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Encore!: A Boomer's Guide to Rocking Your Retirement
Did you just cash your last paycheck?
What now? Watch TV all day? Teeter on the front porch? Totter toward obsolescence? Not on your life!
This ain’t your grandma’s retirement.
Today’s baby boomers are the fastest growing retirement population in history. They’re healthier than ever, and retirement will never be the same. Get ready to rock your Second Act.
In Encore ! you’ll
•Techniques for evaluating what you like to do now and how to keep doing it.
•Tips for eating right and being active so you can live YOUR best life.
•Tools for staying engaged with your friends and making new ones to heighten connection.
•Traditions to enhance your spirituality.
With wit and compassion, Marilyn Watson also shares stories of people experiencing the “groundhog day” syndrome, as well as others trying to keep a spouse from alphabetizing the spice shelves. Your remaining years are rich with possibility.
The show does go on, so get ready for your incredible Encore !
What now? Watch TV all day? Teeter on the front porch? Totter toward obsolescence? Not on your life!
This ain’t your grandma’s retirement.
Today’s baby boomers are the fastest growing retirement population in history. They’re healthier than ever, and retirement will never be the same. Get ready to rock your Second Act.
In Encore ! you’ll
•Techniques for evaluating what you like to do now and how to keep doing it.
•Tips for eating right and being active so you can live YOUR best life.
•Tools for staying engaged with your friends and making new ones to heighten connection.
•Traditions to enhance your spirituality.
With wit and compassion, Marilyn Watson also shares stories of people experiencing the “groundhog day” syndrome, as well as others trying to keep a spouse from alphabetizing the spice shelves. Your remaining years are rich with possibility.
The show does go on, so get ready for your incredible Encore !
152 pages, Paperback
Published January 4, 2019
60 people are currently reading
34 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 4, 2023
Okay, here’s the thing. Knowing that my time to retire was coming up in say, 5-10 years I gathered a LOT of retirement and ‘what seniors should know’ books. Just look at my book list. It’s ridiculous.
But of course, real life just yells “Grab your ankles!” and while I worked through the pandemic, when that job was over I couldn’t get arrested. So I was retired whether I liked it or not.
Turns out not much really changed for me. I still was programming on the computer 8 hours a day, but I just wasn’t getting paid for it.
But of course, now I’m retired and I never really read any of those books I’d been collecting. It’s kind of too late.
So I started to get rid of them, but I kept I few I figured I should at least try out and this is one of them.
“Do it like a rock star!” Only people who are still in their 12 year old maturity think that a ‘rock star’ is the ultimate in achievement!
It’s probably just a personal pet peeve, but as a computer programmer I was always annoyed by the perception that I had to be a ‘rock star-ninja-guru’ programmer by both headhunters and potential employers.
I’m always like ‘Do you want a magical fairy? Or do you want someone who will Think and Type about how to make your business work better?’.
The answer is almost always “Magical Fairy Please!” So any appeals to me that I might be a ‘rock star’ always stinks of bullshit to me. End of sidebar.
Beginning of another rant. The book makes clear it is not about Financial Planning, Medicare or Taxes. Fair enough, I’ve already gotten that taken care of for better or worse anyway and that’s not what I was looking for in this book.
Now I’m not quite sure what direction this book is going in but the sentence “We each have specific gifts that were bestowed upon us and we only one life to live.” (Error in sentence the authors).
This is complete horseshit. If we’re LUCKY we have specific gifts. But most of us aren’t lucky. If we’re TAUGHT we can have specific gifts. But most of us are taught by a lousy public school system and haven’t ever learned how to teach ourselves. If we WORK AT IT we can get specific gifts, but I’ve just met too many people that have no specific gifts. None. They just don’t. And without a major life change, they aren’t likely to get any either.
We all want to believe it, and thankfully many of us can believe it enough to GET specific gifts. But we’re all born with gifts and they’ll just ‘appear’. Horseshit.
