Mauro Guillén: Why You Should Think Healthspan Not Lifespan

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Mauro Guillén. He's currently the Dean of the University of Cambridge Business School. He's an esteemed keynote speaker, a frequently engaged consultant, and a recipient of prestigious awards including Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. His insights and commentary are highly sought after by major media outlets, including NPR, Bloomberg, and CNN.
In addition to these roles, he's an accomplished author. Among his influential books that have garnered worldwide recognition is 2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything. His most recent literary endeavor, The Perennials: The Mega-Trends Creating a Post Generational Society challenges the conventions of generational laborers such as Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. He proposes that discarding these dated classifications is key to unlocking our collective potential.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. I'm thrilled and honored to have on my podcast, Mauro Guillén. With no further ado, let's begin this thought-provoking discussion.
The title of your book is just great, maybe thank you, Gina Pell, but two of you have coined this term that's going to be used.
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah. It may also be that you would like to become a perennial, so I don't know whether it's self-interest or it's just admiration.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, it really is admiration for the title. I hate to burst your bubble. I'm not that deep a thinker. The first example you bring out about BMW having five generations, that is a stunner in and of itself. But then I tried to do the math and I don't understand how the math can work because if the youngest person at the BMW factory is twenty, and the father is forty, or the mother, and then the next generation is sixty, and then the next generation is eighty, five generations means there's a 100-year-old relative working. Am I doing the math wrong? How can five generations be working at BMW?
Mauro Guillén:
Yes and no. You are doing the math correctly, but you are assuming that only people who belong to the same family or the same lineage are working there. Generational groups sometimes are only ten years, so it's people that were born in a given decade. You see what I'm saying?
The requirement here for working at BMW and counting generations is not that grandparent and grandchild and everybody in between are there. Some of these generations, like Millennials and others, they're defined as people born between certain years. And so the interval is typically ten years or twelve years or something like that, and that's how in the end, you can get to five generations.
Guy Kawasaki:
You are testing your readers.
Mauro Guillén:
It's a very good question. It's a very good question, but you made an assumption that is not necessary. Okay? Good catch. Good catch.
Guy Kawasaki:
I passed the test. Did any other podcaster ask you that question?
Mauro Guillén:
No, no. Good catch. You pay attention. Absolutely.
Guy Kawasaki:
What has been the benefits to BMW of these five generations working at BMW?
Mauro Guillén:
What we know is in general, that work teams that include people with diverse backgrounds, and that diversity could be ethnic diversity, could be diversity in terms of education or training, or it could be diversity in terms of age, tend to have higher productivity and higher creativity. See, this has been found in many settings, but in this particular case, what they found was that having the generations together essentially increased productivity and also satisfaction at work.
Again, they seem to enjoy the fact that they were different people there with different capabilities because we develop different kinds of skills at different ages, and so people with different ages or belonging to different generations can bring to the table different kinds of skills. It can be experience or it can be technical expertise, or it can be the latest knowledge about computers, whatever it is. But essentially that's what happened.
Guy Kawasaki:
Has there been any kind of negative effect like fifty, sixty year old person saying, "I refuse to work for someone thirty years old who has only been at BMW for ten years and I've been here for forty years. I'm not going to take orders from this punk."?
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah, no, absolutely. The problem with all of these multi-generational settings is that sure, there are advantages to be obtained, but there's also the potential for intergenerational conflict. And not only that, also it's "Why don't you work harder? You have to pay for my healthcare and pension. I don't want to work here and pay taxes and then go into the healthcare and pensions." The potential for intergenerational conflict is always there, so you need good managers to essentially set up the right conditions so that then you only obtain the benefits, and you try to avoid the shortcomings of a multi-generational workplace.
Guy Kawasaki:
I was thinking about this. If the President of the United States is eighty-four years old, you could make the case that the federal government is a multi-generational organization of head of its time.
Mauro Guillén:
It's a hyper multi-generational. Yeah, right now. Remember, we also have the Supreme Court. We've always had the Supreme Court where appointments are for life. Some justices just go on forever, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So sure, actually in the government, if you include all of the branches, that's where you see I think the most extreme example of let's just say a piece of the government, the White House. In the White House now, you have a lot of generations, but remember they start with interns who could be like twenty years old in the White House, and then you have the President who is in his eighties. Absolutely.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't think we should get started discussing the Supreme Court because that's not an organization I hold in high regard right now.
