Time to Reboot America

Thomas Friedman, the highly respected New York Times columnist and author of numerous best selling books, has a great column today, Christmas Eve. The headline:

Time to Reboot America

He makes a strong case – so strong, so urgent, I want to quote liberally from it:

“We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

“To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

“For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

“That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.”

Friedman is not the only national figure calling for rebooting America. Almost every day someone in government or business or society at large is calling for the reinvention of our country, or some huge part of it, on a scale not seen in decades, maybe ever.

For such a rebooting to happen, I think we need much more than government bailouts and stimulus packages. We need for people by the thousands and millions, at every age and in every walk of life, to face up to and overcome the hard times by rebooting themselves and their organizations – their governments, schools, companies, churches, civic and charitable organizations.

Remember that the term “rebooting” and its counterpart “booting” were adapted for computer talk from “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.” It is time for some major pulling up on our own bootstraps. We collectively got ourselves into this mess. We collectively need to get ourselves out of it.

It is the challenge and the opportunity of our lifetimes.

Bring back the wooly retiree

Scientists are talking – seriously, it seems – about the possibility of regenerating a wooly mammoth, a furry elephant-like mammal that went extinct toward the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. With the mammoth’s genome now decoded and DNA available, the experts say it could be done for about $10 million.


By today’s standards, when “trillion” is the new “billion,” that sounds pretty cheap. But we think it would be a better idea, and much less expensive, to bring back some wooly retirees.

We’re talking about bringing them back into the active, productive, vibrant life of the rebooter. Out of the TV room, out of the lounge chair, on their feet, doing things, and back into the mainstream.

Now of course, retirees haven’t become extinct, but going into a passive, do-nothing retirement bears some similarity to going extinct, doesn’t it? Withdrawing from the active life, shutting down the inner computer and basically checking out of life accomplishes about the same thing as disappearing.

Maybe we should start considering the passive retiree as a missing person. Perhaps not physically missing, but mentally and emotionally and psychologically missing.

Rebooting offers a healthy alternative to retirement “extinction.” Continuing to work, volunteering, going back to school, teaching, consulting, turning that lifelong hobby into a business – all are ways to recharge the batteries and bring oneself back into life on earth.

And the really good news: no danger of a retiree Jurassic Park!

Rebooting: an idea whose time is still here!

RebootYou.com started up a year ago in September. Back then, the economy was fairly healthy and optimism was strong. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 13,820 on September 21, 2007, on its way to 14,164 in October. The Consumer Confidence Index was in the 80s, on its way to the 90s.

It seemed like a good time to launch a website dedicated to the proposition of reinvention, restarting, and rebooting – especially after “retirement” from a conventional career.

Now the Dow is barely above 8,000 and the consumer confidence index is at 38, its lowest point since it was first devised in 1967.

Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 240,000 in October. Job losses over the last 3 months totaled 651,000. In October, the unemployment rate rose from 6.1 to 6.5 percent, and the number of unemployed persons increased to 10.1 million.

Many retirees have seen much of their savings wiped out. People are still talking about rebooting, but now it’s about rebooting the whole country – or at least the whole economy.

So is one of the basic ideas of rebooting – continuing to work after retirement – out the window? Is reinvention no longer an option? Are so many people out of work and the economy so far in the tank that there simply aren’t any jobs for people looking to start anew?

I think not.

Maybe the possibility of staying on the job, or finding a new job, is off the table. But there are many other ways to reboot, and now is the time to explore them. Here are a few ideas from RebootYou.com (http://www.rebootyou.com/how_to_reboot.html).

• Start your own business – maybe consulting in your field of expertise, or some other field. In her book, Starting Over: Reinventing Life After 60, author Pat Skilling Kellerman tells story after story of people over 60 who have turned their interests into businesses, including pottery, woodworking, cooking, selling wallpaper, owning and operating a bed and breakfast, song writing and farming, among others. You may not grow “too big to fail,” but you may do very well, as have many of the people in Ms. Kellerman’s book.
• Volunteer at a church or local non-profit. There are scores of organizations that need willing, capable and experienced volunteers in virtually every area -- financial, marketing, fund-raising, general management, hands-on work, you name it.
• Go back to school.
• Become a teacher.
• Join the Experience Corps. Go to http://www.experiencecorps.org/index.cfm
• Join the Peace Corps. (http://www.peacecorps.gov/)
• Pursue a paid Encore Career, as championed by Marc Freedman, Encore.Org (http://www.encore.org/) and Civic Ventures (http://www.civicventures.org/)
• Volunteer elsewhere and do good work. Go to the website http://www.networkforgood.org/ and you’ll find thousands of opportunities, and even if none of them are in your area, maybe you’ll get some good ideas there.

