You Can Have Your Retirement Fantasy Today

You can have your retirement fantasy today. Hey, everyone, this is Nir Eyal from the near and Far podcast and with me, as always, is Nick Gray. We're going to read to you one of my latest blog posts on near and far.com and then we're going to talk through the article to kind of share some further insights. Nick, how's it going?

It's going great. Now I have a story to tell the listeners. You and I got to hang out in Singapore, and I haven't actually talked to you from this last time. Do you remember what we did on that last Sunday night in Singapore?

Was this the fish market tour?

The fish market tour we did. But remember that awesome live theater thing that was a little challenging but also very fun?

Yes.

Right. A wild experience. So I went to visit near in Singapore. We got to hang out for three days. We talked about the podcast. We talked about how thankful we all are to have you as listeners. Thank you so much for listening. I'm back from my summer travels now and we're going to get back on our cadence of recording this. But Nir, guess what happened? I got on the flight home from Singapore, I got recognized on the plane and somebody said, are you Nick Gray? I said, yeah. He said, I'm a fan. I think I see you on LinkedIn with near. I said, what? That's. How cool is that? That's awesome. It was really nice.

It's one of the things I love about Singapore is that it is a small island, right? It's only five and a half million people. It's a tiny little city state. And so it's a very friendly place. So I'm so glad that they extended the hospitality to you as well. You well deserve it. And by the way, anybody listening, if you have not checked out Nick's book, let me give it a quick plug. It well deserves it. The Two Hour Cocktail Party. It is an amazing book and people in Singapore. I've met several people who use the book. I've been to cocktail parties based on your book. And so you have a lot of fans out here in Singapore. And if you haven't read Two Hour Cocktail Party, highly recommend it.

Thank you. Thank you for the plug. It's a helpful thing if you want to host meetups. Actually got to host a meetup in Singapore, which is really fun. It was really neat. If you're wondering what near is like in person, I can tell you that it was go go energy. He took me to this workout class that was one of the coolest workout things by the way, I was so sore for days, days afterwards.

Sorry about that.

But the workout is like a brain physical training. So you're tapping all these things. You're doing these mind challenges and physical challenges. It was a lot of fun. We had. We ate delicious food. We had great conversations. We went to a fish market at like midnight. It was so random and cool and awesome. So thank you so much for hosting me. I really enjoyed it.

My pleasure. My pleasure.

Well, when we were booting up, we were talking about what is our number? What is our number where you feel like you could live differently? And I think you must have known that we were doing this article because you were like, well, you don't have to have that much money, you know? And now that goes right into this. You can have your retirement fantasy today. So if it's okay with you, Nir, I'll start to read this and then I just feel like naturally you just kind of come in with other things to add. We'll do the hands or the fingers and stuff like that.

Sounds great. Great.

You can have your retirement fantasy today. Dreaming of retirement helps you fantasize about your ideal life and potentially have it. Now imagine your retirement. Are you picturing long, lazy days on a tropical beach under coconut trees? Maybe you've opted for a life of adventure, traveling to all the places you haven't been to yet. Perhaps the science fiction novel you've always wanted to write is finally pouring out of you. You might spend all your time volunteering for a social or political cause. Or maybe you even go back to work, but in a very different field than before. As human life expectancy has increased, retirement has evolved from the end of life to a second life. The average retirement age in OECD countries in 2018 was under 65. Yet some research suggests humans could live to be 120 to 150 years old in the future. That leaves us so much time. Of 9,000 adults in the United States and Canada in a recent study, 55% said that retirement represented a new chapter. After decades of working to earn a living, they are turning to projects, pastimes, and even second careers that excite them. But why should you wait until you retire to pursue those things? Lifespans may be increasing, but but long life is no guarantee. What if you used retirement as a frame of reference to realize how you want to spend your time right now? Retirement as a frame of reference? The idea of retirement lets people dream big. My guess is they feel that after fulfilling one career, they will have met their social familial. And financial responsibilities and cast off the chains of wage slavery. Finally freed to do what they really want, they had a job that provided for themselves and their family and hopefully enabled them to save enough money to live comfortably. They contributed to the economy and taxes and the working world. They satisfied their parents or family's expectation that they do a specific job and be successful. Thinking about retirement lets us see past what we should do to what we want to do. It cuts through the distractions that keep you from recognizing your values, which are attributes of your ideal self. Even if you're not on the cusp of retirement, fantasizing about retirement helps paint a picture of your ideal life. But it doesn't just help you figure out what you're working for and toward. It helps you integrate some things you thought you had to delay until retirement into your life now. When my last company was acquired, I had time to think about what to do next. One of my friends asked me what would you do if money was no object? This question is similar to what would you do in retirement? Because it cuts financial and some familial responsibilities out of the equation. I said I would learn for a living. I would learn and write with the goal of making the world better by explaining what I'm learning to others. I started doing that, which turned into blogging, which turned into my two books, Hooked and Indistractable. This passion became my livelihood, but it doesn't feel like a job. So what would you do in retirement? Once you have a rough idea, you can pinpoint which aspects so you can make time for today.

