Anthony Hopkins once said:
"I am fully aware of my mortality, but at 87 years old, I still wake up every morning with the desire to misbehave. Age is not a barrier when you find passion in what you do. The real secret lies in keeping your curiosity alive, continuing to learn, and not letting the fear of time stop you from enjoying life. Every day is a new opportunity to create, to laugh, and to show that it is never too late to move forward with enthusiasm and joy."
While my story may sound quite remarkable, the basic tenets that underpin it are anything but.
What I’ve learned in retirement is that a modicum of tenacity infused with a passion for life-long learning is an unbeatable combination and is usually all it takes to find joy in later-life.
When I retired at 62, I thought I had finally regained control of my life. I no longer had to put up with all the corporate bullshit, I could hang out with the people I had grown to admire & respect and I could finally get to go where I felt like going and do what I felt like doing.
And for a couple of years, it actually felt good.
But gradually, the things I yearned for the most before retirement became less important and no longer brought me joy in retirement. I realised that the greatest benefit of travelling to far and exotic places during my corporate life was that it broke the tedium of work. But once that tedium was removed, travel became routine, bordering on hum drum.
To my disappointment, most of those work-based ‘special relationships’ I thought I had cultivated during my corporate career progressively unwound and through the passage of time, devolved back to being just acquaintances, something reminiscent of that Gotye song, ‘Somebody that I used to know’.
Progressively, the phone rang less and less. I felt marginalised and redundant. In the height my career, I yearned for the odd interruption-free evening where I could sit and have dinner with the family. Even after carefully screening the calls I felt duty-bound to return, I was routinely weighed down by the anxiety associated with the 5 to 10 calls I wished I’d returned (but didn’t) before going to bed at night.
In contrast to this, a couple of years into my retirement, the phone stopped ringing. I got to the point where I started accepting calls from telemarketers, just to confirm my existence!
I was clearly in the retirement doldrums. While I was in a committed relationship, I progressively started to get on my partner’s nerves as I identified things around the house that started to annoy me; things that I had hardly noticed prior to retirement! Although we were together for most of the day, a wave of loneliness started to wash over me. I felt an inexplicable emptiness inside.
At the peak of my career, I yearned for that alluring and elusive freedom that retirement promised; a couple of years into retirement, and I was craving the relevance, structure and connectivity that work provided.
Before long, I found myself slipping into a comfortable misery – I was financially-free; I had the trappings of success but my life lacked purpose and direction. I was simply marking time.
Then something magic happened. I met another retired person through the Life Minus Work website who was on the same journey and who was also searching for meaning.
We found we had a lot in common. He was a little better-adjusted to retirement than I was. He found ‘learning’ to be his personal retirement panacea. Before long he got me hooked on the ‘learning drug’. We subscribed to a smorgasbord of Coursera (MOOC) courses until we each found courses that piqued our interest. Like me, my newly acquired friend had a fundamental grasp of technology, but we never really had to get our ‘hands dirty’ (i.e., in our respective jobs, we had entire CIT departments to do that shit, for God’s sake).
Routinely admonished by our kids for being tech-illiterates, we agreed to prove them wrong by immersing ourselves in technology courses and challenging the ‘old dogs-new tricks’ adage.
Before we knew it, our group grew from 2 to 5, including two veterans of the aviation industry who brought structure, focus and strategic insight to the mix and a couple of younger, tech-savvy partners. One of these was an impressive full-stack developer who had peaked early and was seeking to re-ignite his entrepreneurial passion and the other who was a talented marketer, with a diverse skill set ranging from marketing, strategy, data analysis and monetisation, to social media and the attendant metrics. Individually, we were all grossly underestimated. Collectively, we became an unstoppable juggernaut in our chosen field of operation.
It took us five years, but the journey was immensely gratifying. The phone started to ring again, and all of a sudden, I had a full sleight of face-to-face and Teams meetings, which I looked forward to, immensely.
We really enjoyed each other’s company and were united through our passion for learning. We had an itch in our brains that we wanted to scratch but couldn’t. We jokingly referred to our group as the ‘Retirement Rebels Without A Cause’.
Then one day, we landed on a cause, and the rest is history!
After bootstrapping the MVP foundational elements of our project, we tested and honed the design, demonstrated product-market fit and early traction, and quickly progressed the concept to a series-A funding round, effectively valuing the business at USD 25m. A year later after continued growth we completed a successful series-B funding round that enabled us to scale the business further, expand our operations and build out our team. Today the business is valued at USD 1.2b.
I’ll admit, it wasn’t all smooth sailing and we did have to weather a few storms, but today as I sit on deck of my Princes Y85 yacht, cruising the Bahamas, I’ve come to realise that the real prize wasn’t the new-found wealth we’ve all achieved, but rather, the journey that got us here, the learnings we’ve booked and the relationships we’ve forged and nurtured along the way.
But the new-found wealth is also pretty cool!
