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Doing Nothing Today

When I woke up this morning there was only one thing on my calendar.  Playing tennis at 4 with Chas.  Three short years ago my calendar would have had a dozen entries for today all involving my job.  Back then I could not conceive of a day like today,  a day with absolutely nothing to do.  Now I cannot fathom ever doing a 9 to 5 job again.

Oh, so cool, they just hit the tornado siren in town for a test, it is a beautiful day and I’m sitting outside with the pets. My two dogs who are resting near me decided to join the siren in a howling concert, lovely pup vocals! The cat is far too cool for this embarrassing display and looks at the hounds with reproach.

The view of the hundreds of acres of wooded wetlands on three sides of my house is serene as each tree and bush tries its very best to out-green its neighbor.  To be honest I can’t even see all of the two acres I own much less the hundreds surrounding me that are part of somebody’s family trust.  But I know they are out there because I’ve walked them all. The woods are dense here in Arkansas and you can only see perhaps a hundred feet into them.   The flowers my wife has planted in our yard are a delicate pink but to tell the truth a natural patch of vibrant yellow wildflowers just past them out in the woods are more vibrant. The birds are singing in full stereo in all directions and it is simply amazing how beautiful everything looks, smells and sounds this morning.

Where was I, oh yes, the JOB.  I called it a 9 to 5 but it was more like a 7:30 to 5:30 plus a few hours on Sunday and unplanned call outs due to weather, power failures, equipment failures, fires (YIKES!!) surprise EPA inspections (YIKES!!) and when deadlines for presentations to the CEO Who Must Not Be Named were looming.  And there were lots of those deadlines.

It paid well, very well and I liked being the face of a large employer that provided high paying high tech jobs.  It was like being a small town mayor, everybody knew my name and most were friendly.  I traveled a lot, stayed in fancy hotels and ate fancy meals.  And I saved my money aggressively for the day when I would either be too old to work or would no longer enjoy it.

I thought that day would be in my seventies, but in my fifties it came early.  The environment became toxic and hostile, or at least my perception of it, and at the same time I inherited half of my dad’s estate.  Not enough to change my status, I was already financially independent, but enough to jolt me into the realization that I was past needing to ever earn another Benjamin.

So I told my CEO, you know I can’t say his name or he might appear, that I was planning my exit.   I told him he should look for someone else to do the job because I was seriously considering riding off into the sunset and he did and I did.  And that was three years ago which brings me back to where I am.  Sitting on my patio in my backyard with the animals and the trees and nothing to do except talk to you this morning.  And there is nothing I’d rather do than that.

 

I don’t choose to spend many days like this because I like to be in motion.  But some days, like today,  doing nothing is exactly what I want to do.  There is a gentle freedom inside me that I never felt when I worked.  Back then no matter how I tried to calm my mind next week’s deadlines loomed over me, preventing me from ever attaining the peace I feel sitting here today.

You might be where I was three years ago, with plenty of investments to fund a life past your 9 to 5 but you cannot grasp what that life will feel like.  That is very true, you will not be able know if this will work for you until you live it.  But if it is any help it is working for me, and it is working for hundreds of other bloggers who write about it every week.  When I decided, I was nearly 60, so rather than a giant leap it was just a small step.  You may be 43 and the step looks quite uncertain.  Who will you be after you give up the career that has helped define you to others?  I can tell you that most of us who retired earlier than our peers do struggle with answering the question “What do you do?”.  Because two days ago I was a lobbyist and yesterday I was a tax consultant, both side gigs, and today I’d have to say “Nothing, I do nothing”.

The thing is, life feels much different now.  I did not realize I carried much stress before, but every day of the last three years I have felt fifty pounds lighter.  My bedroom scales confirm my actual mass hasn’t changed but I still feel like I’m floating.   Some metaphysical load has been lifted off of my shoulders, off my back.  I sleep until I want to get up.  I haven’t lost my purpose or found more purpose because I’m still me but not much happens to me that I fear or dread.  All in all, life is better.  And better is good.

 

 

Are you on the edge of retiring early, slightly early or taking a mini retirement?

Does it scare you to think about what life will be like a year after you retire?

What will it take to make you decide to take that step?

 

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I Saved a Life

I saved a life 30 years ago on a dark night when I was scared to death for my own.

I’m not sure how other bloggers do things but I keep a Word document on my laptop that is titled “Blog Ideas”.  When inspiration or a muse strikes me I open the document and add the idea to this living document and when I’ve used the topic I cross it out.  When I have time to write, like right now, I open the file and see what “feels” right to write about (see what I did there?). When I’m on a creative jag sometimes I will throw ideas into the mix that aren’t strictly related to my core competencies of personal finance, investing, career advancement and early retirement and today is one of those days!  It is a story from long ago that changed two lives dramatically.  Mine and Mike’s.  But in a way it is about investing, saving and risk versus reward which are surely applicable to personal finance.

Mike and I worked in a plant environment, and by that I do not mean a farm or a forest.  Our plant was of the chemical variety with a jungle of pipes and tanks and furnaces.  Hundreds of acres of extremely complex equipment containing very dangerous materials under high pressure and temperatures with hundreds of employees supporting the safe and reliable operation of the facility.  I actually worked there for over thirty years and in that time we never lost an employee to a work accident in spite of the inherently hazardous materials we worked with. But that night we did lose six lives, in a terrible accident. And yet we didn’t lose a person.

 Mike was an operations hourly union worker who was helping our maintenance crew that evening.  I was a new engineer.  We knew each other but both of us were/are on the quiet end of the scale so we had barely talked.  That night there were some problems with some of the equipment and it was being taken off line for repairs.  It should have been routine but in the planning one source of toxic gas connected to the equipment was not properly isolated.  A crew of six men was working on the equipment when a cloud of deadly gas was released directly on them.

They all fell to the ground, dead, as the gas instantly paralyzed their lungs and they stopped breathing. I wasn’t part of the planning or involved in the maintenance but I was on the scene nearby looking at some related equipment when it all went down and along with a few other workers in the area responded to recover our stricken friends.  I dropped down on my knees beside Mike, who like the others was not breathing, and to all appearances was dead.

A person’s brain can survive for three to five minutes without oxygen so the absence of breathing may look like death but there is a small window of time where lives can still be saved. Because several of us had trained in CPR for an occurrence just like this we each were able to get our patients breathing again.  Without the onsite CPR we provided all six would have died long before the ambulances and EMT’s arrived.  That was over thirty years ago and to my knowledge five of the six saved that night are still alive and well today. One died of unrelated cancer five years ago.   Mike certainly is healthy and well.

It was a pretty simple thing to perform CPR on a friend when you are the only hope he has and there is no one else there to help.  It is a little less simple when you are in a toxic gas environment yourself and have no idea which way to drag your stricken coworker to safety.  There is a point at which you just have to weigh the risk that you will be killed against the certainty that your friend is already dead unless you stop and save him.  You can run or you can stay, we all stayed and they all lived.  Of the six none remained in the chemical industry.  I guess the trauma of “dying” and coming back was too much.  Of the rescuers everyone stayed with their jobs, because the privilege of saving a life is a rare thing and pretty much cancelled out the fear we had of dying ourselves that night.

