I hate the word retirement. My dad retired; I won’t retire. | ||
| --Nick, 50, CPA | ||
Traditional retirement isn’t for everyone. Take, for example, Dan and Arlene, a couple we’ve known for years and bumped into recently. Dan had had a very successful career as an attorney in New York City, and Arlene had been an accountant. They had retired a year before and moved to the south of France, to a beautiful spot they had visited on four prior dream vacations. In France, they planned to live out their perfect vision of retirement: museum hopping to do some sketching and painting, visiting with friends, cooking with the freshest herbs and ingredients.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “We heard you retired to France.”
“It was horrible,” Arlene said.
“Not us,” Dan agreed.
“We flunked retirement,” they said together, laughing.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Arlene thought for a moment, searching for the right words. Then her eyes widened. “We missed our lives!”
“We flunked retirement” made us stop and think. How could two smart people with all the means in the world have “flunked” retirement? Where had they gone wrong? We were puzzled about this and asked Dan and Arlene to talk with us further. When we met with them, they explained that their life had turned into an endless vacation—a lifestyle they had thought would be right for them, but wasn’t. They admitted that during the 20 months they had spent in the south of France, they had learned a lot about themselves and what makes them tick.
Before retirement, Dan and Arlene had both been active in community and philanthropic activities. They had family nearby whom they saw frequently. They had regular routines. Dan played racquetball twice a week with an old friend. Arlene regularly took her grandchildren on special outings, like going to see The Nutcracker at Christmas.
Of course, they had realized before they retired that they would no longer be able to do these things in France, but it had never occurred to them that they would miss them so much. Dan and Arlene realized that they had given up too much of what they loved.
Finally, it dawned on Dan and Arlene that they hadn’t needed to go to the south of France to find retirement satisfaction. It was in their own backyard. All they had to do to find it was know themselves better.
Real Quotes
Lee Iacocca said that he flunked retirement. In a famous Fortune magazine article (June 24, 1996), the retired Chrysler executive warned, “You plan everything in life, and then the roof caves in on you because you haven’t done enough thinking about who you are and what you should do with the rest of your life.”
Traditional retirement, in the old sense of leisure only, isn’t for everyone. Because of the ways the world has changed, and for reasons we talk more about later in this chapter, traditional retirement isn’t something you should accept without careful thought.
Retirement has traditionally meant a going from. The traditional meaning of retirement is a single event—“withdrawal” from the workforce into leisure, relaxation, a slide into the end of life. Webster’s dictionary defines retirement as “removal or withdrawal from an office or active service; to seek privacy or seclusion.” The word retire comes from the French word retirer, meaning “to withdraw,” which comes from the French verb tirer, meaning “drawing out or enduring,” the same root “martyr” comes from. Not exactly inspiring!
Even the words associated with retirement are inadequate. Semi-retirement doesn’t suffice (although we use the term because there’s no other alternative yet). The term middle-aged workplace issues totally misses the point. Second-career itch sounds like change for the sake of change. Early retirement is a euphemism for executives who are laid off. Un-retire sounds too much like the un-cola! In fact, the subject of this book—working in retirement—would have been considered an oxymoron until just a few years ago. An article on retirement in American Demographics magazine had this to say about the word: “The dictionary often has trouble keeping up with society’s changing definitions of traditional nomenclature, but perhaps the term ‘retirement’ needs to be retired altogether.”[1]
Society has changed. Retirement was invented by Bismarck, first chancellor of the German Empire, in the late nineteenth century, when most people didn’t live long enough to worry about what they were going to do when they stopped working. Even when Social Security was instituted in the United States in 1935, benefits began at 65 but the average life expectancy was only 61!
Real Quotes
Jimmy Carter calls his 1980 presidential defeat his “involuntary retirement.” When he went home to Plains, Georgia, he was 56. “I realized that according to the life expectancy tables, I had 25 years to go. What was I going to do with 25 more years? I was in a little town with 600 people and no job opportunities.”[2]
When work usually meant hard physical labor, both men and women were worn out by the time they reached their 50s and 60s, so most didn’t make it to retirement. But in today’s digital age, more people use computers and phones and sit at desks in air-conditioned offices. Sophisticated machines do the heavy lifting. The idea of needing to rest at the end of your career because your body is physically worn out from long days of back-breaking work just isn’t true for most people the way it was for past generations.
