Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and you

As luck would have it, those guys are going to be fine. They have a bazillion dollars already, and when the brouhaha about the current presidential administration dies down, I am sure that they will settle into some very cushy job on Sirius XM or have a Joe Rogan-esque 9-figure contract with Spotify or something. They're going to be A-OK.

But they're both people over 50 who've been fired. According to the last jobs report, the job prospects for those over 50 are in negative growth territory. And for the few that are getting new jobs when they are 50 or older, they are typically seeing compensation that is 10-25% less than their previous job.

Those funny guys have very specific talents. They are late-night TV talk show hosts. There's not a lot of those jobs, and the skills that you develop for that particular job may not be broadly applicable. I don't know that Jimmy Kimmel could survive being an accountant, and I don't know that Stephen Colbert could thrive as a landscaper. They might be very surprising fellows and be able to do those jobs incredibly well, but they have a very narrow skill set even if they are the very best at what they do.

So you are 50+ and maybe you find yourself on the job market for the first time in a long time. In true GenX fashion, let's rage against that machine, people. This is not a time to do exactly what everyone is expecting. The world is upside down, it's on fire, no one knows what's happening next, it's chaos. So why are you going to go do the same thing that you might have done when you were 32 years old, worried about your mortgage and thinking the corporate ladder is going to save you from an endless stream of Nintendo N64 games and Totino's pizza rolls?

“But I only know how to do this one thing,” you might say. “I only know how to do medical coding,” or “I only know how to work in a factory,” or “I may only be really good at selling plumbing fixtures at wholesale.”

That's not a limitation, silly. That's a liberation.

Do you remember Thundarr, the Barbarian? He was that buff, blonde guy in some sort of hairy loincloth that had a sword that got its power from the sun or whatever. Well, he didn't have many job skills, and he hung out with some weird emo girlie and a wacky angry cat thing. I don't recall him ever saying, "I need vocational training."

I don't care if your single greatest professional achievement is being a greeter at Walmart or if you are a former hedge fund manager dude who thinks that a 10,000 sqft house is “cozy”. You have amazing skills that you can apply to people who are new to the situations in which you thrived, or you can apply these hard-won skills to brand new situations.

Old Thundarr's Sun Sword was magic. It is completely unclear how a comet passing between the Earth and the moon in 1994, as was the case in the mythical world of Thundarr, actually caused the world to become super-scientific, barbaric, and magical. But let's just roll with it. OK? His Sun Sword was sort of part of him, even though it was a separate thing. He was integral to making the Sun Sword work. It didn't work for other people. The power only showed up when he did…when he activated it.

Ready to Rock the Thundarr? (Note - we are not rocking the Casbah at this time. Soon, tho, - I promise.)

A long time ago, I worked with a guy who was a former science teacher who was downsized. He taught middle school and high school chemistry and knew his way around the periodic table, Bunsen burners, and Pyrex beakers. I worked with him at a florist.

Yes, so this guy who had summers off, a pension, and 20 years worth of teaching middle schoolers the difference between a mole (a unit of chemical measurement) and a mole (a blind whiskery rodent), turned his understanding of chemistry into creating thriving plants at a florist in Weymouth, Massachusetts. He always said he could have retired to Florida, but he didn't really like the idea of sitting in God's waiting room.

Another guy I know spent years and years working at a bank. He did all sorts of stuff with the retail IT systems at a bank. He wasn't a financial person, but in the course of a career, he picked up some things through osmosis and understood how a bank worked. When he, too, got downsized during the Great Recession, he looked for a new bank job for a couple of years.

I don't know if you remember, but banks were closing branches like crazy then, so there was a real lack of demand for in people who understood how bank IT systems worked. But he knew an awful lot about how banks worked & he started working with loan brokers to get their data set up better so they could generate more SBA loans through banks. He took what he knew about retail banking systems and turned it into a consultancy where he helped brokers create better applications.

Neither Chris nor Charlie had actually planned on becoming who they became after their jobs ended in their 50s. But they had skills that, like Thundarr's Sun Sword, were part of them.

In the case of Kris, the high school teacher, there was absolutely no connection between chemistry class and the florist until he made one. The greenhouse operations and plant sales at this florist took off because that guy could make a fuchsia more beautiful than you could ever imagine. Unlike the school system, he was granted an equity share in the business & when the owners retired, he became co-owner of this business that he stumbled into. It wasn't his plan, but it was his calling.

Charlie had specialized knowledge about retail banking IT systems. He wasn't part of the lending ecosystem, but he knew how banks collected and used data - the flows and formats were his native language. In 2009, the banking industry basically said, "Charlie, we don't need your expertise anymore. The world has changed, and you represent the way we used to do things." But he knew things & he was able to leverage that into a new career that paid him much more handsomely than his “career” ever did.

But I don't know about you, but I've never been a big fan of having a boss tell me what to do. If you spent a career either being the boss or being told what to do by the boss, do you really want to inflict that on yourself? If you're over 50, I know for a fact that you have exactly zero fucks to give. Maybe even negative fucks.

So don't put yourself into a position where somebody else is asking you to give a fuck. Think about what you know. Think about who you know. Think about how you can apply your Sun Sword in a way that's magical. There's a spot where you can take your knowledge, your expertise, your insight, your energy, your love, your enthusiasm and make it more valuable to somebody else than it's ever been to any employer that you've ever had.

At that point, you will know exactly where to give that fuck.

Pro Tip: When you are starting up a consulting gig, you might want to start a newsletter to show off your smarts and acquire new clients. You can do that with a dedicated newsletter platform like Beehiiv (what we use to create this newsletter), or you might want to try a more “marketing automation” type platform - Brevo is powerful and cheap.

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. Our ads are ads - duh. But some of the publishers that we link to in our content may offer us a commission if you buy something from them - that doesn’t influence what we link to, nor does it influence what we say about it.