

### THE ART

### of

### SUCCESSFUL

### RETIREMENT

"A Life of Quality after a Life of Work"

### Roger Mayes

### Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Roger William Mayes

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2. SETTING THE SCENE

3. THE ROAD TO RETIREMENT

4. THINK FOR YOURSELF

5. QUALITY OF RETIRED LIFE

6. PREPARE FOR ACTION

7 DEVELOP YOUR PLAN

8. LIVE YOUR PLAN

9 TRAPS, ERRORS, AND THINGS NOT TO DO

10 A CASE HISTORY – ROGER MAYES

11 JUST ONE IDEA

12 REFERENCES AND CONTACTS

*******

#  1.INTRODUCTION

## WHY THIS BOOK?

As we enter the second decade of the twenty first century, we find ourselves in a world confronting a number of significant problems. Many of these problems are of a material nature. According to the World Bank, despite the fact that poverty rates have declined significantly over the last twenty five years, there are still hundreds of millions of people living in absolute poverty, which is defined as being less than $1.25 per day. These people are overwhelmingly concentrated in the so-called "developing" world.

That same period has been a time of more or less steady economic growth in the developed world. During this period those individuals who formed the post WW2 population explosion known as the Baby Boom in the Western World have been enjoying the economic benefits of rapid technological developments in almost every field of human activity. Employment levels have been high, and the boomers have typically experienced steadily increasing standards of living associated with ever higher levels of financial prosperity. These people are now reaching the stage of their lives where they can put their feet up and enjoy the fruits of a life largely committed to increasing the financial well-being of the economy in general and themselves in particular. Surely such fortunate people can not have a care in the world.

Well, this is not necessarily the case. Many boomers have been so busy living the good life in the prosperous countries of the west that they have not given a thought to what will happen when the time comes for them to stop working. They have been so busy consuming whatever they have been able to earn that they are only now realising that a retirement of ease and comfort requires a certain amount of cash in the bank. Such people are now looking forward to spending their declining years either seeking what employment they can find, or being a burden on their relatives. However, many others have heeded the advice which regularly appears in the financial press and publications and have been steadily putting aside some of their hard-earned money to fund a retirement which will be at least financially independent. Surely then at least these people have not a care in the world.

Well, once again this is not necessarily the case. Making financial provision for retirement represents only one, admittedly very important, aspect of the thinking which is necessary for a happy retirement. Another aspect is how to actually spend the time which suddenly becomes available when a working life comes to an end. My personal observations and much anecdotal information indicates that very many people, through a lifetime of hard work and financial discipline, are putting themselves in a position to enjoy a rewarding retirement, but are failing to take advantage of the opportunity which they have earned themselves. Worse still, many such people experience fear, uncertainty, and stress when they encounter the reality of retirement. Just about anybody you speak to on the subject of retirement has morbid horror stories about someone they know who went into an immediate decline when they retired, and suffered depression, loss of health and in many cases premature death in the years following their retirement.

This book is aimed at such people, the ones who have spent years saving for and looking forward to retirement only to find that they don't know how to go about it. More specifically it is intended to help the reader to avoid becoming one of those horror stories. Not only does it seek to help those who have already retired and are finding that the reality of retirement is not living up to the dream of "golden years" which has been somewhere in the back of the mind throughout the decades of working life, but even more it is aimed at those people who are reaching the final few years of work, and are just beginning to wonder what they are going to do about retirement. It seeks to do this by prompting the reader to think very clearly about the influences at work in our modern society, and the nature of both work and retirement, and to plan accordingly. It is my belief that a lack of clear thinking is the main cause of the problems which otherwise successful people experience when it comes to retiring from a working life. The Greek philosopher Socrates expressed the belief that an unexamined life is not worth living. An unexamined retirement may still be pretty good, but with a bit of careful thought about what retirement means to you, retirement can be the much more than that. Far from being a time of comfortable decline into old age, it can be a time of continuing personal growth and increasing quality of life.

It is my belief that those people who have managed to reach retirement age financially independent and in sound health are faced with the greatest, in fact the ultimate, opportunity of their lives. On a slightly more desperate note, it is also the last chance they will have to improve their lives! That it appears that so many such people experience fear, disappointment, and boredom when they retire genuinely upsets me. This should not be the case. People who have worked hard and managed their finances carefully to put themselves in a position to lead a satisfying retirement deserve better. This book is an honest attempt to help those people who have worked so hard for this opportunity to see retirement as something much more than just a postscript to their lives, and to encourage them to use the years left to them to add many years of quality living to their time on earth.

## ABOUT ME – PART ONE

The content of this book is based largely on my own experiences of both working and retired life, so if you're going to take any notice of what I say to you, then maybe you need to know a little bit about me. I am at the very forefront of the baby boom, a pioneering boomer. My parents got married in 1940, and the first letter they received when they returned from their short honeymoon to their new little love nest was my Dad's call-up papers to serve in the British army for the duration of the Second World War. He obviously had some leave along the way, as my brother was born in 1943. Dad was eventually demobilised in early 1946, and I was born in November of that year. As the world tried to return to normality and make up for the lost years, the birth rate in those countries affected by the war surged, giving rise to what I remember at the time was referred to as the post war bulge, but has since become known as the Baby Boom.

I am, like everybody else, modelled by my early circumstances, a product of my time and place. I guess you would call my parents lower middle class conservatives. My Dad had left school at 14 without any qualifications, managed to get a job as an office boy at the height of the Great Depression and ended up working for the same organisation for 49 years, retiring as a director. My Mother went through Education College and became a primary school teacher until ill-health forced her to stay at home. Their combined backgrounds, embodying education, hard work, and loyalty, ensured that my brother and I were brought up immersed in the popular philosophy of the day – get the best education you can, then get the best job you can in the best organisation, work hard, live frugally, try and have some fun along the way, and one day you should be able to retire in some kind of comfort before dying and leaving a small inheritance to the next generation.

My life story so far has continued pretty much along that path. I was fortunate to be able to attend one of those centuries-old British schools where education is prized for its own sake rather than just as a process which ends in a school-leaving certificate. From there I went to University, emerging with a degree in Physics, and, by a fairly haphazard process which I describe elsewhere in this book, embarked on a career in what is now known as Information Technology but was then merely referred to as working in computers. I was never one of those fortunate people who have managed to follow a calling. What I did was always a job, a means of earning an income to support myself and my family. Despite that, I actually enjoyed the succession of jobs which formed what I refer to as my career. In particular I have always found the people in the IT industry to be good company, and the work offered a huge amount of variety and intellectual challenge. In the almost forty years I spent in the industry, it changed beyond all recognition. There was always something new. But Information Technology was never a calling for me. The motivation was always to earn an income rather than any thing inherent in the activity itself. Since my retirement I have not even attempted to keep abreast of what is happening in the industry, simply because there are much more interesting things for me to spend my time on. If I had been born to wealthy parents and had never had the need to work, then I certainly would not have had the career which I did have.

None of this makes me unique. Throughout my working life I have always taken a keen interest in my fellow workers, and what makes them tick. I even went to the extent of doing a three year university course in Psychology via distance learning in order to help me understand the motivations of my fellow workers, and, indeed, friends and contacts in many other professional environments. In addition to this formal background, I have, over the years, gained what I believe are insights into employee psychology by asking any number of my friends and colleagues about their thoughts and attitudes to their work and their lives. Also, in my later working years I was frequently in a position to act as a mentor to younger colleagues, giving me further opportunity to find out about the desires and motivations of corporate employees. The conclusion which I came to was that there was nothing unique about the way I viewed my work experience. In fact, in the corporate world my experiences were shared by almost all of those with whom I discussed the matter. No matter how much the corporate world tries to tell its employees that working for the corporation is a noble activity which will lead the along a path of personal growth and self actualization, very few people actually experience corporate life that way. I expand on this theme throughout this book, because I believe it is very important for the retirees to think clearly about what their careers have meant to them, and to contrast that with the opportunities which retirement can offer.

## ABOUT ME – PART TWO

And so I came to the penultimate stage of the life story which I mapped out earlier, the retirement that comes just before the dying. I did a lot of thinking about this, because it appeared to me that it represented a great opportunity, and was worthy of a bit of planning. I tried to do a bit of reading on the subject, but the vast majority of books on retirement focus exclusively on the financial aspects – very important, I agree, but not what I was looking for. The organisation which I was working for as I approached retirement age had an employee assistance program which offered counselling and advice from professionals, and which included advice on the subject of retirement. I took advantage of this, and had a session with a delightful and very professional young lady who is a registered counselling psychologist. The only problem was that she was in her thirties, and had clearly not considered retirement, and certainly had no practical retirement experience. The process was interesting but useless as far as practical advice was concerned.

So it became apparent that I was largely on my own. I started my own retirement planning process about three years before I actually stopped working, and my only regret is that I did not start it sooner. The process which I went through forms the basis of this book.

As I write, it is more than six years since I stopped working. To say that I am happily retired is an understatement. During this time I have experienced a level of personal growth that would have been impossible whilst in paid employment. The quality of my life is better than at any other time in my adult life. I expand on my personal experience of retirement later in this book, but in summary my activities include the following:

→Although not gifted creatively or artistically, and have never considered myself as being good with my hands, I experience the satisfaction of creative activity through my woodwork – mainly making decorative jewellery and other boxes out of plain and veneered woods. These are mostly given away, any surplus I sell to recoup some of my costs. But the important thing is that I am much better at it now than when I started – It has been a vehicle for personal growth.

→I indulge my passion for nature and the outdoors through serving as an Honorary Officer of a local Parks Board, through nature photography, and through excursions into natural environments with my wife, who is a keen bird watcher.

→I keep myself fit through cycling and regular sessions at the gym, as well as playing field hockey at the "Masters" level.

→Any spare moments are filled by reading, which has been a lifelong passion. I never had enough time for reading in my working life. Still don't!

→These activities have been interspersed with holidays and a certain amount of travel

→I have always enjoyed writing – letters to friends and newspapers, sales proposals and the like - and now I am writing a book!

But the important thing about my retirement is not the activities which I undertake, but the subjective feeling which I experience. The activities which define your retirement will differ, maybe dramatically, from mine. But if the feeling is the same, then you will undoubtedly be a successful retiree. I can best describe that feeling as one of being blessed to be able to explore the opportunities which a level of freedom offers. Given reasonable luck with my health, before me stretches a period of time equivalent to at least half of that which I spent working, and I am free to use these years to explore my own possibilities and potentialities. I find that opportunity more exciting than any opportunity ever offered by my years as a corporate employee.

I have exchanged my interest in my fellow employees for an even greater interest in my fellow retirees. The transition from worker to retiree is not always a simple one, and I have observed an interesting mix of reactions to this event. This book is the result of blending my own experiences with those of others whom I have observed.

In short, I am old enough to have garnered some experience in being retired, but young enough and energetic enough to invest some of my retirement time in evangelising my retirement message. I am not a professional psychologist, philosopher, or life skills counsellor, but I am 'QBE' – Qualified by Experience. I have made some mistakes, but I have also learnt, and feel that I have grown and continue to grow as a person. And I am convinced, from my own experience, that retirement does indeed offer the greatest opportunity of the typical retiree's life. That is the short answer to the question "why did you write this book?". I think I have something very important to share with people who are approaching retirement or already retired.

## ABOUT YOU

I do not have as much to say about you as I do about myself, for the simple fact that I do not know you. But I have made a few assumptions, and these need to be spelt out up front.

As I have said previously, most of the books available on the subject of retirement deal exclusively with the financial aspects. One of the assumptions of this book is that you have already made financial arrangements for your retirement at least to the extent that you can survive on your retirement income. Financial independence is fundamental to a happy retirement, but great wealth is not. Elsewhere in the book I deal with the relationship between time and money in the retirement years. This relationship boils down to the established principle of supply and demand. Simply put, as the amount of time left to you decreases, so its value increases to the point where it cannot be reckoned in money terms.

So the first assumption which I have made about you is that financially you have provided adequately, whatever that may mean to you, for your retirement. But mankind has a subtler need than mere survival. It is a sad fact that for more than half of the world's population, providing food for today is the most pressing problem facing them. But the fortunate ones who have been able to secure a degree of certainty about their survival, a different problem exists, namely, "what do I do now?" This is the problem which this book addresses.

The second assumption is that you are in reasonable health. Throughout my life I have enjoyed taking part in a variety of sporting activities in an enthusiastic, as opposed to proficient, manner. As long as I can remember I have enjoyed the experience of vigorous exercise of almost any type. Because of this and, I guess, given a degree of luck in terms of the genes I inherited from my parents, I have arrived at retirement age in rude good health. In this book you will find no more than passing thoughts and advice on how to manage your health at this time of life. As with the issue of financial well-being, this must not be taken to imply that I do not consider health to be important. Just the opposite is the case. All I am saying is that this book is about other issues. The only mention of health is that you must be realistic about the fact that you are at a time of life when physical capacity is inevitably declining, and you must factor this into any longer term plans which you make. If you have doubts about health aspects of getting older, consult your medical adviser.

I make no assumptions about your age and time of life, although I guess the fact that you are reading a book about retirement makes it likely that you are around retirement age. However people can start thinking about retirement at any age, in fact the sooner the better. I recently met a twenty six year old who said he could not wait for the day he retired. If people in that frame of mind were to start seriously planning for their retirement along the lines suggested in this book, they might find out a few things about themselves that could change their approach to life long before retirement. The assumption that I am making about you is that you have started to think about retirement but have not yet formulated a clear plan of how to make the most of this time of your life. From my observations of those around me who are in this situation, this probably makes you a bit nervous about retiring. If that's you, read on.

Alternatively, you may be someone who has already retired and is finding that the promise of the golden years is proving to be elusive. If this is you, it is certainly not too late to do some serious thinking and maybe set sail in some new direction.

Thinking about retirement is no different in principle from thinking about any other period of your life. So I believe that the thoughts laid out in the following pages, and in particular the insistence that you must think about how to plan your life, are applicable to any life stage. I would like to think that this book could be a useful addition to anyone's reading who is thinking about how to make the most of their life. But it is aimed at people who have provided materially for their retirement, but are wondering what to do next.

## ABOUT THIS BOOK

I'm rather surprised to have written a book. I'm a very normal person, and normal people don't write books. Intellectuals and creative people write books, and I certainly would never describe myself as either intellectual or creative.

In fact the book kind of wrote itself. I was approaching the retirement age mandated by my then employer, a large multinational corporation in the Information Technology business who thought that sixty was the right age for their employees to be put out to pasture. I had done a good deal of thinking about my impending retirement, and was looking forward to it. I had even done some preparation in a fairly informal way. Then my employer was involved in a huge take-over, and in the ensuing consolidation I was offered retirement, on quite generous terms, two years prior to the planned date.

I look on that offer as the best thing that any employer ever did for me, but it did catch me rather unawares at the time. Within the space of a week I went from frantically preparing sales presentations to sitting on the front porch reading a book. What it forced me to do was to actually think in a more formal way about the whole issue of retirement, so I decided to start writing down and categorising my thoughts on the matter. Before I knew it I was into the habit of sitting down first thing after breakfast and writing down my thoughts about retirement.

The possibility that my notes might one day become a book formed somewhere along this process. However, my notes remained notes. Converting them into a book required me to juggle the random notes into some kind of logical sequence. The net result of this is that the book has been divided into a few sections, with a hopefully logical flow of thought in each. However, the various sections fall into the general categories of THEORY and PRACTICE. There are a couple of sections which address how to go about THINKING about retirement, and a couple more which address the DOING of retirement.

## A DIFFERENT APPROACH

I believe that one of the main reasons that people experience difficulties with retirement age is the way that they think about it. Let me rephrase that. I believe that the main reason that that people experience difficulties with retirement is that they don't think about it. At best people approaching retirement have a few vague plans about learning to paint, playing more golf, or going on a world cruise. At worst there is just an assumption that once the routine of commuting to the office five days a week comes to an end, life will automatically become some kind of Nirvana, suffused with the mellow glow of the "golden years". I believe that retirement is an opportunity which deserves better treatment than that.

Almost all the books which I have found which address the issue of retirement consider only the financial aspects of retirement planning. The few which, as this book does, address the lifestyle aspects tend to jump straight in to discuss how great retirement can be and point out all the wonderful things one can do when retired. They tend to gloss over the established fact that many people find retirement a difficult and stressful time of transition. This book takes a different approach in that it starts by stepping back from the actual process of retiring to consider why it should be that something that appears so simple and which most people look forward to should be experienced by many people as a time of stress and uncertainty.

So in the first parts of the book I spend a lot of time laying out for you my ideas and beliefs on the twin subjects of work and retirement, how they differ, and how they fit together to form a life. I believe that this is important. Because we spend so much of our adult lives immersed in a working environment within a materialistic society, we tend to form many assumptions. The first half of the book sets out to show how many of the influences which surround us in the modern world actually make retirement more difficult than it should be. Successful retirement requires different thinking from that which carried us through our working lives. You may or may not agree with my views, but my objective is to get you to think deeply and clearly about any assumptions you have about work and retirement so that you can clear them out of the way and start your retirement planning with a clean slate. Getting you thinking along these lines is the objective of the first part of this book.

By all means skim over the theoretical stuff if you are eager to start the actual planning process, but spending some time and effort in thinking about my retirement has unquestionably paid dividends in improving the quality of my retired life, and I am convinced it will do the same for you.

In the later sections I have laid out what I consider to be important factors for anyone to consider when putting together a retirement plan, and living life in retirement. I put forward my ideas on how to go about planning a retirement. These are broadly divided into things to do, and things to avoid. Once again, the ideas are my own, and I present them to you for your approval or rejection. If you approve, use them to craft your own retirement plan of action. If you reject them with howls of derision I will not mind provided that you replace them with your own, carefully thought out ideas of how to live the best retirement for you. I repeat that my objective is to get you to consciously make the best you can of the opportunity which retirement is presenting to you. If you do this by accepting my ideas, that will be great. If you do it by improving on my ideas for your particular situation, that will be even better, because you will be more likely to succeed with your own ideas than by relying on mine. Either way, the objective of the later parts of the book is to get you to formulate a plan of action which you are confident will help you to live a successful retirement.

Finally I spend just a few pages recounting my own experiences of retiring. As I said earlier, I spent quite a bit of effort thinking about my own retirement, and I can promise you that very few people can be happier in retirement than I am. Your own retirement activities may, in fact almost certainly will, be very different from my own, but I hope that my example will assist you in crafting a retirement which will fulfil your own unique criteria for retirement success.

## WHAT ABOUT THE TITLE?

The title suggested itself when I looked around for other books on the subject of retirement. Such books as I could find addressed what I think of as the "science" of retirement. This mainly centres on the very important aspects of finance and health. The science of retirement focuses on issues such as annuity rates, actuarial tables, prostate examinations and mammography. Unquestionably financial and physical health are necessary preconditions for successful retirement, but are not in themselves sufficient. The science is based on facts which are the same for everybody.

The Art of Retirement on the other hand concerns itself with all the other factors which go into making retirement a life-enhancing experience. Two retirees who have identical retirement income and are in equal states of physical health will not have the same retirement plan. Their opinions on what constitutes a good quality of life in retirement will differ, and their activities will, or at least should, vary to reflect this. Just as with learning any other art or life skill, there will be trial and error, but overall there should be a feeling of moving forward or getting better. The art of successful retirement, then, is about this process of deciding what _YOU_ will do in _YOUR_ retirement in order to experience an improved quality of life after your working life has come to an end, and then putting that plan into practice.

If this was easy then there would be no need for a book such as this. The general assumption is that retirement must be easy, because so many problems and restrictions are removed from our lives when we stop working. However, overwhelming evidence, as well as personal observation, suggests that many people find retirement a difficult time, even when they have planned their finances carefully, and are in good health. The early parts of the book look closely at why this should be so. With this understanding as a basis, the later sections suggest ways to go about crafting your own successful retirement. But just as an art teacher teaches the student how to paint and then leaves her to choose her own subjects, it will be up to you to decide the subject matter of your own retirement plan.

The other part of the title, the concept of a successful retirement, I address a little later on.

## THIS BOOK WILL HAVE SUCCEEDED IF...

This book will have succeeded if it gets you to think differently about YOUR retirement. It will certainly have succeeded if it makes you more excited about retiring.

This book will have succeeded if it helps you to overcome any fears or doubts you may have about retiring.

This book will have succeeded if it helps you in any way to develop a plan for YOUR retirement.

This book will have succeeded if it helps you to be a success rather than a failure as a retiree.

Above all, this book will have succeeded if it helps you to live a retirement which helps you to grow as a person and which adds value to your life as a whole.

Note the emphasis on YOUR retirement. This book will not tell you how to retire, because everybody's retirement is different from everybody else's, and I have no idea what your retirement will look like. That you have to decide for yourself. But in order to do that, you will have to think about your life in retirement differently from how you thought about your working life. This book will, I hope, help you to do just that.

It is not a long book. You really should not be spending a lot of your valuable retirement time reading my thoughts and words. Read it. Clarify your own retirement thinking. And then get on with making your own retirement a rewarding success.

## A BIT MORE ABOUT ME

Something which I did not say about myself, but which you may have gathered, is that I happen to be living in South Africa. I mention activities such as spending time in "the bush" and being involved in rhino conservation which take advantage of the unique South African environment. These are details. They form part of my particular retirement situation, and I mention them to illustrate points. My ideas for successful retirement are not limited by geography.

You may well not live in South Africa. That in no way alters my message to you. Wherever you are in the world, there are unlimited opportunities to experience personal growth and enhanced Quality of Life when your working life comes to an end. This book encourages and challenges you to go out, find those opportunities wherever you happen to be, and to use them to craft the best retirement you can for yourself.

*******

# 2. SETTING THE SCENE

## RETIREMENT FAILURE AND RETIREMENT SUCCESS

The Boomers are quitting. The generation born amid the flush of hope and optimism at the end of the Second World War are hitting their seventh decade. In their lifetimes they have helped to change the face of the planet at a rate never before seen. The technologies which they developed and harnessed have changed forever the way mankind works, communicates, travels, thinks. In a single generation they revolutionised social, sexual, and moral thought and behaviour. They have observed at first hand economic crises, terrorism, environmental degradation, and the total change of the world order. The Cold War, with the ever-present threat of nuclear devastation, started and finished in their lifetime. Their energy, ambition, initiative, intelligence, greed, and compassion have changed the very meaning of human life on earth.

And they now face the prospect of sitting back and enjoying the fruits of their labours. They worked hard to put themselves into a situation where they had enough material resources to enjoy the opportunities for leisure that their generation has created. And for many of them, the situation which they now face is as scary and uncertain as any which they have faced in their hectic lifetimes.

The story of the Boomer generation has virtually defined the meaning of the word "successful". To have been successful in the decades since the Second World War is to have benefitted from the improvement in material well being throughout the developed world. The successful person has built a career which has allowed him or (significantly, compared with previous generations) her to acquire and display the trappings of material acquisition. A bigger house with flashier cars (note the plural!) in the garage and an ever increasing armoury of gadgets in every room announces to the world at large that here lives a successful person. If you hear it said of someone "Oh she's very successful", then you can be pretty sure that she has risen to a position with an impressive title and/or is making a lot of money. What you are not so sure about is how happy she is or how she views the overall quality of her life.

So we now sit at a moment in time when a very large number of "successful" people are reaching the time of their lives when the activities which have made them successful are coming to and end. They are retiring from professional life. And very many of them are retiring having thought little about what it actually means to them to retire. Retirement has been a kind of vague blissful state which will automatically happen to them once the daily struggle for income comes to an end. They have given not the slightest thought to the possibility that they might have to change their thinking and expend their energies in different directions in order to be as successful in retirement as they have been in professional life.

Because we are so used to thinking about success as meaning career success, we have an implicit understanding that if someone has reached retirement with sufficient money to be able to retire in comfort, then they must have been "successful". This in turn implies that, once we have retired financially independent, the quest for success comes to an end. However, if we broaden the definition of "success" to cover all aspects of life, then we see that a genuinely successful person is one who has had, among other things, a successful career, successful family life, and successful social relationships. AND a successful retirement.

One hears a lot about success and failure in a career context, but very seldom when talking about retirement. How is it possible to fail at retiring? Well, the thought that it is possible to be successful in professional life and a failure in retirement hit me, as thoughts often do, when I was least prepared for it. I was in fact on a Wilderness Walking Trail in the Kruger National Park. It was there that I met John and his wife. On these trails a small group of members of the public is taken to a camp in one of the Park's magnificent wilderness areas, and are led by experienced rangers on guided walks through unspoilt bush, in order to experience in close-up the miraculous interplay of the life-forms of the African savannah, from ants to elephants. Evenings are spent chatting around the camp fire, getting to know your trail mates. All in all, it is a fantastic experience.

I have always found on these trails that the kind of people who undertake them are generally the kind of people that I like to be with, and John was no exception. He was also clearly "successful". He and his wife had arrived at the main camp in a top-of-the-range German luxury car. The refreshments they had brought included expensive wines and champagne. In conversation it turned out that he owned a business whose clients included some very big names. Their children were either attending or had attended the very best schools. And overseas travel, for purposes such as watching the French Open Tennis Championship, seemed to be taken for granted. But it also turned out that a few years previously, John had retired, and had been retired for some three years.

John's wife, who appeared to be quite a bit younger than John, explained to me that he had been too young to retire. That she herself and all their friends were still working, so "he had nothing to do". That he had been bored and frustrated. And that he had finally bought a business and gone back to work. John gave absolutely no indication that he loved his work so much that he could not live without it, and he certainly did not appear to need the money. In fact I got the distinct impression that he was looking forward to retiring again. I only hope that when he does, he is more successful than the first time.

Now I believe that there are various levels success and failure, both in the working environment and in retirement. These may be summarised as follows:

TOTAL SUCCESS in the career environment means a combination of supporting oneself and one's family and ending up financially independent, as well as satisfying many of one's social, intellectual, and self esteem needs through one's work. People with this kind of success will claim to love their work, although I might challenge that in some cases. Total success in retirement is the subject of most of this book.

NON FAILURE in the career environment means hanging in there and becoming financially independent, without necessarily ever achieving that much in the way of joy from one's involvement in the world of work. If you held down your job but were always looking forward to Friday, then you are probably a career non-failure. Non-failure in retirement means that you support yourself throughout the years between employment and demise, but experience this as being a time of passive existence, rather than one of growth, opportunity, and enhanced satisfaction with life.

TOTAL FAILURE in the career environment means not being able to hold down a job, and not managing financially. Total failure in retirement means being bored, frustrated, and having the feeling that retirement should be more than you are experiencing. It probably also means that you look back on your working life as being better than retirement in some way. In John's case, giving up on retirement and returning to the world of work without either financial need or apparent desire was clearly a case of someone being a career success and a total retirement failure.

Although I had thought at some length about my own retirement, this was the first time that the idea that it is possible to be a failure in retirement had occurred to me. I definitely believed, and still do, that retirement in today's world represents the greatest opportunity which most of us will encounter in our lives. To make the most of this opportunity is to be successful in retirement. Not to recognise the opportunity, or not to give it the thought and attention which it deserves is to be a failure in retirement. Sounds simple, doesn't it. However, I believe that many, in fact most, people do not take full advantage of the opportunity presented by retirement, and therefore fail at retiring to a greater or lesser extent. I believe that I understand why many people find succeeding at retirement difficult, and in many cases actually find the prospect of retiring scary and stressful. And I believe that I can help people to approach retirement in a manner which will make their retirements successful.

That is why I wrote this book.

## RETIREMENT – BIG PROBLEM?

When we talk about retirement today, we talk about some pretty big numbers. The people who are now reaching retirement age are what are commonly referred to as Boomers. The baby boom occurred in the fifteen years from 1946-1960. During this period the fertility rate in those countries with reliable population statistics was roughly twice the average for the rest of the twentieth century. This means that, starting right now, more people are going to be reaching retirement age than at any previous time in world history.

But that is not all. People these days are also living longer than at any previous time in world history. According to the United Nations Program on Aging, at the time of writing, one person in ten of the global population is over sixty years of age. By 2050, this ratio will be one in five. The reason for this is that life expectancy has increased in the lifespan of a single generation, which also just happens to be the most populous generation ever. According to the United Nations Program on Aging, twenty years has been added to global life expectancy in the second half of the twentieth century. This means that the older population is itself getting older. Currently, 12% of people who are sixty years or older, are over the age of eighty. By 2050 this proportion will have risen to 21%.

The American Government published a report in 2006, sixty years after the end of WW2, which claimed that every day throughout that year, 8000 Americans were turning sixty. These days many people retire at sixty, and those who don't retire will probably spend a lot of time thinking about retirement over the next five years or so. Actuaries are telling us that people who make it past sixty today stand a very good chance of making it past eighty, so those 8000 boomers, and others like them across the developed world, face the prospect of at least another twenty years of life.

Big numbers. If you require any more proof that we are dealing with a big issue here, just get onto the internet and enter "ageing population", or some similar phrase, into your search engine, and see for yourself. I am not going to labour the point here.

Across the Western World governments are very concerned about the increasing age of their populations, and well they might be. Retirees continue to consume resources after they have ceased to contribute their labour to the production of those resources. This would be fine provided that sufficient reserves have been built up to support them. In theory these reserves will have been put aside by the governments and the individuals themselves throughout their productive lifetimes in the form of government sponsored and private pension schemes. The problem comes about because this is a process which had to start many years ago, based upon the population and economic projections available at the time. Any inaccuracies in these calculations brought about by, for instance, the dramatic increase in longevity of people in developed countries, will mean that there is a shortfall in the capital needed to fund these pension schemes. As we have seen, average life expectancy has increased by 20% within this planning time horizon. This in turn means that pensions will have to be funded from the production of the younger generation. However, as we have seen, the population in general is getting older, so governments are faced with a situation where an ever-decreasing proportion of the population, the young, is having to support an ever-increasing proportion of retirees. Viewed from this perspective, the impending retirement of large numbers of boomers is indeed a problem.

