Retirement is a Really Bad Idea
The Amplified Impact Podcast
October 29th, 2023
Let’s talk work. I used to hate it.
The very word work was like a four-letter curse.
My perspective on work started to change when I ventured into entrepreneurship and realized work can be fun and fulfilling when it moves you closer to your goals.
Do you find yourself counting the years until retirement?
I challenge you to reframe that notion. Retirement isn’t about quitting work; it’s about retiring from work you despise.
If you’re stuck in a job you hate, remember that you have the power to change it.
Assess the constraints holding you back, and tackle them one by one.
Find what ignites your soul and create the life you love.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“If you’re not moving towards what you could be in life, if you’re not living in alignment with that, you feel it.”
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
I used to hate working. It was work was like a four letter word and it was not a good four letter word. It was something I grew up dreading, it was something my dad, my grandfather like whenever they made me do work, it was hard physical manual labor that I hated. I don’t like working with my bodies, I’m not great with working with my hands. And so I just grew up equating work with drudgery and compounding this was the fact that I was very bad working for other people, very bad at caring about the output of my work or caring about the result. And all this kind of made it so that I was a very bad employee. And all through my twenty s I really thought that the goal of life in many ways was to work as little as possible so I could go off and do the other things that I really enjoyed doing. And what was interesting is that I was very fortunate at different points in my life to be a professional athlete, which is it sounds really cool on the one hand, but, like, full transparency, you don’t make a lot of money as a professional athlete, as a professional rock climber, snowboarder.
Anthony Vicino:
You don’t make a ton of money doing these things unless you’re the top two or three people in that sport. Everybody else is just kind of scrounging by and they get to live their dreams, so to speak, and do the thing that they love for a living. But it was very interesting to me how my relationship with those activities almost immediately changed when I started getting paid for them. Suddenly I started to resent them because they were work. They were no longer the thing that I loved doing, now they were what was putting food on the table. And so just my outlook, my perspective on work kind of put a negative spin on that thing that I once loved and that surprised me and it surprised a lot of other people that I knew who had been striving to become a professional athlete. Like how the game kind of loses its luster when suddenly you’re not doing it for the love of the game, but now you’re doing it for the paycheck and maybe also the love. So all that’s to say is work was something that I’ve always had a contentious relationship with and I just wanted to do as little of it as possible.
Anthony Vicino:
But my relationship with it really started to shift when I got into entrepreneurship and building businesses because then it was suddenly like holy crap. Work is fun when it’s going towards something that’s moving me towards my goals, my purpose, my meaning. And it’s funny with athletics I was always very good at putting in the work, like practicing for hours and hours on end. I can get hyper focused on any activity if I love doing it. And so I was good at doing that work, but I wasn’t good at doing work that made money. For some reason, as soon as the work was related to making money, it became this completely different thing entirely. I don’t know why I had this weird mental hang up about it, I guess, and I think a lot of people do. So I don’t think I’m alone there.
Anthony Vicino:
But one of the things I came to realize over the last few years is I’ve been very fortunate to have found entrepreneurship and find these avenues through which I can work and grind for hours on end and enjoy the process, because I love what I do. And it reminded me of the fact that the goal isn’t to retire from working. The goal is to retire from working on things that you hate. A lot of people just kind of set their sights on this horizon 65 years out into the future, and maybe not 65 years, but like 40 plus years out into the future so that when they’re 65, they can finally retire. They go, I don’t know, like, gallivant the world. A lot of us put off for tomorrow what we could do today because we’re not ready for it. Like, I want to go travel the world and do all these cool things, but I have this responsibility. I have work, I have my kids.
Anthony Vicino:
I have all this stuff holding me back from doing it. And so someday I will do that, and that’s what retirement kind of becomes. But retirement is very much a new modern concept. Only within the last 70 years that this even became a thing. Before that, our ancestors never even contemplated the idea of retirement that was just so foreign to them. Of course they’re going to work until they’re dying in a lot of cases, not because they had a choice, right? Let’s not romanticize this. I’m not saying they wouldn’t have stopped working if they had been given a choice, but something that I was reading some stats on this recently is very interesting, is like how quickly people physically and cognitively decline after retiring. And I think it’s because, one, they lose all the social interactions, the cognitive interactions, the things that were challenging them, and then they just kind of become depressed and almost melancholic in the sense that you might not love your work if you’re doing work right now that you hate doing, you might not love it.
Anthony Vicino:
You might, in fact, hate it. But if you stop doing it and you had nothing to fill that void, which a lot of people, when they get to retirement, they have nothing that steps in to fill that void. And so they’re just left rudderless drifting. And that’s a very bad place for humans, because the analogy that I like to think of is the shark. The shark drowns if it’s not moving forward, which isn’t true. It’s a myth. But I like that frame because I think humans are like that. I think humans do need to be progressing.
Anthony Vicino:
Man, I’m really struggling with the emphasis on my syllables today. But humans need to progress towards something. They need to have something that they’re moving towards, which Abraham Maslow talked about when he said these words that which man can be, man must be. I think there’s so much truth in that phrase that if you’re not moving towards what you could be in life, if you’re not living in alignment with that, you feel it. And I think if you’re setting your goal of being done working someday, you’re looking at the wrong thing. Right? The goal isn’t to stop working and go off into the sunset because that is a fast track towards decline and your later years are probably going to be pretty miserable. The people who are, I don’t know, have the best longevity and long term outcomes seem to be the ones who stay engaged in their work and are very intensely in love with it in many ways. Think about Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.
Anthony Vicino:
These guys are like in their ninety s and they are still cognitively sharp, showing up for work, doing the thing because they love it. They don’t have to do it. They could have retired decades ago, but they do it because they love it. And as a result, they’re still, despite drinking Coke and McDonald’s every day, they’re still kicking it and doing pretty damn good, all things told. So I just wanted to share this because if you’re setting your slights on retirement thinking like, oh, I just want to be done working, I challenge you to reframe this. Remember, the goal is not to retire from working. It’s to retire from working on things that you hate. And the surest path that I know towards doing things that you love and filling your life with rewarding consequences is one.
Anthony Vicino:
Entrepreneurship, I think, is a great avenue, but that’s not for everybody. But just recognize that even if that’s not your path, you do have so much say in what you pursue these days. You have the internet and a computer. You have access to the world, which means you have access to unlimited job opportunities and unlimited different avenues. That could be the thing that sparks your soul with joy. And so there is no sense anymore to work a job that you hate. The only reason that you would do that is because you don’t have the skills, the resources, or the desire to move beyond that. And all of those can be solved with intention and consistent right action.
Anthony Vicino:
So I encourage you to look at your situation audit like, why do I have this job that I hate? Is because I don’t have the skills necessary to make that next jump? Is it because I lack the resources? Is it because I lack the desire? What is it that’s holding you back? And then solve for that. And then once you’ve solved for that. Reassess. Now what’s holding you back? Reassess again. This is the theory of constraints and this is a really great way of making very fast progress towards your goals is consistently identify the constraint in the system, unblock that, and then unblock the next constraint in the system next biggest constraint. Just keep doing that over and over and over and you will eventually get to where you’re trying to go. So that’s going to do it for me. Guys and gals, I appreciate you all being here, as always.
Anthony Vicino:
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I’ll catch you back around of these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused my friend.
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