I had read an article last year which proposed an interesting premise: once you reach 60, you acquire the right to make the statement “I’m getting too old for this sh!t”.
I whole-heartedly accept. “Hey honey, can you clear out the gutters?”; “Let’s get the ornaments off the tree and back into the attic.”; “Employee reviews are due by the end of the month.” My response: “I’m getting too old for this sh!t”.
In 2016, after 18 years as a member of Vistage (an executive peer advisory group), I became a Vistage presenter on the topic of Digital Marketing. With over 32 years of experience in the B2B world under my belt, I was hoping to share my experience with those who were challenged by the digital revolution.
There was a time when I used Letraset, photostats, a T-square, and a triangle to 
create mechanicals that would then be used to print catalogs. I remember my first desktop publishing system — a Mac SE20 — with Quark, Illustrator and Photoshop installed. When done, you put your output onto a SCSI drive and sent it to the print shop. This was a significant shift in the world of marketing collateral prep.
Being there when everything flipped has given me a leg-up on my contemporaries. As my positions changed and I moved up the corporate ladder, I always had the full range of Adobe products on my computer allowing me to maintain my skills in digital media. Additionally, I got onboard with social media with AOL in 1996. Digital marketing? Been there, done that.
So an odd thing happened after my second presentation to a Vistage group of C-level execs. Part of the process is that the group members follow up a presentation with reviews of the speaker. In order to maintain your spot as a presenter, you need to maintain a minimum rating average of 4 out of 5. One member of that group rated me a “2” with the comment that I was too old to be presenting on digital marketing.
My initial response, “I’m getting too old for this sh!t. I was doing Social Media when this guy was still in cub scouts”.
But, I’m not quite ready to admit I’m over-the-hill.
Of course, there are younger experts in social media but there are few out there with over 30 years of B2B experience in medium-sized businesses who also understand the difference between a hashtag and a keyword.
So maybe I’m not “too old for this sh!t” — just yet.
Need more information on what I can do to help you? Contact me.
