Episode 01: Leaving the Grind: Now What?

In this episode, Rob and Brent explore the transition into semi-retirement, discussing the challenges and surprises that come with leaving behind a long career. They reflect on the impact of the inner critic, the importance of finding meaning beyond money, and the need to build new relationships. The conversation emphasizes the significance of time abundance and the journey of creating a fulfilling life portfolio. They aim to share their experiences and insights to help others navigate this transformative stage of life.

Topics we are covering in this episode:

• The inner critic can diminish over time, leading to healthier perspectives.

• Transitioning to semi-retirement can bring unexpected changes in relationships.

• Finding meaning in work becomes more important than financial gain.

• Time abundance can lead to feelings of guilt about productivity.

• Building deeper relationships is a rewarding aspect of semi-retirement.

• Navigating loneliness is a common challenge in this life stage.

• Creating a portfolio of interests can enhance life satisfaction.

• It's essential to balance work and personal life in midlife.

• The journey of midlife is unique for each individual.

• Sharing experiences can help others in similar situations.

Transcript:

Transcript Disclaimer - May contain the occasional confusing, inaccurate, or unintentionally funny transcription moment. It’s all part of the show.

Lena: Welcome to Midlife Circus, where the spotlight shifts, the stakes change, and the clowns? Well, they might just be Rob and Brent. In this first episode, Brent and Rob, friends for many years, kick things off with a candid conversation about leaving the grind, stepping into semi-retirement, and figuring out their next great act. This show isn't about bucket lists or career wins. It's about the weird, wonderful in between space where we start asking bigger questions, chasing new ideas, and occasionally running straight into a pie in the face.

Midlife might feel like a circus, but you don't have to go it alone. Let's get into it.

Brent: Rob, if Midlife is a circus, what's one act you're glad is finally over?

Rob: What a fun question to start this conversation. I'll stay on the circus theme for us today, and I will tell you, Brent, it's the lion tamer act that I'm, happy is over. And when I think about how I approach life and work, it was kind of like the lion, the inner critic, the inner voice, the drive to perform and get results. When I moved into a semi-retirement, I was able to turn a lot of that off. And the inner critic, that inner voice in my head that was criticizing what I was doing or, always critiquing how I did things, it became more and more silent.

So now it's nearly gone, and I'm pretty excited about that. I can participate in activities without setting a big lofty goal. So, like, some of the endurance runs that I do, I might set a goal just to finish and just to participate. And for me, that's different. I used to get really excited about here's this hard time I'm going to go for in a run or here's how fast I need to be.

And that inner critic or that drive has reduced itself. I now want to accomplish different things, but the drive and the lion roar has reduced a little bit in terms of my approach to that, which I think is a lot healthier for me, and it makes me enjoy, different things a lot more.

Brent: Do you find that the inner critic, let's tie it back to your work of the past. So is that always that drive to do more, to accomplish more, to present yourself in certain ways, but you're not losing that inner drive as you approach midlife or as you approach semi-retirement. Do I understand that correctly?

Rob: Correct. Yes. Would say that the drive is still there to do things and to do things well, but the criticism I applied to myself, like, would replay conversations that I had or meetings that I held, I'd replay them over and over in my head and identify where I could have done better or different. And it never was what did I do well. It was always what can I do different?

What should I have done different? How could I have handled that different? And while there is drive to do things and to perform and to push myself, the criticism of myself has gone away, and it's reduced quite a bit. And I know as we're doing this podcast, I am critiquing and editing our content, but it's not with the same maybe malice I had before and the beating myself up over things. It's more of the excitement of I can keep making this just a little bit better.

And then also got to the point where I can say, you know, this is good enough. I'm actually very happy with where this is sitting today, and I can move forward with it.

Brent: Isn't it amazing that inner critic and how challenging that can be to navigate as a leader? Because yes, we want to always be in that state of continuous improvement and get better at our crafts and our professional careers. But sometimes it's just a nuisance. Can you just turn it off? That's what I always felt.

