The traditional three-stage life: education, work, retirement is dead. And if you’re still building your business or professional practice on that outdated model, you’re setting yourself up for a painful awakening.

When I first picked up by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, I expected another optimistic take on extending our golden years. What I discovered instead was a profound rethinking of how we structure our entire careers, businesses, and professional identities.

As someone who coaches helping professionals to build sustainable, purpose-driven businesses, I found this book’s insights both challenging and liberating. Here’s why every entrepreneur needs to understand the implications of the 100-year life and how it might completely transform your approach to building your business.

The New Longevity Economy

Let’s start with the core premise: Many children born today have a good chance of living to 100. Even those of us in our 30s, 40s, and 50s will likely live significantly longer than our parents. This isn’t just a demographic curiosity; it’s a fundamental restructuring of our professional timelines.

Gratton and Scott lay out a compelling case that longer lives require a complete reimagining of how we think about careers, education, savings, and relationships. The math simply doesn’t work otherwise. If you live to 100 but save for retirement as if you’ll live to 80, you’ll run out of money. If you stop learning in your 20s but work until your 80s, your skills will become hopelessly obsolete.

As I worked through these projections with my coaching clients, a sobering realization emerged: Many helping professionals are still building businesses designed for the three-stage life, when they’ll actually need to thrive in a multi-stage one.

Personal Reflection: From Linear to Cyclical

This shift from linear to cyclical career planning resonates deeply with my own journey. After establishing a successful corporate career, I didn’t just “pivot” once; I’ve continually reinvented my professional identity, culminating in founding Oneness to help others navigate similar transformations.

What I’ve discovered is that reinvention isn’t a one-time event but a recurring necessity. The professionals who thrive aren’t those who execute a single perfect career change but those who develop reinvention as a core competency. This maps precisely to what Gratton and Scott describe as “transitional skills”: capabilities specifically designed to help navigate the increasingly frequent periods of change.

The Five-Stage Life and Entrepreneurial Planning

The authors propose that instead of three life stages, we’ll increasingly experience five or more:

1. Education/Exploration
2. Independent Producer (early career)
3. Corporate/Institutional (mid-career)
4. Portfolio (multiple income streams)
5. Retirement/Encore (potentially part-time work into 80s)

What’s fascinating is how many entrepreneurs are unconsciously stuck in stage-two thinking: building businesses designed for independence but not necessarily sustainability or long-term growth. They’ve escaped traditional employment but haven’t fully embraced the implications of a multi-decade entrepreneurial journey.

The Entrepreneur’s Longevity Challenge

Here’s where things get particularly interesting for the helping professionals I work with. The book points out that longer lives require significantly more financial resources but also create space for multiple professional reinventions.

This presents a fundamental challenge: How do you build a business that can evolve through multiple iterations while providing the financial foundation for your extended lifespan?

The answer lies not in building a single “forever business” but in developing what I call “strategic adaptability”—the ability to maintain core purpose while continually refreshing your business model, offerings, and even identity in response to changing conditions.

Tangible Assets vs. Intangible Assets

One of the most profound insights from “The 100-Year Life” concerns the changing nature of assets. In the traditional three-stage model, tangible assets (savings, property, investments) were paramount. In the multi-stage life, intangible assets become equally critical:

1. Productive assets: Skills, knowledge, reputation
2. Vitality assets: Health, wellbeing, relationships
3. Transformational assets: Self-knowledge, diverse networks, openness to experience

For entrepreneurs, this framework provides a powerful planning template. Instead of focusing exclusively on building business value in financial terms, the multi-stage entrepreneur must simultaneously develop:

• Expertise that evolves (productive assets)
• Sustainable work patterns (vitality assets)
• Adaptive capability (transformational assets)

Personal Reflection: The Intangible Portfolio

This framework fundamentally shaped how I built Oneness. While I certainly care about financial sustainability, I’ve been equally intentional about creating business systems that support my health, developing a diverse network that spans industries, and cultivating the self-awareness needed to recognize when it’s time to evolve.

I’ve noticed that many of my most successful clients take a similar approach; they’re not just building businesses but comprehensive asset portfolios that include their intellectual property, professional relationships, and capacity for continuous reinvention.

The Implications for Business Models

Perhaps the most actionable part of “The 100-Year Life” involves rethinking how we structure our careers and businesses. The authors suggest several strategies particularly relevant to entrepreneurs:

1. Exploratory Investments

In a multi-stage life, periods of exploration and reinvention become essential investments rather than risky detours. This might mean:

• Taking sabbaticals to develop new skills
• Experimenting with adjacent business models
• Investing in new knowledge domains even when the ROI isn’t immediately clear

I’ve implemented this thinking by dedicating 20% of my professional time to exploring emerging fields adjacent to my core expertise. This “exploratory portfolio” has repeatedly yielded unexpected business opportunities that wouldn’t have emerged from linear growth alone.

2. Regenerative Work Design

If you’re potentially working into your 70s or 80s, sustainability becomes non-negotiable. This means designing business models that:

• Don’t rely exclusively on your personal energy or time
• Create value through systems and intellectual property
• Allow for periods of higher and lower intensity

With my coaching clients, we specifically design business models with “regenerative capacity”: the ability to create value while simultaneously replenishing the entrepreneur’s physical, mental, and creative resources.

3. Portfolio Careers

The authors make a compelling case for portfolio careers; multiple professional activities that provide both diversified income and varied experiences. For entrepreneurs, this might mean:

• Building multiple revenue streams within your business
• Maintaining complementary professional activities (speaking, writing, teaching)
• Creating investment income alongside active business income

Personal Reflection: Strategic Diversification

This concept of portfolio careers directly influenced my approach at Oneness. Rather than building a one-dimensional coaching practice, I’ve intentionally developed multiple, complementary offerings: one-on-one coaching, group programs, digital products, and thought leadership that strengthen each other while providing both financial and intellectual diversification.

Reimagining Professional Identity

Perhaps the most profound implication of “The 100-Year Life” concerns how we think about professional identity itself. In a multi-stage life, identity becomes less about a fixed professional label (“I am a consultant”) and more about underlying capabilities and purpose (“I help professionals navigate transformational change”).

This shift from fixed to fluid identity creates both challenges and opportunities:

The Identity Challenge

For many entrepreneurs, especially those who’ve built personal brands, the prospect of evolving beyond their current identity feels threatening. They’ve invested years becoming known for specific expertise: won’t changing dilute that equity?

The authors suggest the opposite: In a longer life, clinging to a fixed identity becomes riskier than developing an adaptable one. The key is finding the balance between consistency and evolution.

Identity as Narrative

The solution lies in reconceiving identity not as a fixed label but as an evolving narrative. Rather than defining yourself by what you do today, you define yourself by the themes that connect your various professional expressions over time.

I’ve found this approach particularly powerful in my work at Oneness. When I help professionals articulate their “identity narrative,” they discover they can evolve their offerings while maintaining authentic connection to their core purpose and values.

Personal Reflection: Narrative Continuity

This principle transformed how I think about my own professional evolution. Rather than seeing my shifts from corporate strategist to executive coach to business strategist as disjointed moves, I now recognize them as expressions of an underlying narrative about helping individuals and organizations align their actions with their deeper potential.

This narrative continuity has allowed me to evolve my business model repeatedly without losing the trust of my audience or clients. They recognize that while my methods may evolve, my fundamental commitment to helping professionals find strategic clarity and authentic success remains constant.

Practical Applications for Entrepreneurs and Professionals

The insights from “The 100-Year Life” translate into several practical strategies for entrepreneurs:

1. Design for Iterations, Not Endpoints

Instead of creating a business plan aimed at a single endpoint (like a specific revenue target or exit strategy), design for multiple iterations and evolutions. Ask yourself:

• How might this business evolve through multiple 5-7 year cycles?
• What core capabilities would enable various pivots as conditions change?
• How can I create structures that support periodic reinvention?