Along with the idea of retirement came the assumption that you “worked” until you “retired” from your full-time “occupation,” “career,” or “job.” But today, the distinctions between working and retiring are blurring. The mandatory retirement age has been all but eliminated, and Congress has repealed the Social Security “earnings test” for people 65 or older. Government data show that the percentage of people over 65 who are in the workforce has been rising since the mid-1990s, after decades of declines. As of 2005, 13.8 percent of the 65+ population was in the workforce, a number that continues to increase.
Two contradictory trends are going on here. On the one hand, there’s an outmoded societal attitude that people of a “certain age” should retire and, on the other hand, the facts show that these same people are staying active longer and longer in the workforce. Obviously, someone’s hiring them!
Retirement is associated with other old-fashioned ideas about the people who retire: retired people can’t be useful, they need to rest, they want to relax, they can’t learn new skills. Nothing could be further from the truth!
The transition to retirement is stressful, and that stress is made worse by not having a plan. The old adage “if you fail to plan, then plan to fail” is as true for retirement as for anything else. People who retire, leave stimulation behind, and don’t replace it create stress for themselves. Leaving full-time work is a time of change, ambiguity, and lack of structure. It’s easier to know where you’re going if you begin to develop a road map ahead of time. That way, you can avoid the feeling of being out of control, which only leads to more stress.
Management gurus Peter Drucker and Peter Senge were familiar with the difficulties people face when they retire.[3] Drucker argued that many executives are simply “unprepared” for retirement. Other retirement experts agree. “We plan our careers, but we don’t plan our retirement,” says Dr. Phyllis Moen, director of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute at Cornell University, who has studied couples’ retirement transitions.[4] Dr. Moen’s study substantiates a turbulent transition after quitting work. She found that for many couples, the first two years after leaving a job were a period of marital strife.
Do you think you’ll find not working stressful? We asked our friend, Dr. Tessa Albert Warschaw, noted executive coach, psychotherapist, author, and expert on resiliency, to address the issue of stress in the transition to retirement. Tessa reports that three main areas cause stress:
The lack of psychological preparation
The lack of fulfilling activities
The change in family dynamics
Tessa has created, especially for this book, the following questions to help you assess where you are in your preparation for the transition to retirement. Answer these questions and count the number of “yes” answers to see how you scored.
Without preparation, you may not have the satisfaction you’ve always dreamed of. Renee, one of our Real People, retired impulsively and wasn’t happy afterward. We give Renee’s story here and, as we do after each Real People story, the lessons and observations gleaned from it.
Renee is 65 years old. She retired at age 60. She has always loved education and teaching. After many years in the classroom, she went back to school at night and got an advanced degree that led to a job in education administration. She enjoyed this position for several years, until a change in leadership came along that she didn’t like. One day, when she’d had enough, she walked into the superintendent’s office and handed in her resignation. Renee had, for all intents and purposes, suddenly retired.
Real Quotes
The idea of a “leisure society” with whole blocks of people with nothing to do except enjoy themselves, is to me a vision of hell, not heaven.
—Charles Handy, best-selling business book author and consultant[5]
Renee’s husband, Carl, was, understandably, caught completely by surprise. He was phasing into retirement slowly in his real estate practice, still working three days a week. Renee was disappointed that Carl wasn’t able to spend more time with her. She had other interests but none that really engaged her. She was in a political group she felt so-so about. She belonged to a reading group but found it disappointing because its members gossiped more than they discussed books. She grew increasingly frustrated and anxious.
As she enters her fifth year of not working, Renee regrets her hasty decision. She sees now that she retired for the wrong reasons. She is envious of her husband, who, in the five years since Renee retired, has made a smooth transition to not working at all. Thinking she’ll never find what she really wants to do by herself, she tags along with Carl, but even the most loving couples don’t always want to be together, and this is causing tension between them.
Lessons and observations:
Renee quit working because she was fed up with office politics.
She retired impulsively.
She didn’t discuss her decision ahead of time with her spouse.
She expected her spouse to fill the gap in her retirement.
