Overcoming Fear of Retirement

It was about ten years ago that my vague dreams of a very early retirement started crystallising into an intention. A year later I had a deal in my pocket, and a year after that, just before my fiftieth birthday, I left Shell and embarked on a life with a major anchor removed. I have not regretted the choice for an instant.

The lack of regret does not mean that everything turned out as I had envisioned. My ideas of lazy days in the Portuguese sun were always a bit of a mirage. Then I separated, found a new partner and new energy, and eventually found myself on a different continent in a bustling city. One preconceived notion of retirement, of being open to see where life led, did come to fruition, but in a more radical way than I had considered.

I encounter a range of reactions when I tell people that I departed from a stable job at such a young age. Many are envious and admiring, a few are a bit dismissive, and some are just baffled. At the time, a few people tried to talk me out of it, notably my mum. Her stated logic was about my need to stay active mentally to avoid early ageing, but I suspect part of her unstated logic was to protect her nest egg and her ability to show off about her achieving son to her friends.

There are some common themes among reactions. While asking me questions, people are inevitably thinking about their own situations. The most common thought whirring through people’s heads starts with “I could never do that, because…” The most common question, and one I still struggle to answer, is “What is it that you actually do all day?”

Taking account of all the reasons people claim they could not retire so early, I have come up with five broad categories. I classify them as fears, concerns about what might happen. Some are clearly stated, while others are obscured or even unconscious. The fears overlap somewhat. I actually think only the first of the five is fully valid. I believe the others are usually excuses propping up delusions or denials.

The first fear is of poverty. This is the valid one, and the one I can’t help much with. Of course most of us live to a great age nowadays and we need some financial security. Governments and firms can afford ever less generous pensions, while our kids need our support ever longer in the age of spiralling house prices and lifetime student debt. Few people can have the luxury of even considering sacrificing a stable income without taking a reckless gamble. I was blessed with that luxury.

However, often it is those few who are most strident about the other fears. And perhaps the minority who could consider retiring is somewhat larger than we might assume. While you do need money for any quality of life, you can certainly live well in a smaller home. Not all of us have kids, and some kids have good prospects and others might do better without so much support. There is paid work available for people in late middle age nowadays. Before using this fear to conclude that retirement is off the table, it is certainly worth doing some sums.

The second fear is of ageing. I find this the most misguided of all the fears, but also perhaps the most prevalent. It is where my mum started. I think what happens is people look at the retired people they encounter, who of course are usually old and often infirm, and they project themselves into that existence and conclude it is not what they want. This is plainly silly. It is Father Time that makes you old and getting sick that makes you infirm. Retirement does not accelerate it, it happens at its own pace.

Of course staying active is good for physical and mental health. But there is no reason at all for becoming inactive on retirement, indeed rather the opposite. Diverse opportunities for paid and unpaid work and for hobbies are truly abundant. I believe I am much more healthy that I would have been if I had still been grinding away for Shell. My mind is freed into more places than before, and my body appreciates better sleep patterns and proper exercise. I have many fewer aches and fewer illnesses than I did before. I believe that would be true for almost anyone, and this fear should simply be discarded as misplaced.

The next fear is of boredom. This is usually almost as groundless. It lies behind the question about what I actually do all day. Now I admit I might have been a bit lucky. If was in Portugal all the time I might get a bit bored occasionally, though I am sure there would be compensations. But even there it would be a true failure of imagination not to be able to find things to do that are fulfilling, and in New York the list is endless.

Activities are important, but start with the basics. I love the first two hours of the day, with a languid start, companionship, savouring breakfast and coffee. I love the chance to read and relax and reflect each day. I recall when I first started attending church regularly, how the quiet reflective hour became an oasis from the pace of the rest of my life. Well, now I have that oasis all the time, at Church, at home or anywhere else. Then, with any sort of open and curious attitude, the chances to study, or volunteer, or work, or just bum around with others, or travel, or walk, or read or write or sing, I promise you’d find something.

Actually, for most I suspect the fear of boredom is really a fear of dull activities imposed by a partner or others. It is fair enough not to be enthused by hours of babysitting, or hanging around shopping malls or coffee mornings, and there might be an unspoken expectation in a marriage that this is what life would entail. This is not really fear of boredom, but fear of self, of which more below.

The fourth fear is of irrelevance. This one is all about status and ego. It is amazing how many people really think that their firm could not carry on without them. What rubbish! Just look at these wonderful demonstrating kids in Florida and the sad people in politics – those of us over fifty should just get out of the way! If we really need to see our names near the top of organisation charts, or underlings to make us feel important, then we have an ego problem, and, once again, a fear of self. Are we frightened of exposing ourselves as a failure, to our partner, kids, parents, self? Well, we had better address that, ideally before we retire.

