Lynda Gratton: What If You Live to 100? Here's How to Actually Plan For It SB1898

The traditional life plan, learn, work for four decades straight, retire once and for all, was built for a much shorter life than many of us are actually going to live. Lynda Gratton, London Business School professor and bestselling author of The 100-Year Life, has spent years studying what happens when that old blueprint stops matching reality. Her answer isn't a bigger retirement number. It's a completely different way of thinking about how work, rest, learning, and relationships fit together across a much longer stretch of time, and what that means for how you actually fund it. What You'll Walk Away With Why a single, long block of retirement often backfires, and what tends to happen to people's sense of purpose and friendships when it doesThe "weaving" framework: eight threads, four about staying productive and four about nurturing yourself, that Gratton argues need ongoing attention throughout life, not just at the endWhy a "flexibility fund" might matter more than a traditional retirement account for anyone planning to take real breaks, sabbaticals, or career pivots along the wayA simple four-option framework (stay, switch, scale back, or sail away) for deciding what to do when a chapter of work stops feeling rightWhy the fastest way to burn out is neglecting the "nurture" side of life, and why neglecting the "productivity" side leaves you financially fragile insteadA genuinely useful reframe on AI: not a threat to outrun, but a reason to double down on the specifically human parts of work and life Why This Matters Now Longer lifespans sound like good news until you realize the traditional financial and career plan never accounted for them. A forty-year runway to retirement followed by thirty-plus years of doing nothing structured often turns out to be less fulfilling, and harder to fund, than a life built with more transitions built in along the way. Planning for that kind of life means thinking further ahead than most retirement calculators do, and building in the flexibility to actually use the extra years well, not just survive them. From the Basement A Dolly Parton headline turns into a genuinely sharp personal finance lesson: how she turned down Elvis, kept the rights to "I Will Always Love You," and built Dollywood, her literacy program, and her entire business empire on the exact same core talents rather than chasing unrelated ventures. Old-school diversification, but the boring kind that actually works. Resources Mentioned Living the 100-Year Life by Lynda Gratton https://www.london.edu/think/living-the-100-year-life — Lynda's book, workbook, and free diagnostic on the eight life threadsLife Threads podcast https://www.london.edu/news/new-book-and-podcast-series-on-how-to-sustain-a-50-year-career — Lynda's eight-episode podcast series exploring each threadThe 100-Year Life by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100-Year_Life — the original million-copy bestseller that started this line of research See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  You know, I don't understand this podcasting thing. How come you boys can't have those keg parties and chase the girls like all the other nice boys do? Y'all are nerds.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Live from Joe's mom's basement, it's the Stacking Benjamin Show.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug, and let's say you retire early and live to be, I don't know, 130 years old. What will you do with your time? Today, we're talking to longevity and wellness expert Linda Gratton about retooling your retirement. Maybe it's time to throw away the old way of envisioning your life. In our headline segment, you've heard all the Dolly Parton tributes, but what lessons can we learn from Dolly that help you with your money? We've got a bundle, and then I'll share the biggest bundle of joy this podcast ever produced, my trivia. And now two guys who I had to interrupt from singing, I Will Always Love You,

• 1:40Speaker 02

  so we can actually start recording. It's Joe and O G G G G G.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  If you've never heard OG's singing voice, you don't know what you're missing.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  I would clearly sing Jolene.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  But not I Will Always Love You?

• 1:58Speaker 04

  Isn't that Whitney Houston?

• 2:00Speaker 03

  That is, well, we'll talk about that song because that is a song written by Dolly Parton. And there's a great story about how that song came about. So fantastic, OG. How are you on this glorious Wednesday in the middle, we're at the middle of September already. It's crazy.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  And it's still 105. We're just so happy to be participating in fall. When we moved to Texas, everybody said there's four seasons like every place else. There's almost summer, summer, still summer, and Christmas. And we are in the still summer season of our Texas.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  In Texarkana, I usually call it almost summer, oh, God, no, more, oh, God, no, and then fall.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't get fall. Face of the sun to 40 and raining.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, not good. Well, the good news is we're inside, we're in the basement, we're feeling all cozy, and we're ready to go. We got Linda Gratton upstairs talking to mom. She is an amazing woman. Doug called her a longevity and wellness expert, which is all true because of really what she focuses on. But in truth, she is an organizational theorist looking at how people work inside organizations better. And the reason this is important, OG, is that she has done a lot of work on this idea of checking out, just psychologically checking out.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, what were you saying? I checked out.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. But when you, when you check out from society, in other words, you decide that you want to retire at 40, what does that do to you? And she has done a lot of work about how we atrophy. And so she talks about how valuable it is to be a part of the workforce. And if you're going to be a part of the workforce, how do you do that? Well, then she started looking into the future. And when we look into the future, OG, you've seen this with a mentor, Dan Sullivan, talking about longevity and how important it is to really look at your work with your eye on the prize of maybe we're going to live to be much older than 100 years old. It completely changes the way you think about retirement when you think you might live to be 140.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it does. It's an interesting thought exercise for sure.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  So she is a management consultant and professor of management practice and organizational behavior at the London Business School. She's also the founder of HSM Advisory, a global research and advisory practice bridging academia and business. She is somebody I was super excited, said yes, that she would talk to us because as people that have known us for a long time know, there's definitely value in finding your place in work. And Linda is probably the person who could talk to this the most. So I can't wait to have that discussion with her. We're going to have that in just a moment. But we have a couple of sponsors who help us keep making podcasts for you at the cost of zero.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  We're going to hear from them now, and then Linda Gratton joining us in the basement. Well, you may know that chaos is the name of the game here in Mom's basement. What with guests coming in and out, Cooper the cat getting in the way, Doug being, well, being Doug. The holidays make it even worse because it's all about food and big meals. And the problem is prepping for those takes forever. But what about those between meals, right? The meals between those huge, huge, huge bookends? Well, that's where Factor comes in. Factor is made with high quality ingredients that you recognize and trust with over 175 banned ingredients. You always know you're eating something that's good for you, even when you don't have time.

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• 6:21Speaker 03

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• 7:04Speaker 03

  Well, stackers, most of us inherited a fairly simple life plan. You go to school, you choose a career, you work for maybe several decades, and then you retire and you try not to pull your hamstring walking from the retirement party out to the parking lot, right? But that plan was built for a shorter life. Linda Gratton has spent years studying what happens when many of us live into our 90s or perhaps reach 100, and that sounds exciting. It also sounds complicated, expensive, and like significantly more time for us to make some really questionable decisions. Linda, welcome to Mom's Basement. How are you?

• 7:42Speaker 05

  I'm very happy to be in Mom's Basement. Thank you, Joe.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Well, before we talk about what to do with those years, let's talk about longevity. How real is the possibility that many of us are going to live far longer than our parents or our grandparents expected?