How are governments preparing to face this problem? Well, the British government, for one, has reacted by increasing the official retirement age. Currently set at 65, the official retirement age in Britain will be 68 by 2044. The long term nature of this plan shows that we are looking at a problem which is difficult to address in the short term. You can't just change the rules of retirement overnight. Financial planning for retirement takes a lifetime. What the British government can do, and is doing, is to encourage those people who are reaching retirement age to carry on working for a few more years. The British Government website has specific links to assist senior citizens to find employment. This approach not only eases the problem faced by the Government, but also assists those individuals, of which there are many, who reach retirement age only to find that they do not have sufficient funds to follow the kind of lifestyle which they have been dreaming of when they retire.

I have no intention of spending a lot of space documenting the nature of the aging problem being faced by governments across the developed world. The most cursory of web surfing will give you more than enough evidence that there is indeed some kind of a problem. I cannot summarise it better than the website Knowledge at Wharton, which says

"In the United States the baby boomers are just three years away from receiving social security checks, and an aging-population tsunami is sweeping across the rest of the world as well".

So if you happen to be a government official with responsibility for crafting policy with regard to the welfare of the aged, you do probably feel as if you are really sitting in the path of a tsunami. And it is this problematic aspect of ageing and retirement which happens to grab the newspaper headlines – impending disaster always sells better than good news.

Now in the first part of this book I will be focusing quite a lot on those influences in our modern world which tend to inhibit individuals from being able to approach retirement with confidence and optimism. The tendency of the mass media to paint the current situation as a problem is but one such influence. But the individual who has reached retirement age in good health and financially independent is not faced with the problem of formulating public policy. It is my contention that such individuals, far from facing a huge problem, should in fact be enjoying the greatest opportunity of their lifetimes. Let us consider retirement from the viewpoint of such individuals.

## RETIREMENT – BIG OPPORTUNITY?

I think I can safely assume that most readers are not government officials tasked with formulating retirement and pension policies for the population at large. So we can look at things from a completely different perspective. Let us rather consider the situation from the viewpoint of individuals who are actually faced with retirement. Where have they come from and what lies ahead of them?

The current generation of retirees have lived all of their lives in the period since the second world war. They are likely to have received a higher standard of education than any previous generation, equipping them to face, and benefit from, a wide variety of situations. This period, despite all its ups and downs, has been characterised by almost uninterrupted growth in prosperity in the countries of the western world. This has enabled many of these people to be in a situation where they have garnered sufficient financial resources in terms of pension benefits and other investments to support them through the rest of their lives. From a physical perspective, they have benefited from a healthy diet (even if laced with the odd deliciously unhealthy snack!) and ever improving medical facilities, which mean that they have attained retirement age in robust good health.

The environment which they find themselves in offers them a greater selection of activities than has been available to any previous generation. They have, to all intents and purposes, unlimited access to information through the miracle of the World Wide Web. Any subject which takes their interest can be investigated immediately without recourse to formal instruction or the acquisition of expensive literature. If more formal knowledge is desired, they can take their pick from a world of distance learning opportunities. They can get online and buy or download books on any subject from anywhere in the world. They can join online interest groups or social networks of like minded souls spread around the globe. They are more mobile than previous generations. In their lifetimes international and intercontinental air travel has become a commonplace. If a more leisurely form of travel appeals, they can select from a fleet of modern cruise ships which combine relaxation with travel to exotic destinations. They are free to relocate to their chosen retirement location whilst at the same time maintaining contact with family and friends through online social networks. Modern technology has touched almost every human activity, bringing creative capabilities within anyone's reach. Let me take the examples of two activities from my own retired life which have been revolutionised in this way – photography and woodwork. Digital cameras, together with image manipulation computer software, have allowed anyone to experiment with artistic or creative photography at minimal cost. And modern power tools equip even the most ham-fisted artisan (that's me!) to produce elegant joinery work with a minimum of difficulty. I could go on _ad nauseam_ but the message which I am trying to get across here is that nobody who has reached retirement age in good health and financially independent has any right to be bored in a world such as the one which the boomer generation themselves has been largely involved in creating.

So what future faces today's retirees? Having reached the age of sixty or sixty-five they can, with reasonable confidence, look forward to the prospect of another twenty, thirty, or even more years of good health and vitality in retirement. This is the biggest single change from previous generations of retirees. It is in large part the reason why retirement today presents a greater opportunity than it did for previous generations. Just think back on how much you learned and developed in the first twenty years of your life. You did not have much choice of what you learned, but it was certainly a lot! Then think back on how much you learned and achieved in the first twenty years of your working life. You built on the basic knowledge and skills acquired in your youth, and channelled your efforts specifically to the serious business of building a career and earning an income. Now think of the next twenty years. You have the physical and mental health to achieve just as much as you did in the first twenty years of your working life. The difference now is that you are free to channel your efforts in whatever direction you choose, unhindered by the need to earn an income. You do not have to please a boss or a customer. You are, for the first time, genuinely your own boss and your own customer.

So the combination of health, longevity, technology and mobility have combined to offer today's retiree fantastic opportunities. Viewed in this light, surely nobody retiring today can possibly experience retirement as stressful or problematic? But read on...

## RETIREMENT – STILL A PROBLEM?

The intention of the previous two sections is to point out that, whilst for governments and policy planners, the current situation of many people facing a long period of retirement is a problem, for the actual retirees themselves that situation SHOULD present a fantastic opportunity. However, if you investigate the second viewpoint you may find quite a bit of contradictory evidence. In fact you probably have already. I think everybody hears stories of people finding it difficult to settle into the retired way of life. And the media do not always help. The same newspapers which periodically document the problems which ageing populations present for governments also carry stories which seem to be designed to strike fear into the hearts of those who are retired or about to be. An example was a recent article in the online expatriate version of the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph under the heading "Older people turning to drink after retirement", with a rather more dramatic subheading proclaiming "hundreds of thousands of older people turning to drink after they retire, a new study suggests". The article reported that a survey had found that 13 percent of over sixties said that they had drunk more since retiring, and of these, one in five said that they used alcohol to ease feelings of depression. It seems reasonable to assume that many more such people feel stressful reactions to retirement without succumbing to such openly damaging behaviour.

I have also done a little informal research of my own. I'm interested in people. I like to know what makes them tick. Throughout my working life I liked to question people about their motivations in the working world. Since the time that I started thinking seriously about my retirement a number of years ago I've been interested in what other people think about retirement, and what they are doing about it. Statistically, it's a small sample, but the people I've spoken to are pretty normal kind of people, so I think there stories are probably quite typical.

Of the people I've spoken to about retirement over the last five or ten years, there have only been two who I can remember who were looking forward to retiring without any reservations at all. One of these was 26 years old at the time, the other was 38. Neither was anywhere near retiring. People who are within a few years of retiring are rather more nervous about it. It seems that retirement is a bit like bunjee jumping or parachuting. It initially seems like a fun idea, but the closer you get to the reality, the scarier it becomes.

Naturally, many of the people with whom I associate these days are at the same stage of life as I am – they are either recently retired or about to be retired. I notice that when I raise the subject of retirement there is an increase in the level of attention amongst such people. They really want to find out what others think on the subject. Very often there will be expressions of apprehension among those approaching retirement, or of dissatisfaction and uncertainty among those recently retired. So if you are feeling a bit nervous about retirement, you are not alone. There is nothing wrong or unusual about you. But equally there is nothing stopping you from overcoming your fears and doubts and experiencing a rich and rewarding retired life.

I have already told you about John, who started me thinking about retirement in terms of success and failure. Let me now tell you about a few other specific cases which illustrate what I am talking about...

### The Cyclist

Firstly, let's consider someone whom I will just call The Cyclist. About six months after I retired I entered a big cycle road race. At the end of the race I gate crashed the hospitality tent of the company I had worked for prior to retiring. A friend introduced me to someone whose name I never found out, and whom I had never seen before, and haven't seen since. Whilst chatting over a cold beer, courtesy of my ex-employers, I told him that I had recently retired. He immediately showed interest, and questioned me closely on what I was doing, and whether or not I was finding retirement difficult and/or boring. It turned out the he had himself retired at about the same time as I had, not from the corporate world but from his own business, which he had sold. Since then, he had spent his time at something of a loose end, bored, frustrated, and irritated with himself that he was finding it so difficult to do something as simple as stopping working. He ended up by telling me that he was seriously considering buying a small business and starting working again. From the manner in which he said it, this was clearly not what he really wanted to do. He had no answer when I asked him why, if that was what he really wanted to do, did he sell his business in the first place. The really sad thing was that we found that our interests overlapped almost identically. He enjoyed reading, claimed to love the outdoors, and had a vague liking for "making things". However, since retiring he had read not a single book, had not had a bush holiday, and had made nothing. All he had done was catch up on some household maintenance, played a little golf, and got bored.

The Cyclist represents a common situation in which a person has entered retirement with no forethought or planning whatsoever. Retirement is a big change in anyone's life, and to undertake such a change without any thought is to invite failure, or at the very least a lot of frustration.

### The Father-in-Law

Then there was the story of The Father in Law. I was chatting to a young friend about retirement recently, and he told me about his father in law. It appears that this gentleman is approaching retirement with a certain amount of trepidation. My friend said that his father in law's biggest fear was that retirement would turn him into someone whose entire day revolved around reading the morning newspaper. He envisaged himself waiting for the local store to open at 7:00am, and getting very grumpy if the papers did not arrive until ten past. Seven until eight was spent devouring the trivia of world events, and the rest of the day was a big blank in his mind. Now I have never met the gentleman concerned, and I am sure that there is a certain amount of exaggeration in the tale for dramatic effect, but I am equally sure that the lack of a clear plan, or even a vague idea, of how to approach retirement is being shared right now by millions of boomers across the world. I have included his story here because it is a nice illustration of a fairly common condition which I have come across when discussing retirement with those approaching retirement age. This condition is almost a kind of paralysis, combining a fear of the unknown nature of the retirement ahead of them, and an inability to do anything about it.

The Father-in-Law probably believed that he was in fact thinking about his retirement. However, there is a difference between thinking about something and worrying about it. Very often the cure for worry is thought followed by choice and action. Thinking clearly about retirement can turn it from something to worry about into something to be eagerly anticipated.

### Pete

Then we can take the example of Pete, one of my oldest and truest friends. Perhaps because of his Irish ancestry, Pete has a slightly quirky outlook on life, which, among other things, has made him great company throughout the decades of our friendship. When he retired from a long career in the retail industry he initially stayed on for another couple of years at the same organisation as a consultant, doing the same line of work as he had for the previous many years with apparent success. He did not particularly enjoy doing this, so he found his own way of dealing with it. Rather than merely terminating the agreement, he set his fees so high that nobody would ever hire him. Much to his amusement, they still did, but only for a few one-off presentations or meetings. So his plan worked. Pete is now "retired", although still available as a consultant to anyone prepared to pay a ridiculous fee.

Pete's approach actually symbolises another of the main problems with retirement. In our society we are so prepared and conditioned to believe that we have to be "productive" that it is psychologically difficult for us to stop earning an income. We simultaneously desire the blissful state which we have for so long imagined retirement to be, but we fear leaving behind the familiar, structured life of work to which we have become almost addicted.

Incidentally, I also fell into the trap of doing consulting work after I retired. The arrangement lasted only long enough for me to realise that, whilst it does have some good aspects to it, it can also be a mistake. I expand on why this is so later in this book.

### The Breakdown

Finally, let me tell you about The Breakdown. This is the story which prompted me to get serious about writing a book. It finally convinced me that there is indeed a problem around retirement, and that it can be a serious problem. It concerns a friend of even longer-standing than Pete. This friend had spent his entire working life in a rewarding and very productive career managing development projects in various parts of the world for government and international aid agencies. His contributions had been recognised at the highest level. He had in many ways been looking forward to retiring and settling down in one place for a change, but his retirement plan only got as far as deciding where he was going to live. He had never sat down and thought through what the details of the retired existence would involve. In reality, the sudden change of lifestyle put him under unanticipated stress. The situation was exacerbated by a few health problems, which themselves could certainly have been triggered by stress. Eighteen months after retiring, this outgoing, energetic, fun-loving man was undergoing treatment for depression.

Fortunately the story has a happy ending. By facing up to the reality of his situation and seeking professional help, he is now well settled into his new life. But his experience should be a warning to all that we cannot take it for granted that retirement will automatically be a time of joy and bliss. It takes a bit of thought and planning. Hopefully this book will assist you with this and ensure that you not only avoid the negative reactions which some people encounter after retirement, but rather turn the retirement experience into one which will continue to enhance your quality of life for years to come.

### The Shrinks Agree

So much for some anecdotal evidence. But the scientists agree. Take a look at the following table. It is known as the Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale and it represents a very well established attempt to rate various life events according to their likelihood to cause stress.

I think that there are three things worth pointing out here. Firstly, retirement is right up there in the top quartile of stressful events, similar in its impact to being fired! Secondly, in addition to retirement itself, a number of entries on the list are things which will change when you retire, such as social activities and recreation. These changes just add to the inherent stressfulness of retirement. And finally, the list contains life events which anyone would think should be very positive, such as getting married, gaining a new family member, outstanding personal achievement, and taking a vacation. The reason for this is that psychologists recognise two different types of stress, eustress and distress. Distress we all know about, but eustress is stress brought about by positive life events. Think of getting married. It should be the happiest day of your life, but think also of all the stress that the big day creates. So it might seem that retirement is going to be tough whether you are looking forward to it or dreading the thought. Whether you experience distress or eustress, it is still a stressful life event.

## SUMMING UP

In this section of the book I have presented some evidence that retirement can be, and frequently is, a time of stress and upheaval which leaves the retiree at best nervous and uncertain, and at worst physically ill. But I have also given reasons why it should be an opportunity which should fill the retiree with excitement. The objective of the book is to set the retiree on a course which leads to a retirement which is experienced as being a time of increased Quality of Life. As a first step, I am going to devote quite a bit of space to examining why it should be that so many people experience retirement as something to be feared.

*******

# 3.THE ROAD TO RETIREMENT

## WHY IS THERE A PROBLEM?

So we have this problem. We have large numbers of people who are arriving at a time of their lives when they should be able to indulge themselves in a life of ease and pleasure. But our own observations, as well as media reports and psychological research, tell us that many of these people are not only failing to do so, but are finding their situation somewhat scary.

Why should this be? What are the root causes of this apparent paradox? Well, I believe that, as in so many aspects of human life and behaviour, there are many factors which interact in complex and varied ways. So many, in fact, that it almost appears that modern society is structured in such a way as to make a smooth transition from work to retirement almost impossible. By the time we reach retirement age, we have already travelled a pretty long road. We will have been moulded by the environment through which we have travelled, and the influences which we have encountered along the way. If we look back and think about the kind of life journey which the typical baby boomer has undertaken, I think we will find at least some of the reasons why retirement is not quite as simple as it appears. In order to understand why retirement is a complex event, we need to look at how we arrived at it.

This book is not a scholarly or scientific treatise. It is not based on wide-ranging research. It is based on my own experience and understanding. So what I have done in the following sections is to look back on my life and describe some of the major influences which I encountered at various stages, and how I have viewed them. I am in no way exceptional. I think it is a safe bet that most baby boomers will have had similar life experiences, and will be able to identify with at least some of what I have to say. It is important to remember that I am viewing all of this with regard to its relevance to retirement. Much of what I have to say may come across as being pretty negative and hide the fact that I consider myself extremely lucky to have spent my life in free market societies. However many influences in such societies do not prepare us well for what I consider to be a successful retirement. I hope that this will become clear as you follow what I have to say.

In his play "As You Like It" Shakespeare famously divided life into seven ages, but for my purposes I do not need that many. In the following sections I start out looking at life as consisting of three phases. Phase one, which I call Childhood, refers to our lives up to the time when our education is complete, which for most boomers meant the end of high school or graduating from a tertiary institution. The second phase, Adulthood, refers to our working lives from commencement to retirement. And the third phase, Maturity, is the time which we spend in retirement. In each phase we not only encounter certain facts, but are also subjected to many societal influences which affect our thought and behaviour. I take this approach for clarity of explanation, but it tends to hide my firmly held belief that life only really makes sense when viewed holistically, so I've tacked on a section at the end which tries to look at the overall picture.

Let's look at childhood.

## PHASE 1 - CHILDHOOD

Childhood should be a happy time. For everybody. It is a sad indictment of human achievement that as a species we are so far from this ideal. I, however, remember my own childhood as being extremely happy. We were far from being a wealthy family, but all the basics were catered for. I was also fortunate to win a scholarship to a school with an unbroken history going back to the first Elizabeth. From there I progressed to University, graduating with a degree in Physics, a subject in which I have taken an interest ever since. So there we have the facts – I come from a loving family and was exposed to a great education, even if with the wisdom of hindsight I 'could have done better', as my school reports frequently suggested. These facts meant that I reached the end of phase one in good health, with an ability to think and reason clearly, and a pretty good general knowledge of 'life the universe and everything'. In the wake of a devastating world war, most governments in the western world saw education as being a key foundation in the process of rebuilding, so the Boomer Generation were typically well catered for in terms of education.

But what were the INFLUENCES at work throughout this time. Parental influence on my education was strong. My father, a very intelligent man, came from a family which could not afford to keep him in education beyond the minimum legally allowed, and my mother trained as a teacher. They gave my educational efforts the maximum of encouragement, but they were very firm that whatever I studied should enable me to find meaningful employment. That meant, in their terms, scientific subjects. Anything else was "rubbish". Similarly, my school prided itself on providing a 'balanced' education. But the only counselling provided was career oriented.

School also introduces youngsters to a world of competition, and of reward for talent and effort. The annual prize giving ritual rightly gives public recognition for achievement, and reinforces the truth that nothing worthwhile is accomplished without effort. But there are other, more subtle, forms of competition which influence young minds. Thinking back I can remember so many areas where being better than one's peers was the desirable outcome. In those days, for instance, youngsters used to cycle to school (do they still anywhere, I wonder?). So it became important to be seen with the right kind of bike with the right kind of equipment. Hub gears were used on delivery bikes whilst derailleur gears were used on racing bikes, so derailleur gears were the gears to have. The fact that hub gears were just as effective and required no maintenance whilst the derailleur gears of those days needed constant adjustment to prevent the chain falling off was irrelevant. And Campagnolo was the make to aspire to, because that was what the riders in the Tour de France used. Thus did brand awareness raise its head. Brand hierarchies appeared in almost every aspect of life. At cricket, for instance, it was important to have the right make of bat. Whilst I was reduced to using the anonymous pieces of wood supplied by the school, others more fortunate than I boasted Superlights made by Grey Nichols or handmade models by Montagu Odd. What applied to bats applied equally to all other sporting equipment. When I started playing hockey all hockey boots were plain black and made of canvas, but this was the age when identifiable logos were beginning to appear on sporting goods. In my middle years at school I invested in a pair of leather Pumas. I still remember the early season blisters they gave me, but they made me look like a real sportsman, even if the appearance was not backed up by my performance on the field.

What applied to sports goods applied even more so to every day clothing. Adolescents of every era have been sensitive about their appearance, but the coming of age of the boomer generation saw a mushrooming of designer labels as the swinging sixties spawned one fashion craze after another. Depending on whether one wanted to be considered as being more of a 'Mod' or a 'Rocker' so one's choice of clothing was a subject of careful planning and critical scrutiny. In short, all aspects of life – fashion, music, entertainment – blossomed with opportunities for the expression of a new-found individual freedom after the austere years of the second world war. And the brand name became the symbol of your identity.

And how do I remember reacting to this environment? I worked. Not so much, alas, during term time at the studies that were supposed to be preparing me for my future, but in my vacations I undertook a series of mind-numbing occupations to earn sufficient money to spend on all the things which the new world order was offering. I worked in municipal gardens. I worked in a cosmetics factory packing product for export. I delivered mail during the Christmas rush. And I finally found the ultimate vacation job – working twelve hour shifts six days a week in a bakery and earning twice what most students were getting.

I was not alone. When term time came to an end, and exams had been successfully negotiated, the student population formed a veritable army of unskilled labour. Without student workers desperate for pocket money during the holiday periods, British industry would have closed down. The end result was that, by the time the vanguard of the boomer generation reached the end of what I call their childhood, in other words when they had completed their education and were ready to embark on their professional careers, certain ideas and values were already firmly implanted in their collective mindset. In short, they had taken on board the truth that if you want to have your share of the good things in life, then you have to work. And you knew what the good things in life were, because the brand managers and your peer group told you what they were. You were perfectly prepared to take your place in the post-war world as a producer and consumer of material goods and services.

### Transition – Childhood to Adulthood

Thus primed, I undertook the phase change from childhood to adulthood. In my case the process unfolded as follows. I had studied physics and managed to come out with a degree in that subject. Along the way I had come to the conclusion that I was not cut out to be a physicist. I doubted that I had the brainpower, and I certainly did not have the motivation, to devote more years of my life studying the behaviour of abstract particles on a shoestring research budget. I wanted to start earning money, so it seemed reasonable that I should go into the business world. I had a scientific training, so it was equally reasonable to seek out some kind of scientific activity within the business community. And there were things called computers which were used in business which were reputed to require a scientific mind to make them work. So I decided to look for a job in the computer industry. It is hard for young people entering the I.T. industry these days to imagine how different things were in those far off times. At the time I made this life decision I had never actually touched a computer. The only computer I had seen was the computer in the university physics department, which could be seen through the glass panel in the door to the computer room. Undergraduates were not allowed to pass through this door. The process by which I selected my life's work was really this haphazard.

And I was not alone. To the best of my recollection, in my physics class there were only two people who had a clear idea of what career they wanted to follow when they enrolled at the university. One had a calling to be a teacher, and the other was fascinated by weather and climate, and had been advised that a degree in physics was the best qualification to enter the meteorological office. Most of my student friends went from student to professional life via a similarly random path to the one I trod.

This is not unique to science graduates. Less than a week prior to writing this section I was discussing retirement with a friend who has recently retired after a working life spent in the management of municipal transport systems. He expressed relief that his working life was coming to and end. He had joined the municipality because his father had died shortly before he finished school, and an uncle who held a senior position in the municipality had been able to arrange a study bursary for him, which committed him to working for the municipality when he graduated. In his own words he told me that "I never said whoopee, I've finished school so now I can go and work for the municipality". He fell into his career as haphazardly as I did.

To a greater or lesser extent the same inevitably applies to all youngsters starting to find their way in the world. A twenty year old who has spent most of his or her days studying according to a school syllabus does not know enough about life in the wide world to make a well informed career choice. A small percentage, such as my two student colleagues, feel a strong calling channelling them in a particular direction. Most of us make the best decision we can on an inadequate understanding of what is involved, and then make the best we can of it. Think back on your own experience. Did you choose your career in response to a calling, or did you just launch into the unknown world of work and then spend the following decades making the best of your early decision?

Once again I would like to emphasise that I do not see this in a negative light. I was in fact extremely lucky to fall into an industry which offered a fast changing environment, and which has become a central part of just about every aspect of modern life. I cannot think of another industry which could have offered me more stimulation and variety.

In an ideal world we would all have the opportunity to earn an income whilst pursuing an activity which we love for its own sake. The world might have a surplus of professional golfers, rock musicians, and freelance travel photographers, but we would all be happy. But this is not an ideal world. In practice, most of us make the best decisions we can from the options open to us, and then make those decisions work as best we can. The sum total of citizens following this process is what makes democratic capitalism work as well as it does. But, as I hope to convince you, it does not make an ideal preparation for a successful retirement.

## PHASE 2 – ADULTHOOD

The transition from childhood – the time of education – to adulthood was not a traumatic one for me. I was equipped with a good education and qualifications which made me at least appear to be employable. But just as importantly, I had been weaned into the capitalist philosophy which forms the backbone of most of the 'developed' world. Just as in the case of phase one, my experience of phase two can be described in terms of a set of bare facts as well as of the influences of which I was aware as my working life progressed.

The bare facts of the matter are that, despite ups and downs as my career progressed, I managed to remain fully employed in various aspects of the Information Technology Industry throughout my working life, thereby earning what could probably be described as a good middle class income. Although never a dedicated technocrat, I enjoyed many aspects of my work. I always tried to be a good employee, and did my best for my various employers and their customers. And I was reasonably careful with my money, always making sure that I put away a portion for the day when I would no longer be earning an income.

I was always very clear about what my work meant to me. My 'Life' was my family and my interests and social activities, many of which revolved around sport. My 'Work' was there to support my life. I viewed my job as the contribution which I made to my employer's organization. My career was the process by which I was able to increase that contribution, with hopefully a commensurate increase in remuneration. This may all sound pretty cold blooded, but I believe that this clear distinction between what work meant to me and what more important personal values meant helped me to survive in the corporate jungle and come out the other end in a reasonably sane condition. Throughout my working life I saw dozens of examples of people who looked for more from their working environment, only to be disappointed for reasons which I will discuss shortly.

As I say, those are the facts. However, life is not that simple. Along the way I was conscious of a huge number of influences in my environment. This is going to be a pretty long section, but hang in there. My purpose is to show that almost every influence which has impacted on us throughout our working lives in fact works against us retiring successful and stress free.

OUR PEERS

We first met peer pressure in phase one, when we compared our second hand bicycle with the brand new multi-geared racing machine that the class poseur got for his birthday, or when our mediocre examination results were compared with the string of distinctions achieved by the class nerd. Human beings are competitive by nature. The desire to do better than the next person is built into our circuitry. If this were not the case, then there would be no such thing as sport. The difference is that in sport, 'doing better' is defined for us. If we score more goals than the other team then we have done better than them. Such attributes as happiness or satisfaction cannot be measured, so we naturally look for indicators – scores – by which we can measure our success in life against that of others. So there is always pressure to display our 'success' in any one of a thousand ways. A bigger house in a better area, or a more up-market car immediately spring to mind, but it goes much further than that. Who has not succumbed to the temptation of spending more than is necessary on an item of clothing or a watch or a cell phone or any one of a thousand other items because they will make us look better, or in other words, a little more successful. And from where do we get our ideas of what it means to be successful? Well, from many places, but in particular from..

THE MEDIA

Our competitive instincts have evolved from our earliest origins. Social interactions allowed our ancestors to assess their standing within the clan. Nowadays the media allow us to assess our standing in the whole world. As well as informing us about world events, newspapers, magazines, television and social media carry glamorous accounts of the activities and tastes of top sportsmen and women, top socialites, top movie stars, and top business executives. This is quite understandable. Who wants to read about ordinary? But by once again focusing our attention on the extreme symbols of success which such people display, the media tend to distort or downplay our own personal success criteria. This is tragically illustrated by the distorted self-image adopted by some who, comparing themselves with glamorous models and stars projected in the media, fall victim to destructive eating disorders. But to a lesser extent it unavoidably applies to us all.

THE MARKET MAKERS

Closely related to the media are the twin influences of advertising and marketing. The proponents of these activities point out the necessity of the suppliers of goods and services to inform the marketplace of their offerings. Very true, but successful advertising goes beyond this by endeavouring to make us dissatisfied with what we have, and making us believe that acquiring the advertised item will increase our happiness and/or success. Marketing goes further still by creating 'brand awareness', leading to sometimes ludicrous outcomes. Brands, as such, have no value whatsoever. If you are wearing a sweater, for example, the fact that it is made by a particular well-known manufacturer, whose name and logo are prominently displayed on the garment, is of no benefit. The only relevant factors are how well it is made and how warm it keeps you. But the fact that it displays its well-known brand name allows it to be sold for more than a no-name product of the same quality. The automotive industry is full of examples. Toyota, to pick merely one, manufactures and markets an excellent range of cars under its own name with worldwide success. However, when it went into the luxury car market it decided, wisely, to sell its cars under a different name, and started the Lexus brand. This despite the fact that the Toyota became a leading brand largely as a result of its reputation for quality and value. This was not enough to be successful in the luxury market. The implication was that if one drove a Toyota one was part of the herd. If one drove a Lexus one was successful. When one buys a Lexus one is not only buying a quality car – one can do that by buying a Toyota – but one is buying a brand and the associated image. What applies to cars applies to almost every other commodity – clothes, watches, cellphones, even food and drink. Premium beer anyone?

The most obvious way in which influences such as peer pressure and branding affect our ability to retire successfully is that there is always a tendency to spend more than we need to on a whole range of products and services. This can result in us spending money which could more wisely be put towards funding our retirement. But remember that I am assuming that you have overcome such pressures, and have arrived at retirement age financially independent. The more subtle effect involves our thought processes, and this I cover later on.

THE GOVERNMENT

We all know that the main purpose of governments is to stay in power for as long as they can. In order to do this they need some kind of measurement of success, and, just as with individuals, the most accessible measurement is money. So every government in the western world advertises its success by means of financial figures, in particular the Gross Domestic Product, and associated measurements of productivity and competitiveness. This is certainly not a bad thing. Mostly it is a very good thing. My point, which I hope will become clear as I go along, is that in itself, financial success is an incomplete measure. If we open our newspapers and read in the financial pages that GDP growth has increased, we feel good. If it has decreased we feel bad, and even quite possibly a little bit guilty. Are we trying hard enough? Should I really have bunked work last Thursday for a round of golf? But if you think about it, are you really happier or more fulfilled because the GDP is growing? Probably not, but we feel the pressure to produce anyway.

In short, it is in government's interests to keep us working as hard as possible for as long as possible. Policy changes in this regard take time, but making sure that the media contain a steady stream of articles telling us that GDP needs to increase, and that having more people living on pensions (ie retired) is a great danger does nothing to make the act of retiring any easier, no matter how well you have prepared yourself financially.

INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY

So far the influences which I have described have been environmental, by which I mean they are all around all of us all the time. But in our world of work we are subjected to strong influences which are specifically aimed at making us more productive members of our employer organizations and of society in general. These influences vary from honest attempts to improve the effectiveness and wellbeing of the working person to the downright exploitive. I examine a few of them here, starting with the attempted study of the working environment in a scientific manner by people who call themselves industrial psychologists.