We never talked about it later, to the point that I do not even remember who most of the victims  and most of the rescuers were.  I visited Mike in the hospital a couple of days later while he was recovering and he was obviously very uncomfortable in my presence.  We still live in the same small rural area and when I see him today it remains very awkward, I’m not sure why.   It was something way too personal between two people who were only barely friends, and I think I’m a reminder when we meet of something too dark and fearful for him to come to terms with.  I don’t know what they saw at death’s doorstep, none of them ever said as far as I know.  It just became something nobody ever mentioned again.  Maybe that’s why I am doing it here.  It profoundly influenced my life and was one of my best moments where I had a choice and what I chose to do had real and lasting consequences for myself and for another family.

I suppose it is easy enough to tie this into personal finance concepts like investing.  What did the CPR classes cost my company?  A few thousand at the most.  What would six deaths have cost them had they been of the permanent variety?  Millions probably.  Maybe more when you consider the regulatory agency fines, the impact on stock prices, the civil lawsuits that never happened, the impact on company morale the difficulty of finding workers for a plant with a damaged safety record and so many other negative consequences.  It might have been the best financial investment the company ever made.

This story also deals with risk and reward.  Investing is all about balancing risk.  It is also something you have to do when life presents you an opportunity to get involved in something real.  What are the risks and what are the opportunities?  And sometimes the reward is so great that you willingly undertake great risk, particularly in career and entrepreneurial situations.

What about nonfinancial returns?  All of those guys had families, wives, children and extended family that depended on them being there.  In all the ways that family matters broken families were kept intact. That CPR investment saved 175 years of human life (and counting), the most precious commodity we have.

Teaching employees CPR was a form of insurance and if this blog post accomplishes anything I hope it encourages somebody who is hesitating on term life to go ahead and get the policy because life is not assured to any of us.  And if someone was contemplating taking a first aid or CPR course then do it, please.  It is absolutely too late to try to learn by watching YouTube at the scene.  I would try that probably if I was not trained, but realistically in a crisis you will fall back to your training and if you have none you will probably fall back to failure.

And since this was about saving something, someone, what does it say about savings?  To me it puts money into perspective.  I have enough money now, I do not need to earn another dollar for the rest of my life.  But when I look back on my life’s accomplishments, I am prouder of what I did that night thirty years ago than of any of the equipment I designed or of my current portfolio.   My message is that achieving financial independence is not a “Why” goal worth investing yourself in.  It is a means to help you achieve what is important to you but in itself it will not make you happy.  Your impact in this world on others is what will matter to you later.  Your journey to financial independence and the things you do on that trip for others and for those you love are the real return on the way you invest your life.

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Giving Your Kids Millions?

Are you crazy?

You are going hand down millions of dollars to your kids!
Ok, I get it, you are sitting their shaking your head because one, if you do have kids they are just little rug rats at this stage and you are way away from having your own funeral in the near-term future. Plus you do not have millions of dollars anyway, you may be still in the negative net worth column and if not you can no doubt remember a couple of years back when you were. But let me promise you, this is not hypothetical, you may not be there now, but you will be there in the future.

Making my case for future millionaire you is pretty easy so let me lay it out for you.

1. You are in this community. The FI, FIRE, Frugal, Life Hacking, Career Boosting, Entrepreneurial, Side Hacking and etc. community. Need I go on? If you are reading in this space you are likely having an inordinate amount of success in your pursuit of financial independence, however you define it.

    2. The 4% rule. Everybody talks about how the underlying studies show a high rate of success for anyone that sticks with the 4% safe withdrawal rate. With success defined as an insignificant chance of running out of money. What is less often noted is that in two thirds of those cases the retiree ends up with over twice the amount of money he had at retirement, and only 10% of the time was the amount of the estate after death smaller than the original retirement nest egg. That means even if your magic number for early retirement is $500,000 there is a big chance that will grow to a million by the time you leave this mortal coil (every post needs a little Shakespeare).

    3. You are killing it, and won’t know how to stop.
    Most of this community of financially savvy learners is not going to be content laying on the beach for fifty years. You people get things done, you are smart and focused and are winners. The very fact that you have a plan means you are the kind of person who will always be shooting at some target ahead of you. So what? Well, the what is that you will continue to earn money, and probably even more than you spend, for the rest of your life. It may be in a location independent web based business or something more old fashioned like my consulting side gigs but it will earn you substantial income and will keep you at a 0 to 2% withdrawal rate instead of 4%. And those kind of withdrawal rates end up allowing your nest egg to not just double but grow to three to five times what you retired with. Like it or not you are going to be a millionaire or more likely a multimillionaire before your heirs receive an inheritance.

    So now that I have your attention and cautious agreement that you will be faced with deciding the final destination of over a million dollars and most likely over a million dollars per child lets talk about that. I have an advantage over you in that my three kids are aged 27, 30 and 33. I know the kind of adults my kids will turn into, you don’t. Similarly I know the kinds of adults my friends’ kids have turned out to be as well. And guess what, our kids are not like us!

    I was a meat eating southern guy. My wife grew up on a farm where slaughtering pigs, chickens and cows was just another daily activity. One of my daughters is a vegan, the other eats no pork. I convinced two of my three children to pursue engineering because I had so much fun doing it. Neither of them found engineering very interesting and one ended up in regulatory work while the other went back to school and is a doctor. Your kids will be like you in some ways and unlike you in many others, but how they will be with money you can’t know.

    The Dave Ramsey Paradox. Now first let me point out this is my own invention, you heard it here first. The Dave Ramsey Paradox is as follows: “Advice like your grandmother gave but we keep our teeth in”. Plus, if you become good at handling your personal finances you can “Change Your Family Tree”. Let’s think on that. If you can “change your family tree” by handling money well and teaching your kids then every grandmother who gave sound money advice would have money responsible kids and in time money responsible grandkids. So if the grandmothers planted the family tree correctly how come so many people need to be pruned?

    Obviously some lessons just do not catch on from one generation to another. Depression era babies see the world differently than do Boomers. Boomers do not see eye to eye with Generation X or Millennials and whatever generation comes next will almost certainly confuse all of us.

    All that is to say my kids are not like me. We have outside pets which works great when your backyard has 800 acres of wooded wetlands to play in but they are city kids with indoor dogs? Really, dogs indoors? Who knew you could even do that?

    And this is the problem you are going to face. You are going to drop a seven figure sum into your kid’s hands someday, and they are probably not going to share your values when it comes to money. Will it help them or hurt them when it happens? Well, what is the worst that could happen? We could look at another statistically large group of people who have had large windfalls and see how they have fared.
    The news is not very good. Over one third of lottery winners go bankrupt some point after winning. It is counter intuitive that free money would cause people to end up in greater financial duress than they were before winning but one third is not a small statistical result. The correlation is clear and real. Also going broke is not the worst that can happen, “winners” also suffer higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, divorce and suicide. It is pretty sobering to think that a “gift” of a large amount of money can have such unintended consequences.

