When You're 64

My wife and I frequent a farmers market Sundays in Dupont Circle, and often buy from a local pickler named Number 1 Sons.

The pickler's stand is run by 20-somethings who inevitably ignore me until I go all geezer on them and crabbily insist on making my purchase.

I'm not alone in taking it personally.

According to a survey by AARP of 61- to 69-year old Americans, 21% say they feel invisible around Millennials, and 10% say they receive slower service at stores and restaurants.

Fifty years ago, Sir Paul McCartney's lyrics to "When I'm 64" seemed so sweet.

Every Boomer would relish aging, he implied, just as long as "you still need me."

Things aren't quite working out that way.

But there's more than sour grapes in my tale.

There's a business lesson.

The late novelist Pat Conroy once told C-SPAN, "Every industry is going to be affected by the aging population. This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges."

He was right—especially about the opportunities.

The GI Generation didn't put up with crap service. Why would Boomers? We ended an unjust war; elevated women, blacks and gays; invented heavy metal and punk rock; and created the Internet.

Hey, Sonny: If you want to disrupt, try disrupting discourtesy.

NOTE: July 19th marks my 64th birthday.

Gamification Supercharges Tradeshow Exhibits

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.

— E.M. Forster

Seven of 10 Americans believe attending events connects them to others, according to a recent survey by Eventbrite.

Among Millennials, that proportion's even higher—8 of 10.

Seven of 10 Millennials also believe events expand knowledge better than online content does, the survey reveals. And 1 of 2 attend events to have experiences they can share on social media.

For Millennials, attending events "is all about projecting to your social media network, and painting a picture of a phenomenal lifestyle," event planner Aubri Nowowiejski told Skift. "They chase experiences over things to get those likes and comments and interactions, and that dopamine fix."

If you accept Eventbrite's findings, exhibit marketers who help Millennials polish their personal brands will come out winners at tomorrow's B2B events.

Gamification is the secret sauce.

By offering them high-yield opportunities to enrich their personal brands, gamification counteracts Millennials’ unfortunate reluctance to engage in the "real world" of sales conversation.

Gamification makes networking fun and unintimidating—and delivers the all-important dopamine fix that comes when a Millennial wallflower can update his social media feeds.

One ready solution for exhibitors is PLAYBOOK, a lead-gen system that marries pre-show marketing with gamification.

With PLAYBOOK, exhibitors can not only attract large crowds of fun-seeking prospects to their booths, but get them to look up from their phones long enough to engage in conversation.

DISCLAIMER: I'm a bit biased in favor of PLAYBOOK, because it's the creation of Bob & David James. Learn more here.

This is No Ordinary Job

This is no ordinary job. This is your #dreamjob.

— Salesforce

Human happiness never remains long in the same place.

                                                                                     — Herodotus

With the success of socially conscious companies like Apple, Google, Whole Foods and Salesforce, Millennials' expectations of finding a dream job have risen.

A recent Harris Poll, in fact, shows 8 of 10 Millennials think they can find one.

I was hired for my first dream job under false pretenses.

The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf hired me as its publications clerk in the belief I wore hearing aids when, in reality, I wore band-aids.

It was 1974, the year of gargantuan eye wear, thanks to Sir Elton John, and my fashionably oversized specs were so heavy they irritated my auricles, making it necessary to wear band aids for relief. But to the association's HR folks, they looked like hearing aids.

The job was a dream job because, after a long series of outdoor gigs, it was my first experience working in an air-conditioned office. Washington, DC, is sultry much of the year; the Alexander Graham Bell Association was a 65-degree nirvana.

I was lucky, because, as the Harris Poll indicates, most Boomers, unlike their Millennial counterparts, don't expect to find a dream job (the same holds true for Gen Xers). They're dubious. Millennials, by comparison, are like overeducated Don Quixotes, rejecting home and hearth and questing instead for the perfect job.

The Harris Poll also indicates how workers define a dream job. Among those who hold one:

• 91% say they know what's expected of them
• 83% say their work matters
• 73% say the job is rewarding and
• 70% say the job taps their greatest strengths.

While many considerations—from compensation, security and opportunity, to mission, culture and location—help define a dream job, it's noteworthy that defined outcomes—the key to sustained organizational growth, according to Gallup—tops the list.

