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Episode Transcript
Avivah: Don't start thinking you're gonna retire and slow down in your fifties or early sixties, but on the contrary, prepare yourself for a whole nother chapter.
Sharad Lal: Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Sharad Lal. This is episode 46. Today we are breaking away from conventional ways of looking at life and exploring a new perspective. With advancements in healthcare, our lifespans are increasing, potentially granting us an additional 25 years.
Imagine your children are going to live to be a hundred years old. With this in mind, we must reshape our understanding of life, work, relationships, and how we choose to live. To help us navigate, we are joined by the remarkable Aviva Wittenberg Cox, a respected entrepreneur and advisor to global CEOs and leaders in over 40 countries.
Aviva challenges us to view life through the lens of four quarters. She suggests that the third quarter spanning from 50 to 75 years old holds 25 years of countless possibilities, an opportunity for us to become who we are meant to be. Aviva's expertise extends across multiple domains. As a consultant, coach, writer, and speaker, she specialises in fostering generational and gender balance within the world's leading companies across various sectors.
She's a regular contributor to Forbes and Harvard Business Review. She lectures at various prestigious institutes like INSEAD and HEC.
Aviva has also taken the stage at renowned events, including TED Economics conferences and the Drucker Forum captivating audiences with a fresh perspective and innovative ideas. I first discovered Aviva through a dear friend Alan, who's a fan of the podcast. Alan had the privilege of hearing Aviva speak at an INSEAD webinar where she introduced the concept of four quarter life.
Intrigued and inspired by her ideas. He insisted that she be a guest on our show. In this engaging conversation, Aviva and I delve into the endless possibilities of the third quarter of life and discuss strategies for planning ahead. We explore the concept of 60 year careers, the role of identity as we reinvent ourselves, the pursuit of love later in life, how our understanding of marriage might evolve.
We also touch upon topics like ideal retirement, location, fostering a sense of community and so much more. Join us on this wonderful journey as we uncover the untapped potential of our extended lifespans and discover the keys to a fulfilling life in the third quarter. But before getting to the podcast, thank you very much for your support.
We are now listened to in over 110 countries, over 1200 cities and I am in the top 5% in the world. If you haven't already, please do consider subscribing. Do consider giving us a rating as well. Thank you in advance. Now here's our conversation. Hi Aviva. Welcome to How to Live. Good Morning in the UK.
Where in the UK do we find you today?
Avivah: Downtown London, near Waterloo Station.
What's the concept of four Quarter lives?
Sharad Lal: Nice. Thank you very much, Aviva, for making time, and congratulations on all the good work you're doing. Before we get started, let's just introduce this concept that you have, which I find so fascinating. What's the concept of four Quarter lives and how's it different from our understanding of life?
Avivah: The concept of four Quarter Lives came up. I was inspired by a book called A hundred Year Life by Linda Gratton and Andrew Scott that many of your listeners may have already enjoyed. Otherwise, I really recommend it and it really woke me up to the fact that we may live longer than we think, and I think there's an old map of life that is three stages.
You get educated, you work, you retire. So, That wasn't really working and I didn't see it around me and I didn't want to emulate that. And so I combined the book and the old three quarters and said, no, actually I think it's no longer three parts. It's a four-part dance. I did a little wink to the corporate world and their constant insistence on quarters and Wall Street reporting.
Q1 is basically where we grow and learn. Q2 is the first part of early adulthood, 25 to 50 where we usually tend to achieve and do what is expected of us by our families and cultures. Q3 is the 25 years after 50, which I think is the new piece gifted to us by these longer lives. We basically have an extra 25 or 30 years over the past half century added to our life expectancy.
And most people imagine that it's stacked on at the end, so it'll be old longer. But I think the reality and the real big shift is we have this strange new thing called Q3 that I don't think people are really ready for.
Sharad Lal: Staying with the Wall Street analogy, what do you think are the key metrics in the various quarters, q1, q2, and what are we supposed to do in those quarters of life?
Avivah: Life is such an incredible ride, right? And it's gonna go up and down and there are gonna be highs and lows. And I think what's very interesting is to be able to do so consciously and mindfully and learn the lessons of life at every stage. And I think each quarter has pretty clear human development phases.
And I think the exciting part of this new Q3 is what it offers us is a mature adulthood. We still have incredible health and energy if we're lucky, but we're building on Q2 on a whole foundation of knowledge, expertise, relationships, and family construction. But I think the secret of Q3 is to really become.
Who we might have always wanted to be, but got a little sidetracked by some of the obligations of q2. I think that's especially true for women who are juggling a lot of family and work and parental care. Q3 offers an opportunity to post some of those things. And discover who one is, when one isn't, all the other roles that one carries in q2.
And I think that's an enormous opportunity for time and exploration, and I think that's the goal of q3.
What's the time to start thinking about q3?
Sharad Lal: Thank you for that. So becoming is such an interesting word for q3, where like you said, we've got our education in q1. In Q2, we've gone out and achieved what we are meant to do. We've done our responsibilities. Maybe at this stage, kids, they are leaving the house. Now we have the opportunity before we hit 50 to become who we are meant to be.
And it's not just. A midlife crisis where we have a few years of doing something, it is a full 25 years where we can go out and become what we are meant to be. What should we think about it? What's the time to start thinking about q3?
Avivah: I think what's, what would be really helpful is if we start redrawing as early as possible because I think the earlier you prepare yourself for the fact that you're gonna have a much, much longer life, the earlier you can imagine and dream up a pacing that will serve you better.
So I hope anybody in Q2 who's listening to this sort of thing, realises that they have more time than they think. In Q2, you feel like you have to get everything done before 50. Yeah. You have to peak your career. You have to make your money, you have to build your family, you have to make your mark on the world.
And I think that creates some unsustainable levels of pressure for many people and to open it up and to realise. Q2 is a little bit of a dress rehearsal, right? It proves you can run the race muscle up a little bit, build strong foundations for life, and then. Know that you're gonna have this time in Q3, and my recommendation of how to prepare for Q3 is to know it exists.