    But you could logically argue, and I would agree, that lottery players do not represent your kids. Lottery players tend to be over represented by the lowest 20% earners in the country. Your kids presumably will be at least average earners and probably higher since you are the focused achievers that you are. Maybe that alone will save them from the fate of lottery winners.
    So what about the statistics of heirs to fortunes? Unfortunately they are not much better. In fact 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth in the second generation and 90% lose it by the third. So much for changing your family tree! Now those statistics are gathered from studying mega-rich families whose assets will probably exceed yours or mine but it still is concerning that families that know they will be handing down vast fortunes do not seem to be very successful at training their kids to be successful millionaires.

    Maybe I have convinced you this is a real dilemma you will face someday and now I am sure you are expecting me to provide the kind of sage wizened advice that older folks like me are known for. Sorry, no help here at all. But I will tell you my plan. In my case it will all go equally to the three kids, zero restrictions. They are mature and while they may not be as frugal as I am the worst-case scenario is they will spend it and not have it for retirement or to hand down to their someday kids. That isn’t so bad and in fact I probably should have spent more of my money myself when I was younger.

    On the other hand I have a relative whose kids haven’t proved themselves very responsible with money. He currently has no plans to leave his multi-million dollar estate to his kids because he fears how they would handle it. I suggested he perhaps set up a trust that only doled it out in small doses that were less susceptible to feeding undesirable behavior but I’m not really sure what his ultimate plans will be.

    My kids are already adults and I know them by their lifestyles and actions. I cannot see the million dollar plus inheritances they will get someday being anything but a blessing in their lives. If you do plan on having kids, and yours may not even be here yet, and if they are they may be very young, you will have a long time to determine how to pass down your lifetime assets. There are a few other related questions that you will also want to consider if you haven’t. What will you do with your assets if you choose not to have children? How do you handle handing down money in a blended family? And very important who should raise your kids if they are left without parents while still young?

    What is your plan on handing down money to your children?

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Why Do Rich Boomers Work Until They are 70 (and Why I Did Not)

Most of the energy that vibrates within the hearts and souls of the FI and FIRE community resonates with frugality, aggressive savings rates, economic life hacks and safe withdrawal rates. It makes perfect sense because this community, while diverse, is also over represented with millennial and Gen X members. FIRE was never a thing in my baby boomer world and in fact most boomers are simply befuddled with the concept of walking away from a perfectly functional, if not fulfilling job until you hit 66. The only real exceptions were military or government jobs that provided full retirement after a 20 or 30 year hitch and even most of those men and women started a second 9 to 5 career right after leaving with that fat pension.

I decided to retire in my 50’s, barely still in my 50’s, and while that sounds like conventional retirement to most in the FIRE community it was very early for someone who was in the corporate officer ranks of a Fortune 500 company. Most of the chemical and mechanical engineers I started work with hoped to someday manage a large department or perhaps a facility. Only a few attained that and even fewer of us made it to the promised land of large stock options and bonuses. Of those most of the ones I knew personally worked past normal retirement. My old boss for instance announced his retirement recently to be slated for 2019. He’ll be over 70 then and that is about average for people in his position in our industry. In good years he makes the better part of a million dollars depending on profit related bonus and stock deals. Unless he is totally incompetent with money, and I know he is a very level headed guy, he has been FI for at least the last twenty years. His net worth is probably north of ten million at this point in his life, so why is he still working?

I think I know, because if you had asked me seven years ago I would have told you I was planning on working until I was 70 myself! Stay with me millennials, it may help you understand your own parents a little better. Work was a game. Now I don’t mean it was all fun but that the point of games is to try to be the winner. Who ever played Monopoly (or Call of Duty, OK?) with the goal of losing? In my day work was viewed as the same thing, a win or lose proposition. Not something to tolerate until you could escape it but as life’s grand challenge and one where winning got you the nicest houses, the coolest cars and the biggest bank accounts. Some of us wanted all three of those and others, like me, were naturally frugal and just saw the money as a way of keeping score, not much different than Monopoly money. Or maybe golf is a better metaphor. I hate golf, I’m a good tennis player but golf is so much better for drawing comparisons to life. Nobody goes out to play golf intending to lose. They know their ability so they don’t expect to shoot par probably but they still compete with themselves and their friends. And if they are not very good they usually keep on playing anyway. They do not generally find themselves in a place where they feel “GI”, Golf Independent, and that it is OK to walk away from golf forever.

And there is this, and this is where I will sound elitist and privileged. The boomers that did choose early retirement were often losers at the game of work. Like golfers who were totally inept (me) the work game was such an unproductive and unsatisfying string of personal defeats that they finally couldn’t stand it anymore and they just dropped out. The winners were the competitive people that blew by their rivals. The ones the rest were jealous of and sometimes hated. And here is the crux of my message. Winners do not quit their game willingly. Can you imagine Tiger Woods walking away from golf when he was the best in the world because he was financially independent? Or Tom Brady retiring from the Patriots five years ago? Why would a hot shot engineer or CEO who feels he is in the top 1% of the world’s players in his game walk away before he has lost a step. And while pro athletes wear out their bodies in their 30’s knowledge workers usually are pretty much as smart at 70 as they were at 35.

And that is why FIRE never caught with most of my generation and why slightly early retirement is about the best we can manage. Most of my friends will work until 66-70 because we do not understand the nature of work in the same way you do. In retrospect I think you have a healthier view, particularly if you are really adept at work. There is even a cliché for the trap that talent can be for the high earner’s mindset, golden handcuffs. If you are really good at work then you stand a chance at making a lot of money and having your peak earning years be in your fifties and sixties. So the only way out of your 9 to 5, which for the elite workers is more like 6:30 AM to 7 PM, is to walk away from the game while you are still an All Pro player. How often does that happen in the sports world? Never. Similarly it did not happen in my generation very often in the world of the corporate elite.

I only got out of my golden handcuffs because of this community and the way it confronted me with the stark reality of my financial independence. I very easily could have become my boss and faced another decade of long hours at a job that I found increasingly unpleasant. I am so thankful to the bloggers and podcasters in this space for building a place in my head that made retiring early seem acceptable and perhaps even noble and admirable. The message of trading working for money to spending your time on what is truly significant to you, to me, took about two years to grow to fruition in my mind and heart.

Most of my still working friends are puzzled by the fact that I do not have a full-time job. Some of my former coworkers seem uncomfortable around me, as if I must be damaged goods, a former star who blew out his knees and can no longer play the game. It is a struggle to relate how this new world I live in works to people who are still drinking the Kool-Aid I used to love. They are somewhat mollified by the fact that I consult a little bit but when I try to say I just do that for fun now, not for money, they act as if I switched to speaking in Russian or an unknown tongue. It is why I blog, because you people, you understand me better than they do. The FIRE community is very diverse but also very accepting. Even long in the tooth boomers are welcome here. Thanks for that.

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Will Early Retirement Kill You?

What prompted me to even think about this somewhat morbid topic was reading an interesting post by “Retiring on My Own Terms” in which ROMT countered the argument popular recently in media that instead of saving aggressively people can more easily just work longer/retire later. One of the points he made rather elegantly was that trading time for money is not necessarily a good idea, particularly when your time is limited once you reach a standard retirement age.