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah, I don't think anybody does really.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can you explain what the traditional perspective is, like the four stations of life?
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah. Once upon a time, about 140 years ago or so, some geniuses came up with the idea of having universal schooling. So everybody had to go to school. And also the idea roughly about the same time that everybody should get a pension after working for so many years, that everybody should have a right to a pension.
Once those two innovations became the norm in the world, and they spread from one country to another slowly, but by 1960 or so, every developed country in the world for sure, every emerging market, also not the poorest countries, but every emerging market as well had universal schooling and all these pensions.
Once set, those two things, that they should happen at certain ages, then you're dividing life into before you go to school, that's when you play, you're very little, then you're a student in school, possibly university, then you work. That's the third stage. And then finally you're entitled to this pensions.
Not only entitled, actually by law you are in many countries obligated to retire. Not in the US, but in many other countries in the world, you're obligated to retire, and that's the fourth stage of life. We've been living life in that way, and it's too compartmentalized, it's too regimented, it's just too strict, and it doesn't allow for deviations.
If you take the wrong turn or you are unlucky in life and you don't make it to the next stage at the right time, then you're going to be permanently disadvantaged. I think that's the problem with this, but also in this day and age in which we have technological change and we have so many things just shifting, it's too rigid. It's not flexible enough to enable people to do the kinds of things that they would like to do. That's the business of the four stations of life.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that the original reasons for coming up with this have largely disappeared, and now we're preserving something that is no longer necessary, or positive, or desirable?
Mauro Guillén:
Oh, absolutely. Let's talk about universal schooling first. Universal schooling was created to help people learn, but also to essentially come up with a large enough number of industrial workers for manufacturing that would be disciplined. Remember, school was not only about learning, it was also about discipline. And teachers used to be very strict about all sorts of things. Then all the expansions, the logic for them at a given age, at a mandatory age in particular, has also broken down because now we live much longer. Not only that, we stay healthy much longer than a hundred years ago.
Somebody these days who qualifies for a pension, let's say at age sixty-four or sixty-five, that person is still in very good physical and mental shape, could continue working. In fact, so many people prefer to continue working, especially in the United States when they're allowed to do so, because retirement I think, has been completely oversold.
When people go into retirement, they get cut off from social networks at work, they become isolated, they start watching more TV because people, when they retire, we know this from research, instead of doing great things like volunteering or spending time with the family or with friends, what they do is they spend more time watching TV or they spend more time with screens, with their phones and so on and so forth.
In other words, it's not the best lifestyle for retirement. I firmly believe in response to your question that the motivations, the reasons for having those two things in place have nearly disappeared.
Guy Kawasaki:
You touched on this very briefly just now, but could you explain the difference between lifespan and health span? And what are the trends for both?
Mauro Guillén:
Absolutely. This is very interesting. Thank you for asking that question. The lifespan is life expectancy, how long we are expected to live, and this has been increasing for the longest time, obviously, as we have managed to control disease, and we have come up with medical procedures and with medications and all of that. The health span is how many of those years of life expectancy that we have are going to be in good health, mental and physical health, so that we could be active, we could work, or we could travel, and so on and so forth.
Typically, of course, the lifespan is longer than the health span by about, I would say on average maybe eight years. Normally the average American, for example, the last eight years of his or her life, or their life, would be not in perfect health. So in some kind of a situation in which they're limited, they cannot do whatever they want any longer.
Now, listen to this, Guy, this is really interesting. The United States is the only country in the world, I've checked this many times, it's the only country in the world where the life expectancy has grown faster than the health span.
In other words, in the US we have added more years of life, but the years in which we remain healthy, have stagnated, haven't grown as quickly. In all other countries in the world, both things have been growing at about the same pace, but not in the United States. So we're adding years of life, but not as many years of healthy life. In other words, the growth in the health span has been slower in the United States than the growth in the lifespan, and it's the only country in the world in that situation.
