In this section you’ll identify your top 10 accomplishments. Ask yourself these questions to get started:

Jot down any answers to these questions. As you identify your accomplishments, keep these pointers in mind:

Coming up with life accomplishments is about taking into account all the complexity and individuality of each of our lives. Don’t get into the trap of setting the bar too high. Give yourself credit for what you’ve achieved. You don’t have to be on the Supreme Court to be proud of what you’ve done. And don’t minimize or negate your accomplishments. There will be those who say, “That was no big deal about backpacking the Appalachian Trail.” But it is a big deal if it’s a big deal to you. Paint with broad brushstrokes, and don’t rate your accomplishments against someone else’s criteria. You’re not doing this exercise to be competitive; you’re trying to get to the heart of the matter—your life.

We’ve included examples of life accomplishments in the following box. These are real-life examples, offered by retirees and pre-retirees in our focus groups when we asked them to tell us which of their life accomplishments they were most proud of. When you look at the list, you’ll notice that it includes all kinds of items, big and small, professional and personal. Take a look at the list to get your own ideas started.

Now that you’ve reviewed the list, it’s your turn to identify your top 10 accomplishments. You can see that the people we interviewed used broad brushstrokes. If this exercise is familiar to you, remember that this time you’re doing it for a different reason—to see what accomplishments really got you charged up and that you’d like to have more of in the future.

As a starter, we tell clients to think back over their lives in five-year increments. Don’t try to tackle your whole life in one fell swoop. What did you accomplish that you’re proud of at work? At leisure? Think sports, family, church, organizations, community, friends. What comes up? Can you take credit for anything similar to the accomplishments in the preceding list? Write down your answers. Some people can’t stop writing; others find it hard to begin. No matter what, don’t set the bar too high.

Did you have more than 10? If so, rank them according to what you really got the most charge out of, and pare down the list to only 10. Ten should give you a good breadth of your achievements.

How many of your top 10 accomplishments fulfill drivers? Review your list of drivers to see. Was it one out of ten? Five out of ten? All ten? What kind of accomplishments did you have? What categories did they fall under? Were they related to sports, community, family, work, or personal? Were they in one area more predominantly than others? If your accomplishments are all work-related, you’re going to need to add more interests, hobbies, or leisure into your rewired life—or else keep working!

If you felt happy, elated, pumped up, or satisfied when you looked at your top 10 list, we’re willing to bet that at least some of your drivers were fulfilled through your accomplishments. Taking an example from the preceding box, “saving an innocent man from going to jail” could be the fulfillment of the making a difference driver. Depending on the person, “inventing a new piece of equipment” could be the fulfillment of several drivers, including accomplishments, competition, creativity, intellectual stimulation, lifelong learning, passion, problem-solving, recognition, skills and talent, or value. The squash club champ who holds the club title may fulfill his competition, belonging, recognition, visibility, and identity drivers.

Some of our accomplishments don’t fulfill a specific driver but are in line with our personal values and beliefs. For example, raising good children can be a reflection of your strongly held values about the importance of family. As we’ve said elsewhere, when you rewire, you’ll want to think about how to have activities that bring driver fulfillment into your new life. We now add that you should also think about your life accomplishments as another guide.

Life accomplishments have a halo effect. They impress people, and telling others about them is pleasurable. Without their social dividends, many people wouldn’t accomplish as much as they do. Think of all the people who have told you about a life accomplishment soon after you met them or were getting to know them. These accomplishments run the gamut from catching a record-setting fish, to fighting Rommel with the Allies in North Africa in World War II, to volunteering every week in the children’s hospital for more than 20 years, to trekking in the Himalayas.

Which of your top 10 do you like to share with others?

Here are some additional questions to ask yourself about your top 10 list. Jot down your answers.

See if you can think of the accomplishment in generic terms, as a type of accomplishment, not just as the literal accomplishment itself. What is it about the accomplishment that turned you on? Break it down into the audience and the environment. For example, you may have found it fulfilling to work on creative projects with people you like. As an advertising copywriter, for example, you enjoyed being part of a creative team that did cutting-edge campaigns. You may be able to transfer that driver fulfillment to a new organization and a new group of people when you rewire by planning and executing the publicity and marketing for a local theater group.

If giving speeches at work gave you the chance for visibility and you want to continue to fulfill that driver when you rewire, you might want to give speeches for Chamber of Commerce audiences or through Toastmasters.

You’ve been living with your strengths and skills a long time and you have a lot of them. If you know them right off the top of your head, great. But if you don’t, to make it easier for you to identify them, look at your top 10 accomplishments identified earlier and see what it took to achieve them. Let’s say, for example, that you climbed Mount Everest. It wasn’t just your competition driver that enabled you to accomplish the feat. You also had a set of strengths, including athletic ability, endurance, physical strength, and good balance. Your skills may have included the ability to plan an expedition, marshal the resources, and analyze and problem-solve all the issues involved in coordinating and equipping yourself or a team, not to mention executing myriad highly skilled climbing tasks—some large, some small.

