#581 The 100 year life with Lynda Gratton (A Career Well Spent Series)

**Lynda Gratton** (0:00)
Hi, everybody.

**Helen** (0:00)
It is Helen from the Squiggly Careers Podcast. And before today's episode starts, I wanted to let you know about something that Sarah and I have created for the summer.
We are going to be launching a series all about a career well spent. We're going to release four episodes, one every Tuesday, and it's going to be us in conversation with an expert who can give us a different perspective on what it means to have a career well spent. We'll talk about longevity, we'll talk about relationships, we'll talk about time, and we'll talk about making a difference. We wanted this to be a community learning moment too, so on Thursdays, we're going to have a LinkedIn live where you can bring your questions, you can bring your reflections, and we'll discuss the episodes together as a community.
All the links you need are going to be in the Squiggly Careers newsletter. So if this sounds like something you want to get involved in, and we really, really hope you do, it's all free, and it'll be a great learning moment, then all you need to do is sign up for the newsletter, just go to squigglynewsletter.com, that's squigglynewsletter.com, and we will send you everything you need to know to get involved. But for now, let's get on with today's episode.

**Sarah** (1:09)
I am not sure our podcast would exist without this brilliant leader, and that is Lynda, Lynda Gratton.

**Lynda Gratton** (1:18)
What you're doing is you're just weaving your threads. You're trying to let none of the threads become so fragile and weak that they break, but at the same time, being able and confident to move into other directions.
The thread of mastery is about building things that you're good at, that you love, that you can do. The golden threads, you know, the metaphor of a weave was just such a glorious way of talking about our lives.

**Sarah** (1:46)
How do you feel that kind of AI and mastery work together, work for each other?

**Lynda Gratton** (1:51)
Your biggest competitor is not going to be AI. It's going to be somebody who's using it better than you. Make yourself more human. Now, what is it to be a human?

**Sarah** (1:59)
Each of those threads are important. How do I start to make some choices? How do I start to make some decisions on those threads?
Hi, my name's Sarah, and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. This episode is the first one in our Ask the Expert Summer Series, where we'll be reflecting on what does a career well spent look and feel like for you. We'll be borrowing brilliance from four different experts, and today you're going to hear my conversation with London Business School Professor Lynda Gratton. Well, she'll be talking to us about what does it mean to live the 100-year life.
Hi, and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast. My name is Sarah, and this week we are borrowing brilliance, not from a topic, but from one of our long-time inspirers and heroes of the podcast. I am not sure our podcast would exist without this brilliant leader, and that is Lynda, Lynda Gratton. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. And for those of you who are watching, you can see I've got my hands on an uncorrected proof of Living the Hundred-Year Life, which is Lynda's new book. And I think being able to say that I get to read this book before it's even out, basically means that I've made it in my squiggly career. I could now retire happy, though as Lynda will tell us, it doesn't really work like that anymore. So that's what we're going to explore today.
So, Lynda, I read the Hundred-Year Life, the book you wrote with Andrew Scott a little while ago now. And that had so many light bulb moments for me because we just started thinking about careers not being ladders. And I read Hundred-Year Life and I thought, maybe these insights we've got make sense. Maybe there's kind of something in there. And you've now written this new book called Living the Hundred-Year Life.
What's prompted you to kind of come back to this Hundred-Year Life concept? Maybe what feels different now than when you first wrote the Hundred-Year Life?

**Lynda Gratton** (3:58)
Well, we wrote the Hundred-Year Life 10 years ago.

**Sarah** (4:01)
Wow.

**Lynda Gratton** (4:02)
And what's happened since then? Well, the world has just transformed, hasn't it? AI, politics, climate change. And it just means that there's even more happening in your career. But at the same time, you could well live to a hundred, if you think you're going to live to a hundred, Sarah. But let's say we do. I hope I do. I hope you do. Then we're going to be working into our 70s or 80s. And so I wrote the book because people love the Hundred-Year Life, as you said, but then sometimes they said, but what do I do now?