Leisure, leadership and legacy.
This year, the first of the baby boomers are eligible to hang up their hats and step into retirement. So what are they planning to do with their time? Can one have a purposeful retirement?
My hope is that they will develop a retirement ‘portfolio’ (like I have a work portfolio) that consists of leisure, leadership and legacy. Because let’s face it, at 65 people are potent. They have experience, are highly qualified, generally well resourced and as of soon, they have a lot of time on their hands. After 6 months of playing golf and gardening, they might start asking “is there more to retirement than this?”. Some will serve on boards, and although I think that governance is an important place to have their experience and expertise, I also hope that there will be more active transference of knowledge being brokered.
Boomers - here are the 3 things I hope you will do on retirement:
1. Write Your Wrongs (and your Rights). My friend Rumi Shivas introduced me to the idea of boomers telling - in essence - their insights from a lifetime of work into a ‘thin book’ - 50 pages rather than 300. (Goodness knows that format would appeal to me - someone who rarely has time to read past chapter 3!). The purpose should be to document key insights - what worked, what didn’t, noticing the key points of leverage and any regrets. I am convinced that we need to honor our ‘breakdowns’ as much as we celebrate our success. The only true failure in life is the failure to learn from a mistake. What a wonderful opportunity to ‘mine’ a life of experiences to uncover the gold and invest that wealth back into the world.
2. Discover Your Protégé- Before soaking up your retirement savings on sailing holidays to the Cooks, Invest in returns you won’t see in your lifetime. Invest in a young person - a purposeful young professional who is working in an area aligned to your experience and offer to invest time, money and experience into them.
3. Barrier Bash. What the world needs is people who have connected with what ‘brings them alive’. If a person has never had the time or permission to ask this of themselves, retirement is the perfect time. Boomer, if you have ever felt limited by society (your parents, your family) - now is the time to break the barriers and get the best out of the rest of YOUR one precious life. Surprise me; take up skateboarding, climb Kilimanjaro, design a website, paint a mural. Its time to live like there is no tomorrow - when in fact there is one, and we are inheriting it from you.