Guy Kawasaki:
And why?
Mauro Guillén:
Because I think we eat too much processed food. We have a lot of people who unfortunately have excess weight. We have a lot of people who don't follow a healthy lifestyle, and that takes a toll.
Modern medicine has given us the possibility of extending life or making it possible that we don't die from certain causes, but because we have in America, the average American has these very unhealthy habits, then sure medicine keeps us alive, but not necessarily healthy, not necessarily 100 percent healthy so that we can travel, and we can do everything we do. It's the only country in the world where this is going on.
Guy Kawasaki:
So are you telling me that the last eight years of my life is going to suck?
Mauro Guillén:
If you're the average person, yes. But I don't know whether we're average a lot. I don't know enough about your lifestyle. All age is not a row of roses. But if we follow a healthy lifestyle, we can enjoy a lot of years beyond let's say age seventy or eighty being in good shape.
Guy Kawasaki:
Would you describe the structure of a multi-generational work team? How does this work?
Mauro Guillén:
It is a team in which as you said before, it could well be that a person of a given age is reporting to somebody who is younger. What we know from research is that people are very accepting of that. Of course in Silicon Valley, which you know very well, this is not unusual that younger people are the bosses and older employees are the subordinates.
But of course, in traditional companies like GM, or you name them General Motors, or any of the old great old American companies, it was extremely unusual that a younger person would be the boss. That's one way in which these teams operate.
But more importantly, young people and people with more experience on the job bring different kinds of things to the table. They may bring technical expertise or they may bring experience and so on. Therefore, in that diversity, that's where you find that the roots of that higher productivity and higher creativity that I was referring to earlier.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's assume that's going to happen. I just have a list of areas that I would like you to explain the implications of multi-generational, longer lifespan, longer health span, and what it means for society. The first one is education. How should education change knowing that this is what teams will be like?
Mauro Guillén:
Let me put it this way, education used to be something like a gift, learning that we would experience when we were young and we were supposed to learn at school or university everything that we would need in order to be able to work for forty years or so, and then we would retire. But technological change has rendered that model implausible for the future because we see all of these workers who are now being replaced by machines or by AI, they need to be retrained. So learning now has to be something that happens at every stage of life.
Now, intriguingly technology is also coming to the rescue, so it's causing the problem, but it's also creating the solution because I think online learning will be the way in which we can have very large numbers of people engaged in lifetime, lifelong learning throughout their lives. In so doing, of course, they may be taking classes with people from other generations.
So that's the multi-generational learning that I talk about. This is already happening. I mentioned in the book that upwards of 30 percent right now of the American population is engaged in some form of online learning. Typically, that takes place with other people of different ages. So this is already going on and the percentage will keep on growing.
Most companies right now that have more than 500 employees, they offer lifelong learning for free for their employees because they have realized how important it's for their employees to continue learning. This is something that is already in motion. I think new technologies, new entrepreneurs who have launched educational ventures online, especially online, I think are facilitating this process big time.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you have kids?
Mauro Guillén:
Of course, two of them.
Guy Kawasaki:
How old?
Mauro Guillén:
One is twenty-four, the other one is twenty-two.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so they're about the right age. Maybe if they asked you as they're in college or senior in high school, "Dad, you're the expert, what should I be studying? How do I prepare for this world? How can I study for a job that doesn't exist yet? Dad, give me the parameters. What kind of education should I get?"
Mauro Guillén:
First of all, I don't think my daughters would ever refer to me as an expert and would want my advice on that issue because they would prefer to make up their own minds. But if we're talking about other people’s kids. I get this question frequently, and what I always tell both the parents and the kids, it's something very simple, which is, look, you are going to have to switch jobs very frequently. You probably will have to switch careers once or twice because now we live very long, and things are changing so quickly.
What you need to do is to learn the most important skills that underlie everything else. What are those? The ability to read and to write very well, and the ability to handle numbers and abstract concepts very well. There's a number of majors in college that prepare you for that. There's a number of high school programs that prepare you for that.
