Midlife MavericksSir David Attenborough turns 100 this week.
British television is running several specials to celebrate someone who is a national treasure. One of the clips doing the rounds is from Life on Earth, 1978. He was filming a mama gorilla with her baby. The gorillas just lay on him. He squished in behind them, underneath them, completely still while they decided he belonged. It is absolutely delightful footage.
I was watching it with my mum. We sat there for a bit, both quiet. Then they cut to the interview where he talks about how that moment changed wildlife television forever. Thousands of people saw it when it first aired. It rewired how a whole country thought about nature documentaries.
I turned to her and said, “Que privilégio, mãe. To still be working at 100. At something you absolutely love.”
She agreed. With no hesitation.
My mum had to retire at 70. Government employee, mandatory cut-off. She didn’t choose to stop. The system chose for her. And she’s the kind of woman who likes working. So am I.
Quote of the Week
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
Dolly Parton
The People Who Never Stopped
Mick Jagger is 82 and still filling stadiums. Dolly Parton keeps writing songs and showing up in rhinestones like she’s got somewhere to be. Robert Redford was working on Dark Winds until the day he died last September, at 89. Clint Eastwood is still directing at 95.
Nobody asks them when they’re going to wind down. They chose to keep going.
For the rest of us, the script is different. You work until you hit a number. Then you stop. If you’re lucky, the pension covers it. If you’re less lucky, you spend two decades stretching a pot that was never big enough while your brain quietly rusts from underuse.
Office life trained us to think of work as something with a start date and an end date. You enter the building at 25, you leave at 60-something, and the bit afterwards is the reward. Slow mornings and the garden.
For some people, that is exactly what they want. Fair enough.
For the rest of us, and I think there are more of us than anyone admits, stopping is the punishment, not the prize.
The Generation That Deleted the Apology
63% of Gen Z workers now see their careers as temporary by design. They don’t plan to stay at one company. They don’t plan to stay in one industry. They’re building income from multiple streams before they’re 30 because they watched their parents get restructured and decided the whole model was broken.
Nobody’s calling it a portfolio career. The phrase doesn’t even come up. It’s just work.
Meanwhile, women in their 40s and 50s who’ve spent twenty years apologising for resume gaps, sideways moves, and career breaks are watching a generation arrive that treats all of those things as features. The shift is identical but the guilt is different.
Gen Z got there by instinct. Midlife women have to get there by decision, which is harder because you have to unlearn the idea that a single employer and a steady salary is the only responsible way to live.
The Part That Should Scare You
MSN ran a piece last month about the growing trend of seniors returning to gig work because the pension wasn’t enough. People in their 70s doing delivery shifts and odd jobs to fill the gap between what they saved and what life actually costs.
I posted something on Threads last week about forced retirement hitting people at 50. The comments came fast.
That’s the split. Attenborough at 100, doing the work he loves, surrounded by gorillas and the full force of a purpose that never expired. And someone’s mother at 72, picking up gig shifts because nobody told her to build something portable while she still had a salary.
Both of those are real. Both of those are happening right now. The difference between them was made decades earlier, in the choices about how to structure a working life.
What My Coaching Clients Actually Want
I’ve coached five women this year. Helen. Paula. Candice. Laura. Caroline. All different industries and different stages of life. Every single one of them wanted the same thing.
And if you’re reading this newsletter, I suspect you want it too.
None of them wanted to stop working. All five wanted to build something completely different. A portfolio career where they decide exactly how they work and who they work with.
What surprised me, even though it probably shouldn’t have: none of them were optimising for money. Not one. They were optimising for the stage of life they were in. For a nervous system that felt composed instead of constantly on alert. For being able to engage with things they actually loved doing.
Family didn’t come up once. This was entirely about them. Their interests. Their minds needing somewhere to go. The ability to be more creative and to have real flexibility in how they spent their days. Even if you still work ten hours a day, you choose which ten hours. And you choose with whom.
That is a completely different relationship with work. And once you’ve seen it, the old model looks absurd.
OWN IT
My mum liked working and I like working. The question was never whether to work but whether someone else gets to decide what you do and when you stop.
A portfolio career gives you something a single employer never will: the ability to keep going on your own terms. You scale down and drop a strand. You shift from execution to advisory. You reduce hours without reducing relevance. Nobody walks into your office and tells you that your role has been restructured and here is the package.
This week, look at your current work and answer one question: if your employer told you tomorrow that your role no longer exists, which part of what you do could you sell independently within 90 days? Not in a year. Not after retraining. Right now, with what you already know.
If the answer is “I don’t know,” that’s your starting point. If the answer is “nothing,” you’re wrong, and I’d put money on it.
Reply and tell me what you came up with, or tell me you’re stuck. I read all of them.
See you Wednesday