Yes, even with so many gloomy signs and downward-pointing arrows, there are still opportunities for personal reinvention. Despite the dark clouds, there are rays of hope and optimism. At the upper levels of government, on the Obama transition team, in Congress, among the scholars and pundits and commentators, there is talk of rebooting – rebooting the economy and, indeed, the whole country.

In hard times, Americans have always risen to the occasion. We will do so this time, too.~

Knocked down by the financial hurricane? Get up and reboot!

The financial crisis that toppled major Wall Street banks and snarled credit markets around the world has also taken a toll on nest eggs, forcing people to rethink when - and even if - their savings will allow them to retire.

More than half of people surveyed in an Associated Press-GfK poll released Wednesday said they worry that they will have to work longer because the value of their retirement savings has declined.

Associated Press, Oct. 1, 2008


Talk about an inconvenient truth. I know the feeling. I watched the monster eat a giant hole in my IRA in September.

There is unanimous agreement that we have a crisis on our hands. And even though linguists and scholars have debunked the popular notion that the Chinese word for crisis (weiji) incorporates the words for both “danger” and “opportunity,” thinking Americans have to be hoping they can find the opportunity in this danger.

So where’s the opportunity in our current crisis? I believe it is in rethinking the old notion of “retirement” as a period of rest and relaxation, and instead deciding that this is the time to reboot oneself into period of extended productive contribution.

It might be continuing in the same line of work, starting a new business, consulting, or taking up an “encore career” in a socially meaningful (and paid) role in such fields as education, health care or community work.

RebootYou.com has been promoting the idea of working beyond the so-called “normal retirement years” for reasons other than financial emergency. But a financial emergency definitely gets your attention. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, “Nothing focuses the mind like losing your life savings.”

Fifty-five percent of people surveyed for the AP-GfK poll said they were worried that the financial crisis would reduce their savings and force them to postpone retirement. The poll, conducted Sept. 27-30, was based on phone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,160 adults. It had a margin of error of 2.9 percent.

In a previous blog (July 31, 2008) I wrote about the new book, Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge. The premise of that book is that even without a financial crisis, many people will have to work longer than they thought they would just to maintain their standard of living. With a crisis, the number is undoubtedly larger.

RebootYou.com can help. I invite you to click over to the site (http://www.rebootyou.com/) and check out the possibilities. There are dozens and dozens of ways to reinvent yourself. And if you’ve already done it, tell us your story so we can share it with others. Look for the heading, “Submit your story” for the easy steps to follow.

Staying Healthy and Vigorous All Your Life

The headline on the story in the August 26 New York Times says it all: “Living Longer, in Good Health to the End.”

Isn’t that the way we all want it to be?

I think so. This article, by Jane E. Brody in the Times’ Personal Health column, is one of many I’ve seen lately offering encouragement that the final years of life don’t have to be a prolonged period of discomfort, distress and suffering.

“There is increasing evidence that the societal burden of increased longevity need not be so drastic,” says the article. “Long-term studies have shown that how people live accounts for more than half the difference in how hale and hearty they will remain until very near the end.”

Dr. James E. Fries of Stanford University in 1980 put forth the idea that good health and vigor can be extended well into a person’s 80s, and illness and disability can be compressed into a short period at the end of life.

Many studies have come to a consensus conclusion that genetic factors – such as the amount and proportion of HDL and LDL cholesterol in the blood – account for only about 35 percent of the length of a person’s life. The rest – roughly 65 percent – is determined by environmental factors.

It’s never too late to adopt habits that predict a healthy old age, according to Dr. Richard S. Rivlin, an internist and director of the nutrition and cancer prevention career development program at Weill Cornell College.

“While measures started early in life are most likely to have the greatest health benefit, older people should never feel that turning over a new leaf at their age is anything but highly effective,” he is quoted in Brody’s article.

He said people in their 70s can do a number of things to help prevent hypertension, heart disease, osteoporosis and even cancer. These include restricting calorie intake, limiting saturated fats, replacing simple sugars with fiber-rich whole grains, and eating plenty of high quality protein.

Another very important measure that people in their 70s can take to stay healthy is to make exercise a regular part of their daily lifestyle, including aerobic activities that elevate the heart rate, weight-bearing activities that strengthen muscles and bones, and stretching exercises that reduce stiffness and improve flexibility and balance.

Many long-term studies have pinpointed exercise as the single most potent predictor of healthy longevity, in women as well as men, Brody writes. She concludes: “It’s not that very old people… can exercise because they are healthy, these findings indicate. Rather, they achieve a healthy old age because the exercise.”

What top scientists are learning about memory

For anyone worried about memory loss, here is a book with the greatest title ever: Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research (Harmony Books, Crown Publishing Group, Random House, 2008) by Sue Halpern.