But in addition to that, it's not just technical knowledge or technical skills. What I also told them is that you need to be good at social skills because they're increasingly important in the workplace. What do I mean by that? The ability to work in teams, the ability to communicate, the ability to negotiate, the ability to resolve conflict, and also emotional intelligence. Those are social skills and they happen to be as important as technical skills, I think for the future.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, what if your hypothetical kids or daughter say to you, "Dad, I don't need to know how to read and analyze and manipulate data nearly as well, because there's this thing called artificial intelligence, and so it'll write for me, it'll speak for me, it'll generate content for me. Dad, your advice is already wrong."
Mauro Guillén:
It's outdated.
Guy Kawasaki:
So what's the answer to that?
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah, no, I get this very frequently, both from my kids and from my students. "You're too old to understand what's going on." AI certainly is going to change quite a few things here and there, but Guy, we are going to have to learn how to interact with AI. I don't think AI will just do its job by itself. We're going to have human beings.
What we're seeing at least in these initial stages is that workers, like you and I, we use AI tools, and we tell the machine, "Did you do that correctly?" We prompt it. We try to essentially lead it to where we want it to go. It's a fantastic tool. I'm not saying that we're not going to be using it. I'm using it almost every day. But I think we will need to learn how to do that.
In order to learn how to interact with artificial intelligence, I think we will need to have the skills that I mentioned earlier. We will need to understand what artificial intelligence is all about. We will need to understand the technical aspects of the problem that we're trying to solve, and we will also need to have those social skills that I told you about earlier.
Guy Kawasaki:
How does multi-generation, health span, lifespan these changes, how does it affect the careers of women?
Mauro Guillén:
Women, I think have the most to gain from the breakdown of the model because for them, these four stations in life were very limiting. Women, because in addition to all of the other clocks that we have in life that you have to complete high school by a certain age, that you have to do this and that, they also have the biological clock. If they want to have children, that also imposes some kind of a constraint.
I think that the ability now that I think shifting away from the old paradigm into this perennial way of life that I talk about in the book is going to be very helpful to women because if we're talking about enabling people to have several careers, if we're talking about enabling people to learn at different stages in life, that's only going to help women, which now oftentimes lose their possibilities for promotion if they stop to have kids.
If we look at professional progression in life in a different way, I think women, more so than men I would say, stand to benefit more. Although, men will also benefit from a departure from the old paradigm.
Guy Kawasaki:
Except that men are still making the rules.
Mauro Guillén:
Correct.
Guy Kawasaki:
A woman is saying, "Okay, so I can have kids, I can stop out. That's career. I had a whole career before I had kids. Now I'm coming back." It's career number two or three. But aren't men still making the hiring decisions? And you cite in your book that with the same qualifications, when you're able to infer the age of the applicant, 40 percent more callbacks for a younger person than an older person. So who's making that rule?
Mauro Guillén:
Obviously, it's always the same people, but if we give women more opportunities, then eventually there will be more women in those positions of power, in those positions of the decision making. It's very difficult to change the top of the pyramid by going directly to the top of the pyramid.
But if we start in tradition change from the bottom of the pyramid, then we will see that it's just a matter of time. Hopefully, a relatively short period of time that we start seeing more women in positions where they can make decisions than they can change things.
Guy Kawasaki:
What's the impact of this perennials on marketing?
Mauro Guillén:
Marketing has always had a very strong ageist bias. In other words... And it was for a good reason, I guess for many decades. The largest segment in the consumer market was people in their twenties, thirties, and forties, because we had a baby boom, and therefore younger people were numerically more important than older people. All marketers, advertisers, public relations folks, they were always addressing the needs and the aspirations of the younger age groups.
But now beginning in roughly speaking about ten years from now, first with Japan and then China, then Europe, then the US, then Latin America after that, what we're going to see is the largest segment in the consumers market is going to be people above the age of sixty, because we have all of those baby boomers becoming older, and we're seeing that there's fewer babies are being born.
So, more people at the top of the age pyramid, fewer at the bottom, and marketers will have no option but to recalibrate their messages because otherwise they're going to miss out on the largest segment in the market. It's just as simple as that. That's going to be the biggest change.
In addition to that, let me add one thing that I think is really interesting is that influencers have become, in this age of social media, so important, influencers. So far up until maybe five years ago or so, we primarily had influencers that were from the same generation as the people who were being influenced. But we're starting to see more cross-generational influencing, consumers being influenced by people who are of a different age group or generation.
