It was reunion time for the “Today” show when Matt Lauer, Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley got together to report the news. It was the second time the trio was reunited recently, as the first time was on Monday, Dec. 30, 2013, when they joined weatherman Al Roker for a back-in-the-day themed show.
Pauley was also there to promote her new book “Your Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life,” which is about people rediscovering themselves in their latter years. The book is based on Pauley’s occasional “Today” show segment entitled “Life Reimagined.”
In an interview with USA Today, the veteran newscaster said while writing her book and doing the “Life Reimagined” segments, she learned that many Baby Boomers still want to work after retirement, but they want to do something completely different.
“What many of us are looking for at the other side of retirement is more work, but a different kind of work,” she said. “It’s not starting up a new career necessarily, though some will. But we do want to stay productive, and some will need or desire a paycheck. Maybe we want to do it without a boss. There’s a lot of research about people our age as entrepreneurs.”
Additionally, Pauley said that she’s okay with not being that famous anymore, due to the fact that fame means something entirely different these days.
“Fame used to be something one earned after decades of achievement, exposure, expertise,” she noted. “And today it’s happening so young for people like Justin Bieber. I had young fame and I was uncomfortable with it because it didn’t feel earned. I’m not apologetic anymore, at 63. I’m fine with it [and] comfortable talking about ‘I used to be famous’ without the self-consciousness of the 33-year old me.”
And Pauley said she likes the term “Reimagined” over “Reinvention,” when it comes to deciding what to do after retirement, because the latter sounds like you only have one shot at figuring out what you want to do, which isn’t the case. And she pointed to her own career as a good example.
“I’m still on television but the stories I tell are very different, and the way I tell them is very different,” she said. “While I have partners, I don’t have a boss, and I really like that.”
Image via Wikimedia Commons