Reading that I became obsessed with the concept that there might be an even bigger issue buried in that question. What if the choice of when you retire, whether that be early retirement, slightly early retirement (my choice), standard retirement or late retirement had an impact on not just the quality of your life but also on the length of life, your life expectancy itself? Is it possible Mr. Money Moustache has doomed himself to an early expiration date? What if being a rat on a wheel at a regimented and even unpleasant 9 to 5 extends your life span indefinitely? What if being let out of the cage is something humans are ill equipped to handle, something that will lead inevitably to our early demise? What if post retirement part time or full time work you enjoy, but know in your heart of hearts is unnecessary, is inherently unable to provide the same sense of purpose that a pre-retirement JOB provides? What if volunteer work or endless travel in an RV or a sailboat fails to make you feel relevant? Perhaps things are great until the kids leave and then early retirees sink into a deadly funk? What if Jack Nicholson was right and “you can’t handle the truth!”? Can you tell I love hyperbole?

This is far from a hypothetical question for me. I slightly early retired over two years ago and life has felt very good so far. But life felt pretty good prior to that too. I still work out the same amount, a little more tennis, but the same amount of running. I’m not gaining weight, I’m not sleeping poorly and I am not addicted to anything but it is clear that life feels different. I have not had a single bout with anxiety or depression either and I can honestly say the last two years have been two of the best in my life rivaled only by some early in my marriage, family and career.

I have very little stress but I also have less drive because I do not have many deadlines. The ones I do have are usually self-imposed so they are pretty lenient. In my old life there was a real boogeyman, my CEO, more terrifying than most of my childhood monsters. But now I move at my own pace, and like Frodo, I bow to no man. And it feels good! Undeniably it feels better, but is it better for me? I do not know and that frightens me a little bit. Because I firmly believe we are not capable of objectively assessing our own state of being. So I turned to research for an answer.

And studies show the answer is … whatever you want to believe! Of six reports I looked up one showed that early retirees die early, one showed the opposite, three showed conflicting data that made conclusions impossible and one opined that when you retire makes no difference unless retiring leads to unhealthy behavior, like sitting on the couch and eating bright orange cheese puffs all day. So what is a FIRE devotee to do if there is no great data out there on what is one of life’s greatest questions, “how do I live a long life?”

Here is where I get to throw my twenty-seven cents worth in. And my favorite quotes on the subject. From Vicki Corona, “life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away!” And from Steve Runner, “Life is short, but it should be long enough.” I believe there are two core factors in longevity, one is taking care of your health. That one is the easier of the two. In my case I run and play tennis, a lot. The other factor is much more complicated than getting some exercise and eating right. My personal belief about longevity(outside of good health) is that it is not a pursuable goal. Much like happiness it isn’t won by striving to attain it, it is a byproduct of striving for something else. And there, perhaps, is the answer. Finding your something else, your why, your big hairy audacious goal, your mission, your purpose.

And that, I believe, is the reason the data and the studies show disagreement. Nobody has found a reliable way to measure how closely people’s pre and post retirement lives are satisfying their “Why’s”. Any study that does not correct or normalize the data for an important variable is likely to provide inaccurate results. If somebody’s only or predominate reason to live was wrapped up in their job then it is reasonable to conclude that retirement may well kill them or shorten their life span. That seems to be more of a problem for my generation than with Gen X or millennials. The idea of finding one’s purpose through their 9 to 5 has fallen largely out of favor and barely has a toehold in the FIRE community. But that does not make you any safer from finding yourself in a purposeless life after you escape what feels like indentured corporate servitude. I consume blogs voraciously and even though I’m a boomer I still feel like I understand Gen X and millennials from what they write and from mentoring so many in my career.

It seems to me that the FIRE community is focused on the tech and the hacks required to get to the exit point much more than knowing what they will do when they get there. And that is a mistake, and really the point of this post. If you are on a planned trip to early retirement then start now planning what that life will look like. I think to just assume it will come to you in a blinding flash of insight after you quit your job is risky business that is not consistent with the careful way you are preparing financially. It deserves every bit as much thought and effort as becoming financially independent.

In my case, I recognized that work added a lot of meaning to my life so I carved out a few small consultant part time gigs that I could step right into. This was only possible because I had been planning it for a dozen or more years. No financial need for the income but earning an income always made me feel good about myself and I did not expect that to change, and it has not. It is still one of my “Why’s”. As someone who has been a public figure I like being in the news occasionally and negotiating business deals and my part time jobs let me continue to do that. And I like expressing myself so this non-monetized blog gives me a great outlet. I have a cluster of “Why’s” including several I will not list because the real point here is to get you to think about yours. You probably have anywhere from a year to maybe a dozen or more to plan your exit. You may find purpose in side gigs or in travel or in raising your children together. Maybe your first retirement project will simply be to find your “Why’s”. But I’d recommend not waiting until then. I was much happier starting my slightly early retirement with a plan I had been preparing for decades than I would have been with no plan. Will I live any longer because I’m happy and challenged by the life I’m living now? Seems very likely to me.

How about you, have you spent any time planning or visualizing what life after a full time job is going to look like? Do you think having a plan is worthwhile or would you rather just wing it?

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The Financial Marathon

Have you ever noticed how many marathon running analogies, metaphors and similes are used in the personal finance, financial independence and FIRE communities? And please don’t ask me to differentiate between analogies, metaphors and similes because its complicated and I’m an engineer and not an English major. Perhaps it is the unique place marathons hold in the running universe, the most common long distance race. Or maybe it is the fact that while running is a fast sport, marathons still take a long time to complete. But almost certainly they are a popular model of life because they require endurance and a sustainable pace as opposed to the instantaneous all out effort of a 100 meter sprint.

My financial journey to FI and slightly early retirement certainly occurred at a pace very much like my marathon gait. Slow and steady. While world class marathoners run 26.2 miles in just over two hours my goal in marathons was to finish in under four hours. That sounds ridiculously slow I know to non-runners and to elite runners alike but since I ran most of my marathons in my fifties I still finished in the top fourth of my age group most of the time so it is all relative. But fittingly it does parallel my FI finish time pretty closely. I achieved a seven figure net worth at fifty, the same year I ran my lifetime fastest marathon and 5K. Compared to Mr. Money Mustache, the Frugalwoods and FireCracker who hit FI in their early 30’s me getting there at fifty is almost an exact match to how I compared to elite marathoners. They are world class, me, well I’m in the top 25% of my age group.

That inability to finish with the best could be cause for envy or shame but it never hit me that way. I realized I do not have the genetic makeup to be a great long distance runner, because I trained as long and as hard as many elite runners just to achieve mediocrity. But I’m still proud of the effort, which at times took every ounce of will power in my aching body. I ran through illness and injury and never, ever, withdrew from a single one of the 15 marathons I entered. Sometimes it wasn’t pretty when I was so cramped up I literally had to drag an unresponsive leg behind me across the finish line, but I just could not quit something I had started. Certainly that is a trait that is necessary in the run to FI as well.