So the fifth and deepest fear is of self, and it often lies behind the other fears. Work is a wonderful way to procrastinate, to stay busy enough not to have to think too hard, or to avoid true communication within a stale partnership. Most of us have some fear of self, and most of us spend our lives running away from it. But of course that fear can be dealt with, and sooner rather than later, because it tends to only become stronger if left to fester. Confronting the possibility of retirement can be a great starting point for necessary healing.

So those are the five fears. I think I have a degree of all of them myself, but all have been reduced by retirement, so retirement has turned out to act as a healer rather than a harbinger. The same might be true of you. If you can get beyond the first fear, I have real doubts that any of the others should hold you back, unless you really, really enjoy your work. That is you enjoy every day, every meeting, every early morning alarm, every encounter with your boss, every foregone opportunity for culture or reflection.

And of course it is healthy to consider the fears even if retirement seems way off, because nowadays no job is truly secure and none of us know what lies around the corner. Addressing these fears as part of a voluntary process is far better than being confronted with them under duress and with the ego taking an additional battering.

Ten years ago, fate presented me with some vague dreams, and somehow I managed to put one foot in front of the other and follow them up, confronting fears along the path. I feel truly blessed that I did.    

What makes great sport?

Last weekend was superbowl weekend. A majority of Americans and a minority of everyone else were glued to their TV’s. Admittedly, some of those were more interested in Justin Timberlake or Tide adverts than the game. But some of us watched the game, every snap of it. And wow, what a game it was.

I was really surprised by the pundit reaction the day after the game. The consensus seemed to be that it was one of the most exciting games ever, but that it was far from the best, because the defences of both teams did not play well enough. I beg to differ. I saw many fantastic defensive plays. I also saw many other excellent attempts at defensive plays that were trumped by perfect offence. That is the way the league has set up the rules – perfect offence will usually win out, unless the defence take reckless gambles that ultimately cost more than they gain. For me, that was what we saw last Sunday, two strong and disciplined defences that somehow nullified part of two perfect offences but could not stop every play.

For me, this was not far off a perfect game, and perhaps not far off perfect sport in terms of its entertainment. It helped that I was partisan, because that always adds a dimension. As it happens, my team lost, but even immediately after the game I cared little about that, such was my awe of the spectacle.

So that got me thinking about what makes perfect sport. I qualify this in a couple of ways. First, I am thinking about watching rather than playing. For participating in sport, there would be an entirely separate debate. Next, I am thinking about watching on TV or another device rather than watching live in person. I love to attend live sports, an indeed at its best there is no substitute to being there, but a debate about watching live would bring in extra factors, such as proximity and practicality. Some sports are generally hopeless live – golf is a good example, because unless you are a caddy or walking with the players you are constantly hacking through mud to get some sort of view of some shots.

I came up with four factors that together create great TV spectacles. To an extent the factors overlap, and some elements could apply to multiple factors. But as a model I find it a reasonable starting point.

The first factor is intensity. It has to be apparent that the outcome really matters to the players and spectators. All the players should be clearly giving their full effort to win. This intensity has to be maintained throughout the event, not just ramped up for the last few minutes. And intensity is ruined by any suspicion that a contest might not be clean. Sadly, most athletics and cycling are now tainted in my eyes by the potential for doping, and cricket carries a similar risk because of gambling. Sports like wrestling, with partially fixed outcomes, are also doomed.

The second factor is athletic beauty. Some plays have to take the breath away. There has to be a sense of awesome excellence that is beautiful to behold, something that obviously takes unlikely talent and practice to execute. For it to be called a sport rather than a game, part of this must be physical, involving the brain and also other parts of the body. So chess or poker lose out on this criterion. So do snooker or darts, they are not physically demanding enough, even if the ability to perform reliably can be awesome.

The third factor is drama and tension. There have to be sustained times during the game where we are short of breath, glued to our sets, and with our minds racing through a wide range of eminently possible outcomes. Ideally, these should often build up over seconds and minutes or even over hours. The tension has to obvious among participants and spectators, and the most successful players should be the ones able to navigate the emotions involved. There cannot be long periods lacking such drama. It helps to be a partisan to be able to capture the tension. Baseball and cricket share slow build ups of tension before explosions of drama, but these periods can seem deadly dull to those without an interest in the outcome.

