Baby Boomer Secrets of Power

What younger generations can learn from Boomer self-confidence.

If you want to understand why Baby Boomers have been and remain so influential and dominant in our world, baptist pastor John Piper’s famous “seashells” sermon from 2000 will help explain it. Trust me, this is relevant even if you aren’t a Christian.

Piper’s sermon at the Passion Conference for college students was one of the most influential religious talks of the past quarter century. Known colloquially as the “seashells sermon”, it had a profound effect on how many people young and old lived their lives.

The Gospel Coalition called it the sermon that swept over a generation, reaching not just the 40,000 people in attendance but hundreds of thousands more thanks to the book he wrote based on its ideas called Don’t Waste Your Life (over 600,000 copies sold).

Several people quoted in that TGC article completely upended their life plans as a result of what Piper said in order to go into the mission field or other Christian work.

Someone I showed the draft manuscript of my book to recommended that I include a reference to that sermon. After watching the clip about seashells itself, which is very powerful, I did include one.

It wasn’t until last fall that I finally watched the full sermon for the first time. Something really struck me. While watching that sermon, it hit me that I was the same age that Piper was when he gave it, 54 years old.

I couldn’t help but contrast Piper at my age standing up in front of 40,000 people and very prescriptively and directly telling them how they should live their lives with my deep hesitation to even offer modest life advice to people.

Some of that is because we are different people, but some of it is due to our differing generational styles.

A gigantic generation, the Boomers were the center of attention throughout their lives, and society has continued to reorder itself around their life experiences, orientations, and preferences.

That generation, especially the early half of it, came into positions of power relatively early in life - and in many cases are still in them. Bill Clinton was the third youngest person ever elected president. He was born in 1946. So were George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Someone pointed out that the people who were president in 1997, 2007, 2017, and in theory 2027 were all born in 1946. That’s a 30 plus year span of dominance.

John Piper was also born in 1946. He too was a prominent figure at a relatively young age. When he was about 40, he and his slightly younger colleague Wayne Grudem were the lead figures in developing the evangelical gender theology known as complementarianism that is still widely adhered to today. I can’t think of anyone that age in younger cohorts who’ve created anything of similar impact.

There are a lot of explanations for this Boomer success. They benefited from being a large cohort of people that society had to adjust to instead of vice versa (true). They were in the right place at the right time, such as to go to college and buy houses when those things were cheap (true). They were given opportunities by older generations that they did not give to younger generations in return (true). They were the first generation to benefit from modern healthcare and lifestyle knowledge such they lived longer and stayed healthier and more productive after age 65 than previous generations did (true).

But this misses that there were things the Boomers did that earned them their success. For example, in adulthood, many of them were workaholics. Growing up, the blue collar Boomers I knew would grab every hour of overtime they could. And the white collar ones were working late and on weekends.

Younger generations have put way more emphasis on lifestyle over work. Gen Z Tik Tokers regularly inform us that they don’t even want a normal 9-5 job, much less one that requires large amounts of overtime. You can’t blame this attitude on the Boomers.

Another core Boomer attribute that has been incredibly powerful for them is their incredible self-confidence.

Watch Piper’s sermon and see someone who comes across as utterly confident that he is right, that what he’s talking about is the most important thing in the world, and that he is thus empowered - indeed, obligated - to tell these young people how they should be living their lives. It’s worth watching the first fifteen minutes to get a sense of that.

This comes through most clearly in the way that he explicitly assumes fatherly authority. He says:

I’m 54 years old…I come to you as a father. I’m old enough to be a father of almost everyone on the grass. I speak to you as the father perhaps that you never had. And I speak to you perhaps as the father that you did have who never had a vision for you, Or maybe the father that you have who has a vision for you, and it’s all about money and it’s all about status. Or maybe, and this would be the best of all, I speak to you as a father exactly what your father has always wanted you to hear, and you never would listen.

Here’s someone who got up on stage in front of 40,000 people that he didn’t know personally and didn’t even have a pastoral relationship to and tells them that his fatherly direction trumps that of their actual fathers who know them intimately, love them deeply, and are in a God-ordained position of authority over them. (That is, unless their father’s advice matches his own).