That I think is really interesting because it will at some point then create a lot more conversions in terms of all of these marketing and all of the associated processes of introducing new products and tailoring them to the needs of different groups.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, are you saying that young people are influencing old people or old people are influencing young people?
Mauro Guillén:
Both. But the most striking is the second alternative, meaning older people influencing younger people. This is really changing very quickly, and it's something that the marketers didn't see coming.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, so this is the so-called Grand-fluencers?
Mauro Guillén:
Grand-fluencers, exactly right.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So I'm sixty-eight, so I'm a Grand-fluencer. You're telling me I'm influencing people in their twenties, or I can?
Mauro Guillén:
You can, exactly. And people in their twenties are increasingly more willing to accept influences from people who belong to other generations. Again, marketers have assumed that most of the influence in what's happening inside generations within a generation, but not across.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is good. I'm going to raise my prices.
Mauro Guillén:
Absolutely.
Guy Kawasaki:
How are we going to be defining retirement in this perennial world?
Mauro Guillén:
I think retirement will be a far more flexible stage in life in which whole array of possibilities will be available to us in part thanks to technology. Most people in retirement would like to do something that earns money for them, but they don't want to go back to the office. They don't want to commute. They don't want to work so many days a week or so many hours. They want something more flexible. And of course, gig work or certain categories of gig work or freelancing come handy.
But I think we should take this one step further, which is that companies should also see that they can use a few hours of people above a certain age because that's all they want to work, and this would engage with them and retain them as providers of certain kinds of services to the company.
I think it's not just gig work or freelancing. There's so many other things, or systems, or possibilities that could be put in place and made available to people above a certain age. That's going to help everyone. It's going to help them stay connected. It's going to help them not fall into this terrible thing of loneliness during old age.
It's also going to help them make a little bit of money, because remember that the average American doesn't save enough for retirement. In general, I think it's going to propel the economy forward. I think it's going to have so many positive implications.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's pretend that Joe Biden calls you up and says, "Mauro, I need some help. You are advocating that this is multi-generational perennials. All these factors are happening. So how do I fix social security?"
Mauro Guillén:
You fix social security by encouraging people to save more, that's for sure. But if that's hard or they haven't done it, so it's just something that you cannot address anymore because they're already aged fifty-five or sixty or seventy, then you give them more opportunities to be engaged with moneymaking work related activities under flexible arrangements. That's what you do.
More importantly, you also make learning available to people of all ages because you see, maybe somebody wants badly to retire because they don't like what they're doing right now at work, but if they had the possibility of learning a new trade or learning a new skill that would enable them to have a second career, maybe they would be very happy and they would take that opportunity.
I would tell Joe Biden, including your appeals for voting during the campaign, that you will facilitate both work options for people above a certain age, but also learning options for everybody throughout their lives so that they can reinvent themselves, especially in response to technological changes and other disruptions in the marketplace. But also, because people do get tired of doing one thing and they want to switch on to something else.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hear you. I understand that. I think that's a great idea.
Mauro Guillén:
Where's the money?
Guy Kawasaki:
But Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are going to say, "Oh, he's trying to make you work longer." That's how they're going to spin that, right?
Mauro Guillén:
But this is only optional. Look, first of all, Americans tend to retire at a later age than most other people in the world, except for the Japanese. The Japanese have the highest actual retirement age in the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah. But then the Americans come second. Yeah, Japan, these people stay working until very late in life.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, shit. I'm Japanese American.
Mauro Guillén:
I know. That's why I'm bringing up Japan all the time. I know. Yeah, you have the worst combination possible. The Japanese and the Americans, they keep on working for much longer than people from other countries in the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's in my DNA. I cannot help it.
Mauro Guillén:
It is in your DNA, unfortunately, yeah. But the point here is that this is optional. If people want to work, keep on working, then I think we should have opportunities for them to do so. More importantly, if people want to switch gears, they want to switch careers at some point, maybe when they're fifty or they're fifty-five, we should also give them the opportunity. That typically would entail learning, and hey, this is where online technology comes to the rescue, because it is so much cheaper and so much more convenient. You don't have to leave your house.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's one part of your book where I felt like such a loser, which is I don't speak a second language. Can you explain why speaking a second language is so important?
