ROAR Into The Second Half Of Your Life With Michael Clinton
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Retirement doesn’t have to put an end to you living out your purpose and passion. Here to talk about how you can energetically dive into life post-retirement is Michael Clinton with his book, ROAR: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late). Michael is the special media advisor to the Hearst Corporation’s CEO. He is also an author and a photographer. He’s traveled to 124 countries, ran marathons on seven continents, and started a non-profit organization. And that’s just scratching the surface. In this episode, Michael joins John Livesay to advise his peers going through mid-life that you can pivot and do more after retirement. It’s just another layer to your cake. Tune in to learn more about Michael’s optimistic and proactive view on retirement and embracing the third act of life.
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ROAR Into The Second Half Of Your Life With Michael Clinton
Our guest is Michael Clinton, the author of Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late). He talks about a life lesson he learned early in his career that whatever job we’re doing is not who we are. He’s all about not retiring but instead rewiring and refiring. Find out how to energize and life-layer your life. Enjoy.
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Our guest is Michael Clinton. He’s the Special Media Advisor to the Hearst Corporation CEO. He’s also an author and photographer, has traveled through 124 countries, run marathons on 7 continents and started a nonprofit foundation. If that’s not enough, he’s also a private pilot and the part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina. He holds two Master’s degrees and still has a long list of life experiences he plans to tackle. He is the author of a new book called Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late). Michael, welcome to the show.
John, thank you for that great introduction. I didn’t realize that’s a lot.
To give the readers some context, I’ve known of you for decades. I also had a career in ad sales on the West Coast. You were a publisher of GQ when I first heard about you. What I respect and admire about someone like you is your reputation has always been stellar through time. That it is a rare commodity that someone is so beloved by so many people. There’s a reason behind that, which we’ll delve into. I want to ask you to bring us up to speed on your story of origin.
Your book, Roar, has been dedicated to your father, who influenced you. There must be some situation in your childhood when you went, “I’m going to live my life like an adventure.” The book opens up with you moving to New York with very little money in your pocket from Pittsburgh. It’s this wonderful story of like an actor almost moving to Hollywood and conquering the city. Take us back as far as you want. I’ll let you start the story wherever you want.
Thanks for those nice comments. I had a 40-year publishing career as a young publisher at GQ, ultimately becoming the President and Publishing Director of Hearst Magazines. Our team got to launch Oprah’s magazine, Food Network, HGTV and buy a couple of publishing companies. Throughout all of the 40 years, the one thing that I always did was have a sense of gratitude for what I was able to experience. I came from a poor working-class family in Pittsburgh. There was no education, role models, money or anything.
To your point, at a very young age, I’ve discussed this with my dad at nauseam. I had this spark that there was a whole other world out there. Part of it was influenced by my dad, my maternal grandmother, and by my high school English teacher, which I write about in the book, who is a very present way at a parent-teacher meeting said to my parents, “Michael would do well on the publishing business, the magazine business in New York. Go figure.” I had no idea what that meant.
I was the editor of the high school newspaper and ultimately became the publisher of my college newspaper. There was a little something in there that he identified. I’m still in touch with him. He’s a great influence. We still communicate. What happened was when I landed in New York with $60, no contacts and a young person, I was able to find my way and it was a combination of skills, luck, timing and all of that.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t retire but rewire and refire. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
What I learned was your reputation, integrity, character and all the ups and downs that you have in business are the stuff that is always remembered and stand out. You and I were long-time sales executives in various capacities. I remember your great reputation in terms of the various jobs that you held. What we learned is that our reputation is what preceded and followed us in any successful business relationship and business success. I learned that young.
I also learned in a young way that we all sit in a seat and the seat is not who we are. It’s what we do. I remember being a little full of myself up as a young 34-year-old publisher at GQ. It was a senior executive who said that to me and a light bulb went off in my head when I realized that I was sitting in a great seat but the reason I had access to so many things was because of the seat I sat in. At a very young age, I started cultivating this notion of what we do is not who we are. I started creating all of the personas of who I was as opposed to what I did. That served me well because I didn’t hang all my chips out of my professional seat.