Halpern’s book is a report on the current state of scientific and medical knowledge about possible preventatives or treatment for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

Capturing the subtitle of her book, here is her summary of the state of good news (as of the time she wrote the book):

• The sorLA gene had been discovered, enabling scientists to use a whole new way to explain what was going on in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.
• Thanks to a new imaging technique, amyloid plaques could now be seen in a living brain.
• There was a growing open-source Alzheimer’s gene bank.
• Preliminary data from a Mayo Clinic-University of Southern California study of the Posit Science program had shown that people who completed the training had significant improvements in auditory memory.
• Biomarkers in the blood and cerebral spinal fluid could show Alzheimer’s nearly a decade before there are symptoms.
• Exercise had been shown to cause new brain cells to grow in old brains. That process, neurogenesis, had been shown to improve memory.
• A diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was not necessarily a “sentence to die from Alzheimer’s.”
• Memory loss in older people was normal.
• The first neural prosthesis, an artificial hippocampus, was close to being tested in living animals.
• The first round of immunizations for Alzheimer’s disease had been completed, no one had gotten sick, and the method of delivery had worked.
• The majority of researchers were working from discoveries that the sticky plaques that had defined Alzheimer’s for years were not the “bad guys,” but that the bad guy was soluble beta-amyloid, which Alzheimer’s patients had in toxic excess. “And while no one yet knew why that was,” she wrote, “the retromer theory put forth by Scott Small and his associates offered a plausible explanation.”

The not-so-good news, at least for me, is what Halpern was finally told after asking many scientists if working crossword puzzles helps stave off dementia or Alzheimer’s.

“You know what crossword puzzles are really good for?” said Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor of integrative neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco, and developer of a computer-based program for children with language-based learning disabilities. “Doing crosswords are really good for… doing crosswords. Do the puzzle every day and you’ll get pretty good at it.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Merzenich concluded, crossword puzzles don’t do anything for memory.

What? You mean remembering that “adit” means “mine opening” doesn’t mean I have a great memory? Rats!

Working longer: A solution for more people in the future

A major premise of RebootYou.com is that it makes sense to stay active after “retirement.” There are many reasons – physical and mental health, economics, and preventing the waste of experience and knowledge, among others.

In fact, we believe that “retirement” in the conventional sense – withdrawing to a passive, unengaged existence – is a bad thing.

One of the reasons for continuing to work described on www.rebootyou.com is the need or desire to continue to make money – other than Social Security or a pension.

Now along comes a book whose main message is that many people will have to work longer than they thought they would, just to maintain their standard of living.

The book is Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge, by Alicia H. Munnell and Steven A Sass (Brookings Institution Press.)

The book was reviewed recently by Harry Hurt III in the New York Times. Munnell and Sass “note that the nation’s retirement system, as embodied by Social Security and Medicare in the public sector and I.R.A.’s and 401(k) plans in the private sector, is contracting in its ability to replace workers’ lost income – even as life expectancy is increasing,” Hurt writes.

I think this book is most likely to be a very important contribution to the conversation about retiring/not retiring, encore careers, reinvention and rebooting. I plan to say more about it in future blogs.

“About 19 percent of men and 33 percent of women who survive to age 65 will live to age 90 or older and have to support themselves for almost 30 years,” Munnell and Sass write. “The arithmetic does not work.”

The authors cite numerous studies that turn up these very inconvenient truths:

• For people who retire at 65 today, it is estimated that Social Security will only provide the equivalent of 39 percent of their incomes after deductions for basic Medicare contributions.
• Those who plan to retire in 2030 can expect net benefits of only 30 percent of their incomes.
• In 1989, 66 percent of American employers provided post-retirement health care benefit programs. By 2006 that number had fallen to 35 percent.
• Americans do not save enough. In a 2004 Federal Reserve study, the theoretically possible or simulated amount of money owned by people aged 55 to 64 was $314,000. However, the actual average savings was only $60,000.

Munnell and Sass recommend that people postpone their retirements from the current average age of 63 to age 66. Four more years of work changes the ratio of retirement to working years from 1 to 2, meaning 20 years of retirement and 40 years of work, to almost 1 to 3, or 16 years of retirement and 44 years of work.

Working longer, the authors say, would delay the need for people to tap into their I.R.A.’s and 401(k)’s, increasing their total assets and the future income they can produce. It would also maximize the benefits of Social Security, which are about one-third higher for recipients who are 66 than for those who are 62.

The authors raise other important issues, which we will discuss in subsequent blogs: whether older workers will be healthy enough to continue to work, whether they will want to, and whether employers will be willing to employ them.

If you’re interested in ordering the book, please click here click here. The link will take you to the resources section of RebootYou.com, and Working Longer is the first book listed.