• 7:58Speaker 05

  Well, there's a very strong possibility, Joe, and I think that we all need to bear that in mind. We all need to imagine that we're going to live to 100. And then, of course, we may not, but for me, that's what I'm teaching my executives, my MBA students, imagine you live to 100 because the probability is that you might.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  I remember some of the research from people like Ken Dykewell talked about this. Gail Sheehy had some extensive research about living to be 130. Like this is not wishful thinking. This is a distinct possibility.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  Well, 10 years ago, Andrew Scott, who's an economist, so he wrote all the finance bit. I'm a psychologist, wrote The 100 Year Life, and it really put out the whole story about the probability that you'd live to 100, what it meant for your finances. More than a million people around the world read that book, and it became a pretty influential book. And what we basically showed is that if you think you're going to live to 100, then you have to think seriously, as your listeners do, about how to finance that. And, you know, either you save a lot, 20% from the moment that you start working, which I'm sure all of your listeners are doing, Joe, or you're prepared to retire at 60 on a very low income from those 40 years,

• 9:15Speaker 05

  or you work longer. And Andrew and I, as an economist, as a psychologist, said, actually, you need to think about working longer. We said into your 70s, I think it might even be pushing into our 80s now. So for me, the question is, well, how do you do that?

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it is interesting, and I love what you said in the beginning pages of this current work that you have. If that was the roadmap, this is the workbook, right? I think you said something like that.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Yes, that's exactly right. So what The 100 Year Life did is that people read the book, especially in Japan and China, and they said, okay, yeah, now I'm sort of getting it. But 10 years later, they're saying, okay, how do we actually do it? And that book, Living the 100 Year Life, is about how you actually do it.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Let's dive into that, though. We hear 100 year life, and part of us thinks that sounds wonderful, as I said earlier. Part of us thinks I can barely manage the current number of years. So what should excite us, Linda, and what should concern us?

• 10:13Speaker 05

  Well, we should be excited about the possibility of living a long life. You know, there's so much we can do. And my invitation to you is to think about your career or your working life, not so much as a ladder that, you know, you're using all your energy to get up, and if you don't get up, you fall off. But rather think about yourself as a weaver weaving your life. And I think when you do that and you think about weaving your life, there's so many things you could put into it. So rather than having that great big chunk of retirement at the age, you know, retiring at 60, dying at 100, let's say, that 40, 30, 40 years, why not reallocate that so that you take time out right the way through your life to do the things you love to do?

• 10:56Speaker 05

  Why not, instead of chunking education at the beginning of your life, reallocate it again right the way through your life so that you can relearn? So this creates a pattern that's a lot more complex than anything we've seen before. And of course, you have to think about funding that pattern. And I know that that's what your listeners are going to be thinking about right now.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Well, and I know that the economic side is not your strong suit. So I think laying this foundation of what we're looking for. And I love the fact that Linda, this now becomes more experimental, right? It becomes more playful, which I love as well. Cause I think if we solve for happiness, being more playful, I think makes us more happy. But when you looked at the traditional plan versus the weaving you're now talking about, what parts of the traditional plan just stop working altogether? You're like, you know what? We gotta get rid of this. There's things that you hear in the zeitgeist where like, you know what? We gotta throw that away.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  Well, I would throw so much of it away, actually. First, number one, throw away the idea that you're on your educated ones. You have to learn right the way through your life. Number two, throw away the idea that you just worked nonstop for 30 or 40 years. Nobody wants to do that. Throw that away. And number three, throw away the idea of a long block of retirement. All the evidence shows it's not good for you. You get bored, unless you're the sort of incredible person who has lots of things. Your friendships start breaking down. And actually embrace the idea that work can be great, that you actually, you can meet amazing people, you can do incredible things. And so we should be also be focusing on finding work that we love. And in a way, that's what the weave

• 12:32Speaker 05

  is about. It's saying you can weave all of these threads together. And from it, it means that you have more choices. And I would say, if there's one thing I would say to the people who are listening today, it would be that what you want to do is optimize for optionality. You want to create a life that you always have choices. And the threads, half of them are about how do you stay productive? Half of them are about how do you nurture yourself? Those are the threads that help you build optionality, choices.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Well, and that's fascinating because tying that into the part that we're good at here, I mean, that says, build that cash reserve account. A friend of ours calls it a screw you boss fund, you know, where I can tell my boss to take a hike whenever I want.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Well, I would actually give it another name. I would call it either a flexibility fund or a transitional fund. And what it says is, I'm going to take time off. I want to have a fund that gives me time to start my own business, that gives me time to retrain for something, that gives me time to have a six month sabbatical, that gives me time to start something entirely new, that gives me time to spend time with my aged parents. So mine isn't a screw you fund. Mine is a, I want to have a great life fund. And to do that, I need that. I need that fund to manage the transitions, actually, Joe.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Well, I like your optimistic framing much better than her, her kind of crusty'd like, take a hike boss. So the challenge is not merely living longer, it's building this life. As we talk about weaving, that's about changing, renewing and holding meeting across all these years. I thought that we were going to then dive into specifically the future and how do we do that? But your framing begins with three guiding questions, the first of which is, who am I? Why do you start with who am I?

• 14:24Speaker 05

  Well, you know, if you're weaving a long life, Joe, you have choices and the fund is going to help you to make those choices. But actually, to know what choices to make, you need to know who you are. And knowing who you are, I think has got three ways that we learn about who we are. The first is, we think about our heritage, you know, how we grew up, our grandparents, our parents, our early years, because they really have a huge impact on who we are. The second is our personality. And then the third is how the work we've already done, already shapes us. Let me just give you an example of that. You know, heritage, I come from, and you'll see some of the stories in my book, the book

• 15:09Speaker 05

  does have stories in it. You know, I come, as it turns out, from a long history of washing women. And most of them in the first and second world war, lost their husbands, they had big families, and they turned to washing. And I grew up in a family with no money at all. We weren't poor, but we just had no money. You maybe know those sorts of families, no cash. And that really has determined my life, you know, how I think about money, how I think about what I want. So that heritage really impacts us. And then character, you know, I tend to be more introverted than extroverted. So actually, although I can teach, I also love spending time on my own writing. And then work, I have two sons, one of them went into venture capital in the US, actually, and one of them is a radiologist.

• 15:52Speaker 05

  And actually, as I've seen them working, I've seen how that work has shaped them. So if we ask ourselves, who are we now? Then the question we want to ask is, well, where did I come from? What's my sort of personality? And also, what has shaped where I already am? Because all of us, we think that we shape work. We don't. Work also shapes us.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  It's so interesting when you introduce this concept, because then of course, I start looking at my own heritage and my own stories. And I think about these phrases that we tell ourselves, like, you know, work hard and don't complain can come from our heritage.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  Yes, that's me, Joe. But I think, I love that. My mother was always said, don't make a fuss. That was the English way of saying it. Don't make a fuss. And that's been my mantra ever since.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  You have a wonderful story, by the way, about a blue cake tin that was always waiting when you came home from school. I love this story. Could you tell that? And also what you eventually realized that that tin represented about your mother and the way she believed that life should be lived, that maybe passed on to you?