There was a reason that I felt such a kinship to you because that’s going to be one of the tweets. What we do is not who we are. I also learned that life lesson when I got laid off from Conde Nast the first time. It’s the premise of if we get so identified with our job title and who we are in making reservations at a hotel or in your case, I’m sure going to all the fashion shows in Italy as the publisher of GQ. When that stops, your self-esteem can plummet. We need to realize that we’re bigger than any one thing happening to us. You talk about this in the Roar tips that who I am is bigger than winning a salesperson of the year or being laid off and all of those things that happen.
If you identify, “I had a good quarter and feel good about myself. I had a bad quarter and feel bad about myself,” or even shorter timeframes, you’re up and down all day long and that doesn’t serve anybody. I’m so grateful to have you say that, especially with your expertise and experience in the world. My first question with your background is and this explains why you’ve been so successful. When you are the publisher, you not only have to have expertise in managing and attracting a great sales team but you have to be the conduit to the editor.
Typically, they’ve been very much divided between church and state. You almost have to have empathy and understanding for what an editor feels is newsworthy and unique. Your background is in journalism. Sometimes people who like the writing part are not good at the selling part of it. You have this wonderful ability to do both. It’s almost like someone who’s an engineer is typically not good in marketing and vice versa. How did you get some sales experience as you were also this amazing journalist growing up?
That’s a very astute observation. The secret is that I did start as a journalist. I started as a journalist, a reporter and an editor at Fairchild Publications, which is a company that you worked for as well in its early days. I always had that skillset and identified as a words person and a writer. At the same time, I was a freelance writer. What happened was I was approached by the publisher of a new magazine that was being launched for the sports industry. It was a B2B magazine called Sportstyle. You may or may not remember it.
What was happening in the whole sports industry was going through a major disruption. Companies like Nike and Reebok were being born. The soft-goods side was beginning to overtake the traditional hard goods side. The publisher came to me and said, “You are so well known and established,” because I was writing for that industry, “Why don’t you come over to the sales side?” I thought, “That’s the last thing I realized.”
ROAR Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late)
My agenda was jelling. I was in my twenties when I wanted to be a publisher, which I had to go into that lane. I jumped the fence, much to the chagrin of all my editorial friends. What I ultimately learned was that creating the affected sales pitch was like developing a story that you would write. When you’re writing a story, you’re going out and gathering the facts, interviewing and talking to different people. You sit down and write the story. In this instance, it was the same skillset but rather than write the story, you wrote the pitch.
The pitch was embedded in storytelling. That’s what you’ve always espoused and important to your message. Storytelling is critical for effective selling and results. I had that epiphany to end up loving what I was doing and being my trajectory into my career. That served me well because I always had a connection with writers and editors. I would always be talking with them, cultivating them and wanting to know what they were working on. They appreciated that from someone from the business side.
My whole premise is that whoever tells the best story is the one that gets the sale. The fact that you could write and tell good stories, it allowed you to do that. It goes back to the basics of journalism, the exposition of any story, the who, what, where and when. Many reps jumped right into the product without giving any framework of something.
I would have this discussion with many writers and editors who are also selling. They’re pitching their story ideas and that so-and-so should be on the cover of the magazine. I have evolved into this place where I do the whole world. You’re either a buyer or a seller, no matter what you’re doing. I’m very involved in the philanthropy world. I finished a Master’s degree at Columbia in Nonprofit Philanthropy.
It’s interesting going back to school in my 60s. I made this comment in class. There were a lot of young professionals. I said, “Effective development directors or CEOs of nonprofits are great sellers.” They were all appalled at the idea. I said, “You’re getting hung up on the fact that you raised millions of dollars for your nonprofit. That’s salesmanship and storytelling about your mission, purpose and recipients. That is effective storytelling and selling.” People sometimes get hung up on semantics. We’re either a buyer or a seller in all aspects of our lives. I’ve always liked being a seller as opposed to a buyer but someone’s always like, “I want to be on the other side.”