Yeah, this is my true to life story. I would never have thought that I could be a professional writer. I'm dyslexic and English was my least favorite subject in school. And so I never growing up thought oh you know what my dream is to to be an author. It wasn't until my friend Lisa asked me this critical question when my friend previous company was acquired of what would you do if money was no object? It's such a good question. I never really thought of it before. It still is the best I can come up with in terms of like wow, if, if I hit my financial number and I'm an empty nester, which I will be here in a few years. But what I do all day and it's still to learn and share what I'm learning. One of my daily mantras of my purpose in life is to explain the world so that it can be made better. That is literally my purpose in life to explain the world so it can be made better. And so, yeah, it wasn't until I asked myself this question that I could start doing that. And it turns out that I could have a good chunk of what my ideal retirement would look like right now. And here's the kicker. I don't want to give away the spoiler of what the rest of the article is going to be about. Turns out I can make a living doing it anyway. And it's actually similar what we were talking about before we started recording for you, Nick. I asked you what you would ideally do and you basically said it was a scaled up version of what you're doing right now, bringing cool people together and hosting these engagements so that people can interact and enjoy each other's company in a new way. You might just do it on a larger scale if there was more money involved. But it's amazing that both of us have really found, I think, a lot of fulfillment by doing the thing we would do if money was no object. As a career.

That's such a neat question to ask. What would you do if money was no object? And what was your mantra that you.

Say I repeat my purpose in life. My purpose in life is to explain the world so that it can be made better.

How did you come up with that? I like that a lot. I don't have one. I feel like, dang, I need one of these.

I don't know if it's essential. It helps me because it's a high class problem. But a problem nonetheless is that when you, you know, and I want to acknowledge how unbelievably fortunate I am to be able to ask myself this question and to have so many options, but when you start getting some amount of success, the problem then becomes that there's so many options, right? Do I want to do this? Should I spend more time on growing my social media? Aud, Is that a distraction? Should I, should I write more books? Should I start a business? Should I be on board? There's just so many things I could do that I needed some way to kind of laser focus into what's really important from a career perspective. So I wanted to ask myself, okay, what's, what's the guiding light? What's, what's that North Star? And for me the North Star is, okay, what, what's my purpose in life? Like what, what can I most contribute to the world? And for me it was this ability to explain the world so that it can be made better. So, so I think one of my talents that not only do I enjoy doing, but I think can also help others is that I take complex fields like consumer psychology, like behavioral design, and make them simple enough for other people to understand them and share them with others.

That's great. That's a nice Such a good question that is helpful to think about and reflect on more often. The next section is titled have youe Ideal Retirement? Now, fantasizing about retirement reveals what's meaningful to you. It shows you how you truly want to spend your time exposing your values. You may not yet have the money saved to live the retired life all day, every day, but you can inject small periods of bliss into your schedule. Use the time management technique timeboxing to schedule your retirement activities in a calendar. I have this free schedule maker and habit tracker that'll help you get started. You can find those on Near's website at nearandfar.com N I R and FAR F A R dot com if you've always wanted to write a science fiction novel, consider timeboxing, a bi weekly writing routine. If you want to volunteer at a dog shelter, sign up and timebox it in your calendar weekly. Of course, because you aren't retired, you won't be able to make time for everything you pictured in your ideal retirement. For example, switching careers might not be feasible due to your financial or familial obligations. But think of it this way. What steps can you take towards switching careers that you can do right now? Time. Box those small steps into your calendar. Every step, no matter how small, that fulfills your values brings you closer to your ideal life.