Mauro Guillén:
I think it's important because it rewires the mind. You see, with language comes culture, comes a way of thinking about the world. Language itself is a cultural act of communication, but there's all of these assumptions that come with it. When you learn another language, you're learning another culture as well, and that helps you put your own culture, your own language in perspective.
Let me give you an example. Mathematicians tell me, this is about mathematics, that when they read an article, let's say, written by a Russian mathematician is an article written in English, published in English, and then they read an article about mathematics published in English, but written by an American, that they can tell who is the American and who is the Russian mathematician.
Because even though both are in English, it is reflected. The way you try to prove the theorem is somehow shaped by the culture, by the way that person thinks. If that person is thinking in Russian versus that person thinking in English, although the articles are then translated and published in English, it does make a difference. Good mathematicians can tell who is the American and who is the Russian behind that paper. It's really interesting. It's fascinating.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Mauro Guillén:
Do you believe that we are hardwired? I do believe that we are hardwired. Our brain is hardwired. There is some structural thing there, and language provides that because that's what we learn when we are babies. We grow up and we are learning how to speak. First, we learn how to listen and understand, and then we learn how to speak. And that hardwires us for the rest of our lives. Therefore, the way we think, the way we react to stuff in the world is very much driven by our culture and by what we learned when we were kids.
Guy Kawasaki:
At sixty-eight, it's too late for me then?
Mauro Guillén:
You can make an effort. You can make an effort. You seem to be somebody who is very driven by what you want to achieve in life, so if you make an effort, you can learn new skills. And among those new skills, you can learn a new language or a second language. Frequently, people say that those who know one country know no country, because you cannot put things in perspective. How can you say that the United States, if you don't know well any other country in the world? You need some comparison. You need a benchmark. You need to gain perspective.
Guy Kawasaki:
There was a scary period where the Vice President of the United States could have been someone who didn't even have a passport. Can you even imagine that situation?
Mauro Guillén:
That's very scary.
Guy Kawasaki:
No kidding. As you look back, what has caused age discrimination?
Mauro Guillén:
I think, this is human beings, and this applies to me as well, so I'm not just talking about human beings out there. I think that we have these unconscious biases. We tend to make attributions. We tend to make assumptions about other people based on the way they look, based on some external signs that we can see, whether they're black or white or brown, whether they're old or young, and so on and so forth. We make inferences based on those observations.
Oftentimes we assume, "Oh, black, this person probably behaves in a certain way, whereas a white person behaves in a different way." If it's old, we also attribute certain kinds of behaviors or certain kinds of attitudes to them versus younger people.
I think it's a human tendency as we always have to make a very big effort to avoid these unconscious biases as discrimination is in part overt, open, but it's also subconscious. There's all of this research that shows that people fall one time and again into the trap of subconscious or unconscious biases and discrimination. It's something that we have to fight very hard if we want to reach equality sometime in the future. You see a woman and a man, I didn't mention that example, and we make attributions about perhaps he's a doctor, but she's something else. We all make these attributions consciously or unconsciously.
Guy Kawasaki:
Have you figured out any practical ways to reduce that effect in yourself?
Mauro Guillén:
I think education, I think the social exercises you can go through that alert you to some of those unconscious biases, and I think they do work because all we need as human beings is the tool to help us see beyond our instincts and try to understand the complexities of the situation. Of course, also try to learn how to avoid simplifications like all women behave this way, or all white people behave that way and so on.
Guy Kawasaki:
Not to go down a rat hole, but I can only imagine how you feel about some place's desire to stop learning about black history or slavery or something. I don't know what the logic is, to protect the psyche of white people. How can you justify not wanting to learn about the bad things that happened in America too?
Mauro Guillén:
Oh, absolutely. I think it's very important to understand the past with all of the great things about it, and also all of the problematic things about it, especially if they continue to have an effect today because I don't think anybody can claim that today in America, you cannot see the long-term implications of slavery. There are long-term implications of such a brutal system that lasted for so long. We are in Juneteenth Week this week, so I think this is an important reflection to go through.
