Last month, I wrote about the beautiful friendships that have enriched my purposeful third act. Thank you to so many of you who shared your own stories. They spoke to the enduring power of human connection.
As I write this, I’m in Halifax visiting my dear friend of more than 35 years, Bruce. We don’t see each other nearly often enough, but when we do, we simply pick up where we left off. The older I get, the more I value friendships like this. They create something increasingly precious: a space where you can think out loud, celebrate successes, admit doubts, challenge each other’s thinking, and simply be yourself. We often talk about psychological safety. Friendships like these have been creating it for decades.
Those reflections on friendship intersect with another theme I’ve been thinking about.
I’ve had conversations with accomplished professionals who are looking for ways to continue to make a contribution. They aren’t trying to recreate the intensity of earlier chapters of their careers. Most are looking for purpose, flexibility, learning, and opportunities to make a meaningful contribution. The hardest part isn’t financial. It’s feeling that their experience is no longer seen.
I’ve noticed this theme gaining momentum on LinkedIn. One person I follow is Andrew Middleton. A recent reflection put into words something I’ve been hearing in many conversations:
“You start to notice… you can become invisible. That can sting, even if you tell yourself you’re thick-skinned enough not to care.”
His words echo conversations I’m having. These are accomplished professionals from many fields who have led organizations, solved difficult problems, developed people, exercised judgment, demonstrated strong emotional intelligence, and made significant contributions over decades. Yet repeated rejection, or simply being overlooked, can quietly erode confidence. No matter how accomplished we are, we all want to feel seen, valued, and needed.
I also follow Annie Coleman, who challenges organizations to think differently about experience in an age of AI. I couldn’t agree more. This edition includes an article that draws from her work.
At a time when organizations are navigating AI, demographic change, and skills shortages, we’re leaving wisdom, judgment, leadership, social capital, critical thinking, and empathy on the sidelines.
What a waste.
Encouragingly, some organizations have created more flexible ways for experienced leaders to continue contributing. Deloitte and Knockri have done that for me, enabling me to continue making an impact and learning without returning to the intensity of a full-time executive role.
I truly hope more organizations think and act this way. Longer lives require a redesign of career systems, not just minor tweaks. We have far too much wisdom, experience, and human potential sitting on the sidelines.
I have long respected Annie Coleman’s work to change how we think about longevity, age, and contribution.
Annie is the UK-based founder of Realise Longevity and a Stanford Center on Longevity Ambassador. She previously served as Group Head of People & Culture (CHRO) at UniCredit. Through her writing and advocacy, she challenges a stubborn assumption in many workplaces: that age means decline. In her recent article on why employers need to stop disregarding older workers, she makes the case for seeing experienced talent as capability, not cost. Research supports this shift too. MIT recently found that certain cognitive capabilities, including vocabulary, general knowledge, comprehension, and math, do not fully peak until our 50s.
So why do so many systems still treat age as diminishing value?
A few years ago, after being interviewed in a Toronto Star article on ageism and women at work, I shared this reflection: “There’s so much left for us to give. It’s really about redefining age as a time of potential to be unlocked, as opposed to something of declining value.”
That is also why the Purposeful Third Act movement matters.
For me, P3A is not about personal reinvention; it is about rediscovery of who I’ve been and who I want to be more of. It is about changing the story we tell about later life: from exit to contribution, from decline to possibility, from being done to continuing to drive forward.
Annie’s work is part of that movement: seeing longer lives not as a problem to solve, but as human potential to unlock.
When people see what later life can hold, it becomes harder to dismiss what age can offer.
Spotlight: P3A Role Model
Anil Arora: A Third Act Built Through Discovery
Anil Arora’s purposeful third act is full. He teaches, advises, consults, serves on boards, mentors emerging leaders, writes, speaks, and still makes room for family, health, learning, and new interests.
After retiring as Chief Statistician of Canada, Anil did not begin his third act with every step mapped out. Instead, he gave himself permission to explore. He tried teaching, returned to consulting, joined not-for-profit boards, and pursued interests that had been harder to fit into a demanding full-time career. And not surprisingly for a statistician, Anil describes this as a period of “discovery and data collection.” He is learning more about what is out there, who he is now, and who he wants to become.
I love that framing. There is freedom in knowing that a purposeful third act does not have to arrive as a finished plan. It can take shape as you go, through curiosity, experience, courage, and following what gives you joy.
Anil also measures success differently now. He considers whether he is learning, taking intelligent risks, sharing what he knows, and helping others reach their potential. He pays attention to how he spends his time across intellectual, physical, family, leisure, and spiritual pursuits.
“Time is now my most prized asset,” he says.
Anil’s story is a wonderful reminder that our third act can hold contribution, learning, joy, and plenty of room to keep becoming.
(And given how much Anil values his time, we feel especially fortunate that he chooses to spend some of it with us on the P3A Advisory Board 😊)
Earlier this month, my dear Aunty Rozina passed away in Vancouver. As I’ve reflected on her remarkable life, I’ve realized how she influenced my own. I’m grateful that, not long before she passed away, I was able to share some of these reflections with her, including how often her older brother, Papa (my father), spoke about her pursuit of higher education, her accomplishments, and the courage it must have taken to leave home and build a life so far away. She told me, more than once, how much it meant to her to hear that.