The general field of psychology is an attempt to unravel the intricacies of human behaviour in as scientific a manner as possible. It has been split into various specialist areas in order to attempt to understand the behaviour of human beings under various circumstances. There are branches of psychology which deal with behaviour in general, such as personality theory and the study of psychological disorders. And there are also branches of psychology which deal with special aspects of behaviour such as child development, behaviour in social groups, criminality, and so on. One of these specialist areas is called Industrial Psychology, and deals with aspects of individual behaviour in the work environment.

Now there is nothing wrong with having such a specialisation. In fact it is a very good idea, seeing that so much of our behaviour takes place in this environment. However, when I was studying psychology, an interesting anomaly struck me. In the study of general personality theory one comes across many different models for human behaviour. Without getting into any detail, one could very simplistically divide these models into "pessimistic" and "optimistic". The pessimistic models, as proposed by the likes of Freud and Skinner, view humans as largely subject to forces beyond their control, such as subconscious drives and external stimuli. The optimistic models, such as those of Rogers and Maslow, view humans as being largely in control of their own destiny and happiness. Now what struck me as interesting when I was studying psychology was that Industrial Psychology strongly emphasises the optimistic models whilst largely ignoring the pessimistic. In fact one of these books did not mention Freud's theories at all. So it appears to me that even in the scientific study of human behaviour, the idea that "work is good" is so deeply ingrained that even mentioning the "pessimistic" aspects of behaviour with regards to the work environment was not an option. My own observation of the corporate environment, by the way, showed me quite clearly that many of those who climbed the ladder of success did so in response to totally neurotic drives underpinned by feelings of inferiority and fear of failure which would have had Freud saying "there, I told you so".

A particularly popular model of human behaviour amongst industrial psychologists and management motivators is Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. I briefly mention it here, but cover it a little more fully later on. Its proponents use this model to argue that work can be a vehicle for achieving the highest levels of life satisfaction, referred to as Self Actualization. Whilst this can certainly be the case for a few fortunate individuals, I believe, for reasons which I expand on later, that this cannot possibly be the case for most corporate employees. Because of this its use in the work context only serves to confuse and demoralize employees. I do, however, believe in the validity of the model, and that it is highly relevant to the objective of making retirement a successful and fulfilling time of one's life.

THE SUCCESS INDUSTRY

In this day and age you have to lead a pretty insular life to be unaware of what I call the success industry. Take a look around any book store and you will find a well-populated section of books which promise to reveal to you the "secrets" of success. They are mostly written by people of whom nobody has ever heard and who appear not to have achieved any success other than writing about the subject.

Similarly, there is a fashion for "motivational speakers" to be given a platform at various corporate gatherings such as Sales Conventions and annual Kick Off events. Many, though certainly not all, of these speakers are no more than showmen who can give an up-beat presentation full of quotable quotes and cheerful anecdotes, and which makes the audience feel good at least until after the speaker has walked off with his cheque. Just as with the success authors, most of them have also never achieved the kind of success of which they speak.

Success authors and motivational speakers like nothing more than to quote the sayings and repeat anecdotes about the people whom they hold up as being successful. "As a young man Tiger Woods used to....." or "Richard Branson says.....". These quotations are supposed to act as pointers to you, the man in the street, as to where you are going wrong in your life. However, almost all of these anecdotes are of people who are obviously following a calling. The Tiger Woods and Richard Bransons of this world have been pursuing their calling from childhood, and this is what separates them from you and me. In this way the success industry can actually do more harm than good, because it creates in the minds of normal people the idea that there is something wrong with them. They should have a burning desire to be successful in whatever career they happen to have fallen into. Lacking either the talent of a Tiger Woods or the sheer innate enthusiasm for entrepreneurship of a Richard Branson, the man in the street should be looking elsewhere for his inspiration. The harmful side effects of this approach became clear to me later in my career when I was frequently seen as a "wise old man" by some of my younger colleagues. They would often approach me confused as to why their jobs and careers were not giving them the satisfaction and "personal growth" that they felt they had been led to believe were the inevitable outcome of dedication to their careers.

None of the influences which I have been describing is particularly evil. But we have been awash in them, and others as well, for the four decades of our working lives, and some of their effect must have worn off on us. Retirement is a time for clear thinking, so it will repay us to consider what these influences have meant and, indeed, continue to mean, to us and the way we think and behave.

### Transition – Adulthood to Maturity

By now you are probably thinking that this guy's lost it. He says he's writing about successful retirement, and all he has written about for the last twenty pages is how miserable he thinks it is to have to work for a living. Just hang in there. Hopefully all will become clear before too long.

I have touched previously on my transition from adulthood to retirement. Just about every influence I encountered in my formative years was aimed at preparing me for adulthood. This ensured that my transition from learner to earner was relatively smooth. But what influences during my adulthood prepared me for maturity and retirement. NONE. Right up to immediately before I retired, I was still being exposed on a regular basis to influences aimed at keeping me in the produce/consume cycle, and none of the retirees I have spoken to on the subject experienced anything different.

I actually did a bit of research to back up the idea that society's focus is almost exclusively on the productive time of life, and ignores the issues of maturity. I visited the two largest book stores in my local shopping mall. Both stores had huge sections dedicated to children's books, very many of which were educational in nature. They also had whole racks of books dedicated to every aspect of business. However, the two shops between them had a total of three books addressing the subject of retirement, and they were all concerned solely with the financial aspects of retirement, and were actually displayed in the business section under the general heading of investment. It was made quite clear that we retirees were on our own when it comes to planning a well balanced retirement lifestyle.

All of the influences which I describe under the heading of adulthood are with us right up to the moment of retirement, and many of them continue thereafter. When you retire you cease to be seen as a producer, but you will continue to be a consumer, and as such will form part of a market at which a number of branded products will be aimed. If you have not been preparing yourself for retirement then the suddenness of the change is what makes it the stressful event that the Holmes and Rahe scale shows it to be.

In summary, then, transition from worker to retiree is entirely in the hands of the individual. One way of expressing this is to say that nothing in the social environment assists or influences the individual in making this transition. A more optimistic way of putting it is to say that, for the first time in their lives, retirees are completely free to set their own course. All they have to do is to cast off the shackles of the influences which have guiding their efforts in the direction which society wants them to be directed, and to replace them with thinking which is based entirely on their own values and beliefs.

## PHASE 3 – MATURITY AND RETIREMENT

Just as with the other life phases, maturity has associated with it certain facts and influences. The facts are that for the first time in his or her life, the retiree is free to pursue whatever course he or she may choose, bearing in mind the assumptions made at the beginning of the book about financial and health matters. However, the influences which have been present in the work environment are suddenly removed, whilst those in the general environment remain largely the same as for adulthood. You can say that the influences which create the need to be a producer and consumer in a materialist society remain the same as before, but the influences which encouraged one to fulfil this role have been removed. This I believe is one of the main reasons for the feeling of disorientation experienced by so many people on retiring.

Another way of describing this phenomenon is to realise that for the first time in his or her life, the retiree experiences genuine freedom. Childhood is restricted by the need to learn how to take our place in society, and we are restricted by the authority of our parents and teachers. Adulthood is restricted by the need to provide for ourselves materially. Neither of these restrictions applies to retirement. The snag is that nothing in the first two phases of life prepares the retiree for it. Nothing in our lives so far has prepared us for freedom.

So what is the reality which many people experience when they retire? The pressures of working life prevent people from thinking too much about retirement much before the event. Only as the day of retirement approaches do people either start worrying about it, or merely assume that, provided they have made adequate pension provisions, all will automatically be wonderful. It could be said that the major influences guiding the retiree into his or her new life are assumptions and worries.

Of these two actions, worrying and assuming, assumption is probably the most damaging. There are two basic kinds of assumption about retirement. The first is that all will be rosy once the daily grind of work is over. A life of leisure, with plenty of golf and travel, will lead to a succession of "golden years". The worry about retirement is that the maturity years will be a kind of boring but otherwise benign deterioration. In this view retirement is a period of inevitable physical and mental decline, leading to the frail care wing of a retirement home, and eventual demise.

The irony of the situation is that living according to the assumption that all will automatically be wonderful once one has retired is the most likely path to the fulfilment of the worrying scenario. It is the assumption by retirees that all will be well that leads to disappointment and disillusion when the reality of sudden loss of identity and purpose which has sustained them for the previous four decades or so hits them, and they are faced with a succession of empty days to fill. Worrying about general decline will blind retirees to the opportunities for growth and fulfilment of potential which the new-found freedom can offer them.

At the very least these people will be subjected to stressful change. From my personal experience, and from my observation of my fellow retirees, a degree of stress caused by the sudden change in life circumstances is inevitable, no matter how carefully retirement has been planned. The less they have thought about retirement, the more is that stress likely to affect them.

So this is the reality which many people experience when retiring. Instead of the state of eternal bliss which they envisioned, it is a time of confusion and stress, followed by a long period devoid of real purpose and leading to a general decline. In my opening section of this book I said that previous generations experienced retirement as being a relatively short period of inaction between lifelong work and death. It doesn't have to be this way in today's world. But it is up to each individual to ensure that their own retirement fits the picture of what it should be. But this will not happen automatically.

## JUST ONE LIFE

In the preceding sections I have broken life down into three separate sections, youth, adulthood, and maturity. I have done this for purposes of explanation. What I want to do now is to put life back together again. When all is said and done, it is just one life that we lead, and I believe that it should be seen as one life, but one life in which each phase plays a part. The person who retires is in many ways the same person who started out in school many decades previously. But that person will also have experienced many changes along the way. Hopefully most of the changes which have taken place can be viewed as improvements. But what is it that has improved, and can we continue that process of improvement once we have retired?

A lot of thought and planning goes into making sure that the education process experienced in youth ensures that the individual is equipped to handle the adult years. The personal development of the youth years ensures that we can experience personal development in the adult years. I do not entirely agree with the nature of some of this development, but it is there none the less.

My contention is that the adult years should be seen as a basis which equips us to handle the maturity years. This is not how retirement is currently viewed as a part of life. Growth, advancement, and _success_ are seen as things which happen in the first two stages of life. Retirement is something which happens after that. With the proviso that one has reached retirement age with sufficient (but not necessarily excessive) financial means and good health, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that growth and success should not continue after retirement. In fact, in my view the purpose of the preceding two life phases is to put the individual in a position to raise the quest for personal growth and development to another level, a level which is not possible for most people in the earlier life phases. I will amplify this thinking in the next few sections, but let me also try to clarify what I am talking about with the following diagram.

In this diagram I have tried to show that a successful childhood followed by a successful adulthood will have generally resulted in an improvement in Quality of Life (QoL). The diagram also shows some of the developments which cause this to happen as we progress through life. But a successful life will consist of a successful childhood, a successful adulthood, and a successful retirement. The problem, and the opportunity, of retirement is to decide "where to now?" when our working life comes to an end. What do we have to do in retirement in order for the QoL line to continue its upward trajectory rather than tailing off into senile decline. It is something worth thinking about, which is what the next section is all about.

*******

#  4. THINK FOR YOURSELF

## YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN

So we have arrived at retirement after a lifetime of education and employment. So far we have been travelling according to a pretty standard roadmap. It is quite possible to be very "successful" throughout one's career without thinking too deeply about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Allowing ourselves to be largely guided by the influences which I described during childhood and adulthood will in no way prevent us from arriving at retirement financially independent and in good health, and with life enhancing family and social interactions. But the influences which are inherent in society tend to channel us towards society's goals. It is interesting to consider for a moment whether anyone is in control of these influences, and the answer appears to be "no". There is no ministry of the Direction of Society. In a free democracy society moves along under a combination of market forces and lawmakers' interpretation of what most of the electorate want. This has resulted in the "produce and consume" influences which I previously described. When we retire the hours and the energy which we poured into being producers come to an end. Senior citizens continue to be a market segment on the consume side with whole ranges of products and services particularly aimed at them (retirement villages with frailcare facilities, arthritis medication etc), but nothing in the first two stages of life prepares us for retirement in the way in which childhood specifically prepared us for adulthood. Which means that we will have to think for ourselves.

For most people this will be a new experience. Sure we've had to use our brains to keep afloat in corporate life and the world at large, but now in order to handle the deep changes ahead of us we have to come up with some fairly deep thoughts. Retiring successfully requires that you rethink your philosophy of life. You don't have one? Well, you have been living in a certain way, and that way of life is about to change, so thinking a bit about what is going to change and how it is going to change might be a good idea. Calling it a philosophy of life sounds a bit grand – maybe rather just call it thinking about the answers to a few questions. But before we do that I would like to take a little detour to show that changing the way we look at life when we retire is nothing new.

When the idea came to me that living in retirement needed a different philosophy from living a working life, I congratulated myself on the originality of my thinking. It came as a bit of a surprise to me, therefore, that there is nothing new about this realization. It has been around for thousands of years. I can hardly claim to be a great student of ancient eastern philosophies, but I am going at this stage to dip into the complementary ideas of ancient Confucianism and Daoism which I came across in my general reading.

## CONFUCIOUS SAYS...

About five hundred years before the Christian era two schools of philosophy were being developed in China, namely Confucianism and Daoism. I found it rather fascinating that the way in which I thought about work and retirement actually dated back to long before the modern era. K'ung Ch'iu, known to us in the West as Confucius, and Lao Zi, credited as the founder of Daoism, were probably contemporaries in the 6th-5th centuries BCE. Their respective schools of philosophy address different aspects of the social order of the day.

The best brief description which I have come across of these two philosophies and the role which they played in ancient Chinese society is in Alan Watts' book, "The Way of Zen", and I can do no better than to quote this source verbatim.

When we turn to ancient Chinese society, we find two "philosophical" traditions playing complementary parts – Confucianism and Daoism. Generally speaking, the former concerns itself with the linguistic, ethical, legal, and ritual conventions which provide the society with its system of communication. Confucianism, in other words, preoccupies itself with conventional knowledge, and under its auspices children are brought up so that their originally wayward and whimsical natures are made to fit the Procrustean bed of the social order. The individual defines himself and his place in society in terms of the Confucian formulae.

Daoism, on the other hand, is generally a pursuit of older men, and especially of men who are retiring from active life in the community. Their retirement from society is a kind of outward symbol of an inward liberation from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct. For Daoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

Confucianism presides, then, over the socially necessary task of forcing the original spontaneity of life into the rigid rules of convention – a task which involves not only conflict and pain, but also the loss of that peculiar naturalness and un-selfconsciousness for which little children are so much loved, and which is sometimes regained by saints and sages.

Watts goes on in his description, but the only other phrase of his which I would like to borrow is " _To be free from convention is not to spurn it, but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it_ ".

I do not believe I could summarise my outlook on work and retirement any better the preceding few paragraphs. And remember that the philosophies being described are two an a half thousand years old. Modern society is still moulding the "wayward and whimsical natures" of its children to the requirements of society. We call this process education. (For those who are not familiar with Procrustes, he was a mythical malefactor who guarded a mountain pass in ancient times. Travellers wishing to make use of his pass were forced to lie on Procustes' bed. Those who did not fit neatly onto the bed were either stretched or had bits chopped off until they did fit, and were then allowed to go on their way. Sounds rather like the indignities which modern travellers suffer when trying to fit into tourist class seats on a modern aircraft!) We are doing similar things to our children today. We do not notice the stretching and chopping which takes place in order to transform the unruly but happy toddler into, for example, the unsmiling auditor of company accounts, because it takes place over a number of years, and everybody else's toddler is undergoing the same process. Society needs accountants, and so society creates them from the raw material available, namely you, me, and our children. It does not feel to us like a one-sided transaction, because society in its turn bestows upon the remodelled child the rewards which it has at its disposal, namely prestige, position, and financial gain. So modern capitalist society is doing a pretty good job on the Confucian side of the philosophy.

In part, this is understandable. It is relatively easy to instruct young people along a limited path. The philosophy of Confucius, as described in his Analects, consists of a number of fairly clear instructions. " _The master said 'in guiding a state of a thousand chariots, approach your duties with reverence and be trustworthy in what you say; avoid excesses in expenditure and love your fellow men; employ the labour of the common people only in the right seasons'_ ". (Lau D. C., 1979). Our trained accountant will recognise this as instructing him to work hard, don't get caught in breach of contract, watch the overheads, and use casual labour wherever appropriate. All pretty clear and straightforward.

Daoism, on the other hand, appears to be a bit more nebulous. The most quoted source of Daoist thought, The Dao De Jing, itself says that the Dao cannot be expressed in words. This would make it pretty tricky to set an examination paper on the subject. However, if we focus on Watts' statement that we should use convention and not be deceived by it, we can interpret it as saying that in conforming to society's norms throughout out working lives we are putting ourselves in a position to live according to our real nature when we retire. In other words by channelling our efforts towards society's goals, we earn the right to do whatever we wish when we retire. We no longer need to conform to society's blueprint. One of the reasons why people find this difficult is that every individual's nature is different, so it is not possible to state exactly what one should be doing. Rather, if it is not obvious to the individual, then the process of retirement should be one of discovery of one's true nature, and of then developing it.

Without getting bogged down in philosophical detail, then, we can say that ancient Chinese wisdom has been telling us for two and a half millennia that adult life can be divided into two separate parts. Firstly we have to make a contribution to society by subjugating our own wants and desires to the needs of society. But once we have done our duty, we are then free to explore and develop our own natures. This exploration may well be to the benefit of the society in which we live, but this is not necessarily the case. Many people in retirement find great satisfaction in carrying out charitable work of great benefit to society. This activity gives expression to a part of their innermost personality which desires to be of service to others, and which might have been suppressed throughout the years of labour directed only at personal gain and nurturing the family. In such cases personal and community goals are perfectly aligned. But Daoism tells us that this does not have to be the case. Our activities in retirement can equally be directed at personal objectives which are purely "selfish", in the sense that they benefit nobody but the individual concerned. There are no rights and wrongs involved in the choice, it is purely a matter of what is the right choice for each individual.

Just because the idea that retirement requires us to alter our thinking has been around for a very long time does not make the process any easier. There are still a lot of questions which we need to clarify for ourselves. Let us start by looking at what we mean by the twin concepts of work and retirement.

## WHAT ARE WORK AND RETIREMENT?

This book is about retirement. Simply defined, retirement is what happens when we stop working. However, to fully understand what that means, we first need to understand what we mean by the word "work". For most of us we mean some kind of employment, be that in the corporate world or self employment. But, for the purposes of thinking about retirement, I have my own definition of what work is. This is so important for what I am trying to say that the definition gets its own highlighted paragraph.

WORK IS WHAT YOU DO BECAUSE YOU NEED TO EARN AN INCOME.

I once came across a lovely quote, I do not remember where, from a gentleman named Henry Longhurst. I wrote it down in my little black book of quotations quite a long time ago. Mr Longhurst was the BBC's chief golf commentator when I was a boy. He was an extremely good commentator, knowledgeable about the game and its personalities, and with some interesting fact or anecdote about every golf hole on every golf course in the world, or so it seemed. He obviously loved what he did, and the quote went along the following lines: "The secret of success in life is to find out what you enjoy doing most, and then find someone who will pay you to do it". As a principle, I cannot fault it.

Another person from the world of broadcasting who obviously subscribes to the same philosophy is the internationally renowned astronomer Sir Patrick Moore. Here is a man, who in his lifetime has authored literally scores of books on his subject, and broadcast regularly in multiple countries with unfailing enthusiasm and energy. He has obviously been an extremely busy man throughout his life. Not so long ago, I heard an interview with him on the radio in which he proclaimed that he had never done a days work in his life. All he had ever done was what he had wanted and loved to do, and had somehow got paid along the way.

Such people as these are often quoted by motivational speakers as being the kind of successes which corporate employees should seek to emulate in order to be similarly successful in their working lives. But there is a fundamental difference. What I am leading up to is one of the basic principles of this book, namely that...

...A CALLING IS NOT WORK

If retirement is that period of life after you stop working and work is what you do because you need to earn an income, then these people could never retire. The simple reason is that these people were doing what they did, not because they needed to earn an income, but because they wanted to. They would have made every effort to continue doing exactly what they were doing even if nobody paid them to do it. One can think of other examples. Surely many professional sportsmen and women fall into this category. They typically have to spend a huge amount of time and energy battling through amateur ranks before they earn a cent from their sport. If they did not love what they were doing for its own sake, they would never survive such a harsh apprenticeship with no pay. Professional musicians fall into the same category. I once read that the great Spanish cellist Pablo Cassals was asked why was he still practicing for 5 hours a day at the age of 83. "Because I believe I am making progress" was his reply. At an age twenty years beyond that at which most people have given up their life's work, and at a time when he was surely not doing it out of financial need, he was still putting in a full day, every day. Certainly many other people are doing what they do professionally because of a calling rather than because they need to put food on the table.

But where does that leave the typical corporate employee? Well my time in the corporate world convinced me that the vast majority of people in the corporate environment are definitely not there because they are following a calling. Throughout much of my 40 year career in the Information Technology industry, I became very interested in the people I worked with, what they thought, what motivated them, what they felt deep down. Over a period of many years I asked dozens of my co-workers what they would do if they won the National Lottery or ran into a sizeable fortune by some other means. In particular, I asked them if they would continue doing the same job for the same employer that they were doing now. In the whole of that time not one of them answered that they would continue along their current path. I emphasise, not one. Most of them also did not have a clear idea of what they would do, but they were very definite about not doing what they were currently doing for their current employer. And this was in the IT industry, surely one of the most dynamic, stimulating, intellectually challenging industries of the modern era. And not just any old companies in the IT industry. I had the privilege of working, at various times, for some of the world leaders in that industry.

So why, then, do people put so much effort into their jobs, with many of them claiming that they enjoy what they do? Most such people subscribe to what I call THE CAREER MYTH rather than the career itself. They have bought into the belief that if you want your share of the material goodies which the modern world can offer you, then you'd better get out there and graft. Of course there is choice within this paradigm. One person will study to be an accountant while another opens a hardware store, but the real belief is that I have to earn a living, not that my purpose in life is to audit the books of public companies or sell plumbing materials to householders. The real purpose is to provide materially for self and family. Over the years, we come to identify ourselves with our career choice. We adapt our values and beliefs to our behaviour, rather than the other way around. The result of doing so over a long period of time is that we form the myth that we _are_ that choice despite the fact that most of us had no clear understanding of what we were letting ourselves in for when we embarked on our careers.

The career myth is grown into us as we develop by the very influences which I described when discussing childhood and adulthood. Work hard at school, even if you do not particularly like what you are studying, so that you can get good marks. Then you will be able to go to a good university so that you can study something 'relevant' (I hate that word in this context), rather than something which you love. If you invest a few years of your youth to studying, then you will be able to get a good job and invest more of your years earning a good income so that you will be able to buy the things that the advertisers tell you that you should want. Invest enough energy into this process and you will become "successful".

THE OPPORTUNITY AFFORDED BY RETIREMENT IS TO REVIEW THE WAY YOU SPEND YOUR TIME FREE FROM THE OBLIGATION OF HAVING TO EARN A LIVING. IF YOU FIND YOURSELF DOING SOMETHING FOR FINANCIAL REASONS, THEN ASK YOURSELF WOULD I BE DOING THIS IF THERE WERE NO FINANCIAL BENEFIT TO IT. IF THE ANSWER IS NO, THEN TRY TO FIND SOMETHING WHICH YOU WILL DO FOR ITS OWN SAKE, SOMETHING WHICH EXPRESSES YOUR DEEPEST BELIEFS AND VALUES.

At retirement not only does the commercial imperative fall away, but so does the professional identity. For decades when someone asked you "what do you do" you were able to answer that you were an IT consultant or whatever. Immediately the person who asked you has an idea of how you spend your time. But if you answer "I'm retired" this alone gives the other person no idea of how you spend your days. Merely being retired is not an identity. The process of planning your retirement is largely a process of deciding what your identity is going to be once your working life is over.

This sounds good, but remember that most of the people whom I asked what they would do if they suddenly no longer needed to earn an income did not know what they would do about it. Well, that is exactly the situation which many retirees find themselves in. And not having made any real plans about what they are going to do next is the fundamental reason why so many retirees find retirement stressful.

So that is work. What about retirement?

I defined work as any activity we do _because we need to earn an income._ Retirement can therefore be defined as _any activity we do when we no longer need to earn an income._ If we accept this definition then we can see that we automatically retire when we consider that we have enough capital to last us the rest of our lives, even if we continue with some kind of activity which brings in an income. There are many things which change once we reach that situation, but the greatest one is _choice._ Before we have accumulated sufficient capital to retire, our choice is limited – we have to work at something which brings in some money. After we have accumulated sufficient capital to retire, we can choose whether we continue to work for an income or not. If you have made a bundle by the time you are thirty, then you can choose whether or not to keep working for an income. Whether you keep working or decide to drop out and live off your capital for the rest of your life, by my definition you have retired.

Now there is obviously one very big issue implied in the previous paragraph. I will address it now, and then largely ignore it. How does one know whether one has enough capital to be able to retire? It is in fact a big enough issue to warrant a whole book on its own, and there is no shortage of books and financial advisers which can help with the financial aspects of retirement planning. The fact that I really only mention the financial aspects of retirement planning in passing does not by any means indicate that I do not think they are important. Adequate financial resources are absolutely essential to retirement success. The importance which I attach to the subject matter of this book is that many, in fact very many, people fail at retirement, or are at least very worried by the prospect of retirement, despite the fact that they have provided more than adequately financially. Indeed, in some cases financial success has been achieved by focusing so intently on it that the change to retirement is more difficult than for someone who put less committed effort into earning an income. In short, financial security is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for retirement success.

So, to sum up and simplify, retirement is that part of one's life after the time when one has acquired enough capital or has a sufficient pension income to enable one to choose how to spend one's time. Certainly that choice can be to continue in paid employment, and there can be many reasons why one might make this choice, but it is a choice made free of the necessity which has been involved up until this time. How one goes about making this choice determines whether one's retirement is a success, a non-failure, or a total failure. How to go about making this choice is the subject of this book.

Retirement is typically defined as stopping work. I find this idea of stopping something a bit negative. I encourage you to rather think of retirement as being when you have earned the right to start living entirely according to your own beliefs and values.

As an aside I would just like to clarify something at this stage.

## WORK IS GOOD FOR YOU.

It may seem from what I have written up to now that I am somehow against the idea of having to work for a living. Nothing could be further from the truth. My message is not that the great multi-national corporations and the smaller companies which create employment for millions of people across the world are in some way evil entities. I am not preaching against globalization, or pleading some kind of socialist manifesto. This is not a political treatise. I look back upon my professional life with a great deal of pride, and indeed no small amount of pleasure. I did face and overcome intellectual challenges. I did experience job satisfaction, at least some of the time. I did meet and work closely with very many fine people, some of whom I am still delighted to call friends. I have always said, in fact, that what kept me in the IT industry was the very high calibre of people one meets in the industry. They are typically bright, well educated, and free thinking, and to some extent their company satisfied my social needs of the time. I also believe that I was a good employee – certainly I always tried to be – and did my best to be value for the money which I was paid, and to add value to the customers of my employers. I am also proud of the fact that, through my efforts, I have been able to provide for myself and my family, give my children a sound start in life, and to provide a measure of security for my old age. And I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to do this, which is certainly denied to billions of the less fortunate across the world. But still the fact remains that every single hour of my labour I did for one reason, and one reason alone - because I needed to earn a living. If I did not have that need, then my life would have taken a very different course. I am not exactly sure what that course would have been, but it would most certainly have been different.

So from my own point of view, work did many things for me. But the best thing it did was to put me into a position where I was able to retire.

## WHAT DOES THE FREEDOM OF RETIREMENT MEAN?

Retirement means being free from the necessity of earning an income. But what does it actually mean to be free. Existential philosophers have spent a lot of time and effort thinking about the related topics of freedom, choice, and responsibility.

Human existence is unique in that not only are we constantly changing, but we have a certain amount of choice about the nature of that change. A wild animal can be said to be free or in captivity, but even the free animal is not actually making any choices. All of its actions are dictated by hormones and instincts – hungry? Then hunt. Startled? Then run. Spring time? Then mate. A wild animal also changes with age. The playful lion cub becomes the dominant male and finally the moth-eaten outcast living on the fringes of the pride. None of these actions or changes are controlled by the animal.

Human beings are also in a constant state of change, and a large amount of that change is also out of our control. I haven't met anybody yet who can halt or reverse the ageing process, no matter how hard they try or how much they spend on health supplements. But there is also a certain amount of change which we _are_ able to at least influence by exercising our free will. To a certain extent we can influence who we become. The existential school of philosophy states that this is not only possible, but that it is each individual's _responsibility_ to make a choice about what they want to become, and to strive towards achieving that goal. Even if you decide to just see what happens and "go with the flow", this is actually a choice which you make. American psychologist and philosopher William James summed this up when he said "When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice". Many people find the act of making a free choice difficult, because it involves thinking. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre put a rather gloomy spin on the subject of freedom. "Man is condemned to freedom..." he said, "...he cannot escape choosing". When you retire you will inevitably decide how to spend your retirement, either consciously and proactively or by choosing to wait and see what happens..

Freedom, then, is freedom to choose. We only actually exercise our freedom when we make a conscious choice. Whilst we are working our freedom is constrained by the need to earn an income. When we retire we have far greater freedom of choice. In order to make the most of our retirement we need choose how we spend the large amounts of time which are no longer dedicated to work. Planning a retirement is just a matter of choosing how to use our time.

But there is also a subtle twist to the issue of freedom. Once we have made our choice, are we still free? To use an analogy, when the waiter in a restaurant gives us a menu with ten dishes on it, we are free to choose whichever one we want. Once we have made that choice we have a responsibility to accept the meal which the waiter brings, provided it is in fact the one we ordered. If we say "sorry I've changed my mind" after the dish has been prepared the result will just be chaos and acrimony. Similarly if we keep changing our mind about how we intend to spend our retirement hours then we will get nowhere. Once we have decided upon a course of action we have a responsibility to at least give it our best shot. If we then decide that we will be better off doing something else, it still does not mean that the original decision was wrong. Rather it means that we have learnt something about ourselves, and have therefore made progress.