For me, what am I glad that it's finally over is similar vein, but if we're sticking with the circus metaphor, it's the conductor. And the conductor to me, it's always that theme music. It's like that, and then there's so many things going on at once. Or the juggler or all the clowns coming out of the little mini car and they just keep coming and coming and coming. And I find that in my career, most of it in the last, let's say ten years was always so active, so many balls spinning, so many things that I need to attend to, and it just never slept.

It was just on, on, go, go, go. And part of that I enjoyed, but I'm glad that I can move on from the constant feeling that I have to always be on. It's super challenging. That was hard for me to navigate, especially when I moved into summer retirement. I'm like, okay, woah, what am I doing?

Because I didn't have that constant movement. But I'm glad that that stage is a bit in the rearview mirror because that conductor mentality, if you're always trying to keep the balls in the air and nothing fall, it gets exhausting.

Rob: You were spinning a lot of plate. Right? It's that's the other maybe the person think about it. You're spinning a lot of plates and maybe now you're letting some of those plates fall. Is that what I'm hearing from you?

Brent: Yeah. Or not even putting them on the stick to spin.

Even better, don't even start that. When you make the transition to for you and I, we both refer to it as semi-retirement. It's how you create space for other things and how you learn to say no, and your whole life is just not revolving around work, work and more work. So that's our episode today. We're going to talk about us leaving the grind.

What are we up to now and setting the stage for what is this podcast about? And we've got Midlife Circus. And so we're going to talk about different themes that may come in and out of our conversations and understanding that we're working just like all of you towards our next great act. And what does it look like? So to kick off the conversation, why don't you share with our listeners what was the grind for you pre-semi-retirement?

What did it look like? What did you leave behind?

Rob: I left a twenty-six-year career, twenty-seven-year career in financial services. So I started direct at a college as an entry level financial adviser, moved into various roles with a couple different companies. I became a branch manager, a regional manager, a national director and vice president, running different parts of change within a financial services organization, all aligned with helping advisors do better work and have more impact with their clients. So that was the grind for me. And I would say that the job itself wasn't the grind, Brent.

It was how I approached it. And it's go back to that earlier question. It's the inner critic and the drive that I brought to the job. That's what became the grind to me was how I approach my work and my viewpoint of what was success. And it was always a pretty far bar that I had to reach that I would define as success.

It was all self imposed. It wasn't company imposed at all. It was that self imposed bar of success and what was that threshold that I would be content with the work that we were doing at the time. And it never felt like it ever reached the bar. I always kept grasping for it, but never could feel content in that work.

And so the grind for me was a twenty-six-year career in financial services helping clients, but not directly working with clients, in the last probably fifteen years of that career. What about you? What do you leave behind?

Brent: I feel like I left chaos behind. No. So my career is about thirty years long. I spent the first part of my career working at really large organizations like General Electric, PricewaterhouseCoopers. And then I went into this entrepreneurial stage where I launched a few companies.

And then I went back into a large company. I was kind of playing back and forth with my strengths. And more recently, before I moved into the semi-retired lifestyle, I was leading a private equity investment firm. And so what was my life like? It was definitely a grind and it was something that I've always been attracted to.

I like the hard work. I like leaning in to learn new things. I was a management consultant for a number of years. I was always learning how companies worked and working with leadership teams and board of directors. When I was in the investing landscape, I was putting a lot of emphasis or my time into understanding the different companies we could invest into.

And then once we made investments, I was joining board of directors and just always being very active. So my grind was very intense, but it was something that I set the intention to make it intense because I just enjoyed my work a lot. It was quite a transition from that level of intensity to now what does semi-retirement look like for me? But it's something that I look back and I smile on, but I'm also super excited about my next great act as I navigate those waters.

Rob: And in your history, Brent, you took a couple companies public, didn't you? Some of the private equity investments that you had did end up going public, correct?

Brent: Yeah. We took one in particular public. That was an incredible experience. I'd never been through something like that. It's a very intense process.

And actually when we took it public, it was right at the beginning of COVID. So the world was a bit shut down. The public markets started to open back up and we did things that had never been done before, running things very virtually, like a virtual roadshow when you're trying to get investor interest and so forth. So it was a really fun experience for me, challenging because there was so many moving parts that I was unfamiliar with. But I look back at that moment in time in my career and it was a super highlight.

