The Ryan Hanley Show
The Retirement Fallacy: Embracing Fulfillment Now | Derek Coburn
Mon, 19 May 2025
Join our community of fearless leaders in search of unreasonable outcomes... Want to become a FEARLESS entrepreneur and leader? Go here: https://www.findingpeak.com Watch on YouTube: https://link.ryanhanley.com/youtube Master of the Close - Learn how to scale your sales, fast: https://link.ryanhanley.com/masteroftheclose What if retirement is the biggest lie you’ve been sold? In this thought-provoking episode, Derek Coburn—author of Let’s Retire Retirement—joins Ryan Hanley to dismantle the traditional retirement narrative. Instead of grinding it out for “someday,” Derek makes the case for building a life of meaning, fulfillment, and freedom now. Whether you're an entrepreneur, executive, or just someone tired of living for the weekend, this conversation will challenge everything you thought you knew about success, time, and what it means to truly live. Pre-Order Let's Retire Retirement: https://amzn.to/45gFUty What You’ll Learn: Why the retirement dream is outdated (and dangerous) How to design a fulfilling life without waiting until 65 The hidden cost of deferring joy Practical steps to integrate passion, purpose, and profit today This isn’t about escaping work—it’s about upgrading life. Recommended Tools for Growth OpusClip: #1 AI video clipping and editing tool: https://link.ryanhanley.com/opus Riverside: HD Podcast & Video Software | Free Recording & Editing: https://link.ryanhanley.com/riverside Shortform - The World's Best Book Summaries: https://link.ryanhanley.com/shortform Taplio • Grow Your Personal Brand On LinkedIn: https://link.ryanhanley.com/taplio Kit: Email-First Operating System for Creators (formerly ConvertKit): https://link.ryanhanley.com/kit
Chapter 1: What is the Retirement Fallacy?
So I got a question for you. Hit me. And we can talk later if you don't have time. So do you think, this is relative to your TED Talk, what you've been going through in your life, what I've been going through in my life in a similar way. This is like an existential question that I've been pondering for a while.
Do you think it is possible to play a different game than the game that most people are playing without winning the primary game first? And I got we had money in the bank. We had like time.
We had, you know, things that we had on our side that allowed us to sort of like go through all that shit to emerge on the other side, like wanting to do something different that I don't know that like a single dad with a 96 job probably couldn't have done it the way that I did it.
Yeah, I think, so I think there's two sides to that. So one, I have both had the money and not had the money at different times, right? So I felt it both ways. Here's where I kind of come out on this. I honestly don't know if you can do it the way everyone does it and truly be successful and happy anymore. I think even the people that choose that path, I don't think they're happy with that path.
I think they've just made a compromise to find harmony in their life and in maybe another place, right? Like I really love doing hundred mile runs and being at my kids sports games. So I'm going to work this, you know, nine to five type job that, you know, maybe I can do well, but don't particularly care for. But it allows me to do the other things that I have in my life.
I think if you consciously make that decision, and that was a big part of where the TED Talk came from, if that's a conscious decision, more power to you. I think where people really, and I think this is where a lot of people are finding themselves today, is... they didn't consciously make that decision, right?
Now they're flailing and searching and grasping and chasing every $27 faceless YouTube video course they can buy to try to find something that's fulfilling in their life. Or they turn to drugs or alcohol or sex, or they, you know, you know, whatever, whatever other destructive thing they can do, um, because they weren't consciously making decisions.
They were, they were following a path that they thought they were supposed to follow. That being said, um, I think you have to find your way of doing things and it's the only way to do it. I think if you've already made it, it's substantially easier because, because of the transfer that you get the transfer expertise.
So if you are, you're very successful at one thing and then you pick a second thing that you want to be very successful at. A lot of the trust respect that you get in the other will be transferred over and that makes it a lot easier to jump. However, I do think that if you're doing something unique and you give yourself a
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Chapter 2: Can you live a fulfilling life before retirement?
I sold my practice to a private equity company in 2019, had an earn-out, have my clients, handful of clients I've been working with for a long time that I want to continue to work with, but I'm not really looking to grow my practice anymore. And when I started writing the book, None of that was on the table. And I was like, I want to write a book as a way to attract more clients for my practice.
