Growth Requires Change

Last week my wife and I spent a lovely weekend in Los Angeles. We invaded my cousin’s home and spent time with his wonderful family. As an aside, the two energetic and precocious boys we temporarily displaced from their bedroom made me feel both wistful and relieved as I thought back on when our own children were very young. Keeping up with brilliant and dynamic youngsters 24×7 is a young man’s game….and that’s not me any longer. Our own brilliant and dynamic teenagers are now self-sufficient and, thankfully, responsible enough to leave on their own from time to time. The last time our family journeyed to L.A. was in 2019. I couldn’t help but think about all that has changed in the ensuing 3+ years. I wasn’t yet retired, our oldest son wasn’t in college, and nobody had heard of CoVid-19. Change is inevitable and it can clearly be uncomfortable. However, it is also clear that growth requires change.

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

C.S. Lewis

Plan Do Check Act

Ultimately, I’m just a planner in an unplannable world. But the un-plannability (not a word?) of life doesn’t keep me from trying. Where some may perceive overkill in the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) construct, I see a simple planning model that helps me organize my thoughts, goals, and next steps. Planning gets a bad rap, in part I think, because it is sometimes assumed that a plan should be a “set it and forget it” proposition. It’s been my experience that the opposite is true. Just as people need to change, so do our plans. Essentially no plan can remain unchanged in the real world. I believe we should embrace this fact rather than discount planning as a waste of our time.

Recently my plan changed. I’ve started to work with a company called Right Sized Inventory. You can read about the company’s co-founder in a blog post I wrote about him a couple of months ago. The idea is to work a smaller number of hours (my target is ~40/month) and hopefully help the company grow and thus be more successful. Jumping back into a more formal work setting hadn’t been part of my post-retirement plan. But sometimes opportunities (or risks) come along that demand our attention and should instigate reflection and, possibly, course correction. I believe that a flexible plan combined with a sense of purpose can help us navigate life in a way that provides us with both a North Star and an adaptable chart with which to pursue it.

Nearly 18 months into my own retirement plan, it feels like a solid time for reflection and perhaps adjustment.

My Plan

As I approached retirement, the plan I had in mind can be summarized in this way:

• Spend more quality time with family
• Improve physical, emotional, & mental health
• Write something creative
• Contribute more around our home
• Keep the financial house in order

I had other aspirations as well (volunteer in my community, learn to speak Spanish, pick up playing guitar, create a podcast), but frankly, they haven’t yet made the cut in my time budget. My wife and I do give blood every 8 weeks but, to be honest this does not take much time and isn’t really what I had in mind. The above five elements of what I wanted to do in retirement (at least the first 1-3 years of it) have fully consumed my time. But I’m at peace with the stuff I haven’t attempted yet because I’m working on the stuff that is most important to me.

Making a plan is the relatively easy part. Turning the plan into daily action can take some persistence and perseverance. So how do I think I’m doing so far? If it’s true that growth requires change, how successful have I been in changing myself during the past 18 months?

Making the Plan Work and How It’s Going (Do/Check)

To do or not to do, that is the question. It isn’t quite the existential question Willie Shakespeare had Hamlet ponder, but it is the key inquiry we all must face if we are to take the all-important plan-to-action step. It isn’t easy to align our behaviors and actions with what we say our top priorities are. During my career I would have said that family was the most important thing in my life. Truthfully, I didn’t always act if that was the case. Many, many times I prioritized work and my career over family life. As my teenagers might say, “facts”. Retirement has afforded me an opportunity to change my approach so that my daily activity aligns better with my priorities. So how’s the plan going?

Spend more quality time with family

Happily this has greatly improved from my full throttle working days. I’ve seen the vast majority of the soccer games my son and daughter have played during the past year and a half. I’m able to go on long walks with my wife most days. I’ve been able to help my children with homework and preparing for college. My wife and I have been able to take our time traveling (the aforementioned trip to L.A. was a great example). On a whim, I drove to see my daughter’s away soccer game and also see my oldest son at college.

In addition, I’ve been able to spend more time with my parents. It’s been gratifying to help them around their house and take my mom to appointments. I’ve diced roasted green chile and made tamales with my mom. My dad has allowed me to record stories from his amazing life. I treasure the time I’m able to spend with them as we all age. As an aside – my mom used to tell me that one doesn’t really know how much our parent love us until we become parents ourselves. I’ve found these wise words to be undeniably true.

