The First Fluxx Book Club - The 100-Year Life
Last night we came together to chat about the 100-Year Life, by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, and the impact our longer lives are having.
Yesterday we held our very first Fluxx Book Club — a relaxed affair with book clubbers from a cross section of industries and backgrounds chatting about The 100-Year Life, by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott. With no strict agenda, we just wanted to see where the conversation took us and hear thoughts and experiences from all the interesting people who have joined the club.
The book discusses exactly what the title suggests — the prospect of living longer — including the boundless opportunities that may come with having more time on our hands as well as the profound implications of living longer. We had some really interesting conversations in the virtual room — including the impact on our mental and physical wellbeing, what could happen to the education sector and what it really means to be working and retiring later on in life:
“I’ve spent some time listening to customers’ stories and helping them with financial retirement plans — a lot feel fed up by having to work much later into their lives; they don’t have the money to retire, and they don’t want a new career or to have to retrain at their age.” Book Clubber who works in the Annuities sector
“Nano degrees will be the future in education and old universities providing 3-year degrees will be a thing of the past.” Book Clubber who has worked at a London University
Why did we start a Book Club?
At Fluxx we often end up chatting about the best books to read. But, let’s be honest, there are a lot of business books getting published all the time and many are, well, a bit of a slog. Even when we start one of the worthwhile ones, we often can’t or don’t get to the end. We wanted to fix that, so we launched a book club that we’ll run every three months and we’ll choose one book about business, psychology or design we think has something original, interesting or important to say.
Some Book Clubbers had time to read the full book and others who didn’t have the time, got a one page summary of the key themes and ideas before the club met. You can check out the full summary below:
Fluxx Book Club: The 100 Year Life Book Summary
Imagine living for 100 years. Does the prospect of a long life fill you with hope or with dread?
For all the boundless opportunities that may come with having more time on our hands, there are profound implications of living longer that we have to face up to.
Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott’s book addresses how the pivotal parts of our life; from work to relationships and finances to wellbeing, are changing radically and how we must prepare ourselves for living a fulfilling 100-year life.
The authors argue that the traditional notion of a three-stage approach to life, of education, followed by work and then retirement, is collapsing. As life expectancy rises, so do retirement ages. And with the rapid advancement of technology making the future job market unrecognisable, the job we have now is unlikely to be the one we retire from. Regardless of whether we’re in our twenties, forties or even sixties — we need to do things differently from previous generations.
For Gratton and Scott, to be successful in the newly emerging multistage life we need to retain an open mind, taking time to actively explore or at least reflect on new paths. Delaying a career to travel and explore the world is not irresponsible, it’s important. And throughout life, we need to take steps to retrain and up skill continuously, without being afraid to try something new.
With these societal shifts come the breaking down of barriers. Following a successful career as an FT columnist, Lucy Kellaway retrained as a teacher and now helps professionals transition into teaching later in life through Now Teach. As we spend more time working and take new paths later in life, how can we make sure ageism doesn’t impact hiring decisions? And as employers, how can we ensure that our workforce is equipped with the right skills to thrive as individuals and continue to drive our businesses towards success?
Crucially, the 100 Year Life was written before the coronavirus pandemic, raising questions of how the themes addressed in this book have been impacted by the tumultuous year that has nearly passed. Through Covid-19 we have seen an incredible disruption to the way we live — from learning how to work well from home to accelerating our relationships with our local communities.
As technology takes over many jobs, humans retain an advantage in innovation and human interaction. But this year we’ve seen our reliance on technology skyrocket, not least to try and replace the human interaction we’ve been denied. In a covid and post-covid world, we need to take a fresh look at how to view our 100-year lives.
We need to think about how the roles and responsibilities of individuals, businesses and government have shifted and what this means for us moving forwards.
Things we’ve been pondering whilst reading The 100-Year Life…
- How can we prepare our businesses and our employees for The 100-Year Life?
- How can we prepare ourselves through training, financial planning and other means for The 100-Year Life?
- How can we eliminate the issue of age discrimination in hiring as people retire much later?
- How do we feel about living longer — does it fill us with hope or are we left full of dread?
- Are the key messages of the 100-year life still ringing true and has anything changed in 2020?
A positive review of The 100-Year Life…
“Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott have written an important and highly readable analysis of the problem that most governments and corporations would prefer to ignore. A lot of us are going to live a lot longer than our grandparents — indeed, more than half of today’s kids will live to be 100. This has implications for much more than just our personal finances. Our entire lives, they argue convincingly, will need to be reconfigured to deal with the unprecedented lifespans we are being granted. Required reading for baby boomers and millennials alike.”
Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University
And a less positive one for good measure…
“This book may deserve 4 or more stars from the economists to whom it should have been marketed, but not from me. I found nothing of relevance to my life in its 264 pages. I am a healthy 67-year old with what is currently an adequate pension and other savings, but I don’t know more about how to manage those assets than I did before I started reading. I know I need to exercise if I am to remain healthy, but this book offered me nothing to refine or improve my exercise efforts. I know I need a strong social network, but the authors failed to offer suggestions in that important area.”
Sierra, reviewing on Amazon
If you’d like to come along to our next Book Club, follow us on Linkedin where you’ll hear about the next meet-up.
Rory Keddie is a consultant at Fluxx. To find out more about Fluxx and to keep in touch, check out these useful links.
