These are four goals that I want us all to consider to stop chasing as we approach 50 years old in order to enjoy our journey, the time that we have left, even more. And the first one is to stop chasing career advancement and to really focus on the joy and the purpose of our career in what we're doing. You know, in your 20s, if you can get a promotion early and to get a a $10,000 a year raise, a $20,000 a year raise. That is going to compound over a 30, 40 year career.
But as we're in our 50s, is it really going to move the needle that much? And would it be better? And I'm suggesting that it would be.
Would it be better to focus instead on enjoying our career, enjoying the things that we're doing at work, enjoying helping to build a team and helping to mentor other folks? And to make the organization as strong as it can be without focusing on, you know, what's in it for me. Now, it's just human nature that we're going to be thinking about it. But part of it, too, is just accepting where we are in life, that we've likely gotten most of the promotions that we're going to get out of our life. And the time we would have to put in to make ourselves a viable candidate for that next level, you know.
oftentimes that means working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And that's great when you're in your 20s. But when you're in your 50s, think about what that extra 20 hours a week is taking away. It's taking away time, time from your family. It's taking away time to take care of your health.
It's taking away time for adventures and experiences. And our time becomes more valuable than the incremental money that we can make. So at some point it becomes so much so, our time becomes so valuable, that eventually we retire and we say that it's not worth the money that we're getting to give up, to sacrifice what we need to sacrifice in order to keep the job. But in your 50s, you're likely still not there yet where you're ready to retire.
But one of the ways to kind of ease into it is, you know, instead of working 50, 60, 70 hours a week. Could you work 40 to 50 hours a week and still do a really good job in your career and for your company and still be a valuable member of the team? Because oftentimes what drives us to put in those extra hours is we want to be the best, right? We want to be the candidate for the next promotion, but giving yourself permission to get off and to...
step out of that rat race and say, it's more about enjoying the entire journey as opposed to optimizing on this one piece that can steal a lot from us outside of work. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it's nice to get those accolades at work.
Yes, it's nice to be given the assignments that everybody's excited about and maybe something has some international travel that you'd like to do. And yes, it's nice to get the monetary benefits from it. But you know what? There's other things in life that are also nice to have. So optimizing on life as opposed to optimizing on the title and optimizing on the paycheck.
I'm encouraging you to optimize on life and at some point, stop chasing the career advancement. Okay, number two. is to stop, you know, bigger is better.
I live here in the United States and it's, you know, he with the most toys wins, right? And better, faster, bigger, cheaper. And bigger, as we get older, at least in my case, and I've been a financial advisor for over 20 years, in many of my clients'cases, you know, having that bigger home, what that represents is just more work, more things to go wrong with your house. more things that need maintenance, more things that need to be cleaned.
And the question is, you know, do you own your house or does your house own you? And so at least in my case, when the kids left for college, I was in a fairly large house in the town I was in, and I just wanted to simplify. I wanted a smaller house, I wanted less maintenance. I bought another house that was one-third of the size.
And the organization, the HOA, takes care of all the maintenance on the outside. And you know what? I do not miss shoveling snow. And I don't miss finding a contractor to get the house painted every three or four years.
And I don't miss calling when different maintenance things need to be done. Life is simpler. And so the bigger house, I think that's one of the things that we can all... quit pursuing, particularly when we move. You know, that tends to be the time that we're tempted.
You know, we're moving anyways. We've got to pack up everything. We move to the new town and we just kind of get this square footage creep that takes place. The realtor shows us different houses and oh, that's nice. It has an entertainment room and oh, that's nice.
It has an extra bedroom that we could use as an office or as a weight room, whatever it is. But at some time... at some point, you know what, it's just nice to go to the health club and let them worry about maintaining things and things like that. So that's the second one. The third one is just stop pursuing stuff.
It's not the stuff that gives us the happiness. And I'm going to talk about what in my experience, both as an individual as well as a financial advisor, what does give us the happiness, but it's typically not more stuff. Right?
It's not having, you know, a fourth car when there's only two people in the family. It's not having 50 pairs of shoes instead of 20 pairs of shoes. It's not this stuff. We all have these cardboard boxes showing up at our house week after week after week.
And I know people that don't even open the cardboard boxes. They just have so much stuff. And is this stuff bringing you joy?
If it is bringing you joy, great. You be you. But if it's not, I just want to put some things on a radar screen that I've seen.
I have an interesting vantage point. I'm very fortunate to work with people. Most of us live our own lives and that's how we learn our lessons.
I've been fortunate in my job to be able to walk alongside my clients over 10, 20, 30 years and see their experiences. I've been a financial advisor for two decades of that, and I just have friends that for 30 years I've been walking alongside them. And these are some of the things that I've learned. And maybe one of the most important things is to stop comparing ourselves to other people.
And that is one of the things that's given me an immense amount of freedom in my life, is when I stopped comparing myself and saying, am I doing as well as... You know, one of my high school classmates, or one of my college classmates, or one of my business school classmates, am I doing as well as them? And you know, it's very liberating, it's very freeing to say, you know what, there's 9 billion people in the world. I just need to make sure that I'm building my life as opposed to comparing myself to other people.
And for me, that's been very liberating. So what have I seen people do that have brought them joy? It's really... people focusing on their purpose, you know, what are their hobbies, whether it's a hobby or volunteering, what are the things that really bring them joy, either in work, outside of work, with the family.
It's focusing on relationships, maybe your elderly parents, maybe your younger kids. It's really thinking about how much more time do I have with them? How many more summers do I have with them? How many more holidays do I get to celebrate with them?
And really, Making the most of each of those times that we do get to be together. And then for me, I love adventures, right? So it's about relationships.
It's about adventures. For me, I like to travel. There's no shortage of adventures the way I travel. I like to take public transportation when I'm in the country. I like to live like a local in a foreign country.
And that opens the door for me for a lot of adventures. Sometimes they can be a little scary in the moment. But you look back at them and you say, wow, that was really interesting. It opened some doors to some things that I wouldn't have thought about.
So for me, the key word is moments, creating moments, whether that's an adventure, whether it's moments with people that I love, friends, things like that, adventures. And just creating these memories that, you know, hopefully when my day comes where I'm looking back at my life, I look at those and those are the things that I cherish. And speaking of cherishing things, one of the things that I found as a financial advisor is people really cherish their time once they get through the transition of retirement. The thought of retiring both financially and just mentally can be scary. And that's why I made this video here, why retiring at 65 might be a big mistake.
Join me in that video, and thanks for watching this one. Bye-bye.