Improve physical, emotional, and mental health

While I feel I’ve made some positive changes in this area, improvement is a work in progress. I previously wrote about some things I feel I failed at during my career. The common theme for me was that I nearly completely deprioritized my own health. So I have a long journey ahead. I’m doing better here for sure (walking 2-3 miles most days, avoiding high work stress, reading for pleasure, learning new things). It’s just that I believe more is possible. As I find with most things, positive change only really sticks for me personally when I can form new habits. I’d still like to form better meditation and mindfulness habits in my day-to-day life. In addition, I suspect that increasing my investment in physical activity will pay even more dividends for my mental & emotional health.

Write something creative

Modern work for many of us means a lot of time on a computer. Reading and responding to e-mail can seem like our primary function. When I wasn’t dealing with email (or its more insistent and annoying sibling, Instant Messaging), I was constructing PowerPoint presentations. No offense is intended toward Microsoft, but I now hate PP. Once upon a time, pre-career, I enjoyed writing. This retirement goal embodies my desire to enjoy it once again. The plan.work.retire blog you are reading right now (thank you very much, btw!) is the activation of this goal. I still don’t totally know what I’m doing with this blog, but I learn something new nearly every week. I still hold out hope that I’ll act on my desire to write a novel at some point. But I realize “some point” doesn’t really really exist until the “first point” becomes a reality.

Contribute more around our home

As is the case with improving my health, I know there is more that can be done to more fully achieve this goal. Progress may seem better than it actually is when you go from nearly nothing to something at all. To be fair, outside chores have largely been my responsibility in the division of labor my wife and I have settled into over the years. And I have been able to make some progress on the lengthy list of imagined projects – we now have a neat second living area complete with a fire pit and mini pond. Likewise, some of the house projects on the “scroll of doing” have been completed (new bathroom faucets are perhaps the shiniest example). Unfortunately, the big garage “purge and clean” event has yet to take place.

I’m doing better from a day-to-day household perspective as well. However, I’ll once again mention that visible progress from literally nothing to a little something can seem greater than it is. I cook (really this means barbeque) more often these days. My wife can rely on me to complete simple household tasks (happily, I now know where roughly 90% of the dishes live once they are clean). A little something is better than nothing and might become something more (or something like that).

Keep the financial house in order

Retiring last year has provided us with boundless serenity as we casually watch the financial markets calmly float on docile waves of predictability. Yeah right! Fortunately our plan doesn’t rely on good market performance in the near-term. Keeping our budgeting and financial planning on track is more important in retirement than ever and demands more of my time. Remaining calm in the storm that is the current macroeconomic environment isn’t easy. Seeking additional sources of income is a good idea in times of uncertainty. Making sound spending decisions that are aligned with our budgeting plan also continues to be paramount.

Adjusting the Plan

This brings me back to the change of plan I mentioned above: the opportunity to start working part-time feels like the right adjustment to make at this point. I already feel that I’m learning and adding value to a venture that has meaning to me on a personal level. I previously wrote about finding Ikigai (a Japanese concept meaning “that which gives your life meaning”) as a way of finding purpose in retirement. One way to think about Ikigai is that it exists where my time affluence, talent and rewards converge.

Time affluence is the idea that one has enough time to choose how it will be allocated across multiple options. For many of us (including me), time affluence is extremely difficult to achieve while we work full-time and have significant family commitments. To a great extent, our time is allocated for us between full-time work and full-time family responsibilities. To say I’ve been enjoying the time affluence that retirement has provided me is an understatement. By adding ~10 hours per week of work to my time investment portfolio, it is likely that I’ll reduce investments elsewhere. For example, the rate at which I write and publish this blog has already slowed down. The rate at which I knock out home projects has slowed as well.

One advantage of planning is that it can provide a way to make trade-off decisions more explicit. Just like money is a resource that allows us to do the things we want to do in life, so too is time. Therefore it follows that just like monetary affluence provides us with a greater number of options on how to allocate our affluence, so too does time affluence. I’m unwilling to reduce the time I spend with my family or on focusing on my health so the choice is to reduce time allocation elsewhere.

Growth requires change

I believe change is more than healthy…it really is necessary. Someone once sent me the quote “when you’re done changing, you’re done.” My plan will continue to change and adapt. Surprise opportunities and threats will present themselves and require adjustments. The one thing I know is that the plan will ultimately not come to fruition as it currently exists. And that’s ok. If you buy into the idea that growth requires change, my advocacy is that you need to know what you are changing from and for what purpose. Change can be scary. But I’d rather face it head on rather than pretend it isn’t going to happen.

What are your thoughts about change and how you prepare for it?

Written by: A Reed Reviewed by: B Holman