I don't pretend to be a retirement counselor, but I have conducted stand up lectures to auditoriums filled with entrepreneurial business women who found themselves at the end of a traditional career path with a gold watch on their wrist, but now wanting to start their own business as a new direction in life.
The first thing I ask women in settings like that, is to write down their definition of "retirement"... and then they take turns reading their answers aloud to us.
The Webster's Dictionary definition of "retirement" is: "The act of leaving one's job and ceasing to work"... like, the end dude, have a good life and good bye once and for all.. as the office door slams behind you🚪as you walk out to the employee parking lot for the last time and drive home. The End.
I officially "retired" from the traditional work force when I was 22 years old. At the time, I held down two part-time traditional jobs and realized that the only person making more money than me was the person who owned the businesses I was working for, despite me doing all the work!
That's when the definition of "retirement" suddenly hit me. I could be doing those two jobs all my life, only to retire 45 years later after doing the exact same thing every day for the previous 45 years, only to sit at home and do nothing but dream about the good old shitty days at the salt mine!
When I started my own entrepreneurial nautical marine business venture at the age of 22, I quit both part-time, tax-sucking jobs and immediately held a Retirement Party in honor of myself with all my old college and high school friends!
It was kind of crazy really, because I even had colored banners across the room that said 'Happy Retirement Old Girl' along with balloons and other festive things! 🥳
The bottom line was, I was officially retired from working for someone else.
What MY definition of retirement became, is "Changing your path in life".
Retirement therefore is only that narrow transition line which defines what you've always done all your life on one side of the line, versus what new direction your life's path will take you on the other side of the line!
Retirement therefore, is the identifiable 'gap' in the concrete between one concrete slab and the next concrete slab that butts up against the first one as one walks along a sidewalk, for example. Where one slab ends and the next one begins is the transition point between the first and the second. That transition gap is the retirement point of one slab before the next slab begins.
Retirement therefore, doesn't actually mean "The act of leaving one's job and ceasing to work", it means "The act of transitioning from one path in life to the next path in life, the second of which may not yet be defined in principle".
Retirement marks ONLY the act of transition, not the act of ceasing to work!
