Don’t act your age in retirement. Act like the inner young person you have always been JA West
I was reminded of the West quote this week after the England women's football team won the final of Euro 2022. According to midfielder Georgia Stanway, manager Sarina Wiegman told the team to "play for the little girl who wanted to be in your shoes".
I suspect most of us as children had dreams of what we wanted to be or do when we grew up. How many of us took those same dreams into teenage years and eventually adulthood though. When I was at primary school I wanted to be a fighter pilot, influenced by WWII films about "the few", the pilots who flew Spitfires and Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain. As I got older - my eyesight not being good enough for flying - I discovered some artistic ability and a passionate interest in ancient history, thus my ambitions centered around those things. My perfect job would have been illustrating history books, magazines or comics, ideally having written them as well.
So naturally when I left school I started work... in a bank. Encouraged to pursue a career in a 'safe' industry with decent pay, I put aside the dreams of the things I really wanted to do. After 3 years I knew the business of banking didn't interest me but then along came an opportunity to get involved in the early deployment of computers to an environment that was still - in 1986 - largely handwriting or typewriter based. Having spent the last 36 of my 39 years there in technology roles, you could say I eventually discovered something that I was both good at and found interesting. Or to quote Steve Jobs in his famous speech to Stanford University graduates "the only way to do great work is to love what you do"
But still, that young creative person, my inner self, has never gone away; he's just been dormant, waiting for the freedom to emerge without the pressure of having to earn a living. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of what I've built, delivered and achieved in IT over almost four decades, but inside me is still that desire to create something just for the pleasure of doing so. Writing, drawing, painting, photographing: all of these things I'm waiting to get started on. Speaking to retirees, the same advice came up time after time - find yourself a project. I have so many projects I want to complete, deciding on which to start first is the biggest challenge but whichever it is, I want to do so in the way that would make my 12 year-old self proud.
It's easy to view retirement as the end of your usefulness, a slow descent into irrelevance and death. But we have the most valuable thing of all: experience. Whatever career we had, we came up against problems; sometimes we solved them, sometimes we didn't but failure is the best opportunity to learn that life gives us. Don't leave that experience behind, take it with you into your retirement projects.
Steve Jobs ended that speech with the words "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish", to which I would add Stay Curious.
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