• 16:59Speaker 05

  Well, so many people who are listening to this will remember their mums and being a child. And I came from a typical 1950s family, you find them right across the US, where mom was a homemaker and dad worked. And mom was really keen on homemade stuff. We had no convenience food at all in the house. And every day when I came back from school, there was a blue cake tin waiting for me, which actually had two tiers. The bottom was biscuits and the top was a cake. I still have a huge cake fetish, by the way, which is understandable. And I guess, you know, the reason I brought that up, Joe, is that lots of us women are working, you know, the majority of women now work. And

• 17:41Speaker 05

  so that meant I didn't bring up my kids like that. They never had a blue cake tin when they came home. And I think that that's why part of the threads I talk about, two threads are about those relationships, you know, about intimacy and friendship. Because, you know, in terms of the thread of intimacy that goes through all our lives, work really impacts our relationship with our children and with our partners. And that relationship also impacts work. So as a working mother, I always worked. So I didn't bring up my kids in the way that my mom brought up her kids. And that was something I think all women have, I mean, lots of your listeners are thinking, yeah, I needed to come to terms

• 18:21Speaker 05

  with that. And I said in the book, I just consider myself a good enough mother. I was good enough. I did my best.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  But what's interesting is, when I read that, I also thought, you know, how many of these things that we buy, we make these buying decisions all the time. And your mom bought the blue cake tin, which was as much about her view of life as it was anything. And I start looking around my house, and it just made me wonder, are our houses, is we're looking for these clues about who we are and what we believe? Do we just merely need to look around us at the things that we've surrounded ourselves with?

• 18:57Speaker 05

  Well, novelists, I'm reading a book at the moment by a novelist who writes about how do you write? And she says, every time you go into somebody's house, every object is screaming at you and telling you, look at me, look at me, this is who this person is. So, you know, there are those three questions, but that one is a really important one. And interestingly, Joe, I've just finished a pilot where I asked a whole bunch of executives to spend 10 weeks with the book over, you know, a couple of hours every week, going through all those sort of exercises and tools I have in the book. And actually, all of them, including, one of them was a bank, an investment bank, the executives spent three weeks asking that question, who am I? And when I asked them at the end, what did you

• 19:41Speaker 05

  find most useful? They said, you know, when we started, we asked, why are we starting here? And now we really appreciate it because we realize that the new form of life we're all living has got a lot of choices in. And if you want to make good choices, you need to know who you are and why you're making those choices.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  We have these things that we're choosing between and areas that we're deepening as we're weaving our life. So we have these strands, some of which are ones that we haven't explored enough, like maybe who we are for those executives. There may be other ones that we've explored a lot. Do we start off in our exploration by making these strands that are strong, stronger? Do we start off with our strengths? Or do we look at the areas where they're frayed and maybe need to be tightened and put back together?

• 20:29Speaker 05

  Well, you know, gosh, these are great questions, Joe. So we are moving on actually to the second. I invite my readers to ask three questions. So the first question is, who am I? The second question is, where am I now? And that's where the metaphor of the weave comes in. Cause you say, I'm a weaver, I'm weaving my life. Where am I now? And I'm suggesting that there are eight threads that hold your life together. Four of them help you to be productive and four of them help you to nurture yourself. And the reason I've got both, Joe, is that, you know, if you just really develop your productivity threads and don't do anything with your nurture threads, then you burn out. And you see that a lot. Some of your listeners are feeling that. But similarly, if you spend all your

• 21:13Speaker 05

  time, you know, strengthening your nurture threads and don't strengthen your productivity threads, you become very fragile. At the age of 50, you can't get a job because there's nothing you do that anybody wants to buy right now. And of course, all of us are in competition with AI. So that's a heavy sell.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Oh, because you thought, we talked about this earlier, all of your training was at 20 years old, that you haven't kept up.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, you have to keep up. So, you know, you have to do your productivity, you know, build your skills, think about how you use technology, think about how you cooperate with each other, think about how you build wisdom and knowledge. So those are those productivity threads. So the answer to the question, Joe, which is, where do you start? What I suggest to people is that they first of all, look at all eight of them and just get a sense of which is fragile and which is strong. And in fact, I have a free diagnostic that you can go to. It's on my website, www.livingthe100yearlife.com, which is actually wonderful, Joe. And I recommend all your readers do it. It's free. It's, it's wonderful. We've had thousands of people doing it already. And at the end of it, I'd suggest, take a

• 22:17Speaker 05

  cup of coffee and look at that diagnostic and ask yourself probably three questions. Question number one, what is the strongest of my threads? And usually people aren't surprised by the one. The second is, what's the weakest? And the third is, what intrigues me the most?

• 22:39Speaker 03

  I should have brought mine with me because I took it a few days ago.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, you should have done.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  And I don't have it in front of me, but I found it so fascinating that in a couple areas, to your point, they were foundational and in many, they were renewing, which is interesting because I was renewing in areas where I'm currently excited.

• 22:57Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, exactly.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  And then the place where I was fragile was my blind spot, was truly my blind spot.

• 23:03Speaker 05

  Do you remember what that was, Joe?

• 23:04Speaker 03

  I don't. And that's what's

• 23:06Speaker 05

  I'll tell you what, it was probably

• 23:07Speaker 03

  I'm still blind to it, Linda, I'm still blind.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  If we're doing a probability check, I would say it's probably calm because

• 23:14Speaker 03

  It is. It 100% was. Yes, because I go from task to task to task. And I have trouble finding the calm spaces.

• 23:22Speaker 05

  I can see that just from what you do. So that's one. And actually, we're now building enough data, Joe, to realize that. So that's why when I said calm, I've seen the data coming in. So I know that, that that's currently the most common weakest thread. And why that's so worrisome and problematic is, do you remember I said earlier that in this new life that we're weaving, we have to make a lot of choices? Well, making a good choice requires you to stand back and think and review. And unless you have calm in your life, you just don't have the time. And so giving yourself the gift of time to reflect, to think, to imagine

• 24:04Speaker 05

  what you want to be. I don't mean to say, what am I going to be in 10 years' time? Nobody knows the answer to that. And you'd be foolish if you thought you did. But nevertheless, just to give yourself time to imagine, yeah, who you could be, who you are now. So that for me is really important. By the way, I don't think that people need to make massive changes. I, in the book, and I feel it even more powerfully now, just talk about small actions and experiments, just the thing you'll do tomorrow. So like with you, Joe, I'd say to you, why don't you just take half an hour off tomorrow? Why don't you just walk to work tomorrow? Well, why don't you, you know, do whatever you was promising yourself to do? Just give yourself half an hour. That's all.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  There's so many side threads there too, about social media in our lives. And also, you know, as you're speaking, Linda, I'm also thinking that, just thinking about all of these threads, there could be some fairly standard financial decisions that you make that aren't right for you when you are examining your weave versus what other people are weaving in their life.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I agree. And that's why when I was preparing to talk to you, Joe, and I, as you said at the beginning, I'm not a finance expert. I do actually run a small company. So I have some slight feelings about cash flow and so on. I did like the idea of this flexibility fund, which is to say, you know, put money aside for the transitions that you want to make so that you can start your own business and you can take a short sabbatical. And really think about that at the age of 35, 45, 55, 65, you know, just every 10 years, ask yourself, do I need to make a transition? And how am I going to pay for that? So I think the financing is sort of fascinating. And when the first book was published, quite a lot of insurance companies got in touch with me and said, is

• 25:52Speaker 05

  there a different model here? I guess that probably is. I guess that someone is going to be repackaging our insurance and, and savings so that it fits with this flexibility fund.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  Should have trademarked it right now, Joe.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  You speak a lot on the productivity side. Let's go there. Mastery, cooperation, knowing and amplifying are four terms we need to get comfortable with. But let's talk specifically about knowing. If I think now my career may span 50 years and may have all these different threads, how do we keep expanding what we know without feeling like I'm permanently back in school?

