The Hazelnuts Wisepreneurs Guests Still Working at 80

Hazel Edwards is eighty years old and has published more than 200 books. Her episode on the Wisepreneurs Podcast (episode 43) is the third most popular in the podcast. When I asked her why she keeps working, she looked at me as though the question made no sense.

I wanted to be in charge of my own working life, she said. 

That was it. No grand philosophy. Just a woman who decided at twenty that she'd build a life around learning and writing, and fifty-eight years later hasn't found a reason to stop.

What I didn't expect was that Hazel would start sending me more people like her.

She calls them her "hazelnuts," the people she connects to my podcast because she thinks their stories deserve to be heard.

Three of them, Laurie Smale (episode 70), Dr Michael Best (episode 76), and Dr Miklós Pohl OAM (episode 84), turned out to be among the most compelling conversations I've recorded. And the more I looked at what connected them, the more I realised these four episodes tell a single story.

Hazel's hazelnuts

Hazel has this habit of connecting people. She mentors writers, she introduces professionals to each other, and she referred three guests to me over the past couple of years. Each time she'd say something like, "You've got to talk to Miklós" or "Michael's writing a book and you need to hear his story." She calls her referrals hazelnuts, which tells you something about her sense of humour.

These aren't professionals coasting into retirement. They're people who arrived in this country under circumstances that are hard to fathom today, built careers across multiple fields, and are now, in their late seventies and eighties, doing some of the most interesting work of their lives.

Four arrivals that shaped everything that followed

Here's what I found really interesting was how each of them arrived at where they are now. The starting points are extraordinary.

Hazel grew up in a country general store in Victoria. Her father went broke. University wasn't on the radar financially. She got into Toorak Teachers College on a studentship, which was enough to live on for two years in exchange for three years of teaching wherever they sent you.

I started at the same college in 1974, about a decade after her. We both came from backgrounds where that studentship made the difference between an education and not having one.

From that start, she built a career that now spans 200+ published books, an Antarctic expedition, a touring musical, and a book in Braille and Auslan. She coined the word "authorpreneur" and had it printed on her business card, which confused everyone when she was writer in residence in China because the word doesn't translate.

Miklós Pohl OAM, left Hungary on New Year's Eve 1956, during the revolution. He was nine. His family paid a soldier to guide them to the Austrian border through snow fields, with military flares going up around them. They were stopped by two Russian soldiers, boys of eighteen or nineteen.

His brother, who spoke fluent Russian because Hungarian schools taught it, handed them a bottle of vodka. The Russians hugged them, kissed them as Russians do, and said "on your way."

As the family walked away, his older brother thought they might be shot in the back. Miklós, at nine, had no idea of the danger. He just remembers walking for two hours until they reached a sign in Hungarian: "Welcome to the Free Land." His mother bought him a violin when they arrived in Maitland in 1957. He's been playing ever since, including founding the Australian Doctors Orchestra in 1993, which has been running for over thirty years..

Laurie Smale ran away from school at thirteen. He'd been belted by the maths teacher and humiliated every day, and he couldn't take any more.

He ended up working in a junkyard with a man called Old Bill Menzies, who taught him about antiques and scrap metals.

From there he went to the Murano Mosaic Tile Factory in Frankston, an Italian glass factory, where he worked seven days a week as a thirteen-year-old. He slept beside the furnace. The Italian workers fed him lasagna and treated him with warmth he hadn't expected. "I wanted to be an Italian," he told me. He spent the rest of his life learning the language, eventually going to university at thirty-seven and graduating with honours in Italian.

Michael Best came to Australia from France at six, not understanding any English. His parents grew up in France but came from elsewhere: his father from Ukraine, his mother from Poland.

He built a medical career spanning more than fifty years, working as a GP in Melbourne. Then, at seventy-five, a phone call about something he'd never heard of, the endocannabinoid system, sent him down an entirely new path. He's now eighty and writing a book called The Science Beneath Medicinal Cannabis, with Hazel as his mentor.

What they're doing now matters more than what they did then

The origin stories are remarkable, but what makes these conversations resonate with listeners is what these four are doing right now.

Hazel, at eighty, has a reissue of her book on authorpreneurship coming out. She's still speaking, still mentoring, still learning. She sees teaching and writing as the same business: shaping ideas, sharing ideas, and encouraging people to learn with humour.

She told me she wanted to "choose projects that I thought were worth doing." That principle has guided her for nearly six decades, and she hasn't changed it.

Miklós wrote Music Is Medicine on the thirtieth anniversary of the Australian Doctors Orchestra. The book contains interviews with orchestra members about their musical lives and medical specialties, from neurosurgeons to GPs.

He set up a music camp in Clunes, a beautiful old gold town, modelled on the Mount Buller chamber music school. When the ABC asked him about refugees during an interview there, he said it was like having a hand grenade thrown at him. He muddled through it, but he has great sympathy for refugees and asylum seekers because of what he went through as a child.

