Living and Working in the Age of Longevity

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Adi Ignatius** (0:59)
I'm Adi Ignatius.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:00)
I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:10)
So, Alison, as you know, my father passed away recently at the age of 104 He stayed sharp pretty much up to the end, and that is relevant to our conversation today.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:19)
Yes, I was so sorry about his passing. He was such an amazing man, not only a father to you and several highly accomplished siblings, but secretary of the Navy in the 1960s and then a successful businessman.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:31)
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. But my point in mentioning that is that a lifespan like his is becoming less and less rare. We're living longer, we're living healthier.
There are many more centenarians, and that has profound implications for work and for our careers.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:45)
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I personally want to work until I'm 100, but I do think that old notions about retiring at the age of 60 or 65 don't really make sense anymore. Many of us can be very productive and lead valuable work lives for much longer.

**Adi Ignatius** (2:02)
Yeah, exactly. And I think management has to adapt to this. I mean, individuals do too. And our guest today, Lynda Gratton, has excellent advice on how people should think about their career options over a relatively long time span. Gratton is a professor of management practice at London Business School and is author of the new book, Living the 100-Year Life, which builds on her earlier book, co-written with Andrew Scott, called The 100-Year Life. She has a lot to share about how we can plan our careers differently in light of our longevity and what organizations need to do to keep up. Here's our conversation.
You know, for our audience, I want to talk mostly about the implications of this one work and career. But before that, I mean, you know, at a high altitude, how should we think about all of our very possibly centenarian lives, about the pace, the expectations, about the pursuit of happiness?

**Lynda Gratton** (2:52)
Well, I would say we've always wanted to have more years.
Anyone, if you ask anyone, what would you like? Would you like more years? Everybody's going to say, yes, of course, I'd love more years.
And actually, right now, we have that opportunity. We have the opportunity to do what our parents and grandparents didn't do, which is to live a great deal longer.
But of course, that's complex for us in many ways, because some of the ways that our institutions are formed, the assumptions we have about our lives, all of those are based on the idea of a three-stage life. You know, you are educated, you work, and you retire at 60 or 65, and then you live maybe for 10 years. But now I'm saying you could live to 100 Everything else has to be remade. This generation of people, at whatever age, or this age you are right now, all of us are learning how to do that, whether we're 70, 50, or 30 We're actually learning, what does it take when you live a 100-year life? I'm incredibly optimistic about it. I think it's a wonderful thing. But it does mean that we have to change the way we think about our lives.

**Adi Ignatius** (3:56)
So I tend to be somebody who lives to work as opposed to works to live. How should somebody like me think about my working identity in this era, in this new world?

**Lynda Gratton** (4:08)
Well, the economics of a 100-year life is that you need to make money in some form or another, probably into your 70s or even your 80s, unless you've saved 20% of your income from the time that you started work, or maybe 15%. And very few of us have done that. And so you haven't. No, neither did I. So it's a sort of a financial reality. But I don't think it's really that that makes it important. I think what really makes it important is the idea that work can be such a wonderful thing for humans. You know, it brings so much things. It develops our skills. It allows us to meet new people, especially of different generations, which I think is really important as you age.