Book Forewords/Thought Leader Perspectives
Few books have multiple Forewords, yet Your Retirement Quest has is fortunate to include the perspectives of three prominent thought leaders with expertise in areas critical to life and retirement planning. Dave Ulrich has been ranked the #1 Management Educator and Guru by BusinessWeek, and was named the most influential person in Human Resources by HR Magazine for three years. Throughout his career at Right Management, Doug Matthews has helped thousands manage career and life transitions. Tony Schwartz is a leading authority on developing and sustaining the energy we need to live our lives fully and the New York Times best-selling author.
Retire Retirement
I am generally not affected by my birthdays or the prospect of aging. But, when I hit 55 a few years ago, something felt off-kilter. After a few weeks, I realized that this was the age at which my father retired. He left over 30 years of government service to pursue other passions. He and my mom traveled and spent time with grandchildren, and he spent 2 to 3 hours a day 5 days most weeks distributing surplus or day-old food from grocery stores to homeless shelters and food kitchens. His retirement years were meaningful to him because he filled them with good works. I struggled to decide if my professional work was providing me with meaning in similar ways or if I should "retire" and shift more time to family and volunteer work. While I have chosen to continue professional works, my father taught me by example that we need to redefine retirement.
This excellent guidebook by Alan Spector and Keith Lawrence offers insights, assessments, and cases of how to prepare for and deal with inevitable retirement. They present some startling statistics that capture the scope of retirement challenges:
- 10,000 people a day will retire!
- Most people spend less time planning for retirement than for a two week vacation.
- The average retiree spends 43 hours each week watching TV.
- Retiring is as stressful as getting married, losing your job, or having a close family member become ill.
- The highest suicide rate in the US for any segment of the population is men over 70; 50% higher than the suicide rate for teenagers.
- Only 35% of retirees have a written plan for the future finances.
- The average person today has an average of 1.5 friends compared to three a decade ago.
- Only 27% of retirees do community service.
- Less than 4% of retirees invest more than 4 hours per week helping others.
These data suggest that we need to rethink our models and approaches to retirement (Tammy Erickson claimed the clever phrase, "retire retirement").
While many leaders are focusing on Generation Y employees, we need to remember that the "bonus year" employees (those employees who may retire at 60 and live into their 80s) have enormous experience and years of productivity ahead of them. Wise companies will find ways to continue to engage this workforce. Mature employees may continue to contribute to their organizations by mentoring others, by working part time, and by bringing lessons of history to bear on the problems of tomorrow.
But, for those who chose to retire, the message is clear: find meaning. In the last few years, Wendy Ulrich (wife and psychologist) and I, who are confessed meaning junkies, have culled many disciplines to identify how people create meaning. Meaning is generally not randomly discovered or found by wandering around; it is intentionally created and fashioned by explicit and thoughtful actions.
Simply stated, retirees who create meaning will have more abundant lives than those who do not. At my father's funeral, hundreds of people showed up, because they had a meaningful experience with my dad, and he with them. He knew the life challenges of the manager of the local produce department in the grocery store; he cared for those in need; he wrote thousands of letters of support to those he met; he gave flowers to the bank tellers. He created a meaningful life.
In our work to discover the "why" of work, we found seven factors that shape a meaningful experience. These seven factors overlay perfectly with the 10 secrets Spector and Lawrence reveal and the fulfilling retirement model they propose. As people prepare for retirement, they need to answer seven questions (see The Why of Work):
- Identity: Who am I? What are the strengths I bring to my bonus years and how can I use those strengths to strengthen others? (Secret #6 Mindset)
- Relationships: Who do I travel with? Who are the friends I will connect with who will bring joy and meaning to my life in my family and social network? (Secret #7 Team Effort)
- Environment: How do I organize my retirement setting? What values will I bring into my retirement lifestyle? How will I build my physical setting to complement my emotional desires? (Secret #4 Planning)
- Challenge: What challenges will I continue to work on that are easy, energizing, and enjoyable to me? (Secret #1 Freedom; Secret #10 Time)
- Learning and resilience: How will I continue to grow and learn and recover from the inevitable mistakes along the way? (Secret #8 Action; Secret #9 Resilience)
- Delight: Where will I find fun and joy along my bonus year journey? (Secret #2 More Than Money)
These questions are as relevant for Gen Y as they are for the bonus year retirees. This retirement guidebook is a fantastic roadmap for answering these questions so that those who retire will continue to find meaning that creates abundance. The ideas in Your Retirement Quest are simple, but magical; the cases are compelling and personal; the exercises are insightful and useful.
This is a great book. Some, like my father, stumble into retirement and are able to create the meaning they seek. Others need roadmaps to lead us into this journey so that we can make the bonus years a windfall of opportunity and meaning. When I do choose to shift from my present full time professional interests to pursue other activities, I hope that I can keep in mind the clear counsel in this excellent guidebook.
Dave Ulrich
Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
Partner, The RBL Group (www.rbl.net)
Planning Your Second Life
In my career at Right Management, I have had the opportunity to work directly and indirectly with thousands of our client companies' employees who have been dealing with major career and life transitions. I have found no more challenging situation than that of a company's most experienced employees moving toward the end of their careers and through their transition into retirement.
It is in that regard that Your Retirement Quest stands as the valuable and authoritative resource; assisting people who are wrestling with retirement decisions on every front of their lives. We tend to think of retirement decisions only as financial in nature when in fact, as Your Retirement Quest so comprehensively outlines, there are actually 10 secrets for creating and living a fulfilling retirement, with finances being only one aspect.
The career and life transition ahead of the most experienced employees affects employers as well. Forty percent or more of the current workforce are contemplating retirement but would be willing to work on a more flexible basis - yet employers, in general, are not proactively engaging this vital talent even as skill shortages will soon become a reality.
The one constant I have found to be most helpful in any transition, especially the significant move into retirement, is the value of planning. This is true for both the employee and the employer. This book, therefore, is for everyone. The practical approach provides a simple yet holistic way to define our own individual "second lives;" helping ensure that each person can define a purpose and plan for his or her life, particularly as he or she moves closer to the major life transition that is retirement. This process promises new beginnings; don't leave home without it!
Doug Matthews
President and Chief Operating Officer, Right Management
Retiring Smart
We boomers never really believed we'd get older – much less old – but the evidence is increasingly undeniable. Ten thousand of us are retiring every day. However much we may have looked forward to a time in life when we didn't have to get up and commute to the office every morning, precious few of us have spent much time thinking about what to do with ourselves when that day finally arrives.
No wonder one-third of all men over 65 years old end up depressed within a year of retiring. Work has been the primary source of meaning and the biggest occupier of daytime hours for many men and women now retiring. Filling those hours doesn't happen automatically. As Janis Joplin, the consummate boomer-who-never-grew-up, once put it, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
I've spent most of my adult life reading, thinking, writing and speaking about what it takes to live a productive, satisfying life, on and off the job. A raft of data now supports the view that in order to thrive, we need to systematically build and renew four separate sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
This is true no matter what our age, and it's especially so as we get older and can no longer take it for granted that we'll have the energy we need to live the life we want. Maintaining a full reservoir of energy across each of the four key dimensions requires a high level of intentionality. In purely practical terms, that requires building highly specific rituals into your life to assure that you translate your intentions around your retirement into behaviors and practices that stick.
Keith Lawrence and Alan Spector are both retired, but only in the most technical sense of the word. Both of them work out regularly, volunteer in several nonprofits, travel widely, and are deeply involved with their families. Somehow, they've also found time to write the book you're now holding, Your Retirement Quest, which provides a rich roadmap to assuring that during these years, you're not only financially secure, but also healthy, happy, intellectually challenged, and focused on what matters most to you.
Most thinking people do about retirement is around financial planning, and most of us don't even do that very well. Lawrence and Spector start there, but then cast a much wider net. In this book, they'll take you through the five predictable stages of what they call "the retirement journey" and then define the ten key elements to assure that this stage of your life is rich and satisfying.
The ground of a successful retirement is your physical well-being. Most of us pay far too little attention to our health throughout our lives. As Lawrence and Spector point out, ninety per cent of Americans get less than 30 minutes of exercise per day. As we age, we truly begin to pay the price. Your energy is your most precious resource. Taking care of your body becomes critical not just as a protection against heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses, but also as a means to assuring that you can do everything you want to do.
This book is a roadmap to the path ahead. Awareness is always the first step, and Your Retirement Quest first lays out what you can expect at each juncture. The key is to develop a plan that encompasses all dimensions of your life before you actually retire. If you are already retired, then this is an opportunity to consider putting more intentional structure into your days.
Regardless of where you are in this process today, this book will help you design a more fulfilling path for all the tomorrows ahead.
Tony Schwartz
Founder and CEO of The Energy Project
Author of four New York Times bestsellers (most recent: The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance)