speaking to someone whose opinion you value. That might be a specific colleague, mentor or your wise uncle – someone you would like to hear say, “That was terrific. You really hit it out of the park.”
• Computer scientist Sara Hooker says “the first step of any meaningful pursuit is to severely underestimate its difficulty.”

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.