Ellen Goodman

Ellen Goodman is headed straight for the semicolon, that pause between her long career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist – and whatever comes next. Goodman has just told her editor that she will wrap up her column at the end of this year.

“I love the phrase ‘encore careers,’” Goodman said in a funny and deeply personal keynote that opened the Purpose Prize Summit. “Life is a stage. We are all, always, only in a stage of life. The words are full of showmanship and applause.”

In talking about her own plans, however, she said, “The phrase that kept running around in my head was, ‘I’m letting myself go.’”

The negative connotations – fat, lazy, out of shape – make the phrase all the richer. “I love the idea of reclaiming that phrase,” she said. “After all, where will you go when you let yourself go?”

Goodman’s own journey from Then to Now started with a small group of women – including a politician, an anthropologist, a college president, a nonprofit leader, a professor and others – who began to meet for weekend retreats twice a year. Some have made their encore transitions; all are committed to having an impact on society.

“We are grandmothers and writers, wives and social activists, caregivers and independent women, eager for time and yet mindful of the uncertainty of life, trying to slow down and trying to cram in more.”

Goodman called herself a slacker in the transition department, just entering the semicolon pause. But she is already a social entrepreneur, having brought together doctors, policymakers and media people to jump start a movement to normalize conversations about the end of life and the choices about end-of-life care by framing the question, “Have You Had the Conversation?”

But if social innovation is going to be the framework for the new stage of life, Goodman suggests, a few obstacles will have to be cleared out of the way. Age bias, internal and external, saps the self-confidence needed to re-up for a turn as social entrepreneurs. The workplace, too, is constraining, and needs to be rethought to make time more flexible. And “we need mentors as well, because I can tell you that even the most powerful CEO may have a crisis of confidence when entering a new world.”

Without such a transformation, she said, there looms an unattractive alternative. Many older Americans may view longevity with fear, she warned, and “go into a long, narrow protective crouch against anxiety, fear, loss,” resulting in a “me-first” politics that exacerbates tension between the generations.

In that context, she said, “The Purpose Prize gathering is indeed revolutionary. … We have engaged a problem that has no name and begun to wrestle with it. Here in the semicolon, I am looking at you as my mentors. The problem and the gift of longevity will be solved by the people who name it and wrestle with it. Who reinvent age.

“Those of us who let themselves go. And go for it.”

Click here to view the video of Ellen Goodman’s speech at the Purpose Prize Summit.