were times when you really enjoyed it, but by and large you find work to be a necessity rather than a joy. On the other hand you may have embraced work as a key part of your personal life evolution, to the point that you don’t want to quit. This is especially the case if you have built up your own business and see it as your primary driver for living. You can’t envisage a life that doesn’t involve a working career.
I have mentioned two scenarios. Your experience might be somewhere in between.
Whatever you feel about work you will have done some financial planning for your later years. We all spend considerable time and money to make sure we have financial security during our dessert years. It’s just as important to develop your own self-investment plan. A self-investment plan is exactly what it says – investing in your own interests, talents, abilities, passions and dreams – deciding what you actually want to do with your time in the next phase of your life. Statistically speaking, we can look forward to living a lot longer than people did in past generations. In the times of the 19th century Industrial Revolution, management felt you had lived most of your life by the age of 65 and likely to die by age 70. There was little point to planning a full and meaningful life after your working years then. Now you might even live as long yet as your working life so far. That’s a long time if you are thinking of spending your dessert years basically sitting in your rocking chair watching the world go by.
Whatever your feelings are about this final stage of your life, fear can be a big factor in your thinking. Not just fear of not having enough money to enjoy your dessert years but also the fear of a life without work. Will you have interests that motivate you in the way your career work has done over the years? You will need to make some long-term lifestyle decisions in a fast-moving, rapidly-changing era where it is hard to predict what the world will be like next week or next year, let alone over the rest of your life. Will you just keep going the way you are for all those years? Probably not.
Your way of thinking about retirement is being influenced by many factors other than simply the role of work in your life and your identity as a person. Whether you are male or female, you will be experiencing a change-of-life. You might be starting to wonder if your life is like a glass that is half-full and still filling, or a glass that is half-empty and continuing to drain away. You are certainly starting to see almost everything differently – including your priorities, your physical and mental abilities, your financial needs and who is important in your life. To many of us these changes are scary because they are signs of getting old. Increasingly though, we are starting to see this changed outlook on life as something of a release from the expectations we felt were placed on us in the first half of our lives. Maturity is helping us to realize not only are we entitled to follow our passions but others actually want us to relax and be ourselves more.
Putting it simply, you are moving into a wonderful stage of life where you start the gradual process of changing the emphasis from:
Making what you have to do the centre of your life (supported by what you love to do)….to
Making what you love to do as the centre of your life (supported by what you have to do).
It doesn’t happen overnight but the very thought will drive you onwards over the coming years.
They say everything happens in three’s and that applies to life itself.
I have already described your life is like a traditional three-course meal. The other three-stage perspective relates to a statement I made very early in this book: “The whole of your life from birth to death – not just your working career life – is a continuum of progress, growth and self-actualisation.”
1 Where you are at right now in your life’s progress, growth and self-actualization
2 What interests/passions you would like still to pursue towards fulfilling your natural-born potential
3 What actions/changes/recalibrations you might make in your desire to fulfil that potential
Now, long before you make any decisions whether to cease fulltime work, is a great time to seriously think about those three statements and how this book can help you look ahead positively and with optimism to the promise of your life still to come.
WHAT’S FOR DESSERT
By the time you are in your late 50’s society is giving you all sorts of encouragements to start thinking about that word retirement. Perhaps those years of paying superannuation contributions can soon legally become available to you. Perhaps it is just a feeling of “how many more years do I want to keep doing this”. Whatever the prompt may be you are increasingly conscious of the need to make some big decisions about what you want to do with the rest of your life.
It’s not unlike the feeling you get when you are getting down to the last few mouthfuls of the main course of a meal. You are starting to think, “I have enjoyed the main course but now I am looking forward to choosing a dessert”. As I suggested earlier:
“What’s for dessert?? I’ve finished the main course and I’m still hungry”.
You constantly have a want to eat food in order to satisfy your hunger. Once you have eaten, you feel temporarily satisfied. But there is another hunger which is never satisfied – the hunger to keep growing, developing your talents, enriching your life and achieving your deepest wants. I call it your life-hunger, the hunger that drives you forward in the best and worst situations, unstoppable until your last breath or the onset of a health condition that overrides that desire.
Your life-hunger sometimes causes you to take little bites, sometimes big bites and there are even times when you might bite off more than you can chew. Life comes back to bite you at times too, but you never lose that innate desire to keep on moving forward in life, growing, flourishing and blossoming. Thinking of your future not as retirement but as enjoying your dessert years heralds the beginning of a new era in which age has no bearing on your outlook on life. The issue of whether or not to keep working will be influenced less by economics and more by your hunger to keep on growing as a person.
How to keep satisfying your hunger to make the most of your personal life potential will continue to be as it has always been - the product of your own unique mix of natural-born talents and passions, garnished with your personal life experiences. Prepared and served in your own way you can produce a lifetime culinary delight that no other chef has created in human history, nor will there be anyone in the future with your particular life ingredients, talents and passions to create quite the same masterpiece.
The Value of Dessert
Say you are enjoying a night out for dinner with family or friends. Your main course was very satisfying and it was also a responsible choice with a good balance of vegetables, and perhaps some fish, red meat or other ingredients that are generally recognized as ‘being good for you’. Someone suggests that you all have a dessert. There is an enthusiastic yes from around the table. Clearly everyone feels that they have done the right thing with their main course and now it’s time to have something that is going to taste great and will be fun to eat.
The menu indicates that there is a wide variety of dessert options from which to choose. Do you choose on the basis of cost? Or do you, within a reasonable context of your available budget, let your imagination run riot as you anticipate having something that you are going to really love eating? Your taste-buds begin salivating as you savour the expectation of how good your dessert will taste, with just the right (to you) texture, colour, aroma and flavour. Everyone around the table is delighting in the fact that they enjoy the right to choose exactly which dessert they want without regard to their normal eating rules or what anyone else
