Tell me about your vision. So my vision is that we will be a world connected in a much bigger way.
My vision is to stop wasting our most precious natural resources, which is not oil, coal, and gas.
It's our people. It's our experts. And so my vision would be to get more and more people
sharing their expertise through mentorship all around the world.
Wow. That's a very... not unique, I would say, but it's very profound. I really... if the impact
can be measured, you can measure the impact of what you're about to do. But Deborah, I think
it's going to change a lot of lives. It's going to help a lot of people. More so, it's going to
save people a lot of time with taking someone else's experience and bridging it in your own,
so you can save years of your life. I know someone has done that for me,
and I'm grateful for those experiences. Deborah, where did this vision of you coming in as a mentor
or connecting mentors to mentees come from? Well, I'm an applied developmental psychologist,
and I went into research looking at all... and I'm an aging specialist, and I looked at all of the
terrible things that none of us want to face as we age, and was studying those quite happily. And
someone came to me and said, why study aging? What benefit does it give us? And I said, oh, well,
we'll, you know, mitigate depression, and we'll find more cures for Alzheimer's disease and other
dementias, and we'll help people with frailty. And he said to me, so you're putting a band-aid
on the ultimate, which is all negative. And I thought to myself, is that really what I'm doing?
And so, I decided, you know, I decided to go take a look at this and say to my... and say,
what is it that I really am doing? Am I just giving myself a good time with this research,
or am I making a difference? And when I went back and started to look at some of the developmental
literature, I realized that I was looking at everything wrong. I was looking at our physical
trajectory, which is a steep incline when we're young, you know, we're born, and then we have a
steep incline, we walk, talk, do all the things, run fast. And then we hit a peak very early.
And then there's a slow, steady decline. And that's what most of us think of as aging.
But I never took into account the emotional trajectory. And that starts the same time
when we're born, and it goes up, up, up, up, up, and it never declines. And so I said,
I want to know more about that. So when I started to dig into it, I looked at Erickson's stages,
and I looked at all of the other research, the Harvard Longitudinal Study,
Laura Carson's work on happiness, all of these things. And I realized that
at the heart of it is connections, but we all are built to want to give back in midlife.
And there are three ways we can do that. One is volunteering, one is mentoring, and one is
philanthropy. And when I realized that, I thought, why wouldn't I want to study mentoring, because
you're giving a piece of yourself, it's like leaving a little legacy, a little tiny nugget
of legacy in somebody else that takes your wisdom. And I thought that's fascinating. So that's where
the vision came from. But ultimately, it went into practice when I started researching individuals
who mentor. So I looked at five-star generals and grandmas and everybody in between. And I found
that they all had the same story. They would cry when they talked about what impact it made on them.
So I had always been hearing about mentees and what mentorship does for the mentee. But I realized
there was a lot more going on for the mentors and the benefits are as huge or even huger for the
mentor. So that's really ultimately where the vision came from, was knowing that we have an
untapped resource that we can really utilize and it's free.
Wow.
Aging specialist, but I didn't even know there's a thing called aging specialist. And that's
good to know.
There are plenty of people out there.
Yeah. And then you talked about the emotional aging. I think that's the first time in my life
I've actually heard that term. Tell me more about that. I'm just very curious.
So when we're born, we all know the physical trajectory. That's like, we don't even have to
imagine that. What most of us don't think about is our emotional trajectory. So think about yourself
when you were two and you didn't get something that you wanted. What did you do? You might have
cried. You might have thrown yourself on the floor. You might have like wrapped yourself around a
parent's leg and said, I'll hang on until I get what I want. Whatever it was, it isn't what we do
now. If your boss says, hey, I need you to work a few extra hours. You don't throw yourself on the
floor and latch yourself around your boss's leg and say, no, I don't want to do that. We have an
emotional development that helps us to cope with things that come our way that when we're little,
when we're young, are really big deals. By the time we hit midlife, we become experts in all sorts of
problem solving and emotional coping. We become experts in relationships. We know how to navigate
tricky relationships. We understand the importance of intimacy and connection and having, you know,
few deep friendships rather than a whole lot of people who are, we're superficially connected
with. So that's really what our emotional trajectory is. And we can expect to be happier as we get
older. So when I teach students who are in college, I say to them, hey, you can all outrun me, but I'm
happier than you. And it's an interesting thing for them to hear because in the end, I don't think
that they care that they can run faster than me either. But most people, if you ask any parent,
what do you want for your child when they grow up, they say, I want them to be happy. And you can
expect that that will happen that on that emotional trajectory. That's entirely new information to me.