It was always a rude awakening if an ad director decided of a client that they wanted to get into sales and had all these salespeople calling them all the time. They couldn’t figure out why nobody was returning their appointment or calls as a salesperson versus every time they called us the client and got instant return. You’re not your title. What you do does not stay the same. The premise of the subtitle of your book, “Before It’s Too Late,” is so much a part of a good story. There’s got to be some sense of urgency. It’s part of good selling that we got to make a decision sooner than later.
You could have called the book Stroll into The Second Half Of Your Life but instead, you called it Roar. What hooked me was Before It’s Too Late. I thought, “Before I die and run out of opportunities, I’ll ask him because I know how much effort goes into a book name and title.” How did you come up with that hook Before It Was Too Late?
[bctt tweet=”Learn to life layer with different aspects of who you are.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let me first say that the whole reason for the book was, as I was stepping out of the day to day, everything I read, learned and observed was all about the big wind down as opposed to the big wind up. What happens is if you’re 50 or 60 and you’re healthy, you’re going to live to be 90. The construct that you were given is based on something that was created back in the 1930s and ’40s when life expectancies were in the early 60s. You retired and died.
Retirement is an artificial construct that is about 80 years old in the history of the world. It was created by our government and policies in the ’30s. This awareness, all of a sudden, that you’re going to live another 30, 40 years, what are you going to do with that time to make it meaningful and engaging might mean something like starting a whole new second career, lifestyle or relationship. The punchline of Before It’s Too Late was to underscore a sense of urgency about it.
You can pivot in midlife and create a whole new second-half journey but you’ve got to do the groundwork and don’t want the opportunity of that to pass you by. What was ironic is the book was conceptualized and written before the pandemic. The book was bought by the publisher as the pandemic was happening.
Before It’s Too Late, you have this undercurrent of the pandemics here, stuff happens to the world at large and affects all of us. The last years have been an existential time for so many of introspection. Am I doing what I want to do? Am I living where I want to live? Am I the person I want to be with? All of those things gave it a sense of urgency. That punchline amplified the times that we’re in.
I have the image of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones with that boulder chasing him. You talk about how important it is for us to re-imagine our life before someone re-imagines it for us. You can sit back and say, “I have a high chance of getting laid off. Print sales seemed to be down everywhere. Am I going to try to learn a new skill or am I going to wait and let that happen? If it does happen, am I going to let it take me down and never get back up? I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’ve been doing this for so long.”
Tell us a story, if you don’t mind, of either yourself or someone else. You have so many great examples in the book who said, “What I’m going to re-imagine?” You’re living your life like that. You got a new Master’s. You’re traveling. You probably have a whole list of places you still want to go and photograph, I’m imagining. The core thing I got from your book, Roar, is the people who are the most curious are the happiest and most successful. Would that be fair?
That’s very fair. One of the things that I wanted to do with the book is to identify people who were embracing this way of living. I call them the re-imaginers. I interviewed 40 people that I found who have done what I’m talking about in terms of this re-imagining process that should be with us for our entire lives. One example of this is a woman who was in our business. She was a journalist for a newspaper and saw what was going on around her.
Second Half Of Life: Retirement is an artificial construct that is about 80 years old in the history of the world.
She was a divorced single mother. In her 50s, she started thinking about the rest of her life. She decided that she wanted to go back to school and wanted to study a particular form of Psychology. She lived in New Mexico but the school was in California. It was part online and part in-person. She had to do the commute and all of that but she didn’t have the money. She decided to sell her house and move in with a roommate in her 50s to bring her costs down and did her Master’s degree.
