“Musicians don’t retire. They stop when they don’t have music in them anymore.” (Louis Armstrong)
I recently reviewed the film The Intern. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it, Robert de Niro and Anne Hathaway are adorable.
Ben Whittaker (de Niro), a widower, realizes at 70 that he doesn’t like being retired. He sends his ‘letter of intent’ in video format to a company that sells clothes online. He is accepted and ends up working for a very young, entrepreneurial, sceptical, extremely dynamic boss (Anne Hathaway).
The film brings to the fore themes such as generational wisdom, how not to judge people by their age and how to best explore each individual’s talents. It’s a film about starting over; anytime, at any period of life; about doing what you love, about living a balanced life, about being passionate about what you do.
I came back to this film for a few reasons. I have many acquaintances who complain that after they are past 45, they don’t get called for job interviews much anymore, and if they are called, they never get an answer. It is no a secret that there is obvious age discrimination in Romania. I would add that it’s not just here. A French friend of mine told me about the current called ‘jeunisme’: if you’re over 45, you’re no longer of interest, whether it’s for recruitment, training or consultancy. More young people would be invited to the discussion.
I’ve read that there’s a lot of talk in the US about ageism. The aim is firstly to raise awareness of the fact that there is a predisposition to age discrimination, and secondly to draw attention to a segment of the population that still has a lot to say, to contribute, has valuable experience that deserves to be put to good use. With increasing life expectancy, rising retirement ages, and the global spread of concern for a healthy, balanced lifestyle, people can and want to be active for longer, they want to be involved, committed.
The model of many years ago, where a person retired and was no longer involved, co-opted in various organisations, initiatives, is obsolete.
An evolved society is one that also treats its older people well. I think that we are far from this state of affairs. As long as we mock people who are older than us, talk down to them, aggressively, the balance between a prehistoric (but careful not to offend the Middle Ages) medieval society and an evolved 21st century society tips heavily towards the former.
Anyway, coming back, I had long ago proposed to revisit The Intern. I wanted to understand what was interesting about the film that made it memorable, beyond the two actors, and what we could take away from it in everyday life.
One quote that moved me was the following:
“Musicians don’t retire. They stop when they no longer have music in them. (Louis Armstrong). I still have music in me, I’m sure of it,” says the character played by Robert de Niro.
Another aspect that impressed me was how the intern relates to his boss and everyone in the company where he works. He’s not there to lecture them, he’s not telling them what they’re doing wrong, he’s not speaking from the height of his wealth of experience.
He is doing something a coach should do: meeting the person in front of him where they are. And that ‘there’ is not below, it’s not above, in fact it’s not about that. The intern keeps his own style (dresses in a suit every day, always has a handkerchief to give to someone who needs it, has remarkable personal discipline) but moulds himself to the people and organisation he works for. He never once says that something is not working well, that things are a big mess. When he notices a bunch of stuff lying around, he goes in himself and tidies it up. Everyone in the office is delighted when, one morning, they can’t find the pile of hastily discarded files. The intern had put them in their place. Discreetly, without drawing attention to himself.
He doesn’t correct his boss, he doesn’t hold her accountable or tell her he’s unhappy, he doesn’t roll his eyes. He doesn’t remark on his colleagues, he doesn’t hold a theory about what it was like in his time.
But he jumps in to help when needed, regardless of the nature of the task. He supports others, encourages them. If you like, he is to his boss what Jimminy Cricket is to Pinocchio. But in such an unobtrusive, elegant, thoughtful, gently humorous way that you can’t help but adore him.
The question, for those of us at the end of Q2 or beginning of Q3 of life, if we divide a hundred years into quarters of 25 years, is how do we bring our experience, our wisdom, to companies, to society, in a similar way, so that they want to have us around.
The match theory never appealed to anyone, if we’re honest, nor to us when someone else did. The raised and waved index finger of someone who thought he was lecturing us, I don’t think it led anyone down the right path, quite the opposite.
So the challenge for experienced people is to adapt, to share from their experience but not as a normative parent but with the gentleness of Ben Whittaker; the challenge for companies is to rethink the structure of the organisation so as to explore and benefit as much as possible from those experiences; the challenge for the younger generation is to accept that they can learn from any interaction, that much in this world repeats itself, as Eminescu said, “everything is old and everything is new” or, to paraphrase Borges, the history of the world is like a long string of differently intoned metaphors.”
via: Forbes