And I think, wow, that's a I'm so excited to dive deeper into this, Deborah. Oh, good. My jam. You
know, when I started in the field of aging, I tell people this, you know, if I went to a cocktail,
a cocktail party was the worst place for me because if I said I'm an aging specialist, people were
like, oh, no, I just got stuck with the most boring person in the world. How can I escape this person?
And so now if a person expresses interest, I'm just so excited and more and more people are.
Yeah, I wow. I don't know why people get bored with it. I think it's very, very exciting to know
about these things. So how did you get started on this journey of aging specialist and
becoming a mentor to other people when you started tapping into these things?
So, you know, I did not even know what a psychologist was. And I went to visit my
grandmother in an assisted living when I was a teenager and she wasn't behaving like herself.
You know, I had the most fun grandma. She was the type of grandma that you could go to her house and
you wouldn't have to pack clothes because she had clothes that fit us, you know, when we were young
and that we would be OK wearing out. We just had to pack shoes. That was it. And so when she wasn't
happy, she was angry and irritable and, you know, snappish. This wasn't the fun grandma that, you
know, we all love to see. So I went to the person at work there and I said, there's something wrong
with grandma. She's not behaving like herself. And they said, I know she's depressed, but don't
worry, we'll fix her. And I was like, how do you fix her? And what is depression? What are you
talking about? So they did. They fixed her. And I came back and I said, I want to do what you do.
I want to fix grandmas. And so I was working with kids at the time and I made a decision to switch
and and work with older adults. And that's how I got into research. But there wasn't anything about
the positive aspects of aging. It was all how do you fix a depressed person? How do you fix somebody
who's frail? How do you how do you fix all the things that we don't want to have? And then it
wasn't until I went to that dinner party and a person told me, you know, hey, why bother what
you're doing? Why bother putting band-aids on people? You know, tell me what I want to know.
Why do I want to get older? And that's when I made the switch and decided to start looking into
things that people have been looking at for a long time. But nobody gave it any real thought or
credibility. And so I've fortunately seen a lot of change in the field of aging where people are
starting to look at the positive aspects of it. And so when when I started to research and talk to
about 45 people about mentoring, everyone told me I was absolutely crazy for thinking about this.
They said nobody wants to mentor. It's a burden. Nobody wants to give back. They're, you know,
they've got their own stuff to do. So I was hearing from people the importance of getting a mentor,
you know, for a mentee. But what they were like burdening somebody. It didn't make sense to me.
So when I looked at what we can expect, there's a term called generativity. And that means that we
can expect to want to care for somebody without expecting anything in return. And anybody who's a
parent knows when they have a brand new baby, and it's crying and crying, you know, we love the baby,
you know, the baby isn't, you know, doing things for us, other than giving us a sense of love and
purpose and meaning. And that's what we get when we hit midlife, when all of our expertise has been
gathered. So every little box you check through life, go to school, go to college, buy a car,
buy a house, have a partner, you know, decide to have kids or not, whatever those boxes are. But
the time you hit midlife, you say, Well, what does this matter? Do I mean anything in the world? Do
I matter in the world? Do I have anything? Like, is this it? And that's when we hit the stage of
generativity, where we want to give back that stuff that we've learned, and that we've been
accumulating for so long. And it means something to us to have somebody else carry that it's a legacy,
it's a form of feeling, you know, like we're valued, we matter. So when I started to talk to
people about it, people said, I want to do that. I just don't have access to kids. So most really
high level people, and the mentor project really works with the top 1% of leaders in their fields,
they don't have access to kids, they can't go to a park and say, Hey, kid want to learn quantum
mechanics, it's not going to work well. So they said, I'd love to be able to get in front of kids.
And Bill Cheswick said, he was one of the fathers of the firewall. And he said, I want to get in
front of third or fourth graders before they're jaded and think they can't do science and math.
So he just didn't have an appropriate place to do that. So we formed a small group of people
who had worked in NASA, you know, Irene Yakbus, who was the lead on the mission to Mercury, my dad,
he was like, I'll do the website, you know, which is the core group of people who were like,
let's see what happens with this. And then it was a snowball within six months, we had a woman,
her name is Jen Snow, can't come on board, and we had 60 mentors. And so we went from 10 to 60,
and then to 80. And then, then we had a waiting list. And we just couldn't keep up with all the
mentors who wanted to become mentors with us for no pay, but just the ability to be able to give
back their expertise and see that it wasn't being lost. Because every person I talked to who was
hitting retirement, it was like a door was closing on a library full of information. And they were
feeling irrelevant. And, you know, they weren't feeling validated. And this was the way to do
that. And it's all free. So that's how we started. Just organically, we never thought we'd get past
10. We didn't ever expect to make money or to do anything big with this and it exploded.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking
forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get
more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to
participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time
building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.