She didn’t spend enough time planning and exploring her options.
Renee left unanswered the most important question: why do you retire? If she had taken the time to plan what she wanted to do, she would have been a lot happier in retirement.
Why do you want to retire?
If you’re thinking about quitting, you can avoid the problems Renee faced because she hadn’t thought things through:
Know why you want to retire. Determine whether you’re quitting impulsively, on someone else’s schedule, or on your own schedule. Are you leaving for fun and relaxation? Are you leaving in frustration? Are you being forced out? Why you’re leaving has an impact on where you’re going and how easy your transition will be.
Admit to yourself if you’re considering retiring because you don’t like your job. A bad boss, being burned out, office politics, and tough commutes are not necessarily reasons to quit working, but rather to change jobs.
Be honest with yourself. Sometimes people mistake their jobs for their lives. If your job has become your identity, acknowledge it. You need to be aware that this work/ego involvement will affect your life when you quit working.
Retirement can be just plain boring. Robert Eisenberg, featured in People magazine (June 4, 2001) as America’s oldest living worker at 103 years old, quit working in 1970, when he was 72, but after about 10 years he found retirement dull. So at age 82, Eisenberg took a job overseeing production as a consultant at Zabin Industries in Los Angeles, a zipper manufacturer he had previously owned.
Real Quotes
The day I came home from work and discovered that my recently retired husband had rearranged the kitchen drawers, I knew we had a problem.
—Susan, 58
Boredom was one of the biggest complaints we heard in our research, and not just from Type-A personalities or hard-charging executives. In our in-depth interviews, retirees returned over and over to the theme of meaningful work. They wanted to be engaged in activity that was meaningful, not just activity for activity’s sake. Walt, one of our Real People, was bored with retirement until he rediscovered an old passion. Here’s Walt’s story and the lessons and observations learned.
Walt, now 61, quit work at 58 after spending his entire career in advertising, starting as a copywriter. In the first few months after he retired, he and his wife traveled. Then he read books he’d never had the chance to read. But after 18 months, he hit the skids. He was bored out of his mind.
We coached him to get out and meet people. At a party, he met the dean of a nearby community college, who offered him the chance to teach a beginners’ writing class. He tried it for two semesters and quit. He didn’t enjoy teaching beginners, but he was intrigued with the skills that went into writing.
Walt met a former colleague who invited him to a writer’s roundtable lunch. There he ran into old friends, one of whom asked if he would do some freelance writing for a newsletter company. Walt’s freelance work led to his being asked to teach a graduate writing class.
After his previous teaching experience, he was hesitant to accept at first, but he discovered to his surprise that he loved teaching at this more advanced level. These students were committed to their work, dedicated to becoming better writers. They respected Walt. Walt decided to continue to teach writing at the graduate level.
Writing was his old passion, the one that had gotten him started in the business in the first place. He hadn’t realized that passion still burned in him.
Lessons and observations:
Walt was bored with traditional retirement.
He rediscovered an old interest—writing.
Walt wanted to be valued by audiences that he valued.
He created his own options by getting out and talking to people.
Walt was able to recover from his retirement “slump” pretty quickly and with no real harm done. But we can’t help but ask: Why did he have to go through that in the first place?
If retirement means you stop doing things you love, it won’t be a happy experience. In our experience working with clients, people underestimate the things they like about their work.
These can be small and large things. For example, Samantha, a retired salesperson who had commuted an hour each way to work for 15 years, felt something was missing in her life after she retired. She soon realized what it was, and it was something small: Samantha was an avid jazz music fan, and during her commute, she would listen to jazz CDs in the car as a way to relax. She needed to continue listening. She bought a portable CD player and decided to listen to the CDs while she worked out for an hour three times a week at the gym. With a little fine-tuning, she was able to schedule back into her life what she was missing.
Other situations are more challenging and the problems bigger. Dr. Hill, a retired physician we know, has never replaced the fulfilling recognition he got from practicing medicine. Here’s Dr. Hill’s story.
John Hill is a warm, fun-loving, 75-year-old physician. He is revered in his community, where he is known as “Doc.” Dr. Hill left health care because of the increasing insurance paperwork and HMO-controlled managed care. Looking back, he feels he lost his identity. “Now I do the grocery shopping hoping to run into old patients who treat me like a celebrity.”