When I look at the advantages I had of being a high earner with a frugal spouse living in an area of the country were housing was inexpensive and commuting was unheard of I had no excuse for not succeeding. Excuses, that brings to mind the most vivid example I’ve personally seen of refusing to have one. It was the marine corps marathon in Washington DC. I wasn’t well trained and I was feeling the beginnings of the creeping desperation that sets in during the opening miles of a race when I saw a cluster of guys running up ahead of me. They were soldiers, marines, in uniform with heavy battle packs on their backs and the four of them were at each corner of a fifth marine in the middle of the formation. Two of them had odd objects on their backs that I couldn’t make out until I got closer. Then in shock and awe I realized they were prosthetic legs belonging to the uniformed man in the middle who was in a racing wheelchair. He had lost his legs in the explosion of an improvised explosive device in Iraq. I was overwhelmed with emotion for this marine who was committed to powering through 26 miles with just his hands to move him and for his brothers running with him in fatigues and heavy packs on that hot day. I think I cried for at least a mile, it affects me even now when I think about it. I never felt sorry for myself or thought about quitting again that day. How could I? Examples of living life courageously with purpose inspire us all to be better than we are, and in this community, we have an abundance of great examples. Running marathons alone is tough, running with friends, with brothers and sisters, is so much easier. The FI race is no different and the bloggers and podcasters and authors that have committed themselves to helping the rest of us, lift us up with their examples of endurance and success.

Sitting here composing this I just had an epiphany! One of the reasons I did not achieve FI sooner was that I did not start as early as I could have. I was buying new cars and making some of the common money mistakes in my twenties and there were no 401k plans available yet at my company so I wasn’t investing aggressively. While I ultimately was still fine that delay put FI off by about ten years. In my case I actually loved my job and would not have retired any earlier but getting that late start did cost me at least a million dollars. And what I realized just now was that while I never would have been an elite runner I almost certainly would have been much faster had I started earlier with my running. I didn’t run in high school or college and only began short runs in my mid-thirties. I started real endurance distance running in my mid-forties which meant by the time I was at my technical best my body was already well past its peak performance years. Physical strength and speed are a lot like compound interest in that if you want to achieve your max performance you have to start early.

Pacing matters. I ran twelve marathons as fast as I could and they were extremely painful. There was very little pleasure involved except for crossing the finish line. And that was OK because my goal was all about my finish time. I ran three marathons with another person, two with my wife, where I was the faster runner and was able to run coach them through the race. Just slowing down my overall race time by twenty minutes or so made the whole race a lot of fun. There is a lesson there for the FI journey as well. It may be that living like a hermit in a refrigerator box on saltines and ketchup packets from McDonalds would get you to FI at the age of 29, or 39 or 49 but that is going to be a life of mostly pain. Perhaps the optimum course is for you and your running mate to slow the pace only slightly, to where you can actually talk as you run and enjoy the beautiful landscape you are traversing and still get to the finish line at 32, or 42 or 52. Is winning the race three years faster worth suffering through the run or can you have your cake and eat it? Can you run hard but not so hard that life hurts? I think you can and I think you should.

I still run 18 miles a week but a decided lack of cartilage in one knee has made marathons a bad idea for me so like I did with my 9 to 5 job I have retired from long races. Do I miss them? No! But did they teach me a lot about living life? They did. They taught me that pain is OK for three hours and forty-eight minutes if you are shooting for your personal best finish at 50 years of age. They also taught me that running painfully flat out on the edge of collapse might work for a race but it is no way to live your life. Have you learned something about the FI journey from one of your sports or hobbies you would like to comment on?

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What My Parents Taught Me About Money

Many of the bloggers and podcasters in the FI and FIRE community have shared that they got into financial trouble early in their own adult lives in part because their parents were not good at handling money. As the proverb goes, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. Maybe it takes coming back from a money disaster to build the kind of passion that inspires a great blog, too. If so I’m in trouble because my financial journey was plain vanilla with hardly a misstep along the way. This post is about why my path to financial independence was so smooth, with the credit going to my parents.

Mom and Dad taught me to work. This was more than a few years ago and in those ancient times there were no child labor laws being enforced. My first job was working as an indentured servant to my crafty brother as a newspaper delivery boy. Yes, believe it or not, snowflakes, parents let kids get up at 5:30 AM and ride their bicycles in the dark throwing newspapers in complete stranger’s yards before school. And in my case it was elementary school. Don’t try this at home now, child protective services will come confiscate your kids and probably your dogs as well. Allowances did not exist, hand outs from parents did not exist, only jobs existed. I learned that earning money was hard work when it was 5 deg F outside or when it was pouring rain or when huge playful dogs decided to drag me and my bicycle around their yards like a giant squeaky toy! As a side benefit I learned to manage and budget my spending to fit the miniscule amount my parsimonious brother paid me.

As I grew older I kept throwing newspapers for my miserly brother but eventually moved up to much better paid minimum wage jobs assembling bicycles and lawnmowers at a retail store, sacking groceries, general help at a pharmacy and then hit the big time with factory assembly line jobs. I learned about overtime and got a first hand look at adults who were supporting families on paychecks that barely covered my college pizza bill. I came to realize my parents did not just make me work to earn spending money but because it offered a first-hand comparison of manual labor (me) and the management and engineers who supported the operations. It was pretty easy to see that the variety of work and presumably the pay for the engineers was considerably better than what was going to those of us on the assembly line. It taught me that there was no way I would survive doing the same repetitive tasks over and over 40 hours a week. It was all I could do to make it through the summer. That incentive to stay in school and avoid manual labor probably had as much to do with me becoming an engineer as anything else.

Dad and Mom met in college. He was there after the war on the GI bill. Both of them had better incomes than their parents due to the education they received and they were big believers in its value. There was never a question of whether my brother and I would attend college, it was a given. We were both extremely intelligent nerd kids so it was in the cards for us anyway but the fact that our parents paid our way without the need for any school loans, because they had saved up the cash to do so, was another great example. My wife and I did not have to borrow any money and our three millennial kids received their four year degrees without a single dollar of debt. Well, actually, our three kids all got completely free rides since they were brainiacs but we had the money set aside had we needed it. We ended up just giving it to them when they graduated. All three paid their own way for their advanced degrees.

My mom first planted the seed of chemical engineering in my mind. She was a school teacher and she knew that the son of my favorite math teacher was a chemical engineer. She casually mentioned that it was apparently a very well-paid profession and since I was a chemistry and math nerd I thought it sounded perfect for me. My dad did not specifically weigh in on a major but he was very supportive of anything that sounded complicated based on the idea that it probably paid better the harder it was to achieve. He had also managed to advance from basic seaman duty on an aircraft carrier during WWII to operating the ship’s radar and I think that gave him a healthy appreciation for how technical skills could improve your work experience. Engineering became my chosen major and it turned into a great career. My parents, as usual had been right again! Two of my three kids also became engineers, the third refused to be brainwashed and earned a business degree although she was summa cum laude in doing it.

There were many money lessons my folks taught in the home by example. For instance, they paid cash for everything. Appliances, furniture and even their cars were bought with cash. My dad sold insurance and my mom taught in the public schools so we were by no means wealthy yet they used the envelope system to save money for large purchases. I thought that was normal, I had no idea that most people took out car loans! It was kind of a shock to find that out later. They also used credit cards but made a point to explain that they paid off the balance every month.

