Working hard to adjust to new life of retirement
Dear Friend,
I hope that by the time this reaches you, the dust has settled from your decision to retire. I wanted to share some insights from when I left the corporate world, which I hope will help you in your process of adjusting to your new life. Yes. There is life after your career.
I once exited the corporate limelight, in 1998. I was a relatively big fish, in rather a small pond – namely the Brazilian insurance industry. I immediately moved to a different country and promptly lost contact with about 250 people I worked regularly with. Here is what I learned
Many, many people befriend you for what you are, not who you are. I am not sure this is human nature, but it happens with startling regularity and is universal, at least in business. Aristotle defined this friendship as that of “utility”. In some way, you are useful to them, and in some ways (to be fair) they are useful to you. Coming out of the limelight alters this relationship and destroys it, in most cases. Of course this is rather depressing, but it is reality. The upside is that it sorts the wheat from the chaff, and those that keep in touch through thick and thin, the ones who you can call a year from now, and chat as if you had dinner together last night, are the real friends.
- “Arbeit Macht Frei” (roughly “work sets you free”) was the motto above the gate to Auschwitz. It was the last horrible deception of a series of deceptions that lead millions to their deaths. It is still a deceptive credo, even today. Work can indeed free us from poverty, from boredom and it builds whole societies. But it does not truly make us free. True freedom is born from the choices we make to give back – be it to our families and loved ones, to our society or to those who are less fortunate. Maybe this is why monks and other ascetics believe themselves to be truly free: they give back more than they have. Working ourselves beyond our physical limits can be comforting but is ultimately futile, because we have worked ourselves to death in search of something that is not attainable by work alone.
- You have the gift of leadership. You can lead people to do great things and achieve lofty goals. This is an amazing skill. Now, however, you are going confront something far more difficult. You are going from leading people to spend more time leading yourself. This requires that you know yourself, and this requires the rest of your life. All I can say is that it is a voyage beyond the horizon. It can be very scary and sometimes disappointing, but like all great voyages of discovery, it reaps huge riches in knowledge and happiness for those bold and skillful enough to keep on sailing.
- Humility. When I graduated from Colgate a professor said “if you leave here imagining how much you know, we have failed miserably. If you graduate with an inkling about how little you know, then we have succeeded”. I am reminded every day by my children, by my wife, by store clerks and by all sorts of people, big and small, how little I know. It makes the world a wonderful place, and makes sure I keep trying to catch up.
So there you have it, the sum total of my knowledge in 4 short lessons. I had no idea of the voyage I was about to embark upon – thank heaven – but it is one amazing cruise.
Good Luck!
Sincerely,
Bruce
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