Perhaps no other job in history had more carefully defined outcomes than that of "Keeper of the Royal Rectum," the consultant on colonic matters to the Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt.

The Greek historian Herodotus said the Ancient Egyptians were obsessed with purging themselves "by means of emetics and clysters, which is done out of a regard for their health, since they have a persuasion that every disease to which men are liable is occasioned by the substances whereon they feed."

And if that job lacked for advancement opportunities, there was also the "Groom of the Stool" in King Henry VIII's court—another dream job.

Unless you hate paperwork.

Never Trust Anyone under 30

With apologies to '60s activist Jack Weinberg, never trust anyone under 30.

With exceptions, they lack any sense of propriety―and all sense of history.

Case in point.

On behalf of content marketer Sally O'Dowd, one of these young invincibles―a hired social media expert, no doubt―posted the following comment on my blog today:

Adlof Hitlar has left a new comment on your post 4 Keys to Content Marketing for Events:

Thanks for the great information. I mostly follow sally O'Dowd's blogs. Her writings are really creative, follows an innovative and different style. She's my favorite.

Sally looks to be an extremely delightful and imaginative soul, judging from her two blogs.

She's either that, or, as her agent's comment suggests, an unrepentant anti-Semite with bad grammar.

When everything's a cartoon, everything goes.

Never trust anyone under 30.

Lost Generation 2.0

                                                

You are all a lost generation.

                                                                                  ― Gertrude Stein

How ironic: history's most connected generation may be its least connected.

Research by Gallup shows that, while Millennials are 11 times more likely than members of older generations to use Twitter, they have dramatically less attachment to employers.

"Millennials are the least likely generation to be engaged at work," say analysts Brandon Rigoni and Bailey Nelson.

Only 29% of Millennials are committed to their work; 55% are indifferent; and 16% are decidedly disengaged.

Gallup's findings also show Millennials in large part are detached from coworkers and nonchalant about their employers' mission.

"Unless organizations focus on and execute the right tactics, Millennials' lack of engagement at work will continue―along with their tendency to job-hop," the analysts say.

Twenty-one percent of Millennials have changed jobs in the past year; 60% are open to new job opportunities; and only 50% plan to be with their company in a year.

The fix?

Face time.

"Gallup finds that employee engagement is highest among employees who meet with their manager at least once a week," the analysts say.

"Millennials want to understand how their role fits in with the bigger picture and what makes their company unique. The emphasis for this generation of employees has switched from paycheck to purpose."

Garbage In, Garbage Out

New research appearing in the International Journal of Business Administration suggests junk content consumption lowers the quality of your writing.

Sixty-five adults participated in the study.

They provided the researchers writing samples and reports of the time spent reading various books, newspapers and websites.

Using an algorithmic tool, the researchers compared the quality of participants' writing samples to samples taken from the books, newspapers and websites the participants most read.

The comparisons show a strong correlation between reading and writing skills: people who read more complex stories have more complex writing, and vice versa.

The researchers blamed junk peddlers like Reddit and Tumblr for participants' worst writing habits.

Consumption of content rife with jargon, slang and shorthand threatens an adult's ability to compose complex sentences.

Neuroanatomy is also to blame.

"Neuroanatomy may predispose even adults to mimicry and synchrony with the language they routinely encounter in their reading, directly impacting their writing," the researchers say.

Or as Ludwig Feuerbach once said, "You are what you eat."

The researchers prescribe heavy doses of literary fiction and academic journals to counteract the effects of emojis, memes, tweets and listicles on writing skill.

When I Ruled the World

Baby Boomers are more engaged and productive workers than Millennials, according to studies by Gallup.

Gallup's researchers suggest three reasons why: Boomers see their jobs as suited to their skills; as career capstones; and as intrinsically fulfilling.

Millennials, on the other hand, take less pleasure from work, and remain less engaged and productive. Additional studies show they don't care particularly much for their employers.

"Young people are increasingly cynical about work," says psychologist Jean Twenge in Psychology Today.

Cynicism is worrisome, Twenge says, because it trumpets lackluster performance—and pay—in the long run.

Twenge recommends Millennials quit their dreams of world domination and seek instead that "intrinsic fulfillment" Boomers enjoy in the workplace.

Dialing back social media is a good start.