• 26:32Speaker 05

  Oh, no, knowing is about curiosity, Joe. Yes. It's not about being at school at all. It's about being open to the world. So for me, knowing has got two sides to it. The first is about knowing yourself, and that's sort of what we spoke of earlier. And the second is about knowing the world around you. Everyone's talked so much about AI and people have said to me, well, what's special about being a human? And what would you say to your kids? And I would say, really push curiosity. And for me, the thread of knowing is about curiosity. And that's why the thread of adventure is so potentially interesting, because you learn, you're curious through adventure. So for me, knowing really is one of the things that keeps us human.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  You like starting side businesses for the same reason.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  I always have a side business going, Joe.

• 27:23Speaker 05

  Always.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  But I think it makes it really interesting because, you know, early in my career, I thought side businesses were a distraction, that if you spent that same time just getting better at that core task. But the older I get, the more I realize that core task changes and a side business can help you adventure off and learn a bunch of new skills without the threat that you have with your corporate suit.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I absolutely agree. And for those of you who are thinking, I don't want to do a side business, I want to stay in my same company. That's also fine. Because actually, in a way, companies have side businesses, you know, you could work in another part of the business or in a different function, or take on a project that, you know, someone's asked you to do. So in fact, actually, if you look at companies, we think of them as monoliths, but they've also got really exciting things happening. And sometimes just jumping into those is a way of really learning and a way of pivoting, because the challenge of AI is so much of our jobs will go. And we just need to learn how to pivot. I mean, my pivot is about living a hundred year life, but the pivot is also living the hundred

• 28:28Speaker 05

  year life at a time of astonishing technological developments.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Which brings us to, if you're going into new areas, this idea of cooperation, right? We often talk about careers as though success comes from our own individual talents or hustles, as people call it. What do we miss when we overlook our ability to work deeply with other people?

• 28:50Speaker 05

  Well, we miss the opportunity to really speed up. We miss the opportunity of diversity. Let me give you an example. You know, The Hundred Year Life was my most successful book by a long way. I mean, a million copies is, is an astonishing feat, frankly. And it was good because I wrote it with an economist. It was a cooperative venture. I couldn't have written that on my own. And neither could he. But the combination of the diversity of my mindset, I'm trained as a psychologist. So his mindset, he's trained as an economist. When we brought our minds together, we suddenly went, oh, my God, you know, when we think about assets as tangible and intangible assets and blah, blah, blah. And we riffed for a year before we even began to write that book. And looking back at my own life

• 29:35Speaker 05

  and listeners, I suggest you do the same. Just think of the times when you've worked with somebody, when you've said, wow, that really was exciting. I learned something new. I heard something I hadn't thought before. That's not to say that everything we have to do, we have to do with others. You know, I wrote this book on my own. I was really happy to write it on my own, actually. So it's not to say that we need to cooperate all the time. But there will be times, particularly if we want to pivot, when being with people who are different than us, different ages, different nationalities, is just an astonishing gift to us.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  It is so exciting. One of my favorite places on earth is Austin, Texas.

• 30:14Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  But it's because, Linda, about what you're talking about, all the fusion that exists in that town, these diverse points of view, the uniquely Texas with, in some areas, Asian cooking, or, you know, combining Mexican flavors with things. It's fantastic. And this fusion, I feel like what you're saying is we think about ourselves as a chef, right? One of these chefs playing with different foods.

• 30:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a one, I've got my stories sort of running through the book. Please don't think it's a memoir. It's not. But there are 20 or 15 to 20 little stories, 500 words. One of them is the story of cooperation is the story of a chef. Because I'm in my house in Spain, and I happened to be finishing a book, which was about cooperation called hotspots, and happened to bump into somebody who is a chef who specializes in chocolate.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Oh, that would suck. That'd be a horrible career. Chocolate? I couldn't do it.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, we actually made a box of chocolates that tasted of cooperation. So I had this idea that cooperation has these different elements and each chocolate tasted. I mean, look, honestly, did anybody make any money out of this project? No, they certainly did not. But honestly, it was so much fun, because when people read the book, they got the box of chocolates. And as I described, each element of cooperation, like, you know, you've got to have trust and you've got to have diversity. And they ate the chocolate that tasted of that.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Oh, that's cool.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it's just so much fun. And I do think, you know, and this is why finance can sort of get it wrong, really. Life is about adventure and fun. Of course, you need the money side of it. Of course, that's crucial. But that's not going to get you. Just as being incredibly healthy isn't going to make a great life, you just end up being a really healthy person. Well, so what? What are you going to do with your time?

• 31:59Speaker 03

  It is interesting, because the more you speak, the more we talk about using money as fuel. There's going to be times when I want to take a course, or I want to go visit a region, or, or make chocolates with the chef, or whatever that is. And I need to have enough money available at the right time to be able to do those things. I want to talk on one more thing about productivity, which is the idea of amplifying, because you mentioned AI, right? Using technology and AI and being able to work around it, like, how do we use these tools to increase our reach, the things that we're able to do, without allowing them to flatten the parts of us that are uniquely human?

• 32:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's something we're all wrestling with. And those of us who are parents see it in our own children as well. And I know we're all really anxious about that. Let me give you my perspective on that. Right now, large language models, AI, if you're skilled, will increase your productivity by six times, not sixty percent, six times. So the first question I would say to everyone is, if you can do that, what are you doing with that extra time you've created? Now, most people are saying, oh, I'm just going to do more. No, no, no. Use that extra time to allocate some of those resources to your other threads. You know, to spending time with a friend, to spending more time with your partner, to learning something new.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  So that's the first thing. Don't let it suck in all your time, because you'll never, ever weave the life that you want to. The second thing is that what AI invites us to do is to become more human. Because AI is not human. It can pretend to be human, but it isn't a human. So then you have to say, well, what is being human? And of course, there is the analytical part of being good at judging, good at making choices, good at making decisions. But I think there's another part as well, Joe, which is about adventure and stories. You know, the stories that you and I have just talked about, like the blue cake. AI couldn't have written that. Now, it could, of course, if it's, you know, ingested my books, which it had, it'll be able to spit it out again.

• 34:05Speaker 05

  But it's not going to be able to tell a story that has a sense for me and a sense for you. So, you know, how we gather stories in our life, how we have adventures, how we become more ourselves. As one of the people I spoke to in the book said to me, you know, Linda, what AI does is it makes everything average. So that if you want to be different from our AI, you need to be more yourself, even if that means being a bit weird or a bit odd. That's what humans are.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  It's fascinating. I'm finding that so much in my own use of AI that I become more comfortable with it when I boss it around. When it bosses me around, I come up with average ideas. But when I'm like, no, no, no, no, I want to think more about this area. AI can't do that. It takes my input to make that happen.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  I agree. You know, people say AI hallucinates. Well, that makes it sound as if it's this incredible thing. It's not. It just makes mistakes. These are just mistakes. These are not hallucinations. And so when I use it, when my students use it, I just use it as if it's, you know, an undergraduate working with me, or maybe a PhD student. It gets quite a lot wrong, but it's fast and

• 35:14Speaker 03

  It's excited all the time.

