Is retirement a good time to be an entrepreneur?

Neera 2 Comments

We have been conditioned for centuries in believing that retirement is the time to hang our boots and lead a quiet life preferably playing with the grandchildren and maintaining the garden.

But the world has changed; our beliefs must also change.

For a start, we are living much longer than before. Where previously people used to live a maximum of five to ten years after retirement, nowadays we easily reach the late eighties and even late nineties before it is time to say goodbye to this world. Which means having thirty-plus years in our hands to do something with.

Seems like humans are the only animals who retire in their old age.

Try selling the concept of retirement to a humpback in her sixties (in whale years of course) to give up a 5000 km journey back to Antarctica each year and stay in the warm pacific waters just because she is too old. She will wack her barnacle-encrusted tail at you and will tell you to get out of her way.

Becoming an entrepreneur in your sixties might seem like a crazy idea but it is the best time to succeed than in your thirties and forties.

Here are five reasons why.

Life Experiences: You have two to three decades of life experiences to draw from in addition to enthusiasm. Insights drawn from life’s trials and lessons learned from mistakes made have equipped you with wisdom that will help you succeed in any endeavor you wish to pursue. And you have better habits cultivated over decades than any young entrepreneur which more than compensate for the youthful energy.

Financial Stability: You face less financial risk than in your younger years Children have grown up and are not financially dependent on you. You perhaps outrightly own your house or have equity in it. And you might have some savings and some superannuation accumulated over the years. All this means that you are in a much better position to set yourself up as an entrepreneur.

Confidence: Being in your fifties and sixties means that you have been through a lot of life including some tough times and you have come on the other side somewhat unscathed. Those experiences have given you confidence that you won’t be knocked about by obstacles easily. You are better equipped to find your way either through or around difficulties as they present themselves.

Attitude: Fifties and sixties is a great age. It is during these years you develop an ‘I-don’t-care-what-people-think’ attitude which enhances your productivity and increases your chances to succeed many folds. You also develop the quality of ‘stickiness,’ something our younger counterparts will take decades to develop. That puts you on the front foot already.

Your Network: You have an amazing network of people around you. They have different skills and expertise you can draw on and guess what, they are in the same age group as you are which means like you they now have fewer responsibilities and more time to give you a hand should you need one. And they are always willing to give you free advice.

We are the first generation in history, for whom the retirement years present the opportunity to live the life we wanted to live.

We have nothing to lose.

We know our values and we have figured out our own unique philosophies. They provide solid ground on which to build our enterprises.

As middle-aged entrepreneurs, we don’t just want to make money; we want to make a difference. Never before in our lives, were we in a position to do so.

It will be such a waste not to do use this opportunity to leave a mark.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Every writer must become an entrepreneur?

Neera 1 Comment

Do you know why most of the writers don’t succeed?

It is not because they are not good writers or because they can’t find time to write or they don’t put enough effort in their vocation.

Most writers don’t succeed because they refuse to see themselves as entrepreneurs.

Their thought process goes like this: I am a writer, I just want to write. I do not want to learn marketing, build an email listing, or deal with the publishers. 

So they keep writing and hoping that one day a publisher will like their work and will give them the break. Their book will be published, it will become an overnight bestseller and they will be rewarded with the name and fame they so much deserve and soon royalties will start flowing.

I can almost guarantee you that it is not going to happen. 

Writing is such a laborious, challenging, unrewarding activity that you will not be able to sustain it without some kind of payoff whether it is in the form of money or just recognition. The sooner you accept that sooner you will be able to establish yourself in this booming industry in the proper way. 

Only then you will be able to wholeheartedly commit to your passion. And the way to ensure that you do get paid for your efforts is to become an author entrepreneur.

Why you may ask? 

Here are five reasons:

  1. There is too much competition
  2. The conventional publishing industry is dead.
  3. People’s reading habits are changing
  4. The self-publishing industry is booming
  5. Entrepreneurship is not as hard as it sounds

There is too much competition.

Conventional publishers are flooded with manuscripts. There is little chance a publisher will get to read your manuscript and publish it over established writers who are also churning out new books regularly.

The conventional publishing industry is dead.

The conventional publishing industry was dying a slow death and COVID 19 pandemic has hastened this process. Perspective Publishing reported in March this year that in Italy 18,600 fewer titles will be published, 39 million books will not be printed at all and 25,000 titles will not be translated. Many publishers are concerned about whether they will be able to survive the COVID 19 crisis. If this is replicated in every country then the publishing industry will be badly hit.