Don't start thinking you're gonna retire and slow down in your fifties or early sixties, but on the contrary, prepare yourself for a whole nother chapter, which might be quite different than the first part of adulthood, or it may be more of a continuation. There are different ways of living these different chapters of life.
But I think the earlier you know this stuff, the better it is. So I can see that now my generation is waking up to this in their fifties and [00:09:00] sixties saying, wait a minute, I don't wanna retire. I don't want that old three stages of life. And then it's a bit late to adjust. It would be much easier if we knew this right from 40 on that.
Okay, I can finish off Q2 over the next decade and then I'm gonna. Go back to school, start a company, create a new idea, give back, do what everyone wants, but there is a whole other opportunity. The pressure of this idea that we should have everything done in q2 and I think if early in your thirties and forties that, yeah, that was good.
And now what are you gonna do with what might become some of your peak performance contributory years?
Inspirational Stories From People in Q3
Sharad Lal: A lot of the listeners are in their forties, so a great timely message to them.
I know you've spoken to many people who've done inspirational stuff, having planned it. In the thirties and forties and set up q3. Is there any inspirational story that comes to mind of someone who's done a good job in q3 and that could be inspiration for people to listen to? So many,
Avivah: there's so many different models of q3.
This is the other thing that I wanna stress is I've written a little bit on Forbes. You can see some of this thinking about models of late work and work doesn't have to be like paid employment, right? There it is, it's your life's work. So I was just talking yesterday to an extraordinary friend of mine, Luis Gallegos, who's been a career diplomat from Ecuador all his life.
He's been 50, he's 75 now. He's been 50 years in diplomacy, and he's not done, and he just keeps going. He negotiated the UN Convention on the rights of. People with disabilities in his Q3 and now as he's just launching q4, he just keeps going. He's now working on the UN Convention on the rights of older people.
I've seen people in Q3 decide that after a first kind of corporate sort of career or academic career, they've gone on to create new ventures, new companies. I had a doctor and a university literature professor team up in what I call duets. And they began to write books about illness in opera, and they started doing all these lectures and now they're in all the opera festivals of the world talking about the link between history, disease, medicine, and its influence on different operas around the world.
Other people start new companies. I had another colleague who was a private equity guy who made a lot of money in q2. Now in Q3, he's just taken over as chairman of the Board of Woods Hole, which is one of the world's great oceanography institutes in the us. I think that's the kind of inspiration that has really given me pause that we can do anything.
How To Plan A 60 Year Old Career?
Sharad Lal: Wonderful point and wonderful that there's so many models that if you love what you're doing, you can double down and take it to new heights and not be under pressure to reach the peak by the time you hit 50. And at the same time, there's so many other options of starting businesses, and I know you also spoke earlier about education.
You can actually go back to school and have a new beginning on something else. If there's a dream you've harboured, you can. It's a good time to bring it out in the open as well. So that time, like you said, is available for many things if you plan it right. Now with this reality careers, as you famously said, now you have 60 year careers.
How do you plan a 60 year old career?
Avivah: I hope people realise that if you have a 60 year career, you're unlikely to have a single career if careers are gonna be 60 years long. I think we need to understand that we're gonna have to change careers. We're gonna have to evolve and grow and learn and relearn and reinvent probably a number of times.
I think now we're gonna have to become like a lot of young people already with multiple interests, side hustles. We're gonna start knowing. That we might do one thing that earns us money. We might do another sort of side hustle that is our passion, and then we might turn that passion into a business or another career.
We are all multiples. We're multiples of talent and interests, and now we're gonna be able to do that consecutively. We just are gonna have to be. Aware that every phase will be a foundation for the next phase after that and the next phase after that. And we will end up being the cumulative product of a number of different things that we do, and the more they make some kind of logic.
Fitting together. I always think, I started out as a computer scientist. I [00:14:00] flirted with journalism in Q2 and writing, but I never really did it that much. I did business school. I went to business school and became a consultant. And it's only now that I realise all of those experiences have fed into a great comfort in creating online programs, writing books, speaking, and being comfortable with public speaking and public appearances that were all taught to me over many decades in q2.
Sharad Lal: That reminds me a little bit of what Steve Jobs said, where the dots will connect and of course you look back and it seems like a logical conclusion, but it could be different things happening, which will come together. Like in your case, it's so wonderful that you've been a consultant, you've been to business school, you've dabbled in creative writing, journalism, and now it's all coming together in the great books you're writing, the theories you're putting together.
So that's so wonderful to see it all come together and new skills develop while you build off the old skills.
What are the Different Transition Skills?
Avivah: I've spent the last 20 years on this issue of gender balance around the world. I've worked in over 40 countries with every possible kind of company and sector. What I find very intriguing is that this issue now of longevity and generational balance that I'm adding on is incredibly similar to the issue of gender balance, right?
It's this massive wave first, the rise of women and the 20th century, and now the rise of the old. And both of those things will change everyone's lives and every company, and everyone has to adjust in every sector. So, All over the world. And so they have great similarities in terms of the transformations required and the challenges and the management and leadership skills you have to build in order to manage those transitions.
And I always say there are four kinds of preparatory roles to every good transition. It's the brain. You need to have it. Good educational foundations, relevant knowledge for what's coming next. You need great love in the second dimension. Great relationships, strong foundations, a good community family, love to support you on the journey.
That's where human happiness is truly grounded. And then you need what I call flexibility, which is really having enough assets and money and savings to give you a degree of choice in what you wanna do next. And that requires where this is very helpful as if you're listening in your early years, is to start saving not too much, but right early on because compound interest.
Saves us all. If you start in your twenties with that kind of discipline and knowledge, which I did not, I think it would help a lot of people.
Opinions on Identity
Sharad Lal: Great point there on, on those four pillars, and the last one being practicality of savings. And I was also curious as you're shifting and changing and reinventing yourself and trying different things. What do you think of it in terms of identity?