• 35:15Speaker 05

  Telling me how marvelous I am and who doesn't need that in their life, Joe.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  That was the best thing you've said so far, Linda.

• 35:22Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. That's the best. That's the best thing you've ever written. Hang on, you said that to me just five minutes ago.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  It just gets better every four seconds.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  I had a question all the way through this project, which was this. It's Monday morning and our stacker just is rolling out of bed and goes, you know what? I can't do this for another 20 years. And as you mentioned earlier, we all recognize that feeling, right? The harder thing, I think, is distinguishing between I need a job redesign or I need a career reinvention, maybe a full reinvention of career, or that chapter, Linda, is simply finished and it's time to embark on a whole new adventure. How do I begin to parse those three options?

• 36:11Speaker 05

  Well, I think it's a mistake just to sort of bet everything on a single option. What I think we can do as we roll out of bed is to ask ourselves, and again, I'm going to come back to the thread analogy, because I think it's such an important analogy here, is to ask ourselves, where am I standing right now? And if, for example, you're realizing that you're doing the same job over and over again, and you're really bored with it, then my guess is your thread of mastery is pretty low, is pretty frail. So you have to ask yourself, what could I do right now to change that? And in the book, and in fact, in all my teaching as well, I really focus on small actions that you can take. I don't think any of us do these massive, oh, tomorrow I'm going to wake up and be a Buddhist monk.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  I think what happens is you take an action. So you might say, okay, well, maybe I'm interested in changing jobs. Well, why don't I start talking to somebody who's got the sort of job that I might like? So perhaps I'll have coffee tomorrow with somebody and I'll just talk to them about what they're doing, not to get a job, but just to hear what they're saying. Or maybe you're saying, you know, I really need to increase my skills. So why don't I talk to my boss and say, look, are there jobs around or projects that I could do to increase my skills? So I guess what I'm saying, Joe, is that when you think about it, you know, as a huge thing, it's completely terrifying. And even listening to you, I felt anxious and I bet lots of your listeners didn't. Oh, my God, I don't know. What am I going to do?

• 37:36Speaker 05

  What I would say is break it down. Ask yourself, what am I going to focus on now? But then the other thing I would say is also ask yourself how you're spending your time. There's a lot of difference between people in this world. And I realize that some people are born with, you know, just a lot more opportunities than others. But there's one thing we've all got. We've all got 24 hours a day. And how we allocate that time is something that we can think about. And I would say the threads really reflect on how you're allocating your time. And you can make a really big difference. So if, for example, you look at the last few days and you've allocated three hours a day scrolling

• 38:17Speaker 05

  through social media, one of the questions you might want to ask yourself is, which thread did I strengthen by doing that? And if the answer is no threads, then you have to ask yourself, why am I doing that now? I know that's an easy thing. So the thread of friendship, for example, we know from research that it only takes six minutes. It's only a six or eight minute conversation with a friend to start strengthening that. You know, it's not that you have to go on holiday with them or spend every evening with them. Speaking to them on the telephone or however you're doing it, six minutes makes a real difference. And I think that's really how we have to think about it, just sort of things we do every day, not these massive choices

• 39:00Speaker 05

  that have huge consequences that make us feel anxious just thinking about them.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  I don't spend enough time on strengthening those friendships. And the fact that it takes six minutes is amazing. And yet I think about when people reach out to me to strengthen those relationships. I think about just how amazing and gratifying and fulfilling it feels when I had a guy text me out of the blue, maybe 20 minutes before you and I started talking today, that I hadn't heard from in weeks. And he was just inquiring, how have I been? Like, what's been going on? And it just, even to feel him reach out, Linda, was so important. I think it's like that to me. How important is it for me to do that for other people as well? Because I get a lot out of it at the same time.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  Part of the reason I was so happy to have friendship as one of the threads in the book is that, you know, on these long, long studies of people right the way through their lives, if you ask the question, what is it that's created fulfilling lives for them? Is it the amount of money they make? You can ask 20 questions. And what we know is that being poor is horrible, by the way. So I'm not in any way suggesting that this is a wonderful state. It's not. But for most of us who have sort of an average income, the thing that really makes a difference is friendship. And, you know, friendship is something that accumulates, just like any other investment. I am very fortunate because my weakest thread is friendship.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  I've always really focused on mastery and getting on and teaching and writing and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. However, when I was 14 years old, I met somebody called Shirley for whom her strongest thread is friendship. So she kept friends with me. And so we now celebrate recently 60 years of friendship. And if you go on to my podcast, and I've only got eight episodes, so each episode is one of the threads, you'll hear me and Shirley talking about that.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  That's awesome. Is the podcast also the 100 year life?

• 41:04Speaker 05

  Yes, it's called Life Threads. So I have a podcast, I have a diagnostic, I have the book, and I have a marvelous workbook, Joe, which I illustrated myself with my own hands.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Has anyone ever talked to you about calm?

• 41:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, it's so much fun. I just have to amuse myself, but I just so wanted this idea to get across that I've tried every which way to see what landed and we'll see. I've got a great podcast, only eight episodes. I know you do eight episodes a week, so it took me months to do it. I'm in awe of you, Joe.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  We'll link to the podcast also in our show notes, as we will the diagnostic that I found so fascinating. But I want to play a game before we say goodbye, because I think games kind of illustrate all of the wonderful framework that you've presented us with today. So I want to play a game called Stay, Switch, Scale Back, or Sail Away. So your choices are Stay, Switch, Scale Back, or Sail Away. And I'll describe a stacker situation. And I'd love for you, Lynda, to tell me which of these doors we should explore first. Not a final prescription, of course, but just the first door we maybe want to explore. So Scenario one, you love your craft, but you hate the company.

• 42:22Speaker 05

  I would say, switch.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Scenario two, you're financially independent, you love contributing, but you don't want deadlines controlling your life anymore.

• 42:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe scale back or sail, sail or scale.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting because you've got flexibility there, don't you?

• 42:41Speaker 05

  You've got a long life, Joe. There's lots you can do. You can, none of these are mistakes. You can sail one day and switch the next.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Which is cool, knowing that it's not irrevocable. You're not making irrevocable decisions.

• 42:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the really great thing about a long life. I've noticed that because I've carried on working for many years. You can actually go back and have another go.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Scenario three, you're exhausted, but you're caring for children and aging parents at the same time?

• 43:07Speaker 05

  I would say stay.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  And it's hard to stay there, isn't it?

• 43:11Speaker 05

  It is hard to stay, but I think stay isn't a bad thing at the moment, particularly with the economy as it sits. And what I think you can do with stay, I noticed with burnout, people who are burning out, they've either got to be promoted or they've got to jump. And I think actually staying can be a really good thing and really focusing on the other threads of your life, but also realizing that probably by staying, there's opportunities for you to learn new things. There's opportunities perhaps for you to scale back a little bit. But I think staying, I wouldn't recommend somebody who's under that much pressure to also move.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  It is interesting because as life presents these new things where we learn new things, we learn so many new things, even though we're showing up the same every day.

