If the excerpts were impressive, the book blew me away. I finally found someone who understands how to successfully manage the aging process.
Dr. Helen Harkness is well past retirement age but wisely refrains from revealing her chronological age. However, I can tell you that after meeting her at her office in Garland, TX, she functions as a dynamic, fifty-year old. She maintains an active professional schedule as president of Career Design Associates, Inc., which specializes in individual and organizational renewal through career and management training programs. She has been an English professor, department chair, director of adult education, acting dean of business development, and academic dean and provost at the University of Plano in the 1970s. When I last corresponded with her, she was off to Australia to deliver a keynote address.
Don't Stop the Career Clock is filled with meticulous research to support the author's thinking and beliefs about aging and working. There is something on every page worth highlighting. Particularly helpful for those vacillating between retirement and continuing to be productive in one capacity or another, is the chapter "Seven Steps for Resetting Your Career Clock." In this chapter, Dr. Harkness provides numerous exercises to help you think about what you are good at, and what you might really want to do with the rest of your life. The exercises alone are worth ten times the cost of the book.
What I personally found most helpful is the chapter "Learning a New Way to Tell Time." In it, Dr. Harkness says, ". . . because of our social and cultural expectations, we program ourselves to begin to fall apart at a certain designated age, and we oblige.". She then gives her "live long, die fast" contemporary model for aging which should give hope to anyone over age 65 who has bought into the myth that "it's too late for me".
If you are "middle aged" or older, this is a "must read" book. If you are younger, get a head start on designing a fabulous future for yourself. Don't Stop the Career Clock will show you how to do it.