Attitude is everything
What "The Intern" can teach us about job hunting as older adults
Confession time.
I’ve been looking for a job for two years.
I started this newsletter a year ago because I needed advice, I needed support. And I wasn’t finding it. So I decided to create it.
And if I’ve learned anything in the last year, it’s that job hunting is almost totally about attitude. You can’t control the ups and downs of your job search - only your reaction to them, and how you move forward.
Attitude is everything.
Which leads us to “The Intern,” a glossy Nancy Meyers vehicle that nevertheless has a lot of things to say about how older people can navigate the world of work.
Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro) is a retired widower looking for something to do with his days. He gets a “senior intern” position working for hard-charging tech CEO Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway, playing the boss this time).
Ben’s new job is in the refurbished factory space where he spent 40 years managing the printing of phone books. (One of his young colleagues asks him, “What was your major in college? …Do you remember?”) While he starts as a fixture of his age that no one knows what to do with, he ends up being a trusted colleague and a confidant of his young boss.
What makes Ben a role model for those of us navigating the choppy waters of the job market after 50?
He’s adaptable. He leans into every challenge with openness.
He’s both a mentor and a mentee. He doesn’t mind learning or taking direction from people less than half his age.
He’s observant. He notices things other people don’t, and acts on those things.
He’s confident. He knows his experience can help, and manages to communicate that without alienating his young colleagues.
He’s calm. Nothing ruffles him, even when things start going off the rails.
Ben is great!
But here’s the problem with Ben: he’s not real.
He’s a character in a movie. A Nancy Meyers movie at that - stories of people who live curated achingly upper-middle-class lives. So, he never raises his voice. He never worries. He never says the wrong thing. At one point in the movie, Jules literally says to him, “How do you always know just the right thing to say?”
He knows what to say because it was written for him.
We are not Ben. We get frustrated. We get depressed about rejection. We question where we go next.
So as much as we can learn from Ben in terms of taking best advantage of our opportunities, I think the bigger lesson is: we need to be OK with our imperfections. We need to be gentle with ourselves.
We’re not perfect. No one is. (Except Ben. But again, he is a fictional character.)
We will have setbacks. We will have bad days. (I’ve had a lot of those recently.) But the possibilities are also endless.
We don’t have Nancy Meyers writing our lives for us. But we don’t need her. We have decades of experience behind us and all kinds of success in our future. Like Ben, we can use that experience and savvy to our benefit.
If I sound like I’m trying to psych myself up, well then guilty. But I want to do it for you, too.
Onward and upward.
See you next week!
What are you struggling with right now? Let me know in the comments, or just reply to this email. If you are going through it, so are a lot more people. And I would like to write about it.
I often wish I had someone writing lines for me! Although I'd pick Jane Austen (see my latest post, https://flowerchild.substack.com/p/jane-austen-and-alfred-hitchcock). I did enjoy that movie when I saw it on a plane a while back, maybe because I was already feeling old in the workplace surrounded by so many young people in tech, and then at clean-energy startups. But despite the fact that I'd love to have a personal writer whispering my lines in my ear, you're right — in job hunting as in everything else, attitude is everything and it's the only thing we can control. It's a process, though, seemingly a lifelong one!