Because one day you go in and you're like a consultant. The next day you could be a coach, which could be very different. What do you think of identity and how do you work through that?
Avivah: It's a really interesting point because I think we're coming from a world where people want to ascribe labels. They wanna know really clearly, are you a consultant?
Are you an author, are you a speaker? What are you? And I think what's changed a lot, and I think the younger generations have been instrumental in helping us shift. I think the flexibility that we now have to understand that people can do different things has hugely progressed. And so now when you say I'm this and I'm a piano player, and I'm a writer and I'm, that is much more accepted.
It's partly the narrative you tell yourself. If you think that you can only be masterful at one thing, that you have to be a specialist in order to be respected, that tends to be what you communicate. But if you can confidently say, I'm a doctor, a writer and a speaker. And you have done each of those things and are pretty good at it and have a record to prove it.
I think it's fantastic to be able to role model to others that no, you don't actually have to be only one thing. In fact, if you are only one thing, your likely ability to transition over these new longer lives is gonna be reduced.
Which Companies Have Taken In An Aging Workforce?
Sharad Lal: Wonderful point. The doubts around identity are in our mind, and if we can have the right confidence and narrative, nobody cares as long as we can do the job required of us.
You touched upon organisations and companies in some other interviews where, For the last century, there were companies who actually were gender balanced for this century, the progressive companies are the ones who are gonna be able to manage a generational workforce, which are a lot older. Which companies have you seen?
Think about the ageing population. Think about the 50 to 75 people in how to use them and have roles for them. Who are the ones doing it well and what are they doing?
Avivah: It's new, right? I'd say this whole issue of age is new, and what I was suggesting is that those that are some of the progressive companies that were some of the first to gender bounds are just better prepared.
For generational balance because they've already thought very deeply about how to flex for different needs. The problem is the old uniformity of careers that they used to be very upper out and linear and unbroken. Women can't survive that kind of thing. Nor can young fathers who want to have important parenting roles, and so careers become a little bit more squiggly variable in and out.
Pauses were allowed. Reinventions were possible. And I think that helps companies prepare for what I think we're going towards is a workforce that's going to be. Generationally balanced and it'll be almost in time, 50, 50%, over 50 and under 50. The motivations of people over and under 50 might be quite different.
They don't care quite as much about money. They care far more about purpose and generativity and flexibility. Flexibility is a huge issue now for almost everybody in the workforce. And so it's very interesting to hear all the debates about working from home and remote work and hybrid. All of us need flexibility in order to survive and thrive, and that flexibility has been hard won, and I think women were some of the first to fight for it, and now it's generalising to become much more of a workplace norm and obligation.
Impact of Longer Lives In Relationships
Sharad Lal: Wonderful point. Now in terms of work, of course, we've dug into this four quarter life in a deep way. I'd love to understand if you've actually studied the impact of longer lives and other things like friendships, relationships, marriage.
Avivah: I did, I read a book on late love mating Immaturity, because I think one of the other consequences of longer lives is what we've seen.
You may not wanna be married to the same person for 70, 80 years. That might be something that requires relational skills that we still have to build. I did a TED talk on something called conscious coupling, and I think we will need to rethink dual careers in an age of longevity and that maybe are.
Relationships will be a little bit like our careers. They will also be multiple and evolving, and whether you change partners or keep the same partner for all those decades, the relationship will have to evolve and grow. And so I think we want to probably understand that. Relationships are the heart of human happiness.
There's a wonderful centenarian study from Harvard that's been going on for 80 years and has really distilled down to the root of human happiness is in our intimate relationships. Being conscious of that and knowing that you really wanna invest and spend time with relationships in q2, this is a real invitation for men to spend more time.
Take that time of being a young parent. As one of the pluses of these longer lives and one of the investments in a healthy dual career couple that will be able to last and reinvent cuz some of the wounds of Q2 are overly gendered roles, right? That we're shutting down what people wanna do by forcing them to do too much of a traditional role.
So yes, I think we have to prepare for either multiple relationships or much better investment, much more mindful investment in the relationships we have.
New Models Coming Up
Sharad Lal: Are you seeing different models for relationships come up if you're looking at longer relationships? Have you seen anything interesting in terms of models?
Avivah: What we're seeing is that it's shifting terrain, right? Divorce, which everybody says is 50%, and it isn't. Divorce has been falling for the last 30 years among the educated. It's still rising among those without degrees. But yeah, the reality is that the more educated you are and the later you get married, which most people are now getting married later and later, the more likely that relationship is to last.
What we're now seeing is the only place where divorces are increasing are in your fifties and sixties, and I think this is a pretty direct consequence of some of the longevity we're discussing as you wake up in your fifties. And you realise that you have another 30, 40, maybe 50 years, do you wanna be having breakfast with the person on the other side of the kitchen table for that length of time or not?
And now I think a lot of people are deciding no relationships will take new investment just like careers will. In Q3, don't ignore your personal partner. Life in relationships after family is dramatically different. It's a whole other chapter, and some people grow dramatically together and do wonderful things and create new ventures.
Others will inevitably grow apart.
Thoughts On Communities
Sharad Lal: What about communities? I've always been very curious about the community because. As you grow, you start becoming different and everyone starts becoming more and more unique and maybe the security of the community you had 10 years back changes. How should one think about communities in terms of safety as well as people who help you grow?
Avivah: Communities are essential. I mean that when I talk about the pillar of love in your life and relationships, it's not just your personal partners, it's all of your relationships. And I think what we, what many of us have learned in life is that you edit almost all the time. You grow, you change. And so does everybody around you and your friend base, your community base.
Many of us who have moved internationally, Also disrupt our communities and have experience of many different communities where you can keep relationships as you leave physically, but you stay connected. I think the kind of community you choose. To evolve has a huge impact on your own evolution. And I think the more you choose it, rather than just status quoing and staying where you are unquestionably, the better it is.
