KACHARAGADLA

A  study  by University of Michigan researchers I just read about in the  Squared Away   blog  from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College noted that “about 40% of Americans who were still working when they turned 62 had moved to a new occupation sometime after age 55.” But when older workers  change occupations  later in life, the study added, “they experience a decrease in hourly earnings.” Let me unpack that study, which was called  Occupational Transitions at Older Ages: What Moves are People Making?  Then, I’ll offer my five rules to follow if you want to keep working into your 60s or beyond — especially if you want to change careers to do it. Taking a Pay Cut After a Career Switch I wasn’t terribly surprised by the researchers’ pay cut finding. The truth is, based on the workers I’ve studied and interviewed for  my books  and articles, most workers who change careers take a step down in salary when they start over. But here’s the interesting part: Th

The idea of “work-life balance”  is an invention of the mid-19 th   century . The notion of cultivating awareness of one’s work versus one’s pleasure emerged when the word “leisure” caught on in Europe in the Industrial Era. Work became separate from “life” (at least for a certain class of men) and we’ve been struggling to juggle them ever since. Today, when so much work and leisure time involve staring at screens, I see a different struggle arising: a struggle to find a healthy balance between technology and the physical world, or, for short, “tech/body balance.” A   2016 survey from Deloitte  found that Americans  collectively  check their phones 8 billion times per day. The average for individual Americans was 46 checks per day, including during leisure time—watching TV, spending time with friends, eating dinner. So attached are we to our devices that it’s not unusual to have your phone with you  at all times . We carry our phones around everywhere as if they are epi-pen

You’ve decided to leave the organization, and the decision was driven by your needs as a working parent. Maybe you’re taking a new job with fewer hours or less travel so you can spend more time with the kids; maybe you’re “up-ramping” and taking on a position with more responsibility, pressure, and pay – so you can afford those looming college bills; or maybe you’ve decided to put your focus on responsibilities at home before looking for a different opportunity. Regardless of the specific reason why, the question now is how – how to leave in the right way, how to be credible, honest and transparent while acting in your own best interests, and how to preserve the long-term career capital you’ve worked so hard to create. Unfortunately for working parents, there’s no offboarding playbook, and when you’ve got your kids and family in mind, the raft of emotions attached to a professional exit can swell to very large proportions. You may feel guilty, excited, conflicted, angry, or rel

If you’re not a numbers person, finance is daunting. But having a grasp of terms like EBITDA and net present value are important no matter where you sit on the org chart. How can you boost your financial acumen? How do you decide which concepts are most important to understand to your work and your understanding of the business? And who’s in the best position to offer advice? What the Experts Say Even if you don’t need to know a lot about finance to do your day-to-day job, the more conversant you are on the subject, the better off you’ll be, according to Richard Ruback, a professor at Harvard Business School and the coauthor of the  HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business . “If you can speak the language of money, you will be more successful,” he says. After all, if you’re trying to sell a product or strategy, you need to be able to demonstrate that it is both practical and high margin. “The decision-makers will want to see a simple model that shows revenue, costs, overhead, and

We have to be very careful in choosing our pursuits, because our habits make us. In Hans Christian Andersen’s fable  The Red Shoes , a young girl longs for a pair of pretty red shoes. She ultimately tricks the blind woman who cares for her into buying her a pair. Her love for the red shoes causes her to give them priority over the more important things in her life, and, as often happens in fables, karma is not on her side. The shoes become firmly stuck to her feet and force her to dance non-stop, to the point where she almost dies from exhaustion and starvation. We can scoff at the little girl’s foolishness, but, in real life, we often do the same thing -- we chase after the things that we  think  will make us happy and don’t realize that we’re heading down a dangerous path. One study found that the people who experience the greatest job satisfaction aren’t the ones in the big, fancy offices; they’re the ones who approach their work as a calling, even when that work involv

You are the sum of your habits. When you allow bad habits to take over, they dramatically impede your path to success. The challenge is bad habits are insidious, creeping up on you slowly until you don’t even notice the damage they’re causing. “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”   –Warren Buffett Breaking bad habits requires self-control—and lots of it. Research indicates that it’s worth the effort, as  self-control  has huge implications for success. University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman conducted a study where they measured college students’ IQ scores and levels of self-control upon entering university. Four years later, they looked at the students’ grade point averages (GPA) and found that self-control was twice as important as IQ in earning a high GPA. The self-control required to develop good habits (and stop bad ones) also serves as the foundation for a strong work ethic and high pro

Books have the power to change lives. We live in a time when books are more affordable and accessible. Yet, fewer entrepreneurs read books, using the excuse of a lack of time. If you can’t find time to read, you as an entrepreneur will not grow, which will have an effect on your business. If you study any successful entrepreneur, you’ll see one of the keys to their success is that they educate themselves through books. You can get books these days for as little as .99 cents. Many are even free through Amazon’s KDP Select program. There’s no reason not to have a Kindle full of books that can educate you and teach you strategies to grow your business.  Here are six books that can help you create a business and life you love. This list is a good start. It’s up to you to research books that will help you and your business where you are in your journey. These books are changing lives and helping entrepreneurs grow their business.  1.  Just Blow it Up: Firepower for Living an Unlimit