The Career/Longevity Connection

The premise of the Career/Longevity Connection is that engaging in meaningful work enhances one's life expectancy. According to D. Mahoney and R. Restak (1998), to live longer, people must develop a longevity attitude. Proven intervention strategies are given for use with adults engaged in career reassessment. ********** History has many examples of. individuals who successfully changed careers later in life and individuals who continue to work well beyond typical retirement age. Admiral Richard E. Byrd was retired from the Navy when he flew over both poles. Jack Frankel had a long and successful career as a scientist, researcher, and founder of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and university president. At age 61, he quit his job as president of California State University at Bakersfield to become an actor because he thought that it would be fun. After several small roles, Frankel won a part in a movie, called The Tomb, about an Egyptian vampire princess awakened by an earthquake. Frankel says that, in the film, he plays the role of a professor of Oriental languages who stumbles on the key to this vampire princess. He talks about one great scene in which the princess tears out his heart with her fingernails, which he claims is one of the high points of his career ("Talk About a Change of Pace," 1985). Another example of someone who has changed careers is Larry Dyke, an artist who was asked by Pope John Paul II to do a painting for the Vatican museum (Moore, 1983). Dyke's journey to becoming a professional artist followed a long and difficult route. During his junior year in college, he was a second-string quarterback on a lackluster football ream. Seeing that he was not going to be a successful athlete, he quit the football team. Dyke's father suggested that he work toward a career in medicine, but he tried three times and never got into medical school. He also tried dental school and veterinary school, and did not get accepted into either one. Dyke's father was an optometrist, and his older brother was a medical doctor. To earn a living, he was a teacher for 10 years but was not satisfied with teaching. Dyke's hobby was landscape painting, and several of his friends encouraged him to submit several of his paintings to a local gallery. The paintings sold quickly, and before long Larry Dyke was a professio nal artist with a very promising career. The story of several individuals who were changing careers in midstream for more satisfying lives was the emphasis of an article in the Sunday edition of the San Antonio Express-News by staff writer Becky Whetstone Schmidt (1995). One of those individuals was Roberta Jones, who would be finishing medical school at age 41 after an undergraduate degree in graphic arts and after jobs as a freelance artist, loan officer, guitarist in a gospel singing group, and minister for a religious organization. Jones said that she sometimes thinks about what she would have been if she had not taken the risk to go to medical school. Another article in the San Antonio Express-News on June 21,1998 ("Thorndale Reporter Nears Century Mark," 1998), told the story of Grace Berry, who at age 100 was still writing for a weekly newspaper in Thorndale, a small Southeast Texas town. Berry was a widow working at a local grocery store for $1/day in 1936 when the Champion's publisher asked her to come to work for him. She is still working for that paper and enjoying her work. These stories and many others indicate that individuals considering career changes come from all walks of life and many different age groups. Also, the work lives of individuals vary considerably, as indicated by the story of Grace Berry who was still working at age 100. THE LONGEVITY ATTITUDE In 1998, David Mahoney, a long time businessman and advocate of brain research, and Richard Restak, a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist, published a book titled The Longevity Strategy--How to Live to 100 Using the Brain--Body Connection (Mahoney & Restak, 1998). …