Hello, this is Emma Ganon, and thank you for listening to this podcast. I just wanted to let you know that my new book, The Success Myth, Letting Go of Having It All, is out on May the 18th.

I think it's my best book yet, so I'm excited for it to come out. And the book unpicks the eight success myths from happiness to money, to productivity, to celebrity, to the idea of finally arriving, and how chasing a version of success that doesn't align with your values can really take you off track, and this book is about getting back to yourself.

Breaking free, finding a new way forward, and it's available on May the 18th. If you love this podcast, you'll love the book, and it's available soon from all good bookshops, so you can order yours now. I hope you like it.

Hello, this is Emma Ganon, and welcome back to The Success Myth Diaries. This is a brand new mini series to accompany my new book, The Success Myth, Letting Go of Having It All, which is out on May the 18th, 2023.

My book unpicks the eight success myths from happiness to money, to productivity, to celebrity, to the idea of one day arriving, and it looks at all the different ways that traditional success is marketed to us endlessly, and how it can take us off track to really what makes us feel personally fulfilled.

To celebrate, I'm interviewing a selection of people I admire on this topic about success, and I've asked them to come with their three success myths that we can unpick together.

Today's guest is Jeff Hamwey. He's a seasoned teacher, master facilitator, and chief innovation and education officer for the Modern Elder Academy.

The Modern Elder Academy is a program for people going through mid-life transitions. I love following their Instagram page, and they do amazing online events. They're on a mission to reframe mid-life from a crisis to a calling, and their purpose is to help people find a renewed sense of purpose, and really love what they do as they go into the next chapter of their lives.

I'll leave a link in the show notes so you can find out more. I so enjoyed hearing Jeff's myths of success, and it was super interesting all about transitions and making the most out of life. So I hope you enjoyed this episode.

So I'm really excited to have Jeff here with me, and we're going to dig into some of the themes around success, which just feels quite important at the moment, I think.

And you have so much wisdom and experience on this topic, so thank you for being here.

Before we dive into the three success myths that you shared with me, could you just explain a little bit for the listeners about the Modern Elder Academy?

Because I think it's so wonderful, and I'd love to hear in your own words, you know, why it exists.

Fantastic. It's really nice to be here. We're speaking my morning, your afternoon, so good morning, good afternoon.

Why did we set up the Modern Elder Academy? You know, it's actually really interesting process to sort of think about success in relationship to why we set up the Modern Elder Academy.

In 1905, we were expected to live to about 55. From 1905 to now, you can expect to live to about 76. This is data from the US, so I get it that it might not be the same world over.

But actually in the US, if you live to 55, you're likely to live longer than almost anywhere else in the world.

So what's happened is this massive demographic shift. People are living longer than ever before.

And it's not just aging longer, they've got healthy life spans for longer than ever before.

But I often think about it as, if 20 to 50 is one adulthood and 50 to 80 is another adulthood, we've added another adulthood in the last 100 years.

And we haven't really discussed what on earth to do with it, how to do it in a way that isn't necessarily the way that we've seen our parents or our grandparents grow older.

So if we've got a longer health span and a longer life span, how do we live that life longer? So the academy was really created to address that idea.

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