It’s Sunday - Let’s Get On The Bus
OK - a little confession time…I had crushes on BOTH Marcia Brady & Laurie Partridge. In the end, I think I decided that Marcia was truly the one for me - but now that I am older and wiser, it is so clear that Laurie Partridge was the right woman for 8 year old me… It should also be noted that my college girlfriend felt weirdly threatened by Laurie Partridge’s (actor Susan Dey) appearance on LA Law - a TV show we watched together.
The Partridge’s Music Still Rattles Around In My Brain
Come on Get Happy - an upbeat earworm that really is the theme of chapterneXt.
We’ve talked about passive income, AI grandparents and the relative virtues of AirBnB vs traditional landlording. Here’s the big idea, though…
Come On Get Happy
It’s silly, in a way, for you to think of your post-50 economic life as a push for happy. But with fewer miles ahead than traveled, it’s time you thought about filling up your own tank. And while the Partridge Family Bus seemed to run on groovy clothes, sunshine, & the tight bass lines of future trainwreck Danny Bonaduce, we all know that the 1955 Chevy 6800 Superior Coach ran on gas. And at under 10 mpg, there were a lot of stops at the Citgo station to refuel.
So, to power your own Mondrian-themed life, we need to find a mixture of cash and happy, right? (At 66, though, I don’t know if Danny Bonaduce is raring to join your tour…).
Some Cash Happy Stories
CTO to Happy Employee: A guy that we know, after a career as a tech CEO working on big machine learning predictive models, decided that he didn’t want to be the guy managing the tech team - he wanted to be on the tech team. When he stepped down as CTO of his big-time gig, he jumped into a really small software company that made software for professional recording studios. I remember him telling me that his new job combined three things that he loved - technology, music & working as part of team. He wasn’t a senior engineer, or a manager, he was just a guy that wrote code. The pay was probably 30% of what he was making as a big time CTO, but he was compensated in ways that fed his own meaning & sense of self.
Civil Service To Author: Do you remember Watership Down? (OMG, I loved that book & the movie still brings me to tears - Julia watched it just recently with one of our teens…still powerful.) Well, the author, Richard Adams, had a full on career with the British civil service - from 1948 to 1972. And his gazillion copy selling book stemmed from his love of telling his daughters, and then grandchildren, stories. Damn - that sounds like a pretty heart full & happy faced career change.
Three Holes In One: OK - this isn’t a career change, but a British woman has knocked down 3 holes in 1 - in a single month. Lyn Parry is 74. She started golfing in her 50s - she wasn’t a life long golfer, but she found her thing. She’s had 5 holes in 1 in her golfing career - that’s crazy. But 3 in a month? Someone calculated the odds at 1.95 TRILLION to 1. Golf makes her happy & that lead to an unbelievable and wholly unrepeatable run of luck/skill.
Crash Expert: “This Looks Like 1929” → 70,000 Hedging Here
Mark Spitznagel, who made $1B in a single day during the 2015 flash crash, warns markets are mimicking 1929. Yeah, just another oracle spouting gloom and doom, right?
Vanguard and Goldman Sachs forecast just 5% and 3% annual S&P returns respectively for the next decade (2024-2034).
Bonds? Not much better.
Enough warning signals—what’s something investors can actually do to diversify this week?
Almost no one knows this, but postwar and contemporary art appreciated 11.2% annually with near-zero correlation to equities from 1995–2024, according to Masterworks Data.
And sure… billionaires like Bezos and Gates can make headlines at auction, but what about the rest of us?
Masterworks makes it possible to invest in legendary artworks by Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more – without spending millions.
23 exits. Net annualized returns like 17.6%, 17.8%, and 21.5%. $1.2 billion invested.
Shares in new offerings can sell quickly but…
*Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd.
We’ve Told You Stories…
Harlan Sanders & his perseverance, Tom Cillo & his career as a 50+ college football player and bunches of others, but the connective tissue between all of the stories that we tell isn’t success or money, but the drive for meaning, relevance & happiness.
After all, “Hello world, hear the song that we’re singing…Come on get happy!”
chapter neXt is a newsletter/community/guide for entrepreneurial folks in their 50s and beyond. It is published by Julia Kelahan (check her out on LinkedIn, her amazing strength-based learning center & her ADHD & Executive Function coaching business) and Tim Kilroy (check him out on LinkedIn & his agency growth business & his agency-focused newsletter). They are the proud parents to 5 kids, they live near Boston & their dog’s name is Fred.