I retired in 2010. I say “retired” – one week I had a company to run and the next I didn’t. There was no long wind-down, no plan, no roadmap. Just a Tuesday morning with nothing to do.
If you’re reading this because you’re about to be in the same position, or you already are, here’s the thing nobody told me. The hard part isn’t the money. There is a great deal of advice about the money. The hard part is Wednesday.
All the advice you’ll be offered is financial
Every piece of retirement guidance that came my way in 2010 was about drawdown, annuities and whether to downsize. All of it necessary. None of it about what to do when you wake up.
That isn’t a criticism of financial advisers. It’s that “will I have enough?” is a far easier question than “what am I for now?” – so it’s the one that gets answered.
So I picked something absurdly specific
I decided to walk the South West Coast Path. All 630 miles of it, Minehead to Poole, past every cove and caravan park in the West Country. There was no good reason. I just needed a reason to put my boots on that wasn’t “exercise is good for you”. I set out to walk it for charity but honestly I walked it for myself too. To think and gain some purpose without the job title.
It took 47 days and each day I walked with a different person – a friend or ex colleague and without fail at some point on the path they asked ‘so Graham, what are you going to do now?’
And somewhere along the trail – in the salt air, the wind, the cliffs and the crashing waves I realised this was not the end of work but the beginning of a new dream.
Pick the version of your idea that has an edge to it. Not “learn an instrument” but “play this piece at my daughter’s wedding”. The specific one survives contact with a wet February. The vague one doesn’t.
It won’t look like progress for a long time
For about two years, nothing happened that anybody would have photographed. But eventually the dream arrived because in my late fifties I got fit enough that climbing a mountain stopped looking ridiculous. My dream was to climb Mont Blanc not Everest but then it got interesting.
What’s your dream? I mean it as an actual question — there’s a form, and I read every one that comes in.
