Why Not Plan?

I have always maintained that the success I’ve had in my career, my retirement, my marriage and family has been largely the result of good fortune and not due to any hard work on my part. Because I’m not really good at hard work. In other words, I’m lazy. Yet I’ve done fairly well at my career, starting as a summer intern and ending up running a billion dollar company. I’ve stayed married to my best friend for over 44 years. And I have no money worries in my slightly early retirement. I’m loving life and feel I have a purpose and a lot of great relationships. But when I reflect on how all of this came about I do see I did one thing differently than a some of my friends did.

And that secret to success is so very simple, I took ice cold showers every morning of my life…No, sorry, I hate cold showers. Morning rituals were not my thing. My thing was planning out life’s big decisions logically. I’m pretty spontaneous on most things, my wife and I usually will head cross country on week long road trips with maybe one or two days advance notice. No kids, no pets, no planning required for fun stuff usually. I’m not talking about that kind of planning. I’m talking about logically planning out the three or four key decisions you will make in your life. Things many people do impulsively.

One of the earliest pivotal decisions I made was to pick a career that I thought would motivate me. Because as I opened with, I’m not good at hard work but I am good at fun work. Even as a young teen I knew the good and bad parts of me. The bad was the laziness but the good was a very adept intellect. I was smart, very smart. And I loved problem solving. Remember those word problems in algebra? The ones you hated? Those were cake to me. And so were all things science and math. So as strange as it might seem I was thinking about a career before I even got to high school and ended up deciding chemical engineering would leverage my innate ability to handle extreme math and science and also would pay me very well. It and electrical engineering were the consensus two hardest four year majors that existed at the time so it just made sense that engineers would always be in demand.

But how many people even have a career plan in mind when they start college? My first engineering fundamentals class had 14 people in it who declared chemical engineering as their major. Exactly two of us graduated in that field. The others all ended up doing something else. Some figured out it didn’t match their skill sets, or it didn’t interest them. But they could have known after taking high school chemistry and physics if it was their thing or not. But they did not plan well enough and wasted time in college taking courses they weren’t going to use when they switched their majors. Some did not have the right kind of brain to handle the coursework, if you didn’t score 1450 on the SAT or 32 on the ACT you need a different major, because you probably weren’t going to be able to pass the courses. Again, it does not take much research to know that.

My next big decision was getting married. I had dated just for entertainment until I met my future wife. I was trying to date her roommate in college, which never happened, and became fast friends with her. She shared the same values on faith, money, kids, recreation and optimum places to live and over time we fell in love. We have been married 44 years so far and still are both happy with the decision. But we were friends and dated for two years before getting engaged. We didn’t enter into marriage lightly, we both thought about what we needed to do to put glue into the relationship that would hold us together. She took up tennis, I taught her to ski, we both loved hiking and fishing already. Today those are still all favorite things. Yet we both had friends who married people they couldn’t even date without fighting. It made no sense to us that people who approached life so differently were going to make a lasting couple. And they didn’t. Marriage is about love and romance, that’s true, but it better have a solid logical foundation as well. It’s one area you better have a plan.

The next decision chronologically was to select a job. Because I had chosen a major which was in high demand I had my pick of jobs. I interviewed over a dozen companies and took trips to nine locations to hear their sales pitch of why I should work for them. These were all expense paid trips to be wined and dined and put up in exclusive hotels. Eight of the nine companies made me firm job offers. And rather than me selling myself to them they were practically begging me to work for them. It was pretty heady stuff for a kid who had never been on an airplane until then. All were offering great pay, $80K in today’s dollars, plus or minus a few thousand, depending on the company. I had a choice to make again, but I had already been planning it out in advance.

The summer before, I had taken an internship at a oil and chemical complex in my home state. Unlike most of my fellow students who did the same at other companies I was given serious projects to complete and left with only as much supervision as I asked for. The others were giving training projects that were like additional coursework, and not much fun. I was actually being a real engineer and building things. Also this local company was smaller but had a bright future. They were investing heavily and would be hiring quite a few more engineers after me, but I was the only one in my class they were interested in. Being the first one hired would give me a competitive edge. I took that job, did senior level work from day one and ended up running the place by the time I was 41 because I got my foot in the door first. A lot of people would have picked one of the other jobs at a bigger company, but why face insane competition when you don’t have to? I had a plan.

The final and most recent key decision I had to make was about when and how to retire. I worked until I was sixty not because of financial reasons but because I enjoyed what I did and wasn’t sure if retirement would be as much fun as my job. But still, I had been planning for it my entire career. Little things like maxing out our retirement plans, plus investing in taxable brokerage accounts, paying off our house early and not borrowing money to buy depreciating assets like cars all put us in the position where money was not an issue when it came to retirement. Being well paid was also a big part of being financially independent.

I also knew I needed some purposeful activities after I stopped full time work, including some paid consulting. But that is hard to do if you are the boss at a billion dollar company. There aren’t many consulting jobs for that skill set, at least in my rural area. So decades earlier I had decided that no matter how high up in the company I got I was going to keep a couple of niche areas in my job description because they were adaptable to consulting. These were things that others in my position would have delegated to others but I kept them as part of my duties just so I could do some consulting if I wanted to. It worked perfectly.

I get to do as much expert witness work as I want now and find it keeps me in touch with a very interesting group of people from my former career as well as politicians and business leaders. And it pays well even though I do not need the money. It still feels good to open up a big check now and then. Some of my friends who were running other local large companies approached me when they retired about how to set up a consultancy and sadly I could not help them because they had not preserved the technical skills in an area that had market value. They knew how to run a big company but that is a full time job and it’s difficult to find someone willing to pay you to do that one or two days a week. In most cases those guys went back to lesser paying full time jobs because they needed the money or did not have enough purpose in their lives to feel good in retirement without a job. One went back to work full after their spouse issued them an ultimatum.

In my case, I love being retired, my wife and I will head out to the tennis courts as soon as I finish typing this. I have a half dozed volunteer and paid gigs active right now, plus this blog and too many hobbies to keep up with. But only because I planned retirement for decades. The finance, the volunteering, the consulting and the hobbies were all ready to go well in advance.

What about you, have you planned the big life decisions with a logical underpinning or are you more a spontaneous free spirit.

Is it really possible for a teen to figure out their lifetime career based on their self knowledge and talents?

How do you avoid growing apart from your partner? Even if you are perfectly compatible at the start we all change over time.

As usual if the comment box doesn’t show up then try clicking on the title at the top of this post.