People’s reading habits are changing.

More and more people are moving to eBooks and audiobooks. The sale of eBooks and audiobooks has dramatically increased since the lockdowns started in March. This unexpected event has brought a behavior shift in the reading habits of people which is expected to stick.

The self-publishing industry is booming. 

It is the way of the future. It is also the way to get properly rewarded for your effort. Typically, a new author gets paid $5000 advance for their first book if a publisher likes it and is willing to print 5000 copies. The publisher will not print any more copies until all previously printed copies are sold and he has recovered his money. Then only he will print the second batch. Typically the royalties even for the established writers range from 10% to 15% of the retail price of the book. 

You can earn the initial deposit by selling just 500 books at $10 each by self-publishing. That too without printing a single copy. 

Wouldn’t it make sense to become an entrepreneur and publish your own work?

Entrepreneurship is not as hard as it sounds.

Howard Stevenson, a long time professor at Harvard Business School, recounts the story of a senior faculty member describing the field of entrepreneurship to a young person: “You peel it back layer by layer,” the faculty member said, “and when you get to the center, there is nothing there, but you are crying.”

In other words, there is nothing much to be an entrepreneur and yet so many people are so scared of being one.

In the writing world, an entrepreneur is a writer who makes income from her writing. To be able to do that she needs a platform to establish herself. A platform is literary her ‘stand’. It is her ‘genre’, her ‘viewpoint’, her ‘take,’ all blended into one. Her platform is also her ‘shopfront’ from where her readers can access her work.

And she needs to do that much before she has published anything. Developing skills to write the quality of stuff that people pay to read can take many years, so does develop the skill to promote your work.

Joanna Penn is a successful writer-entrepreneur earning a six-figure income from her writing. You may not have read her books or may not have heard her name but she is the shining example of how the twenty-first-century writers can establish themselves as writer-entrepreneur.

Joanna says, “the author business model is a marathon, not a sprint.” She started writing in 2006. It took her five years to develop her writing skills. In 2011 she left her job to become a full-time writer. It took her another four years to start making six-figures income. Today she is generating income from 25+ books, a blog, a podcast and a number of other sources. Click here for her author timeline from the first book to multi-six-figure income.

What one thing can you do today?

Have a look at the sites of writers of your genre and find out how they have set up their platforms. Joanna Penn, Jeff Goings, James Altucher, Shuanta Grimes, Danielle Trussoni, have all set themselves up as a business and have a platform to stay in touch with their readers and generate interest in their books.

Then start working on building your own platform.

Photo by Fa Barboza on Unsplash

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Can Acceptance of Death Make Us Live Better

Neera 1 Comment

Considering we are all going to die one day, how surprising it is that we don’t talk about death at all.

When I say death, I don’t mean death as statistics like we are seeing on TV at the moment, or the death of a loved one.

I mean our own death.

If death is such an inevitability, why don’t we refer to it just like downsizing or moving to a retirement home?

Death is a phase of life just like birth is.

We make a lot of plans for the arrival of a new life but none whatsoever for the departure of another.

I am not going to the extent of buying a coffin next time it is on sale at Costco and keeping it in your living room as they used to in some cultures. That will be going too far and might attract the unwanted attention of the god of death (Yamraj), but I do believe that acceptance of death and talking about it now and then make us appreciate life better.

I know… I know… how insensitive of me to bring the subject of death when there are so many deaths around us. But that is the whole point.

None of us has come with the guarantee that they will live to the ripe old age? None of us were given assurance that our loved ones will be around forever?

Considering how profound its impact is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing it is that death has not taken its place along with love, betrayal, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Nonetheless, a few writers have tackled the subject and shared their insights.

Reflecting on the profound transformations he has witnessed in his work with thousands of dying people and their living loved ones, Frank Ostaseski, the writer of the book The Five Invitations – Discovering what death can teach us about living, writes:

Dying is inevitable and intimate. I have seen ordinary people at the end of their lives develop profound insights and engage in a powerful process of transformation that helped them to emerge as someone larger, more expansive, and much more real than the small, separate selves they had previously taken themselves to be. This is not a fairy-tale happy ending that contradicts the suffering that came before, but rather a transcendence of tragedy…. I have witnessed a heart-opening occurring in not only people near death but also their caregivers. They found a depth of love within themselves that they didn’t know they had access to. They discovered a profound trust in the universe and the reliable goodness of humanity that never abandoned them, regardless of the suffering they encountered. If that possibility exists at the time of dying, it exists here and now.

– Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations

Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, one of only a few who understood it well. In A Year with Rilke, he wrote:

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.

Instead, we spend our lives shuddering at any reminder of our inevitable end, forgetting the miracle of having lived at all.

Nearly a century later, John Updike, an American novelist, and poet echoed this sentiment: “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

However poetic this notion might be, it remains one of the hardest for us to befriend and reconcile with our irrepressible impulse for aliveness. How, then, are those only just plunging into the lush river of life to confront the prospect of its flow’s cessation?

Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher, a most significant one at the time of the French Renaissance, articulated the central paradox of death and the art of living in The Complete Essays: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Still, lament we do, and some of our greatest art gives voice to that lamentation.

That paradox is what Mark Strand explores with transcendent courage and curiosity in his poem “The End,” found in his Collected Poems.

THE END

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

– Mark Strand, Collected Poems.

No law says that we will not be able to live better lives by ignoring death. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

Our lifelong struggle to learn how to live is inseparable from two facts – our mortality and our dread of it.

Drawing on the ancient wisdom of Buddhism, Frank Ostaseski considers the inseparability of life and death:

In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two. We cannot be truly alive without maintaining an awareness of death. Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most.

— Frank Ostaseski

Montaigne says it in nutshell as below:

… if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity. –

— Montaigne

But it is Emily Levine, the comedian, and philosopher who offers the most contemporary, brilliant, and funny acceptance of her own mortality and shows how to make the most of it.

PS: A heartfelt thanks to Maria Popova for her site BrainPickings which introduced me to the authors referred to in this article and is also the source of many quotes in this article. Maria, your site is inspirational and, at times, savior.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

The healing power of writing

Neera 1 Comment

I was never set out to be a writer. For about thirty years of my early life, I had no intention or reason to write anything other than work-related reports, emails, and resumes.

Then in the summer of 1999, I discovered writing quite accidentally.

I was recently employed by a multinational company after finishing my degree in Information Technology. Previously I was a Biochemist and was finding it extremely hard to get any jobs in my field after a seven-year gap to raise my children. Being employed again was really reassuring.

But that assurance didn’t last long.

Nine months later my company was overtaken by another big Information Technology company and many people were retrenched. New to the Information Technology environment where mergers and takeovers are a norm, I feared for my job and accepted a six-month contracting position in a government department.

When I handed my resignation, I was invited for an Exit Interview (another new thing for me) where a senior manager (a very nice fellow) asked the reasons for my leaving.

I had none. Except that I might lose my job.

I later learned they had no intention to do so.

The new company was bigger and better with more career advancement opportunities. Had I tried to win a job with the company from outside, I stood a very slim chance. And here I was letting it go just because I was afraid that they might fire me.

I realized what a big mistake I was making.

I was swapping a permanent positing with a six-month contraction position. Without thinking any further, I rang the contracting company and said I was not joining. Then I went to the senior manager who interviewed me and said I was not leaving.

That started a chain reaction.

In short, I was told that my resignation was approved and it cannot be reverted. The contracting company said they will try to get in touch with the department to see if they could get me back the contracting job I had declined but there were no guarantees.

A day before I had two perfect jobs, today I had none.

And it was no one else’s fault but mine. Here I was, on the last day of work, feeling humiliated and stupid.

I berated myself. How could I be so stupid? Why didn’t I first find out whether I can retract my resignation before saying no to the contracting offer? I went for a long walk but that didn’t help much. My inner talk was not letting me rest.

I couldn’t face my colleagues either. They all knew what I had done. In hindsight, they would have been sympathetic had I let them but I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

This was when I noticed a blank A4 size writing pad and pen on my desk.

Without realizing I picked it up and started writing whatever was going through my head. The same thoughts were going in circles, on and on, again and again. Writing them down helped break the cycle.

I wrote for an hour without looking up. I had filled three sheets in that time. The handwriting was messy because of the emotions but I was beginning to feel better. As if a lot of weight was lifted off my chest. I got up and made myself a cup of tea and got back to writing.

This time I was able to see things in a positive light.

Maybe the department hadn’t hired another contractor. The wheels of the public service turn slower than the private sector. Maybe the contracting company can find me another contract soon. Maybe I can start applying for jobs in the open market now that I had a little bit of IT experience under my belt.

As it turned out, I did get the contract position back. The next week, I was sitting at the new job, with twenty other contractors who were hired at the same time as me to work on an aspiring new IT project. All my worries, humiliation, and self-berating long forgotten.