We’re not asking you to do a plain-vanilla skills inventory here. You’ve no doubt done that many times. We want you to focus forward: which of these strengths and skills do you like enough to use when you rewire?

Look at the following list of strengths and skills, and ask yourself which of these (and any others) you used to accomplish your top 10. The lists are not meant to be complete, but they are intended to get you thinking. (If you have a strength that’s important to you that isn’t related to one of your top 10 accomplishments, don’t exclude it.) Write down your answers. A few examples include the following:

Selected strengths:

Now that you’ve written down your strengths, it’s time to look at your skills. Look at the following list of selected skills. Which skills listed here (as well as any others you may add) did you use to accomplish your top 10? Write down your answers.

Selected skills:

What did you write as your list of skills you used to accomplish your top 10? Look over your list and identify the strengths and skills you “own.” We know you assessed your skills when you wrote your resumé or CV, but you’re doing this now with a new eye toward what you really want to do in your rewired life, not what others want you to do.

Looking into your history from a strengths and skills standpoint should put a smile on your face, and you should feel that you have a lot of valuable strengths and skills to use when you rewire, if you choose to. Some might have been dormant and just haven’t been used in a while. You may choose to further develop other skills in rewirement, but first you must recognize the ones you already own.

Just because you’re good at a certain skill doesn’t mean you want to use it when you rewire. For example, Francine, 72, was good at numbers and had been a budget analyst during her career, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with calculations when she rewired. Instead, she chose to volunteer at her local soup kitchen and teach yoga at the local YWCA.

Boards or other organizations might want to tap you for your skills. Don’t get caught in a trap of saying “yes” just because you’re asked. They may want something from you that you no longer want to use. On the other hand, you can also use your skills to get you in the door and parlay that into broader opportunities you really want.

We all have talents we’ve never used or haven’t used in a while. That’s why it’s important to know our strengths and skills inside and out. In this section, we look at how you can enhance, adapt, or otherwise change how you use your skills to gain more driver fulfillment in your rewired life. For example, Mike, 57, retired after 30 years of teaching. He had loved teaching high school science but was tired of collecting, researching, and imparting theoretical information in a way that had little impact on students’ lives. He wanted to have a personal impact on individuals’ lives.

Mike decided to add a new skill—counseling—in his rewired career and got a Master’s degree in social work. He focused on family counseling with an emphasis on crisis counseling. In his rewired work, he still imparted knowledge and used many of his same strengths and skills that he used when he was a teacher, but his audience and his role in the process had changed. Working one-on-one with families, he was no longer imparting knowledge that was going to be used in a theoretical, impersonal way, but rather knowledge that had a real impact on the families he was working with. He was much happier in his rewired career because he knew that in sharing the information this way, he was making a difference and being of value, two of his most important drivers.

After a long career, you might want to adapt your skills in a related career that uses similar skills. That’s what Anne Baley did. Anne, 67, worked as a missionary doctor for more than 20 years in Zambia. In the early 1980s, as associate professor of medicine at the university teaching hospital in Lusaka, the capital, she realized that patients she was seeing in the clinic had AIDS, something only a few doctors in Africa realized at the time. As she continued to care for sick and dying patients, she remembered her childhood desire to join the ministry. “I was dealing often—well, all the time—with people who were facing the ultimate questions of death and dying,” she said. In 1990, she left Zambia for theological training in England, and she was ordained an Anglican priest in 1994.^[2]

Which strengths or skills do you want to adapt when you rewire? You can use existing skills and adapt them to start a business. Caroline, 66, was a sculptor while her husband still worked but adapted her artistic skills at his retirement time. She now designs door pulls and sells them through her own website. Her husband, Bill, 67, has taken over the marketing of her business. They’re having a ball. The new business has saved his sanity and given them a wonderful outlet to share, plus income.

You may decide to go from using business skills to using personal artistic skills. Sarah, 50, a divorced single mom, was bored in her career as a chemical engineer because (among other reasons) it didn’t offer enough fulfillment for her creativity driver. She quit working when she married a widower who had already retired. She and her husband split the year between the Poconos in Pennsylvania in the summer months and Florida in the winter. Sarah is exploring painting of all types (watercolors, oil, pastels) to fulfill her accomplishment and creativity drivers. Her frustration is that her skill level is still low, but she is seeing improvement. Because painting is a portable hobby, it’s especially suited to her East Coast snowbird lifestyle.

Do you have any skills you want to add or enhance when you rewire? Did you identify dreams or interests in Chapter 7 that require new skills? Don’t discard a dream just because you don’t have the necessary skills. If the desire is there, the “how” will emerge. Write them down. You can use Chapter 7’s methods for developing interests to develop your skills as well.

All of us are good at things we’re not wild about doing. So when it comes time to rewire, many people decide to focus on skills they really love or want to develop and back burner the rest. Many people want to focus on new experiences, novelty things they’ve always dreamed of doing and being—definitely not just the same old thing! In a ritual of back burnering, Sarah, the aforementioned chemical engineer, threw out her engineering reference books when she quit working. She saw that as a form of commitment to her new life.

Which strengths, skills, or situations do you want to steer away from when you rewire? They may be job-related, or they could be situations you don’t want to be placed in, using skills you don’t want to use. Look back over the list of skills you created earlier in the chapter and also review the following list of workplace situations to get ideas. Jot down anything you want to table. You might wonder why we’re asking you to do this. Rewiring is a time of opportunity, and it’s your time to create a great next act. So admit what you don’t want to take forward with you.

Rewirees told us they had been skillful at managing the following workplace situations, but that these were the kinds of things they wanted to steer away from if they could in their future:

Of course, some of these things will never go away. But it’s important to know what you absolutely won’t do again. Al hated office politics and liked closure and getting things done. When he retired, he was asked to sit on a board. In his desire to fulfill his drivers (structure, belonging, and recognition), he accepted the position before he did his homework, and he told us he had joined a “hornet’s nest.” He was in an especially tough position because he wanted to honor his three-year commitment but found himself counting the days until his three years were up.

Maybe you were successful because you played office politics well. But you never valued the play, only knew you had to do it and did it well. As you craft your future, you don’t want to do it anymore. Write down what you dislike.

Knowing what you don’t want is almost as important as knowing what you do want in your rewired life. Add to your list anything you don’t want that we’ve omitted. The last thing you want to do is create a rewired life full of things you dislike.

Tom is the national sales director who is looking at retirement in six months. He has his golf, but he also is taking a comedy class, belongs to a monthly pinochle club with his wife, and is preparing his routine to be the emcee at the golf club’s members-only golf tournament dinner and at his company’s upcoming sales conference.

When Tom looks at his list of skills, he realizes he likes who he is and the skills he owns but he’s getting tired of how he has been forced to use them lately. Although he has said he wants to retire in six months because he is burned out, he is beginning to realize that he has to investigate exactly what is burning him out.

He isn’t sick of selling, just sick of what, how, and to whom he is currently selling. He likes developing people, but is tired of asking them to deliver more and more. He loves challenges and being competitive but likes it to be in a healthy environment. He’d like his personality and humor, even a personal interest, to be a part of the sale. When he saw his accomplishments, he realized that he hasn’t laughed a lot lately—something that was always very important to him. Tom’s accomplishment analysis was really eye-opening for him.

Paula owns an HR consulting business and is nuts about sailing. She was a foster child and supports initiatives for young girls and women. She loves to go sailing with clients, her daughter, and adolescent girls, but she is also a guest lecturer (through her friends) at local universities and colleges on HR issues.

When Paula looks at her personal discovery inventory, she recognizes that she has become a serial retiree. She loves working, but she also loves being wanted for the expertise she brings to work. She is no longer interested in the day-to-day, but she’s not ready to relinquish her business role. She is conflicted about stopping work and then wonders if she should stop work or just the work she’s currently doing. She’s tired of the challenge of bringing in new clients.

And she is recognizing that as much as she loves sailing, the problem-solving on the water doesn’t give her the same kind of charge as problem-solving on issues.

Bob is the engineer who works at a major automotive manufacturer and who runs the firm’s community outreach activities. He has his WWI reading (both books and magazines), plus regular e-mailing to his Western Front Association members around the world. He’s very active in his church, goes to services every Sunday, and holds a lay leadership role. He spends considerable time reading about global church issues and international missionary opportunities for couples. He is also developing a program on board governance for the nonprofit boards he’s affiliated with, through work and on his own. Bob puts very high stock in work and work-related accomplishments.

When Bob took a look at his personal discovery inventory, he realized that there were some things he liked and some things he disliked. Bob admits that he would not choose to use all these skills if he had the choice. He would quickly relinquish anything having to do with engineering but keep the logical thinking of an engineer. He would like to continue to touch lives and make a difference.

He will always be sociable and loves being part of a team, but he doesn’t want the continued pressure of always living under a deadline or being called to put out fires.

Carol worked on Wall Street and has an extensive network of social, political, and business contacts. She wants to start some kind of organization to save animals. On top of her caring for her own dogs and her political interests, she attends photography exhibits, gallery openings, and modern art museums. She is an avid art catalogue browser (both printed and on the Internet).

Carol reviewed her life in five-year increments to come up with her personal discovery inventory and had the following thoughts: After Carol went through the exercise of identifying her strengths and skills, she realized just how transferable her skills are from Wall Street to the development of a new nonprofit. Instead of financing deals, Carol wants to finance a new organization to save animals. She will leverage her skills to make a difference in society—saving abused animals.

Like the four pre-retirees, you need to know your strengths and skills because they enabled you to accomplish many things in your life that you’re proud of, and because they are transferable into your rewired life.