## WHAT ARE MY NEEDS NOW I HAVE RETIRED?

I have defined retirement as being that time when we no longer have the need to earn an income. But when we have reached that stage what other needs do we still have?

The subject of human needs has received a lot of attention from psychologists over the last half century or so. Probably the most well known name in this regard is Abraham Maslow, but other high profile researchers such as Carl Rogers and Victor Frankl have also contributed to the modern understanding of this complex subject. What I will attempt to do in the following paragraphs is to take a simplified look at human needs in order to give us a framework to use when considering retirement. As always when a subject is simplified something is lost, but I think that what is left will be useful.

Human needs are frequently represented as forming some kind of hierarchy, but for the purposes of thinking about retirement I would like to do things a bit differently.

Another way of saying that we have a need is to say that we feel that we are lacking something. According to this school of psychology it is this feeling which motivates our behavior. Psychologists agree that the kind of things which we need can generally be categorized as follows:

→Things which we need for physical survival such as food and air to breathe

→We need to feel safe and secure

→Most people feel a need for satisfying relationships, be they family, friendship, or romantic.

→Need for status, recognition, and self esteem.

Maslow called these needs "Deficiency" needs, because it is their perceived lack which motivates behavior. Different people feel these needs differently, and that is why people exhibit different levels of motivation.

Remember that for the purposes of this book I am assuming that I am talking to someone who has reached retirement age financially independent. Let us consider how these needs might have typically been addressed as such a person progressed through life. I have summarized it in the following diagram:

You will notice that this is the same as the QoL diagram which appeared earlier, but with the different kind of needs highlighted. So at least up until retirement, satisfying our deficiency needs has actually improved our quality of life. Let us see how some of our needs get satisfied as we progress through life.

The need for physical safety is so self evident that we can, for current purposes of planning a retirement, ignore it.

We all start off our lives being totally dependent on our family. Parents supply food, clothing, shelter, and love, and boost our esteem by praising our every accomplishment. All social contact takes place around the family.

From this cloistered starting point, our social sphere widens through school, college, social networks, and increasingly prestigious clubs and societies. We start our own family. By the time we reach retirement we have an established social network, some of which revolves around our work activities.

When it comes to security needs, the moment when we first launch out into the workplace is probably the time when our security is at its lowest. We are not yet established in our careers, living from hand to mouth in a succession of rented dwellings, and spending more than we should on having a good time. Parents are sometimes called upon to sort out the financial consequences. But as we start to earn more, build up some savings and buy a home of our own, so we can face the world more confidently. By the time we reach retirement age the children are off our hands, the mortgage is paid off on the second property, we have two prestigious cars in the garage, and we have put aside enough capital to see us through the rest of our lives. We are settled in our home and financially secure.

But we have also achieved a certain status in the workplace. We have a fancy title with our own office, and undercover parking. Our experience is valued, and junior members of staff seek our advice on a wide variety of issues. Outside the work environment we are established members of our social circle. Our social status and financial well being make us feel good about ourselves, so our self-esteem is high. This general increase in security, self esteem and status is reflected in the diagram by the "well being" arrow following an upward path.

But then what happens at retirement? Assuming that we have prepared well financially our security needs should not change when we stop working. There will probably be a feeling of anxiety when the regular salary cheque is replaced by some kind of annuity payment - it's almost like getting something for nothing – but we soon become accustomed to the new routine.

However, two other areas of our life will definitely change. The regular social contact with colleagues in the work environment will come to an abrupt end. We may not have thought of business meetings as social occasions, but they do involve interaction with our fellow human beings, and minor events such as gossip sessions at the water fountain or sharing the latest joke doing the rounds brighten up the dullest of routine days. Suddenly having eight hours or more of one's own company can be a bit of a shock. And any prestige, real or imagined, which we have been able to garner as we climbed the corporate ladder will also evaporate pretty quickly. Your personal office, complete with personal assistant, now belongs to someone else.

As part of our retirement plan, then, we must consider how we feel about such changes. Replacing these lost aspects of our lives will not happen automatically, but will only happen if we take actions which will result in these needs being replaced in some way. We can represent this by extending the Whole Life diagram as follows:

But there is more to retirement planning than merely replacing what we leave behind in the workplace, if indeed we see that as a loss. All that we actually lose are what are described as "deficiency" needs. The psychologist Abraham Maslow described another type of needs which he called "being" needs or "meta" needs. (The prefix meta means above or higher). These needs come from a desire or a driving force aimed at achieving ones full potential in a consciously chosen direction. People who are following a calling can be thought of as responding to such needs, but the majority of people are not aware of these needs unless they are alerted to them.

An important aspect of this idea is that the direction chosen should come from the individual's own values or beliefs. Because this direction needs to be freely chosen by one's self, the process of following this kind of motivation is referred to as "self actualization", and the idea is central to planning for a successful retirement.

Now it is true to say that anyone who has successfully made it through to retirement will have developed their potential in certain areas, be they technical, managerial or in some other professional direction. Industrial psychologists and motivational speakers use this fact to claim that devotion to career advancement is the same as following a path to self actualization, but this is not strictly true. By definition, career progression is achieved by doing what someone else wants you to do. If your work is not directed towards what your customer, your boss, or your shareholders want, then you are not going to get paid for it, and your career is going nowhere. Of course one achieves a certain amount of satisfaction from doing work which others consider worth paying for, and from providing for oneself and one's family. I call the growth experienced through career development 'role actualization' rather than 'self actualization' because the actual work content is for most people chosen by the need to fulfil a role in society rather than from an examination of one's deeply held beliefs and values. The opportunity in retirement is to explore the directions in which these beliefs and values lead us.

So to sum up on the subject of needs. When we retire some of those needs which our work environment has been satisfying, typically social and esteem needs, will cease to be satisfied. In planning our retirement we must consider how to go about replenishing any detriment we feel in these areas. But very importantly, we now, for the first time in our lives, have the opportunity to spend significant amounts of time and energy discovering and developing our potential in a direction or directions which we are completely free to choose, based on our own values, and without any consideration of having to earn an income whilst doing so. This is the real opportunity afforded by retirement, and I will be referring back to this idea from now on. A final look at the whole life diagram will end this section.

## WHAT IS THE VALUE OF TIME?

A lot of things seem to change when we retire. But looked at another way, only one thing changes – our time. All that happens is that the time which we have been spending at work now becomes available for other activities. How we perceive and plan our time is such a fundamental part of retirement planning that it deserves a whole section to itself.

The nature of time has fascinated and frustrated scientists and philosophers alike for centuries. St. Augustine once said "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know". But one thing about time is clear to me. The value of time obeys the same law of supply and demand as any other commodity. This is typically illustrated by the following graph:

From the moment of our birth onwards the amount of time left in our lives – the "supply" of time – decreases regularly at the rate of 24 hours every day. The snag, of course, is that we never know how much time is left to us until it is too late to do anything about it. This is illustrated in the diagram by the dotted line showing the number of days line from today onwards. For many people the value of the time left to them only becomes apparent when it is known. We can clarify this concept by thinking what our reaction would have been if sometime in our working life we had been told that we only had a week to live. Suddenly our supply of time is known, and it is a lot less than we thought it was going to be. Immediately our assessment of the value of our time would change. Whereas we would have been happy to exchange that week for our normal weekly pay, this would no longer be the case. Even if the boss came to us and said he would increase our pay tenfold if we would just stay on and complete the project we were working on we would not consider it a good deal. The value of our limited time can no longer be stated in money terms. We would probably spend a couple of minutes of our valuable time telling the boss exactly what we thought of him, and then go off and do what was really valuable to us by spending time with people who are important to us, and visiting beautiful places for the last time.

Wherever we are sitting now – the 'Today' line on the graph – we can never be certain of the number of days left to us, and therefore never be certain of the actual value of our time. To my way of thinking this underscores the importance of thinking carefully about how best to use our time in retirement. We are sitting at a point in our lives when our time is becoming rapidly more valuable. Each passing day consumes a higher proportion of our unknown remaining time on earth. Once we are reasonably sure that we have enough money put away to support ourselves through the rest of our days, then it is critical to extract the best value from our decreasing supply of time that we possibly can.

Time is the currency of life. Our lifetimes are measured in years, and we talk about _spending_ time, but maybe _investing_ would be a more appropriate term. If we invest our time, what do we expect in return. Just as when we spend money, we should be looking for value for our expenditure.

When we are young children the value of time is of not the slightest interest. One day flows into the next and we expend all our energy enjoying ourselves. This changes a bit when we get to high school or college, when we realise that we have to invest some of our time in order to pass our examinations and obtain the desired qualification. But we only make a serious calculation of the value of our time when we begin our career. It is at that stage of life that we in effect say "I will exchange a certain number of my hours every day for a certain amount of money, and no less". In other words there is a minimum salary which we expect to earn. As our career progresses that minimum salary increases. Initially it increases because we believe that our value to our employer increases as our knowledge and experience increase. However, as retirement approaches there is also an aspect of thinking "I had better start earning more or I will not be able to afford retirement".

But what happens when we retire? When we decide to retire we in effect say that there are ways of spending our time which are more valuable to us than earning money. But very few people actually decide what these ways of spending time are. Even fewer think of how to go about evaluating the days and hours which we have available to spend now that we are retired. This is not surprising. Our modern society has got into the way of thinking that once something has been evaluated in dollar terms it can be evaluated no further. The only numerical unit of value we have is money.

Let me give a hypothetical example. Suppose that a valuable mineral deposit is found under a piece of ground which currently forms part of a nature reserve. Inevitably a struggle will break out between those industrialists who want to develop a mine on the reserve, and the conservationists who want to keep the reserve in its natural state. The industrialists will produce calculations to show how many dollars the development will add to the economy. In other words they will come up with a precise number for the value of the land. The conservationists on the other hand will try to counter this by saying that the community will benefit from having accessible areas of natural environment for the pleasure of its citizens. But they will not be able to put a precise number to their argument. They have no unit of measure to balance against the developers' dollars. This is exactly the same situation which faces the retiree. At retirement we stop evaluating our time in monetary terms. How then can we evaluate it?

My belief is that the answer is the same for both our hypothetical conservationists and our actual retiree. This answer is so central to what this book is about that it warrants its own paragraph in capitals.

THE ULTIMATE CURRENCY IN WHICH ANY HUMAN ACTIVITY SHOULD BE EVALUATED IS QUALITY OF LIFE.

I shall be using the term Quality of Life so frequently from now on that I need to abbreviate it to QoL. If we focus on QoL we will still not have a precise number, but it may just give us a framework around which to evaluate our activities. In our hypothetical example we may be able to compare the QoL which the community will get from having a nature reserve close by with the QoL which the community will get from having a certain number of dollars injected into its economy.

Let us apply this idea to work and retirement. There is no doubt that a certain amount of financial security is necessary in order to experience a satisfactory QoL. We can consider our working lives as being the time when we prioritize activities which contribute to that objective. But once financial security has been achieved then we are free to invest our time in activities which will enhance our QoL more than will the pursuit of more money. That is when we retire. Of course this is a much simplified picture. We do not _only_ work before we retire, but rather have a mix of activities of which working for an income is merely a predominant one. And there is no way that we can calculate the exact time when retiring is a better value proposition than continuing to earn an income. But the principle remains true.

## ROLE AND PURPOSE

Yet another way of looking at the change which retirement brings is to consider how our role and purpose in life both change. In our working lives our role is defined by the function which we carry out – accountant, director, engineer and so on. The main purpose of our work activities is to provide for ourselves materially.

Of course we also have other roles within the family and community, but these will most likely not change when we retire, even if we have more time to allocate to them. But if the main purpose of a working life is material provision, what can we say about the purpose of a retirement existence? To start with we can say that we are free to choose what our purpose will be. The diagrams which I have used to show the progression of our lives have shown that, if we have been reasonably successful through our working lives, then we will have experienced a more or less continuous improvement in our Quality of Life. I believe that the best way to plan a successful retirement is to think in terms of continuing that improvement. We can summarize the choice by saying that whilst one is working for an income, the question is "what is the monetary value of my time". After retiring, the question is "what is the best way to invest my time in order to improve my QoL?". This is a key concept which will feature again when I discuss the details of retirement planning.

The concept of Quality of Life is so key to the rest of this book that it gets its own section.

*******

# 5.QUALITY OF RETIRED LIFE

## WHAT IS QUALITY OF LIFE?

What is QoL? There is no single answer, and no simple answer. There is no unit of measurement, and that is probably why it never receives as much attention as, for example, monthly salary or GDP, which are represented by hard numbers. But the fact is inescapable that if you spend time earning money and that money does not increase the quality of your life, then you have wasted your time, no matter what the rate of pay. Consider for a moment that GDP includes certain components which clearly do not indicate positive outcomes. For example the economic activities around the development and consumption of drugs to combat stress and depression contribute positively to GDP but hardly indicate a healthy society. And research shows that increasing income only marginally increases life satisfaction once basic needs have been satisfied. If more money does not bring happiness, then what is the point of striving for it?

It has been surprising to me that I have been unable to uncover more research on what QoL means to the individual. Such work as has been done on the concept of QoL seems largely to be directed at communities – answering questions such as "what should we be providing as a community to enhance our citizens' QoL?". There seems to be very little literature which helps the individual to enhance his or her personal QoL. I am not offering any concrete measures in this book. All I can do is to get the reader to start thinking about what QoL means to him or her, and to plan their retirements accordingly.

QoL is subjective. It is a "soft" measure. To a certain extent it is a feeling, similar to happiness. Some researchers have tried to analyse it, and I will have a brief look at some of their findings later, but it remains elusive. There have been attempts to nail it down. One of the first such attempts was made by the rulers of the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Whereas most countries measure their progress largely by how successful they have been in increasing their Gross National Product – loosely the monetary value of the goods and services which they produce – Bhutan attempts to measure its progress by how happy its citizens are. It attempts to measure Gross National Happiness or GNH. Apparently this move started a number of years ago when a British financial journal criticised the backward nature of Bhutan's economy. The then King of Bhutan responded by saying words to the effect of "everything you say about our economy is true, but my people are happier than your people". I wish I knew what the British response to that was! GNH seeks to give a more holistic picture of a nation's wellbeing by including such items as environmental preservation, cultural tradition, and family stability. It also includes GNP because there is no doubt that money _is_ important, but it is not the only important thing.

It is encouraging to note that there are attempts to move policy analysis away from the purely financial. One such attempt at formalising the QoL of nations is the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Program. This is an attempt to "shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people centred policies", to quote Wikipedia on the subject. Once again it does include financial measures, but also takes into account life expectancy, literacy, and levels of education.

How does all this help the individual to think about retirement. Not much! So if QoL is so difficult to pin down, how can we go about making it a core aspect of our retirement plan? I think it will be useful to consider certain aspects of QoL and tie them back to some of the subjects I have discussed earlier.

### Quality of Life vs. Standard of Living

Quality of Life (QoL) and Standard of Living (SoL) are related concepts, or at least overlap here and there. What, then, are the differences between the two?

Well, I have been unable to find any formal description of such differences, so I had to come up with my own. And in the context of this book, I am only interested in these concepts as they apply to individuals. For my purposes I consider the SoL of an individual to refer to certain aspects of the individual's life which can be directly measured. QoL refers to the individual's subjective response to these and other influences. Let's take an example.

If family A lives in a twelve roomed mansion on a golf estate, has a car each for Mum, Dad, and the children, refreshes themselves with French Champagne and Malt Whisky, and regularly flies overseas for holidays, then they have a high SoL. We could attach a measure to this by totalling up the amount of money they spend on supporting their lifestyle. If Family B lives in a two bedroom apartment, gets around the neighbourhood their one ten year old clunker, can occasionally afford a small bottle of cheap wine with Sunday lunch, and holidays with relatives in a nearby town, then we can say that they have a lower standard of living than Family A, because they spend less on their lifestyle. However, if Family A achieved their lofty status by both parents working all hours in stressful occupations, resulting in poor health and a dysfunctional relationship with their children, whilst Family B were happy together running a small shop which kept them in touch with each other and the members of their local community, then we might be lead to believe that the B's were enjoying the better QoL, but we would be unable to put a meaningful number to our belief. What we could say about Family A is that they have put themselves in a position where they _should_ be able to experience a good QoL, because their financial well being gives them a high degree of freedom. But we cannot say their better financial situation definitely means that they are experiencing a better QoL than Family B.

One can encounter confused thinking in all aspects of modern life. However, the propensity to confuse SoL with QoL is probably one of the most widely held misconceptions in the developed world today. This is not surprising. Look back at the sections where I discussed the influences to which we are subjected every day of our adult, and even childhood, lives. Almost all of them are aimed at making us producers and consumers, and both production and consumption are measured in monetary terms. This has been going on for such a long time that it has become an ingrained aspect of the human condition. It was in 1806 that William Wordsworth wrote:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,  
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

And society has been sharpening our focus on getting and spending throughout the ensuing two centuries, with ever decreasing concern about what impact all this energy expenditure has on our QoL. This book is largely about focusing on QoL in retirement rather than SoL.

### QoL and Happiness

I mentioned the recent interest which has been expressed in the Kingdom of Bhutan's use of Gross National Happiness as a measure of national success. Is happiness the same thing as QoL? I think not, and here is why.

Happiness is a mood, and as such it is transient. To take a simple example, it is quite likely that you will be very happy when the football team you support is leading with less than five minutes to play in a cup final. But that mood evaporates rapidly when the opposition score two goals in injury time to snatch victory away from your heroes. People who are living in the most advantageous of circumstances are capable of periods of great unhappiness, whilst even those living in the direst conditions sometimes find moments of happiness.

So QoL is something a bit more fundamental than just happiness. It could be thought of as the combined effect of the physical and psychological environments in which one is living. Having a high QoL does not protect you from experiencing periods of unhappiness as circumstances ebb and flow. Rather it is about establishing a mode of living in which happiness is generally more likely than unhappiness.

So to return to the example of Bhutan, it would probably be more accurate to describe that country's policy as being one of trying to improve Gross National Quality of Life, but that does not trip off the tongue quite as smoothly as GNH.

### QoL as Need Satisfaction

In an earlier section I spoke quite a bit about needs. To a certain extent our QoL can be seen as a measure of how well our needs are being satisfied. This does not only apply to our deficit needs. Once we have fulfilled these deficit needs we can continue to improve our QoL by focusing on the being needs. Stories abound of people who have achieved physical and financial security, status, and abundant social contacts who still feel that something is missing in their lives. Such people can enhance the quality of their lives by striving to fulfil their potential in directions of their own choosing, and experiencing personal growth in the process.

### A QoL Framework

If we agree that focusing on QoL in retirement is a good thing, then we are going to need some kind of foundation on which to build our thinking. It is not going to help us at all to throw our hands up in despair and say that QoL is too subjective a concept to be able to grasp, no matter how nebulous or complex some of the writing on the subject may appear. I came across one article which lists no fewer than 57 attributes which go to make up QoL. Such a model is certainly very comprehensive, but not much use for planning purposes. We need something simpler.

In my reading around the subject I did however come across one framework which I have found to be a very good one on which to base a QoL discussion. This framework has been developed by the University of Toronto's Quality of Life Research Unit, and the discussions on QoL which follow in this book are mainly based on their basic idea. I have given it my own interpretation and used it for my own purposes throughout the rest of this book. Any false impressions created by the use of this model are entirely my own. For those interested in the original work on the subject, I really do recommend that you go to the source, which I have included in the references section at the end of the book.

Let us start with the Toronto's definition of QoL. QoL, they say, is the degree to which a person enjoys the important possibilities of his/her life. Possibilities result from the opportunities and limitations each person has in life, and reflect the interaction of personal and environmental factors. One of the central ideas of this book is that when a person retires both their opportunities and their limitations change significantly. The limitation of having to exchange one's time for money has been removed, and the opportunity of large amounts of time being freed up for a choice of activities appears.

Toronto go on to identify three major domains of life, which they label Being, Belonging, and Becoming, which they further break down into a number of aspects which they call sub-domains. I will do the same, but from now on I will be using my own descriptions and interpretations, which mostly agree with the Toronto originals, but do vary in places.

I will start with a bit of a caveat. Any attempt to partition something as complicated as human life into neat compartments will always end up being an oversimplification. However, it is sometimes necessary to do this in order to discuss the subject without getting bogged down in finer and finer detail. With that in mind let us look at what the three life domains consist of.

The BEING domain includes those aspects of our lives which do not change much from day to day. To a large extent it defines who we are right now. I describe it under the following headings:

Physical and Mental Health

Some days we feel good, some days we feel not so good, and some days we are down with the flu, but overall we can say that we do or do not enjoy good health. What goes for physical health also applies to mental health. Nobody I have ever met lives entirely free of stress or worry, but most of the time most of us manage to cope with what life throws at us. A firmly held set of values and/or spiritual beliefs goes a long way towards supporting us in achieving this.

Daily Chores

A lot of life consists of routine. Food needs to be bought and prepared, the house needs to be kept clean, cars and appliances fixed and maintained, tax returns filed and so on. In order to experience a good quality of life it is necessary to be able to handle these chores without letting them become a debilitating burden.

Work

For most of us the details of what we do each day in our work environment change, sometimes dramatically, from day to day, but the general nature of what we do changes slowly. If we are competent to handle what the customers threw at us today, we will probably be able to handle what they throw at us tomorrow. If we enjoy what we have to do in our work environment, feel confident in our ability to handle it, and have just enough variety to challenge our abilities, then our work will probably be a positive contributor to our QoL. I talk about career change a bit later.

Leisure

Most of us find time for activities whose sole purpose is to "give us a break". A leisure activity is anything which has leisure as its purpose. The possibilities are endless. Reading the newspaper, walking the dog, sports, hobbies and so on. Whether a particular activity is a leisure activity or a growth activity (see later) depends on how we perceive it. Let me take an example. Someone who has played golf to a twenty handicap for the last ten years, who has no intention of working to improve that handicap, but who loves his Sunday morning round with his pals is using golf as a leisure activity. If that same person set his sights on achieving a single figure handicap and invests large amounts of time, effort and resources to achieving this, he would be using golf as a vehicle for personal growth. As I said earlier, trying to analyze human life is liable to throw up some grey areas.

So much for the BEING domain. What about BELONGING? As its name implies, the belonging domain refers to our relationships. We are social beings, and as such we all have relationships which are important to us and form a cornerstone of our quality of life. It is important that when we go through the great change in our lives called retirement that we maintain a social network which fulfills our relationship needs. I see relationships as falling under four headings as follows:

Family

Most people's strongest relationships are those formed within the family environment. Part of our evolutionary success has been because we learned how to function in family or clan groups held together by common purpose and bonds of affection. Despite the fact our modern lifestyle has put stresses on family bonds, most people I know give a very strong impression that their relationships with at least some of their family members are a fundamental part of their existence. In many families pets are as much family members as are the human members.

Close Friends

Some people almost deserve to be included as family despite not being related to us in any way. These are our lifelong friends. Such friendships can survive long periods of separation. Even at such times it is somehow nice to know that such a friend is there, and the comfort that this thought supplies definitely improves our QoL.

Social Groups

We can also belong to groups which get together for some kind of shared purpose or interest. In our working lives, the work environment provides one such, and its sudden termination is but one of the changes which we have to cope with at retirement. These groups come in a variety of forms such as book clubs, sports clubs, theatre groups, wine appreciation societies – the list is endless. As they are mainly formed around a common area of interest, they frequently perform an instructional or informational function, as well as being a vehicle for healthy social interaction. Indeed some, such as the University of the Third Age for example, exist primarily for the purpose of ongoing education, with social contact as a spin off.

Community and Environment

Not all of our relationships are with other people. We live in a relationship with our surroundings, both natural and man made. In fact most of the literature which I have found on the subject of QoL concerns the management of physical facilities and environment for the benefit of the elderly and sick. With regard to retirement this is an important aspect. Many people plan to move when they retire, either to a smaller dwelling, a purpose built retirement location, a cottage at the coast, or even to a new country. To do so without consideration of how the environment and community facilities fit in with your lifestyle will just add to the stress of retiring.

And so finally to the BECOMING domain. Becoming is all about change. It can mean change in either our being or belonging domains, or it can mean branching out in an entirely new direction. I view this domain as consisting of the following sub domains:

Career Development

Throughout our working lives our competence increases, and as this happens we take on bigger and wider responsibilities. We call this process career development and we experience this as a growing process. This process obviously comes to an end when we retire, and the key to leading a truly successful retirement is to replace this growth aspect of QoL with something else.

Practical Becoming

Referring back to the Being domain, I said that part of who we are is our ability to cope with the demands of day to day living. Practical becoming refers to the process by which our capability to handle these demands improves. To quote myself as an example, when I bought my first house almost forty years ago I had no idea how to change a tap washer, and my first attempts at installing an extra shelf in a cupboard were laughable. I am still not the world's greatest handyman, but my capability to handle such situations has improved steadily, and I experience a level of satisfaction in being able to handle most domestic situations I encounter. What applies to DIY also applies to other areas of everyday life such as handling our finances or parenting. We can sum up practical becoming by saying that we just get better at the demands of living.

Growth Becoming

Practical becoming means improving at some activity which satisfies our physical needs. Growth becoming means improving at some activity which expresses our values and explores our potential. There are many ways in which this can be accomplished, and some of these will be discussed later. The important point I want to make at this stage is to say that the opportunity presented by retirement is to continue our growth in this direction when the growth experienced through career progression comes to and end.

In reading what I have written about the actions to be taken in formulating a retirement plan, always refer back to the Toronto analysis. Just about everything which I have written is based on the idea of becoming, in some way or ways which you yourself choose, more than you were at the time you retired. This is the opportunity of retirement which is so frequently neglected.

## WHAT DO YOU THINK?

So far in this book I have done my best to describe my thinking on what retirement actually means. I can assure you that it is a line of thinking which has served me well. If you agree with a lot of what I say, that is great. If, on the other hand, it is your opinion that what I have been saying is a load of hogwash, that's also fine by me _provided_ that you have thought clearly and carefully about what retirement means to you, and that you are convinced that your own thinking reflects your own beliefs and values, and not those inflicted on society by the various influences which I have described in the sections up to this point.

## YOU CAN STOP THINKING NOW

Up to now I have gone on a bit about a variety of subjects. There is a reason for this. We are complex beings living in a complex world, and understanding our own behaviour is not always that easy. That is why it is possible for something which we assume to be both simple and desirable – retiring happily – can in fact be a source of fear, uncertainty, frustration and stress for many people who have been looking forward to if for decades. Let me summarise what we have covered so far.

→The first, and very important, point is that just as it is possible to be a success or failure in one's school and professional careers, so it is possible to be a success or a failure in retirement. We tend to assume that if we have made it to retirement date in reasonable health and financially secure, then retirement success will follow automatically, but this is not the case.

→Following on from this I will re-state, at the risk of overstating, that physical and financial wellbeing are essential for a successful retirement, but do not of themselves guarantee retirement success. These issues constitute what I call the "science" of retirement. However, this book is about the "art" of retirement so I have only addressed them in passing.

→The situation in the industrialised western nations is that more people are reaching retirement age in better health, with greater prosperity, and with better access to a wider choice of activities than at any time in the history of mankind. This combination of factors has to represent an opportunity unparalleled in human history. The objective of this book is to help people to make the most of this unprecedented opportunity.

→Despite the existence of this opportunity, many people find the prospect of retirement to be scary and the actuality to be a disappointment, even when they have provided adequately for retirement and are in good health.  
The basic reasons why this is the case are a lack of thought about and planning for retirement, combined with an assumption that retirement will automatically be some kind of paradise, free from all cares and worries, without any effort on the part of the retiree.

→A critical factor is that in the developed world today society is oriented strongly, in fact almost exclusively, towards material growth. The purpose of education is increasingly seen as being to prepare the learner for the workplace. Apparent success and social prestige are judged by the conspicuous display of material acquisition, despite such acquisition frequently being achieved at the cost of family harmony and personal health and happiness.

→If we define "work" as being something which we do because we need to earn an income, which is the case for the vast majority employees in the corporate world, then we can see clearly that the purpose of our activities changes when we retire. Most people have never considered what their personal driver would be if the need to earn an income is removed.

→Many things change when we retire, but perhaps the greatest change is the value and use of time. When we are working we spend the bulk of our time in earning income. The challenge in retirement is to find activities which have a greater value than a financial one.

→The measure of value changes when we retire. In our working lives the measure of value is to a large extent money. We tend to balance the need to earn an income with the amount of satisfaction we experience from the intrinsic nature of the work which we do. In other words the way we spend our time is a compromise which is made necessary by our need to earn an income. When we retire the compromise falls away. We can, indeed we must, focus our attention entirely on the intrinsic value of our activities.

→The concept of Quality of Life (QoL) is central to this thinking. This is not a complete change from the thinking in our working lives. The acquisition of financial capital is essential to sustaining a satisfactory QoL, and many aspects of work itself contribute positively to QoL. But once we have acquired enough capital to see us through to the end of our lives, then the opportunity of retirement is to focus all our attention on those activities which will enhance our QoL further.

→Success at retirement, just like success at any other activity, is a result of self knowledge, preparation, a certain amount of risk taking, and a will to succeed. The next part of this book is a description of what is involved in taking these ideas, applying them to your own situation and personality, and making your own retirement a glowing success.

*******

#  6.PREPARE FOR ACTION

Enough of philosophy, psychology, and general pontificating, it's time to start doing something. And once you start, don't stop. Crafting the perfect retirement is a process, not a destination. I have been pretty lucky on my retirement journey in that most of the things I've tried have contributed to improving my quality of life, but we have to expect that sometimes we try something which doesn't turn out to be as good as we thought it would, and have to redirect our efforts elsewhere. It has been said that Thomas Edison was delighted when an experiment failed because he had discovered one more way in which things did not work, so his understanding had improved. If you can think of your retirement as an experiment to find out how you function best then you are on the right track.

