September 2018

Why I’m a Lifelong Learner

When people ask me what holds the 3200 members of CoveyClub together, I say one thing: We all share a deep curiosity about the world, about how it works, and about how our interaction with it changes (or doesn’t!) with age. In fact, I’ve had many women tell me that the first thing they relate to on the site is the CoveyClub tagline “Where lifelong learners connect and grow.”

“I’m a lifelong learner!” many of you have told me by email or in person. Well, so am I.

When I was moving up the ladder, I knew it was time to move on to another job when I had stopped learning. Then I would pick my head up, look around for some brilliant boss who was doing something different, and I’d try to land a job with them. My lust for learning made me feel like I was the youngest person in every organization no matter how many birthdays had gone by.

So after five years as the Editor-in-Chief of More, I decided to look around and see what was next. I quickly realized that I had worked for the best of the bosses out there already. “What’s happened to this business?” I asked one of my good friends. “There’s no one to learn from anymore!” That’s when she looked at me quizzically and said, “That’s because you have become the boss that everyone comes to learn from.”

I was stunned. How could this be? I was 55 on the outside but felt 25 on the inside. Then I began noticing that many of my former employees had begun to refer to me as a “mentor” in our conversations. Somehow I’d (deliberately?) missed that I’d grown up!

My love of learning sent me back to school in my fifties to get a master’s degree in sustainability management (only two more courses to go!). It’s what drives me to travel to places that put butterflies in my stomach, and it’s what pushed me to start CoveyClub. And I may have met my match: The learning curve on a start-up is overwhelming, infinite — and completely energizing.

This focus on learning brings me to the how-tos of style in the September issue of TheCovey. It is deliberately packed with useful stories you can learn from — whether it’s a new way to get rid of peach fuzz in Carmindy’s “10 More Fabulous Anti-Aging Beauty Tricks” or how to know when to hire a personal stylist in “Do Your Clothes Make You Look Old?” or how to store your most precious clothing in “Museum-Quality Storage for Your Clothes.” (FYI: The personal stylist piece came about after an event I did at a law firm with a designer friend; so many women in the audience were confused about how to update their look and wanted to know if and how they should hire a stylist that I made it a point to have TheCovey research those answers.)

In fact, September is such a great time for taking stock of your personal style (hey, we deserve a new notebook and pencils, too!) that we’ve connected with my old friend Tim Quinn, the celebrity makeup artist for Giorgio Armani cosmetics. He’s joining us on Thursday, September 20th, at Bloomingdales in NYC to teach us all of his fantastic anti-aging beauty tricks. Join us and learn how to cover up your under eye without it looking cakey, how to line your eyes in a way that won’t smudge, and how to create a youthful glow. I’ve had access to zillions of makeup brands over the years, but Armani is the one I keep buying for myself.

You can purchase tickets to the Armani/CoveyClub event here.  I hope to see you and meet you there.

Have a great September, and let me know how you keep learning by posting replies to our CoveyClub Facebook page.