"Social media doesn't help us live the career stories we want," Twenge says. 

"We constantly judge ourselves via comparison to others, and social media fuels this fire. Seeing posts from friends about their seemingly glamorous, high-profile work can make us question our focus on intrinsic rewards. It helps to remember that every job has its downside, or at least its dull side, which few share on Facebook."

Twenge also recommends:

• Reducing the volume of other distractions in the workplace

• Savoring the tasks you most enjoy, aiming for "flow"

• Finishing mundane tasks when you're naturally least engaged (while waiting for the start of conference calls, for example); and

• Looking for fulfillment outside work—in hobbies and among family, friends and communities

"In the end, focusing on intrinsic fulfillment should lead to extrinsic rewards, too," Twenge says.

Besides, "Who would ever want to be king?"

The New New Age

Were he to examine some of Facebook's users, Freud would have a field day.

The good doctor said children, primitives and neurotics all shared an "animistic" view of the universe. Every object has a will that "magical thoughts" can command.

This self-loving "omnipotence" forms the very root of narcissism, Freud believed.

So it's no surprise today's selfie-obsessed customers are embracing magical thinking, as a new report from JWT Intelligence asserts.

New-age accoutrements like crystals, gongs, incense and magic creams are hot, the report says.

"As we navigate through the stress and mundanity of our everyday existence and parallel online lives, we are increasingly turning to unreality as a form of escape and a way to search for other kinds of freedom, truth and meaning.

"What emerges is an appreciation for magic and spirituality, the knowingly unreal, and the intangible aspects of our lives that defy big data and the ultratransparency of the web."

And it's not just Trustafarians who are into magical thinking.

According to Pew Research Center, while the percentage of Americans who attend church declined between 2007 and 2014, the percentage who say they routinely "feel a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being” increased.

"This is being played out via a third-wave New Age for a post-digital generation, which is seeking spirituality through crystals, astrology, sound baths, tarot and tapping. What differentiates this new New Age from its previous incarnations is that the alternative beliefs and practices are now considered serious, irony-free, credible, millennial friendly and cool."

They May Never Know What Hit Them

Whether they know it or not, Millennials' destinies have been shaped by the Great Recession—just as Boomers' were shaped by the Vietnam War.

While family and fortune play defining roles, wars and the economy affect our lives more fundamentally.

In 1960, John O'Hara sent his publisher Bennett Cerf a letter describing the cast of characters in a book he was writing.

O'Hara described them as "the people of my time," men and women too young to be part of The Lost Generation—the generation disillusioned by World War I—but too old to feel part of "The Greatest Generation."

"Everybody can understand a war," O'Hara told Cerf. "But it is not so easy to understand an economic revolution; even the experts continue to be baffled by it; and the people of my time never know what hit them or why."

Millennials are in a companion boat.

They're a generation that won't see anything resembling the luxury and security their parents and grandparents enjoyed.

And they may never know what hit them.

As marketer Mitch Joel advises in his new book, Ctrl Alt Delete, "Accept it: There is no gold watch in your future."

Remains of the Day

AOPs, rock on!

Over three nights in October, California mega-festival DesertTrip will feature a slate of "living legends" that includes Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones and The Who.

Festival-goers who return all three nights will rock out to a cadre of 35 Grammy and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners.

A wrinkled but ribald Benny Hill gave us a glimpse of the geriatric goings-on in 1972, when he aired Woodstick, his eight-minute spoof of Woodstock.

Speaking of The Who, the WHO claims you're officially "old" when you're 50, in many nations "the point when active contribution is no longer possible."

Adults and Older People (AOPs), rock on!

Benny Hill Woodstick by kermlinmaster

Welcome to Indenture

Employers who recruit a lot of recent grads are luring them with a new perk: student loan repayment.

Bloomberg reports that investment and consulting firms like Nataxis and   PricewaterhouseCoopers will pony up as much as $250 a month toward a candidate's college debt.

McKinsey, Bain Capital and Accenture will also pay down employees' student debt, according to The Wall Street Journal.

If you're willing to provide seed money, we can jump on the bandwagon and start up our own firm to compete with Accenture.

Indenture.

A pillar of colonial America, indenture (a version of "enforced servitude") underwrote the tobacco economy in the Chesapeake region.