## CLEAR YOUR MIND

Start with a clean slate. Whether or not you agree with what I have written in the earlier sections about the many influences which shape our lives as we pass through childhood and adulthood, you will definitely have acquired a set of assumptions opinions and prejudices by the time you reach retirement age. Not to have done so would be inhuman. Let me give you what appears to be a common example.

On no fewer than three occasions recently I have chatted with friends about retirement. All three are quite successful in the business world, and I presume that they are in a financial position which would allow them to retire should they so choose. However, all of them rejected the idea of retiring at any foreseeable date, and they all used exactly the same words to express their opinions – "I couldn't just do nothing". To them the choice of what to do with their lives was simple: work or nothing. It is so patently ridiculous that such highly intelligent men could utter such nonsense that hypnosis is the only explanation. Stage hypnotists make a living by getting volunteers to stand up in front of an audience and do ridiculous things. Our modern society has managed to produce the same result by getting sane people to believe that paid work is the only reasonable use of our time on earth. One of my friends did in fact give an indication that he had thought a bit further. When I first mentioned that I had recently retired he asked if I was playing much golf. So there we have his world vision – life is work, golf, or nothing.

I am not criticising the fact that these men are continuing to work after achieving financial independence. If their reply to my questioning why they had not yet retired had been along the lines of "I have carefully considered a number of alternative activities which are now open to me, but have come to the conclusion that nothing will improve my quality of life as much as a few more years work", then I would applaud their insight and choice of career. But I detected no such introspection. My impression is that they have never considered anything other than work.

The opportunity which retirement presents to us all is the chance to start from scratch, but without the limitations inherent in earlier life stages. But we DO have preconceptions. It WILL be difficult to change. So go back and think about what YOUR working life meant to you and try to recognise what assumptions you will be carrying into your retirement.

## START SOONER RATHER THAN LATER

I have very few regrets about the way I tackled my own retirement. The only thing I would have done differently would have been to start serious planning sooner than I did. There are a few very good reasons why thinking about retirement sooner is a very good idea.

Firstly, there is the whole issue of managing the huge change which retiring involves. As I have mentioned earlier, one should never underestimate the impact of the change which occurs in one's life at the point of retirement, and anything which can be done to reduce that impact should be done. Two ways of doing this are to spread the change out over time, and to be thoroughly prepared for the change mentally.

When I speak of spreading the change out over time, I am not merely talking about thinking about what one is going to do after retirement. I mean actually starting to do those things which are going to occupy one's time after retirement. Let's think of a couple of examples. Suppose that you have decided that in your retirement you are going to spend time doing voluntary work for a charity. Spend some time _before_ you retire contacting local charitable organisations and finding out what opportunities for such work are available in your geographic area. In talking to the people involved, you will be able to discover which ones need the kind of input which you would be happy to contribute, and which ones offer an environment which you think you will enjoy. You can start giving some time on weekends and seeing how the activities and people involved match your idea of a satisfying environment for your retirement activities. If, on the other hand, you plan to undertake a formal course of study in the history of art after your retirement, then start investigating the different courses available. Maybe some teaching institutions offer an introductory course which you can undertake before you actually retire. Start reading around your chosen subject. Whatever the course of action you plan to pursue after retirement, the sooner you stick your toe in the water and find out what is actually involved, the sooner you can decide that your choice was not quite what you wanted, and the sooner you can change course for something more appropriate. And, importantly, the less stressful the change when retirement date comes around, because the change is more spread out over time.

So how soon before retirement should you start to investigate retirement activities? The simple answer is that it is never too soon, and we will discuss why this is the case in a moment. But to give a more helpful answer, then I would say that starting serious consideration of your retirement plan five years before retirement date would be a very good time to aim for, and if you have not started doing some serious planning one year before retirement, then you are leaving it very late. But on the other hand, it is never _too_ late!

There is a very good reason why you could never start planning your retirement too soon. In the first part of this book I spent quite a bit of time developing the argument that the most valid purpose for which to spend your time in retirement is to improve your Quality of Life. But you may well wonder if that is not the most valid purpose for which to spend your time throughout the whole of your life. Absolutely correct. So in an ideal world, every decision you make would be aimed at improving the quality of your life, and planning your working life would be no different from planning for retirement. But the nature of life in the modern world tends to make this very difficult to achieve. In order to earn a decent living and to provide for our current and future needs, we have to subordinate our priorities to those of the corporation and its customers, at least during our working day. This takes the majority of our waking hours, and a huge amount of energy. I always had good intentions of doing things which were of interest in the evenings after work, but frequently could not muster the required energy after a day of struggle in the corporate environment. So the best view to take is that you spent your working life putting yourself into a position where you could focus solely on improving your QoL. You no longer need to worry about earning an income, so concentrate on activities of greater value than mere money.

Very frequently, however, people will find themselves in a position of increasing freedom as they approach retirement age. Children will, hopefully, be becoming independent (and no, you never get rid of them completely, thank heavens!), and you will find yourself in a situation where you will be able to start easing off at work. Spend some of that new-found freedom on practising for your retirement, as I suggested. To put it simply, start retiring before you stop working.

There can also be financial advantages to starting sooner. Taking up any new activity very often involves expenditure. In my own case I decided early on that woodworking was going to be one of my retirement activities. Now woodworking, like so many other activities in this life, offers an almost infinite opportunity for expenditure. Quite close to where I live is an outstanding woodworking shop. Every time I go there I could spend a fortune. I would love a better table saw than the one I have, and an extra router would be very useful. I really do need a bandsaw, not to mention all the small tools and gimmicks which call out to be bought every time I walk into the store. And that is just woodwork. Don't even talk about photography, my other passion! However, because I started early, I could spread the financial outlay over time. I started out with just a drill press and a small router, and spent a lot of time getting to know how to use them. I also surprised myself with what I could actually produce with them. Additional equipment has been added as needed or when a local hardware store had a sale on, and I have had plenty of time learning how to use the tools which I have got. Another great advantage is that, if I had decided that woodworking was not for me, I had not invested so much money that I would feel tied in to my decision. Compare that with my late brother-in-law who went out and bought a whole workshop full of equipment, and hardly ever used it. The lesson is that making a change in one's life involves risk. When you change course, you can never be completely sure that your new direction will be the one you want to take, so easing in to some activity gives you the flexibility to change without losing too much.

But what if you have already retired and you are finding out that retirement is not living up to what you thought it would be. It is too late to start retiring before you stop working, but it is never too late to start planning a meaningful retirement. Even if you retired many years ago, it is still worthwhile sitting down and reviewing how things are going. If you are not experiencing retired life as an ongoing improvement in your QoL then it is time to consider a change. In any event, one of my suggestions is that you carry out a review along the lines detailed in the rest of this book on a regular basis throughout the entire retirement process.

So the general message is – the sooner the better, but it is never too late!

## MAP YOUR TIME AS IT IS

Your retirement is nothing more than a period of years, and retirement planning is the process of deciding how you are going to spend those years. The change as you move from working to retirement is a change in the way you spend your time. So a good place to start planning is to look at how you spend your time right now.

Take out a piece of paper or open a worksheet on your computer and set up a table that looks like this:

For each morning afternoon or evening time slot fill in the number of hours you spend on work (including commuting time, lunch break at work, and any time working at home), family/social involvement, leisure activities, and chilling out, which in today's world typically means watching television. Notice that I do not include chilling out as a leisure activity, and the difference is in the word 'activity'. Leisure activities are purposeful activities such as sport or hobbies. No two weeks ever look quite the same, but charting your "typical" week will give you a clear idea of the size and importance of the decisions which you are going to make, consciously or unconsciously, when you retire.

Now do the same with the following monthly table:

Just note down for each month the number of weeks in the year which are typical working weeks, and those which are not typical. Mostly the untypical ones will be vacation time.

Now I want you to look very critically at your two tables and make your first big retirement decision.....

## IF YOU DON'T WORK, DON'T RETIRE!

This rather peculiar heading refers back to my definition of work in the earlier section of this book. Work, if you remember, is any activity which you engage in _because_ you need to earn an income. An activity which you genuinely love for its own sake can never be described as work, whether you get paid for it or not. The key question to ask yourself here is, would I consider doing this activity if I were _not_ paid to do it.

I was chatting to someone recently who said with pride that he was continuing to work long after normal retirement age because he loved his work. He had an accounting function in a government department. I asked him if he got paid for it, and he looked at me as if I was crazy. "Of course", was his reply, "you don't think I would do it for nothing, do you?". How does such a person reconcile in their own mind that they love what they do, but would not consider doing it without being paid to do it. If you genuinely love doing something, then not only would you do it for nothing, but quite frequently you would actually pay good money in order to be able to do it. Think of the number of people, retired or not, who pay large sums of money to belong to golf clubs and go out of their way to purchase expensive equipment just in order to be able to play a round of golf every weekend. If you genuinely "love" something, then that is the kind of commitment that you will be happy to make for it.

Just in case you think that I believe that loving your work is a sure sign of insanity, let me recount another conversation I had recently with someone who runs a company specializing in environmental rehabilitation. A typical project involves getting the landscape back to its natural state when a mine closes down, and his work takes him to all corners of the globe. His eyes sparkled when he told me about his working life, and at one stage he said, and I quote, "I just wish I could live to a hundred and work every day of my life". It was said with such commitment that I do not doubt him for one moment. Do I consider such people insane? Absolutely not. In fact I envy them. To be living in response to such a calling is to indeed be blessed. But in my experience such people constitute a very small proportion of the working population.

Now let us not confuse issues here. I am not saying there is anything wrong with being paid for performing valuable activities. What I am saying is that, when you have retired and you no longer _need_ to earn an income, then the _reason_ that you decide to engage in your activities should never be money. There are far better reasons than that, and those reasons are the issues of growth and personal development which I listed in the earlier sections of this book – the self actualization issues. There can indeed be very valid reasons for making money whilst doing them, and I discuss some of these in a later section.

But right now I want you to look critically at what you have put into your tables. It represents a life. Yours. And it will change when you retire. How do you feel about that?

If the concept of erasing the hours spent on work from the tables and replacing them with something else fills you with a profound sadness, then don't retire. Find some way of continuing with that work activity, either in your current organization or a similar or related one, or in a freelance capacity by yourself. Once again I give a few suggestions later. But realise that, according to my definition of work, you are not working, so you are really in no position to retire!

If you feel a sense of fear or uncertainty when you look at the amount of time which is going to be freed up, then tell yourself that the way to overcome fear is to confront it. Realise that you _will_ be doing something in those hours and days, and that you can either let happenstance decide what that something will be, or you can consciously decide what it will be, based on sound criteria. Read on. I will give you pointers along the way.

If you can't wait to erase those working hours, then carry on reading to convince yourself that your excitement is based on a firm foundation, and not predicated on assumptions which may be misleading at best and dangerous at worst.

## DECIDE TO DECIDE

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice. William James

If you are like most working people, the biggest chunk of time on your timesheets will be work time. This is the time which becomes available when you retire. What you do in that time will be what you choose to do in it. And you can choose what to do with your time in two ways – consciously or unconsciously. In other words you can choose to make a definite decision based upon criteria which you perceive as being relevant, or you can wait and see what crops up.

Making such fundamental decisions will be a new experience for most people. Sure, we have to make decisions on a daily basis in our working lives, but the parameters constraining the decision are pretty narrow. In most cases there is a right decision, or at least a best decision, based on the requirements of the organization. Once retired, we are free to set our own parameters and decide accordingly. To be free is to be in a position to make our own decisions. If we then fail to make a conscious decision, then we in effect relinquish our freedom. The school of philosophy known as existentialism centres around the concepts of freedom, choice, and responsibility as they apply to human existence. According to this philosophy, every human has the freedom to make choices which are aligned with his or her personal beliefs and values, and the responsibility to follow through with these choices. Doing so will result in the person becoming, in the words of Soren Kierkegaard, the founder of existential philosophy, "that self which they truly are". A hundred years later Abraham Maslow arrived at the same conclusion via a different route, and called his destination "self actualization".

So if you are going to make the most of the opportunity which your retirement represents, then you are going to have to make some decisions. Nobody can tell you what your decisions should be. This is not a multiple choice examination. You really are on your own, but hopefully the following sections will help you to find a satisfying way forward.

*******

#  7.DEVELOP YOUR PLAN

## WHAT DOES A PLAN LOOK LIKE?

We are going to try to put together a retirement plan. To help us in this endeavour we will think in terms of the Being, Belonging and Becoming framework for QoL, and also consider the ideas of self actualization and growth potential which we discussed in the previous section. But what does a retirement plan look like?

Well a retirement plan is nothing more than a picture of how you plan to spend your time in the years after you stop working. If you are more organized than I am you will like to see your plan neatly written down. In order to do that you need nothing more sophisticated than the timesheets which I got you to fill out in the previous section, plus maybe a few jottings of thoughts and ideas. Using the timesheets is in any event a very good way of forming ideas as to what your retirement activities will look like. However, be aware that if your actual retirement is anything like mine, then the chances of any particular week resembling the plan are just about as close to zero as you can get. There is nothing wrong with that. One of the great pleasures of retirement is the ability to be flexible.

The planning process is more important than the plan itself. Once you have created a plan by filling in most of the gaps in the timesheets then feel free to throw them away. The important place to have a well defined retirement plan is in your head. That should not be too difficult, because there is not very much to it. When someone asks you the question "what are you going to do when you retire?", you should be able to answer something along the lines of "Well, I should have more time to spend with the grandchildren, and I intend to get to the gym at least three times a week. But apart from that I want to take up nature photography, so I've already joined the local camera club, and I also intend to start a course in conversational Spanish which I will try out when my spouse and I fulfil a long term dream of completing the Inca Trail up to Machu Picchu in Peru next year. And I have a reading list as long as your arm". Anyone who has an answer like that is clearly facing retirement in a positive frame of mind and has planned for social interaction and personal growth. In the course of implementing such a plan some kind of a routine will establish itself. The grandchildren will have to be collected from school at certain times, the camera club will meet on certain days, and the Spanish classes will also have a firm timetable. But that will still leave plenty of room for the flexibility which is one of the aspects of retirement which makes it such a joy.

In the following paragraphs I discuss various things you might need to consider as you develop your plan, and it will certainly do no harm to write down your thoughts and ideas as you go along. The plan you end up with, however, should be simple enough, and clear enough in your mind, to be able to discuss it off the cuff with anybody at any time.

## EMPTY THE TIMESHEETS

Now that you have decided to decide what your retirement will look like, let us see how big a problem that is going to be. Go back to your timesheet and erase or delete all of the work time. Whilst you are about it, take out any 'chilling out' time that was in your original version. That should leave some pretty big gaps, but some activities will remain. The process of planning your retirement consists of nothing more complicated than filling these hours in again.

But before we start doing that let's just look at the kind of numbers we are talking about. A retirement consists of time, so I want you to work out how much time you will have to fill in living your retirement. I will use my own numbers to show you what I am talking about.

Whilst I was working I would typically leave home at 06:45 in the morning and be back home around 18:15 in the evening. Eleven and a half hours a day times 5 days gives a total of fifty seven and a half hours per week which required to be allocated to different activities when I retired. Your own calculation should not be too different if you are a typical corporate employee, so let's stick with that number for purposes of illustration.

So fifty seven and a half hours per week is the theoretical amount of time which you have to seriously plan for in retirement. The real world number is considerably less. To start with, take out an hour for lunch at home, with maybe a little nap to follow. Take out another hour a day to fetch the grandchildren from school. Take out a few hours a week for casual visits to and from other retired friends. Take out a bit more for chores around the house and garden. Take out a morning for an extra round of golf to add to your regular Saturday morning fourball. In fact, take out almost half of that fifty seven and a half hours and say that when all is said and done our retirement will leave us with thirty hours a week which we need to fill.

And what about the yearly timesheet?

Now that we are retired we are going to spend more time away from home simply because we can. How much more? Well suppose that we used to have four weeks of vacation per year when we were employed full time. Now we can have the same holidays we always had and add in the lifelong ambitions to visit exotic destinations every year. So double it up to eight weeks away from home every year.

Now let's do the numbers. Suppose we retire at age sixty five. If we've made it that far the statisticians tell us that we stand a very good chance of making it to eighty in good health. In other words we can look forward to at least fifteen years of active retirement, and we need to plan accordingly. In each of those years we are going to spend forty four weeks at home. So our retirement will consist of (44x15) six hundred and sixty weeks. And we said that we need to plan for thirty hours per week which will be freed up by retirement and which were not immediately accounted for. So our retirement now has (660x30) nineteen thousand eight hundred hours still to be filled. And remember that we have not touched the relaxation and chill out time which we have always had.

I want to consider these numbers from two perspectives. Firstly, notice that the number of hours we ended up having to plan for is almost two times ten thousand. The amount of ten thousand hours became a popular topic of debate a few years ago when Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers: The Story of Success" was released and became an instant best seller. The book examines the careers of exceptionally successful people in a variety of fields. One of the central themes is that before they became successful these people had typically spent around ten thousand hours improving their performance in their chosen field. This is not just a number which Gladwell pulled out of thin air, but is based on a body of psychological research. Needless to say, there followed a great deal of debate which I have no intention of going into, and obviously just spending ten thousand hours doing something is no guarantee of stardom. But I think we can agree that if we do spend that amount of time doing something which we want to do because we are interested in it, then we should be able to acquire a satisfying level of capability. And, even given the relatively conservative assumptions I made, we have _twice_ that number of hours available to us in our retirements. Just hold that thought. I shall be referring back to it.

Secondly, now that we can see just how much time is becoming available to us it is realistic to realize that most of that time is going to be spent at home, regardless of how much we promised ourselves that we were going to travel the world when we retired. Don't take my word for granted. Do your own sums and come up with a figure of how much time you realistically expect have available to you over the next fifteen or twenty years. Just carrying out the exercise of playing around with the timesheets will show that for the vast majority of us, throughout the years of retirement, most weeks of the year, and most days of those weeks, will be spent at home. It seems obvious, that the greatest opportunity to ensure that our retirement is a rich and rewarding experience, in other words, to make our retirement successful, lies where we will be spending the greatest amount of time.

IF WE USE THE MAJORITY OF OUR RETIREMENT TIME ENSURING A GREAT QUALITY OF LIFE, THEN OUR RETIREMENT SUCCESS IS ASSURED. DREAM ACTIVITIES SUCH AS A WORLD CRUISE OR CLIMBING KILIMANJARO WILL BE CHERRIES ON TOP OF THAT CAKE.

## START TO FILL THEM IN AGAIN

Let's go back to the timesheets. After you have emptied out all of the hours which are freed up when you stop working, what are you left with? A lot of what is left will be basic "being" and "belonging" activities. These are the day-to-day things which you do which define who you are. They are the daily chores and ad hoc maintenance jobs, and regular leisure activities such as visits to the gym, taking part in sports and hobbies or social contacts with friends and family. In your working life these activities had to be scheduled in between working hours. Now that this constraint has been removed you are free to allocate more time to these activities if you so wish. Think of it as being free to be who you want to be. Examples of what I am talking about might be a midweek round of golf, looking after the grandchildren on weekday afternoons, more time tending the garden, or reading. The list of possibilities really is endless.

Just a couple of words of warning here. A number of people find themselves very busy as soon as they retire with repair and maintenance jobs around the house which they have put off until their retirement. There is nothing wrong with this, but these activities are not part of your retirement plan. Unless the house is about to collapse, these activities should not keep you busy for more than a month or two immediately after you retire, but the retirement plan I am talking about maps out how you are going to spend the next twenty years or so. You do not really retire until these chores are complete.

The other thing I would like to point out at this stage is that probably the biggest mistake which people make when thinking about retirement is to assume that life will just become one big leisure activity. For sure more time can be given over to such activities, and one of the great pleasures of retirement is that priority can be given to them. It is wonderful to be able to say to a friend "come over any time" and mean it, because you know that you can drop whatever you are doing to spend quality time with people who are important in your life. Hopefully the exercise of filling in as much time as you want with chores and leisure activities will convince you that even when you have done so, there is still a lot of time left unaccounted for. To use the numbers I calculated in my case, I do not believe that anybody can seriously fill in twenty thousand hours only with leisure activities. This is a very good thing, because leisure is only leisure when it is compared with something else. So just as the working person's time can be divided between work activities and leisure activities so the retired person's time can be divided between retirement activities and leisure activities. What do I mean by retirement activities? Just as work activities are directed towards the purpose of working – to earn an income – so retirement activities are directed towards the purpose of retirement – to improve the quality of life by undertaking activities which are meaningful and which contribute to personal growth and development.

We have arrived at the critical moment. We have had a look at how much time has been freed up by retiring. We have filled in a certain amount of this time by making a realistic estimate of what our leisure and social time is going to look like, and how much time we are likely to expend on chores and errands. And we still have a large number of hours left in our typical week. How we fill these hours will dictate whether we have a truly successful retirement which satisfies your meta needs and enhances the quality of your life, or one that just keeps you ticking over until you die. And remember that you are not only free to choose how you spend those hours, you _have_ to choose. You cannot avoid choosing. You either make conscious choices based on your needs and values, or ad hoc choices based on day to day random happenings. The following sections are all about making conscious choices.

## STILL NO CALLING?

I have said that the most fortunate people when it comes to choosing a career are those who are able to pursue a calling, and that those people will very likely never retire. However some people have what might be described as a frustrated calling. They have been aware of some kind of activity which they have felt a strong desire to carry out, but the practicalities of earning a living and raising a family have limited the opportunities for doing so. My cousin's wife is an example. Throughout her life she has always been involved in church activities, but only when the children became independent did she have the time to undertake the training to become a lay preacher, and she now ministers to three congregations in her locality. She is leading a very busy and very rewarding retirement. The decision of how to spend retirement time for such a person is as easy as a career choice for someone able to earn a living from their calling.

However, here comes some bad news. If you were not aware of a calling during your working life you will probably still not be aware of a calling now that you have retired. What is a person in such a situation supposed to do?

The fact of the matter is that retirement can be just as rewarding for such a person. The person with a calling in effect has the decision made for them. For the rest of us the responsibility of making a decision becomes even more of a personal responsibility, because it will involve a certain amount of introspection. Properly viewed, however, the process of deciding upon rewarding retirement activities can be an interesting journey of self discovery. Do not rule out the possibility of finding some activity which assumes the role of a calling in your life, but which has lain dormant under the responsibilities which working life placed on you. Work through the following sections.

## WHAT REALLY INTERESTS YOU?

We live in an interesting world. Just scan through a week's worth of wide ranging documentary television programs on channels such as Discovery World, History Channel, National Geographic, and so on. Then add in the speciality channels which focus on food, travel, and sport. Hundreds of programs on dozens of subjects, created by people skilled in the business of making stuff interesting. The art of documentary television has become so refined that the best documentary makers can make just about any subject grab the attention of the average viewer. And they have the budget to visit the most interesting locations anywhere on the planet and interview world authorities on the most specialized of topics. I am sure that most of us have found ourselves saying "Did you see that program on Greek history/Amazon Indians/genetic engineering last night? It was fascinating". But ask yourself whether you are really interested in the subject of the program. One sound piece of advice you have probably heard a number of times in your life is to judge people by their actions, not by their words. So now apply that test to yourself. If you really are interested in a subject then you will do something about it. Did you feel motivated after the program to get online and investigate the subject further? Or search your local library for books on the subject? Or make a mental note to look for organizations which you could join to further your involvement in the subject? You didn't? Then was the program _really_ so interesting for you, or was it little more than a way of killing some time? Television has allowed us to indulge a passive interest in many subjects. But for purposes of living our retirement in a fulfilling manner, we are looking for _activities_. So sit down now and draw up a list of your top five or ten interests. If they really are what interests you most then you should be prepared to actually do something about them. Just don't tell me that you can think of no such interests. I have never met anybody that boring, and I don't believe that such people exist.

When you are in a library or bookshop what books do you pick up and thumb through? What kind of articles do you read in the newspaper? What magazines do you subscribe to? What interests have you had previously in your life which you were not able to pursue because of lack of time or opportunity? Now is your chance to really pursue some of those interests and turn them into purposeful activities.

## PLAN NEVER TO BE BORED

Without doubt the thing which most potential retirees fear most is boredom. So plan never to be bored. As you develop your plan look at it critically and try to imagine yourself living it. Are there still a lot of blank spaces? Are too many hours allocated to one activity that you do not really believe will keep you interested, or that will require a lot of effort. If so, go back to your list of possible activities. Select another one which can be used as an alternative when enthusiasm for the main activity wains. As I have said, since I retired I have _never_ , and I mean never, been bored. I know myself. I can have periods of great enthusiasm for something followed by periods of finding it very difficult to summon the energy to get stuck in to the very same activity. So I do not just have one retirement activity. Right now I have three main retirement activities, namely woodwork, environmental activities, and writing this book. But I also have a default activity which I can always fall back on, namely reading. And I have a choice of reading material at hand at all times. As I am writing this, for example, lying round my study I have David Attenborough's book on "Life in the Undergrowth", Bob Dylan's autobiography "Chronicles: volume 1", and a Len Deighton novel, all of which have been read to some degree. Three books on the go at any one time is pretty typical, so if I am waiting for the glue to dry on a woodwork project, and the light is not good enough for photography, then I have a selection of interesting reading material ready and waiting. I truly believe that I could never be bored if I am within reach of a library. I also agree with whoever it was who said that those people who do not read are no better off than those who can't!

And anyway, life is also continually adding things to my "to do" list. Broken appliances need fixing, the children still find things they need me to do, friends drop in unannounced and so on. Retirement boring? Mine certainly isn't. And by the way, I can go for days on end without spending a minute in front of the television. I don't have the time for it because there is usually something more interesting to do.

Remember the calculation which we did to work out the number of hours which we had to fill in retirement. Using my own examples and being pretty conservative in our assumptions, we came up with around twenty thousand hours, and I said that it was possible to become highly skilled in almost any activity in half this time. This means that you can choose two main retirement activities and still become something of a master in both! There really is no excuse for boredom in retirement.

When all is said and done, go back and ask yourself how it is possible to be more bored after retirement than whilst you were working. In the work environment, your possible activities are always constrained by the needs of the moment – what the customer, the client, or the boss wants will limit your freedom. When you are retired this constraint is removed, so it should be impossible to be more bored in retirement than in the working environment. Everybody has interests. Your retirement plan must have in it ways to develop these interests by pursuing them actively, and to find new ones. The search for ways to overcome boredom should be stimulating enough in itself to ensure that boredom in retirement is just not possible.

People become bored in retirement simply because it takes a little bit of effort to decide for yourself what to do with your time. In the work environment the decision is largely made for you by the circumstances of the moment.

Planning a boredom-free and rewarding retirement is a balancing act between having enough activities to choose from to avoid getting bored, but at the same time having few enough activities to be able to enjoy the satisfaction of developing your capabilities in pursuing them.

## WHAT HAS STIRRED YOU IN YOUR LIFE?

Think back over your life. Has there been any time when you have done something which made you think "I wouldn't mind spending a bit more time doing that". Or maybe it was something which you read about or saw someone else doing. Later on in the book when I describe my own path to retirement I talk about how I decided on woodwork, and specifically box making, as a retirement activity. If you can remember such an occurrence then now might be the time to dig out that memory and fashion it into a retirement activity. That is what I did, and I have never regretted it.

Think back on your working life. What did you enjoy most about your work. In my own case I used to enjoy putting together proposals and presentations, and also finding out what motivated my fellow workers. Forming my thoughts about retirement into this book has been motivated by similar interests. The hundreds of hours which I have spent at my word processor have been challenging – writing a book is more effort than I thought it would be – but I am enjoying the process of structuring my ideas and committing them to print, and I am motivated by the thought that maybe my words will be of help to someone.

## PATHS TO SELF ACTUALIZATION

The previous sections are designed to get you thinking about what subject matter you might find interesting enough for you to build your retirement around. But one of the keys to a successful retirement is that it should involve activity. It is, after all, your activities which will fill the hours which are freed up when you stop working. It is worth considering what kind of activities are available to us when we decide that the purpose of our lives is to improve QoL. In any chosen field of interest there will be different kinds of activity which an individual will experience as rewarding depending on their unique personal values. An interest in nature, for instance, may lead one person into nature photography, another into a formal course of learning about ecology or conservation, and yet another into volunteering to assist in the running of a nearby bird sanctuary. It is worth thinking about the different kinds of activity which are available. You might be able to think of others, but I believe the following five cover most of the options.

###  Creativity

I think that everybody admires truly creative people, and has a degree of envy of those who have managed to make a living from being creative. Being a successful writer or artist certainly falls into the category of being a calling. Everybody is aware of the successful writer who had multiple rejections of their early works before getting their big break, but who just kept on writing anyway, because it was the only thing they ever really wanted to do. Sometimes these people suffered genuine financial hardship before eventually tasting success. The luckier ones earned an income at some or other job whilst working on their masterpiece late into the night at the end of the working day. The same applies to many a famous painter, actor, or other performing artist. Dogged determination is as much a talent as is artistic flair.

However, you do not have to be a professional artist in order to experience the satisfaction which creativity can bring. Everybody is creative to some degree, and opportunities to express creativity are everywhere. When we think of creativity we tend to think immediately of artists. And how many of us have not at some time or other said "I wish I could draw or paint". Well, retirement gives you the opportunity to spend time painting. Do not let a perceived lack of talent get in your way. Go and paint anyway. You may just discover that, despite not having talent, you can learn to produce something of which you can be proud. And you can guarantee that in a year's time your work will be better than it is now. That is called growth.

Opportunities for writing are greater now than at any time in the past. Writing a personal diary or creating a family scrap book has always been an option, as has corresponding with distant friends, and "letters to the editor" are an excellent way of expressing your thoughts and ideas. But today we also have social media, online forums and blog sites which exist purely as outlets for the thoughts of the general public. And the print media, in the form of magazines and journals, are forever on the lookout for new contributors.