When he quit working at age 72, Dr. Hill volunteered at the local hospital, but it was hard for him to let go of the “I’m in charge” mentality. After several awkward situations in front of patients, he and the hospital parted ways. Next he tried volunteering as a physician at a local men’s prison. The inmates didn’t appreciate him. Frustrated, he resigned after only three months. He thought about joining a medical practice, but felt he just wasn’t up to it physically.
To keep busy, he holds a leadership position in his church and is on the board of the local symphony, but these activities aren’t satisfying enough. He says his biggest regret is that he doesn’t play golf. In the end, he wishes he had found a way to continue his practice.
Lessons and observations:
Being a doctor is Dr. Hill’s life and identity.
He quit because he was frustrated with industry changes, not because he was tired of practicing medicine.
Recognition from audiences he values is his “hot button.”
Leadership roles in extracurricular activities do not fill his void.
He wants to do hands-on medical work, but he has picked groups that don’t give him recognition.
Dr. Hill’s patients gave him his sense of identity.
Is there anything in Dr. Hill’s story you can recognize? Will you miss the people side of your work? Do you want to be recognized? If so, by whom? Where will you find these people?
So far, we’ve introduced you to three real people who found it stressful to retire. How will you find retirement? Boring? Stressful? When you leave work, will you be leaving behind things you love to do? Do you want to focus on leisure activities, or do you want to keep more of what you’re doing now? Where do you fit in? For example, do you believe any shoulds about retirement? I should relax, I should quit working completely, I should want what my neighbor wants, I should travel. In our research, we found that people believe too many “shoulds” when it comes to retirement.
You’ve heard about retirees who flunked retirement. You’ve met Dan and Arlene, Renee, Walt, and Dr. Hill, all people who didn’t get it right. Now it’s time for you to start thinking about what you want from retirement. Start with the vision of retirement you already have. You may not realize it, but you do already have one. It’s been in the back of your mind. It’s a picture that’s developed from seeing your parents or other relatives retire, from watching colleagues or neighbors, or from the media. Your vision of retirement is important to be aware of because it’s your starting point, your foundation as you begin the rewire process.
To help you figure out what that vision is, we have supplied self-exploratory questions. There are no right or wrong answers—only yours. Take the time to reflect on each question. After the self-exploration, write down in your journal or on a piece of paper the first thing that comes to mind. As you continue to read this book, keep these ideas in mind.
If you’re still trying to figure out what your vision of retirement is, here are a range of thought-starter questions for you. If you could retire right now, what would you do? Is your image of retirement getting up late and reading the newspaper? Is it playing more tennis or being outdoors more? Do you feel excited about not having to get on the interstate at 7 A.M.? Will you look forward to stopping for coffee any time you like? Will you miss the social lunches at work? How have you learned what you know about retirement? When you think about continuing to work past 62 or 65, how do you feel? Do you care what other people think of your retirement? Have you seen your parents retire? If so, what was their retirement like? How do you want yours to be different? Do you carry “baggage” that retirement should be a certain way? Reflect on your answers.
In our research, we found a link between a person’s desire to seek an alternative to retirement and the attitudes they held about retirement. People shared with us many of the reasons they flunked retirement and went on to rethink traditional retirement. The following list comes from our personal interviews with retirees.
By now, we hope we’ve convinced you that a traditional retirement isn’t for everyone. And maybe we’ve gotten you thinking about whether you’ll modify traditional retirement to make it work for you. In the rest of this chapter, we focus on the alternative, rewirement, and why it makes so many people so happy.
Changing the word from retirement to rewirement is more than just changing the t to a w. We came up with the term rewire one day when we happened to be in a record store where Tony Bennett’s CDs were on display. We marveled at how well this entertainer, who had his own TV show in the 1950s and won two Grammy awards in 1962, had now repositioned himself for the twenty-first-century MTV generation. We laughed and said, “He’s wired for action!” At the same moment, we looked at each other and said in unison, “No, he’s rewired for action!”
