Six months after leaving his operational role, the speaker describes shifting from a 70/30 work-life split to 15/85, calling it inversion rather than retirement. He now does advisory work, coaching, and podcast appearances while spending time with grandchildren, traveling, and cooking. He argues the term retirement misrepresents what he's actually doing.
Chapters
All right. Well, time flies. It's been 6 months already since I stepped out of the operational world and started my next chapter. And in the spirit of sharing and helping this community, I thought it might be interesting that I put some reflections together 6 months into the journey that I'm into right now. So first, call it what it is. Not what it is not. What do I mean by that? Well, first I should have listened to my wife day one and not called this step retirement. And honestly, she kept telling me, "Hey, you are not retiring," and you did not retire. And I did not retire because if I go back to the dictionary and look at the definition of retirement, it's the fact of leaving your job and stopping working. And I did leave my job, but I did not stop working. I inverted. And now I'm in inversion. So what does that mean? It's not retirement. What does that mean? Well, I used to work most of the awake time, so the time that I was not sleeping. And roughly, I was on 70/30, 70% of the time working, 30% of the time doing other stuff. And I invert that to 15/85. And of course, when you work 10 to 15% of the time, you can't have, and you shouldn't have, an operational job that is requiring almost 24/7 being operational. But it does allow time for actually very high-quality work where, unless you do that by necessity, and that's a totally different topic, it's not retirement, it's not inversion, it's simply change of schedule. But then you still work because you have to, right? But if not, which is inversion and what unfortunately I call retirement, you work on what you love the most. And so the time you decide to invest into that work. But to qualify for inversion, well, you have to basically invert. So I was at 70/30. Now I'm at 15/85. I'm more than inverted. So I did it, but it's not— Retirement. So what's the moral of the story here? Well, if you call it retirement, that means you retired. That means that the ratio that I was talking about earlier became zero hundred. If it's something else than that zero hundred, call it whatever you want. Inversion works for me, and quite honestly, I think that the bigger names understood that better than I did, and. They don't say they retire. They say, oh, I stepped down as CEO, as prime minister, as professional athlete, or as professional coach, and I started another career. They invert. They did not retire. They're not using very often that term for a good reason. So that's number one, call it what it is, not what it is not. Number 2, less easy to manage. It's crazy fast. Really crazy fast, how you disappear from the radar screen. After the first 3 months where people are trying to figure out if you really meant what you said, then you join the dark world of the not worth paying much attention. Suddenly everything you know or can contribute is worth not much. But shame on me, I said I retired. Remember what I said earlier? So, I excluded myself from the world most of you belong to. So, of course, I went off the radar screen. That said, some of you know better and are really tapping into me at a return and quality that I could never offer during the previous part of my life. So, what's the moral of the story here? Unless you want to disappear from the radar screen, LinkedIn being one of the radars. It's totally fine if you deliberately choose to disappear, but be very clear— if not, be very clear about what you're up to for the work part of your inversion, my 15%, for instance. Number 3, doing only what you love doing for work is extremely rewarding and The past 6 months, I have done what I said I'd do in Inversion: sharing and advising. I share what I learned freely in podcasts, videocasts like this one, with great success for some, less success for others. And because of the previous point, it's harder and harder to keep people engaged because you're not on the radar screen anymore. But I'm enjoying that. I'm enjoying that too. Very much like doing what I'm doing right now. And also I've been advising individuals or firms. Some people are quite clever and know what I can offer and they use my services. And I currently have a couple of people on individual coaching and a couple of firms on advisory engagement. And I think everybody's super happy with the outcome. At least that's what I'm hearing. And I'm extremely happy doing it because I have as much time as I want and need to think about the next conversation or the business problem that we talked about in the previous meeting. And I have yet to say no to anybody, individual or company, who contacted me for a piece of advice on basically anything. So, 3. I love it too. And always consider it very confidential. I did quite a few of those and it's super, super enriching. The moral of the story, I'm one phone call away and I will take that phone call. No exception. I love it, right? Doing only what you love doing for work is extremely rewarding and addictive. There's only 5 points. Number 4, inverting means most of the time not working. It's amazing. And takes a lot more time than I ever thought. Let's talk about the main thing about inverting and inversion: the stuff that is now most of the time. Here we're LinkedIn or YouTube or the podcast, so it's not Facebook or Instagram. So let's not go into too much personal details. But this has been amazing for me, taking care of now two grandkids and helping our daughter and her. her family, going through having 2 children very close to each other in time. And unfortunately, the last one was born 3 months earlier than expected. So, that's brought its own set of challenges. And we joined friends wherever they are because they're on vacation and we just joined them, following our son in whatever he's doing, visiting Luxembourg that now we call home for most of the time. We're returning to California for long breaks. I'm back at running. I just ran 60 miles last month. I cook all meals. I do all the things that I love doing. And there are so many things that I said I'm going to do when I'll invert— I used the other words prior— that I have not been able to do because I simply don't have the time. The moral of the story is work achievement is not necessary. For happiness, personal realization brings as much, if not more, joy and an incredible sense of purpose that is beyond imagination. All right, let's wrap it up. Moral of the story, the overall moral of the story. First, I do not regret the decision that I made in starting this process a year ago. Well, maybe I. Would have done it earlier if I realized that it was not retirement but inversion. I know where is a financial aspects that kicks in, and I realize how lucky I am to have been able to do that when I wanted. Let me tell you, working is expensive. There's a lot of feed and fees when you spend most of your time working. Inverting is Saving. Inverting is saving. There is multiple level in that last sentence. All right, I hope this was helpful. I would really, really love to contribute to making you successful as in business or personally. Just ping me. It's really, really the only thing I miss is to talk to each and any of you about stuff that can make you more successful. Thank you. Bye.