The fourth factor is an element of strategy, where the brain is tested as well as the body. This is much easier to achieve in team sports, where a key element of strategy is to optimise team performance. The best teams should be able to transcend what appears to be attainable by the individuals involved. Team sports should enable specialisation among players, and also open up a variety of different ways to win. Such sports also tend to evolve over time, as new strategies emerge.

The best NFL games combine intensity, athletic beauty, drama, tension and strategy as well as any sport I know. If the teams are well matched, have different strengths, and where I am rooting for one to win the combination is superb, even more so with the added intensity of the playoffs. The beauty of a perfect pass or a diving catch, the strategy behind play calling, the drama of so many close finishes and rules favouring risk taking, and the intensity behind every play – the NFL has every element required for compulsive viewing. It is a shame the game is so complex and takes a while to fully understand, but part of that is necessary for its depth of strategy. A bigger shame is the danger involved for players, including brain damage from concussions. I think a way can be found to radically reduce that without losing any of the magic.

What about other sports? Rugby Union can be fantastic at the highest level. It helps that rule makers started to favour beautiful attacking play – thirty years ago I recall Bill Beaumont uttering the commentary “in international rugby, the purpose should always be to boot the ball off the pitch whenever possible”. Rugby League, Aussie Rules and Hurling all share similar positive elements and can be gripping as well.

What about soccer? It is certainly athletically beautiful. There is often drama and tension, and strategy too. However, too many games lack intensity, either because the teams are ill matched, or because one team is trying to prevent good play rather than create it. Rules could be improved to reduce this aspect.

Cricket and baseball are wonderful games, but without partisanship they really lack drama. Many games also lack intensity, either because of inadequate consequences for players or because they are so long. Long form games have their place for aficionados, but short form games can widen their appeal.

Basketball lacks strategy for me. Ice Hockey has everything, but is flawed because it moves faster than the eye can follow – I need replay for everything.

Then there are the individual sports. Tennis too often either lacks intensity or becomes such a war of attrition that it compromises the other factors. Golf lacks intensity, with the exception of the Ryder Cup. For me, athletics lacks either intensity or strategy depending on the event, and swimming rarely has drama except in relays. Skiing is beautiful but lacks everything else.

Some sports that we see rarely appear to have promise. I enjoy volleyball and badminton, especially the women’s games, which seem to encompass more strategy. There must be other wonderful sports out there if we only got a chance to see them. I guess one reason we don’t is that broadcasters realise that familiarity is important to understand strategy while partisanship helps drama, and both these factors can be lacking from small doses of coverage.

This model certainly helped me reason out why I love some sports more than others. Perhaps something similar could help rule makers improve their sports. It certainly helped me understand why the superbowl last week was almost unmatched as a sporting spectacle in my experience. I could not tear myself away from the beginning to the end. The only thing missing was the right result.

It's the Customer, Stoopid

I had a boss once who had a single catch phrase. He was a Belgian, recruited from outside into Shell during a period of chaotic mismanagement. He was comically incompetent, a fact that was obvious to everyone he came across. He was a kind and well-meaning man, but in the end he contributed to the destruction of many careers and the ill health of many of the victims, including me. I can’t blame him, he did his best, but I still harbour resentment for those who recruited him.

His catchphrase was the customer. Whatever anyone said or argued, his riposte, when forced to comment, was something like “but what does it do for the customer”, or “I miss a focus on the customer” or something like that. It reminded me of Peter Sellers in Being There, one of my favourite films of all time, in which an uneducated gardener rose to be US president by spouting homely gardening wisdom.

How we laughed. How we mocked. How we suffered. But now I have come to see how he was somehow right. Jean-Claude, I apologise. For, at a deep level, it really is all about the customer.

You can imagine our frustration. We would have an excellent plan to select better locations, or streamline a supply chain, or motivate station operators. These were important, even critical, and had great commercial justification. We argued until the ends of the earth that they really were about the customer – we were giving customers more convenient places to buy, or lower prices when we passed on cost savings, or stronger service. But actually the customer benefits really were by-products at best.

This truth was obscure to me, and to most of our leaders. But the writing was on the wall. Our customer offer was fundamentally weaker than that of a supermarket or unmanned station, and gradually more and more competitors in more and more markets exposed that and customers defected. We could have matched or beaten these offers, we had the assets and the opportunity, but the customer was not sufficiently at the centre of our thinking. The same is true of 99% of businesses.