We realized the similarities between Tony Bennett and the retirees we had been interviewing. They were all still the same people with the same skills and interests, but they had now refocused their energy in new contexts—or in Tony Bennett’s case, for a whole new audience. Changing the t in retire to a w in rewire represents a whole new way of approaching life, of staying vital, of using your strengths and abilities, your gifts. It’s a way of staying active in work related to your field, working at something new, doing what you love, or staying connected to what makes you special.
In our research, we found that pre-retirees differed when it came to their outlook and attitude toward retirement. There were four main categories of attitudes:
Those who were excited and knew what they were getting into
Those who were excited but had no idea what they were getting into
Those who were panicked and had no idea how to get in control
Those who were angry and not physically or mentally ready but being forced into it
All but the fourth category of pre-retiree—those who were angry and not physically or mentally ready for retirement but were being forced into it—were open to the rewiring process.
We discuss rewiring in depth in Chapter 2, but for now we’ll simply say rewiring is an alternative to traditional retirement because it encompasses activities that provide meaning, not just leisure. It includes expanded work options and opportunities to contribute to those around you by re-routing the energy that was spent in your prior occupation into flexible, satisfying retirement work opportunities—including full-time, part-time, flex-time, phased, sabbatical, seasonal, paid, personal, and/or volunteer. Being rewired is a customized, individualized way to live and work, one that may require a journey of discovery. It’s for you if you are open to it.
How will you know if being rewired is for you? We developed the following list of attributes from the rewirees we talked to in our research. How many of the issues strike a chord with you?
So far, we’ve seen that traditional retirement isn’t for everyone. Now we’d like to introduce you to four pre-retirees who knew they wouldn’t be happy with traditional retirement: Tom, Paula, Bob, and Carol.
As we first meet them here, they are beginning to think about retirement. We meet them again in Chapter 4 and in subsequent chapters, and we follow their stories as they evolve throughout the book. We track their progress as they follow the five-step rewire process. For now, Tom, Paula, Bob, and Carol know that traditional retirement isn’t for them and they’re beginning to envision what they want as an alternative.
The rest of this book describes in detail the rewiring process, shows you what it is all about, and gives you the steps to take to achieve it.
Tom, 58, has spent his career in sales and is now the national sales manager for a northwest-based technology company. He is the life of most parties. But he’s burned out at work. The thrill of putting together winning sales teams and being on the road so much is beginning to wear thin. But the pleasure in developing salespeople and sales teams is more than just professional for him.
Tom broached with the division president the possibility of starting a “stepping-down” initiative, one in which he would begin to give up some of the travel and focus on developing a strong succession plan. But despite his good standing, Tom was told that the company had no mechanism in place to allow such a unique structure to occur. “You are either our national sales manager or you aren’t,” the division president said.
Tom is about to decide that he has earned his retirement, and although it will be tight financially, he is going to go for it. He has agreed to stay for at least six months, a year maximum, to get staffing right and to close pending deals.
Golf is his passion. Tom is in denial that he’ll miss anything about work. He thinks golf, golf, and more golf will be enough for him as his retirement goal. His wife is concerned about whether golf alone will do it for Tom long-term. He used to coach his sons’ Little League teams and thinks he could do something like that again. His wife is concerned about what he will do in the winter months when the course is closed and it’s not baseball season.
Paula, a human resources executive, is in her mid-60s and has retired twice. Divorced, she has a 25-year-old daughter. Paula was a foster child and is a strong supporter of women’s and young girls’ issues.
Paula’s first retirement was from a publishing company where she had worked for 25 years. She was 49. After six months, she decided what she had really needed was a sabbatical, not retirement. She realized that work had been her primary intellectual stimulation, and she missed the problem-solving.
She landed a position running the human resources department of a consulting firm. For seven and a half years, Paula thrived. She spoke at industry functions, sat on panels, and was quoted frequently in the media. But by the time she had reached age 57, Paula was tired. She retired for the second time.
Paula discovered sailing when she and her daughter went on a sailing vacation. After that, she took an intensive sailing course in Annapolis, Maryland. Paula then met a group of experienced sailors who asked if she wanted to crew on the Newport– Bermuda–St. Martin race. Paula, a quick study, knew she could meet this challenge and accepted. She spent a year as part of the team, and when she returned, she couldn’t wait to go again.
