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The Wonder Years can certainly be amazing—a panorama of dreams only for those with first love, long summers, and a lifetime on the runway. An established identity, new family and old friends, the freedom to pursue personal goals, and professional satisfaction.
Ken Kiewra of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln doesn’t want you to forget the Year of Wisdom. They are named after the famous psychologist Eric Erickson. Eric Erickson loosely defined it as starting at age 65. But Erikson sees the Year of Wisdom as shrouded in twilight, a period of contemplation of the life that has been lived, a period of readiness to be filtered through the lens of regret and fulfillment. However, Kiewra and others have come to perceive those years as not the end of the road. , as a gateway to more others.
A professor of educational psychology, Keiura has spent much of her career studying talent development and the productivity of gifted people. Through a series of interviews with people making the most of Wisdom Years, Kiewra and his two students, Jessica Walsh and Chris Labenz, were teaching a course on creativity and talent development. I first considered exploring the With support from the university’s Center for Transformative Education, they will do just that.
Some of our interviewees, including Husker volleyball coach John Cook and broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff, have maintained their early passions well into their later years. Others, including the trio known as Wonder Woman, decided to radically change the direction of their lives, just as some started thinking about breaking up.
These in-depth interviews, and the lessons about the Year of Wisdom the team later extracts, are detailed in a paper recently published in Educational Psychology Review. We talked about the importance of things, the value of chasing bliss, and how best to acknowledge aging without giving in to it.
How was this research done? What prompted you to start interviewing, as you put it on paper, “people who have avoided traditional retirement and are still doing meaningful work”?
I have done research on numerous talents. We explored the role parents play in developing prodigious talents across all sorts of domains, especially those abilities. I was also doing research on productive academics and why they are so productive. So we were looking for a new entry point.
I’m moving forward in my career and wanted to see what I could do in my own Wisdom Years as retirement approached. Want to go to the meadow? Or do you want to stay productive? what did others do? What are the productivity success stories of the Year of Wisdom?
How did you decide who to interview?
One of our co-authors, Jessica Walsh, has an interest in journalism, so we chose Judy Woodruff, one of the most powerful people in the news world. Rich Mayer is perhaps the greatest educational psychologist on the planet. It’s my field and his Chris Labenz, so he was the obvious choice. I have interviewed him for other research on productive scholars. John Cook: We are all fans of Nebraska Volleyball and he has had a great career. There is probably no coach anywhere that has been this successful, so he was a fitting and easy choice.
As we were formulating our research, we were reading about Nancy Shank, who was a professor and administrator here at the University of Nebraska. He turned from being a professor to being a playwright. We were really interested in it because it was a very clear starting point – to basically quit your day job and go in a completely different, unpaid direction. So she was an important and interesting choice.
Who better than John Rosenow, who wrote a book about the Wisdom Years and founded the Arbor Day Foundation at age 21? And he’s a local. So he was a great choice.
The last photo is from my daughter who is a dedicated naturalist and hiker. She was well acquainted with her three female adventurers known as Wonder Woman. They literally quit their jobs, sold off their possessions, and set out to discover America on foot on thousands of incredible hikes through the American wilderness. So we had to talk to them.
Your interview provided multiple lessons on how to stay productive and find meaning later in life. What lessons particularly resonated with you?
One was that none of these people wanted to retire.And if they retired, they were going to retire To something, nothing from something. They all recognized that they didn’t want to quit their life’s work and think about what to do next.
Another lesson, follow your bliss. All of these people were doing what they loved throughout their careers. Their work was a labor of love, much like not going to work in the first place. And whether they stayed on course or strayed from the path, they truly followed bliss. For example, Nancy Shank loved her job in college, but there was something more amazing about her. She had this desire, this need, this passion to create, to write—to write plays, to write novels. So she was certainly someone who followed her bliss. Who better to personify this than Rich Mayer? Even after retirement, I continue to work at the same salary. how many of us do that? But his view was, “Why should I retire? I love what I do. I’m interested in what I’m investigating. There’s nothing I want to do.”
I don’t believe these people lived to work. I think they saw their work as fun and playful. The psychologist Howard Gardner is famous for studying creative people, the extraordinary and extraordinary creators, and they all have this childlike perspective and a sense of what they are doing. I had a childlike joy. That’s what I saw over and over again with the people I interviewed: incredible passion, bliss. For them, this didn’t work.
Have you ever been surprised by what an interviewee said?
I’ve seen this happen among other talented people I’ve studied, so it probably doesn’t surprise me, but there’s a little coincidence, a little bit of luck, or the idea of the universe trying to make something happen. Perhaps the best example is the vagrant woman who went to see a financial advisor to plan out her finances for the rest of her life and was told years later that she could finally retire in her 70s. I leave that meeting with numbers and pie charts stirring in my head. They go to a small coffee shop and find on the shelf a book about changing the nature and direction of your life. What if they don’t go to that coffee shop? What if they haven’t seen the book? Where are they now? Do they still have what they call a somewhat satisfying job? Think about all the experiences and all the lives they might have missed if they stumbled upon the book by chance or were somehow led to it.
Whenever I interview talented people, there is always one or two crossroads in their lives, and they never go in any particular direction unless something accidental, almost mystical happens. Maybe. I find it fascinating. Of course, the other part is that people always have opportunities, they always have choices. It’s the choices they make that really define them and their lives. Wonder Woman could have seen the book and chosen to ignore it.
American society often seems to focus on young people. How do you think this research will contribute to the debate about youth and aging?
During the Year of Wisdom, people recognized their vulnerability and said: I have to grab the railing now. I had to change my daily routine to get more sleep and exercise more. They all recognized the frailty of life and aging, but found ways to counteract or reduce it. We use monthly paper calendars, yellow pads to list our weekly goals and plans, and post-it notes to let us know what we plan to accomplish for the day.
These people have been purposeful and purposeful in how they stay productive despite the fragility of aging. increase. Because we all have barriers, be they aging or not. To be successful, it must be compensated. We have to climb over, climb over, go through, and circumvent barriers. That’s what these people were doing. They persevered despite their physical and mental limitations. They were not deterred. they continue to produce.
It also appears that production can continue in the physical domain as well. Wander Women is in her 70s and still has over 2,000 miles of hiking. When asked about their physical limits, they said: OK, so what? A twelfth mile is still fine. It still takes you where you want to go. Still alive and well. It’s still fun. My guess is that former elite athletes probably feel the same way.
How do you think you can apply these lessons in your own life?
I am 68 years old and thinking of retirement. But I love what I do. It’s been my bliss and the possibility of continuing to write and produce after retirement. It’s just that some of that work is likely to move outside of educational psychology.
Whatever direction or project I pursue, I will happily continue to produce at a high level and be inspired and guided by the people at Wisdom Years who seem to slow the aging clock.
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