Jan Jachimowicz

A great comparison, at least in my mind, are athletes.

Athletes retire when they're very young.

Many athletes retire when they're in their 30s.

And so retirement is a shock that we can observe and then actually look at for a lot longer time periods.

And there's this recent story that I love by Andrew Luck, who was a quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts for six years, retired, I think he was 29 or 30 when he retired, which is quite young for a football player.

And in the months and years that followed, or the way that he talks about it now, fell into a deep crisis of meaning.

He was completely unprepared for what he wanted to do next.

There were really difficult days.

And in large parts because he asked himself, if I'm not a quarterback, then who am I?

And then to start thinking about what am I drawn to?

What else could I do?

That really opened the door for him.

He now ultimately, he went back to grad school.

He is now, I believe, the general manager of the Stanford football program.

So a very different role than he had before, but still somewhat related to the sport of football that he cared very deeply about.

But I think using that as an excuse to say, what if...

We thought more intentionally about what we might want to do after retirement and started experimenting now before we actually make that transition so that when retirement happens, we have something that we can retire to and we can start experimenting with.

Absolutely.

I love Phil Hansen's story because to me it exemplifies that we often have very narrow beliefs about how we want to go about pursuing our passion and that we're not attentive enough to the many different ways in which we could actually pursue our passion.

So for Phil, he wanted to make pointillism art.