I loved the people I was working with to accomplish that. And it was fun to see how everybody dove all in to make it happen. So it was exciting times for sure.

Rob: What prompted you to leave that behind and actually go into the semi-retirement phase?

Brent: It was more of an opportunity for me. And I've launched, I think five or six companies in my career and everyone has this beginning and an end. And it was just an opportunity for me to leave my last company in good hands and go explore what was next. Now, the unknown for me was what is next, and that's part of what I've been navigating for the last few years. But it was just an opportunity, and I'm excited to continuously explore what's next.

I still do certain things that I used to do. I'm still curious about investing. I'm really excited about what we're doing with Midlife Circus podcast. It's fun to work with a friend and it's also fun to explore a space that I'm unfamiliar with. How about yourself?

What was your decision? What really prompted you to make the decision to go into semi-retirement?

Rob: The last firm that I worked for, we had a couple of organizational changes in the years leading up to me deciding to step away. And at each one of those organizational changes, I was given a bigger opportunity and really a bigger role. And in this last change, I realized that the bigger role and the increase in income wasn't necessarily worth it anymore. And for years, I did a pretty simple equation, Brent. I think a lot of people do this equation as I exchanged stress and stress in my life for money.

And so what amount of stress will I take on in this role for the next year and what's the expected income I'll get and is it worth it? And that equation kept saying, yes, I I'm getting paid well. The stress is worth it. And as you move up in your career and move into more and more senior roles, while the money is very nice, the level of stress is also kind of commensurate with that level of income. And it got to the point where I started thinking down the road a little bit further and realizing that while I was assuming stress for income today, I was likely impacting my later years in life.

So some of the stress impacting my health, not today, but impacting my health later in life. And realizing that for a couple of years I'd had enough, I could have retired a couple of years before I did and moved into a semi-retirement before I actually pulled the plug. But it was realizing that equation that the level of stress I was willing to assume for the income, I became worried that at some point down the road that would catch up with me. And I wouldn't actually have the length of healthy retirement that I wanted to have, but I worked so hard to accomplish through my working years. And so in the last organizational change, I, had the opportunity to step away and to move into a semi-retirement to find what's next, not having any clue what it would be.

And you're just a year and a half, I think, year to year and a half ahead of me, which gave me quite a bit of learnings that I was able to watch you go through that experience as well.

Brent: I'm glad that I could be tortured on your behalf of my learnings.

Rob: What I should and shouldn't be doing as with my time and energy and money during retirement

Brent: you navigated that decision and a big part of Midlife Circus is coming up with and describing the scenarios that we've gone through, but also what other people are going through and making these stories, these examples available to a broader audience. Because we all go through it at one point in time. If you think of us being Gen Xers, what's the age for Gen X right now?

Rob: 45 to 60. 45 to 60, depending upon what you read. And I would say we probably have some Gen X adjacent. So people that are in their early sixties and maybe some people that are a little younger than 45, but really it's nineteen sixty-five to nineteen eighty is what is defined as.

Brent: And that population, from my understanding, The United States is roughly 65,000,000 people. So you think about the transitions over the next ten or fifteen years of people moving into semi-retirement. What I experienced is there's a lot of books out there that talk about this stage of life and it's often referred to as midlife. And there's places you can go to help navigate it. What we're trying to do is this isn't a podcast that's focused in on financial analysis or being a financial advisor.

It's not a podcast that is teaching you how to find your exact next great act. We're trying to give you pathways, ideas, explore this together. We're sharing our experiences. We'll have guests that we'll bring on to share their experiences. It's all about this next great act, but also talks about there's some of it is ugly.

It's not pretty, it's challenging. And I can personally attest to some of those things, which leads me to a question is, when you made the decision to step away from your last leadership role and the way you described it, you're being very eloquent about it, but it's one of those things, another org change. We hear that so much. Eventually you just get tired of them and you're like, I'm out. It's like you're a professional wrestler.

You're like, Tap out. I'm done. Like, get me out. Get me off the stage.

Rob: Me out of the Hulk Hogan, get me out of here.