2. Invest in Transformational Capital

Deliberately build the assets that facilitate successful transitions:

• Develop diverse networks across multiple industries
• Create regular practices for examining assumptions and spotting emerging trends
• Build financial reserves specifically allocated to future transitions

3. Practice Identity Expansion

Actively expand how you think about your professional identity:

• Experiment with articulating your purpose in progressively broader terms
• Identify the transferable principles behind your current expertise
• Practice “identity play” by temporarily adopting different professional perspectives

4. Create Regenerative Business Models

Design your business to sustain multi-decade engagement:

• Build systems that create value without constant personal energy expenditure
• Develop intellectual property that generates passive income
• Create natural alternations between high-intensity and recovery periods

5. Cultivate Intergenerational Intelligence

In a multi-stage life, you’ll increasingly work across generational boundaries:

• Develop relationships with both older and younger professionals
• Study emerging cultural and technological trends
• Create business models that leverage intergenerational collaboration

Personal Reflection: The Practical Impact

These principles directly shape how I structure both my own business and my work with clients at Oneness. When helping professionals design their business models, we specifically plan for multiple iterations, create buffers for transitions, and build regenerative systems that can sustain decade-spanning careers.

One client, a therapist transforming her practice into a broader wellness business, initially planned for a single transition. By applying the multi-stage framework, she instead developed a 20-year vision with four distinct evolution phases, each building on the previous while creating space for emerging opportunities.

The Entrepreneurial Advantage in the 100-Year Life

While the 100-year life presents challenges, entrepreneurs have distinct advantages in navigating this new landscape:

1. Autonomy and Adaptability

Unlike those in traditional corporate structures, entrepreneurs can more easily:

• Adjust their work patterns as needs change
• Integrate new skills and offerings without institutional permission
• Create customized transitions between stages

2. Identity Ownership

Entrepreneurs generally have greater control over their professional narratives:

• They can evolve their positioning more fluidly
• They can test new identities in limited ways before full commitments
• They can maintain consistency in purpose while evolving in expression

3. Multiple Value Creation Pathways

Entrepreneurial ventures offer diverse ways to create and capture value:

• Through active work (services, products)
• Through intellectual property (systems, content)
• Through business equity (ownership stakes)
• Through investment of business proceeds

Entrepreneurial Freedom

This entrepreneurial advantage reflects my experience at Oneness. By building a business with flexible structures and multiple value-creation mechanisms, I’ve created a platform that can evolve with changing market conditions and my own changing interests and capabilities.

More importantly, I’ve witnessed how this approach liberates my clients from the constraints of traditional career thinking. By embracing the multi-stage mindset, they move from anxiety about “making the right move” to excitement about crafting an evolving professional journey aligned with their deepest values and aspirations.

From Longevity Challenge to Opportunity

“The 100-Year Life” presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge lies in recognizing that traditional approaches to career and business building are increasingly mismatched to our longer lifespans. The opportunity lies in consciously designing multi-stage careers that create sustained value, meaning, and financial security.

For entrepreneurs specifically, this means:

1. Recognizing that your current business model is likely one stage in a longer journey
2. Investing deliberately in the intangible assets that facilitate successful transitions
3. Creating regenerative business structures that can sustain multi-decade engagement
4. Conceiving your professional identity as an evolving narrative rather than a fixed label

Final Reflection: The Entrepreneurial Journey

At Oneness, this multi-stage perspective fundamentally shapes my approach to helping professionals transform their expertise into sustainable, purpose-driven businesses. Rather than merely helping them execute a single transition, I focus on building their capacity for continual evolution; the true requirement of thriving in the age of longevity.

The 100-year life isn’t just about living longer; it’s about living more adaptively, purposefully, and strategically across an extended professional journey. For entrepreneurs willing to embrace this perspective, longevity becomes not just a challenge to solve but a canvas for creating businesses that evolve as naturally as we do.

How are you designing your business for multiple stages rather than a single destination? Share your thoughts in the comments.

At Oneness, I help professionals transform their expertise into businesses designed for sustainable evolution. If you’re navigating your own professional reinvention, let’s connect about creating a strategy that aligns with both your immediate goals and your longer journey.