Dad became a little bit more successful over time but he did not succumb to lifestyle inflation. The modest house my brother and I were raised in was never traded in for a larger home. With the help of a carpenter he did eventually add one room on to the house so my brother and I could be separated. Apparently, the deprivation of working for him for slave wages had instilled in my mind the desire to kill him in his sleep, but I’m mostly over that…mostly. Similarly my wife and I have lived in our first and only house for over thirty years, and have no plans to move. We also added on but the house remains very modest for our net worth. My wife’s parents also lived their entire married lives in the same small house so it was a family tradition on both sides.

My parents, greatest generation members, did not job hop around much. I do know my dad had three jobs over a 45 year career but he stayed at his last job for over thirty of those years and my mom never changed jobs. That was far less common in my generation but not unheard of. Like my parents I stayed at one company my entire career and my wife primarily worked the same job until she early retired. This is not advice I would give to a millennial now, times have changed and the chance of working in one or two jobs is very small and probably a bad idea. My dad also chose to keep working part time until his seventies. I early retired three years ago but immediately started part time side gigs because that seemed to make sense to keep me relevant and challenged. My plan is to keep my part time work for the foreseeable future like my dad did.

Dad kept a detailed spreadsheet of his investments and net worth. He was pretty proud of the fact that he was that guy, the Millionaire Next Door. We keep ours on Personal Capital which is a heck of a lot less work! While he never made six figures, usually less than half of that, Dad amassed an estate of nearly two million dollars by saving aggressively and by having every penny invested in a well diversified portfolio. He had invested so well that even though he and my mom spent their last years in assisted living and nursing homes at the cost of almost nine thousand dollars a month, his net worth continued to grow. By the time my parents passed away my brother and I were already millionaires on our own due to our having saved and invested well over our careers. Of course, my brother had the advantage of skimming most of the wages he should have paid me as a child laborer but really, I’m fine about that now.

While this is specific to people of Jewish or Christian faith my dad also taught me to tithe. He gave 10% of his gross income to the local church and my wife and I have done that as well. We also give generously to charities and to individuals in need. Regardless of religious beliefs I believe giving to help those in need is a key part of prospering financially. Dad was convinced that by giving to others the money would be returned to in even greater amounts. While I do not believe that is literally the case in monetary terms I do believe that learning to give makes you generous and that generous people do far better in their careers than stingy people. Strangely my brother is very generous now, probably as penance for my mistreatment.

My parents modeled joint decision making and kindness to each other. I am sure this contributed to their 63 year marriage. I never heard either of them speak harshly or disrespectfully to the other. Divorce is extremely expensive and although staying married is not primarily a financial decision I believe statistics support that a happy marriage correlates with financial health. Both my brother and I have been married for over thirty years to much better halves than we deserve which has definitely helped our financial success. I believe having someone who loves you and who has got your back helps work stress seem much less stressful and leads to greater productivity and less burn out.

Looking back now that both my parents are gone it is easy to recognize the many ways they helped shape the better parts of my nature. Most of it was not by lecture but by example. We all recoil a little as we grow older and we find ourselves, oh no, turning into our parents! But while I am not crazy about inheriting my dad’s hair loss I’m pretty good with the fact I inherited some solid financial life skills. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

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So You Just Got Promoted, Part 2

This is the second and final installment of everything I found that worked about managing teams from three decades in the Fortune 500 world. If you are reading this then you probably read the first part, but if not then please check out Part 1 to get the complete picture.

As detailed in my previous post the reason I decided to post this was because a former employee had recently looked me up just to tell me she had modeled her career after mine. She told me I was the best boss she had ever had and she wanted her team to love their work the way my team had back in the day when she was an intern. That was pretty awesome to hear! It also fits into this community to suggest ways to get ahead at work because promotions and salary increases will speed your way to FI or FIRE.

In the first post I covered how critical it is to not only treat every team member as your equal but to really believe it, or get another job! I covered how your function is no longer to produce a ton of work but to equip, inspire and lead your team to produce multiple amounts of work. Also how important it is to hire talent because having a world class team is what will lead to personal success. Finally, I covered fighting for your team when it comes to raises, training and even when facing layoffs.

But there is a lot more to cover so here it is!

Teach your team that customers come first. Our team was composed of graduate engineers and engineering student interns. We did not deal with the end users of our products very much, the people that you would normally consider to be your customers. We did both the design on plant expansions and also solved technical problems that impacted the operations of the chemical plant. Also, since we were the “whiz kids” that could solve any problem that came up we acted as a sort of technical support department for the 500 or so other employees at our site and every difficult problem eventually got dropped on our desks with a plea for help. These were problems of our internal customers and not our own team’s problems and we were not given much guidance from above on how much time to spend on them.

I say all that to explain how we prioritized. We had assignments from my boss and his boss and then we had requests from all the other departments. So how did we decide what to do first? Obviously you do what your boss requests first, right? Wrong! I strongly encouraged my team to put the requests from those without the authority to demand action ahead of the demands from the top.

I decided to place the requests from other departments (our internal customers) as the top priority for myself and my team. It may sound crazy to prioritize a request from a junior accountant in another department over a directive from the plant manager or the vice president he worked for but that is exactly what we did. We also got the boss’s work done, early if possible, but we jumped on the lower level requests first. Most of those requests were short term in nature and it proved surprisingly easy to get them out of the way without derailing the important big projects we were assigned.

What did that accomplish? We made friends because we bailed people out of trouble on a timely basis when they knew we didn’t have to. There is nothing as important as trust and gratitude in a business environment and we built both by showing we valued coworkers by prioritizing their requests. Was there a downside? Yes, because to avoid being late on deadlines from upper management we sometimes had to stay late to solve all the lower tiered internal customer issues. Was it worth it? I think so. Of the eight engineers in my former team, and the interns, most of them are now vice presidents, or manage large departments and are making medium to high six figure salaries. Some have retired early like me. I rose to the top job in the company by the time I was 41 by being promoted past the other department managers even though they were all ten to twenty years older than me. And they were, by and large, happy for me because of the trust and affection my team had earned. This concept is not taught in college and is not obvious to most people so it is an easy way to separate yourself from other team leaders if your team has internal customers. Most people think that you get promoted because of talent. That’s only partially true. The most important factors in getting bigger paychecks and promotions are how much the decision makers above you trust you and how much they like you. The fact is they are constantly evaluating your brand among your coworkers in determining how promotable you are. If they see you are well liked and trusted by other teams then you are on your way.

Lead by example. Part of the work in our team was dividing the large chemical complex into separate areas and having each team member responsible for about one hundred million dollars of process equipment and the products it produced. In the past the team leader, always a former team member, would not assign himself part of the plant, he’d just assign his old area to someone else on the team when he promoted to team manager. I didn’t do that. I kept my old area assignment because I did not want to lose touch with that important part of what my team members did. There was a fair amount of tedious record keeping and data analysis that went with optimizing the operations of your part of the facility and when there were operating problems you were sometimes called out on nights, weekends or holidays to get the “ox out of the ditch.” That isn’t so much fun but it is way more tolerable when you see your boss doing it too. I not only came out when my part of the plant messed up but I also came out when theirs did. Sure, I had to work some extra hours, but not that many and we really bonded when they saw I had their backs, no matter what. It also kept me from saving the “cake” work for myself and delegating the “crap” work to my team. Most team leaders do way too much of that. The results were it gave me a loyal team that respected and protected me.