Brent: Get me out of here. What has been some of the surprises that you've had since you've stepped away? Because it's hard to always anticipate what is the future going to entail. But what are some surprises that you didn't mess necessarily even anticipate in a semi-retired lifestyle?

Rob: There's a lot, and that's really I think what a lot of the context of what this podcast is going to be about are some of the surprises and experiences that we had early on in this transition that not a lot of people are talking about right now, especially for Gen X in our population. Couple of them were how quickly things changed. So the interactions that I was having with people on a daily basis from a work standpoint, people I work with and talk to every day to not talking to them since I left, and I would call some of these people friends. I would have called them friends because we interacted every day. I know about their kids.

I know their kids' names. I've sent birthday cards to the house and gifts to their houses. They've done the same with me, and I haven't talked to them since I left. That's been hard to deal with a little bit at times, and I'm trying to force more connections in my life right now, but how quickly things changed the day in which I stepped away from formal employment and working someplace. The other I would say, Brent, is well, I I talked earlier about that self imposed lion tamer, like, put the inner critic away.

What I also will say is that after leaving and having put so much of my identity into what work that I was doing, how empty it felt not to have something big on the radar, something big to be doing today. And so I quickly replaced that with doing an ultra marathon, a pretty major ultra marathon that gave me some form of purpose. But what I found was intellectually the purpose and the impact I was having, I wasn't feeling satisfaction in my life and how quickly I started realizing, wait. You're really I wouldn't say I was a loser. That goes back to that inner critic voice, but you could be doing more and not could be, but should be doing more.

So almost like a level of guilt came in to place for me that I should have been doing something a little bit more to either impact the world, impact the community, impact my family, and didn't give myself the time to actually walk through that experience and say, you know, I'm going to take some time and step back. So I actually did that and let that linger a little bit in my life. So I would say how quickly things felt like they were changing and how quickly I started viewing myself differently at that point.

Brent: It's so relatable. I mean, for me, I was so shocked on the friendships and how that changed so quickly. And here we are working with the same people day in, day out, and we're doing amazing things together. You're talking and every day you're getting to know them more and more in a deeper level, their kids or what's going on with their personal lives. It's just being human.

But then those relationships dried up within about forty-five seconds it felt like, because you're no longer in proximity on a regular basis. Your commonality, your main thread has now been severed, meaning work. I find that so fascinating. That blindsided me so much. I was just like, What just happened?

Because these are people I talk to every single day. And then all of a sudden gone. Now, I'd experienced it on the other side when people left. Yeah, I probably just disconnected and said, I got to move on. Now report to somebody else.

Or, I have a new customer I have to work with or something like that. But I never experienced it on my side. That was just really awkward, sad, all the emotions run through. It takes a little bit time to navigate that. But as you said, it encourages to forge new relationships.

Rob: Or deeper relationships. And I'd say that's maybe one of the beautiful things that's come from this, Brent, is I'm now in a much deeper relationship with the real friends that I have. Part of this podcast, I'm learning a lot of new things about you, which is really fun and exciting. I think I'm having impact on some friends' lives in a different form as I as I'm able to go deeper into their life and interact with them. So while there is a sense of loss in the relationships that I let that I lost when I left work, there's also a great satisfaction in the depth of relationships that I've really been able to build now that I've had the time and didn't have the distraction of work to go deep with the people that I really care about.

Brent: This is so important, the way you just described it. For me, one of the things that I did right out of the gates was I needed to occupy my time. I was surprised by the relationship side of things, but I took out an opportunity and I actually reached out to you right away and said, I'd known that you'd completed the rim to rim to Rim Trail in the Grand Canyon, which is going from the South Rim to the North Rim and back all in one go. It's about 48 miles. It takes way too long.

It's really challenging.

Rob: Hot.

Brent: It's hot and cold at the same time. Right. We're five minutes apart, it felt like. So I asked you if you wanted to do that because I needed to fill a void of just my time. What am I going to do with all this time?

So we went on this journey together and we broke to another good friend of ours to join us. And the three of us did that. And that was probably six months or so after my departure from my last company. And it filled, what am I doing today? Or what am I doing this week?