In 1962, after completing her A-levels in Tanzania, she secured a full scholarship to Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the world’s premier women’s colleges, established as a women’s counterpart to the Ivy League. At 19, she was one of only two students from Africa and one of only two of Indian heritage. I still find myself thinking about what that must have been like. She was an outsider by many measures, yet she didn’t simply navigate that environment. She thrived in it.
For the next four years, she didn’t return home. Instead, during school breaks, she travelled across the U.S. by bus and car and spent a summer in Mexico City, where she learned Spanish. She embraced the world with curiosity, confidence, and a willingness to venture far beyond what was expected.
I was only a toddler when she left for college, so I knew her first through the stories I heard. Years later, after we had both made Canada our home, I came to know Aunty Rozina personally as someone who was comfortable in her own skin, unabashedly wicked smart, real, and lived life on her own terms.
Her example helped shape the woman I have become. She didn’t wait for permission to pursue the life she wanted. By living it, she showed me that it was possible to step beyond traditional boundaries and imagine a different future.
We often think our greatest influence comes from what we say. But sometimes it comes from how we live. Aunty Rozina’s courage, independence, curiosity, love of spirited debate, playfulness, and the confidence to be herself continue to inspire me.
We miss you, Aunty Rozina.
I pray that your soul may rest in eternal peace. Amen.
Leadership and Work in an AI World: More Human, Not Less
How Can AI Support Young People’s Learning and Development?
With my fellow speakers, Benoit Hardy-Vallée, Alysse Anderson, Maggi Xu, and Farwa Kazmi, and moderator, Rachel Bruce, at the JA Canada panel Elevating Human Capabilities in a World of AI
Junior Achievement (JA) helps young people build the skills, confidence and entrepreneurial mindset to thrive in work and life. Through hands-on learning in entrepreneurship, work readiness and financial health, JA Canada reaches young people across the country as part of a global JA network serving students in more than 100 countries.
As a supporter of JA Canada and a member of the Board of Governors of JA Worldwide, I have seen how thoughtfully JA is approaching an important question: will AI help young people build their capabilities, or will it do too much of their thinking?
JA is making a deliberate design choice: use AI as a coach, not a co-pilot. As part of JA Boost, its AI-powered learning platform, JA is developing two AI mentor-agents to support its entrepreneurship programs:
JA Pitch Master helps students improve their pitch presentations by providing feedback on structure, clarity, engagement and delivery.
JA Biz Master guides students through business and financial planning, including market sizing, pricing, forecasting, and other core aspects of launching a business.
What matters most is what these tools do not do.
They do not write the pitch or build the business plan. Instead, they ask questions, challenge assumptions, and guide students through complexity. Students remain responsible for the ideas, the decisions and the answers.
This distinction matters far beyond JA. Every organization adopting AI is making a similar choice: Will AI replace people’s thinking or will it help strengthen and amplify uniquely human capabilities?
The technology may be the same. The way it is designed and used determines the outcome.
Through its AI Ambassadors program, JA is also drawing on early adopters from its global network to experiment, test ideas and share learnings. This is a very JA approach: global ambition shaped by people closest to the learners.
Young people will spend their working lives alongside AI. Building AI fluency is essential. That includes preserving the productive friction of learning: questioning, revising, testing assumptions, practising, and, yes, sometimes getting it wrong.
The real test is not whether people can use AI to generate answers. It is whether it helps us become better thinkers and strengthens our capacity to question, discern and make decisions using sound judgment.
Builders of Inclusive Prosperity
Who Gets to Shape Our AI Future?
Professor Taylor Owen and August Hochman, who shared their perspectives on AI at a recent Forward Global webinar
One of the things I value about this phase of life is the opportunity to keep learning from people doing important work.
Two people who have recently expanded my thinking are Professor Taylor Owen and August Hochman. I heard them speak at a recent Forward Global webinar on AI safety and risks. Both are focused on ensuring AI serves humanity, but they approach the challenge from different directions.
Taylor is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communication at McGill University and founding director of its Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy. His work emphasizes the importance of giving people meaningful agency in how AI is governed. That idea is reflected in Gen(Z)AI, an initiative led in part by the Centre that brought together 100 young Canadians to deliberate on AI policy and share their recommendations with federal government decision-makers.
August, founder and CEO of Ark Philanthropy, has made me think differently about the role philanthropy can play. Donors can move early, direct resources toward overlooked risks, and support work that governments or businesses may not yet be positioned to pursue.
Together, Taylor and August have reinforced my belief that shaping an AI future that serves humanity will require more than better technology or smarter regulation. It will also depend on who gets a voice, which risks receive attention early, and whether we invest in the public’s capacity to make wise choices.
And that is part of inclusive prosperity: ensuring that AI does not widen income inequality but helps narrow it, that its benefits are broadly shared, and that more people have a meaningful role in shaping the future.
