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Back to EpisodesHow to Find Your Purpose in Retirement
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Podcast 412
Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose.
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Script | 411
Hello, and welcome to episode 412 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve.
When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes.
The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers.
It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”.
I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English.
Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live.
Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching.
It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching.
In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb?
Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control.
I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption.
Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court.
The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession.
However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and