Teach your team all your tricks and tips. I was one of those lucky people who fit my job like a hand in a glove. I never had to work very hard, it just all sort of flowed on its own. A lot of the “secrets” of being successful were obvious to me but not always to every team member I had. I made it a mission to share everything I could to help my people succeed. Things like the knowledge that most of the credit you got on a project was not determined by the quality of your work. Sounds a little insane, right? What I mean is that the quality of the project is judged not on the meat of the work but on the elegance of the presentation. One misspelled word in a report, one bad use of grammar in the presentation to management can destroy a hundred hours of flawless calculations. It is not fair but it is how the world works so I taught my folks to spend a lot of extra time triple checking the deliverables on their work. I’m a typo fiend, I can rarely read a novel by a leading author without finding at least one typo. They just jump off the page at me. (That said I’ll probably make one in this post!) We preached incessantly that perfection was the only acceptable level for the final presentation and I firmly believe that led to the stellar careers that my former team members are enjoying today.
We also encouraged everyone to have a buddy on the team that would proofread their reports and backcheck their calculations. That is just one example but there were dozens of technical tips that we shared freely. All of that was based on the fact that my team was not my competition, they were my launching pad to future success.

Help them go somewhere else if that is the best thing for them. I hired the best and our company did not have enough promotion opportunities to match the number of top level people I was training. That meant that some of them would get stuck at levels that would not let them reach their full potential. In those cases I encouraged some incredibly talented people to leave our company. Consequently I have friends all over the country in important positions, just like my intern that inspired this post. You are not doing your company a service by keeping talented people stuck below their true potential.
In other cases you may have a talented team member that wants to change direction within your company, maybe transfer to a sister facility or a completely different functional area, like marketing. You could view this as a personal loss and try to stop it or slow the process down but that is a mistake. You have to consider the opportunity from their position and do your best to make it happen if it truly will benefit them. I transferred out so much talent to other locations and departments that I felt like a training department. But that has given me a great network that makes some of my entertaining retirement side gigs possible today.
And then there is the rare situation when you have hired someone who just cannot do the job adequately. They are not bad workers but their skill set does not match the job. That is on you, not them, and you owe them your best efforts to move them to an area where they can excel. One of my young engineers was earnest and dedicated but the work was just outside his level of competence. Our projects were extremely complex and just because he had a chemical engineering degree did not mean he had a facile enough mind to keep up with the rest of the team. I was able to convince him to transfer to a very important department where mentally balancing multiple equations at the same time was not a requirement. He was hesitant but reluctantly agreed to the move. He was awesome at it and a few years later was running a major department in his new specialty at a sister facility. He would tell you now that it was the best thing that ever happened in his career. Many managers would have fired him and in so doing they would have thrown away a friend and a huge company asset.
Finally you need to fight to get your people promoted within your company, even if they may get ahead of you in the food chain. Of my two best team members over my career both first worked for me and I later worked for them and then finally one worked for me again. We stayed friends through it all and did our best to promote each other’s careers. There are many twists and turns in a career, some people see it as a fail when they do not get every possible promotion. But if you trust and appreciate a team member then when they win it is a win for you too because you trained them.

Have fun! This is pretty big. In fact my intern that modeled her leadership style after mine remembers the fun we all had more than anything else. It was little things like constant pranking. Not mean spirited, nothing gender specific and mostly nerd humor but we had a blast. I remember in the early days of powerful personal computers we had a big new one arrive and it had an odd quirk in that the wiring to the speakers would actually receive radio signals. This was a bug and not a feature. If you touched the case in a certain place you became part of an antennae and the radio broadcast of one particular station would come through very audibly but if you moved your hand it would revert to silence. I decided to convince one of my team members that all computers had a radio built into them (this was before wifi so they definitely did not have radios in them). I wrote a piece of ridiculous code that did nothing except send random things to the screen and I got my team member to come watch. I’d run the program, which did nothing, and then touch the case without him noticing and the music would play. I gave him a copy of the “program” and he spent days trying to figure out why he couldn’t get any other computer to receive radio stations. It was hilarious watching him try to convince others he could turn their PC’s into a radio. OK, you’d have had to be there. But we operated like a family, we went on vacations together and had mutual hobbies in the department with team members. We helped each other move, went to family events and genuinely liked each other. The most common sound heard in our part of the building was loud laughter, it is my best memory of those days!

So that is it for what I learned in three decades of working with teams. A few paragraphs does not look like much but there really is a pretty narrow space between a successful, highly paid career and an average one. I had the former and so did most of my team members and I sincerely believe the few concepts I shared here made all the difference in the world.

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Down Six Figures in Six Days

I was feeling a little smug last week, have to admit that. My net worth and my investment portfolio were closing in fast on new all time highs! My spouse and I were heading out on a two day drive to Breckenridge CO for some skiing and there were no worries to be found. Now back in the condo after a day of glorious powder I checked the market and to be mild it dropped like a boat anchor today. Added to last week’s losses my investments are $110,000 lower than they were one week ago. Fortunately as a slightly early retired couple our portfolio is less than half equities so the loss could have been much higher. My brother, also slightly early retired looks like a genius because he texted me last Tuesday that he was going to cash with a big part of his portfolio and he got the trades made right before things started to go mideval on my net worth.

Most of you have experienced something similar as investors these last few days. You may be early on in your journey to FI and if so rejoice! You lost little and will get some discounted prices. Or you may be already at FI and already early retired and this market bobble might be a particularly hard sting to your peace of mind. That is precisely where I am and I watched myself react to see if I really believed all the things I’ve said to others about investing. And…I passed. I actually got a wry smile on my face when I checked the indices for a couple of reasons. First because I’m not losing anything if I don’t sell. And second because my portfolio is diversified, doesn’t have exaggerated cap weighting and can handle a blip, or a correction or even a historic bear market. And I have to say I was pretty happy I didn’t have any exposure to crypto currency just now.

So is this a speedbump, a genuine correction starting or is the fabled bear coming out of hibernation to visit? Nobody knows, it is fair to say that as of Monday afternoon on the 5th of February, 2018 Wall Street looks to have another down day tomorrow. If the futures markets are correct, there is already blood in Tuesday’s streets. But profits are strong, the tax package will make them even stronger so there is every chance this is just a speed bump in another good year or two of equity growth. However price to equity ratios are quite high and the bond interest rates appear to be creeping toward business borrowing depressing levels so that’s a downside. Of the many indicators out there of future prosperity you can find one you like if you look hard enough.

The real question to ask yourself that you can actually answer is how did you react to the market suddenly acting like it has always acted, outside of the last few years? Were you OK with the way it felt, did it make you feel good about your investment strategies and your FI or FIRE plans? Or were you distraught and kicking yourself because you weren’t my brother and weren’t able to time the market with precision? This little slice of history is a perfect time to evaluate your risk tolerance. If you can’t avoid a knee jerk reaction to unexpected market moves then perhaps you need to reevaluate your plan. Personally when I made my own investment decisions I found days like today caused me angst, pain and fear. Now that I have three managers handling parts of my portfolio and I’m hands off my own money I felt no real pain at all. Today might be the day that some of you decide to turn to a financial planner or a financial advisor yourself, or it might be the day you take your money back into your own hands to manage.

It would be interesting to know what the last few days felt like to you. And whether that provided you an insight into your own thoughts about your journey to financial independence and perhaps early retirement. Please let me know. Now as for me I’m expecting 10 to 15 inches of fresh powder tomorrow here in Breck, something that the weather guys are actually fairly decent at predicting. Maybe we should let them try to model the stock market?

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So You Just Got Promoted! Part One

So you just got promoted and now you are leading a team. First, congratulations! One of the fastest ways to FIRE is to accelerate your income and one of the fastest ways to do that is to move up into the management ranks. As someone who did just that during a corporate career ending up with over seven hundred employees on my teams, I intended to someday share the things I learned and borrowed that seemed to work.

But I did not plan to make this post so early in my fledgling blogging career until something happened a couple of weeks ago that changed my plans. A profoundly meaningful event overtook me by surprise. It had nothing to do with the new year of 2018 or resolutions or goals. Instead it reached back twenty years or more into my past.

A friend was in town, an engineer who had briefly worked for me as an intern at the plant when she was still in college getting her chemical engineering degree. I was in my first management position in those days running a group of eight young engineers and a few paid interns. Since graduation she has worked at a major chemical corporation out of state but she was back in our little town visiting family and friends. She had looked me up just to tell me in person that she was now managing a young group of engineers and interns very much like mine when we worked together.

But what she said next was one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever gotten, something unexpected and wondrous. She said that she loved her job and that her model and her daily goal was to lead her team exactly the way I had led mine. She said that it was so much fun it didn’t seem like work at all to be a part of our team. She said that I was the best boss she had ever worked for and she just wanted me to know. That’s big to me, so affirming!

I hate opening this post this way because I know it sounds like the least humble brag imaginable and that isn’t my point. I’m thrilled to get feedback that I was not a terrible manager, it is the kind of thing that lights us older guys up in a way I could not begin to communicate to a younger version of myself. But the reason for the story is that it spurred me to take some time to ask myself, why was that such a great time in my life and hers? What exactly did I do as a manager to not suck the life out of my people and to not kill their spirits as seems to be all too common then and now?

I think any ideas I can share within this community on leading and managing teams and departments could be useful stuff for young millennials entering into management for the first time. So here is everything I can remember that worked to create a little happy and successful Camelot of a department of incredible young professionals. Very few of these are Steveark originals, I tried to steal from only the very best.

This got kind of lengthy so I’m putting in two parts, here is Part 1.

Treat Everyone as an Equal
Sure you just got promoted to be the boss/leader/manager but why would you think that makes you of any higher value than the newest or least paid employee in the company? It doesn’t, all that promotion means is that the bar just got raised for you and now you need to step up your game to an even higher level than the one that got you promoted in the first place. It is a verifiable fact that everyone on your team knows some things that you don’t know and is better at some parts of the job than you will ever be. Do not ever see yourself as being better than your team, you just have a different job description. It is not just a matter of what you do, you have to believe in your core that your team members are just as valuable and their hopes and dreams and fears matter just as much as yours do. You cannot fake this, if you don’t feel this deep in your heart then you need to find another job.

Hire Talent, You Cannot Teach It
I don’t care if you are Nick Saban (arguably best college football coach ever even if I am an Arkansas fan), you cannot win with a team of “C” class players. Happy productive teams need “A” class talent, not in every position but in most of them. This can be tough because as a new manager you probably did not get to hire your team, they were already there. But over time you may get to have some say in bringing new people in. Realize that picking talented people that can play nicely with others is the most important thing you can do to win in the corporate world. Your future promotions depend far more on the talent of your team than they do on your own talent.

Understand Your Job
As the team leader your job is no longer the job that got you promoted. It is perverse and counter intuitive at first, I know, but your job is to get excellence out of your team and most likely that will limit the amount of work product you get to produce yourself. That can be frustrating because you know you are good, it is why you got put in charge, and now you do not have time to spend on what you were so good at. Frustrating, sure, get over it! Once you learn to focus on building the capability of your team and improving the quality and quantity of their work and their overall enjoyment of the team’s mission and their engagement with the company they will absolutely blow the tiny amount of work you used to be able to produce on your own out of the water. When it is working like it should some days on your commute home you will realize you did not do any work at all. You just helped others get their work done, that is when you know you have got it going on!

Fight for Your People
If you are getting this then you now realize that your success is no longer going to be based on your ability to produce work. It is completely in the hands of your team. That is what management and leadership is, getting sustainable results out of people. To do that you have to have a team that trusts you, loves you and wants to win for you. And to do that you have to be a leader that trusts them, loves them and wants them to win individually and together. So you fight to get them raises much harder than you fight to get one yourself. If you elevate them then your compensation will take care of itself generally. Give them full credit, maybe even too much credit for their work. Don’t you dare put your name on their work and pass it off as yours. If you have to have your name on the report or you have to give the presentation based on their work because of company protocol you make sure you write or speak the full name of the person who did the work and compliment the work they did in front of everyone at the meeting. You want the CEO to know you’ve got a talented team, it is the kind of thing that lights up young talent and makes them happy and it really helps when you are fighting to get them more money if the top dogs know who they are! And if worse comes to worse, which it will at times, fight to keep their jobs in the face of a layoff. Make a case as to why your team needs every member, let them hunt elsewhere for sacrificial lambs. You may not, probably will not win that fight but they are your people. Fight like they matter to you because they should.

Train Your Team
We sent every team member to at least one out of state seminar or class every year. Sometimes they went to several. I heard old guard managers grumble that if you train them that well then someone will want to hire them away. How incredibly ignorant that view is! People do not leave jobs because they have employable skills, they leave their jobs because they fear they are becoming unemployable. If you train them in the latest greatest of whatever it is they do then you give them the confidence that they can get a job anywhere. Paradoxically that makes it much less likely they will even look for another job. And it is not just the information they will learn that builds this confidence but the network they build from interfacing with other companies at these events.

The other thing we did, and I did steal this idea from a mentor, was to wait for the aging giants in our sector to retire from competitors or large engineering companies and then to hire them to come in and teach my young engineers the absolute best practices they had developed over their 40 year careers. I do not know of anyone else that did this but we gained incredible guidelines, principles, practices, procedures and ideas that we never could have come up with on our own. Every sector has a few Einstein’s and they are eventually retired by their companies. They often still feel they have useful knowledge and sometimes they are thrilled to feed young minds. We were careful to stay away from proprietary information and patents. I just wanted to expose my young padawans to Jedi masters and the way they thought. It was big! I am still sharing many of the ideas I was taught by these masters in my consulting side gigs today. And I still cannot fathom why more companies do not do this.

But Wait, There’s More!
Indeed there is and I’ll put it in a post in the very near future! The second and concluding installment of the very few things I may have done right in my early 9 to 5 career. But first I’m headed to Colorado to ski for a week, if I post from there it will probably be about new powder!