• 43:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Scenario four, you're financially ready to retire, but work supplies nearly all of your identity, your structure, your relationships.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  Switch.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Hmm. What do you mean by that?

• 44:07Speaker 05

  No sailing away. I would never recommend people retire early. I know that there's a whole thing around it. I just wouldn't recommend it. I would say switch to something that perhaps doesn't take up all your time, because that's maybe why you're thinking of retirement, but actually still creates your sense of identity.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Is there ever a time when a full retirement is exactly the right next chapter in a hundred year life? Is there a time?

• 44:35Speaker 05

  Probably. I mean, I think the interesting thing about life as it was, the three-stage life, full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement, is you never had to ask yourself, when should I retire? Because the institution did it for you. The government, you know, social norms and so on. But now they're gone. The fact is that you have got to ask that question. And I think each one of us will answer that question in a different way, but it's a very important question to ask.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  It's also interesting because leaving what you're doing now and knowing where you're going next, I think are two totally different things.

• 45:08Speaker 05

  They are. And that's why I said switch, because what I love about switch is that you're doing something that's sort of comparable, but in a different environment, you know, like you could be switching to a volunteer role, or you could be switching into mentoring younger people, or you could be, I love the idea of switch. I think it's a really important transitional state that we should be exploring.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Imagine that we meet our 90-year-old selves.

• 45:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Tonight.

• 45:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  What are they most likely to thank us for beginning now, after they heard you and I talking today?

• 45:47Speaker 05

  Well, I think they would thank you for building self-awareness about where you are now and making sure that at the age of 90, none of your threads were so fragile that they broke. So for example, on nurture, my 90-year-old self would say, thank you so much for having Shirley as a friend for 80 years. Or it might say, thank you so much for learning skills, because I'm still teaching my grandchildren or great grandchildren. So I think, thinking about your future self, and that's the third question that I ask in the book is, what actions could you take now? And what promises might you make to

• 46:28Speaker 05

  your future self? I think that's a really important question. I mean, for me, right now, it's about staying healthy. It really is because my threads are pretty strong. I'm doing all sorts of exciting things, the book, the podcast, and so on and so forth. But for me, it's Pilates, walking, all of that stuff.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  The book is Living the 100 Year Life, How to Build a Career That Lasts and a Life You Love. And Lynda, it's available everywhere.

• 46:55Speaker 05

  It is available everywhere. Audio books, there's a workbook, there's a diagnostic, there's a website, there's a podcast. Oh my goodness me, you cannot get away from it.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  If only you brought some fun to this, I would have appreciated it more.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 47:11Speaker 05

  That's the marvel, isn't it, of having done a lot already?

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for mentoring us today, for helping our stackers understand better who we are, see how our lives, I think more clearly after this, how they're woven, and how to make better choices for the years ahead. So thanks for joining us at Mom's Basement.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  Thank you. I'm loving being in Mom's Basement.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  You've never said that during your career before, have you?

• 47:39Speaker 06

  Hey, hey, this is Tiffany Grant from the Money Talk with Tiff podcast. And when I'm not sprinkling business and money gems everywhere, I'm stacking Benjamins.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Hey there, stackers. I'm a man who believes deeply in the golden rule, especially the part where if I buy you lunch, eventually you gotta buy me my lunch. So I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug. Today is the birthday of a guy whose name used to be plastered across malls all over America, JCPenney. Contrary to popular media, Mr. Penny didn't start out thinking, someday I'd like to anchor a shopping mall between an Orange Julius and a Spencer Gifts. In 1902, he became part owner of a little dry goods store in Cammerer, Wyoming, a coal mining town of only about 1,000 people. The store wasn't even called JCPenney. It was called The Golden Rule, because Penny believed you could build a

• 48:33Speaker 02

  successful business by treating customers the way you'd want to be treated yourself, which seems quaint today, doesn't it? But now, the golden rule is more like, would you like to join our rewards program? Here's the part I love. Penny's store was cash only, no store credit. People actually warned him that wouldn't work because miners got paid monthly and the competing company stores extended credit. Penny said, nope, good merchandise, fair prices, good service, cash only. And it worked. Eventually, those golden rule stores became the JCPenney Company, and his name became one of the most recognizable names in American retail. Which brings us to today's trivia question. We all know the

• 49:18Speaker 02

  name JCPenney, the J stood for James, but what did the C stand for? Here's a hint, it's OG's favorite C word. I'll be back with the answer right after I ask Joe's mom if the golden rule means she's obligated to treat me exactly the way I treat myself at the Sizzler.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Well, you may know that chaos is the name of the game here in Mom's Basement, what with guests coming in and out, Cooper the cat getting in the way, Doug being, well, being Doug. The holidays make it even worse because it's all about food and big meals. And the problem is prepping for those takes forever. But what about those between meals, right? The meals between those huge, huge, huge bookends. Well, that's where Factor comes in. Factor is made with high-quality ingredients that you recognize and trust with over 175 banned ingredients. You always know you're eating something that's good for you, even when you don't have time. It's ready in two minutes, whether it's lunch

• 50:21Speaker 03

  between meetings or dinner after holiday shopping. Factor requires zero prep cleanup or effort from you or mom, so you can focus on everything else in your day. Factor even has heart smart options like the Green Goddess Baramundi with tomato, rice, peas, kale, and green beans, or the enchilada-style chicken and sweet potatoes. Those are so good. They're crafted with lean proteins, fiber-packed fruit and veggies, and healthy fats. Try those out. Your heart and your taste buds will thank you. For Cheryl and I, Factor has been a great way for us to stay busy and focus on family life and beating mom

• 51:05Speaker 03

  at card games. I use Factor and you should too. So let's eat real, stackers. Head to factormeals.com/sb50off. Use code SB50OFF. And you know what? You're going to get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year while supplies last until December 31st, 2026. That is code SB50OFF at factormeals.com, SB50OFF at factormeals.com. See website for more details. There is a financial conversation that's coming to millions of American families and there's a pretty good chance, nobody wants to be the person who starts it.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Inheritance. And here's why that matters. An estimated $124 trillion to heirs and charity is expected to be transferred by Americans over the next 20 years. It's an extraordinary amount of money, but Kiplinger's research found that 51% of adults and their parents, get this, never talk about money. And there's a pretty big disconnect. 47% of parents expect to leave a meaningful inheritance, while only 24% of adult children expect to actually receive one. Nearly 30% of parents don't even have a will in place. Maybe it's time we talked. Kiplinger calls it the trillion dollar talk, a conversation about inheritance,

• 52:27Speaker 03

  estate planning, wills, and the questions families should be asking before those decisions become urgent. Because knowing what your family wants and having a plan for it can be one of the most important financial conversations you will ever have. Ready to start yours? Visit kiplinger.com to learn more about the trillion dollar talk and what this historic wealth transfer could mean for your family.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Hey there, stackers. I'm clearance rack connoisseur and undefeated mall arcade champion, Joe's mom's neighbor Doug. Before the break, I asked you about birthday boy JCPenney. Here's one more fun twist in the JCPenney story. Long before he founded Walmart, Sam Walton actually worked at a JCPenney store in Des Moines, Iowa. Apparently, the history of American retails like just one giant LinkedIn network or something. But back to our question, JCPenney's first name was James. I told you that part. So we know what the J stands for. What did the C stand for? Or as I said earlier, OG's favorite C word?