But I didn’t forget what the act of writing did for me on that day.

We all face times in our lives when we want to hide our face and curl-up in a fetal position. Sometimes even that doesn’t help.

We all face times in our lives when we want to hide our face and curl-up in a fetal position. Sometimes even that doesn’t help.

Writing has the power to bring us out of the dark places by breaking the cycle of depressing thoughts. 

Writing helps us work through your thoughts and emotions, regulates our feelings, and teaches us to express what we’re going through.

In a classic experiment, James Pennebaker, PhD., University of Texas, assigned healthy undergraduates to one of four groups. All were asked to write for 15 minutes for four consecutive nights. Three of the groups were asked to write about some traumatic event in their lives; the fourth group wrote about some other trivial topic. All four groups were then tracked for the next six months and researchers found that the three groups who wrote about traumatic events had fewer visits to the health center.

Doug Foresta in an article on Psychotherapy.net writes that he was interested to find out how his clients tell the “story” their lives. According to him, it typically goes something like this: “I’m a horrible loser, and I keep doing the same thing over and over and I don’t want to but I can’t stop.” We usually tell the worst version of our life story.

He then advises them to imagine the blank page as a safe space where they can try new ideas and new stories about themselves without being judged. He asks his clients to explore who they would be if they didn’t feel so stuck in their problem.

Writing is a powerful tool to bring clarity in thoughts.

When you start expressing your emotions on paper suddenly the horrible story of being stuck is revealed to be just that, a story. And since stories are written, they can be revised, especially if we are the ones who wrote the story in the first place. Writing then becomes an empowering act that sparks creativity and imagination.

What can you do if you find yourself in a hole?

Next time you feel stuck or going through the bad patch try writing to get through keeping in mind the following:

  1. Write nonstop for at least 15 minutes. Pick a thought and write till it finishes. If the next one interrupts, start writing about that. The idea is to take it all out.
  2. Don’t worry about the language. You are allowed to leave sentences unfinished, use clichés, abbreviations, and even foul language if that helps. Keep in mind that this writing is for your eyes only. No one must see it unless you want them to.
  3. Experiment with the medium. You don’t have to write by hand although they say there is a direct connection between your hand and brain. Typing on a computer or even a mobile phone is fine too if it works better for you.
  4. Don’t edit yourself. Part of the exercise is to access your feelings and you can’t do that if you’re constantly redirecting yourself.
  5. Write for a few days or even weeks. If the problem is lingering and you are still seeking clarity, carve out 10 to 15 minutes and write regularly. You don’t have to do it every day, three to four-time a week is all that is needed.
  6. Reread… but not right away: It’s a good idea to go back and see what you’ve written. You will find patterns in your thinking you weren’t aware of before. You will also find in there the solution you were looking for.

Photo by Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash

Is worry wearing you down?

Neera

Three monks were out for a walk — one wise, old monk and two of his younger disciples. 

The older monk points at a large boulder and asks his disciples, “Is that boulder heavy?” 

The younger monks find it an unusual question. “Of course, that boulder is heavy!”

“But,” says the old monk, “only if you pick it up.”

This classic Buddhist parable is a reminder that it is our choice whether we carry the boulder on our backs or leave it where it is.

The boulder in the Buddhist parable represents our worries and none of us is strong enough to carry them on our backs all the time.

Image by the author

The image that comes to my mind of a muscular man who is carrying the atlas on his shoulders. The Atlas represents the world, and no man, doesn’t matter how strong he is, can carry the burden of the world on his shoulders.

Our world has changed forever right in front of our eyes. So many lives have been lost. No one knows when this pandemic is going to be over and when we will be able to live normally, travel normally, and meet our family and friends normally.

We are all worried.

So many people have lost their jobs. Many others have lost their loved ones. The scars the cruelty of nature, mismanagement of governments and greed of certain people have left behind scars will take decades to heal.

We are hurting.

Nobody knows how we are going to emerge at the other end. No one can predict how many more lives will be lost to this pandemic. No one can say for sure how long the pandemic will last or what kind of world we will find ourselves in when we get to the other side of this catastrophe.

We are anxious.

How to control this anxiety.

First of all, we need to put the boulder down.

Feel lighter? I bet you do.

But “Anxiety” doesn’t. 

It doesn’t want you to let go of worry. You see “Anxiety” and “Worry” are best friends. They want to stay together. Anxiety wants you to keep carrying Worry so that she can keep living in your mind.