Under the system, an Englishman who sought a clean start in America signed a contract that promised he'd repay his master for ship fare, clothing, and room and board by laboring for seven years. 

Women also signed the contracts.

The word indenture refers to an indentation made on each contract. When it was drawn, two copies were made. One copy was then placed over the other and an edge indented.

As a result, master and servant could always spot whether a copy might be forged (often the end-date would be changed by one or the other party.)

On a serious note: Burdensome debt is no laughing matter. It drives in part the popularity of Bernie Sanders among Millennials. As one Boomer told a group of college students, “Your generation’s debt is our generation’s draft."

Over. Not Over.

Why buy sunglasses at Walmart when there's Warby Parker?

Metrosexuals' buying habits mean retail giants are “overstored,” says The Washington Post.

Retail space, which mushroomed before the Great Recession, is growing at a pace slower than that of the US population, while retailers like Macy's and Jos. A. Bank shutter stores left and right.

But closing stores isn't the same as closing shop:

• Walmart, for example, will close 269 stores this year; but it will also open 300 new stores; and spend billions on a new e-commerce operation. 

• Williams-Sonoma and other specialty chains will aim for a "sweet spot" of around 250 stores, while drawing more sales from e-com. 

• Chains like Burlington Coat Factory will chop not the number, but the size, of their stores, packing "the entire assortment in a smaller box." 

• Staples will repurpose its real estate by adding shared office spaces to stores. 

• Sears will sublet space to Nordstrom Rack and Dick’s Sporting Goods. 

As retail giants abandon shopping centers, nontraditional tenants like restaurants, gyms and health clinics will fill the space, according to analysts. 

European retailers will also begin to appear on the scene in large numbers.

HAT TIP: Michael Hatch led me to the Post article.

The One Percenters

Try as they might, the narcissists packing the 9/11 Memorial Museum during my visit this week couldn't palliate the place.

Out of a compulsion to vaunt their little lives, they vamped about Ground Zero as if it were Dollywood.

They never got the memo: One percent of people—tops—deserve attention.

Like the 3,000 workers who perished in the Twin Towers.

Like the first responders who risked their all.

Like the Flight 93 passengers and Pentagon employees.

The rest of us don't.

On-Demand Undermines Even Investors

In the 19th century, an enterprising forebear of mine owned a block of houses in the mining town of Franklin, New Jersey, that he leased to workers.

Unbeknownst to the workers, he also leased his mineral rights to the local mining company, which promptly dug a shaft beneath the houses.

According to family lore, my forbear had to skedaddle one dark night, when all the houses and their occupants vanished in a mine-shaft collapse.

Lesson learned.

When investors undermine workers, everyone gets the shaft.

The halo's fast falling from the Uberization of work, Caroline Fairchild writes on LinkedIn.

Millennial entrepreneurs are shifting workers from 1099 to W-2 status, because they're learning that, to succeed, they have to do things like train people and ask them to show up at 9.

You know, 19th century stuff.

As Fairchild shows, on-demand startups that want to appify black markets in everything from home delivery to hospitality face harsh critics.

"As these venture capital darlings walk the fine line between saving on labor costs and breaking the law, regulators and politicians are watching, and critiquing, their every move," she writes.

"The lines being drawn here raise critical questions: Should workers embrace the freedom the digital world offers? Or should they try to hold onto the rights that their predecessors fought over 100 years to win? Is this new economy moving us forward or backward?"

Forward or backward? What do you think?

Plan 9

Attention ad planners: 9 seconds is the perfect period to expose a digital ad, according to a study by Sled.

The ad-platform provider found customers' brand awareness increased twice as much as it did when they viewed an ad for other lengths of time.

But that may be an eternity, in Earthlings' time.

According to Sled, customers viewed ads run recently by BioPharmX a mere 4.1 seconds, on average. 

And according to MediaPost, customers viewed recent ads from the San Antonio Convention & Visitors Bureau for only 4.8 seconds.

Back to the drawing board.

Bye, Bye, Millennials

Marketers now target Millennials by hobbies, not age, according to Hotwire's Communications Trends Report 2016.

No longer youth-obsessed, brands strive to engage customers through "age-agnostic content" that emphasizes the "hobbies we do for fun and the causes that pique our emotional interest."

Marketers should "forget about age," the report says. 