That’s pretty stunning if you think about it. Think about how confident you have to be - how sure you know the circumstances of the people in your audience, how sure that you are right about what you are saying, how sure that you know what the most important thing for them to be doing is, how sure that your imperatives are for the best - in order to say something like that and give a sermon like that.

This incredible confidence is a trait that I’ve noticed in Boomers. Think, for example, about the various debates around Tim Keller’s ministry approaches towards the end of his life. His basic conclusion out of them seemed to be that he had gotten basically everything right. Or think about Dave Ramsey’s approach to financial advice.

This is true in the world at large as well. Donald Trump is the platonic essence of the Boomer here. While his character is different from those other folks to say the least, he exhibits the same self-confidence and belief that he is the one that should be giving direction, should be in charge.

That incredible self-confidence is one reason why Boomers are so ready to assert themselves, to believe that they should be in charge, to believe that they are empowered to change things and indeed must change things, to believe they should be setting direction - and sometimes to believe that they shouldn’t give up power or pass the baton because no one else can do the job.

This might sound like a critique of the Boomers, but in reality it is a critique of those of us who came after them. The joke is on us because we did not have the confidence necessary to assert ourselves to the extent we should have. The fault for generational underperformance is in part our own.

Think about my own Generation X. We tend to sit back, somewhat detached, analytical. One the one hand this, on the other that. My own work exhibits this to a great extent. Or think about Joe Rogan’s interviews, which exhibit this inquiring style. Millennials and Gen Z have their own, different styles.

These have their virtues of course, but they have tended not to make us the kinds of people who would become institutional or movement leaders or the kinds of people who run things and reshape societies.

In order to aspire to do something like be President or be the CEO of a company or create a high ambition startup or to shape the vocational choices of the next generation, you have to almost be able to generate a reality bubble around yourself such that you genuinely believe, and can cause others to believe, that you are the person that should be doing that.

When the Boomer who became my great mentor at Accenture recruited me as a staff consultant to come work on a project he was managing, he sold me on it by telling me it was the most strategic project in the Firm - big, complex, technologically ambitious business transformation.

For years I just assumed this was true. But was it? Reflecting back, I honestly don’t know. Maybe it was but I can’t be certain. I don’t know what else was going on in the Firm at that time. I do know that he often described what he was working on in similar terms: this is strategic, this is important to the future of the Firm, this is the project to be on.

The important thing is that from his own perspective, this was all actually true. This wasn’t just some sales job or cynical manipulation. He believed it himself. He had internalized it, which it why it was so compelling when he talked about it to other people.

When younger generations are able to do this, they are often very effective at achieving Boomer-level success. Mark Driscoll was a Generation X evangelical example. Although he took a tumble, he built a huge church and was massively influential. He had, and has, the same self-confidence. Elon Musk’s certainty that we must colonize Mars is another example. In fact, most big startup founders have this air about them. It’s almost the first requirement. It’s a common trait in post-Boomers with high level accomplishments.

So this confidence and reality bubble effect is not unique to Boomers, just more common among them. The successes of those post-Boomers who had Boomer-like confidence shows that while post-Boomers did indeed face some structural challenges, as a whole they probably could have been much more successful than they were.

Listening to Piper I realized that my impact in the world is lower than it should be simply because I haven’t internalized the confidence necessary to assert myself to make it happen, to believe I am the person who should be setting the direction, should actually be leading.

I should be much more directive than I am. I’ve reached the age and experience level where it’s fully appropriate for me to do that. There are a lot of areas where I’m simply right and the incumbent evangelical positions are wrong. I’m one of the very few evangelical thinkers read even by liberal non-Christians, who value my tangible, unique insights about the world despite not always agreeing with me. But even thought I know this intellectually, I find it difficult to internalize and actualize.

Earnest self-confidence is one of the secrets of Boomer success and effectiveness. It’s something that perhaps comes more naturally to that generation, but is in theory available to all of us. Rather than complaining about the Boomers, this is a case in which we should be imitating them.

Note: I plan to write about the structure of the seashells sermon and its view of retirement and vocation in a future post.