In this solo episode, I look at what strategic foresight really means for your career when nobody can predict what's coming: longevity, retirement, caregiving, loneliness, and why the human skills will matter more than technical ones as AI changes work.
I maintain that career development is a form of futurism. How do you make decisions when you don't know what the future holds?
Margaret Heffernan has a line I keep coming back to: in an age of uncertainty, planning becomes harder than ever, if not actually impossible, so flexibility, adaptability and the imagination to consider what could happen become vital skills.
When things are stable, you can set a goal, watch the trends, steer toward it and land pretty close. Today, with AI and geopolitical tension, nobody can predict with any certainty how things will go. You still can't stop living or making choices. The question is what you have in place that lets you move forward and still pivot as things become clearer.
So I get personal. Keith and I just turned 55. My dad is 94. My mom retired at 65 and died of dementia at 87. Longevity is on my side and my finances aren't ready for an early exit, so I expect to keep working into my mid-70s, maybe my early 80s, and I need income streams that could carry me to 100. That's why I've been reading Lynda Gratton's new book, Living the 100-Year Life.
I also talk about:
- Legacy. My mom took care of her family, and she had enough. I want work with resonance and impact for the next 40-plus years.
- The nurture threads. I'm an only child with very little extended family, and my kids have told me they may not have kids. As a sole proprietor, I have to build friendship and belonging on purpose. Who witnesses me? Who needs what I know?
- The retirement perception gap. The Old Grey Thinker, a former ship captain who writes on Substack, explores the distance between how retirement is sold and how it's lived, including what happens to your knowledge once "retired" replaces your job title.
- Longevity rewrites the script. My husband's mom died at 54, when we were 34 and our oldest daughter was one. I was in the sandwich generation in my early 40s, raising young kids while caring for parents and handling estates. My dad worked into his 70s and only stopped because my mom got sick.
- Out of sync and lonely. I was an older mom at 32, with nothing much in common with the mommy groups near me. I found my support online through Erica Ehm's YummyMummyClub. In Canada, we measure distance in hours.
- Choose Your Own Adventure as a practice. What shaped you, what do you need right now, what has to be true to get where you want to go, and are you testing the alternatives?
And the skills that matter most? Flexibility, mental agility, imagination, storytelling and knowing yourself. People call these soft skills, and they're anything but. Pure technical knowledge is what's most at risk from AI.
What practices keep you imagining what's possible?
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
- Margaret Heffernan, On the Level (Substack): https://heffernanm.substack.com/
- Lynda Gratton, Living the 100-Year Life (September 2026): https://www.livingthe100yearlife.com/
- The Old Grey Thinker (Substack): https://substack.com/@theoldgreythinker
- Erica Ehm (YummyMummyClub): https://www.ericaehm.com/
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