Laurie, at seventy-nine, is a YouTube storyteller. He's facing his technology fears head-on.

Fear is fear," he said. "It doesn't matter if you're 78 or 18.

The same man who ran from school at thirteen and didn't read a book until he was twenty-two is now creating content and sharing his story online. He described himself as "a wild urchin who had an insatiable curiosity for the world around me, and I've never lost that."

Michael, at eighty, is learning Obsidian (a relational note-taking app) and using Claude, an AI tool, to help with his research. He told me he's announced to his family that he's "going to university again" via YouTube tutorials.

He's discovering that the technology doesn't replace his fifty years of medical judgment; it extends it. He can evaluate what AI produces because he knows what's accurate and what isn't. He described it as having a co-pilot, which is exactly right.

The hustle has an expiry date. Curiosity doesn't.

Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks, makes the point that we have roughly four thousand weeks to live. The modern response to that finitude is to try harder: better systems, tighter routines, earlier mornings.

Busyness gets renamed as the hustle, and relentless work becomes a lifestyle. Burkeman's argument is that this approach is guaranteed to fail. The more efficient you get, the more demands expand to fill the time. You will never get on top of everything.

The Hazelnuts have landed on the other side of that struggle, and I think that's one reason their episodes resonate so strongly is that they've stopped trying to do everything. 

• Hazel chooses projects she thinks are worth doing and lets the rest go. 
• Michael chose one book, one topic, and gave himself permission to take longer than planned.
• Laurie chose to face one fear, technology, rather than pretending it didn't matter.
• Miklós chose music alongside medicine and built an orchestra that plays for charity, not for profit.

Burkeman writes that the only viable solution is to shift from trying not to neglect anything, to consciously choosing what to neglect in favour of what matters most.

That is exactly what the Hazelnuts have done. And they haven't done it by following someone else's career plan. They're not on a corporate path with promotions and KPIs. They've made their own paths through the walking itself: each choice, each project, each encounter creating the next stretch of ground.

Jean Boulton, in The Dao of Complexity, uses a phrase from Daoism that I keep coming back to: the path is made through walking. Her point is that life is always in motion. The future isn't a destination you plot on a map and march toward. It emerges through what you intend, what you value, and what you actually do. As one path is taken, other possibilities fade, but new ones appear that you couldn't have seen from where you started.

That's what these four are doing. They've each found something they still want to explore, something they have more to give to, and they're creating their direction by moving through it. Hazel said she wanted to choose projects she thought were worth doing. She's been making that choice for nearly sixty years, and she's still making it.

Younger professionals caught in the hustle might look at these four and see people with the luxury of time. But it really is something different. They are doing what Burkeman took an entire book to articulate: that the measure of a life well spent is whether you focused on a few things that truly mattered to you. And they are.

The Hazelnuts didn't come to this point by reading a book on time management. They arrived at it by living long enough, and staying curious enough, to discover what was worth their remaining time.

Gentle folk with unrepeatable stories

There's something about these four that I want to name, because it's part of why the episodes work. They are all gentle, generous people. Happy to share their time, their history, their mistakes. There's no performance in these conversations.

• Hazel will tell you she earned about what a teacher would have earned across her career, and she's worked hard for it. 
• Laurie will tell you he was proud of never having read a book, and then tell you how sad that was.
• Michael will admit he's a failure by Hazel's standards because he hasn't finished his book in twelve months.
• Miklós will describe being stopped by Russian soldiers and then tell you about his violin as a passport that's taken him around the world.

They carry stories about early Australia that will never be repeated. 

• The studentships that gave working-class kids an education. 
• The Italian migrant workers who fed a runaway kid lasagna beside a furnace.
• The Hungarian refugees who were hugged and kissed goodbye by the very soldiers who could have stopped them.
• The six-year-old from France who couldn't speak English and went on to practise medicine for fifty years.

None of them are museum pieces, but  living, working professionals who happen to have lived through a version of Australia that no longer exists. Their willingness to share those stories, openly and without self-importance, is their gift to us.

The mentorship thread that runs through all of it

One pattern I noticed across these conversations is how important other people have been to each of them.

• Laurie credits Old Bill Menzies in the junkyard and Sandy from the concrete gang at Chelsea Council with teaching him how to listen and handle people. 
• Hazel mentors Michael through his book-writing process.
• Michael credits Hazel with keeping him accountable and connected.
• Miklós describes the professional musicians who helped him build the Doctors Orchestra: Chris Martin the conductor and Rowan Thomas the concert master, both of whom knew how to work with doctors who weren't used to being corrected.

And Hazel connects them all. She's the glue. Her hazelnuts radiate outward from her generosity and her instinct for recognising when someone has a story worth hearing. That instinct is itself the product of sixty years of working with ideas, with people, with stories. It isn't something you develop quickly.