But creativity is not limited to the visual or descriptive arts. Developing a well landscaped garden, renovating a home, or planning an entertainment for a local children's home can be just as creative as filling a canvas.

The rewards of creativity go far beyond merely producing things. From my personal experience, one of the reasons I enjoy photography so much is that it has increased my powers of observation. When I have a camera in my hand I look at scenes and objects differently, asking myself what part of the scene or what angle of view will make the best picture. This in turn has lead to a deeper appreciation of the beauty which is everywhere in nature. And since starting to do woodwork, I actively look for design inspiration in books, magazines and anywhere else I might find it. I have also found myself looking far more closely at the workmanship in, for example, pieces of antique furniture, marvelling at what those craftsmen were able to achieve without the assistance of modern power tools. In other words pursuing my interests in photography and woodwork has increased my awareness of my environment and all that is in it.

The rewards of just trying are as great as the rewards of producing. But these can also be great indeed. The earlier products of my woodworking "career" were almost always given away as presents to friends and family. In every case, as the maker of these pieces I could have pointed out blemishes or areas where I had made a mistake and had to do some scrambling to correct it. But they were all better than anything which the recipient had ever made, and almost always elicited a response along the lines of "that's beautiful – how on earth did you do it?". Such a response is worth more than money. And a gift made with your own hands, complete with small blemishes, is always more personal than a machined product bought from a shop.

So if you have ever had a thought along the lines of "it must be great to be able to paint/take great photographs/make my own furniture" then seriously consider turning this into a creative activity in your retirement.

### Service

In any community there are always things which need to be done. When one mentions the term "community service" it usually conjures up pictures of assisting the sick, elderly or homeless. Helping others is definitely a way of helping yourself when it comes to finding a fulfilling way to spend your time. For those so inclined, the feeling of being useful to fellow human beings who need help is priceless. But such activities need not be restricted to helping people in need. Animal welfare organisations are also typically under- resourced, and would welcome willing hands at no cost. And every community will have its own special needs.

In addition to giving a great sense of satisfaction, working with a voluntary organisation can also make up for the social network which is lost when one leaves a work organisation. It also has the advantage that such organisations tend to be centred in the community where the work is done. This assists in forming close social ties with one's volunteer co-workers, as well as giving one a greater sense of belonging in the community where one lives, and we have seen that "belonging" is one of the cornerstones of QoL.

For those who have professional skills in which they take pride, there will usually be opportunities to use those skills for community benefit rather than for income. I have a cousin who recently retired as a partner in a large auditing company who now does the books for a number of charitable organisations for no charge.

Not everybody has strong feelings of community responsibility. However everybody has some kind of interest or other. In my own case my interest in nature and the environment have lead me to spending time as a volunteer ranger at various regional wildlife parks. In all honesty I have to say that my primary reasons for doing this are selfish, in that it gets me out into the kind of environment which I love on a regular basis. But then I also experience a high degree of satisfaction when, for example, I am able to enhance a visitor's experience of the environment which the parks offer, or make some positive contribution to the running of the Parks organisation. My wife enjoys bird watching and sewing, and puts these interests to good use in helping with the maintenance of a local bird sanctuary, as well as running sewing workshops for disadvantaged members of the community, enabling them to make clothing for their children and other family members. In each case doing what we enjoy has benefits for the community in which we live.

I can confidently say that whatever your interest there will be some kind of opportunity to make a contribution. You love sport? Some school or youth club close to you will need coaches, referees, or administrators. The arts? Your local theatre or amateur dramatic group will need some kind of assistance. Culture? A museum or historical monument will welcome a willing pair of hands.

Another kind of service could be teaching, or at least talking about, whatever interests you have. I have had a lot of fun passing on the little bit I have learnt about insects from my self-taught insect photography. It really is true that you do not have to know very much about a subject to be able to make it interesting and informative to people who know nothing about it. In fact an enthusiastic amateur can be a more effective presenter than a technically superior professional.

When you retire after a lifetime of work you will have an ample supply of two things which will be in great demand – time and experience. Voluntary work, in all its many guises, will offer ample opportunity for you to fill your retirement hours, days and years with meaningful activities which will not only enhance the lives of those in your community, but will also offer you personal growth and satisfaction at least as great as that which you experienced in your working life, and may well reveal to you a sense of purpose which you never experienced in your employment years,

### Learning

Once again I say that we live in a fascinating world. I cannot believe that there is anybody who has never said "I wish I knew more about...". Well retirement gives you the opportunity to know more about anything you choose.

Earlier in the book, I complained that modern society has forgotten what true education is. I pointed out that the word "education" means a drawing out of what is inherent in the person being educated. Modern schooling tends to be much more focused on forcing in what society feels the individual needs in order to supply what society wants from the individual in terms of productivity and consumption. Well, retirement presents a golden opportunity to complete your real education. If somewhere deep within yourself is a desire to know a bit more about a topic, any topic, then now is your chance. If you are like me, the problem will be to select a topic to focus on, because there are just so many things which could capture my interest. Fulfilling the wish to know more can take many forms.

Opportunities to undertake a formal course of learning are greater today than at any time in the past. The internet has opened up access to accredited learning establishments across the world. If you are sitting in front of an online computer it does not matter that your tutor is not in the same country as you. And the nature and variety of educational courses available has also mushroomed. If you think of retirement as being a multi-decade project, which it is today, then there is nothing stopping you from embarking on a course of learning in a subject about which you currently have no formal knowledge with the objective of completing a doctorate. If you have the interest, you certainly have more than enough time. However, if you are not aiming quite as high, many creditable learning establishments, by which I mean recognised universities and colleges, offer introductory or abridged courses in just about every subject under the sun. If you happen to have a college close to you, you may find evening classes suited to your particular interest.

But learning does not necessarily mean enrolment at a school, college, or university. It could be a simple as joining a local club or society, if a suitable one is within reach. If not, becoming a member of an on-line community can also offer the chance of enhancing one's knowledge in a particular subject. To once again quote my own experience, I have developed an interest in marquetry as a means of decorating the wooden boxes which I make. I am not aware of any other marquetarians anywhere near where I live. But I have become a member of the British Marquetry Society and have received a great deal of help, advice, and encouragement from some of their expert members via email and training DVD's which they have made available to me from a distance of several thousand miles. Today's digital world knows no boundaries.

And if all of that fails, then just battling on by yourself has its own advantages. I seriously considered a couple of formal courses of study when I retired. But experience showed me that, for me, often formal study can blunt my interest in a subject. The material in a formal course, and the manner in which it is presented, does not always match the direction in which my interest takes me. And then there is the stress and rigid discipline of preparing for tests and examinations. There is certainly pleasure and a feeling of accomplishment in passing a course and going on to the next level, but maybe you feel, as I did, that you've had enough of that in your life. So I have pursued my own "course of study", which has involved reading fairly widely around the subjects that interest me.

And do not forget that whatever you do in retirement will probably involve some kind of learning. In my own case, my woodworking activities have meant that I have had to learn a number of techniques, and facts about the various woods, finishes, and tools which I have used. Formal book learning it is not, but sometimes I surprise myself with the amount of knowledge which I have picked up.

So in general, if the purpose of retirement is to grow, then there will be aspects of learning in whatever retirement activities you decide upon. If you stop learning, you die, and dying is definitely not the objective of retirement.

### Dreams can actualize too!

There are a few people who really do have dreams of a wild exciting retirement who go on and make them come true. We have all read about people who have retired and done truly extraordinary things. Some have built themselves a yacht and spent years sailing around the world. Others have embarked on adventures in wild parts of the world in pursuit of some lifelong dream. I equate these people with those who have been able to earn their living by following a calling. Just as motivational books and speakers love to quote examples of "successful" people who are clearly motivated by an innate drive to pursue their calling, so magazine articles about adventurous retirees like to give the impression that this is what retirement should really be like. If you have such a retirement dream then follow it. Don't die wondering what it would have been like.

You might think that I have been a bit too critical of what I have termed dreams and leisure activities. You might still have a sneaky suspicion that playing more golf and spending time travelling are actually what retirement is about for you. Well, you could just be right. But it could also be possible to add some value to your dream with a few small modifications to your thinking. Let me tell you a story – one which I particularly enjoy. It is about someone who did dream of playing more golf when he retired, and turned that dream into something really meaningful.

Towards the end of my working life I was discussing retirement with a colleague of mine, who told me about his father. It appears that all his life this gentleman had loved playing golf, despite the fact that he had neither the time nor the talent to develop much skill at it. He got onto the golf course about once every two weeks and never rose above about a twenty handicap. When he retired he moved to a small town and decided to make golf a central focus of his retired life. So the first thing he did was to put himself through a PGA coaching course. He then offered coaching classes, predominantly to youngsters and others who could not afford the services of the normal club professional. This not only brought him in enough money to pay for his playing, but also got him much more involved in different ways with the game he loved, which doubtless also satisfied many of his social needs. And before too long his handicap came down to ten without too much effort on his behalf. A win-win situation if ever I heard of one.

So there is a lesson to be learned here. Think about you retirement dreams, and see how you can add value to them. How about combining your desire for travel with writing about your experiences. I did just that in a small way once a few years ago by writing an article for a local travel magazine about a holiday my wife and I took in a wetland nature reserve. It actually got published, despite the fact that the publisher was a bit rude about the quality of the photographs I submitted with the article. What they paid me did not cover the cost of the holiday, but it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to see my own work in glossy print. If your dream is big enough you could even write a book about it.

So whatever your retirement dreams, go ahead and live them, but also think hard about how you can add value to them, both for yourself and for others.

### Spiritual Growth

I am very surprised to find myself writing this. I have not led a religious life, and have never considered myself a particularly spiritual person. But I have become increasingly aware throughout the years of my retirement to date that there is a definite spiritual aspect to what I believe about retirement, and that this aspect would probably reward a bit more focus on my part.

For those people who have been involved in formal religious activity throughout their lives retirement offers an opportunity to deepen their involvement and understanding. This can be done through formal study, or by participation in informal study groups which most religious organizations facilitate. It can also involve more time spent in individual meditation or reading of religious texts. My cousin's wife whom I mentioned earlier is quite clearly an example of someone who has made religious practice a focal point of her retirement.

But to those people who have lead a more secular life I can speak of my own experience. Retirement gives one the opportunity to focus more intensely on activities which are aligned with one's values and beliefs, whether these have a religious grounding or not. I have found that focusing more attention on the beauty and complexity of the natural world has sparked in me a profound sense of the wonder of it all. I experience something similar when I work with the natural medium of wood, creating objects of beauty from a few sticks and pieces of veneer. In general I can say that having the time and energy to focus on activities which I have chosen because I feel that they are of value to me has given me a sense of reverence for our world and the life which it nurtures. Zen teachers talk about the value of focusing on what we are doing. They speak of the importance of _awareness_. I consciously take the time now and then to stand back from whatever I am doing and to contemplate just how marvellous is this life. Whatever you choose as your retirement activities, and whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs I recommend that you practice developing your sense of wonder. Doing so has added immeasurably to the success of my own retirement.

## START MAKING SOME CHOICES

By now you should have at least come up with some ideas of what you might like to do with your retirement. Write them down in a list, and then set about choosing two or three which you think would make the best retirement activities for you.

What makes a good retirement activity? Remember that in your working life your time was roughly divided between work activities and leisure activities. In retirement your time will be divided between retirement activities and leisure activities. What you have already filled in on your timesheets are your leisure activities. What remains to be filled in are activities which will add value to your retirement hours by giving them purpose. That purpose is to improve the quality of your life. If you think in terms of the Toronto University framework, then your retirement activities will allow you to "become" something more than you are now – more knowledgeable, more skilful, more useful to the community and so on. If you think in terms of self actualization theory, then your retirement activities will give you the opportunity to explore your potential in a direction of your own choosing and aligned with your own beliefs and values. These are really two ways of saying the same thing.

There are two potential difficulties which you might face in doing this. You will either have too few or too many ideas for possible retirement activities. If you cannot think of any activity which really grabs you enough to commit several hours a week to it, then I suggest that you go back to the calculation you did for the number of hours which you will have to fill in your retirement. If your calculation is anything like mine, then you have around twenty thousand hours free over a fifteen year period. You will be doing _something_ in this time. If you do not make a conscious decision to use the hours available to you to improve your quality of life, then the moment of your retirement will be the high point of your life, and the years of retirement will be a slow decline. The opportunity provided by retirement will have been wasted. So my advice is think, and think again. There must be something in your life worth investing at least some of your twenty thousand hours in. Make a choice and make it work.

If, on the other hand, you have too many possibilities and are finding it difficult to select from among them, then you a far more pleasant problem, but a problem none the less. Selecting two or three activities from among the possibilities is exactly the same as choosing which ones to discard, and there is always the fear of discarding something which could otherwise have been the calling which your life has lacked up until now. But choose anyway, and give your choice your best shot. Choosing one activity over another does not mean that you spend no time at all on the one you discard. There is nothing stopping you from keeping up to date in developments in all areas which interest you, and it is so easy to do this age of information. But keep at least one activity as being the one in which you intend to develop your potential as far as you can.

You do not have to be a hero. Talking of philosophy and psychological theories can make the whole process sound rather grand. The only person you have to impress is yourself. There are no wrong answers. In particular never, ever, reject an idea because it sounds silly or because you are afraid that other people might not think it much of a way to spend a retirement. For the first time in your life you have a completely free hand. Don't waste the opportunity.

The key thing is to settle on something, put it into your time sheets, and see how it looks. Take your time. Remember that you if have not given much serious thought to your retirement you might need a little practice, so consider other options. Obviously the sooner you start the process the more time you have to chew over your options. But also remember that the sooner you make a decision and make a start on your retirement activities, the easier the transition from work to retirement will be.

Once you have reached a decision you will be in a position to embark on your retirement activities. But before we get there the next few sections cover some additional thoughts for you to consider whilst crafting your plan.

## RISK AND REWARD

Do you remember starting your first job? I do. It was in the early days of computers, and I had embarked on a career with a company which made and marketed computers despite the fact that I did not actually know what a computer was. Yes, it was a risk, but I can still remember the feeling of excitement as I met my fellows on the graduate intake program of that large multi-national corporation. I even remember one of our group, a Scotsman named Andy, expressing his doubts about the career direction he was embarking on on the very first day of our orientation course. But we were all fired up with the prospect of doing something completely different. There is no reason why we cannot reproduce that kind of excitement when we embark on our retired life. As I said earlier, I prefer to think of the moment when we retire as starting a new life rather than stopping working life. Starting something is more exciting than stopping something.

As we get older we develop a fear of risk. When I was a youngster starting my first job the thought was there "suppose I don't like my work?". Well then I would try something else. I knew that I had to do something, so I would search until I found something which would suit my needs. The risk in deciding what you are going to do in retirement is exactly the same. You will definitely be doing something in those twenty thousand hours that we calculated you have available to you, so make the best decision you can. You might ask what if I find my retirement unsatisfying even though I have planned my retirement activities as carefully as I can? Same answer as when you started work- try something else. (But see the section below on taking responsibility for your decisions before changing course). If your first choice was wrong, then you have found out something about yourself, and that is priceless.

I think that the key message here is not to be frightened to strike off in some completely new direction. Become a beginner at something. Remember that we are talking about a journey which could quite easily last another two decades. That is a long time, so if we make a "wrong" decision at the outset, we have plenty of time to change course again. And if we make a "right" choice, then we have plenty of time to follow that path along two decades of fulfilment. Don't delay, JUST DO IT, as a well known sportswear company tells us.

There is actually another risk which you may be taking. You may just find out what you _should_ have been doing all your life. In other words you may find a calling. There is so much pressure on us when we are starting out in our careers to get a "good" job that we make conventional decisions rather than looking for something which would mean more to us than merely earning an income. So we might have spent our working lives in a commercial environment as, say, an accountant, when we were really cut out to be in some kind of caring environment. When we retire, we can respond to that nagging feeling that maybe there is something more fulfilling to us, and can at last follow that calling. I call this a risk because there may just be a feeling that we missed an opportunity earlier in life – that there _was_ a calling, but that we missed it. However, it really is never too late. In the modern world we really do have plenty of time left to us after we retire, so get on and make the most of it.

## BE ECCENTRIC

This heading might sound odd, but it is, in my opinion, absolutely essential that when you plan your retirement activities, you are able to break loose from the ties of convention. You need to free up your mind to be able to consider any and all options. Even if you end up doing something quite conventional, you should at least think like an eccentric. What do I mean by this.

Simply put, an eccentric is someone who acts in what the majority of people would consider an odd manner. The word itself comes from Greek words which mean "away from the centre" – off the wall might be a modern translation. The same could be said of someone who is mentally disturbed, but there is an important difference. Mental patients do not _choose_ to act the way they do, but rather do so out of some kind of compulsion brought about by neurotic or psychotic influences. The eccentric, on the other hand, has chosen to act as they do because of an interest or fascination in whatever it is that they are doing. According to Wikipedia, eccentricity is frequently associated with intellectual giftedness or creativity, and the eccentric individual's behaviour is seen as the outward expression of his or her unique intelligence or creative impulse. They are also found to be happier and less stressed than "normal" people, probably because they are expressing a genuine interest which comes from their innermost selves.

The reaction of some friends and acquaintances to the kind of activities which I have adopted as being central to my retirement is indicative that some of them view me as slightly eccentric. If I tell them that I spend a fair proportion of my time making wooden boxes and studying and photographing insects you can see them thinking "that's a bit odd, isn't it". That reaction worries me not in the slightest. I have discovered that, to my way of thinking at least, wooden boxes are a vehicle for absolutely unlimited creativity whilst working with a truly wonderful medium, natural wood. And insects, in their myriad forms, are far more interesting and accessible than any of the large mammals, or even the beautiful array of birds with which nature has blessed this world. Let them think what they want – I'm happy!

So whatever you do, do not allow convention to constrain your thinking when you are planning your retirement activities, and never let the opinions of others sway you. At your age you have earned the right to be a bit odd, and if other people do not understand, that should just make you feel superior, because you have insights into your chosen activities which are beyond the comprehension of those who just smile and shake their heads when you tell them what you are up to.

## WHERE TO LIVE vs. WHAT TO DO

This is a bit of a diversion, but I feel I have to fit it in somewhere. I am sure that you will have come across someone who, when asked what they are going to do when they retire will answer that they are planning to buy a cottage at the coast or in a small country town. Firstly, notice that this does not answer the question. It says where they are going to live, not what they are going to do. However, the success of a retirement will depend on the activities which fill the retirement days and years. In other words, the "where to live" decision should normally follow the "what to do" decision. But if you really have fallen in love with a particular location to such an extent that retiring there is a foregone conclusion, then you still have to answer the question about how you are going to spend your time, and you will then have to choose your activities from those which are available at the chosen location.

I had an aunt who made a mistake along these lines. My family on my mother's side comes from Cornwall, and it had always been my aunt's dream to move to one of the beautiful little coastal villages with which that part of the world is blessed. She had assumed that this would be a stimulus for the extended family to visit on a regular basis. Not having children of her own, this was an important part of what she wanted in her retirement. In the first year of her retirement, all was well, and throughout that first summer a succession of nephews and nieces came to spend some time with her. But for all of Britain's modern road and rail infrastructure, Cornwall is still pretty remote. It was not practical for relatives still leading working lives to just pop in for a weekend. The move to the retirement destination of her dreams turned out to be something of a disappointment for her.

If she had approached her retirement plan from the other perspective – what do I want to do in retirement – then the outcome could have been different. If she had said "one of the main activities I want to pursue in my retirement is to have regular contact with my extended family", then one of two things would have happened. She might still have moved to where she finally ended up – it really is a beautiful part of the world – but she would have had more realistic expectations about her ongoing contact with the family. Or she may have moved somewhere much closer to where the majority of the family members lived.

So the message is clear. Think carefully about where you plan to live in your retirement. Make sure that it is practical in terms of how you plan to spend your time. Family contact is particular relevant here. As you get older, then the desire and the capability to travel in order to be with your loved ones will decrease. And your children will be busy making their careers and developing their own families. It is not fair on them to expect them to regularly disrupt their lives in order to do their family duty.

## PLAN THE SOCIAL SIDE

This really follows on from the previous section. I have said that one of the things you lose when you retire is a lot of the social interaction which the work place inevitably supplies. You need to look at your time plan in the light of replacing the social contacts which have been lost.

Once again, much of the social side of retirement planning will follow on from the activity plan. Certainly many social contacts will remain unchanged – family ties and long term friendships will remain in place. But you _will_ lose some when you retire, and it is worth giving thought to how you will replace these, or indeed, whether they need replacing. It is pretty safe to say that absolutely any activity which you have planned can be used as a basis for social contact. One of the great opportunities offered by retirement is to replace the social ties of the workplace, which come about merely by people being in the same work environment, with contacts which are based on your own freely chosen interests. In my own case, my involvement with conservation includes membership of the local Parks Board's Honorary Officers Association, which brings me into regular contact with like minded souls on both a formal and ad hoc basis. Likewise, my woodworking activities have lead to regular Sunday morning sessions with a friend where we swap ideas about our current plans and projects. Even my regular photographic excursions into the local botanic gardens sometimes involve chatting with other visitors whom I see there regularly.

So look again at your weekly timesheet. How much social contact does it contain, and how do you feel about it? There can be no rules about this. Where one person will welcome more time to themselves after spending a lifetime in a busy office environment, another will miss the stimulus of having plenty of people around. Only you can decide what is right for your retirement.

## DON'T FORGET THE PARTNER

Most people work apart from their life's partner. Making the change from kissing the spouse goodbye in the morning and saying hello again twelve hours later to potentially living in each other's pockets is just another aspect of the change which retirement brings about. Deciding how many of your retirement activities will be shared with your partner and how many will be either solitary, or will take place in the company of third parties will be one of the factors which shape your retirement planning. I can think of a number of instances where the main motivation for adopting a particular activity was not that either partner had been dreaming of doing that particular activity in retirement, but that it was something which the couple could enjoyably do together. This is a very valid reason for adopting an activity. If your shared values give a priority to joint activities, then experiment together. An ex-colleague of mine, who to the best of my knowledge had taken part in absolutely no sporting activity since his school days, told me that soon after retiring some time ago he and his wife took up bowls just because it was something they could do together. The idea was a huge success, as they both thoroughly enjoyed the game, as well as the very social nature of the club which they joined.

In general, all of the types of retirement activity which have been outlined in this book can be carried out on an individual or shared basis. In any event, whatever the retirement plan consists of, it must enhance the shared QoL of the partnership. Whether this is best accomplished by each partner developing their own retirement plan, having a shared vision, or something in between is a matter of preference. Just, whatever you do, don't ignore the partner, and don't assume that your plan will meet with automatic approval of your life's partner, no matter how well you think you know him or her.

## BUILD IN THE HEALTH

I have said from the outset that this book will not address the "science" aspects of retirement, namely financial and physical wellbeing. But many of the activities which are available to retirees have spin-offs in terms of improved physical or mental health.

Attitudes to health vary widely. On the one hand you meet people who seem to take a defiant pride in doing everything they possibly can to ruin the incredible machine called a body with which they have been blessed. Determinedly avoiding any form of exercise, eating excessive fat-laden meals, smoking, drinking and keeping irregular hours, they seem to be on a mission to bring life to the earliest possible end short of actually committing violent suicide. At the opposite end of the spectrum one finds the health nut. Out of bed before dawn to attend the pilates class, munching regular snacks of roots, fruits and nuts washed down with designer water, and spending weekends in bracing open-air activities.

Whatever your own attitude to your personal health, it is worth considering it as an aspect of your retirement planning. I consider myself very fortunate to have always enjoyed a wide variety of physical activities. Maybe because of this, I believe that there is some kind of exercise for everyone. So when considering possible retirement activities be sure to consider those which include some kind of health benefit.

Health and ageing are related entities. Our health requirements change as our physical powers inevitably decline. So selection of retirement location should consider long term requirements. Access to health care facilities appropriate for our older bodies should be available where we decide to spend our retirement years.

Consideration of health matters, of course, should include mental health – the healthy mind in a healthy body. However, I believe that if you fill your retirement with meaningful activities, which is the basis of this book, then there is probably no need to specifically worry about mental health in your senior years. However, it is probably worth mentioning that it is easy to fall into habits which are injurious to mental well-being. First among these has to be television, but I have more to say about this later.

## THINK POTENTIAL

There is an automatic tendency to think of retirement in terms of winding down, of a time of some kind of decline. There is absolutely no reason why this should be the case. The reason I can say this with such conviction is that all of us will have reached retirement age without ever having achieved our full potential in almost any activity which you care to name. Let me take the simple example of lifting a weight.

Let us suppose that you have been a typical regular gym-goer all your adult life, without having been a dedicated body-builder. Let us also suppose that the heaviest weight you ever managed to bench-press was eighty kilograms. I use this example because it translates into nice simple numbers which are easy to compare. When you were, say, thirty years old, you probably had the potential to bench press 120Kgs, but you never actually did more than your eighty, because you never trained to reach your full potential in this particular endeavour. Now that you have reached retirement age, you could probably, with focused training, press 100Kgs. In this particular example, the ageing process has indeed reduced your potential, but your current potential is still greater than what you achieved throughout your life. You could still produce the best performance of your life by working to fulfil the potential which you still have.

What applies to the physical effort of lifting weights also applies to just about any other activity you may care to consider. When you were a young student you had the potential to go on to achieve a doctorate, but for many reasons you stopped studying as soon as you obtained your first degree. Even if learning is more effort now than it was when you were twenty years old, you _still_ have the potential to earn that doctorate in any subject of your choosing. Even if you have never lifted a paint brush, you _still_ have some potential as an artist. If you have done nothing more charitable than dropping a few coins into the collection bowl on a Sunday morning, you _still_ have the potential to make a difference in this world through charitable work. The list of potentialities is endless.

In some activities, potential actually increases with age. Many aspects of charitable work, for example, involve counselling those less fortunate than ourselves, an activity where life experience is invaluable.

The general message is this – each and every one of us will reach retirement age with unfulfilled potential in a whole variety of different areas. Throughout our working lives we are encouraged to fulfil our potential in the pursuit of career development. There is a stigma attached to retirement that it is somehow an end to productive life and the beginning of some kind of decline. But the opportunity which retirement offers is the ability to freely choose the direction or directions in which we will fulfil our potential. No matter how successful we have been in our careers, every one of us will have more unfulfilled than fulfilled potential. So when you choose the activities which will form the basis of your retirement plan, think what possible potential you have in these activities. And do not be afraid to dream a little. If you decide on art classes, then think of maybe one day selling your work, or having an exhibition at your local library or community hall. Such thinking will keep you going long after the art classes have come to an end.

Self actualization is all about fulfilling potential. You have more potential in more different fields of activity than you will ever be able to fulfil in one lifetime. Choose a couple of activities because they appeal to the person you are, form a realistic opinion of your potential in those activities, and work towards realizing that potential. That is the path to success in retirement.

## THINK RETIREMENT SUCCESS

Success is making the most of the situation which you find yourself in. You have retired, and you can afford a certain level of expenditure. If you find yourself getting bored or frustrated with your retirement lifestyle, there is no point in saying to yourself that you should be living the life of luxury on some exotic island or travelling the world if your retirement budget does not allow it. If you really believe that you cannot improve your QoL without such indulgences, then you should not have retired in the first place, and should consider going back to some kind of paid activity.

However, I firmly believe that, given that you have enough income and health to support a reasonable standard of living, there will always be options for improving your QoL which do not require excessive expenditure. Successful retirement involves discovering these activities for yourself, and making them work for you. Correctly viewed, retirement is an exciting process of self discovery and personal growth, neither of which require great financial expenditure.

Career success can have a defined goal, an end point to aim for. You may have set your sights on becoming the chief executive of the organization which you work for, and have actually attained that position. Career goal fulfilled. Retirement may also have well defined goals, but it is never complete. No matter what goals you attain in your retirement, there will still be potential to improve your QoL further. Success in retirement truly is a journey rather than a destination. And no life can be considered a success if the pursuit of success stops when you retire. A successful life requires a successful career followed by a successful retirement.

*******

# 8.LIVE YOUR PLAN

## BE PREPARED FOR THE CHANGE

No matter how diligently you have planned and prepared for your retirement, it will be a very big change, and change is something which human beings, particularly those who are getting on in years, do not handle very well.

By the time I retired I had spent quite a bit of time preparing for the event, and was looking forward to it. I really did not expect to have any problems changing from working to retired life, and in particular was looking forward to having more time for reading. But for some time after I retired I found it quite difficult to just sit and read. No matter how engrossing the book I was reading I would find myself getting restless after about half an hour. I would get a feeling that I should be "doing something", and had to remind myself that I was not only doing something, but that the something I was doing was an important part of my retirement plan. For forty years reading was something which I had fitted in to vacations and gaps in my busy life, and it felt strange to be able to sit with a book with a clear conscience. A feeling of disorientation would assail me at other times as well – getting up in the morning with no sense of urgency, for example, or having a relaxed lunch at home instead of a quick sandwich at my desk. It took me about six months to adjust to the new routine.

But go back and look at the Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale again. A body of research has found that retirement is a significantly stressful life event. Overall my transition from worker to retiree was relatively smooth because I was looking forward to it and had prepared myself. How will it affect you? You will not know for sure until you come to it. Don't be distressed if it comes as more of a shock than you thought it would. The best way to manage the adjustment is to have a plan, and focus on it. Before you know it you will be up and running as a happy, successful retiree.

## TAKE RESPONSIBILITY

Once you have drawn up a retirement plan, it is your own responsibility to make it work for you. If that makes living a successful retirement sound like hard work, then maybe that is not completely inaccurate. Success in your career was hard work, and that was when you had clear guidelines and a corporate structure to guide you. In retirement you have to find your own way. Just as in your career, success in retirement will not come automatically. It will require thought, preparation, planning, and a certain amount of effort. However that effort should totally enjoyable, because it is effort invested in activities entirely of your own choosing. There will also be a certain amount of trial and error, because you are heading into uncharted waters. So be prepared to review your level of retirement satisfaction from time to time. You will need to strike a balance between being flexible enough to make changes when necessary, and sticking to your decisions and seeing them through. If you decided on a certain course of action give it a fair chance of succeeding before making a change. When your motivation flags a bit, then ask yourself the question "what better use can I make of my time right now than investing it in my chosen retirement activities?". If you consistently come up with the same answer then maybe it is time to review your retirement plan.

## FIND YOUR DRIVER

Theoretically motivation in carrying out retirement activities should present no problem, because such activities are by definition what you most want to do – that is why you selected them in the first place. Setting yourself objectives in such activities should in itself be a strong motivator.

However, a bit of extra motivation will never do any harm, and this is where self-knowledge is invaluable. Any single activity can be undertaken in a number of different ways. Some people just love to turn any activity into a competition. Others prefer a more cooperative approach, working together with a group of like minded people to achieve some result. Still others get the greatest satisfaction from passing on their knowledge and skills to others. So if you have chosen photography as a retirement activity, for example, you may be continuously scanning magazines for competitions to enter, joining in on club photo shoots, or running workshops for beginners. Or maybe just taking your camera on quiet expeditions all by yourself. All these activities fall under the general heading of photography, but will probably appeal to different personality types.

Another possible source of motivation for anyone can be the family. Worrying about the wellbeing of one's parents as they get older is a universal phenomenon. And from the parents' point of view, most of the people with whom I have discussed the issue say that they are determined not to be a drag on their children in later life. I have talked about the responsibility we have to ourselves to make the most of our retirement opportunities, but it could also be argued that we have the same responsibility to our families. If we are leading busy, constructive, healthy lives then far from being a burden, we can be an inspiration to the generations which follow us.

## A RETIREMENT INCOME?

Another source of motivation for retirement activities can be to use them as a source of income.

Now I am aware that throughout this book I might well be creating the impression that I am in some way against doing things for money, and the previous sentence could be seen as self contradiction. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am very much a capitalist. So at the risk of repeating myself let me say again that retirement activities should be undertaken for their own sake and for no other reason. But there are valid reasons for also using them as a source of income.

Firstly, and staying with the subject of motivation, making a commitment to deliver a product or service of a particular quality at a particular time can be a very strong motivating factor. I have been approached by friends who have asked me to make a box as a birthday gift for a friend or family member, and I have been pleased to oblige. My usual charge is a book selected from my reading list. But having made a commitment to someone else with a definite deadline attached is definitely a motivating factor.

Secondly, some activities may be just too expensive to carry out without charging. Covering costs, in this case, makes a lot of sense. Once again, to give an illustration from my own experience, I do indeed sell some of the items which I make with my woodworking activities. This, admittedly small, income I have used for purchasing materials (wood is expensive) and equipment (woodworking tools are _very_ expensive!). My income does not currently cover my costs, but every little helps.

Thirdly, it is a fact that products or services which a given away at no cost tend not to be appreciated and as a result become abused. Charging for any products or services at least keeps your "customers" honest, and also makes sure that only people who have a genuine requirement for your services take advantage of them.

And anyway, whatever it is that you are offering, your time, skills, or products, do have a value, even if you would gladly give them freely, so indeed why not charge?

But there is a caveat here. One of the big advantages of being retired is the freedom which you can experience from pressure and deadlines, and the freedom to spend your time as you wish. Charging for something lets customers feel that they have a right to make demands. As long as these demands are in line with your own wants, then all well and good. But as soon as your customer starts setting deadlines and requests which are in conflict with your own growth and freedom priorities, then it is time to cry "enough", and make alternative arrangements.

## YOU REALLY LOVE YOUR WORK?

I have said that if you really do love your work, then don't retire. There are, however, alternatives to keeping on in employment, even if you genuinely do love what you do. Let's consider a few:

→Keep on doing it, but for free! Many charitable organizations require professional services, and would be only too pleased to accept an offer of help at no cost. I have already mentioned my cousin who is a retired auditor and who carries out auditing functions for various charity trusts and church organizations. This kind of activity combines the best of all worlds by maintaining a sense of professional identity whilst giving greater freedom than does the professional life.

→Don't do – teach. Find an avenue which allows you to pass on your knowledge and experience to younger or less privileged people. Become a coach for such people. Once again, you may choose to charge for such activities or do them for nothing. Just remember the warnings – charging can lead to commitments which you do not want, whilst giving for free can lead to abuse and undervaluing of your services.

→Extending the teaching idea, what about moving into a formal academic or research environment.

→Share your knowledge and experience by writing about your field of expertise, either in an instructive or entertaining way.

→At least, if you do continue in your professional field, focus on the aspects which you find most interesting. When working as a paid employee you always have limited choice of activity. When you have retired at least exercise some of the freedom of choice at your disposal

→Undertake further study in some aspect of your profession.

→The options are plentiful!

So when if you find yourself in a situation of working for money after you have retired be sure to ask yourself "is this really what I want to be doing?". Once again, the question really is, "would I do this for its own sake if I was not being paid to do it?".

## ACHIEVEMENTS GREAT AND SMALL

The stories which we read about people who are considered to have retired successfully tend to be about those people who have had big dreams and gone on to live those dreams when they retire. They are the people sailing round the world, cycling through Alaska, learning to fly, and such like. When discussing different paths to self actualization I said that making big plans for your retirement and making them come true is definitely one way of living a successful retirement. But if reading about such apparently high achievers makes you feel inferior, don't despair.

The risk in having a small number of big plans is the risk of having all your eggs in one basket. Not in itself a bad thing, but definitely something to be aware of. If you do not manage to carry out your plan, or if you do carry it out but find it was not quite as satisfying as you thought it would be, then the disappointment is correspondingly greater.

So never fail to give yourself credit for the little achievements, the item of knowledge gained, the skill acquired, the charitable act, which we are capable of accomplishing every day. In fact if you agree with my view that a successful retirement depends more on where we spend the majority of our retired time, then recognising these little achievements in ourselves could possibly contribute more to a feeling of competence and accomplishment than the one-off big success story. Let me give an example, once again, from my own development as a woodworker.

As I get better at my craft, I have somewhere in my subconscious a concept of "the perfect wooden box". I don't know what it looks like, and I somehow doubt that I will ever make it, but I do know that I am getting closer to it. Along the way I have had to learn many things, some of them have been useful in my quest, and some I have put aside, but not forgotten, as probably not taking me in the direction I want to go. I have experimented with different ways of preparing the wood, different designs, different joints, different decoration, and different finishes. In this process I experience success and failure. My home made comb joint jig worked like magic first time. My experiments with hot hide glue were in every respect a mess. But hardly a week passes which I cannot look back on and give myself credit for being a bit more knowledgeable or a bit more skilful than I was, and regularly spending a few minutes giving myself credit for that definitely contributes to my QoL.

So by all means aim for the big achievement, but don't forget the little achievements which you accomplish every day.

## ACT AS IF

But what if, despite your best efforts, you cannot raise the motivation to carry out your chosen retirement activity? It is a situation which happens to everybody, even the most motivated.

First of all this is NOT a good time to question your choice of activity. Everybody experiences periods of reduced motivation, so chances are that given a bit of time you will be back to normal. It is for times like these that I recommend that you have one or two alternative or backup activities that you can pick up at any time. If, however, the feeling persists, the best advice I have come across is in Roberto Assagioli's book "The Act of Will – a guide to self actualization and self-realization". Assagioli points out that although it is very difficult to change one's mood directly, it is much easier to change one's behaviour. If you just start to "act as if" you are motivated, then very often the motivation will follow. I am sure that almost everyone has experienced this with regard to "feeling tired". Frequently at the end of a day's work we complain of feeling tired, but if we actually start to tackle some interesting activity rather than merely flopping down in front of the television the tiredness vanishes. The feeling of tiredness was nothing more than inertia. When "Acting as if" leads to the accomplishment of one of the little achievements which I described in the previous section, as it frequently can, then renewed enthusiasm is guaranteed.

I really do like the Nike sportswear motto of "just do it" – it is such a simple piece of advice, but so practical.

## SIMPLIFY

We all know that making life simpler makes sense, but how many of us do anything about it? Well retirement is the ideal time to take stock of what we have, what we do, and how we do it, and to set about cutting out the fat. And focusing on QoL is probably the best way to do it.

Start with the things and stuff that you possess. If you are at all like me you will have collected quite a lot of both by the time you reach retirement age. Go through each room, each outbuilding, and each cupboard and consider the contents. Do they, or will they conceivably at some future date, contribute positively to your QoL? What I have realised in doing this is that books which I am never going to read again add nothing to my QoL. Appliances which do not work or which I have no use for add nothing to my QoL. Old clothes which I am never going to wear add nothing to my QoL. And I also realised that a lot of these things can add to the QoL of children who have just left home or to people in need. As a result we now have a lot of spare cupboard and shelf space in the house and outbuildings, and we stand more chance of finding things when we need them.

Now that you are no longer commuting, does the second car which you clean, insure, and maintain at great expense add to your QoL? After all, the only thing which a car adds to QoL is mobility, and public transport also does that with possibly less cost and less hassle. And a small car does it as well for two people as a big one. Does maintaining your large garden add to your QoL? If not then consider downscaling, outsourcing to a garden service, or covering flower beds with low maintenance ground covers. Do a second television in the kitchen and a third in the bedroom add to your QoL, or just increase the time you waste watching programs which you do not really enjoy? And does spending every Saturday morning in a shopping mall with a break for coffee and doughnuts really add to your QoL, or has it just become a ritual which keeps you from more interesting and rewarding use of you time.

Focusing on quality of life is in itself a simplifying principle, one which can lead to simplification in many other areas of your life.

## ACCEPT AGEING – DO NOT BOW TO IT

The oldest man to have climbed Everest was seventy six years old. The oldest woman was seventy three. The Boston Marathon has special qualifying criteria for entrants over eighty. The oldest person awarded a doctorate degree in Britain was a retired vicar aged ninety three. Wherever you look you will find evidence that aging is not what it used to be. This change in outlook has happened in my lifetime. When I left university and started playing club hockey in London back in the sixties, conventional wisdom had it that you could play hockey up to the age of about thirty, maybe thirty five, and then you had to look for other sporting activities such as golf or bowls. In the club I played for was one gentleman by the name of Dougie Stocks who was considered to be quite eccentric because he was still playing enthusiastically at the age of fifty. Contrast that with the situation today. I recently played in the Hockey Grand Masters World Cup tournament. This is a tournament exclusively for players over the age of sixty with divisions for over sixty five and over seventy. There were some four hundred players from all over the world. It is a wonderful blend of international competitiveness and friendly camaraderie. The oldest player was a sprightly fellow representing Germany who was seventy nine years old. And nobody thought he was eccentric to still be playing hockey.

However, this does not change the one inescapable fact of life – you are going to be older in your retired life than you were on your youth or adulthood. And being older has certain unavoidable consequences. Physical speed and strength decline. Eyesight blurs. Remembering facts and faces requires more concentration and effort. Energy levels (or should I say _potential_ energy levels) decline. Whatever plans you make for your retirement have to allow for these realities. But much of this allowance concerns not so much what you set out to achieve, but how you set about achieving it.

The key here is to be positive but realistic. Be realistic in the kind of activities which you select, and be realistic about any goals you set for yourself. Adjust timeframes according to your current capabilities, not to how you remember yourself half a lifetime ago. It takes longer to learn something, longer to get fit, longer to recover from injury or exertion than it did when you were younger. But against that you have more time available to you than you have ever had before. Just use it wisely.

## HELP OTHERS TO RETIRE

If you are somewhere close to retirement then there is a very good chance that a number of your friends and acquaintances are at a similar time of life. Speak to them. Discuss their ideas, hopes and fears for their retirements. If your experience is similar to mine you will find quite a bit of fear uncertainty and doubt. As attitudes to aging have changed so has the number of organizations which specifically address the needs of senior citizens grown. But there is always room for more. If you have thought about your retirement and come up with a plan according to the ideas in this book then you will have a head start on most of your friends. Consider taking a leadership role and starting an activity group for retirees within your community.

## THE REAL ART OF RETIRING SUCCESSFULLY

In this book I have used a lot of words on what could loosely be described as theory. I believe that this important because people need to understand exactly why something as simple as retiring should turn out to be so problematic and stressful for so many people. I also believe that giving serious thought to creating some kind of plan is an important first step to retirement success. But the real art of successful retirement lies in _action._ Over two thousand years ago, Greek philosopher Aristotle said that the quality of a life is determined by its activities. Nothing has changed. Throughout our working lives we may have seen ourselves as being active because we were always busy. But for much of the time what we did was what we had to do because of the dictates of the market or the needs of our employer. Cut loose from that controlled environment there is a danger of letting life drift. If you do not fill a significant proportion of those twenty thousand hours which are available to you with meaningful activity, then the opportunity of retirement will be lost to you. I believe that would be a tragedy.

But it is a definitely avoidable tragedy. No matter how imperfect or vague your retirement plan seems to you, carry it out. Do something with the purpose in mind of improving the quality of your life, not just filling in time and being busy for busyness' sake. If you keep at it, then your retirement will be successful.

*******

# 9.TRAPS, ERRORS, AND THINGS NOT TO DO

## NONE OF THE ABOVE

I guess that the easiest way to start off this section is to say that what you should not do is the opposite of all the above. Above all, don't just do nothing. In other words, don't let your retirement activities happen by default. Do not assume that retirement success will happen automatically. I think that the examples of successful people who are experiencing difficulties with retirement clearly show that you cannot make such an assumption.

Similarly, do not procrastinate. The best time to start thinking about your retirement would really be the day that you start working. Having such a long term view could well influence decisions which you make long before you actually reach retirement age. More realistically, you should start thinking seriously about retirement about five years before you actually stop work. In fact you should do more than just think about retirement. You should start doing some actual preparation. If you are considering relocating, then start to investigate property availability and prices in the area you plan to move to. If you have a particular retirement activity in mind, then start it – start acquiring materials, equipment and skills, look for relevant clubs or societies, find out as much as you can. Retirement time is too valuable to waste on such preparatory activities. Don't delay, get started.

At the very least, realise that you have a fantastic opportunity approaching as you close in on retirement time. And like any other opportunity at any other stage of your life, if you do not actively take advantage of it, it will pass you by. That realization by itself should be enough to galvanize you into some kind of action.

## FEAR

"I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little death that brings total annihilation. I will confront my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn my inner eye to see its path. There where the fear has been will be nothing. Only I will remain". Frank Herbert. Dune.

Friends with whom I have discussed the matter of retirement have used a number of words to describe their feelings such as nervous, uncertain and worried, but they can all be summed up as being different flavours of fear. Retirement is a big change, a change from the known and largely structured routine of the last forty or so years to an unknown lifestyle. Fear of retirement is largely a fear of the unknown. And the first thing to do with fear is to confront it and forge ahead, as the quote from Dune advises. What is it that you fear? It could be a number of things. Let us look at some of them.

First, there is financial fear. The arrival of a pay check every month throughout the working life offers a kind of comfort. I am sure that just about everybody faces financial worries at some time in their life, but payday gives us a regular positive boost. And there is always the hope that our income will increase in time. That feeling of security, no matter how illusory, vanishes at retirement. We have earned all that we are ever going to earn in our lives. From now on we only take out of the basket, we are no longer filling it. Our future income has a definite upper limit, and we all have a sneaky concern that maybe we will not have enough in the future.

This is a fact of life. There is actually nothing we can do about it, and, to quote a favourite boss of mine "don't worry about what you can't control". But don't ignore it either. The only way to overcome financial fear is to be financially realistic. I have repeated throughout that this is not a book on financial planning for retirees. There are plenty of books on the subject, and plenty of financial advisers who will do a much better job than I can. All I can say here is that your retirement plans have to take account of your financial situation. Form realistic expectations of your retirement which are based on the realities of your own financial situation, and you can put financial fear behind you. And I will also repeat that financial independence is necessary for a successful retirement, but wealth is not.

Then there is fear of failure. How many people would love to study for a degree after retirement, but do not because they fear that they will fail. Or would love to play a musical instrument but believe that they are too old to start. There are two ways to look at this kind of fear. Firstly, go back to the section about potential. If you have never studied a subject, then you have certainly not attained your potential for learning it. So progress and personal growth are guaranteed – the only way you can go is forward. Secondly, you can say so what? So what if you fail. Who cares? You are not studying in order to become employed. You are not learning piano in order to become a concert pianist. You are taking up a desired activity in order to improve your QoL for your own satisfaction and nobody else's. So what's to be done if you feel you would like to do something but aren't sure you are good enough? Go ahead and do it anyway, for the sheer pleasure.

Another fear that people often express when they talk about retirement is the fear of boredom. This is also expressed as the fear of "having nothing to do". Think about this for a moment and you will realise how ridiculous it is. Throughout all of your life has work been the only thing to do? Far from having nothing to do, you now have an unlimited selection of things to do. All you have to do to take advantage of this opportunity is to make a choice and get started. My biggest time waster in retirement is having too many things to do, so I dither. "I planned to sort out and classify my latest batch of insect photos, but I really feel like getting on with my latest woodwork project. I'll have a cup of tea while I think about what to do". It really happens!

Then there is the very real fear of getting old. Growing older is a process which has been with us all our lives. It never stops. But reaching retirement age is probably the most forceful reminder which we have that the process applies to us. Our physical and mental powers decline steadily and gradually, and most of us can joke about it. But retirement is sudden – one day you are employed, the next you are retired. Combine that with the traditional view of retirement, which applied to our parents' age, that it is a period of decline leading to our ultimate demise. Thinking clearly about your own situation is the remedy for this kind of assumption. The statisticians tell us that those of us who have made it to retirement age will have a very good chance of another twenty years of active life. View retiring as starting out on a new life phase rather than as a period of decline. Think about the opportunities, too many to take advantage of, for realising your own potential. And forget altogether about getting old. That will happen whether you think about it or not. There is a lot of truth in the saying that you don't stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing. Keeping busy will not only keep your mind off getting older, but will slow down the ageing process itself – a double win.

One of the more ridiculous fears is a fear of what other people will think. What will people think of me now that I am no longer productive? What will people think of me wasting my time studying classical Greek literature? What will people think of me starting to play piano at my age? Who cares? You are the sole and final judge of what direction your life will take. Remember that your purpose is to improve your quality of life, and that is something that only you can evaluate. Go on. Be eccentric. Hold to your course, make progress in your chosen direction, and doubters will soon be jealous of the satisfaction you are getting out of life.

Retirement is an unknown, and as human beings we have an inbuilt fear of the unknown. We wonder how we are going to find retirement, and how will we react to this new way of living. This is a very passive way of approaching retirement. Don't wonder – DECIDE, PLAN and ACT. Don't let retirement happen to you, rather fashion your retirement to satisfy your own requirements. Fill out your time maps and imagine yourself living according to them, and you will have a very good idea of what your retirement will be like. The best way to overcome a fear of the unknown is to turn it into the known, and you do that by deciding how it will be.

Ultimately, all of the above can be summarised by saying that we have a fear of change. As I have said before, do not underestimate the magnitude of the change which retirement, but don't let it scare you either. By the time we reach retirement age, most of us have not experienced real change for years. When we were younger we were more adventurous, and undertaking something new was exhilarating. Nothing has changed except our perception. Change is still exhilarating, if correctly approached. The correct approach is with eyes open and brain engaged.

Above all, do not take any notice of other peoples' horror stories. If others have failed at retirement, that is their problem. The thought of succeeding at retirement has probably never occurred to them, so their chances of success were doomed from the outset. Think of your own retirement success, and chart your own course.

Fear breeds fear. Fear encourages us to procrastinate and not to think about that which makes us afraid. Not thinking clearly about retirement and planning accordingly will increase our fear. Practicing what is described in this book will change fear into excitement and anticipation.

## THE PART TIME TRAP

This can be an easy trap to fall into in the "consulting" model of retirement. Many professional people, on retiring, say that they are quitting full time work, but will probably take on a little work on a consulting basis. The reasons for doing this usually include either the desirability of earning income, or the fear of becoming bored in retirement. A very valid reason for continuing to work on a part time basis is that it reduces the impact by spreading out the change involved in retiring over a period of time. However it can also be an error for two main reasons. The first is that working part time tends not to be very efficient for the worker. I myself found that part time work is very inefficient. I found myself giving more time than I wanted. For example, a one hour meeting on a customer site at ten o'clock in the morning in effect takes up the whole morning by the time you have groomed and dressed appropriately, travelled to the customer offices, exchanged pleasantries with some of the customer staff, had your meeting, and got home again. In short, one hour of productive chargeable time consumed a whole morning.

But worse than that is that such work can become a commitment which takes over your whole life. Let me give an example. Pat enrolled on the same environmental conservation course which I undertook when I retired. He was a retired mining geologist who had undertaken some consulting work on a couple of mine developments which required him to spend some time on site away from home. A few months into the course he started missing lectures and practical outings because he was away on his "part time" contracting work. About half way through the year long course, he had to quit because he could not balance the requirements of both his work and the course, and his commitment to the work was more pressing than his commitment to the course. I have no idea whether or not he needed the money and had to take the paid work. He certainly did not give the impression of being short of cash. What I do know is that he was passionate about conservation. He was involved in monitoring bird populations and movements, frequently rising early in order to net and ring birds in various parts of the countryside. So I have reason to believe that he got himself entangled in contractual activities when his heart was probably elsewhere.

So by all means continue part time work after retirement in order to ease yourself into your retirement lifestyle. Just make sure that your work commitments do not spread and strangle the quality of your retired life.

## INDECISION AND PROCRASTINATION

In my third year of high school, our form master had one standard punishment. "Mayes, write out one hundred times 'procrastination is the thief of time'" – or two hundred times for major misdemeanours. I cannot say that have remembered any of the history which he taught us, but throughout my life I have been aware of the pernicious nature of procrastination.

Fear often leads to one of two consequent behaviours. It can lead to indecision, the situation of not being able to come to a conclusion. Procrastination may seem to be similar, but is in fact subtly different. The indecisive person would like to make a decision right now, but cannot decide on a course of action. The procrastinator decides not to make a decision now, but to delay the action of deciding to a later date.

In an ideal world, all decision would be easy. This is not an ideal world, and people find it difficult to decide how to spend their time in retirement.

Indecision comes in two flavours. Either the indecider cannot think of any possible course of action, or cannot decide upon one (or more) from a number of alternatives. I would like to believe that nobody approaching retirement finds themselves in the first situation. Everybody, and I really do mean everybody, has an almost limitless range of possibilities to choose from. The opportunity offered to modern day retirees is largely defined by this range of possibilities. If you really have not been able to come up with one possible retirement activity, then I suggest that you sit down with paper and pencil and start a list.

For the person who has a number of possibilities to choose from but can't come to a decision, then I recommend that you decide on a major criterion and base your decision on that. You may choose the activity which involves the least expense, or the one that your best friend is involved in, or the one that your spouse can join you in, or whatever. If there is so little to choose between the various activities that you cannot easily decide what to do, then it probably does not matter which one you choose – your chances of making a success of your decision are the same whatever you decide. The main thing is not to delay. The sooner you get started on a course of action, the sooner you discover whether it was right or wrong.

However, it is not just a matter of deciding, but rather of committing yourself to giving your decision your best shot. Taking responsibility for your retirement success requires this kind of commitment. Just making a decision without committing to it is still a kind of indecision, so once the decision is made, go for it with all you have. And remember that the value of your time is increasing every day.

## PERFECTIONISM

One of the things which we can lose when we retire is the sense of competence which we have built up over the years in which we have been developing our careers. If we branch out into something new we suddenly become rookies again, and this can be a threat to our ego, or at least be an unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable feeling. Take for example someone who has reached a position of some seniority by the time they retire, and who has decided to enrol on a series of art classes for beginners as a retirement activity. With the wrong kind of mindset, this can be quite a blow to the ego. From being the knowledgeable figure to whom everybody turns for advice, to being a complete novice can be seen as a huge step backwards. Even more so if the other students in the class are younger and appear more talented. Correctly viewed, of course, it can be a source of great excitement, a move to a position from which it is only possible to grow.

The mistake which can be made here is to expect everything to go smoothly from the word go. To expect this is to miss a large part of the opportunity which retirement presents, namely the opportunity to improve at something. It is yet another manifestation of fear, the fear of not living up to our own or someone else's expectations. But if this is the case, it is the expectations which are wrong. Who are we trying to please? When we retire, we become free agents. So as long as we are indulging in activities which we enjoy for their own sake, then there is no need to worry too much about the results which we achieve. In our professional careers, results were everything. If the results were not good enough to satisfy the customer or our manager, then we ceased to earn a living. When we retire, the only person we have to satisfy is our self. And our satisfaction can come from what we are doing, not only from what we manage to produce. And in any event, if we keep on doing whatever it is we have chosen to do, we _will_ get better at it, and that feeling of improvement is what retirement activity is all about. If we produced a perfect result first time, then we would have to look for another activity, because growth is not possible from perfection.

I have a friend with whom I regularly get together to do some woodwork. We enjoy explaining to our friends and family that the skill which we spend most of our efforts developing is our ability to fix or hide the mistakes we make. But it is by this trial and error process that we make progress. We will never arrive at perfection. But the road which leads in that direction yields satisfaction every step along the way.

## LISTENING TO CRITICISM

"Any fool can criticise, and unfortunately, many do."

When you retire and decide to branch out in a different direction from the one you followed as an income earner, you will encounter criticism. Some of this will be overt in nature ("I think you're nuts to believe that you could start learning to play that thing at your age"), but in my experience it mostly comes in subtle disguises, and may even be well intentioned. I have frequently been asked questions such as "why on earth did you decide to make wooden boxes?", often by people who have just been admiring some of my handiwork. There is an undercurrent of "yes it's very nice but is that all you are doing with your life?".

Hopefully, once you have embarked on your retirement journey and are reaping the benefits of whatever activities you have decided upon, you will be pretty bullet proof as far as criticism is concerned. It is in the planning phase that criticism can be most damaging by sewing the seeds of the doubt which we have discussed earlier. The answer to this is to be choosy about how much you discuss your plans prior to retirement, and with whom.

The bottom line once again is that in retirement, you are the only person you are trying to please, so other peoples' opinions count for exactly zero. This is the flip side of being eccentric which I discussed in an earlier section. An eccentric is someone who branches happily out in his or her own direction with no regard for the opinions of others. Becoming a happy eccentric is one of the noblest objectives which the retiree can aspire to.

## OVERRATING ERRANDS

I cannot remember which book or article on time management it was which used the term "errands" for those activities which we feel we have to do and which absorb so much of our time. You will frequently hear people who have recently retired say that they have never been busier than they have since they stopped working. But ask them what takes up their time and they will tell you that they have been doing all the jobs around the house which they have allowed to build up over time. Mostly, these are people who do not particularly enjoy DIY, so that you can definitely presume that these retirement activities are not contributing a great deal to their QoL. All they have done is replace one form of work with another.

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with fixing things around the house when you retire. For those people who genuinely love fixing, repairing, and improving things DIY can be a very rewarding retirement activity. We probably all know of people who, on retirement, have moved into a badly run down dwelling with the plan of turning it over a period of years into the kind of palace about which magazine articles are written. I quietly envy people who have the ability and desire to do such things. Personally I hate fixing and decorating, but for those who are thus inclined, making improvements to their living environment can be a richly rewarding retirement activity.

But that is not what I am talking about when I refer to errands. I am referring to those things which we do because we feel we have to rather than because we enjoy doing them or gain great satisfaction from them. By all means do them if you must. But do not confuse them for a retirement purpose. If they have been left undone for the last few years, then maybe they are not that important. If you have always called in a handy man because you have been too busy to attend to them yourself, then maybe that is a good option although you have increased time available to you. There is a principle known as Parkinson's Law which states that work expands to fill the time allocated to it. This can easily apply to errands if it is allowed to. There is always something which needs fixing or improving. In my own case I thought this would improve when my children left home, but now I find myself responsible for maintenance not only of my own dwelling, but also my childrens' apartments as well!

So go ahead and do what has to be done around the house, around the garden, and within the family. But do not allow those activities to stand in the way of you finding purpose and fulfilment in your retirement. Your retirement success is too important to be put in jeopardy by running errands.

## TECHNOLOGICAL TIME WASTERS

We live in a technological age. Furthermore, we boomers are the first generation to reach retirement age with no excuse for not being "tech savvy". We have memories of grainy black and white television images broadcast by the one and only television broadcaster, and of large black bakelite telephones with steel dials and which actually went "ring-ring" like telephones are supposed to. We have lived through the dramatic evolution from that far off time to today's world of smart televisions with flat screens which take up half a wall and portable devices which can find anybody in the world who we may wish to talk to face to face. Most of us have grown our technological capabilities along with the technological advances. We may still like our books to have pages in them, but we are more than capable of handling an electronic tablet if we have to. As I said in one of the opening sections of this book, the availability of this technology immeasurably enhances the opportunities available to us in retirement. But this modern technology is powerful, and like all types of power, can be used for good or ill. The trick is to use it to enhance your retirement experience, and not to be mesmerized by it.

Flopping down in front of the television is for many people a natural thing to do after returning home at the end of a working day. It helps us to "switch off". But it also becomes a habit, and it is very easy to get used to watching programs which we don't really want to. I managed to get out of the habit of watching television fairly early in my life by asking myself the following question after watching a program: "If I had gone to a cinema and paid an entrance fee to watch what I have just spent the last hour watching, would I have got value for money". Very many times the answer was a resounding "no". What this meant was that I had watched the program because it was something easy to do rather than because it was a good program.