Rather than lifting the worry back on your shoulders, you are going to offload Anxiety too and make her sit with Worry to keep her company.

How can you do that?

By painting the boulder.

Yes, that is correct.

You are going to go to your cupboard where you keep your paint and brushes, pull those out and start painting.

Image by autor

You see Anxiety is a genie, which needs to remain occupied all the time. It cant sit idle. It needs its master to give her something to do all the time.

Give it something to do.

What? you may ask.

Anything.

That is right.

Tell it to create something.

Creativity is the antidote to anxiety. 

That is the reason musicians all over the world were performing virtual songs during the lockdown, painters were posting videos of their art from their homes, bloggers were writing inspirational stories, dancers were performing online dance parties.

Creativity is how you survive trauma.

What can you get your “Anxiety “to do?

My friend Barbara would say, tell her to paint a Mandala. Pick a rock from your garden, pull out some paint and brushes from your cupboard and make ‘dot mandala.’ Here is how.https://neeramahajan.com/media/90ede2c32d1fb88bb80f8613ec135239

This is what Elizabeth Gilbert said on an Instagram message during the pandemic:

Create, create, create…” Don’t stop. 

This is the photo of what I created when I was facing some of the dark times in my life. When I was in the hospital waiting rooms, in funeral homes, in the middle of the night in despair, on airplanes far from home, while nursing a broken heart, when terrified, tired, when angry, when grieving. 

Constant creative response. This is how you keep the dance alive.

This is how you don’t get the stupidification to settle into your bones. Creativity is movement and movement is how we replace despair with a radical muscular engagement with life in life’s terms.

And this is what a young woman wrote in response to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Instagram message.

I used creativity to form communication with my neurological handicapped mother. She couldn’t speak hardly any words due to damage to her frontal lobe. She passed her time in a nursing home being an artist. 

My sibling and I gifted her Empty sketchbooks for years and we received them back as gifts. I learned to draw, to communicate with her. Plus she learned some sign language and music was the best sharing our souls with each other. 

Creativity expresses our emotions and creativity helps us heal. 

Music, art, writing theatrics and so many other ways. We can escape and make our own world. We find out who we really are. I am grateful my family encouraged my art at a young age. 

I am still an artist to this day. It has helped me through lots of hard times.

Feeling anxious with another lockdown?

Create some music.
Learn to draw.
Dance in your room.

Because this is how you get rid of worry and anxiety and thrive during a disaster.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Your life in boxes

Neera

When Karl Friedrich Mercedes applied for a patent for the world’s first automobile in 1886, he was forty-two years old.

It was against the law to drive a car at that time. He needed a letter from the King to drive his own invention. And there were no roads, no gas stations, no all-night drives to liquor stores.

He should have waited.

Should he?

He knew he was onto the fourth box of his life. How many more he would be handed out? Who knew?

Tim Urban, a writer, and a fellow blogger came with an interesting concept about our life in boxes which I first read about in Niklas Goke’s post.

Let’s say you are going to live for 100 years and each decade is represented by a box, then your whole life is just 10 boxes.

If you look at your life this way it is very easy to see, that the first three boxes of your life are gone learning to walk, talk, getting educated and landing a job.

The last two are write-off too; because you are learning to walk and talk once again perhaps struggling to remember where you left your glasses or whether you had your lunch or not.

The only boxes when you have the possibility to do anything worthwhile with your life are the five in the middle.

Even out of those, three are taken up to raise children, building a career, maintaining a social life and building a nest of eggs.

That leaves you just two boxes when you have the chance to do what you really want to do. That too if you are aware of it. Most of the people think that their sixties and seventies are to hang their boots and live a leisurely life.

Karl Mercedes knew how little time he had to turn his dreams into reality.

Although his car was nothing more than a three-wheeled bicycle running with a motor, Benz began to sell it from the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history.

Rather than planning and using those golden decades of their lives, most people just squander those away thinking what could be done in mere two decades.

Karl Mercedes spent next two decades perfecting his design. In 1909, his car, Blitzen Benz set a record of 226.91 km/h (141.94 mph) and was said to be “faster than any plane, train, or automobile” at the time.

Two decades is a long time if you are serious about following your passion. A degree in Medicine only takes seven years to complete, Economics just four, Law only three. With concentrated effort, a book can be written within a year. You can write twenty in two decades if you want to.

Even if you had no control over eight boxes of your life, if you want, you can control your sixties and seventies.

Make these two decades count, and your life will be worth remembering.

Photo by Jan Laugesen on Unsplash