Shortly after turning 50, I left a leadership role as a Vice President for a large manufacturing operation. At the time, I was not really sure what I would do next. What I did know is that I needed a change. Since then, I have been exploring what is next. What it is not … is retirement. A common definition of retirement is the “the action or fact of leaving one’s job and ceasing to work.” Yes, I left a job. No, I was not going to not work. In fact, since leaving the job, I’ve been working as much … maybe just a different type of work and for different goals. Work has been defined as “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.” No purpose. To me that sounds impossible. There is always a purpose. Helping the community, raising children, improving your golf game, increasing your own knowledge. Something. I initially defined my condition as “semi-retirement.” However, using the definition of retirement, I guess what I was declaring to the world was that “I am procrastinating about not working and being without purpose.” Yikes. I knew that I wasn’t retiring. I still wanted to work. I still have a purpose. I started my own consulting business to feed my passion for helping lead teams through ambiguity and adversity. But I am not just a consultant. There are a lot of other things I want to do. I didn’t know what to call it.
After leaving my job, a friend gave me a book called ‘Second Acts’. The book is filled with examples of individuals that left their jobs to re-invent themselves, often pursuing very different occupations and passions. Many very successfully. This resonated with me. However, there were a few differences in what I was trying to do. First, I was not interested in completely closing the first ‘act’ of my life. There is much about it that I still enjoy and collectively, that ‘act’ is what got me here. Second, to me the concept of ‘acts’ implies a deliberate set of serial events, one ‘act’ leads to the next, and so on. For me, what is next is an exploration that will involve multiple simultaneous ‘acts’. Overlapping, diverging, some ending abruptly … more like a Monty Python sketch than Shakespeare.
What I finally realized is that I am not in a particular stage, such as retirement or semi-retirement. I don’t need to call it anything. Rather, I simply changed my focus, and perhaps my purpose. While the term “Right Turn at 50” may not be a fully accurate encapsulation of this change in purpose, it is as close as I could come. Moreover, it gave me a unique domain name for my website (www.righturnat50.com). Besides, ‘And Now for Something Completely Different’ was already taken. For me, my “Right Turn at 50” includes two key components. First, focus on more ‘right brain’ activities. It may seem silly but leveraging my ‘right brain’ to sell a stock photo for $0.25 can be more satisfying than bringing home a six-figure salary. Second, allocate more time and energy for the ‘right things’. One example of my ‘right things’ is to put the same work into my health as I have done in my career. After all, there is a pretty compelling purpose that it is the right thing to do. Set aside all of the normal benefits of being healthier, it also pays pretty well. With the costs of health care skyrocketing, the financial return from an hour of exercise a day challenges that six-figure salary.
There are ample writings about the new ‘gig economy’ and the impact that it will have on jobs and work. I am not retired … maybe I am “gigged”. I now have multiple jobs with different purposes. I consult. I am a photographer. I blog. I run, travel, do carpentry, hike, volunteer, and so on. The list grows daily. Some pay … some do not. All have purpose. What I know is that leaving a job to pursue other activities and work that provides purpose is not retirement. It is liberating.