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Well, it was James Cash Penny. The fitting, isn't it? And now let's share the next segment coming to you for the value price of free. Wait, should I say today only? Free today? Okay, all right. Here's Joe and OG.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Big thanks to Linda Gratton for joining us. And OG, what a whole different take on this idea of retirement, right? Take a few retirements during your, during your working years, which could be now extended into your entire life. I mean, look at Linda, well into her 70s and working and seems like this is something, well, clearly, you heard her, it's something she could do forever. How does that change a job of during a financial plan, though? If I'm not planning for 30 years in the future, I'm planning for a five-year, you know, retirement where I maybe go back to school, get my masters in the thing that

• 54:35Speaker 03

  I've been working on, you know, maybe nuance my career like she's talked about. Okay, maybe I was a physical therapist before, but now I want to go, you know, become a full-on doctor or whatever it might be. I'm going to, I'm going to slightly change careers. How does that change the game from a financial planning perspective?

• 54:54Speaker 04

  Well, you know, if you're going to retire partially, or take the sabbatical, that requires a pretty decent amount of planning ahead of time, you know, because you start layering in these other things that are probably going on. So, so you get out of school at 23 or 24 years old, 22 years old, whatever, and you're going to work for 15 years, that gets you to be 40, right? Roughly. So what else is going on with your, when you're 40? Maybe you've got some young kids at home, you've got, you know, daycare expenses, you're starting to save for college, and now you're going to take off four years to go to med school, or you're going to take off seven years of earnings, basically, to, you know, get through all of that before you kind of work on the back half. So it definitely requires

• 55:38Speaker 04

  a lot more planning and forethought than showing up at 41 and going, you know, I kind of don't like this.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. There is an interesting aspect, though, for those later sabbaticals. If you're 65 and you just decide to take five years off while you reinvent for your 70s to go into your new, whatever new consulting field, let's say you're going to do, or like Linda, you're a professor, whatever it might be. I mean, I'm thinking about the Arthur Brooks stuff, right? About strength to strength about these careers where we expect to see 70-year-olds. The college professor is a great example of that.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  I just saw a video of a guy, very old man, sitting there kind of doing an introduction of himself, right? Hi, my name is Billy So, and who's it? I'm starting my 70th year of ranching. And basically, he was 95 years old. He start, he's like, I started working in 1948 at this ranch. And then I started, and then I worked for this guy for 27 years. And then I worked for this guy for 25 years. Then I thought I'd come here and work and just do work a couple of years. And I've been here for 32. You know, it's like all these, like, he's stacking all of these experiences on top of one another. And dude's 95 years old and getting on a horse every day.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Is that kick ass?

• 56:56Speaker 04

  Tell me that you're really tired from your job at 47 and can't wait to retire. Like this dude's living out of his hat and sleeping in the dirt for three times as long as you've been alive and loving it. Like, he's not doing it because he has anything but the love of the game.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  And if we see, what's the philosophy? I can never pronounce the philosopher's name from the University of Chicago, so I'll apologize. But, you know, flow, getting into the flow state. And you see these people who are really just in love with their, with their job. And I think it's, it is much less about checking out than finding this flow state, like this happiness. How do we get to happiness? Yeah. Huge thanks to Linda for kind of helping us blow up retirement a little bit. Let's, let's do a headline.

• 57:42Speaker 07

  Hello, darlings. And now it's time for your favorite part of the show, our stacking Benjamins headlines.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Well, this headline comes to us from every stinking place on earth. You've heard all of the Dolly Parton tributes. OG, what a legacy Dolly left behind. I've never thought of myself as a Dolly fan quote, but also by the same token, I don't know of any other singer that whenever she shows up on your TV screen, just makes you immediately smile or go, you know what? She's cool. Like, this is, this is somebody who definitely left a legacy with a lot of people. How did you feel about Dolly?

• 58:21Speaker 04

  You know, I, I don't know that I had a lot of experience with Dolly Parton. But of course, seeing some of the highlights over the last couple of weeks, you know, there's a couple of things that I went, that's pretty classy. I saw an interview that she gave where she was talking about, or the interviewer was, yeah, something political, you know, what do you think about this politician? Or I don't know if it was recent or, you know, not recent. But anyways, she was like, I don't have an answer to that. And he's like, well, you must have an opinion about, you know, this person. And she's like, I do have an opinion, but it's my opinion. And I'm an entertainer and I want people to like me. And, you know, look, there's people out there that I like. There's people out there

• 59:02Speaker 04

  that like me. There's people that I don't care for. But these are, that's my personal opinion. Like, why should you care what I, you know? And so I'm not going to talk about that. I want to talk about my music. I want to talk about Dollywood. I want to talk about this other cool stuff that we did, this charity thing that we're doing. I talk about all those things. But I want to be an entertainer and I want everybody to love me.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Her literacy project with all the books?

• 59:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I just thought that was really cool. And then the other thing that I heard was, because you know what? At the end of the day, I don't really care what Paul Rudd thinks about, you know, like some politician thing. Who gives a crap? He's an entertainer. Dolly Parton's an entertainer.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  So good.

• 59:43Speaker 04

  The other thing that I thought was really cool that I read about was she apparently created, produced and recorded a song that nobody's ever heard. And they locked it away in a vault until her, until like 2045. And in 2045, they're going to release it.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Wow. She did so many different things. Let's talk about this. Over the years, she diversified the different things she did. We hear about multiple streams of income. By the way, my favorite Dolly Parton money quote I saw when I was at Dollywood last year, "It takes a lot of money to look this trashy." It's a fantastic Dolly quote.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  It's the same thing as like, when you say, it ain't, it ain't cheap being rich.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Let's focus on her making money specifically, because while you've heard the tributes, I haven't heard anybody go down the personal finance piece of Dolly Parton. And I think there's a big lesson here. Lots of people make this mistake. They are working in one field and all of a sudden they get this great idea. And the great idea is in this completely unrelated field. It has nothing to do with what they do. And yet, Dolly took what I think of as the opposite approach. She identified these things that are unmistakably pieces of who

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  she is, her songwriting, her Appalachian roots, her humor, her appearance, her storytelling, her relationship with her audience. And she found these new ways to work on what she already was really good at. Songs became publishing income, her personality, open film and television opportunities. A lot of people don't know that she wrote Nine to Five, the old movie Nine to Five. Her identity, of course, became part of Dollywood. It's right in her backyard where she grew up. Her concern about literacy and the fact that her dad struggled with being able to read became her imagination library. Like,

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  these weren't random. They were all part of one thing. And I think this is really important. Let me tell you a little story about Dolly and the song, I Will Always Love You, since we brought up at the start of today's show. You didn't know that Dolly wrote that song?

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  So initially, Elvis Presley wanted to record that song and came to her to record it. And of course, if you're Dolly Parton, who at the time is a younger rising star and Elvis is on the top of the world, right? She's like, heck yeah, that's fantastic. Well, what's interesting about this story was that the day before, the day before they're going to, Elvis is going to record the song, Colonel Tom Parker, who, I don't know, are you familiar with Tom Parker? You think people are familiar with Tom Parker?