Okay, chapter 1 “Your Story So Far” is dipping right into the life coach pool. First you make a graph of all your life’s highs and lows on a scale of 1 to 10. “Doing this exercise helps you see how strong you are or prompts you to see that you had better get busy and put things in your life that are meaningful to you.”
Next you are to list the ‘roles’ you play in your life: mother, daughter, friend, volunteer golfer mentor, friend, etc.
Then list two or three goals you have for yourself in each of these roles.
And of course, the ultimate life coach tool “Imagine yourself in these roles, and pretend it’s the final scene of a movie.”
And then yet another of my pet peeves. “…I have asked the grown children not to get me “things” as gifts. Instead, I ask for time and shared experiences with them.”
This seems to be a relatively new idea — that experiences are innately better than “things” and it sounds good right?
Except it is still more horseshit.
All of those “experiences” requires that you buy THINGS in order to have them. Tickets, food, spare time. Spare time is a THING we buy because when we give it to someone else, we are taking it away from ourselves.
Also most of the THINGS we buy are also experiences! I buy books and games. Well, they are both EXPERIENCES that I treasure (reading and playing with friends). Toys that are played with (THINGS) are EXPERIENCES (playing).
So to think that there is some magical differences between paying for a movie and paying for a DVD is just ridiculous.
It’s ALL just ‘stuff’ and you can’t take ANY of it with you! You can’t take your THINGS with you when you die and you can’t take your EXPERIENCES with you when you die either!
“Finally, please get another sheet of paper, and again lay it horizontally. Then mark off from zero to 100 by tens. Next, put a mark by where you are today and another by where you think you’ll leave this planet.”
More horseshit. I’m at 100 today. And I’ll be at 100 when I leave this planet. It’ll probably be a better 100 that it is today. But so what?? What the hell is an arbitrary undefined 0 to 100 mean? Nothing. It’s more new age/airy fairy bullshit.
And here’s the thing. If I leave this planet with dementia and shitting myself, drooling and having forgotten who my wife and friends are I’m probably LESS than 100. But how exactly can I prevent that? No matter WHAT you do you won’t know HOW you leave this planet.
“Make a List of Possibilities” and rename this time “a new beginning”. Jesus Haploid Christ. This is starting to get painfully stupid. This book is idiotically simple minded. I’m not sure what I expected but making lists of what my retirement should be was not one of them. I make enough lists thank you. I think I’m pulling the plug on this one. Nothing I’ve read so far has told me that anything else I’m going to read in this book isn’t going to be stupidly obvious and massively unhelpful.
But of course, real life just yells “Grab your ankles!” and while I worked through the pandemic, when that job was over I couldn’t get arrested. So I was retired whether I liked it or not.
Turns out not much really changed for me. I still was programming on the computer 8 hours a day, but I just wasn’t getting paid for it.
But of course, now I’m retired and I never really read any of those books I’d been collecting. It’s kind of too late.
So I started to get rid of them, but I kept I few I figured I should at least try out and this is one of them.
“Do it like a rock star!” Only people who are still in their 12 year old maturity think that a ‘rock star’ is the ultimate in achievement!
It’s probably just a personal pet peeve, but as a computer programmer I was always annoyed by the perception that I had to be a ‘rock star-ninja-guru’ programmer by both headhunters and potential employers.
I’m always like ‘Do you want a magical fairy? Or do you want someone who will Think and Type about how to make your business work better?’.
The answer is almost always “Magical Fairy Please!” So any appeals to me that I might be a ‘rock star’ always stinks of bullshit to me. End of sidebar.
Beginning of another rant. The book makes clear it is not about Financial Planning, Medicare or Taxes. Fair enough, I’ve already gotten that taken care of for better or worse anyway and that’s not what I was looking for in this book.
Now I’m not quite sure what direction this book is going in but the sentence “We each have specific gifts that were bestowed upon us and we only one life to live.” (Error in sentence the authors).
