I have been purposefully planning for “retirement” for twenty years after I read the book ” Your Money Or Your Life”, which I have referenced many times throughout this two-year-old blog. That book started me down the road of understanding personal finance as it pertains to my little world of managing my spending and savings rates. For me, it was all about squirreling away financial resources to have enough FU Money and eventually being able to walk away from horrible bosses at will.
There are many definitions of Retirement, and for me, it has changed several times throughout my career. To this day, I still don’t have a simple definition of what my “traditional” retirement will look like.
I do know the difference between the choices of retiring at a certain age and retiring when savings and investments can stand on their own to cover a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle.
When it comes to retirement, would you want to retire when you are financially able to or when you hit a certain age?
Today, I’m pleased with how I engineered my July 2018 “retirement”.
I’ve completed a 6-month decompression and detox phase, and have clarity of what I really retired from.
I retired from a marketing job that I had for seven years, five of which were a lot of fun.
I retired from leading truly outstanding teams and individuals for the past twenty years.
I retired from writing performance reviews for individuals that I coached and guided which had a positive impact and influence on their skills and behavior that will last an entire career. Hopefully, they will pass these habits on to their future direct reports using their own style of influence.
I retired from sitting in conference rooms spending way too much time talking about crappy products that customers don’t want or need. It would have been more fun and productive focusing on increasing our value proposition understanding customer needs and then making decisions and adjustments to create a clear market message. (See Simon Sinek and his Start with” WHY” books and YouTube talks.)
I retired from writing marketing plans that were never read or discussed with senior management but I ran with them anyway, to at the very least, have some momentum. I was never sure why senior managers ask for stuff they never intended to read, comment or implement.
I retired from ineffective, condescending, and micromanaging “managers” who spent their time managing up.
I retired from reporting into complete nincompoops who somehow got through the hiring process.
I retired from “managers” who never made decisions for fear of making the wrong the decision.
I retired from office politics which slowly bled valuable time away from serving customers and increasing margins.
That’s not true. I let the rectal fingerlings, who thrived on the politics, have their way because of my twenty-year FU Money position. I just didn’t care for their game while I focused on my team and customers.
I retired from the “yes-men” and the “mini-mes” that followed their bosses around with a pooper scooper.
I retired from 6:00 am conference calls discussing sales figures that were months old.
I retired from working for egomaniacs who only wanted to hear what they wanted to hear instead of what was happening with customers.
Bottom Line #2.
The short-term pain of accepting the truth is much better than the long-term pain of believing an illusion when it comes to aligning the sales funnel with revenue figures.
So I decided to retire from these things and some really awful managers and truly horrible bosses, who will never make it onto my Leader List.
Bottom Line #3.
I didn’t retire from helping people develop and manufacture therapeutic medicines and vaccines.
I didn’t retire from growing a business while increasing margins and broadening the customer base.
I didn’t retire from working with inclusive leaders.
I didn’t retire from making a difference.
Starting with a new gig, I went back to basics and went back to the future. I took a job that I was promoted away from years ago as an individual contributor helping people develop and manufacture vaccines and medicines.
I could never time the stock market, but my timing for this position is nearly perfect.
I reset my countdown retirement clock to create a sense of urgency to appreciate my contributions to help bring the recent vaccines to the market in record time. (But not many understand that it took us thirty years to set us up for success).
In April 2023, I retired again and eventually will write about that. Right now, I’m busy with a travel bucket list and working on adjusting to increase the quality of my health span and relationships. Stay tuned.
Congrats. Take your time and fully decompress without guilt. I wrote another piece about how to spend 168 hours a week.Perhaps that will help organize your priorities on paper. You’re rebranding efforts are buried in your passions and things that you enjoyed before life got too hectic. I spend nearly two hours a day in the gym or doing yoga. This helped me peel some of the layers back to remember what I used to love to do.
Hi Francis! Great article.
I have just started (3 weeks ago) a sabbatical/mini retirement myself. Truly enjoying it! I anticipate being out of the workforce anywhere from 3 – 6 months while I re-package myself and decide what I want my “next chapter” to look like.
I have worked in the commercial insurance industry for the past 25 years… very doubtful I will want to go back to that.
Any intel or advice on re-packaging oneself would be appreciated – thank you!
Thanks for your comment, Fritz. Yes, I’ve been following your road to FIRE for quite a while on your blog. This particular post became my final step to complete my decompression and detox as my “RE” was forced 200 days earlier than my plan.
So I’m ready to start my next gig when the calendar flips.
Cool title, but I may more than a bit biased. Congrats on the mini-retirement and the lessons learned. I just FIRE’d in June, no need to ever go back. I’m writing a Manifesto about it, too. How cool is that?
Thanks Bob. I was concerned that this post was going to come off as sour grapes as you said. It’s not meant to be. It’s really a proclamation that I will no longer tolerate bad management practices and crappy manager’s awful behavior because I no longer have to.One thing for certain, I would never refer to a bad manager with any reference to a leader. They have no capacity or understand how to lead.
I’ve been a valuable and loyal employee and paid very well for my contributions and will continue that practice for as long as think it’s fun and full of meaning. Our work in biotechnology will have a lasting effect that those behind us will build on.
Thanks for following along the blog and making relative and valuable comments from a different perspective.
Francis,
I have never written anything like what you have here because I always figured that one, it sounds like sour grapes and I have moved on past all the corporate BS and two in fear that people would remember my actions at the companies in a different light and call what I wrote sour grapes and all around BS. But following you line I have retired from managers who said I threw customers out of our laboratories when in fact I paid for them to be there; from managers who said I would not travel to customer sites when I had letter from finance warning that I had exceeded my full year travel budget in Q2; from managers who said I was walking around too much when MBWA was the Harvard Business School model of the year for cross function team building; from managers who said I promised raises to staff members when management 101 says that is the stupidest thing you can do; from managers who ran sexually charged hostile workplaces; from managers who punished my teams for thinking out of the box; from managers who put a dollar value on customer and vendor relationships; from managers who see everything as an us vs. them confrontation; from mangers who turned their backs on doing the right thing or just getting it done so the customer stays a customer; from managers who did not know what a SMART plan was when they put me on a PIP to remain silent all day and work hours transparent to time (I don’t know what language that was translated from and I had 4 languages back then). That’s what I remember and that’s not a list of sour grapes, that’s a list of really bad leadership in a company that somehow I helped run which somehow made a difference in biotechnology and in the process contributed to saving millions, no doubt, of lives. I am proud of what I did, very comfortable and satisfied in what I do now. I have FU money but retirement for the second time is not on the horizon because you should see the look in the eyes of my students when they see a cell for the first time or understand why the leaves drop or realize that what they believe is different than what they know.