Act your age has been the traditional admonition. Today, seniors are told to do the same way in a subtle way. In many companies, they are given special titles but no functional responsibility. While waiting for the age of retirement, they are relegated to the background or margins.
Ian Mckellen the actor once had a problem of playing Romeo at the age of 36. He experienced anxiety. He felt he was too old. But when he put his mind into it, he did a rousing performance as a young Romeo despite his age. Remember the expression “You are only as old as you feel.”
To me, the secret really to a productive life even in the late 60s or early 70s is to give your mind’s age a free roam. Feel and think 20, 30, or even a child. Play it like you are ageless. Don’t be defined or confined by chronological age.
This is why young people like to include me in their brainstorming sessions. I am about to become 70 and why are these millennials calling me to help them brainstorm and conceptualize? For crying out loud, they don’t start a creative session without me.
Not so before. Young guys were reluctant to let me join them during conceptualization meetings. They assumed my ideas would be Jurassic, outdated or traditional. It took some time for them to realize that my ideas are not as time bound as they thought. Little did they know that even at my age, I make sure I am always au courant when it comes to trends. I surprise them with new words that are in vogue like “digital natives” and they are flabbergasted that I know about it. Or sometimes I may even be too advanced for them. I throw ideas that they deem ahead of the times.
One time, a really trendish concept the team presented got the client’s enthusiastic approval. When it was revealed I was behind the concept, he was surprised. He thought it was the idea of someone who was from Gen Z or younger.
My advantage is that I have with me years of experience while thinking young. I am a man traveling in time, jumping from today to the past in a jiffy. When younger members of the creative team are excited about a concept, they would turn to me. Scanning my memory bank, I can tell them if a concept has already been done. No comment can be more deflating than “been there, done that.”
Age does not matter if you don’t mind the age is another saying. I want to be in a group where nobody is intimidated by your age or your longevity in the business, and that’s very healthy.
In your mind, unbound your age from time and you become ageless. When you are not conscious of your age, it’s liberating. When you have the ability to roam the age range without mental constrictions, like fingers scaling the piano keys, then it sets you free.
The trick is never allowing yourself to slide into obsolescence or be laos as we say in the colloquial lingo. In my case, I am a naturally voracious consumer of media and I like to soak in the trends, the activities of the young generation, the middle generation and the senior generation. I try to be current. When everybody is starting to migrate to the digital sphere, I too made the shift, albeit slowly but surely.
Take a lesson from the Bee Gees on how they managed to stay alive for 3 long decades. The HBO documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” attributes it to their mastery of a rare pop skill: adaptation. They were discovered, embraced, disbanded, reunited, reinvented, stayed alive through various cultural shifts. From 1960s frills to 1980s cool, they did not mentally and musically retire. When their fortunes started to wane they stayed tenacious by reinventing themselves: “We had to adopt a new sound. We had to adopt a new attitude,” said Barry Gibb. Barry Gibb understands exactly what his brothers and his band accomplished. “We never really had a category. We just had periods and we managed to fit into different eras,” he reflects. “We didn’t always connect. But we stayed around.”
While we are into pop legends, let us look at Tony Bennet. The man is age defiant.
Future proof. His longevity is a story in itself. Year after year after year he triumphs over time.
Bennet never let himself be confined to one era or one decade. This age-free thinking has enabled him to perform for the queen of England and sing duets with k.d. lang, Elvis Costello, and Lady Gaga, among others. Bennett was nearly 70 when he made the “MTV Unplugged” record. In an industry that placed a premium on youth, and an always regenerating pool of music, lyric and voice, Bennett became a rising artist again in the ’90s. There is simply no precedent for a pop performer who has managed to produce top-quality work and stay relevant in the marketplace for more than six decades.
It all comes down to one word: Attitude. As he told the press years ago, he still has a lot to learn and that he continues to study music and what makes a great song better. He still vocalizes every day, but never pushing too much or too hard, adjusting and adapting in subtle ways to the inevitable effects of aging.
What is the lesson here? To stay relevant, never feel too pleased with oneself. Many old folks who have been successful have this sense of entitlement. They live on their past accomplishments. They act as if they know everything and tend to dominate meetings. Young people snigger behind their backs and call them KIA (know it all). The sad thing about it is that they don’t know they’re no longer wanted.
Recently, I was talking to a young woman who has taken over her father’s business.
She liked my “young ideas” about a shampoo product she is marketing online. But I was embarrassed to learn that she did not want her dad to join our meeting because she feels he tends to hi-jack meetings, pushing or imposing his own ideas. She felt his thinking is outdated and he did not have a “feel” for the new market. When I pointed out to her that I was as old as her father, she laughed and said “but you think young, you seem to understand today’s market.” Even if it was mere flattery, I like to think that it was more because my agile free-roaming mind never made her feel my age.
So never say “I am too old.” May asim ka pa. Think like a Tony Bennett. As one of his songs puts it: “And let the music play as long as there’s a song to sing / And I will stay younger than spring.”