Not to the full nature of what your work does, but at least it was a bit of a replacement. And I found that my quest for adventures like that just elevated significantly now that I'm semi-retired. Since then, you and I did a trail marathon together. I did an Xterra triathlon recently, and we have another event coming up in a couple of months. And so I just have more time to do those things, and I'm enjoying them.

But one thing for me that surprised me probably the most outside of the friends, the change in your friends and your network was the importance for me to separate money and meaning. Throughout my career, money was always a driving factor, not I want to earn hundreds of millions of dollars. That was not my drive. It was money to pay for my house. It was money to save for retirement.

It was money for saving for my kid's college. And so a lot of times work falls into that category. I never had this feeling, especially the last twenty years being an entrepreneur, that I was working for money, but I knew the importance of money. And that was something that I always factored into my decisions. Now, being semi-retired and being in a position with some financial freedom and flexibility, I've introduced, I want to make sure that I have meaning in the work that I do.

So meaning becomes the primary and the monetary, if it does happen, it's secondary or tertiary, it falls further down the ladder of needs. So that was something that surprised me because I'd launched a lot of companies and I did a lot of things and all of them had a financial goal in mind. Now I want to make sure there's meaning behind what I'm doing.

Rob: Yeah. Some people are blessed maybe is the best word to say up front and they find a job and a career that pays them the income they need, and they have meaning in that work. It sounds like that wasn't necessarily the case for you always. I'm guessing there was some meaning in the work you were doing, but maybe not as in-depth or as aligned with your values as it is today. I think about it personally as the impact that I was having.

And, you know, it's yes, it was nice to have that paycheck coming in, but now I can actually spend my time and energy truly looking for where can I have an impact on other people as much as possible?

Brent: To your point, I definitely, especially the last ten years, or let's say five years of my career, there was a lot of meaning built into it. The private equity firm that I was leading, our mission was improving human health through nutrition. So there was meaning there. But there's always when you're an investor, you do have to get a financial return for your investors, if you raise money and so forth. So it's always lingering there.

So that becomes often the primary. But now the primary for me is I want to make sure that I have the energy and the meaning behind the work. I like how you use impact. And it's much to do with this podcast. We talk about when you and I were setting out to do this together, we said, we want to make an impact.

We want to provide value to our listeners that are going through this midlife circus, going through this massive transformation in their life, whether it's in ten years they're planning to do it or whether they just did it or maybe they decide to retire five or six years ago and they're kind of figuring out what am I going to do next. We're trying to find pathways to help navigate that. That felt very good when you and I started to talk about it. That's why we're doing this, is to share experience.

Rob: Because the surprises that we had.

Brent: And we continuously have. Yeah. That's what's really fascinating about this. The days that I feel like I've got this figured out, I'm so far from figuring out because emotional roller coaster. And all it takes is I had a phone call yesterday with a colleague who I've only talked to once since I departed my last company.

And he's since moved on as well from that last company. And all of sudden we just jumped right back into investing and deals and all that kind of stuff. I all of sudden that energy came back. And then I was humbled at the end of the call when I'm like humbled might not be the right word, but I was like, reality setting. Like, I'm not in that space the way I was before.

I don't need to get raise my level of anxiety.

Rob: Being a couple years ahead of me, Brent, in this process, or maybe, I think, maybe a year ahead of me in this process, what things are you still trying to figure out?

Brent: Well, it goes back to what I just said, the meaning side of things. And a simple example of that was about a year ago, I launched a company that was going to help businesses or business owners sell their companies. So an exit planning business. It was something that I felt very confident that I can add value, something that I had experienced. I had sold a few of my own companies and then being in private equity, that's a big part of the role that I played is understanding pathways to sell a company.

So I went through all this training, got certification, and I launched a company. So you set up all the technical aspects of doing that, the website and the LLC and so forth. Took on a few clients and everything was going well, but I had this big void inside of me because that money and meaning. It could be incredibly lucrative if that was my goal, but to realize that it's taken away from some of the other things that I want to do such as this podcast. Because I know in the exit planning business, when you take on a few clients, that's pretty much your workload.

