Power Seat
“It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” – Anthony Robbins
As much as I fly American Airlines, you would think my upgrade requests would come through more often. They don’t. Each year, I’m just a few thousand miles short of making Executive Platinum and at Platinum level, I’m lumped in there with the bulk of business travelers.
This rule doesn’t apply when flying home on the weekends. While the majority of business travelers are standing over the backyard barbecue or playing coach to their kids’ soccer games, I was the lucky one just working to get home on Saturday. And since I was one of the few business travelers heading west on Saturday afternoon, my upgrade finally kicked in for Business Class.
To me, these are the Power Seats: leg rests, free cocktails, linens, warm nuts (shhh, don’t tell Jeanine), heavy blankets, real pillows and courteous flight attendants. So as I settled into my Power Seat on the JFK to LAX leg, I had plenty of room and time to finish the book: The Power Years: A User’s Guide to the Rest of Your Life by Ken Dychtwald and Daniel J. Kadlec.
At 800-CEO-READ, it is described like this: “A groundbreaking new self-help book for the 84 million Baby Boomers who want a new model for the second half of their lives the Power Years.” When buying the book, I didn’t realize it was classified as Self-Help. I was on my Millionaire Genre binge after the holidays and Barnes & Noble was pushing this in the personal finance section. So as I was eating the nut mix on Saturday, I kept wondering when it was going to get to the money talk. It doesn’t happen until Chapter 7 and actually, this is not really the thrust of the book.
Rather, “The authors show readers over 40 how to have fun again, find a new balance between satisfying work and enjoyable leisure, enhance the quality of their relationships, re-imagine their lifestyles, rediscover their life’s purpose, and keep their financial lives running smoothly in order to fund their future dreams.”
Now I’m not a Baby Boomer nor is my mother but when I was telling her about the book on Sunday, she referred to us Baby Boomer Bookends. So as two of the Bookends Gen, I told her we could both gain something from their writings.
For me personally, I always feel like I’m going through a mid-life crisis with my career. Perhaps, this is true for many 40 and 50-year-olds because Dychtwald spends a lot of time talking about how retirement is about discovering where your true passions lie. He provides questions & exercises in Chapter 4: Creating Your New Dream Job that can apply to people in their twenties and thirties as well as those staring at 65. He claims that few achieve self-actualization during their careers but since we live so long now, we have “a unique opportunity to seek and find Maslow’s version of nirvana”. Where do I sign up?
It’s a self-help book, remember, so there’s a lot of rah-rah fluff, but overall I think it speaks to both Boomers and Bookends. Let me know what you think.
As much as I fly American Airlines, you would think my upgrade requests would come through more often. They don’t. Each year, I’m just a few thousand miles short of making Executive Platinum and at Platinum level, I’m lumped in there with the bulk of business travelers.
This rule doesn’t apply when flying home on the weekends. While the majority of business travelers are standing over the backyard barbecue or playing coach to their kids’ soccer games, I was the lucky one just working to get home on Saturday. And since I was one of the few business travelers heading west on Saturday afternoon, my upgrade finally kicked in for Business Class.
To me, these are the Power Seats: leg rests, free cocktails, linens, warm nuts (shhh, don’t tell Jeanine), heavy blankets, real pillows and courteous flight attendants. So as I settled into my Power Seat on the JFK to LAX leg, I had plenty of room and time to finish the book: The Power Years: A User’s Guide to the Rest of Your Life by Ken Dychtwald and Daniel J. Kadlec.
At 800-CEO-READ, it is described like this: “A groundbreaking new self-help book for the 84 million Baby Boomers who want a new model for the second half of their lives the Power Years.” When buying the book, I didn’t realize it was classified as Self-Help. I was on my Millionaire Genre binge after the holidays and Barnes & Noble was pushing this in the personal finance section. So as I was eating the nut mix on Saturday, I kept wondering when it was going to get to the money talk. It doesn’t happen until Chapter 7 and actually, this is not really the thrust of the book.
Rather, “The authors show readers over 40 how to have fun again, find a new balance between satisfying work and enjoyable leisure, enhance the quality of their relationships, re-imagine their lifestyles, rediscover their life’s purpose, and keep their financial lives running smoothly in order to fund their future dreams.”
Now I’m not a Baby Boomer nor is my mother but when I was telling her about the book on Sunday, she referred to us Baby Boomer Bookends. So as two of the Bookends Gen, I told her we could both gain something from their writings.
For me personally, I always feel like I’m going through a mid-life crisis with my career. Perhaps, this is true for many 40 and 50-year-olds because Dychtwald spends a lot of time talking about how retirement is about discovering where your true passions lie. He provides questions & exercises in Chapter 4: Creating Your New Dream Job that can apply to people in their twenties and thirties as well as those staring at 65. He claims that few achieve self-actualization during their careers but since we live so long now, we have “a unique opportunity to seek and find Maslow’s version of nirvana”. Where do I sign up?
It’s a self-help book, remember, so there’s a lot of rah-rah fluff, but overall I think it speaks to both Boomers and Bookends. Let me know what you think.
posted by Nina Smith at 6:06 AM
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