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Perry Maughmer: Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today we're exploring the idea around creating a life you don't want to retire from. So first things first. Everything that I do, I approach through the E Three Framework, and that means we leverage, exploring, experimenting, and evolving as our means of navigating our leadership odyssey. I define leadership as having a positive impact on the lives of those we care about. And with this definition, every single one of us has both the opportunity and responsibility to lead in whatever part of the world it makes sense for us to do so. And if we all individually take these opportunities, we can collectively then make the world a better place. So, as always, I'm going to kick us off with three quotes. The first one is from Will Rogers. Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save. The second one from Sophia Loren. There is a fountain of youth. It is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.
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Perry Maughmer: And finally, from Marcus Aurelius, days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set and you with it. So we're going to do a little bit of exploration around the concept of retirement. I'm going to take us back in time and kind of walk us through some milestones in the way that retirement, quote, unquote, was actually conceived. Now, the first mention of it was a New England Puritan minister named Cotton Mather, 18th century New England Puritan minister. And he proposed, quote, that elderly people should be pleased with the retirement, which you are dismissed into. So I don't know how everybody feels about that, but I don't know if I appreciate being dismissed into anything. Now, in 1881, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck actually used a maneuver against Marxists who were coming into power and popularity and announced that anyone over 70 would be forced to retire and that he would pay a pension to them. So we have that going in 1881. Then in 1905, we'll see how everybody feels about this. In a valedictory address to John Hopkins Hospital, the Canadian physician William Osler, he expressed his conviction that a man's best work was done before he was 40 and that by age 60, he should retire. He called the ages between 25 and 40 the 15 golden years of plenty, and that workers between ages 40 and 60 were tolerable because they were merely uncreative. But after age 60, the average worker was useless and should be put out to pasture. So that was in 1905.
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Perry Maughmer: Now, in 1935, the idea of paying older persons a pension sufficient to get them to quit working became widespread. A Californian by the name of Francis Townsend proposed a plan offering compulsory retirement at age 60. Now, in return, the legislature would pay benefits up to $200 a month, provided he spent it all quickly. Now, some Republicans supported the Townsend plan, but most experts said it'd be impossible to finance. So then at the time, president Franklin D. Roosevelt had a team working on a plan, and in 1935, he secured the Social Security Act of 1935, which made workers and their employers fund their retirement at age 65. So officially, in the United States, around in 1935, we had official retirement, age 65. Everybody was funding it, retirement. Now, interestingly enough, those three dates that I picked, 19, five, and then 1935, and then 2023. So I'm going to give you the right. Now, these are the ages, life expectancy for men and women in those times. And I want you to think about this in context of retirement, because back when in 1905, when William Osler gave his speech, he said that people should work, and the best years were 25 to 40, and that 40 to 60 were tolerable. But after age 60, you were useless. Now, in 1905, the lifespan, the life expectancy of a man was 47. And so if you think about this, the were going to offer retirement to people when they were in their 60s, but the average lifespan was 47, and women were 50.
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Perry Maughmer: Now, 1935, when they actually when the Social Security Act started in 1935, that was age 65. The average life expectancy for a man was 60. And so conceptually, we're going to pay retirement to people who had outlived the life expectancy, right? Women were 64. Men were 60. Now, in 2023, the average life expectancy of a man is 75, and a woman is 80. And so you can see the math doesn't actually work. Now, I'm approaching this I'm actually going to approach this from two sides. I'm going to approach it, first of all, just from historical and then also from kind of, I guess, financial side of retirement. But then I'm also going to talk about retirement as a concept and what it does to the human right. Because as you can see, we invented this concept. This concept didn't exist before folks started talking about it. For whatever reason, they wanted to talk about it. If we look back, Cotton Mather was just talking about, okay, well, people should stop working at some time and be pleased. Bismarck was really about trying to control the Marxist and then the other were political.
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Perry Maughmer: But as a concept, this didn't really exist. So we came up with this, and people are going to work all their lives, and then they're going to stop working at some point. And then it became some argument about, is the government going to help them? Whatever. To be honest with you, I don't really care about that. I think we all are concerned about it because there are certain, shall we say, antiquated concepts that we're all living with right now that maybe don't make much sense anymore just from the standpoint of fiscal responsibility. That's a whole nother argument, but you can actually do the math. And I'm going to give you some information here just to support that. One of them is in 1950. So 15 years after the Social Security Act went into play, we had seven people aged 20 to 64 for everyone over 65. So for every person over 65, we had seven people 20 to 64. Now what that means is for everybody that was over 65 drawing on Social Security, we had seven people putting into it, okay, seven people putting in. For every one person drawing right now it's four to one. So that's dropped to every one person over 65, there's only four people putting into it. And they're projecting if we keep our current course, that by 2050 it'll be two to one.