And I think that's what we're gonna start seeing more of as people very consciously thinking about, okay, I'm in Q3 now. You know, do I wanna go move to a different country that's sunny and more relaxed? I think it's early days yet to know if completely shifting your community to some dreamed of alternative that you haven't properly tested might be a bit dangerous.
But I do think that there's a phase of Q3 that's about exploration. Go and try new things, test the waters, and then make a conscious choice of do you love where you are? And I think that's what my friend Chip Conley calls the midlife edit. Sometimes you have to be very clear that there are things you will now choose to leave, and there are now things you will really choose to move into.
And I think that's an exercise that I do also in all the programs I run. There is this moment when you become who you really are, that you realise you don't have to please everybody. You don't have to do everything that everybody's been telling you to do. It's time to shed some of those things and contribute to the communities and causes that you care about and let go of all the rest.
How To Think Of Countries?
Sharad Lal: What a wonderful message of the community. You decide to have the relationships that you decide to have, and through all that, it's becoming who you're meant to be. We in Singapore are always thinking, because we have transient communities, we have people shifting and living in different countries. You do short projects and go around.
So we are always thinking about what is home and how we should think of the country that we wanna settle in. Many of us have had global careers. Whether it is for the third quarter or the fourth quarter. So do you have any guidelines on how we should think of countries as we think about Q3 and q4?
Avivah: What I think is we should realise that place and geography is huge.
I have unexpectedly found myself in London at this age and stage, cuz I married a very charming Brit later in life and I was lobbying for some time. Let's move to Portugal for q3. I was reading all these things. I read a wonderful book. If your readers are listening and thinking about place, there's a book by a guy called Ryan Frederick called Right Place right time.
Which really, it's a little American oriented, but it's very helpful in really thinking through the impact of place on your future decisions. And for globalists who have families that are spread out all over the world, finding an attractive base is a non-obvious equation. And Singapore is interesting because a lot of the expats who have lived in Singapore sometimes can't stay there.
You're not allowed. And so where do you stay? I think it's interesting. It's very hard to invent a community overnight, right? It takes years and decades to do it. And so the earlier you start thinking and planning, both short term and long term. Yes. Being mobile, I'll go all over the world, have a wonderful career, and then create this stable base.
I tried to do that. I bought a house at one point in a beautiful little village called Chautauqua in New York State because my mother and my in-laws were over there, and it was a gathering spot for the family for 20 years. It didn't last because the generation above us has now passed on and the kids have spread all over and nobody wants to go back to the US anymore.
But it taught, I learned this from the French. I think the French are incredibly good at this notion of the family home where some grandparents somewhere had the resources to establish and people have memories of place and times and holidays together. I would try to create that and eventually explore different countries, different places until you find one that really resonates with enough members of your intimate circle that you can choose and say, yeah, this is gonna be, this is gonna be home.
Sharad Lal: That's, again, such an interesting one in terms of exploring and seeing. And I think in Singapore you have a few other unique issues. Many people are mixed couples, so they're originally from different countries. So which country is home? Is Singapore home? Southeast Asia Home, but. Like you said, it's a conversation to be had earlier and it's things to explore, whether it's having a family home that you keep trying out and seeing if that works or something else, but you explore, try different things and see where you can build a community over time.
How Countries Influence Families
Avivah: when you have couples who have two different nationalities, so there are four sets of grandparents in different cultures with different sizes of families.
Then the debate is, well, do you go to one or the other? And there's always a cultural issue on how you're gonna raise your children. What language and cultures are you passing on? Sometimes it's interesting to choose a neutral third country, but then which one becomes, again, the domain? And some people are much more attached to their roots than others.
I'm a fairly rootless person. My very British husband is much more rooted. So as I'm the rootless, it's, yeah, okay, you can have your country. I'll go move around. And I think it's again, a really interesting conversation. I think the more global you become and the older you become, the more meaning those things have, you tend to.
Give more value to roots and histories as you age, because yeah, you begin to understand your own parents better. You forgive a lot of things that you might have had issues with, and you realise the importance of transmission from generation to generation, and you then become the responsible person in managing that transmission.
Closing
Sharad Lal: What an interesting point and so many perspectives to look at. Is there anything else around Four Quarter Live that we should talk about, which we haven't touched upon?
Avivah: It's fascinating to me how much this extraordinary gift of science we've been given of almost a doubling of life expectancy in the span of the last hundred years.
Is often seen as a problem. And my closing is just a moment of gratitude. Isn't it nice to have all this time and be able to have all these lives, all these careers, all these experiences, and to be gifted, really a relationship with your children and grandchildren that may not have been available to prior generations.
And then the question becomes, what do you do with it? What do you do with your extra bonus time? That's a big question and I will think about your answer and prepare for it.
Sharad Lal: That's a wonderful message to end this conversation. Thank you very much, Aviva, for your time and thank you for so openly talking about the various aspects of the Four Quarter Live and thank you for being an inspiration and sharing your own story.
Thank you very much.
Avivah: My pleasure, Sharad, and good luck with your own leap into q3. You'll see. It's good. Yes.
Sharad Lal: Thank you, Aviva, for such an enlightening conversation. For more on Aviva, I will drop a link in the show notes. Here's an action step all of us could consider. What could Q3 look like for us? Even if you're in q3, how can you still shape it?
What can it look like from a career standpoint? Do you want to double down or change tracks? Are there any hidden goals you'd like to explore? What about education? Would you like to go back to school? How can you plan for all this? What about relationships? What would they look like? Long marriages, late love, or any other model?
What about location and community? How will that play out? How would you like to shape your career and your life? Take 30 minutes to an hour to reflect on this. Remember, once you have a vision, you can prepare and plan for it all the very best. That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. We will be back another two weeks from now. On August one, we will talk about a very interesting topic, nostalgia, that wonderful, warm feeling we've all experienced when we think about the past.
Beyond just a feeling. Nostalgia is a powerful mental health tool. We'll delve into this fascinating topic next time. Hope you join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.
