How to Find Your Purpose in Retirement
Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose.
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Script | 412
Hello, and welcome to episode 412 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve.
When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes.
The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers.
It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”.
I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English.
Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live.
Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching.
It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching.
In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb?
Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control.
I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption.
Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court.
The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession.
However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and talk on the subject.
Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs in his brilliant Unleash the Power Within seminar. These human needs are:
The need for: Certainty - the certainty that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure, and the need for uncertainty and variety - the need for the unknown and new stimuli.
The need for significance - the feeling of being unique, important, special or needed and then the need for connection and love - a strong feeling of closeness to someone or something
And then there are the two areas that when we are young, we often dismiss, largely because we are so caught up in our own lives. They are the need to contribute and the need to grow.
When I first did the associated exercise related to these needs, I did just that. My top two were the need for certainty and the need for significance. (Typical for someone who creates content, funnily enough)
I dismissed the needs to contribute and grow. Yet now, I see that these two needs are the source of our purpose.
All living beings need to grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. Just look at what happens to muscles when we stop using them. They weaken and whither. That’s your body doing its job. It wants to conserve energy, and if you’re not using an energy-expensive muscle, it will weaken the muscle.
That is just another reason it’s important to make sure you do your resistance training every day. (Or at least three to four times a week).
Yet growth is not just about the physical; it’s also about the mental. The need to be continuously learning.
This is where our hobbies come in. Hobbies such as learning languages, geology, car mechanics, medieval history, and problem-solving keep our brains active. Our brains continue to grow as we learn.
A good reason not to try to figure everything out by using customer service or Chat GPT. Use your problem-solving skills to figure it out.
And the contribution is where we get our sense of fulfilment. Passing on our knowledge and what we have learned from our life experiences by teaching others.
When I worked in law, it always felt like it was just about billable time. How much could we charge the client? I tried to convince myself that I was helping people, but my bosses were not interested in that part. They just wanted to know how much I had billed that week.
When I began teaching English to adults in Korea, that changed. It did not matter how many students I had in my classes. I got paid the same. Now I felt I was contributing to someone’s success.
Something changed in me, too. I felt excited to go to work every morning. I’d never felt that before, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. It was because each day I got the chance to help people improve their lives and career prospects, and it was a joy to see their progress.
If you were to build a retirement around growth and contribution, you would soon find that your purpose becomes clear.
For most of us, our purpose is unlikely to be as grand as bringing world peace or finding a solution to global warming. For some, maybe, but for most of us, not likely.
Purpose is often much smaller than that. It could be to raise and support your children so they can navigate through their worlds with positivity and pragmatism. For others, it could be, like me, to teach as many people as I can to be better organised and less stressed.
The late Prince Philip, who died five years ago, told his daughter, Princess Anne, that to find your purpose, you should find something that you feel you can make an impact on.
For Prince Philip, that meant conserving and protecting the planet, as well as helping young people be active through his Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme.
He was talking about conservation and climate change in the 1950s, well before it became fashionable to do so. He was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, wrote multiple books on the subject, and was active in climate science.
For Princess Anne, it has been, and remains so today, saving children in war-torn environments, animal welfare and hearing dogs for the deaf.
Which then leads us to the second problem here.
When we retire, it can be very tempting to fill our calendars with all sorts of work in the name of good causes. Don’t do that.
You are not going to be able to have an impact on everything. Instead, you want to look at what you are genuinely interested in.
Prince Philip gave a 19-year-old Princess Anne some sage advice when she asked him what she should get involved in. He told her that she would be inundated with offers to be a patron of this or that. He advised her that she could never be a patron of everything, so she should choose those in which she had a genuine interest.
Ron Dennis, the former owner of the McLaren Formula 1 team, retired from Formula 1 in 2017 and dedicated his retirement to helping young people achieve their aspirations and to become role models for future generations.
His experience of working with people like Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Kimi Räikkönen gave him the knowledge and experience to help young sportsmen and women achieve their dreams.
There’s likely to be something that you have an interest in. If that can be coupled with your knowledge and experience, then you have something you can contribute, and that, in turn, will give you a sense of purpose.
In many ways, the challenge is not about finding purpose; it is narrowing it down to the one or two things that we feel we can have an impact on.
The same challenge we faced when in the corporate world is still there in retirement: overcommitting. This is why it’s important not to rush into things when you transition. Explore, think, test, and experience by all means, but set a deadline for refining your activities into something more manageable.
One of the wonderful things about the world we live in today is that we can share our ideas and experiences by writing a blog, recording a podcast, or even starting a YouTube channel.
The great thing about these avenues is that they need consistency to grow. A weekly podcast does far better than a podcast that rarely adds episodes. This helps you to bring structure into your weeks. You can set aside a day or two each week for your content production.
As your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel grows, that in itself gives you a sense of purpose, particularly if it is contributing to making an impact on something you have an interest in.
So, if you are struggling to find your purpose, first, don’t overthink it. It’s rarely about solving the world’s problems; it’s more about helping people to better themselves, and as someone with the experience you have, you are in a very strong position to be able to help.
Make sure it is something you are interested in, something you enjoy reading about and something you like talking to other people about. If you wake up excited about doing something related to this, then you’ve found your purpose.
One of the most inspiring stories I heard about was about two Canadian gentlemen who loved skiing. Each year, they would go skiing together with their families.
When they retired, they both decided to take their ski instructor certification and become ski instructors. And that is what they do today. They are both qualified ski instructors, and each winter they spend their days teaching people to ski.
This keeps them fit and strong and brings an incredible social experience.
I hope this has helped. If you have any questions around your retirement or impending retirement, let me know. I’m happy to answer your questions in this podcast.
And don’t forget, I have recently launched a brand new programme called Designing the Perfect Retirement. This programme sets out a blueprint for you to create a retirement you find fulfilling and inspiring, and that keeps you fit, healthy and active.
In addition, this programme gives you access to a community where you can share experiences and advice. I will put the details for this programme in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish all a very, very productive week.