It's an intense type of work that lasts anywhere from nine to eighteen months typically, and you're just all in. And so for me, I'm trying to figure out that balance because I had so many years of this career, thirty years of constantly driving for what's next in my career. Now, what's next for me and trying to understand how am I going to continuously be intellectually stimulated without crushing myself? Because I can go all in so quick because that's part of my DNA. I can just go build, like build the next great company.

I'll talk to somebody, let's do it. And then I realized like, well, that's kind of where I was. And I left that behind. Part of this next great act for me is trying to understand the balance between money and meaning, impact, and just waking up every day with that same level of excitement, but it doesn't have to be over the top where as I started out, like those spinning plates. Maybe I have three spinning plates, not 30.

That's something that I'm working towards. That's been something that I'm trying to figure out. That's work in progress. More to come on that. How about yourself?

What are you trying to figure out?

Rob: The big thing I would say is managing time abundance, which seems like a funny thing to be talking about. Right? You go from working sixty, seventy hour weeks at times to not having anything in the schedule the day in the week you retired. Right? The calendar becomes completely empty, and time is all yours.

So you have an abundance of time, and it's really easy. And I think it's really easy for our generation in particular to start to fill that time. We're the generation that didn't get bored. We went and did stuff. We left.

We adventured. We started companies. We did a lot of different things. We didn't have the technology to be able to sit at home and do anything. We left.

We just we got aggressive and we went and did stuff. Like, I saw a meme a while ago that said that generation x, that's the generation that everyone's going to get behind when the zombie apocalypse comes. Right? Is that we're the ones that are going to go figure it out. And now with time abundance, the guilt that sets in of what am I doing that's productive with my time is kind of goes ingrained from a work standpoint, having years and years and years of needing to be productive.

Dealing with that and figuring out how to deal with that is kind of what I'm struggling with still. And early on, I signed up for a giant endurance event. I did the Cocodona two fifty, so 250 miles in Arizona running over, four consecutive days nonstop, had a couple hours of sleep. And so I filled that time early on with just training. As you talked about, you know, doing some endurance events, that's what I did to fill my time.

And that took a year of my retirement. Nearly the entire first year of my retirement was really focused on training for that. And when that ended, I'm consciously not signing up for the next thing just to go fill the void and to fill that time and to have kind of that next thing or the next purpose. I'm consciously taking a step back to say, I'm not going to fill it. I need to be comfortable with having time abundance and really what's important to you in your life, and how do you want to spend that time today.

Don't just go fill it right away, but how do you sit with that boredom and be okay with that and, let that drive your next decision.

Brent: Why do you think when you talk about time abundance and you talk about the stage of life that we're in, midlife, why do you think This is always one of my curiosity questions that I'm trying to navigate. Wouldn't say I'm struggling because it's more enjoyment trying to navigate it. Why do you think at this stage of life, we start to ask bigger questions about what comes after the grind? What comes after that busyness that we were in our careers for so many years. But we start to ask ourselves, how are we going to use our time?

What relationships? Why do you think that is?

Rob: I think it's because we move from a place of account count up to when I get to retire to a place of countdown, which is how many days do I have left on this planet. And midlife is a time when anybody who's been in midlife starts to go through that as my days are becoming numbered, and how am I going to be spending that time? The difference is, though, Brent, it's a different generational approach, I believe, for our generation compared to prior generations and how they thought about this and are doing this. And not a lot of people are talking about that right now. Is how is Gen X going to go and navigate retirement?

And I think we're going to start seeing more and more people move into a semi-retirement, not fully retired like you and I have, and move on to doing other things and impacting things because we're the generation that had to. We had to we're the latchkey kids that got ourselves in the house. We had to figure out how to fix dinner. We're going to keep trying to figure things out as we move forward, which is quite a bit different than I think previous generations have been and have gone through midlife.

Brent: I agree with that. I always approach it for me, I call it a portfolio. And what do I want to put in my portfolio of the things that I'm interested in and curious about? And part of my portfolio is some of those crazy adventures that you and I do together. Some of my portfolio is this podcast and really learning the whole technology aspect behind it.

The conversations that you and I have finding amazing guests. I mean, that's so exciting to me. That's now in my portfolio. I've done some strategy work for a friend of mine and that was really fun work. And I'm not pigeonhole myself into one place.