Avivah: Don't start thinking you're gonna retire and slow down in your fifties or early sixties, but on the contrary, prepare yourself for a whole nother chapter.
Sharad Lal: Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, Sharad Lal. This is episode 46. Today we are breaking away from conventional ways of looking at life and exploring a new perspective. With advancements in healthcare, our lifespans are increasing, potentially granting us an additional 25 years.
Imagine your children are going to live to be a hundred years old. With this in mind, we must reshape our understanding of life, work, relationships, and how we choose to live. To help us navigate, we are joined by the remarkable Aviva Wittenberg Cox, a respected entrepreneur and advisor to global CEOs and leaders in over 40 countries.
Aviva challenges us to view life through the lens of four quarters. She suggests that the third quarter spanning from 50 to 75 years old holds 25 years of countless possibilities, an opportunity for us to become who we are meant to be. Aviva's expertise extends across multiple domains. As a consultant, coach, writer, and speaker, she specialises in fostering generational and gender balance within the world's leading companies across various sectors.
She's a regular contributor to Forbes and Harvard Business Review. She lectures at various prestigious institutes like INSEAD and HEC.
Aviva has also taken the stage at renowned events, including TED Economics conferences and the Drucker Forum captivating audiences with a fresh perspective and innovative ideas. I first discovered Aviva through a dear friend Alan, who's a fan of the podcast. Alan had the privilege of hearing Aviva speak at an INSEAD webinar where she introduced the concept of four quarter life.
Intrigued and inspired by her ideas. He insisted that she be a guest on our show. In this engaging conversation, Aviva and I delve into the endless possibilities of the third quarter of life and discuss strategies for planning ahead. We explore the concept of 60 year careers, the role of identity as we reinvent ourselves, the pursuit of love later in life, how our understanding of marriage might evolve.
We also touch upon topics like ideal retirement, location, fostering a sense of community and so much more. Join us on this wonderful journey as we uncover the untapped potential of our extended lifespans and discover the keys to a fulfilling life in the third quarter. But before getting to the podcast, thank you very much for your support.
We are now listened to in over 110 countries, over 1200 cities and I am in the top 5% in the world. If you haven't already, please do consider subscribing. Do consider giving us a rating as well. Thank you in advance. Now here's our conversation. Hi Aviva. Welcome to How to Live. Good Morning in the UK.
Where in the UK do we find you today?
Avivah: Downtown London, near Waterloo Station.
What's the concept of four Quarter lives?
Sharad Lal: Nice. Thank you very much, Aviva, for making time, and congratulations on all the good work you're doing. Before we get started, let's just introduce this concept that you have, which I find so fascinating. What's the concept of four Quarter lives and how's it different from our understanding of life?
Avivah: The concept of four Quarter Lives came up. I was inspired by a book called A hundred Year Life by Linda Gratton and Andrew Scott that many of your listeners may have already enjoyed. Otherwise, I really recommend it and it really woke me up to the fact that we may live longer than we think, and I think there's an old map of life that is three stages.
You get educated, you work, you retire. So, That wasn't really working and I didn't see it around me and I didn't want to emulate that. And so I combined the book and the old three quarters and said, no, actually I think it's no longer three parts. It's a four-part dance. I did a little wink to the corporate world and their constant insistence on quarters and Wall Street reporting.
Q1 is basically where we grow and learn. Q2 is the first part of early adulthood, 25 to 50 where we usually tend to achieve and do what is expected of us by our families and cultures. Q3 is the 25 years after 50, which I think is the new piece gifted to us by these longer lives. We basically have an extra 25 or 30 years over the past half century added to our life expectancy.
And most people imagine that it's stacked on at the end, so it'll be old longer. But I think the reality and the real big shift is we have this strange new thing called Q3 that I don't think people are really ready for.
Sharad Lal: Staying with the Wall Street analogy, what do you think are the key metrics in the various quarters, q1, q2, and what are we supposed to do in those quarters of life?
Avivah: Life is such an incredible ride, right? And it's gonna go up and down and there are gonna be highs and lows. And I think what's very interesting is to be able to do so consciously and mindfully and learn the lessons of life at every stage. And I think each quarter has pretty clear human development phases.
And I think the exciting part of this new Q3 is what it offers us is a mature adulthood. We still have incredible health and energy if we're lucky, but we're building on Q2 on a whole foundation of knowledge, expertise, relationships, and family construction. But I think the secret of Q3 is to really become.
Who we might have always wanted to be, but got a little sidetracked by some of the obligations of q2. I think that's especially true for women who are juggling a lot of family and work and parental care. Q3 offers an opportunity to post some of those things. And discover who one is, when one isn't, all the other roles that one carries in q2.
And I think that's an enormous opportunity for time and exploration, and I think that's the goal of q3.
What's the time to start thinking about q3?
Sharad Lal: Thank you for that. So becoming is such an interesting word for q3, where like you said, we've got our education in q1. In Q2, we've gone out and achieved what we are meant to do. We've done our responsibilities. Maybe at this stage, kids, they are leaving the house. Now we have the opportunity before we hit 50 to become who we are meant to be.
And it's not just. A midlife crisis where we have a few years of doing something, it is a full 25 years where we can go out and become what we are meant to be. What should we think about it? What's the time to start thinking about q3?
Avivah: I think what's, what would be really helpful is if we start redrawing as early as possible because I think the earlier you prepare yourself for the fact that you're gonna have a much, much longer life, the earlier you can imagine and dream up a pacing that will serve you better.
So I hope anybody in Q2 who's listening to this sort of thing, realises that they have more time than they think. In Q2, you feel like you have to get everything done before 50. Yeah. You have to peak your career. You have to make your money, you have to build your family, you have to make your mark on the world.
And I think that creates some unsustainable levels of pressure for many people and to open it up and to realise. Q2 is a little bit of a dress rehearsal, right? It proves you can run the race muscle up a little bit, build strong foundations for life, and then. Know that you're gonna have this time in Q3, and my recommendation of how to prepare for Q3 is to know it exists.