We're all humans, and when humans get together with other humans, as we have this tendency to get together with other people who are like ourselves, and then once we start going down that path, then the end result could be, it's not always, but could be racism, for example, or could be violence, and so on and so forth.
I think we need to accept first that we are humans. We have to have the humility of acknowledging that we are humans, that we're subject to all of these tendencies, and that we need to actively work towards overcoming that shortcoming as human beings that we have. It's just a fact of life that we have these tendencies.
Look, I think every country in the world or the people from every country in the world are racist. I think historians have documented this really well. It's not just the United States, so I don't think we should feel any different than other countries in the world. What we should do is try to work at becoming less racist.
Guy Kawasaki:
I could make the case that the same thing applies to ageism. If you only work with Millennials, guess what?, You're not going to foster a multi-generational appreciation. Same thing.
Mauro Guillén:
Oh, absolutely. They generate into the worst kind of ageism or discrimination by age. By the way, the same is true of people in their fifties. If they work, they interact only with other people in their fifties they're more likely to develop this kind of discrimination against other age groups. It works both ways, unfortunately.
Guy Kawasaki:
Some of the fifty, sixty year old people that I know, they are convinced that Millennials are lazy, shifty, lack of attention span, discipline, unwilling to work hard, and they're only hanging around themselves.
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah, but the accusation of laziness has been made against every younger generation. It's not just against Millennials, because the people who are now in their sixties, the Baby Boomers, they were also accused of being lazy by the greatest generation, the people who fought World War II. And they couldn't believe that the Baby Boomers, all they wanted was to go to Woodstock and enjoy rock music and smoke pot. They thought they were complete idiots and they weren't willing to work hard. So this accusation of laziness has been levied against every generation all the time. This is a story that repeats itself. And yes, it is a stereotype. It's clearly a stereotype.
Guy Kawasaki:
Basically, nostalgia is overrated. Is that what you're telling me?
Mauro Guillén:
The way I would put it is that age is something to be reckoned with. It is a reality that we age, we grow older. But what is not natural, what is not a given, what is not something that is in inevitable is that we look at people of other ages in a way that is stereotyping. That doesn't take into account the complexity and the individuality of every individual human being. We tend to generalize. And so we say Millennials are this way, or Baby Boomers are that way. We tend to generalize, and that tendency that we have to generalize, I think is very damaging because at the end of the day, we're not recognizing the value of each individual human being.
Guy Kawasaki:
So now a last question, that same question for various groups. Knowing what you know and thinking what you think and your ability to see what's happening, let's say that these various people are listening to this podcast. What's your advice, first of all, to a teenager listening to this podcast?
Mauro Guillén:
Right now is you're going through a difficult time because biologically your body is changing, but unlike teenagers in the past, you don't have to make decisions whose consequences are going to last a lifetime because you see everything is changing so quickly. What I advise you to do is to take a deep breath and think about what you want to do next, have a plan for the future, but a flexible plan for the future, and think that things are going to be shifting.
And therefore, the single most important thing for you to do is to learn how to be flexible, how to be adaptive to change. Don't stress out about trying to choose your career for the rest of your life because you have probably eighty or ninety years of life ahead of you.
Guy Kawasaki:
But you know that every tiger mom is now shutting off my podcast right now.
Mauro Guillén:
I know, but you're going to ask me about them too.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Okay. Good question. So now I know what you tell the teenager. What do you tell the parent?
Mauro Guillén:
That they need to understand that the world that their son or daughter is facing is completely different than the one they were facing. In particular, the rate of change has changed. Things are shifting very quickly these days, and therefore, the rules of thumb that they used when they were younger to make decisions perhaps are no longer valid, that they need to let their children develop their own strategies for coping with this brave new world in which everything is changing very quickly. That's what I would tell them.