You and I are doing some nonprofit work together. That's been super fun. We're actually integrated into some trail work because we use the trails in our local community quite often. So there's a nonprofit that manages the trails and we adopted a trail with a group of friends. That's like building a small little community around keeping these trails in good working condition.

So my portfolio is constantly flexing. That's new for me. I've always had a portfolio approach, but I leaned heavily on work for my entire career. So that was like, if it was a pie chart, that's like that 80%. And then my family was kind of the 20%.

That's a little bit sad to say out loud, but it just who I was. I was known as a great worker and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. Now that portfolio, I'm trying to have a much healthier, I'll call it blend, but I'm allowing things to come in and out of it based on where my curiosities are. But part of it is those relationships as you alluded to earlier, it's like investing in the relationships that you want to invest into because now you have time to do it. And you have to balance the time with others that aren't maybe in the same stage of life that you and I are in, in semi-retirement.

But it sure is fun to go do something like when I did the triathlon, I did it with my brother and it was so fun. We spent three or four days just together. Yeah, we beat ourselves up on doing a triathlon, but we had so much fun camping and all the things around it. We just made space to be present. And the coolest thing was, is if I would have done that event five years ago, I would have been taking calls five minutes before the triathlon and five minutes after the triathlon.

And then the dinner with my brother, one of us would have been interrupted with, I got to take this call. But we were completely unleashed. Like, we didn't have a leash back to anything for a few days. We were just present with each other, and it was incredibly enjoyable.

Rob: The eighty twenty comment that you just brought up is maybe 80% focused on work and professional career, 20% focused on family is nothing out of the norm, I think, for our generation, Brent. That's how you got ahead. That's how you got promoted. That's how you moved up in life. And if anything, I think newer generations maybe have figured this out today is that they actually have quite a bit more balance that we neglected on ourselves.

We didn't give ourselves that balance. We didn't give ourselves that flexibility because that's the way you got ahead was to be a grinder and to work harder and work more and focus more. Right? That's how you got promoted. One of the benefits newer generations have is they're not focused on that as much anymore.

That's going to be something that we are going to have to relearn and how do we shift that priority as we go into midlife late and later life to know that it's okay not to be that grinder anymore, and it's okay to focus on the things that are truly important to you today. That's a learned skill. I don't think it's something that's just going to flip overnight. It's a function of our upbringing and how we were raised and how we had to go figure things out. I know when my mom if I told my mom I was bored, it was my fault, and I needed to go figure it out.

We'll go figure out a way not to be bored. And we figured out lots of ways not to be bored. And I think our generation's going to go into retirement with a lot of different spinning plates if they're not careful because we're going to want to try and fill that level of boredom with something to feel productive. And it's a chance where we can take a step back and not have to do all of that.

Brent: So do you hope that this show brings to our listeners? Midlife Circus, you and I have been working on this project for quite a while. We talk about impact. What are two or three things that you want listeners to know that are coming in the future as we navigate this journey together?

Rob: I hope they learn from some of our mistakes and some of our successes. So, there's a couple of things, Brent, because you're a year ahead of me. You helped me learn before I got to retirement that I'm hoping we can share with our listeners and help them navigate some of those steps so they learn from both our mistakes that you and I both made as we stepped into this and continue to make and will continue to make as we go forward into this semi-retired life, but also some of the things that we navigated, we think pretty well. And here's some things for people to consider. The other area I would say is to find some level of inspiration.

Our retirements are going to look different. Retirement might mean a form of work. It doesn't mean stopping completely. I know for years I had a goal of, I'm going to have enough money that I can retire and just work to cover the bills. And the job was going to be like a, a ski patroller up on the mountain.

And I'll just get a job that'll just cover the bills. That's all I need. I had always thought I would be doing something during my retirement. And so hopefully we share some stories with some people and guests we have in future episodes of an epic retirement that they're having that might inspire people to think differently about what their approach is going to be later in life as they move into a retired, semi-retired, midlife phase in their life. What are you hoping people get out of this podcast?