Don't start thinking you're gonna retire and slow down in your fifties or early sixties, but on the contrary, prepare yourself for a whole nother chapter, which might be quite different than the first part of adulthood, or it may be more of a continuation. There are different ways of living these different chapters of life.
But I think the earlier you know this stuff, the better it is. So I can see that now my generation is waking up to this in their fifties and [00:09:00] sixties saying, wait a minute, I don't wanna retire. I don't want that old three stages of life. And then it's a bit late to adjust. It would be much easier if we knew this right from 40 on that.
Okay, I can finish off Q2 over the next decade and then I'm gonna. Go back to school, start a company, create a new idea, give back, do what everyone wants, but there is a whole other opportunity. The pressure of this idea that we should have everything done in q2 and I think if early in your thirties and forties that, yeah, that was good.
And now what are you gonna do with what might become some of your peak performance contributory years?
Inspirational Stories From People in Q3
Sharad Lal: A lot of the listeners are in their forties, so a great timely message to them.
I know you've spoken to many people who've done inspirational stuff, having planned it. In the thirties and forties and set up q3. Is there any inspirational story that comes to mind of someone who's done a good job in q3 and that could be inspiration for people to listen to? So many,
Avivah: there's so many different models of q3.
This is the other thing that I wanna stress is I've written a little bit on Forbes. You can see some of this thinking about models of late work and work doesn't have to be like paid employment, right? There it is, it's your life's work. So I was just talking yesterday to an extraordinary friend of mine, Luis Gallegos, who's been a career diplomat from Ecuador all his life.
He's been 50, he's 75 now. He's been 50 years in diplomacy, and he's not done, and he just keeps going. He negotiated the UN Convention on the rights of. People with disabilities in his Q3 and now as he's just launching q4, he just keeps going. He's now working on the UN Convention on the rights of older people.
I've seen people in Q3 decide that after a first kind of corporate sort of career or academic career, they've gone on to create new ventures, new companies. I had a doctor and a university literature professor team up in what I call duets. And they began to write books about illness in opera, and they started doing all these lectures and now they're in all the opera festivals of the world talking about the link between history, disease, medicine, and its influence on different operas around the world.
Other people start new companies. I had another colleague who was a private equity guy who made a lot of money in q2. Now in Q3, he's just taken over as chairman of the Board of Woods Hole, which is one of the world's great oceanography institutes in the us. I think that's the kind of inspiration that has really given me pause that we can do anything.
How To Plan A 60 Year Old Career?
Sharad Lal: Wonderful point and wonderful that there's so many models that if you love what you're doing, you can double down and take it to new heights and not be under pressure to reach the peak by the time you hit 50. And at the same time, there's so many other options of starting businesses, and I know you also spoke earlier about education.
You can actually go back to school and have a new beginning on something else. If there's a dream you've harboured, you can. It's a good time to bring it out in the open as well. So that time, like you said, is available for many things if you plan it right. Now with this reality careers, as you famously said, now you have 60 year careers.
How do you plan a 60 year old career?
Avivah: I hope people realise that if you have a 60 year career, you're unlikely to have a single career if careers are gonna be 60 years long. I think we need to understand that we're gonna have to change careers. We're gonna have to evolve and grow and learn and relearn and reinvent probably a number of times.
I think now we're gonna have to become like a lot of young people already with multiple interests, side hustles. We're gonna start knowing. That we might do one thing that earns us money. We might do another sort of side hustle that is our passion, and then we might turn that passion into a business or another career.
We are all multiples. We're multiples of talent and interests, and now we're gonna be able to do that consecutively. We just are gonna have to be. Aware that every phase will be a foundation for the next phase after that and the next phase after that. And we will end up being the cumulative product of a number of different things that we do, and the more they make some kind of logic.
Fitting together. I always think, I started out as a computer scientist. I [00:14:00] flirted with journalism in Q2 and writing, but I never really did it that much. I did business school. I went to business school and became a consultant. And it's only now that I realise all of those experiences have fed into a great comfort in creating online programs, writing books, speaking, and being comfortable with public speaking and public appearances that were all taught to me over many decades in q2.
Sharad Lal: That reminds me a little bit of what Steve Jobs said, where the dots will connect and of course you look back and it seems like a logical conclusion, but it could be different things happening, which will come together. Like in your case, it's so wonderful that you've been a consultant, you've been to business school, you've dabbled in creative writing, journalism, and now it's all coming together in the great books you're writing, the theories you're putting together.
So that's so wonderful to see it all come together and new skills develop while you build off the old skills.
What are the Different Transition Skills?
Avivah: I've spent the last 20 years on this issue of gender balance around the world. I've worked in over 40 countries with every possible kind of company and sector. What I find very intriguing is that this issue now of longevity and generational balance that I'm adding on is incredibly similar to the issue of gender balance, right?
It's this massive wave first, the rise of women and the 20th century, and now the rise of the old. And both of those things will change everyone's lives and every company, and everyone has to adjust in every sector. So, All over the world. And so they have great similarities in terms of the transformations required and the challenges and the management and leadership skills you have to build in order to manage those transitions.
And I always say there are four kinds of preparatory roles to every good transition. It's the brain. You need to have it. Good educational foundations, relevant knowledge for what's coming next. You need great love in the second dimension. Great relationships, strong foundations, a good community family, love to support you on the journey.
That's where human happiness is truly grounded. And then you need what I call flexibility, which is really having enough assets and money and savings to give you a degree of choice in what you wanna do next. And that requires where this is very helpful as if you're listening in your early years, is to start saving not too much, but right early on because compound interest.
Saves us all. If you start in your twenties with that kind of discipline and knowledge, which I did not, I think it would help a lot of people.
Opinions on Identity
Sharad Lal: Great point there on, on those four pillars, and the last one being practicality of savings. And I was also curious as you're shifting and changing and reinventing yourself and trying different things. What do you think of it in terms of identity?
Because one day you go in and you're like a consultant. The next day you could be a coach, which could be very different. What do you think of identity and how do you work through that?
Avivah: It's a really interesting point because I think we're coming from a world where people want to ascribe labels. They wanna know really clearly, are you a consultant?
Are you an author, are you a speaker? What are you? And I think what's changed a lot, and I think the younger generations have been instrumental in helping us shift. I think the flexibility that we now have to understand that people can do different things has hugely progressed. And so now when you say I'm this and I'm a piano player, and I'm a writer and I'm, that is much more accepted.
It's partly the narrative you tell yourself. If you think that you can only be masterful at one thing, that you have to be a specialist in order to be respected, that tends to be what you communicate. But if you can confidently say, I'm a doctor, a writer and a speaker. And you have done each of those things and are pretty good at it and have a record to prove it.
I think it's fantastic to be able to role model to others that no, you don't actually have to be only one thing. In fact, if you are only one thing, your likely ability to transition over these new longer lives is gonna be reduced.
Which Companies Have Taken In An Aging Workforce?
Sharad Lal: Wonderful point. The doubts around identity are in our mind, and if we can have the right confidence and narrative, nobody cares as long as we can do the job required of us.
You touched upon organisations and companies in some other interviews where, For the last century, there were companies who actually were gender balanced for this century, the progressive companies are the ones who are gonna be able to manage a generational workforce, which are a lot older. Which companies have you seen?
Think about the ageing population. Think about the 50 to 75 people in how to use them and have roles for them. Who are the ones doing it well and what are they doing?
Avivah: It's new, right? I'd say this whole issue of age is new, and what I was suggesting is that those that are some of the progressive companies that were some of the first to gender bounds are just better prepared.
For generational balance because they've already thought very deeply about how to flex for different needs. The problem is the old uniformity of careers that they used to be very upper out and linear and unbroken. Women can't survive that kind of thing. Nor can young fathers who want to have important parenting roles, and so careers become a little bit more squiggly variable in and out.
Pauses were allowed. Reinventions were possible. And I think that helps companies prepare for what I think we're going towards is a workforce that's going to be. Generationally balanced and it'll be almost in time, 50, 50%, over 50 and under 50. The motivations of people over and under 50 might be quite different.
They don't care quite as much about money. They care far more about purpose and generativity and flexibility. Flexibility is a huge issue now for almost everybody in the workforce. And so it's very interesting to hear all the debates about working from home and remote work and hybrid. All of us need flexibility in order to survive and thrive, and that flexibility has been hard won, and I think women were some of the first to fight for it, and now it's generalising to become much more of a workplace norm and obligation.
Impact of Longer Lives In Relationships
Sharad Lal: Wonderful point. Now in terms of work, of course, we've dug into this four quarter life in a deep way. I'd love to understand if you've actually studied the impact of longer lives and other things like friendships, relationships, marriage.
Avivah: I did, I read a book on late love mating Immaturity, because I think one of the other consequences of longer lives is what we've seen.
You may not wanna be married to the same person for 70, 80 years. That might be something that requires relational skills that we still have to build. I did a TED talk on something called conscious coupling, and I think we will need to rethink dual careers in an age of longevity and that maybe are.
Relationships will be a little bit like our careers. They will also be multiple and evolving, and whether you change partners or keep the same partner for all those decades, the relationship will have to evolve and grow. And so I think we want to probably understand that. Relationships are the heart of human happiness.
There's a wonderful centenarian study from Harvard that's been going on for 80 years and has really distilled down to the root of human happiness is in our intimate relationships. Being conscious of that and knowing that you really wanna invest and spend time with relationships in q2, this is a real invitation for men to spend more time.
Take that time of being a young parent. As one of the pluses of these longer lives and one of the investments in a healthy dual career couple that will be able to last and reinvent cuz some of the wounds of Q2 are overly gendered roles, right? That we're shutting down what people wanna do by forcing them to do too much of a traditional role.
So yes, I think we have to prepare for either multiple relationships or much better investment, much more mindful investment in the relationships we have.
New Models Coming Up
Sharad Lal: Are you seeing different models for relationships come up if you're looking at longer relationships? Have you seen anything interesting in terms of models?
Avivah: What we're seeing is that it's shifting terrain, right? Divorce, which everybody says is 50%, and it isn't. Divorce has been falling for the last 30 years among the educated. It's still rising among those without degrees. But yeah, the reality is that the more educated you are and the later you get married, which most people are now getting married later and later, the more likely that relationship is to last.
What we're now seeing is the only place where divorces are increasing are in your fifties and sixties, and I think this is a pretty direct consequence of some of the longevity we're discussing as you wake up in your fifties. And you realise that you have another 30, 40, maybe 50 years, do you wanna be having breakfast with the person on the other side of the kitchen table for that length of time or not?
And now I think a lot of people are deciding no relationships will take new investment just like careers will. In Q3, don't ignore your personal partner. Life in relationships after family is dramatically different. It's a whole other chapter, and some people grow dramatically together and do wonderful things and create new ventures.
Others will inevitably grow apart.
Thoughts On Communities
Sharad Lal: What about communities? I've always been very curious about the community because. As you grow, you start becoming different and everyone starts becoming more and more unique and maybe the security of the community you had 10 years back changes. How should one think about communities in terms of safety as well as people who help you grow?
Avivah: Communities are essential. I mean that when I talk about the pillar of love in your life and relationships, it's not just your personal partners, it's all of your relationships. And I think what we, what many of us have learned in life is that you edit almost all the time. You grow, you change. And so does everybody around you and your friend base, your community base.
Many of us who have moved internationally, Also disrupt our communities and have experience of many different communities where you can keep relationships as you leave physically, but you stay connected. I think the kind of community you choose. To evolve has a huge impact on your own evolution. And I think the more you choose it, rather than just status quoing and staying where you are unquestionably, the better it is.
And I think that's what we're gonna start seeing more of as people very consciously thinking about, okay, I'm in Q3 now. You know, do I wanna go move to a different country that's sunny and more relaxed? I think it's early days yet to know if completely shifting your community to some dreamed of alternative that you haven't properly tested might be a bit dangerous.
But I do think that there's a phase of Q3 that's about exploration. Go and try new things, test the waters, and then make a conscious choice of do you love where you are? And I think that's what my friend Chip Conley calls the midlife edit. Sometimes you have to be very clear that there are things you will now choose to leave, and there are now things you will really choose to move into.
And I think that's an exercise that I do also in all the programs I run. There is this moment when you become who you really are, that you realise you don't have to please everybody. You don't have to do everything that everybody's been telling you to do. It's time to shed some of those things and contribute to the communities and causes that you care about and let go of all the rest.
How To Think Of Countries?
Sharad Lal: What a wonderful message of the community. You decide to have the relationships that you decide to have, and through all that, it's becoming who you're meant to be. We in Singapore are always thinking, because we have transient communities, we have people shifting and living in different countries. You do short projects and go around.
So we are always thinking about what is home and how we should think of the country that we wanna settle in. Many of us have had global careers. Whether it is for the third quarter or the fourth quarter. So do you have any guidelines on how we should think of countries as we think about Q3 and q4?
Avivah: What I think is we should realise that place and geography is huge.
I have unexpectedly found myself in London at this age and stage, cuz I married a very charming Brit later in life and I was lobbying for some time. Let's move to Portugal for q3. I was reading all these things. I read a wonderful book. If your readers are listening and thinking about place, there's a book by a guy called Ryan Frederick called Right Place right time.
Which really, it's a little American oriented, but it's very helpful in really thinking through the impact of place on your future decisions. And for globalists who have families that are spread out all over the world, finding an attractive base is a non-obvious equation. And Singapore is interesting because a lot of the expats who have lived in Singapore sometimes can't stay there.
You're not allowed. And so where do you stay? I think it's interesting. It's very hard to invent a community overnight, right? It takes years and decades to do it. And so the earlier you start thinking and planning, both short term and long term. Yes. Being mobile, I'll go all over the world, have a wonderful career, and then create this stable base.
I tried to do that. I bought a house at one point in a beautiful little village called Chautauqua in New York State because my mother and my in-laws were over there, and it was a gathering spot for the family for 20 years. It didn't last because the generation above us has now passed on and the kids have spread all over and nobody wants to go back to the US anymore.
But it taught, I learned this from the French. I think the French are incredibly good at this notion of the family home where some grandparents somewhere had the resources to establish and people have memories of place and times and holidays together. I would try to create that and eventually explore different countries, different places until you find one that really resonates with enough members of your intimate circle that you can choose and say, yeah, this is gonna be, this is gonna be home.
Sharad Lal: That's, again, such an interesting one in terms of exploring and seeing. And I think in Singapore you have a few other unique issues. Many people are mixed couples, so they're originally from different countries. So which country is home? Is Singapore home? Southeast Asia Home, but. Like you said, it's a conversation to be had earlier and it's things to explore, whether it's having a family home that you keep trying out and seeing if that works or something else, but you explore, try different things and see where you can build a community over time.
How Countries Influence Families
Avivah: when you have couples who have two different nationalities, so there are four sets of grandparents in different cultures with different sizes of families.
Then the debate is, well, do you go to one or the other? And there's always a cultural issue on how you're gonna raise your children. What language and cultures are you passing on? Sometimes it's interesting to choose a neutral third country, but then which one becomes, again, the domain? And some people are much more attached to their roots than others.
I'm a fairly rootless person. My very British husband is much more rooted. So as I'm the rootless, it's, yeah, okay, you can have your country. I'll go move around. And I think it's again, a really interesting conversation. I think the more global you become and the older you become, the more meaning those things have, you tend to.
Give more value to roots and histories as you age, because yeah, you begin to understand your own parents better. You forgive a lot of things that you might have had issues with, and you realise the importance of transmission from generation to generation, and you then become the responsible person in managing that transmission.
Closing
Sharad Lal: What an interesting point and so many perspectives to look at. Is there anything else around Four Quarter Live that we should talk about, which we haven't touched upon?
Avivah: It's fascinating to me how much this extraordinary gift of science we've been given of almost a doubling of life expectancy in the span of the last hundred years.
Is often seen as a problem. And my closing is just a moment of gratitude. Isn't it nice to have all this time and be able to have all these lives, all these careers, all these experiences, and to be gifted, really a relationship with your children and grandchildren that may not have been available to prior generations.
And then the question becomes, what do you do with it? What do you do with your extra bonus time? That's a big question and I will think about your answer and prepare for it.
Sharad Lal: That's a wonderful message to end this conversation. Thank you very much, Aviva, for your time and thank you for so openly talking about the various aspects of the Four Quarter Live and thank you for being an inspiration and sharing your own story.
Thank you very much.
Avivah: My pleasure, Sharad, and good luck with your own leap into q3. You'll see. It's good. Yes.
Sharad Lal: Thank you, Aviva, for such an enlightening conversation. For more on Aviva, I will drop a link in the show notes. Here's an action step all of us could consider. What could Q3 look like for us? Even if you're in q3, how can you still shape it?
What can it look like from a career standpoint? Do you want to double down or change tracks? Are there any hidden goals you'd like to explore? What about education? Would you like to go back to school? How can you plan for all this? What about relationships? What would they look like? Long marriages, late love, or any other model?
What about location and community? How will that play out? How would you like to shape your career and your life? Take 30 minutes to an hour to reflect on this. Remember, once you have a vision, you can prepare and plan for it all the very best. That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. We will be back another two weeks from now. On August one, we will talk about a very interesting topic, nostalgia, that wonderful, warm feeling we've all experienced when we think about the past.
Beyond just a feeling. Nostalgia is a powerful mental health tool. We'll delve into this fascinating topic next time. Hope you join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.