Is there life beyond work?
MONEY is NOT of ultimate importance; however, given the economic nature of human existence, we all need some money to get by. Most of us earn our money through constructive work completed on the job as employees or within our actively run businesses.
Understanding that truth is simple and straightforward; yet, have you noticed how with each passing decade, the amount of money we need to sustain — or better yet improve — our lifestyles, as we run our personal and family lives, increases by between 22 per cent and 100 per cent?
That wide range of average annual cash flow needs on a decade-by-decade basis stems from our different personal inflation rates, which I’m assuming lies between roughly 2 per cent and 7 per cent a year.
Whether you earn RM1,100 (Malaysia’s 2019 minimum wage) or RM11,000 or RM110,000 a month, three things are certain:
1. You hope to earn more in active income next year than you do this year;
2. You know you can’t work indefinitely because at some stage the retirement phase of your life (or premature death) will come; and
3. Your identity and sense of self-worth grow increasingly tied to your work (and source of active income) with every passing year.
NOTE: If we take a close look at points two and three above, we come face-to-face with a tough question:
How do we NOT lose our deepest sense of purpose and identity when we stop working for money?
This is something I will eventually struggle with too! A significant part of my self-identity as a productive human being is fused to being a professional business owner, specifically a licensed financial planner who (1) helps clients fund their eventual retirement and who then (2) manages those funds for them in retirement. Even my ancillary business activities of professional speaking and professional writing are almost always focused on those two fields: holistic financial planning and retirement funding.
Your specific circumstances will be different but our challenges are similar. Another way of understanding the question I asked is to consider the way author Jeff Haanen poses it in his fine book, An Uncommon Guide to Retirement:
How do I still find meaning linked to my unique purpose in life within retirement?
That is Haanen’s fifth and last question found in a brief section of his book entitled New Questions for a New Society. Over the last five weeks I have explored each one. (If you would like to read those targeted columns, you may do so at www.nst.com. my/authors/rajen-devadason; I suggest you start with my August 25th 2019 column entitled" 5 Questions to Consider Before You Retire" and then sequentially work your way to the present.)
PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE
In my opinion, the way to answer today’s query, worded two different ways above, is to ensure we have a deep purpose governing the quality and hoped for trajectory of our lives.
For instance, most of us would naturally insist our family is more important than our career. Yet too many of us act in ways inconsistent with that assertion. We do so for two reasons:
1. Our career generates the money we and our family need to live and thrive on; and
2. We lose our way in life by getting distracted and eventually caught up in the "thick of thin things", to borrow a telling phrase from the late management guru Stephen Covey of 7 Habits of Highly Successful People fame.
First, to ensure we reach full-blown retirement in wonderful financial shape, be it at age 45 or 60 or even 75, is not difficult, theoretically speaking...
We "just" need to manage our cash flow responsibly during our decades of active work to save and invest so that we transmute some of our work-generated active income into a growing stream of passive income from a well-diversified savings and investment portfolio. That’s simple to understand.
And yet only a tiny fraction of humanity succeeds in this endeavour. Why?
For starters, it is not due to a flaw in the theory but rather because of an inability on our part — as fabulous, imperfect humans — to stay focused on the task at hand in the midst of daily marketing barrages aimed at separating us from our money.
Second, to help us stay on point we should detect and then repeatedly articulate to ourselves our life’s true purpose. But what is that?
According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christiansen, three questions can help us find and formalise our purpose. The respected resource body Thinkers50 (https:// thinkers50.com) ranked Christiansen as the world’s MOST influential business thinker in both 2011 and 2013. I’ll leave you with his three high octane questions:
1. How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
2. How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
3. How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail or how can I live my life with integrity?
I can’t tell you what your answers should be, but I can assure you if you manage your money to avoid scarcity in retirement AND if you align your life to the answers you come up with to Christiansen’s three questions, you’ll discover that there can indeed be meaningful, purposeful life after work.