This is complete horseshit. If we’re LUCKY we have specific gifts. But most of us aren’t lucky. If we’re TAUGHT we can have specific gifts. But most of us are taught by a lousy public school system and haven’t ever learned how to teach ourselves. If we WORK AT IT we can get specific gifts, but I’ve just met too many people that have no specific gifts. None. They just don’t. And without a major life change, they aren’t likely to get any either.
We all want to believe it, and thankfully many of us can believe it enough to GET specific gifts. But we’re all born with gifts and they’ll just ‘appear’. Horseshit.
Okay, chapter 1 “Your Story So Far” is dipping right into the life coach pool. First you make a graph of all your life’s highs and lows on a scale of 1 to 10. “Doing this exercise helps you see how strong you are or prompts you to see that you had better get busy and put things in your life that are meaningful to you.”
Next you are to list the ‘roles’ you play in your life: mother, daughter, friend, volunteer golfer mentor, friend, etc.
Then list two or three goals you have for yourself in each of these roles.
And of course, the ultimate life coach tool “Imagine yourself in these roles, and pretend it’s the final scene of a movie.”
And then yet another of my pet peeves. “…I have asked the grown children not to get me “things” as gifts. Instead, I ask for time and shared experiences with them.”
This seems to be a relatively new idea — that experiences are innately better than “things” and it sounds good right?
Except it is still more horseshit.
All of those “experiences” requires that you buy THINGS in order to have them. Tickets, food, spare time. Spare time is a THING we buy because when we give it to someone else, we are taking it away from ourselves.
Also most of the THINGS we buy are also experiences! I buy books and games. Well, they are both EXPERIENCES that I treasure (reading and playing with friends). Toys that are played with (THINGS) are EXPERIENCES (playing).
So to think that there is some magical differences between paying for a movie and paying for a DVD is just ridiculous.
It’s ALL just ‘stuff’ and you can’t take ANY of it with you! You can’t take your THINGS with you when you die and you can’t take your EXPERIENCES with you when you die either!
“Finally, please get another sheet of paper, and again lay it horizontally. Then mark off from zero to 100 by tens. Next, put a mark by where you are today and another by where you think you’ll leave this planet.”
More horseshit. I’m at 100 today. And I’ll be at 100 when I leave this planet. It’ll probably be a better 100 that it is today. But so what?? What the hell is an arbitrary undefined 0 to 100 mean? Nothing. It’s more new age/airy fairy bullshit.
And here’s the thing. If I leave this planet with dementia and shitting myself, drooling and having forgotten who my wife and friends are I’m probably LESS than 100. But how exactly can I prevent that? No matter WHAT you do you won’t know HOW you leave this planet.
“Make a List of Possibilities” and rename this time “a new beginning”. Jesus Haploid Christ. This is starting to get painfully stupid. This book is idiotically simple minded. I’m not sure what I expected but making lists of what my retirement should be was not one of them. I make enough lists thank you. I think I’m pulling the plug on this one. Nothing I’ve read so far has told me that anything else I’m going to read in this book isn’t going to be stupidly obvious and massively unhelpful.
October 29, 2022
Great book with lots of info
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It contains a lot of great information and numerous resources to assist you into getting onto the retirement path that is best for you. It provides wonderful ideas and suggestions for ways to make your retirement as enjoyable as possible. I would recommend it to anyone who is considering retiring soon, or those who have already done so, such as myself. It can help you thrive during what many people refer to as their "golden years." It touches on many different retirement scenarios, from traveling to volunteering, or possibly part-time work, or just relaxing however you want.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It contains a lot of great information and numerous resources to assist you into getting onto the retirement path that is best for you. It provides wonderful ideas and suggestions for ways to make your retirement as enjoyable as possible. I would recommend it to anyone who is considering retiring soon, or those who have already done so, such as myself. It can help you thrive during what many people refer to as their "golden years." It touches on many different retirement scenarios, from traveling to volunteering, or possibly part-time work, or just relaxing however you want.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews