Game Plan: Winning Strategies for the Second Half of Your Life
By Bob Buford
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About this ebook
Thousands of readers have found an exciting new vision for the second half of life in the bestselling book, Halftime. Bob Buford showed us that we aren't experiencing a midlife crisis that's winding us down to our retirement years, but a break in the game that can prepare us for the most exciting half of life.
In Game Plan, Buford gives you a practical way to move from success to significance and create an individual strategy that can get you where you want to be five . . . ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . or more years from now. If you sense it's time for a positive change in your life, Game Plan gives you the tools to uncover your best self, aim for your highest dreams, and make your career and personal life more meaningful and fulfilling than ever.
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Game Plan - Bob Buford
Part 1
Leaving the Field
1
Welcome to Halftime
I am forty-six years old; the father of three children (19, 18, and 13); very happily married, and the CEO of a five million dollar subsidiary of a larger company. I am the classic case described in your book, Halftime.
I grew up in a low income Christian family in a rural Tennessee town. As the only member of my family to attend a four-year college, I set high business goals for myself. I have achieved all of them with the exception of accumulating any wealth. The latter goal no longer seems important.
From a letter in response to Halftime
As you approach your fourth decade, you begin to think a lot about who you are and where you are going. It is inevitable, and I believe, universal. Some people approach this period in life pathologically and call it a crisis. I regard it more positively and call it halftime—an interval in a person’s life where he or she explores ways to transform their success into significance.
You do have a choice—you can have a crisis or a halftime.
My hunch is that once the shock of realizing they aren’t twenty years old anymore wears off, halftimers can move quickly away from the language of crisis. True, there are still those middle-aged men who continue to try to look and act like teenagers, but by and large, Boomers have finally grown up. In addition to acquiring a variety of skills and achieving a degree of success, they have discovered that at this ripe midpoint of their lives, they still have tremendous energy, creativity, and intellectual capacity. Consider these facts:
Most people who are fifty will live another thirty years. The actuarial statistics support this assumption. A woman who is fifty, if she doesn’t die of cancer or heart disease, will live to see her ninety-second birthday! Men are only slightly behind in this statistic.
Most of us will likely have a whole second adulthood our grandparents never had. Life expectancy at the turn of the last century was around fifty.
The additional years we have been given will be marked by good health, vitality, and the capacity to contribute at a very high level.
Traditional understandings of retirement will no longer be relevant to a growing number of men and women approaching their sixties.
These facts became exceptionally clear to me a few months ago when I went to the barber shop I have used for years. The founder of this shop, Gordon Abbott, had died at age eighty-two, in itself not an unusual occurrence. However, Gordon had worked at the shop until three months prior to his death, when he became ill. This is a pattern that is becoming the norm and, frankly, one that is immensely appealing to me.
I will never forget that pivotal moment in August 1987 when Peter Drucker told me, You have thirty years left to live, and they will the best thirty years of your life.
Here sat a man in front of me who was almost exactly thirty years my senior and who, in the previous thirty years of his life, had delivered his best and most productive work. In this case, the medium was the message—living proof of immense productivity and influence in the years beyond the fourth decade.
I was forty-eight then, and have now about completed the first ten years of the thirty he promised. So far, everything he said is true. What I find interesting, however, is that more and more people have accepted an almost revolutionary concept of what it means to be old.
I was speaking in Arizona in front of a group of couples who were in halftime and I asked them to think about how old they would be the day they looked in the mirror and considered themselves an old person. The organizers of this conference had given everyone in the audience a clicker
—an electronic device that instantly recorded their individual answers to any multiple-choice question. Precisely eighty percent of the audience selected over seventy-five
as when they would consider themselves old. Whether you agree with it, or are making plans for it, if you are in your forties, you will most likely have ahead of you at least thirty more years of potential contribution on the highest level. To help you get your arms around just how much time you have left, think of what it was like to sign your first thirty-year mortgage. That amount of time seemed like an eternity, didn’t