chapter fourStructuring Your Future

Success Story: Horace Deets

Get up right now and go to the window. Open it, andstick your head out and yell, … I’m mad as hell andI’m not going to take this anymore.—Patty Chayefsky, Network

As I traveled coast-to-coast to visit with successfully reinventive men and women—no matter where or how they had grown up, the kinds of careers they had built in the first half of life, or the nature of the work they had developed since—one salient characteristic stood out: an entrepreneurial spirit.

They felt it was preposterous that the conventional map of life calls for intelligent, accomplished people to begin readying themselves for obsolescence shortly after midlife. They thought it absurd that so many people unquestioningly ...

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