Can’t afford to retire? He helps boomers with reinvention
It took a mid-life master’s degree — and repeated firings from jobs — for John Tarnoff to discover he could break out of a career spent mainly in the film industry.
Now he’s on a mission to help fellow baby boomers cope with the daunting challenge of finding fulfilling work in their 50s, 60s or beyond.
In his recently released book, “Boomer Reinvention: How to Create Your Dream Career Over 50,” Mr. Tarnoff taps his own experiences of being fired from a series of positions at film studios. He also owned a tech startup that went bust.
Now 65, he works primarily as a career coach for older workers and doesn’t plan to retire until he’s in his 70s.
Based in Pasadena, Calif., Mr. Tarnoff also heads industry relations for Carnegie Mellon University’s master of entertainment industry management program, where he teaches and counsels graduate students.
In that role, he is advising students at the opposite end of the career cycle than boomers.
“I’m working with people on the front-end of their careers, helping position them for their jobs, while in my boomer reinvention practice, I am working with folks at the other end of the age spectrum, helping position them for what will likely be their last jobs,” Mr. Tarnoff said in a phone interview.
Students in the CMU program spend their first year studying business management at the university’s main campus in Oakland. Then they head to CMU’s Los Angeles campus in the second year to be taught by entertainment professionals, and participate in internships and projects.
Mr. Tarnoff has decades of insider industry experience to share.
Much of his career from 1974 to 2010 was spent as a production executive and producer on feature films including “Diner,” “The Year of Living Dangerously” and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”
By his calculations, he was fired from seven out of 18 — or nearly 40 percent — of the jobs he held in Hollywood.
Inspired by the storytelling aspect of CD-ROM games in the 1990s, he helped launch a tech company that used animation for marketing and branding. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, his venture failed and he decided to get a master’s degree in spiritual psychology at the University of Santa Monica.
“I didn’t know if I wanted to be a psychologist, but I wanted to learn more about myself,” he said.
His studies helped him “pivot from a career oriented in scripts, materials and ideas to an orientation on people, potential and what makes a person tick behind the creativity.”
A stint at DreamWorks Animation saw him in a job that included internal training, talent development and academic outreach. After six years, DreamWorks was heading in a different direction and once again, Mr. Tarnoff found himself looking for a job.
That’s when he started speaking about and coaching people in career reinvention.
He realized that many boomers don’t want to — or frequently haven’t saved enough money — to stop working when they reach their early 60s.
His advice, in a nutshell, is to reconcile all the positives and negatives of your past career and determine what you can offer that’s unique to a business or customer.
For most people, that means “questioning the assumptions and beliefs and habits you’ve built up over time,” he said. “Just change your thinking by 20 or 30 degrees to see other possibilities.”
His book, published by Reinvention Press, includes detailed worksheets and exercises to reframe job
and career expectations.
For example, list disappointments and letdowns, such as not getting a promotion or seeing a colleague leave with one of your accounts. Then write down what you learned from those experiences and how those lessons fit into your job goals going forward.
Besides his own story, Mr. Tarnoff shares the tales of seven individuals who have reinvented themselves — including a mother of six who started a career in marketing and public relations in her 50s, and a former colleague from DreamWorks who was laid off and later took a job as an assistant kindergarten teacher.
While a traditional career coach might assess clients through tests and recommend they pursue specific jobs like bus driver or bank teller, Mr. Tarnoff sees reinvention as a process of digging deep inside yourself.
“After 40 years of working, you know better what you can do and what will motivate you. The career is inside you. You just have to figure out what it is.”