“When the person you’re meeting is even later than you are.”
“When the boss says thank you.”
The point is that work gives us a place to learn and discover so many new things about our lives and our world. We don’t hire our coworkers! So there are diverse ages, backgrounds, experiences, and thoughts that we don’t always get from friends and family.
Retiring slices off this learning, seeing, and experiencing the stimulation of our world.
Story
The pacemaker was invented in 1899 when J. A. MacWilliam reported in the British Medical Journal the discovery that an electric impulse to the human heart causes a “ventricular contraction”—in other words, you could make a heart beat by zapping it with power! In the 1920s an early version of the pacemaker appeared. It plugged in to your heart . . . and plugged into the wall. Which was great! Except that when the power went out . . . so did you. Still, they used this early version to revive a stillborn infant in 1928 in Sydney, Australia. After ten minutes the baby’s heart beat of its own accord. Suddenly, there was potential. Between the 1930s and World War II pacemaker development went silent. No improvements, no new technologies, no commercialization. Why? They became taboo. People thought pacemakers “revived the dead” and didn’t like the idea of tampering with nature. Must have seen too many zombie movies. Eventually, in the 1960s, fully implantable pacemakers were popularized by a company called Medtronic.
Why do I tell you all this? Because Medtronic has a great story. What’s their mission? What’s their story? What are they trying to do? Here’s an edited version:
To contribute to human welfare by alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life.
Impressive. Beautiful. A great story. If you work at Medtronic, you can probably get behind that. “I help extend life and restore health.” And they make it easy to get behind it, too. The company brings its story to life by printing it on walls throughout the office and having patients read how Medtronic devices touched their lives at big company meetings. Can you imagine how you would feel if an eleven-year-old girl got on stage to read a letter, saying, “Thank you for giving my dad eight extra years to live after his heart attack. I got to take photos and make memories that I wouldn’t have otherwise had”?
I bet the story of your company would really resonate with you.
Every company has a story!
Coke wants to give the world happiness breaks. Harvard Business School is educating leaders who make a difference in the world. Facebook is making the world more connected. Wikipedia is giving the sum of human knowledge to every single person for free. The Red Cross prevents and alleviates human pain and suffering. Google is organizing the world’s information.
Story.
When you’re working you become part of something bigger than yourself. Volunteer at the library and you spread knowledge to the community. Teach at the college and you’re developing productive members of society. Write for the city’s biggest blog and you’re creating community.
What does retiring do?
It chops you out of a productive story. You aren’t part of something bigger than yourself anymore. This hampers your ikigai!
So don’t give up work. You’ll be giving up the Social, Structure, Stimulation, and Story you get every day from being there.
Forget the money.
You’ll lose the 4 S’s, and they are much more important.
8
The dream we all have that is completely wrong
I will never get the chance to ask him about it, but I’m sure the saddest I saw Mr. Wilson was on those final few weeks before he retired. He didn’t want to go. He loved the students, he loved the school, he loved helping kids navigate their paths in life.
The government forced him to give up the thing he wanted most. They took away Monday-morning coffees with the guidance office secretaries, hallway walks at lunch, and the energy from a thousand teenagers every day. They took away his sense of helping kids through family troubles, failing grades, and anxiety about decisions. They took away the things he loved the most.
Mr. Wilson taught me that retirement, as we think of it today, isn’t a dream we actually want. We don’t actually want to do nothing. We just want to do something we love.
Hazel McCallion was ninety-three years old when she decided she would retire from being mayor of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada’s fifth-largest city. That’s after she held the job for more than forty straight years, winning twelve straight elections, and outlasting eight Canadian prime ministers.
Why did she keep going nearly thirty years after “retirement age”?
“There are still challenges,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do. And I want to keep busy.”
We want challenges. Challenges let us contribute a sense of giving, learning, and improving to ourselves and the world. We feel alive. We experience life. We feel like we can do anything.
According to Merriam-Webster, retirement means “withdrawal from one’s position or occupation or from active working life.” In other words, dropping out and going home. Dropping your withered bones off at the beach. What happens when you withdraw from active working life? You idle, which is defined as “to spend time doing nothing.” What happens when you do nothing? You get bored.
According to Merriam-Webster, boredom is “the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest.”
Feeling weary because one is unoccupied.
Is that what you want?
Indonesian author Toba Beta says, “You get old faster when you think about retirement.”
So what’s the dream we all have that is completely wrong?
Retirement.
Fortune magazine published a report saying the two most dangerous years of our lives are the year we’re born . . . and the year we retire.
There’s a reason retirement killed my favorite guidance counselor.
Because we give away our ikigai and we do it to ourselves, with planning, with purpose.
Together with the sudden loss of Social, Structure, Stimulation, and Story, what we find in the barren tundra of retirement is the cold, wet, guilt-drenched thought that this is what we wanted, this is what we worked our whole lives toward, this is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But there is no pot of gold.
Remember the 4 S’s when you’re lost.
The world has far more problems, opportunities, and challenges than it has people like you to do interesting and meaningful work on them. There is so much you can do. There are so many places to go. I know when you look you’ll always find meaty projects and passionate causes you can sink your teeth into.
Just keep learning, keep changing, and keeping growing.
And promise me that you will never retire.
Secret #5
How to Make More Money Than a Harvard MBA
1
What does Harvard do for your salary?
Harvard makes you feel rich.
I walked through campus for two years feeling like I’d been cast as Moneybags in a movie about ruling the world and having it all.
On Harvard’s campus, tall twisting oak trees blow softly in the wind, casting polka-dot shadows over beautiful red-brick buildings, manicured ivy, and rolling lawns. Students ease open thirty-foot-tall carved wooden doors before stepping into marble-tiled libraries. Between classes, students grab made-to-order sushi from the cafeteria before eating with friends on brown leather couches against walls covered with expensive original art.