And it was going to be written for people that have, like, you know, minimal investable assets of, you know, $5 million and more. And then I was approached out of nowhere about selling the practice. Then COVID happened and my father got sick in the meantime.
And because I got some money and I got some space and I got to really kind of take a step back and look at my life, I was like, oh, I don't need more clients. I don't want more clients.
I get to come back to this book and focus on writing it for a broader audience in a way that will hopefully be helpful to a lot more people than if I would have just plugged along and tried to write a book that was going to be a fancy business card to grow my practice. Yeah. But I was having these conversations with clients since 2005, 2010.
I always thought it was very interesting that when people meet with a financial advisor, financial advisors don't say, do you want to retire? They say, what age do you want to retire? We're automatically opted into this thing. And most people say, I don't really know. And they say, well, why don't we just go with 65? Because that's what everyone else picks and people say, sure.
And then they get this number that feels really big and unattainable. It stresses them out. It causes them to skip workouts and skip family dinners and have less sleep and really take them away from where they want to be. And what we're seeing is that a lot of people are getting there. They're finding this retirement thing is not what they were promised it would be.
They don't feel the way they thought they were going to feel and they're going back to work. And so I'm just trying to get the attention of people well before this point to help them realize that as long as you don't hate what you do, if you can find some work that you enjoy doing, ideally, you're going to do it longer than you think.
And because of that, you don't have to save as much, which means you now have more money and more time that you get to spend right now on the people and things that are most important to you.
I was really intrigued by the research in the book around where retirement came from and how new of a concept this actually is. The first retirement fund started, I think in your book you say 1883 with American Express or something like that. That's 140 years ago, 150 years ago. That's not that long ago that retirement wasn't even a concept, wasn't even something that we thought about.
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Chapter 3: What are the dangers of the traditional retirement narrative?
searching for your zone of genius. But once you figure out what your zone of genius is, and you can start to monetize that, whether it's in a leadership position in a company, starting a company, whatever, whatever your place is, and you can make some decent income, I've actually found at this point in my career, even though I'm capable of 8, 10, and when I need more hours in a day,
I found that six hours is like if I work more than six hours in a day, any of the hours past six hours of work, it's like bullshit. My brain's not functioning. I'm not on top of my game. I'm not super creative. Maybe I can answer some emails, but I'm not getting anything done. And anything that I do create in that time is usually something I'm then going to have to rework or
you know, I'm not super proud of to begin with. And that's a really tough, it's really tough to like to downshift. It feels like a downshift, but it's really not. Does that, does that make sense? Like, I mean, and I'm interested in your take on this.
Like I would rather at this point in my career give six hours that I know are, is a plus work and maybe four is a plus and the rest is a minus B plus work. But like, than eight hours of C plus work or 10 hours of C plus work, which is I think what most people, they convince themselves they need to do it even though they're not giving their best effort. And one, do you agree with this concept?
Two, have you found it? And three, how do you start to reframe your mindset if you are that person that's still trying to grind and still burning yourself out and still not able to find those places that you can get a little bit of your life back?
Yeah, you know, I think that the last chapter in my book is called Investing in You. And I essentially say hopefully I've made a case for why you're going to be working longer. And if you agree, that means you now have this extra time and money that you get to spend on other things. And, you know, some of the things I mentioned there are taking better care of yourself.
And I think that in our society – We overemphasize the long-term benefits of things like sleep and diet and exercise, and we underemphasize the significance and the impact of these things in the short term. So yes, sleeping well is very good for you in terms of how you're going to feel 20 years from now, but it's also extremely good for you in terms of how you're going to feel 20 hours from now.
And I think that the best person for any of us to be getting advice from about anything is the most optimized version of us. And so many of us are are not close to that at all. So we feel like we have to work all these extra hours to overcompensate for the fact that. We're tired. We have brain fog. We're stressed out. We have anxiety. We're not thinking clearly.
And if we were to take a step back and say, you know what, like I'm going to make sure I sleep more and the quality of my sleep is going to be better. I'm going to make sure that I'm eating a gram of protein per pound of body weight and I'm going to make sure that I'm getting exercise every single day. Yes, it means I have less time that I can work.
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