The exceptions shine like a beacon. Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea, died last month. Apple in its early days brought joy and value to customers – how sad to see the recent scandals, including the shameful one of deliberately weakening batteries: Apple is now like everyone else, a cash cow waiting to be one day usurped. Uber is another example with flawed execution. Facebook and Google both started centred on the customer, but both have now become greedy and lazy – how can maximising advertising revenue really be in the interest of a customer?

Amazon still has the magic, to the great credit of Jeff Bezos. The markets sort of understand it. Last year, when Amazon bought Whole Foods, the stock price of other supermarket chains tanked. Last week Amazon announced a tie up that could lead it to entering health care, and the incumbent stock prices fell. All the incumbents are putting other priorities ahead of the customer, and are vulnerable.

Monopolists and protected businesses rarely truly focus on customers. Visit any bank, or hospital, or government office, and despair. The maxim follows at micro as well as macro level. My dentist, and local branches of Trader Joe’s and Panera are great places to visit. An individual manager can make a difference.

Why do we not see this clearly? It is because the truth only emerges in the very long term, and there are plenty of ruses and distractions along the way. Customers can be ill informed or biased and tend to be averse to switching. Regulators and investors can protect incumbents. Customer-led innovation requires genius to identify and execute – the Blue Ocean strategy model is one small enabler. Incumbents can keep things ticking along with promotions and other distractions. As an incumbent, it is almost impossible to change culture and cannibalise a cash cow, so a milking and blocking strategy actually makes sense.

Now let us extend the brilliance of Jean-Claude to the ways of running society. Autocracy and theocracy protect cronies. Communism mistakes workers for customers so it ran out of steam. Capitalist democracy should be for its customers so it is the best choice. But just as most corporations forget or ignore this, and get away with it for a long time, the same is true of capitalist democracy.

The distractions and ruses are similar. Parties think they are working for citizens, but more often the citizen is in reality a secondary concern. Citizens are certainly ill informed and biased and averse to switching, and prone to lapping up promotional short-term offers of dubious lasting value. Regulators and investors certainly protect incumbents, and are tools that leaders use to work against citizens, often under some cloud of misinformation. And, just like in business, it is hard to innovate and stand out from the pack and have a blue ocean appeal to citizens and execute so that is heard. For most incumbent parties, milking and blocking seems to make sense.

Just like in business, some customer leaders break through, others are not too bad, and some positively hurt their customers. Thatcher in 1979 started something disastrous, but her initial appeal, to free citizens from the tyranny of Scargill and winters of discontent, was customer based. There is a long way to go, but Trudeau and Macron appear to have an authentic interest in citizens and some ideas to sustain support. Blair first won power through focusing on public services. An interesting article in The Economist this week suggests that this approach is gaining ground again in many countries, after years of being blunted by the chorus against any taxation. In a less democratic context, Lee Kuan Yew’s manifesto was customer centred, and its benefits sustain. Arguably, much of China’s policy in the last 30 years has been designed to benefit citizens.

Then, at the other extreme, are neo-liberals. In the great wrong turning of 1980, Thatcher and Reagan used the need to disempower the unions to launch a regime that mistook financial markets, firms and their bosses for customers. That regime persists today. Citizens do need jobs, economies need innovative firms, and booming financial markets support pensions, but this is not a customer led approach. If it was, it would value quality of life along with GDP, it would address equality of opportunity and redress for losers, it would adequately fund public services, and it would regulate firms to avoid financial crises and abuse of employees.

Among its many sins, the Trump administration in the US takes this to a new level. And also in common with other sins, the greater villain may be the Republican Party, which uses the incompetence of the administration as cover for pro corporate, pro wealthy, anti citizen policy.

The tax bill small print and the retreat from regulating firms are the obvious examples, together with the lack of any policy promoting competition (indeed, the opposite, for example via trade policy). But smaller examples are everywhere. The consumer financial protection bureau has been gutted – how can that benefit the citizen? A bill to require airlines to highlight luggage charges before the last screens of their purchasing websites was removed “because there were not enough benefits”. Maybe I’m missing something, but I can see only benefits. Of course, a root cause is that politicians fear their donors more than their voters. The money from the donors allows them to dupe the voters, at least for a while.

So let us pray for the Amazon party, a group than can open the eyes of citizens with some blue ocean. I don’t actually think this is impossible. Most current centrist parties are just like we were at Shell, supporting our own vested interests and tolerating policies that work against most citizens. But it does not have to be like that. Some mayors are showing the way – on balance I though Bloomberg did a good job, balancing policies offering immediate gains to citizens with others that were more courageous because the benefits would come more slowly.

I wish I had listened to Jean Claude, flawed oracle that he was. It really is that simple. In a generation or two, humanity will learn that too.