When Paula was 59, her daughter asked her to consult on some human resources issues at the small start-up technology company where she was working. Paula created and implemented across-the-board policies and procedures that increased retention and made a positive impact on time to market and profitability. She joined the company as head of the human resources department.
Paula stayed 18 months and then started her own human resources outsourcing/consulting business, having seen the great need for those services in the growing technology field. She has crafted a niche business targeted to new technology and family-owned businesses.
Paula would like to cut back, but she doesn’t know how to maintain her identity, sail, give back, and pull back at the same time. Having “retired completely” twice before, she doesn’t want to do it again.
Bob is a 60-year-old senior engineer at an automotive company. He is an organization man in the best sense. He lives by the golden rule and thinks of the people in the company as his extended family. Because he continues to learn the new technologies, other engineers trust him as a problem-solver and think of him as the go-to guy for complicated technical problems.
Although Bob has had many promotions through the years, he is not a high-powered executive, just an extremely able and committed one. He is skilled at bringing different kinds of people together as a team. Bob, a World War I history buff, has a knack for rallying the troops around a mission—a skill management has recognized, especially during difficult times and waves of downsizing.
Long ago, his company recognized his give-back nature and put him in charge of the corporate United Way initiative. He was also selected to be its Junior Achievement spokesperson and to sit on the company’s diversity council. Bob loves such assignments because (1) the recognition is great; (2) the company pays for his participation; and (3) his wife, especially, enjoys socializing with interesting celebrities.
Bob is nervous about quitting work for good. He has seen both work and church friends do it the right way and the wrong way. He would like to work part-time and is willing to forgo management responsibility if the company will consider a “phased” role for him. Bob would like to keep business and charity events in his life and nurture the community outside of the company. He would also like to work to earn money. The volatility of the stock market concerns him.
Carol, 51, fell into Wall Street, she didn’t choose it. Even though she did well financially as an investment banker, she never believed that her purpose in life was to make other people rich. Carol has a wide network through her work in finance and from her after-hours work supporting politicians and fund-raising for their campaigns. She enjoys being a catalyst for change as well as having access to people from different walks of life.
At home, Carol loves to spend time with her journalist husband and her four English Setters. When one of them died unexpectedly, Carol honored his memory with a donation to the city’s Center for Animal Care and Control. When she learned how many of the animals there would be put down, she decided to make saving animals her purpose in life. Carol adopted four dogs and took them to her vet to clean, fatten up, and board until she could get them adopted, either on her own or through a pet store.
Carol thinks that in saving animals she has found what she has lacked all along. This dream feels so close she can almost touch it.
You’ll meet these four pre-retirees—Tom, Paula, Bob, and Carol—again in Chapter 4 and through later chapters in the book. We track their progress throughout the book as they rewire and you can see how their lives are transformed by the rewire process.
By now, from meeting all the people we’ve introduced in the book—the retirees who were less than satisfied and the pre-retirees who are beginning to shape the nontraditional kind of retirement that will be more satisfying to them—you know that retiring is an individual process. One size does not fit all.
Tip
One size doesn’t fit all. Don’t covet your neighbor’s plans. Seek advice, but remember that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. What works for your neighbor might not be right for you. Choice is the name of the game.
One day at lunch we overheard a conversation that made us laugh, but also made us realize how important it is to have a customized plan that’s yours:
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do in retirement?”
“Fishing, fishing, and more fishing!”
“Don’t you think that’ll get a little boring?”
“Not the way I’ve planned it.”
“You’ve got a plan?”
“Sure. My wife loves the water. She is going to take sailing lessons, and we’re even looking at property on a lake. We’re going to structure vacations around fishing and try to fish in some of the great fishing spots in the United States. We’ve set some goals for ourselves. I was even thinking of writing an article for a fishing magazine. Remember, I am a journalist!”
“Maybe I better talk to my wife about taking up fishing.”
“But you hate fishing!”
“I can learn to like it. You’ve done all the work; I’ll follow your plan.”
“What if I was a skydiver?”
In the next chapter, we talk about rewiring as a going to. In the meantime, we know from successful rewirees that it’s never too soon to start planning. What steps have you taken to think about what you’ll do in the next exciting stage of your life?