Brent: Real quick, I have to go back because I remember you telling me several years ago that you were going to go and become ski patrol. Yeah. And I remember a few times me saying, yeah, you'll be doing ski patrol, but I'll be the guy skiing by you when it's a 22 inches of fresh powder. And you'll be like, why did I sign up for this job again?

Rob: Digging some little kid out of a hole and yeah. Yeah. Making, yeah, making barely minimum wage.

Brent: I think you did it because you talked about there's a fitness level that comes with it, and there's kind of you've always been great on the mountain and helping people out. You were a ski coach at one point in times, bringing all those things together. But then this realization is that exactly what I want to do? But that's that trial and error.

Rob: Right. And I'd probably have like a 22 year old boss, which I probably wouldn't want to have either at this stage of my life.

Brent: Yes, might be challenging. For me, I want to make sure that everybody knows we're going to cover a ton of topics. And one thing that you and I always are working on is our personal nutrition, our personal fitness, what makes us tick both from a relationship standpoint, what makes us tick for that intellectual stimulation. We talk about investing. We talk about a lot of broad topics.

You're going to hear about our adventures. That's just stuff we'd like to do and that's how we fill some of our time. We're also going to talk about, for me, as an example, I'm navigating soon to be empty nester. My youngest is a senior in high school and my oldest is a junior in college. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that experience.

We'll talk about some of the loneliness that comes with having a very full career and then having this big void and what does it mean and how are we navigating it. So there's going to be a lot of topics that we bring in. But what you'll always get out of us is just our candid, this is what we're experiencing. I would say we're going to lean much more heavily on the fun and the enjoyment that we're having, but there are sides of this semi-retired lifestyle that haven't been easy for me, and I know you've shared the same back is it's not all roses, it's just a different experience. And I'm navigating those on a day-to-day basis.

I'm proud to say that I think I've navigated some of the real tough stuff from my initial silence and void of activity to now it seems to be filling up with things that just bring me a ton of joy. I'm excited about that to talk about all these different aspects. I know that you and I have a ton of fun when we get together. And beyond the podcast, we're going to do things that make it really exciting for both Rob and I is bringing people together for some retreats to talk about these things, but doing it in places that most people wouldn't do. We've talked about doing a surf retreat in Costa Rica as an example, more to come on that.

So there's things that we're going to go beyond the normal podcast that we'll introduce. It's all part of helping people through this major transition in their life.

Rob: Something we're all trying to figure out. Right? If I had any final thoughts for this, Brent, as you and I are trying to figure this out as we're navigating it. And if people can learn along the way with us and the things that we are, we're trying to navigate right now and being completely transparent and vulnerable at times. I know one of the conversations that we plan to have is going to be quite vulnerable with our guests around how we're navigating loneliness at this stage in life, which I never thought I would have to navigate.

And while we're not experts, we are experienced, and we have different life experiences we're going to bring to the table. We have different, backgrounds that we're going to help listeners with. I know one of the episodes we'll be recording is an episode on how to hire a financial adviser and what to look for. Having spent my entire working career with advisers, I think I'm pretty versed in a I'm an expert on what you should be looking for when you're looking to hire a financial adviser. And so as I just kind of think through my final thoughts on the podcast is it's hopefully going to be fun, enjoyable.

Hopefully, people laugh along the way. Maybe they'll cry along the way. Maybe some people can identify with the experiences we're going through, and hopefully, everybody gets a benefit from learning from the things we did well and the mistakes that we made.

Brent: A closing thought for me is we are setting the intention to establish your next great act. What is it going to be? How are we going to get there together? This is a community. We're looking to expand the community to go on this journey together and have a ton of fun doing it and find those gems of people that are doing things that we all aspire to do because we know we can do it.

So we're super excited, and we look forward to the next episode.

Lena: That's it for this episode of Midlife Circus. Visit midlifecircus.fm for show notes, transcripts, and all the latest happenings. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss your next great act. Before we go, a quick reminder.

The opinions and stories shared here are just that, personal reflections and perspectives. We're not legal experts, medical professionals, or therapists. This show is for entertainment and inspiration only, so please seek the right professionals when you need guidance. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you under the big top next time. Midlife Circus is a Burning Matches Media production.