The Second-Half Adventure:
Don't Just Retire-Use Your Time, Skills, and Resources to Change the World
By: Kay Marshall Strom
Published: October 2009
Format: Paperback, 208pp
ISBN-13: 9780802478757
ISBN-10: 0802478751
Publisher: Moody Publishers
"Boomers have never done anything in the same old way things had already been done before, so why would they start now? The fact is, they are already in the process of reinventing retirement", writes partner in Kline, Strom International, Inc., speaker, and prolific author Kay Marshall Strom in her inspirational and visionary book The Second-Half Adventure: Don't Just Retire-Use Your Time, Skills, and Resources to Change the World. The author, writing in cooperation with the humanitarian Finishers Group, shares stories and ideas of how baby boomers are working to change the world through missionary work, educational projects, business training, and humanitarian causes around the world.
Kay Marshall Strom understands the strengths that baby boomers have displayed all of their lives, and how those qualities can be applied effectively toward making the world a better place for all. These qualities include flexibility, creativity, focus, and organization. Combined with the vision that baby boomers possess, they can put their best ideas to work to helping build a better life for everyone. The author combines her Christian faith with her clear vision of an improved world, and believes fervently that retirement is simply an open door to a new adventure in one's life. Kay Strom points out that boomers have even transformed missions themselves from their older model of conversions to a new concept of improving people's lives through life skills training, improved health care, business mentoring, and educational opportunities.
Kay Marshall Strom (photo left) believes that our entire lives should have meaning, and be lived in a meaningful way. She shares her experiences, and how her Christian faith has helped guide her toward helping others around the world. At the same time, the author recognizes that the goals and aspirations of people's youth change over time. When a person's working career days end, and those goals have been achieved, there is no need to consider life and its wondrous opportunities to be over at all. Instead, Kay Marshall Strom encourages everyone to discover fresh goals and begin a new career as a person who shares their skills and knowledge with others. With these new ideals in place, the previous ideas that retirement meant an end are over. In their place, the author shares the new concept that another door has simply opened to a different life and fresh horizons to explore.
For me, the power of the book is how Kay Marshall Strom helps to redefine the entire concept of retirement away from that of being an ending, toward one of being a fresh beginning. She describes how the idealism and best qualities of baby boomers can become resources and guides for younger people at home and across the globe to improve their lives. The author knows from personal experience through her mission work, that one person can make a difference in the world, and change conditions for the better. She also includes several inspirational stories of how other baby boomers have initiated second career lives in changing the world. She provides practical advice as well, as to how to recognize and acknowledge personal strengths, experience and future goals, so as to create meaning in the second part of a person's life.
I highly recommend the life changing and retirement redefining book The Second-Half Adventure: Don't Just Retire-Use Your Time, Skills, and Resources to Change the World by Kay Marshall Strom, to anyone who seeks to start a new career, and to initiate or even reestablish previous world transformational aspirations. Instead of thinking of retirement as slowing down and no longer contributing to society in a tangible way, the author challenges baby boomers to rethink their life goals and purpose, and put their skills and inborn talents to work for a higher cause.
Read the paradigm changing book The Second-Half Adventure: Don't Just Retire-Use Your Time, Skills, and Resources to Change the World by Kay Marshall Strom, and reconsider your own ideas about what constitutes retirement. This book will inspire you to rethink your ideals, and to open new doors to exciting times ahead. Instead of withdrawing from the world, the author invites you to embrace it, and begin a second career as mentor, guide, and inspiration to people everywhere.