The additional time and energy available to us in retirement enables us to be more selective. I have heard recently retired people say that since they have retired they have been able to watch more "serious" programs such as those aired on news, special interest and documentary channels. But this is also seductive. Makers of today's documentaries are so skilled that they can make just about any subject interesting. When I hear someone talking about a great documentary which they have watched my reaction is to think, "yes, it was interesting, but were you interested in it", in other words, was it on a subject which actually interests you. The power of television can be used to enhance QoL by being selective, and making sure that you only watch programs which you really do want to watch – those that you would have paid money to see if they were showing at a local cinema rather than in your own lounge.

So make sure that you use television to enhance your retirement experience, and not merely fritter away the retirement hours. By all means flop down on the coach with the remote if you feel in need of some down time, but be aware of what you are doing. And don't let it become a habit which robs you of the opportunity which retirement is offering.

The World Wide Web is similarly seductive. Even more so, maybe, because it is at least interactive. It is very easy to while away the hours following "interesting" links which can lead you away from an item which you are genuinely interested in to totally unrelated pages of information. (see remarks on "interesting" in the previous paragraph). Use the internet to enhance your retirement activities and its value is almost limitless. Let it become a habit and it will eat away hours of your increasingly valuable time.

*******

# 10.A CASE HISTORY – ROGER MAYES

## LEARN FROM A SUCCESS

I am a successful retiree. Who says so? I do. And as I am the only person qualified to pass that judgement, it has to be true. Similarly, only you will be able to judge whether your retirement is a success, a failure, or something in between.

What makes me say that my retirement is a success? Well, I've touched on it at various times throughout this little book. Subjectively, I have never been as consistently happy throughout my adult life as I have been since I retired. I love the freedom to be able to do what I want, how I want when I want. I have been pretty lucky in the way that the decisions I have made about my retirement have largely worked out for me. This has resulted, among other things, in my not having been bored for one minute from the day I retired. It has also resulted in a feeling of personal growth and development at least as satisfying as any such development I felt throughout my working life.

The self help gurus of this world like nothing more than to point to examples of "successful" people. Most of the examples which they choose are the freaks of this world, those super talented or obsessively driven individuals that we read about in the international media. Well I am now going to cite the example of a normal, run of the mill, pretty unexceptional human being that I hope you can relate to. In other words, I will try to convey to you what I do in my retirement, how I feel about it, and how I came to be where I am. In keeping with the general format of the book so far, I will start by outlining what I did, and then try to give an idea of how I perceive my Quality of Life using, maybe somewhat loosely, the Being/Belonging/Becoming framework which I described earlier.

## WHAT I DID and WHEN I DID IT – MY "PLAN"

Put very simply, what I did was "think about it", how much I did was "too little", and when I did it was "too late". As I mentioned earlier, I was offered early retirement some two years before I expected it, so although I had done some thinking and even a certain amount of actual preparation I was still caught rather unprepared. In these dynamic times, such an eventuality can happen to anyone, which makes it even more important to start thinking about retirement sooner rather than later. Being suddenly presented with the reality of retirement caught me off balance as it was. Had I not done any thinking and planning at all then it could have been quite a traumatic occurrence.

I started to really think about retirement at about the age of fifty five, expecting to actually stop working when I was sixty, which was the mandated retirement age at the multinational corporation where I was working at the time. Up until then I had thought about retirement only in general terms, but had already realised that I would need some activity or activities to keep myself busy in my retirement years. These activities had to take cognisance of the fact that my physical strength and energy was going to be declining from now on. This was an important consideration in my case, because my leisure and social activities had always involved quite a lot of sport. While I had every intention of keeping myself physically fit and active, I also realised that you cannot fool old father time completely. Sooner or later the body reminds you that it is time to start slowing down!

By the time I was offered early retirement I had come to a couple of decisions. It would be nice to say that I approached the process in exactly the manner described in this book, but that would be a gross misrepresentation of reality. Looking back now, I guess I had come to three basic decisions.

The first decision was a very easy one. Throughout my whole life I have enjoyed exercise, and have prided myself on keeping in good physical condition, without ever being a fitness fanatic. It was a given that this would continue to be an important part of my post-work lifestyle, suitably adjusted for the changes in physical capability which advancing years inevitably bring. It was really just a case of keeping on with my current activities and making suitable adjustments as time went by.

My main hobby during my working years had been photography, and in particular photographing the natural world in all its aspects. However, this had mainly entailed making sure that I always had my camera with me when we went on holidays. Our preferred holiday destinations have always been in natural surroundings, whether on unspoiled coastlines, mountainous areas, or nature and game reserves. I was determined to improve my knowledge of the natural world and to use a camera in helping me to do this. This thinking all took place at the time when digital technology was really taking over from film, and as it happened I had my first digital camera on order at the time of my unexpected retirement. There was also an environmental course which I knew of and which I had had intentions of undertaking "at some time".

But I also thought that this might not be enough to ensure that I would have a fulfilling retirement. It was mainly in this third area that I applied the principles outlined in this book, and where my retirement planning process actually followed a more or less logical path. I had worked out that most of my retirement hours and days would be spent at home, so I needed something which would fill the following criteria:

→I could do it at home, so that it would be available to me at any time of any day.

→I could do it alone – I did not need to coordinate my time with anybody else

→I would be able to carry on doing it as my physical powers declined

→It offered opportunities to learn and develop new skills – to "grow"

I scratched my head for a while, and the following occurred to me. When my children were small I had made a few things for them out of wood – a desk and chair, a dolls house for my daughter, and so on. Crude though they were, I had experienced a great sense of satisfaction in making those items, and also enjoyed working with wood. It amazed me how good even the cheap pine which I had used on those projects looked when sanded smooth and finished off with a carefully applied couple of coats of wax finish. Also, somewhere in the distant recesses of my memory, I remembered hearing or reading that just about every skill or technique in woodworking could be used in making boxes. So I decided that I was going to make wooden boxes. It was only later that I discovered that this is a recognised and widely followed aspect of the art of fine woodworking. I bought myself a couple of books on woodworking in general and boxmaking in particular, and equipped myself with a router (I wasn't entirely sure what a router was at this stage, but it seemed that every woodworker needed one) and a few hand tools, and started making boxes.

How my efforts in this regard turned out I detail in the following section, but I want to emphasise a point here. This was an entirely conscious and deliberate process of making a decision for no other reason than that I needed something meaningful to do with my time in retirement. Whereas pursuing my interest in nature was an extension of an existing interest, this was something completely new being undertaken exclusively as a retirement activity. It was a "best guess" as to what I would find satisfying based on fairly sketchy information. I could have botched up my first project and jacked the whole idea in as a frustrating waste of time. That it has turned out well for me may well be put down to a generous helping of good fortune, but it has convinced me of the necessity of making a decision, any decision, as to how you are going to occupy your time in retirement, and then acting upon that decision. And it was a process which I started some five years prior to my expected retirement, which turned out to be three years prior to my actual retirement. By the time I retired I had acquired some additional equipment (typically when special deals were to be had, or in answer to some specific need) and some basic skills, and was beginning to produce items in which I could take some real pride.

Apart from these activities, I had always promised myself that I would spend more time reading once I retired, and this I have managed to do, although I could still use a few extra hours in the day to spend with a book under my nose.

But then there is also the completely unexpected. I started writing a book! This one. In thinking about my retirement I had spent some time jotting down my thoughts, and then reconsidering and rearranging my jottings into some kind of order. But I also found myself discussing retirement with friends of my own age group who were also coming to the end of their working lives. Just about every person I talked to expressed some kind of worry or concern about retiring. The idea of fleshing out my jottings into a book occurred to me, and when I mentioned this to my friends every one of them thought that it was a good idea because there was a definite need. I also found that the more I discussed my ideas with my friends, the more passionate I was becoming. It really got under my skin that so many intelligent, successful people could be approaching the opportunity of retirement without having given it any serious thought. So to cut a long story short, right now getting this book finished is my most committed activity. I really believe that I have something of value to say to my fellow retirees, and my already busy retirement has suddenly become even busier. As well as this book, I am setting up an internet blog site which I hope will become a forum for people to share their retirement ideas, experiences, fears, and triumphs. All without too seriously impacting my current retirement activities.

So with that introduction out of the way, let us look at how my retirement has developed, and how I evaluate the quality of my retirement life. I will once again use the Toronto framework of QoL under the headings of Being, Belonging, and Becoming, although probably not quite in the way in which they had intended. I do hope that they will understand.

## MY QoL - BEING

Retirement, as I have stressed elsewhere, is a major change. However, certain aspects of my self and my life have not changed – in many, maybe even in most, ways I am the same person now as I was before I retired. My "being" did not change on the day I retired. It is convenient to think of my life before retirement as consisting of Family, Work, and Outside Interests. Of these, work has vanished all together while the other two continue to exist.

My family has always been the most important single aspect of my life since my wife and I decided to have children. I have been truly blessed to be married to an exceptional woman for three and a half decades. Of the many values which we share, family is the one which we hold dearest. Obviously one's family responsibilities change as the children mature and find their own way in life, but for me there was no sudden change in the way my wife and I relate to our children when I retired. We have not considered moving away from the city to retire in the country or at the coast, and one of the main reasons for this is that we want to be close to our children, for both their sake and ours. So as far as Being is concerned, part of me is still "Dad", and of my wife "Mum". This will never change, although the nature of the relationships will continue to develop as we and our children progress through our life stages. I will return to this relationship when I consider Belonging.

Sport, exercise, health and fitness have been very important to me for as long as I can remember. In my working life, making sure that I got regular exercise was often a bit problematic. One of the great joys of retirement is that I can choose when I go to the gym, so I now go in the middle of the day when it is quiet, and I can get on to any apparatus without having to queue, rather than being part of the end-of-day rush, when even finding parking was a challenge. So from the point of view of being able to get regular sessions at the gym, this aspect of my being has improved since I retired.

The same can also be said of my participation in organised sport. It seems that as the population ages, opportunities for physical activities for the older members of society are increasing. This is certainly the case with my chosen sport, namely field hockey. When I started to play club hockey on leaving university, most hockey players hung up their sticks at around the age of thirty to thirty five. Nowadays more and more players are carrying on into senior ranks. Hockey has formal competition at Masters and Grand Masters level, so I am able to play now with and against the same people that I have played with and against for decades, as well as making new friends over the post match beer. The social, physical, and psychological benefits of taking part in sports do not decline along with the speed and agility which the advancing years take from us. And there are other advantages of keeping up sporting involvement. A year prior to writing this I was selected to represent South Africa at the Grand Masters Hockey World Cup, an official international tournament held every second year for the over sixties. At the age of sixty four, I experienced the thrill of international sporting competition for the first time in my life. As there are categories for over sixty-five and over-seventy, my international career may have a few more years to run. There is hope for everyone!

Regular sporting and exercise activities were always part of my life plan. With the management of my time under my control to a greater extent than was the case during my working life I am able to undertake these, as well as other more ad hoc activities such as cycling and walking, more consistently than was the case whilst earning a living was my priority. The net result is that fitness tests show that I am in even better physical shape for my age group now than I was before I retired. Just knowing that this is the case contributes to an enhanced QoL.

Apart from sport, there have always been other activities which I have dabbled in throughout my life, and which I have been able to continue with into retirement. My upbringing instilled in me a love of the natural environment, and from my earliest days, family holidays were always spent off the beaten track. This is something which I continued throughout my life, and which has seamlessly become part of my retirement. My wife and I try to get out of the city as much as possible, and into an environment where we can indulge our love of natural beauty.

I have also always enjoyed photography. Wherever I have found myself, I have usually had a camera nearby, and have always put a bit of effort into trying to take better photographs than just "snaps". In particular I find that consciously trying to improve my photography means that I am forced to look at my surroundings more closely than if I were just passing by. Even if I do not end up capturing a great photograph, I feel that just trying to see a subject in different ways adds to my awareness of wherever I am.

Both of these activities, appreciating nature and using my camera to add to my life experience, are activities which were part of who I was at the time of my retirement, and are still part of who I am seven years later. However, in the following section I will describe how they have also contributed to the Becoming aspect of my QoL.

The other activity which I want to touch on is reading. Since childhood I have loved reading, and throughout my life I have never had enough time to read as much as I would have liked to. I have always agreed with whoever it was who said that those people who do not read are no better off than those who can't. Whenever asked what I was planning to do when I retired, I would always reply that whatever else I was going to do, I would read much more than I ever had time to do in my working life. And so I read. Mainly non-fiction, but I am also adding to my list of favourite novelists as I now have the time to experiment more and follow recommendations of friends and reviewers. We live in a fantastic world, a world far too vast for us to experience it all first hand. Reading extends our life experience. I still do not have enough time for the reading I would like to do, but it continues to add enormously to my QoL.

So these then are the activities which I brought with me into retirement: sport and exercise, nature, photography, and reading. During my work life they were no more than pastimes, activities to be fitted in when the demands of adult life allowed. But they were part of who I was, and they have continued to be part of me in my retirement. The reason I have described them here is not so that you can take up an identical set of activities. My selection is not in any way "right". But I urge you, when thinking about your own retirement, to consider carefully those activities which you have taken part in throughout your life which have given you pleasure and satisfaction, and to consider what part they can play in making your retirement pleasurable and fulfilling.

## MY QoL – BELONGING

"Belonging" was, I think, the aspect of my working life which gave me the most satisfaction. I have mentioned elsewhere that I always found the people in the IT industry to be very stimulating – bright, well educated, and mostly with at least a touch of humour. Not only this, but a lot of what I did involved being a member of a team, whether that team was putting together a sales proposal for a large IT contract, or implementing a solution which we had successfully sold to a client. This daily contact with a group of people with whom I had a lot in common through our joint endeavours obviously fell away as soon as I retired. Strangely, although I met a lot of great people throughout my working career, there are only a handful of my ex-colleagues with whom I have kept in contact. Not surprisingly, every one of those with whom I have maintained contact enjoys sport and nature. The relationships which depended mostly on work quickly fell away, whilst those which were built on common interests and values have remained. There have been quite a few people I have met whose work is not only their livelihood, but also their main source of social contact. Had I been such a person, retiring would have left a very large hole in my social life.

However, that was never the case. I have already mentioned my family, and the love and warmth that I experience through regular contact with those Very Important Persons has been totally unaffected by my retirement. Thank goodness! My wife and I have also not moved away from the region where we have lived all of our married life. We mentioned the possibility of moving to a smaller town, maybe at the coast, but there are very many reasons, not least family, why this is where we "belong".

Other than family and work, sport has also been a major contributor to my social life. I have tried my hand at a variety of sports down the years, but one constant has always been hockey, a sport which I started at high school, and at which I am now in my 54th season. Being very much a team sport, and one in which depends heavily on a club structure, social life is built into the very fabric of hockey. I have been a member of the same club for forty years. When playing the Saturday afternoon "masters" club matches a number of my team mates have also been club members for decades. We have grown older and slower together. The opposing teams also contain very many familiar faces. The games themselves are still pretty competitive, but once the final whistle has been blown there is never any shortage of camaraderie in the form of light hearted banter or more serious "catching up" with how life is treating old friends. And there is an ever-increasing number of opportunities for us older types to take part in tournaments, both locally and in a number of locations around the world. As I write, I am preparing myself to take part in the local "Grand Masters" inter provincial tournament. All in all there will probably be around a hundred familiar faces, and always new friendships to be made. Being a member of the hockey community really gives me a feeling of belonging.

But also the new activities which I have adopted since retirement have also offered opportunities for social interaction. Woodwork, by its very nature, tends to be an activity undertaken alone. But as it happens I have struck up a woodworking relationship with an old colleague whom I used to bump into sporadically at the local supermarket. On one such occasion he told me that his wife wanted him to make him a jewellery box, and he had no idea how he was going to go about it. I told him that boxes were my speciality and we started getting together on a Sunday morning. To cut a long story short, the Sunday morning sessions have become a regular thing, either at my place or his, and he has made, among other things, jewellery boxes for his wife and daughter, a cigar box for himself, and is currently busy with his second fishing box. He has also branched out on a few "non-box" projects. I have thoroughly enjoyed passing on what skills and techniques I have picked up, and our regular Sunday morning sessions have become part of my social routine.

Membership of organisations involved in the activities which one undertakes is a sure way to satisfy the belonging aspects of QoL. In my case, my involvement in conservation through membership of the Honorary Officers organization of the local Parks Board has not only given me a wide variety of interesting activities, but has also opened up a range of social relationships around those activities. These relationships vary from close friendship to more work like relationships aimed at getting things done. Either way, I am part of an organization of around a hundred people all of whom are as passionate about conservation of the natural environment as I am. Believe me, no environment fosters a sense of belonging more than sitting around a campfire miles from the nearest electrical appliance chatting with a group of such like minded souls.

## MY QoL – BECOMING

"Becoming" implies change. I believe that a key aspect to a successful retirement is to embrace the opportunities to change which retirement offers. In my case, it meant taking on two activities at retirement which had only formed a minor part of my life previously. These are woodwork and nature conservation.

I described in a previous section how I came to decide on the fine woodworking activity of box making as a retirement activity. Let me now describe what that decision has meant to me throughout my retirement.

My first effort was a plain box made out of commercial pine using the most basic joints and surface mounted hinges. It was good and solid and didn't look too bad, and I still have it. It houses my router bits. Expanding my workshop equipment has largely happened on an opportunistic basis. When a local hardware store had an opening special offer, I treated myself to a small table saw. My boxes started to be made from more exotic woods, and featured bodies with keyed mitre joints, and frame and panel lids with bridle joints at the corners. In order to make this progress I have had to overcome various technical issues, and to design and make a number of jigs and attachments to turn my table saw and router into joint making machines. Some of the books and articles which I read showed boxes decorated with beautiful veneer patterns created with a technique called marquetry, so I got onto the web, ordered myself a selection of veneers, and started to experiment. My box lid panels became minor works of art, or so I like to believe. I keep my eyes open for design ideas on the web, in books and magazines, and have even made a couple of boxes with marquetry designs made from photographs I have taken myself, suitably modified with Photoshop. I have got to the stage of being able to take great pride in my work. When one works alone and makes progress through a process of trial and error it is easy to underestimate the progress one is making. It gives me a huge sense of satisfaction when someone sees my work for the first time and expresses wonder that anybody who is not a master craftsman can produce anything of such beauty. Similarly giving away a hand made object to someone who really appreciates it gives me a sense of satisfaction and personal achievement greater than anything which I experienced in my working life. (To see a few examples of my work go to my website – see references at the end of the book).

Now the important points from the previous paragraph have nothing at all to do with woodwork and the details of what I did. The two points which I cannot emphasise enough are the following:

Firstly, I made a conscious decision on an activity which I was going to pursue when I retired. I realised that I needed to have something meaningful to fill my days and years, and made a rational decision about what this might be. I was probably a bit lucky that it has turned out so well for me, but I also feel that to a large extent I have made my own luck.

Secondly, I got started in a small way some _five years_ before I actually expected to retire. In this way I could find out whether or not woodwork was really something which could help to make my retirement fulfilling or not, and I could acquire the skills needed for the hobby gradually, and purchase the equipment I wanted as and when the need and opportunity arose.

On more than one occasion people who are worried about retiring have said to me "you are lucky, you have a hobby to keep you busy". I hope the brief history of my woodworking career to date show that luck had very little to do with it. It was the realization that I needed some kind of activity, the decision about what was most likely to be a satisfying activity, and getting started long before the actual moment of retirement that have lead to the situation which I am in currently.

I have said that financial return should not be a consideration in choosing retirement activities. When you retire you should find something which you love doing for its own sake, and then you will be happy to do it for nothing. Well the first few dozen boxes which I made were a pure cost. They were almost exclusively made according to what I wanted to make, and were given away to family and friends. On a few occasions, friends came to me with a special request for a box which they wanted to give to a family member, and on such occasions I would give them a list of books from which they could choose one to give me in payment for the box. But eventually just about everybody in our social circle had at least one of my boxes, and the cupboard in my workroom began to fill up with boxes of various sizes, shapes, and designs. That was when I started to sell a few of my products, but I would certainly not describe my boxmaking as a commercial activity. If I can cover some of my costs, with enough left over to buy a few tools or gadgets to enhance my woodworking capabilities, then that will be a bonus.

Now, several years into retirement, I have acquired enough capability to produce boxes of which I am proud, and which elicit the occasional "wow, how do you do that" from people who see them. This, despite the fact that I consider myself neither creative, nor particularly good with my hands. I have learnt by a process of trial and error, and the proportion of error is a lot higher than it perhaps should be. But as I get further into the craft, I realise that the opportunities for growth and personal development are infinite. To quote the copy of Fine Woodworking magazine which is sitting on my desk as a write, "A box is a deceptively complex piece of woodworking". There are enough techniques and design variations to keep me busy for several lifetimes, and, despite the pleasure which I get from producing something beautiful and useful, and which is appreciated by the recipient, I will never reach a point of total satisfaction. There is always something new to learn.

There is one more important point I would like to make. I do my woodwork as and when I choose to. I have nobody breathing down my neck with their deadlines. If a friend drops in for a chat, or if there is some good sport on the television, I leave my workshop with a clear conscience, free to fully enjoy the alternative activity which has presented itself. Freedom really is the greatest joy of retirement, provided that you use it correctly. It is very seldom that I find myself getting bored with my woodwork or any of my other retirement activities, but if I do, I merely stop and start doing something else until the enthusiasm returns.

And finally, before leaving the subject of box making, there is an observation which I would like to make as something of an aside which I have found interesting. Almost everybody who gets shown the boxes I have made for the first time says something along the lines of "Gee, they're beautiful. Why don't you sell them?". The comment is meant as a compliment, and I always take it as such, but it interests me that nobody has ever said "Gee, they're beautiful. It must give you a lot of satisfaction to make something as beautiful as that". However, the satisfaction is the only reason why I make them. To me this reaction to my work is a demonstration of how deeply the material imperative is ingrained into our minds. People's instinctive first reaction is to perceive a commercial benefit rather than a QoL one. It reinforces my belief in the significance of the influences which affect our lives, and which I went to some lengths to describe earlier in this book. It is a mindset that I believe we have to reject if we are to live a truly successful retirement.

But making boxes is not all that I do with my days of retirement. I have always had a love for the natural world, and have enjoyed trying to capture some of its beauty in photographs. Whilst thinking about retirement before the event, I had some idea in my mind that I would increase my involvement with nature. In this respect I was caught out. As I mentioned earlier, I was given early retirement some two years before I was expecting it, and at that stage I had done nothing about planning, let alone implementing, any activity involving nature, other than our normal vacation activities. So it was only after I had retired that I started investigating possibilities in this area, and came up with a one year, part time course covering just about all aspects of the natural world, and which opened up the opportunity to become an honorary, part time ranger in the local Parks Board. Maybe I was lucky in that doing the course after my retirement meant that I had more time for the hours of study which the course required, but with the wisdom of hindsight, I would have undertaken this course much earlier than I did. Without getting involved in too much detail, I completed the course and duly became what is known as an Honorary Officer of the Northwest Parks Board. This has opened up a range of activities which were new to me. The basic function of the HO's is to enhance the visitors' experience of the Parks in which we operate, so at weekends we patrol the park roads, ensuring that regulations are adhered to, and interacting with the public to inform them about the Parks, the wildlife in the parks, and to generally offer any information or assistance we can. Usually these duties are pretty routine. But every now and then the unexpected happens. We might have to assist the parks staff to release animals which have been taken in for veterinary treatment, or to right a car which has been overturned by an elephant and calm down the shaken occupants, or assist in controlling a bush fire – whatever the Park Management requires of us. But that is not all that we do. We are also involved in monitoring rhino populations in certain of the parks, which requires us to get close enough to these wonderful and endangered beasts to identify the individual animals, frequently on foot. This in turn sometimes involves tracking, a skill in which we have received basic instruction, but which could in itself easily be a lifetime study. We are also responsible for bird counts in our parks. In my case, the initial training course also ignited an interest in insects, and I started turning my camera on to these smaller subjects. This in turn has lead to me being involved in the training of future Honorary Officers on this aspect of the natural world. As my understanding of nature has increased, so has my sense of wonder at the truly incredible world which we inhabit. I will return to this subject when I discuss the spiritual aspects of my retirement.

The Honorary Officers do not get paid anything at all for their services, and all expenses are for their own account. What they do represents a free service to the Parks in which we operate. In this respect it can be seen as a community service, but the fact of the matter is that we do what we do because we love doing it – the fact that it has wider benefit is a fortunate bonus.

Just as I could spend my whole life on my woodwork and still have plenty to learn, the natural world really is infinite in its fascination and complexity. My knowledge of birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, trees and grasses is much greater than it was prior to my training course, but I have not even scratched the surface of any one of these subjects. I could spend all my hours and days photographing, identifying, and learning about just the insects in my locality. In fact some of my best insect photographs have been taken in my own suburban garden. The beauty of retirement is that I can spend as much time as I like, when I like, watching, photographing, and learning about whatever I choose.

So for the last seven years or so woodwork and nature have provided my main retirement activities. But now I am in the process of adding a third activity, namely evangelising the opportunity which retirement offers. Once again I find myself on a steep learning curve. I have always enjoyed writing. One of the aspects of my working life which gave me the most job satisfaction was putting together sales presentations and proposals, and people who have been on the receiving end of letters and emails from me have sometimes suggested that I should turn my hand to writing. But I am finding that writing a letter of a few hundred words and writing a book of several thousand are two different things, and it turned out to require more work than I ever imagined. But it has also forced me to clarify my thoughts and ideas about retirement, which has been to my own benefit, and which has helped me when discussing retirement with friends. In addition to the book I am also setting up a blog which I hope to become a forum or network for retired people to exchange views and ideas about retirement. I am doing all of the web design and site management myself, which has required me to get to grips with a web development tool and the associated technologies. I am aware that doing this will require a tricky balancing act on my part. In evangelizing the blessings of retired life to others I do not want to jeopardize my own retirement lifestyle. But right now I am loving the challenge, and I really do believe that I have a valuable message for those who are about to retire and are not sure how to go about it. It could quite easily become a calling for me!

And what of the spiritual aspect which I have spoken of? I'm not sure that I have the capability to clearly describe what I mean by this. It really is a feeling, and feelings are difficult to describe. I'll give it my best shot.

The un-pressured nature of my retirement activities means that I have the time to stop and think about where I am and what I am doing. When I stop and think about my woodworking I am aware of two processes taking place. One is the process of taking a few shapeless pieces of wood and transforming them through a series of stages into something both useful and beautiful. The other is the process of me becoming something more than I was before I started the current project – more skilful and more knowledgeable. I learn something on every project.

Similarly when I am in a quiet natural environment I seem to have a greater ability than I did before I retired to just sit and be aware of where I am and the natural processes going on around me. I believe that this is more than merely being older and wiser, and has something to do with the more intense and intimate nature of my interaction with my environment than previously was the case. Before I retired my time in the natural world was limited to the vacation time available to me. My interaction with the environment is now has more purpose than just being there.

Zen teachers speak of the importance of awareness. Our working lives are so rushed and pressured that we speed through our daily lives largely unaware of what we are really trying to achieve. The opportunity which retirement brings to us is to become more aware of the way in which we are spending our lives. The process of carefully thinking about a retirement plan in itself demands that we become more aware of the quality of the lives which we are living.

This spiritual aspect of retirement only became apparent to me after I had been retired for a few years, but I have come to see it as fundamental. When all is said and done the most important reason to develop and pursue a retirement plan which includes aspects of personal growth and improved quality of life is to increase one's awareness of one's environment and of who one is and to live accordingly. Achieving this is probably as good a definition of a successful retirement as I can think of.

## THE MESSAGE

In describing my own experience of retired life the message I want to get across to you is that it is possible and desirable to start a new life when working life comes to an end. Such a life can be a vehicle for personal growth, development, and learning in unexplored directions of your own choosing. The detailed activities which I have been describing are immaterial. I get a bit discouraged sometimes when I describe my retired lifestyle to someone and all they say is something along the lines of "I just don't have the patience for fiddling around with woodwork". Probably no more than one person in a thousand would find my mix of retirement activities interesting. But everybody is interested in something. Everybody would like to know more about something. Everybody has wondered what it would be like to do something. I have told you about my somethings. Find your own and put some effort into pursuing them.

*******

#  11.JUST ONE IDEA

Whenever I buy a book on any subject, I always think that if it contains just one thought or idea which I can take away and use in my life then my money has been well spent. I have covered quite a few topics in this book, and given a lot of suggestions of things I believe you should consider when planning your retirement. I really and sincerely hope that more than one of these ideas has in some way stimulated your thinking about your retirement. But even if there was just one idea of value, then my time in writing this book for you, and your time in reading it, has not been wasted. I will just leave you with these five thoughts, which summarize what I consider to be the most important ideas of this book.

→To be able to consider your life as a success requires you to lead a successful retirement as well as a successful career.

→Retirement represents the greatest opportunity of your life because for the first time in your life you can act in accordance with your beliefs and values free from the constraint of having to earn an income.

→This freedom comes with the concomitant responsibility to make a conscious choice or choices.

→To be able to act freely you have to be able to ignore the largely materialistic influences which are ubiquitous in modern western society.

→Improving the quality of your life is the only valid purpose of retirement.

I wish you a long, happy, and above all successful retirement.

*****

# 12.REFERENCES AND CONTACTS

At various places in the text I have made reference to the following resources:

The Way of Zen; Alan Watts; Vintage Books, a division of Random House; 1989

The Act of Will; Roberto Assagioli; Turnstone Press; 1984

Outliers – The Story of Success; Malcolm Gladwell; Little, Brown & Co; 2008

Confucius – The Analects; translated by D.C.Lau; Penguin Classics

Quality of Life Research Unit – University of Toronto www.utoronto.ca/qol/

Please give me feedback on the thoughts and ideas which I express in this book, and also on your own experiences of retirement. You can contact me on my email:

Rmayes@mweb.co.za

I look forward to hearing from you!

I am also on facebook , where I have posted a number of my nature photographs, as well as pictures of some of the boxes I have made. Visit me at:

www.facebook.com/roger.mayes.3