"Let’s focus our marketing on what really motivates our audience—their passions and the life they choose to live."

The PR firm's report is based on data from 400 communicators in 22 countries.

Furnish Your Brain with Care

Research by neurologists reveals multitasking clobbers the short-term memories of people over 60.

For a 2010 study, four doctors at the University of California, San Francisco divided adult subjects into two groups.

The individuals in one group were asked to examine a nature scene and, after a 15-second pause, answer a series of questions about it. These subjects had no trouble with the task.

The individuals in the second group were asked to perform the same task, but were interrupted. While answering the questions about the nature scene, they were shown a human face, and asked to identify the person’s gender and age. The doctors then resumed asking their questions about the nature scene.

The subjects in the second group who were under 60 had no trouble answering all the doctors' questions. But the subjects over 60 struggled to answer the questions posed after the interruption.

During the experiment, MRI scans of the subjects' brains revealed big differences in the brains of younger and older people, after the interruption.

Among the younger people, the brain-areas engaged when processing the picture of the human face shown switched off immediately after that interruption. But, among the people over 60, those brain-areas remained engaged after the interruption. The over-60 brains brains couldn't instantly switch back to the original task.

Besides concluding that multitasking erases the short-term memories of people over 60, the doctors also believe multitasking impairs the formation of long-term memories, because, to take shape at all, long-term memories require short-term ones.

Interruptions are inevitable. So how can people over 60 stay sharp, minimizing "senior moments" and maximizing long-term memories?

My prescription: Furnish your brain with care.

Leaf through any lifestyle magazine and you'll find an article that insists a serene mind requires a clutter-free bedroom (or living room, sitting room, den or home office).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought a sharp mind did, too.

In A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes tells his sidekick Watson the brain is like a "little empty attic."

The wise worker furnishes the attic with care.

"A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things," Holmes says.

"Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

Unless you're Watson—IBM's, not Doyle's Watson—letting trivia clutter the attic diminishes your ability to focus.

Literary man Dr. Samuel Johnson believed something similar.

"The true art of memory is the art of attention," Johnson said, referring to our ability to retain what we read.

"No man will read with much advantage, who is not able, at pleasure, to evacuate his mind, or who brings not to his author an intellect defecated and pure, neither turbid with care, nor agitated by pleasure. If the repositories of thought are already full, what can they receive? If the mind is employed on the past or future, the book will be held before the eyes in vain."

Parents, Quit Mollycoddling

"Helicopter parents" have spawned a generation of incompetents, says Stanford’s former dean of freshmen Julie Lythcott-Haims and author of How to Raise an Adult.

She recently told the Los Angeles Times that a helicopter parent is incapable of raising a future worker, "Somebody who pitches in, who rolls up their sleeves and says, 'How can I be useful here,' instead of, 'Why isn't everyone applauding my every move?'"

Before powered flight, texting and nanny cams, our forebears had a term for helicopter parenting: mollycoddling.

Coddling in the 18th century meant to treat someone as if he or she were an invalid. The word derived from caudle, a drink served to the sick. Molly derived from an 18th century pejorative for a gay man.

A man who was considered timid and ineffectual was thought to have been raised by overprotective parents, or mollycoddled.

Thank goodness, invalids no longer have to drink gruel; or gay men, prove they're courageous.

But I like old words.

So I urge overprotective parents: you're jeopardizing America's competitiveness and your child's future income! Quit mollycoddling.

Wheel of Fortune

My maternal grandfather, a watchmaker, survived the Great Depression by operating a carnival wheel in an amusement park in Newark, New Jersey.

Today, the wheel hangs on a wall in my home, a gaudy artifact symbolizing weird work and small wagers, and the legacy of a man whose real trade was time.

Most of my grandfather's biographical details are lost, but at least one is clear: despite the Depression, he stayed in the game.

Fortunate are the people who—as he did—show up, learn new skills, take risks, think weird.

They don't surrender to the feeling they're hostages or has-beens. They choose instead to be bootstrappers.

Right now, two generations, Millennials and Boomers, are joined at the hip by the prospect of near-poverty.

They're placing bets on the next spin of the wheel.

The bootstrappers are mastering new, adaptive skills. 

The rest are at home, consuming games and gameshows.

Which are you doing?