Yeah, so this is, you know, I know we've talked about a lot timeboxing and how powerful it is, and I think that's kind of the takeaway for this article, is that when we think about this, this question of what would I do if money was no object? And find just some amount of time throughout your day for that action, for that fantasy retirement life. You can bring some of that into your current life without waiting until a retirement. So for me, when I asked myself, when Lisa asked me, what would you do if money was no object? And to me it was to learn and explain the world so they can be made better. What I realized is I didn't have to do that full time. In fact, I didn't start by doing it full time. I thought, oh, you know, writing's fun. So I literally time boxed an hour to work on a blog post, right? If I could do an hour every day and that sometimes that was on nights and weekends, that's totally fine. But by time boxing that time, it allowed me to explore whether I really wanted to do that more. And if. And if I wanted to do that more, then when I was ready, when it was starting to get some traction, I could find more time for it. Sometimes I asked, well, how do I publish a book? How does that work? I never set out to write books. I set out to do what I really enjoy, which is to research and explain to myself around problems that I'm having. But then by doing that and sharing it with others, first I started blogging. I got about 5,000 blog subscribers. Then a former professor of mine, Dr. Baba Shiv at the Stanford GSB, read my blog post and he said, wow, I really like your work. What if you. We taught a class together. So I went to teach a class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and then later at the Hassel Platter Institute of Design. And then that became hooked. That became my first book, and then continued to keep blogging and writing and processing this stuff. So it just goes to show that by planning that time ahead to do that fantasy activity, whether it's, you know what, I want to. I want to volunteer more in my retirement. I want to become more spiritual. I want to write books. I want to host parties. I want to teach people something, a unique skill. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can have bits of that ideal retirement in your schedule. By making sure that you are turning your values into time through time boxing.

It probably helps you to practice it and figure out if that's what you really want. I had a birthday last year, and I became so stressed and overwhelmed with planning it that I canceled everything. And I said, I'm just gonna clear my entire schedule and treat myself on my birthday to do whatever I want. I'm gonna wake up and just see where the day will take me. And I had such a good day. I had a great day. And when I was done, I was like, why do I have to wait for my birthday? Like, I could do that again. Like I could take a day off sometime. It was such a neat, neat little experience.

You took an experience that you were kind of waiting to savor for later, only on your special day. And you can realize, actually, I can do that throughout. And I think that's. That's exactly the point of this article. You don't have to wait for another 20 years or 30 years until you retire. You can sprinkle in that experience today. You can also understand whether you really want that experience. So I heard an interview recently with the guy who founded Tom Shoes. And he sold his company to, I think, Bain Capital. And he had lots of time on his hands, and he was like, what do I want to do in retirement? Oh, I want to golf and drink beer all day. And so that's like, literally what he did for six months. And then he realized, this is awful. Like, I don't. He was a relatively young guy. I think he was in his 50s. I don't want to do this until the day I die. You can only play golf and drink beer so much before it becomes meaningless. And so he very quickly saw, like, I don't want this for the rest of my life. So he found other experiences that were much more meaningful to him. I wonder if he could have found that much earlier. Maybe he wouldn't have sold the company so quickly because it gave him so much meaning. But because he didn't allow himself anymore any time to dip his toes in what that ideal retirement might look like, he didn't get to discover that he didn't like that thing that he thought he'd want to do until it was actually in retirement.

Well, the one thing that you can do right now is you can go to Near's website, download the free schedule maker. He has a Google sheet template on there that you can do to think about how to use time boxing to schedule your retirement activities in the calendar. Now, what else is that the best thing that they should do next? If they listen to this, they're inspired by what's one thing they could do.

That'S right, what to think about. Ask yourself this critical question of what would I do if money was no object? And then see if you can use your Timebox calendar to sprinkle in some amount of that activity throughout your week using a Timebox calendar.

Hey, Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of Hooked and We're Back from Summer Vacation. If you have a minute, will you leave us a review in your podcast app or right back to the email that you got from Nir's weekly newsletter, that's free, where he talks about designing customer behaviors, your own habits. Thousands of people have signed up to benefit from understanding the research that near shares from User Experience Design, Behavioral Economics, and neuroscience. You can sign up for that free newsletter@www.nearandfar.com. thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.