There’s a lot of money out there for people in midlife, lots of resources like ScholarshipOwl and other sources if you want to do that. She ended up getting a degree in this form of Psychology and has become a counselor. She works primarily in the drug and rehab world. In her 60s, she said, “I can do this for the rest of my life. I’m passionate.” She did a complete 180 because she was a lifestyle reporter, had a degree in Journalism and then later in Psychology.
I found two things with common threads. One of them was curiosity, always curious about the future and the other was every single person I talked to put in the time. They spent a year plus dissecting what is it that they wanted to do in terms of not just making change. Some people say, “I’m happy with my life. I don’t need change.”
The world is constantly changing around you. You have to morph and adapt to that change. They spent a good year doing that, whether it was noticing that their job skills were waning, their company or industry was being disrupted or hit with a natural disaster in their community and making big decisions. The book has a lot of inspiration but also has a lot of tools and resources for people to use to figure out how to do it and get there.
What I love about what you’re saying and Roar is about is saying, “You’re the movie director of your life. If you don’t like what you’re seeing or doing, say cut, change the location, the cast and rewrite it.” They rewrite screenplays all the time. This whole concept of retire, your whole motto is, “Rewire and refire,” which is brilliant because it’s a great soundbite and also inspires us to take action, which is a big part of what Roar is about. Not just, “What if someday I could maybe become a photographer or help people?” Analyze it and take some action. Don’t stay in this “what if” mode where you don’t pull the trigger.
ROAR is an acronym. It’s a four-part process and the A is the Action plan. One of my favorite chapters is a chapter about life layering, which is how you can go about building these different personas, interests and directions in your life so that you’re building a multifaceted aspect of who you are and what you’re experiencing. The action plan is important but you have to step back and look at where do you think you want to go in some aspect of your life to do that.
Let’s give everybody the tease out of what that acronym is. The first R is Re-imagine, which we opened with. The second one is Own where you came from. We covered that in the sense of where you came from and where you are doesn’t define you because you’re bigger than all of that, whatever seat you’re in or title you have. We talked about A for Act.
[bctt tweet=”You can start a layer at any time in your life.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The final one is Reassess. It’s not something you’d go, “I’ve changed myself. I never have to look at it again.” No, it’s an ongoing process. I don’t know if you were the publisher of GQ at the time or not when Art Cooper retired from being the Editor-In-Chief for many years and died shortly thereafter. I thought to myself, “How tragic.”
All of that time, plans and saving money is a very common thing that we hear in men a little bit more than women. When I’ve lost my job, either through being laid off or retiring, I’ve lost my identity. That’s why your book is so valuable. If we’re all going to be Baby Boomers living longer, nobody wants that. That’s the worst possible outcome because you don’t have a reason, whatever that is. I’ve retired. I don’t know what to do with myself and I’m bored. I suddenly find myself getting sick because I’m depressed or who knows what all that is. I thought, “I cannot mention that with your connection to him and your new book about all this.”
I have great fond memories of Art. We worked together for ten years. I saw him at lunch the day that he did have the stroke later in the afternoon. It was very tragic. You raised a great point because oftentimes, people do go off the cliff when they lose that identity and seat. That’s what we need to do about being proactive, re-imagining ourselves and having things happen to us. I want to go back to life layering for a minute because it was the philosophy that I embraced when I was around 39.
I had a great job. I was at the time publisher of GQ and had my rhythm. I had a happy personal life, healthy and all that stuff. I thought I was the most boring human being on the planet because all I was doing was working. I thought, “I’ve got to, in the old vernacular, get a life.” I always had an adventure gene in me, so on my 40th birthday, I decided I was going to go climb Mount Kilimanjaro, take a flying lesson and go to Skip Barber Race Car Driving School. I was going to have a set of adventures.