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Perry Maughmer: So now for every one person drawing, there's only two people putting in. And that will pretty much ruin the pay as you go pension schemes that provide the bulk of the retirement income in rich countries. It just the math won't work anymore. Now also 1967, they passed the Age Discrimination Employment Act. Now, what that meant was you couldn't discriminate based on age. So now you can't, unless now there are exceptions. There are certain executives, policymakers, public safety employees like firefighters and police officers. There are mandatory retirement ages. But most of this for all the people that are listening and for me and people like this, there's no mandatory retirement anymore. They can't make you retire. Theoretically, you cannot be discriminated against for your age. Now, again, you can argue if it does or it doesn't happen, but that was passed in 1967. Now the other part of this is full retirement age is 66 if you are born between 43 and 54. Now it gradually increases if you were born between 55 and 60 till it reaches 67. So anybody born 1960 or later, your full retirement benefits are payable at 67.
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Perry Maughmer: Doesn't mean you can't draw them earlier, but you won't receive full benefits until you're 67. Now again, I was approaching this from kind of the fiscal side, historical side. So now we understand about leadership. We understand about, I mean, from a standpoint, rewind that we understand from a business standpoint and from a historical standpoint where we got retirement from. Now I want to talk about a couple of different things from just a human standpoint, and this is a big one. According to the Mental Health Foundation, one in five of present day retirees experiences depression. Those living alone because of bereavement or divorce may are at more risk, and physical health problems can also make people more vulnerable to mental health issues. Now, recent studies have indicated that retirement increases the chances of suffering from clinical depression by about 40% and having at least one diagnosed physical illness by 60%. On the other hand, many workers have adopted scaling back their jobs at around 55 or 60, or even changing careers, but still working for another 15 to 20 years. So if you think about this, physical health problems can also make people more vulnerable to mental health now. So they're saying that retirement, just retirement, increases the chances of suffering from clinical depression by around 40%. So if you retire, you're 40% more likely to suffer depression. And then on top of that, if you add having at least one physical diagnosed illness by 60%, so retiring also I'm going to get more likely to have a diagnosed physical illness. And those are the issues from the Mental Health Foundation that they found currently with retirees. And so that's kind of the exploration side of what we were going to do.
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Perry Maughmer: Now, I really want to talk about I've been saying this for probably about eight years, since I've been working with business leaders and business owners. One of the most favorite things I tell people is I want them to create a life they don't want to retire from. Because for all the reasons I just said, there's the fiscal issues, there's all of those issues, but the real issue is just as a human. And there's a great and I think I didn't put it on here there's a quote from Leikoka about retiring, and he said that it takes till about 50 till people really know what's actually going on in the world. And that's no cut on anybody younger. All I'm saying is, once you hit that age, you kind of sit back and are able to go, oh, I kind of see how things work. And to think that now those people are going to work another ten to 15 years, and then they're all going to retire and the lifespan is expanding. So if 75 is the median age, you've got people living to 80, 85, 90. And so think about this, you could actually live another 25 years after you, quote, unquote, retire, and what are you going to do with that time, really? Are you going to not do anything? You're just going to sit around, you're going to play golf? You're going to play cards, you're going to read? Those things are always I think those things are awesome for a little bit. I can tell you that I just went on a vacation. I was gone for ten days, and Lisa and I actually thought towards the end, we're like, yeah, we found out how long a vacation can be for us, about ten days is maximum because about on the 8th or 9th day, we were pretty much ready to come home.
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Perry Maughmer: It was nothing wrong. It's just there was only so much recreation you can take, at least for us right now. And I'm closing in on retirement age. I'm closer than I used to be. Let's just say I'm within ten years, right? So here's the thing. Here's what I would recommend, and here's what I'd like people to think about from the standpoint of starting now. Thinking about creating a life you don't want to retire from. I don't care what age you are right now doesn't matter because the best time to start is today. I don't care if that means you're I don't care if you're 2555-6585. The best time to start living the life you want is now. Because by everybody's own admission, it's the only time we can't start. We can't do anything tomorrow, yesterday, because they don't exist. We can only do it today. And so let's start with writing down the life you want to live.
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Perry Maughmer: Actually, don't think about it. Write it down. You can type it, I don't care. Write it, type it, whatever, but make sure that it's in front of you and be very specific and realistic. Now, I'm not talking about how much money do you want. I'm not talking about how many things do you want. What I'm talking about is what does your life look like, feel like, sound like, smell like? How are you spending your days? Who are you engaging with? In fact, I would even say create the perfect day, month, week, quarter year. Actually, write down for yourself what you want your life to look like, what your contribution is, what is it you bring to the world? How would you like to live? Because that's step two. Determine what you would have to do to live that life now, not later, not I'm going to struggle, and I'm going to put my time in for the next if you're my kids age the next 30 years, this is what I'm going to suffer through. I heard somebody talk the other day, and they said, we put off happiness to make enough money to later buy the happiness we wanted earlier.
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Perry Maughmer: If you think about how folks talk about retirement, it's really interesting because most of them are really, really looking forward to retirement because they can't stand what they're doing today. It isn't because they're looking forward to retirement. It's because they're not going to be doing what they're doing currently. And so somehow we are trading happiness, right? We're saying we're going to forego happiness today and do all these things we're doing today that we may not necessarily like so that someone in the future will be happy. And I know of several stories personally where people did that, and they lived less than a year or two after they retired. Their entire lives, they had planned for doing the thing they had always wanted to do, and they died because tomorrow is never promised. Now, I'm not trying to be morose. I'm just trying to be pragmatic, because that's what we do. All right? Now, I will tell you on step one. When you're going to write down the life you want to live, please connect it to your values. That means you have to have explicit values. You have to write those values down as well. When I'm talking with organizations, I always start with Mission Vision values, and I would do that at a micro level too, with you.
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Perry Maughmer: What's your mission, vision and values for your life in Mission and Vision? Vision is where do you see yourself. Mission is how you're going to get there, and values are the things that are going to guide you. Those things should be written down. I know you probably have them in your head, but I'm going to tell you something really interesting right now. I'm going to guess you have a lot of clarity in your head. If I said, what are your values? I'm going to tell you that clarity all but dissipates if you write them down. If I forced you to sit at a table and write them down for me, it would not be as easy as you think it is. It's a very uplifting exercise to do. It's not something that's going to be quick to do, and that's okay. But you should commit yourself to writing down for your life. Now, again, you're not doing this in a vacuum. So if you have a partner, if you have a significant other, if you have family, whatever that is, you have to include those people, because you're not just going to sit down and write yours down. You have to write it down in context of those other people that are important in your life.
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Perry Maughmer: In fact, I always tell business owners they should write theirs down in that context. They need to go engage with their partner, significant other, wife, husband, whatever, and say, okay, first of all, do they match? This was an exercise that I would ask you to do separately with those in your life and then come together and compare and contrast. Don't do it together because you want to find out, are we even envisioning the same thing? Because we don't often talk about it enough. We don't explicitly discuss what we want out of our life. Now, once you have that done, then you have to look at that thing you've laid out in front of you and determine, what do I have to do in order to do this? Truly? What do I have to do? What are the things I would have to accomplish? What are the steps I would have to take? What actions would I have to take? What behaviors would I have to change to accomplish the thing I said I wanted to accomplish? And then the third most important step after you look at those two things so you have a plan you've sketched out, okay, I've started off up here with more or less a goal that says, this is what I want. This is the life I want to live now, not later.
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Perry Maughmer: This is what I want my life to be. These are the things I'd have to do in order to do it. This is the plan. Now, the are both easy compared to the third step. The third step is ask yourself and wait for the answer. Am I willing to do what's required? That's it, right? Am I willing to do the things I've written down that I would need to do in order to have the thing I want to do? Now, I'm sure you've so I'm not sure, but I'll share this with you. There's this old have do B versus B do have, right? So have do B is typically how we go about things, which is once I have this, I'll do those things, then I'll be the thing I want to be. So have do be it's reversed. It's actually in the wrong order. It's not the right way to do it and it's not the way that it works. The way it works is be do have.
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Perry Maughmer: I'm going to be that person and then I'm going to do the things that person would do. Then I'll have the things that I would benefit from. But the have comes last after I be and I do it isn't once I have them. And I'm sure that all of you can either think in your own experiences, I'm going to take this at a micro level, your own experiences of a micro level of how this works. If you've ever worked in an organization where you wanted to be promoted, the single easiest way to be promoted in any organization is to do the job that you want to be promoted into. And what I mean by that is exhibit the behaviors that that person in that role would exhibit. Because if you do that, you've removed all risk for the person that would promote you. Because the other side of this is when you're a leader in an organization, when you're a manager and you're in charge of promoting people, what slows that down is risk. Because if I'm the manager and I'm going to promote somebody, I'm essentially risking my reputation. I'm saying to the rest of the organization, this person should be in this other role. The easiest way to remove that risk is for that person to already have been doing that job so that everybody else in the organization, when that promotion takes place, essentially says, oh, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, I see that. That's exactly what I thought they were going to do because that person is the obvious choice that's B do have. But if I sit back and say to myself, I'm not going to give that effort, I'm not going to do those things until they promote me, until they give me more money, I'm not going to take that responsibility, guess what? It typically doesn't happen again, a micro example of B do have versus have do B.
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Perry Maughmer: Right? Now you've asked yourself, am I willing to do what's required? And theoretically you've answered yourself and said yes. Now, what do you need? You need people close to you who will tell you the truth. You need to go share this with other people who will tell you the truth. Now, these people may be people that care about you. Some of the people that care about you may not be able to tell you the truth. They maybe can't tell you the truth because you don't have that kind of relationship. They don't want to hurt your feelings. They feel awkward. You want somebody who could be radically candid with you. Now, that's based on the book by Kim Scott. And there are four the two axes for this are challenged directly, care deeply. So imagine I've drawn four quadrants, and I have on one axis is challenged directly.
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Perry Maughmer: The other is care deeply. If radical candor is where there's both of those, I care deeply. I challenge directly. If I only challenge directly and I don't care deeply, that's called obnoxious aggression. If I do neither, it's manipulative insincerity. And the one where we see a lot is I care deeply, but I don't challenge directly. That's ruinous empathy because that's where I'm not going to tell you the truth because I don't want to feel bad. It makes me feel bad to tell you things you don't want to hear. Again. You need people in your life that will tell you the truth. Now, these may be friends. They may be family. They may be a mentor. It may be a coworker. You need to find these people.
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Perry Maughmer: You need two or three of them because you've created for yourself a plan to get something that you want. And you've said, yes, I'm willing to do this. Now, you need people in your life who will tell you if you're doing it. And you need to be ready for feedback on this. You need to ask these people for their willingness to give you feedback. Right now, feedback is the scary thing. A couple of things to think about in terms of feedback. You need to select somebody that you trust and respect and ensure they understand how to give feedback, how you want feedback, and that they have the necessary insights and the access to the information to help you. You have to be very specific in your request for feedback. You can't just say, Would you give me feedback on this? Think it through. All right, so ask for specific areas that you want on your performance that you're seeking feedback on, and then also talk to them about the type of feedback you're looking for based on how you can best process it. This is an agreement because this is all happening. This isn't at work. This is you personally.
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Perry Maughmer: You can be as specific, and you should be very specific. And you need to think about how do you best receive feedback? In what environment? Is it direct? Is it indirect? Is it written? Is it spoken? Do the want them to send you an email. Do you need to think about it before you respond? Think through all those things. I would even argue you should do your own evaluation in advance of your performance so you have something to compare it to. And the best thing to do from a feedback perspective is to adopt the mindset of a scientist. Think about this as a series of experiments. My processes explore, experiment, evolve. Think of it as an experiment.
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Perry Maughmer: Think about it as getting data. That all of the feedback you're getting is data. Here's the wonderful thing about this particular scenario. It's different at work when you're getting feedback at work. But in this one, more than any other time, you don't have to do anything with all the feedback. I received some great information one time I was doing an assessment and the coach I was working with said, hey, I want you to get a red highlighter, a green highlighter, and a yellow highlighter. And all of the feedback you get, I want you to go through and highlight the stuff that you want to do something about in green, then the stuff you want to consider yellow, and the stuff that you want to ignore. Put highlight in red because it's your choice. You don't have to do something with all the feedback. That's why I would always have more than one person give you feedback, because you want to see from the standpoint of data integrity. All right, if I've got three to five people who have given me feedback, is there a constant theme that all of them are mentioning? Because if there is, then that's going to be more attractive to me. That's going to be something. Okay, well, if all five of these people notice that, there's got to be some validity to it. But if only one person mentions something, I may or may not pay as much attention to that.
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Perry Maughmer: And so you have to own this process if you want this life, if you want to create a life you don't want to retire from, you want to be very explicit around the process. Now, so we've got through steps one, write down the life you want to live. Step two, determine what you'd have to do to live that life. Step three, ask yourself, are you willing to do what's required? Now, step four is keep repeating the process until during step three, you hear a resounding yes. So remember, am I willing to do what's required? There's a difference between commitment and interest. You want to be committed to this, not interested in it, because it's going to be hard work. By the way, this is why most people don't want to do this, because everybody wants to do step one. They want to write down the life they want to live. They want to envision it, dream about it, all those things. But they don't want to do the work because it's work right? You can't get anything in life without work. Everything takes effort. That's all.
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Perry Maughmer: Be realistic, right? When you when you do this first one, write down the life you want to live. Please do me a favor. Do it within context of what you're capable of. This isn't like Wobagon. We're not all above average, and that's okay. But you still can create a life you don't want to retire from. Just make sure it's realistic in context of what you're willing to do. So those two things are really connected. There's skills and abilities and resources. There's what I want, and then there's my willingness to engage and do the work. And as long as all of those things line up, I got a shot. But you're running a marathon, not a sprint. This is not something you're going to do for a week. This is something you're saying again, I've always said this about strategies need to be sustainable and scalable.
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Perry Maughmer: This is a sustainability thing. This has to be sustainable. You have to look at the things you're willing to do. If you're going to do this, what's required. I want you to think about, will I do this? Am I committed to doing this for ten years? Am I committed to doing this for ten years? Can I see myself getting up every day and doing what I'm writing down here for ten years? And if you're not willing to do that, that's perfectly okay. There's no judgment involved here. I just want people to have ownership of what they're doing and be intentional. Own your life. Nobody else is making you do anything. Then the last step, fucking do something. Like, take action.
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Perry Maughmer: Do something. Step one, whatever it is, whatever those steps are, do something. Do something every day. Take action. You cannot think your way into a new way of acting. You have to act your way into a new way of thinking. There's only so far your brain is going to carry you. Do not get enamored with thinking and creating plans and strategies. It's a waste of time. Once you have an idea of direction and you've sketched it out, do it. Because I got news for you. The plan is going to change once you start doing it. And that's okay. It needs to. Because as Mike Tyson famously said, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face.
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Perry Maughmer: And where that came from was and I forget the gentleman's name who had the quote, it's about strategy is that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Because you're creating the plan in the vacuum of your own head. Everything works perfectly then everything does not work perfectly in the damn world. Shit goes wrong, that's okay. You got to be ready for that. But that also means that the thing you want, the life you want, has to be meaningful to you. It has to mean something to you. So you're willing to do the. Work. Because if it doesn't, at the first sign of hard work, you'll stop. At the first sign of failure, you'll stop. You'll just go back to the thing you had again. That's fine. Just make it what you want. Own your life, whatever that means to you.
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Perry Maughmer: Own your life, because you do, whether you admit it to yourself or not. All right, so I'm going to wrap up with a couple of quotes. The first one is by Eleanor Roosevelt. I could not at any age be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive, and one must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life. Henry David Thoreau said, go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined. And then finally, George Elliott said, it's never too late to be what you might have been. It's never too late to be what you might have been. I hope that everybody takes something away from this. I went through five steps, and very roughly, they are. Write down the life you want. Write down the plan of how you would have to do that. Ask yourself if you're willing to commit to what's required.
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Perry Maughmer: Repeat the process until during step three, you hear a resounding yes. And then five, do something. Take action. Move forward. March that direction. Create it tomorrow. It doesn't take forever. Creating the life you don't want to retire from starts tomorrow. Actually, I'm recording this at 1030 in the morning. It starts later today. It can start at lunch. Micro decisions. Micro actions. One of my favorite quotes of all times is Mother Teresa. There are no great things, only small things done with great love.
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Perry Maughmer: Your life is not about huge moments. Your life is an accumulation of a bunch of small moments. Small decisions. I call micro decisions. The micro decisions you make every day, every hour, end up being your life. You have to be intentional. You have to own them. It's a wondrous and huge responsibility. It is not bad, it is not heavy, it is not negative. It is awesome because you have the capacity to decide at any moment what you're going to do and who you're going to be. Please don't waste it. Now remember, everybody can. Most people won't. Very few do. The only question I have is, are you going to be one of those relentless few who explore, experiment and evolve so that you can have a positive impact on the people that you care about?
[0:33:36]
Perry Maughmer: If your answer is yes, then you're already leading. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart, because the world needs what you have to offer and we need it now. Take care of yourself, take care of each other, and I hope to see you back in the lab soon.