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  I'm like a half a generation off of this buddy, but I'm just, I'm listening.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  No, that's fine, because I think this might be like for a lot of people that don't know Elvis's history. So Tom Parker pretty much had his thumb on Elvis and owned a lot of Elvis's stuff and really made a ton of money off of Elvis. And a lot of people point to the Colonel as the reason Elvis got so exhausted, which led to all of his drug abuse, which obviously led to his early, early demise. So the night before he's going to record, I'll Always Love You, the Colonel goes to Dolly and goes, hey, Elvis doesn't sing a song without us owning at least half of it. So I just need you to sign this piece

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  of paper that, that we'll own half and you'll own half. And Dolly, who at that time is nowhere near as big a star as she is today, refuses the deal. Could you imagine turning Elvis Presley down? Go ahead. Pass. Hard pass.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  A little bet on herself, it sounds like.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  Bet on yourself. There's a new movie coming out. Did you see the new movie coming out about the making of the movie Rocky?

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  No. A movie about the movie? No.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  It's a movie about the same thing. It's about Sylvester Stallone betting on himself. There's this great scene in the preview where these producers are like, okay, we got these people we think would be great for the lead, so and so and so and so. And they're sitting across from Sylvester Stallone and Stallone goes, yeah, no, I wrote this movie for me to star in. The producers start laughing. They're like, yeah, not a chance, buddy. Nice try. Not a chance. You wrote a great movie. Just give it up. And he's like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Not going to do that. So she bets on herself. This happened in 1974. So Dolly's not a small deal. Dolly actually has a show on television. She's recorded several

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  top hits. So Dolly is not a nobody. So betting on herself at this point is a good idea, but still, turning down Elvis. Fast forward, it's in the 1990s, OG, that she finally hands the song to Whitney Houston to sing. She retains ownership of the song.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  Like 20 years she held it.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  She held it for 20 years. You know how much money she'd made in royalties?

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  $10 million.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  It's pretty good.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  $10 million. I'm betting on, on herself. Number one. So she had the songwriting. She said, this is an asset of mine. When she sold a song, she sold the ability to sing the song, but she kept the rights to the song. The rights to the song were hers. She owned that. She had somebody else that would get paid to sing it. She then took the money that she made off of Whitney Houston, not all of it, but she went to an area that was underdeveloped in Nashville, and she bought this office complex with a big portion of that $10 million. So she turns her ability to write songs into an asset that produces

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  another asset in real estate in her backyard of Nashville, not, not far from where she lives. Let's talk about one more thing. Dollywood. Dollywood was a struggling park. They called it Silver Dollar City, Tennessee. The year before she was involved, 1985, 743,000 people attended Silver Dollar City. Park was kind of struggling, OG. So then they asked Dolly if she wants to get involved, if she, they want to form a partnership. They think that bringing her name to it might bring in some more visitors. They thought it might bring in a few. Turns out it brought in more than a few. Dude, in the very first year, in the

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  very first year, Dolly put her name on the park. 743,000 people the year before, her first season, 1.3 million people, a 75% increase in attendance.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  With Dolly attached to it. And it's in her backyard. It's something that she knows. I don't want to belabor this, but I feel like this is the personal finance lesson when it comes to making money, stackers. A lot of people want to go into day trading when you don't know anything about it. You want your portfolio to jump through all these hoops, looking at companies that you know nothing about with individual stocks. You hear about your buddy that has a restaurant and you're going to be an angel investor in a restaurant when, you know, you've only ever eaten.

• 1:07:26Speaker 04

  Neither of you know anything about running restaurants?

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Exactly. And this is not at all what Dolly did, OG.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  Well, it sounds like she surrounded herself by a bunch of experts and went, I don't know the first thing about running a amusement park, but I'm going to have people who know how to run an amusement park. The song thing, right? I mean, obviously, Whitney Houston was kind of, kind of, kind of a sure thing in the early 90s, I think.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, Elvis would have been a sure thing.

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  Elvis would have been for sure. Yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. But then she would have given away the $10 million.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  She got half the money for longer, so.

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't know that it would have been that Whitney Houston version of that song is fantastic. Lots of lessons, though.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  You think we can get Doug to sing a little bit of it?

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  I think we need to. Let's see if we might be able to do that later on in the show. Speaking of later in the show, it is time for us to walk on the back porch. A lot of great comments on our greatest hits week. At the end of the week, we went back in time, OG, as you know, we revisited those marketing campaign slogans. Remember that greatest hit?

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  Remember that episode? Yeah. Stacker Katie said that Paula was right. It used to be frosted Lucky Charms. They got rid of the adjective in the late 1990s. If you missed this, the, the point of this episode was just to show how ubiquitous these marketing messages are. And we think we're ignoring them. And yet, it was amazing how many of these you, Len, you, Len and Paula were able to get right. You got so many right. In fact, on Monday, we had our note from Jim. Jim had a PS to his note where he had another one. He said, Doug missed a good one for the Marketing Catchphrase Podcast I listened to while I

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  was working out. He goes, how about this one? See if you know this one, OG.

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  When stacking Benjamins talk, people listen. So if you missed the episode, we changed it all to a stacking Benjamins slogan. Who is that for?

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  Ooh, that's Charles Schwab.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  It was EF Hutton.

• 1:09:37Speaker 04

  Oh, EF Hutton.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, when EF Hutton talks. Yeah. Again, for our older stackers. So.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Just a half a generation behind again on part of this. All right. That's going to do it for today. Big thanks to Linda Gratton again for hanging out with us. Thanks to you for hanging out with us. I'd love to hear your take on, uh, living a hundred year lifestyle. How do you think about living your life different when you think about living 100 years? What things do you want to do different than what you're doing today? I'd love to hear that. Either write me [email protected]. But even more than that, you can be a part of the show by going on our voicemail, stackingbenjamins.com/voicemail, or stackingbenjamins.com, my more favorite one, yell downstairs. You can also join our community, our Facebook

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  group, stackingbenjamins.com/basement gets you right to our Facebook group. Give us what you think there about, uh, living a hundred year lifestyle. All right. Doug, you've got the greatest hit. Speaking of greatest hits from today's episode, what should we have learned today?

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  So what's stacked up on our to do list for today? First, take some advice from Linda Gratton. Maybe you're putting too much stress on early retirement. What if you retired for a few years now, planning to retool to do something else four years from now, after you graduate into a new field? That opens up the world, doesn't it? Second, Dolly, she was a legend who got there building her successes on top of what she already knew. She didn't branch out beyond her purview. She kept her business based on what was important to her and that she could influence successfully. That'll go a long way for you and your money as well. But the big lesson, speaking of Dolly Parton, the next time you drop by the

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  basement, go ahead and get Joe's mom singing Nine to Five upstairs. You will, I can't, I can't emphasize this enough. You will experience a full on musical featuring like pans banging together, the silverware clanging. She got symbols between her knees. It's a spectacle like none you've ever witnessed. Seriously, this has got to be on your bucket list. Thanks to Linda Gratton for joining us today. You'll find her new book on the new world of work, living the 100 year life, wherever books are sold. We'll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  This show is the property of SB Podcast LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul Sehi. You'll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins.com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. And oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don't take advice from people you don't know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug, and we'll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.