I ultimately became a pilot and ended up climbing many mountains around the world. What I realized is that adventure and adventure travel were very much a part of who I am and how I self-identify. I proclaimed that my 40s were going to be my adventure years. That became my layer if you will. Many years later, I’ve had an enormous set of experiences around adventure. I took photography seriously and called that my creative years. In my 60s, I was much more interested in giving back as well. I called those my philanthropy years. One layer didn’t abandon the other.
It’s like a layered cake. You have your professional and personal layer. In my instance, I have my adventure, creative and philanthropy layer. When I stepped out of my seat, people said, “Who are you?” I didn’t say to myself, “Who am I?” I said, “I’m a photographer, an adventure traveler, a marathon runner, a student, this or this.” I had a whole host of self-identifiers. I was able to lean into my layers. You can start a layer at any time in your life, 25, 55, and 75. Life layering has become my go-to philosophy. I’ve got many friends who have been influenced by that. In the book, the chapter in the life layer gives more flavor to that.
It’s a wonderful visual, especially the cake part of it all and layering a cake. One is not siloed from the next. That’s another shout-out to another mutual friend of ours, Alison Levine, who is an amazing speaker about her adventures climbing all kinds of mountains, including Mount Everest. She’s been a guest on this show in a previous episode. When I think about it, I’m thinking, “I’ve layered without even knowing I was layering by becoming a host.” It’s so interesting how those layers add to who you are, what you know and learn and the conversations you get to have.
Second Half Of Life: Stop being obsessed about age and start being obsessed about person-appropriate versus age-appropriate.
One of the things that you have in Roar is this question, “Imagine you’re 90, what do you want your legacy to be?” That would be a great last question for you, Michael. You’re far from 90 but because you started layering in your 40s, you’re starting to imagine getting your decades labeled, adventure, creative and giving back. Have you thought about what you want your legacy to be?
I have. First of all, I’ll be working on all those layers and adding a few more to the cake. What I’ve come to learn and it was the accidental role model, is as we live longer, this is all new territory for the culture or the world. The longevity factor of people living well into their 70s, 80s and 90s and how they live is a whole new construct. Creating role models of people who are living life fully at those ages, what I’m saying is I want to be one of those people and the accidental role model with many other. The 40-year-old, the 35-year-old or a peer can say, “That’s the 75-year-old I want to be.”
I’m always looking for those 70, 75, 80-year-old people. I have a good friend, Alan Patricof, who you might know is a big hedge fund manager when he’s 87. I want to beat him when I’m 87. He’s an entrepreneur, started a new fund, training for his first marathon and dating because his long-time wife has passed away. He’s vibrant and dynamic. All of us creating role models for our peers and next generations is what I want my legacy to be.
The book again is called Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life. It’s available on Amazon and wherever else you might like to buy books. RoarByMichaelClinton.com will give you everything you need to know about Michael and the book. We’ve scraped the surface of the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully, we’ve intrigued you enough to start thinking about your life layering, regardless of how old you are and how you need to have this book as your guide and roadmap to make your life all that it can be and become a role model for other people as well. Michael, any last thoughts you want to leave us with?
The last thought I would leave people, especially those who are in midlife, is we tend to put barriers around ourselves. Some of that is what I’ll call self-imposed ageism. “I can’t do that because I’m 50, 60.” Stop being obsessed about age and start being obsessed about person appropriate versus age-appropriate. Go back to school, start new careers and relationships, be an entrepreneur or get onto a new regimen. There is hopefully a long life ahead of you. Break the barriers of the self-imposed ageism and restrictions that we all tend to put around ourselves.
What a great inspirational thought that the only things stopping us are our own internal stories that we’re telling ourselves that we can’t do something. Thanks again, Michael.
Thank you, John. It’s great to be with you.
Important Links
- Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late)
- Michael Clinton – LinkedIn
- Sportstyle
- ScholarshipOwl
- Alan Patricof
- Amazon – Roar: into the second half of your life (before it’s too late)
- Alison Levine – Previous episode
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Tags: author, book, life layering, mid-life, Pivot, retirement