Guy Kawasaki:
What kind of rules of thumb are you talking about?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, the rule of thumb, for example, that you need to make up your mind relatively early on if you want to be successful in life, and that you need to essentially be very disciplined and pursue whatever it is that you want to be, your dream very forcefully, as if there's no tomorrow without thinking that in this new world that we have now, probably what you need to do is to make decisions for the next ten years or fifteen years, knowing that in ten or fifteen years, you'll probably have to switch careers, or you need to switch the way in which you think about your life. That's the practical implication.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm a parent of four kids. I understand that. I actually think my four kids have taken that to heart, maybe too much. But anyway, what's the flip side? You're not saying, okay, you should be lazy, you should not study.
Mauro Guillén:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
So what's the balance?
Mauro Guillén:
The balance is by any means you want your kids to work hard because life is hard, and they should fend for themselves or learn how to fend for themselves, that the parents are not going to be there forever. You do want them to work hard, but you want them to work smart, not just hard.
Right now, as things are evolving to think as if we need to make decisions today, when you're twenty years old or eighteen years old for the next sixty years, I think that's a huge mistake. That's a big mistake because you cannot assume that being an engineer and working as an engineer is going to mean the same thing in twenty years from now, especially with AI. Maybe the job of the engineer will be completely different in twenty years from now.
I can tell you the work of the job of a doctor will be completely different in twenty years from now as we incorporate AI into medicine. We're going to have to be so much more flexible, and we cannot assume that you can be a doctor just by going to school for six years when you are very young and be able to practice medicine forever that way. It's not going to be the way things are going to turn out.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, someone who's married with young children?
Mauro Guillén:
Stimulate them. Enjoy that time because it's, at least in my experience, those were the best years of my life when my kids were small and they were totally dependent on me, but I was also dependent on them, so my life revolved around them. I had to oftentimes get up in the middle of the night, and there was always something that required me to leave work, maybe to take them to the doctor or whatever.
So enjoy that period of time and try to stimulate them so that they learn various things. As they grow older, let them make decisions that perhaps will need to be different than the ones that you made at the same age, because the world is very different, and it's becoming even more different than during your childhood. That's what I would tell them.
Guy Kawasaki:
How about someone forty, fifty at the prime of her life, making lots of money, lots of responsibility. Life is great. What's your advice to that person?
Mauro Guillén:
Be on the watch because maybe something will happen tomorrow or in a year from now that may make you redundant at work. Your company may think that they no longer need you, or perhaps there's less of a need for people with your skills. Try to anticipate those waves of change. Try to be open-minded about the fact that you're only forty years old, so maybe before you are no longer able to work, you'll have to retrain yourself. You have to learn something new.
Try to maintain that spirit of, "I'm still twenty years old, the rest of my life is still to be written." Don't think that every chapter in your life has been written. You still have a long ways to go for possibly another forty or fifty years, and maybe you will need to adjust and change, switch gears in a dramatic way.
Guy Kawasaki:
How about an empty nester or retired person?
Mauro Guillén:
For the empty nesters, and I'm an empty nester now, try to find something to fill your life, because obviously when the kids leave the home, it's pretty darn hard. You have all of this time suddenly and you don't know what to do with it, and you feel that you've lost something that is irreplaceable. But again, think that you have twenty or thirty or even forty years ahead of you, and there will be more changes. Maybe you need to go back to school and so on and so forth. But for people who go into retirement, it's great if that's what you want, perfect.
If you start feeling lonely, if you start feeling that you're anxious because maybe your savings won't last long enough, think about what is it that you can do. There's so many other opportunities now through gig work, through freelancing.
Technology is coming to the rescue. Maybe you can do something that will keep you entertained and at the same time will help you make money. There's a whole new world there of opportunities, I think, for people at that stage in life to explore, so go ahead and explore it.
Guy Kawasaki:
From his academic achievements to his media presence, Mauro has proven to be an exceptional thought leader. His ability to blend sociology and business economics has provided valuable perspectives on the intersection of demographics, economics, and technology. Remember, stay curious and embrace the ever-changing world around us. Thank you Mauro Guillén for joining us.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable people. And now, I would like to thank the Remarkable People team: Jeff Sieh, Peg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magaña, Fallon Yates, and last but not least, the drop-in Queen of Santa Cruz, Madison Nuismer. By the way, for the past two years, I've been pronouncing her last name wrong. I've been saying “Nismer”. It's Nuismer. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.