Slightly Early Retirement

I’ve been officially “retired” for five years and five days.  That was when I walked away from my 9 to 5 corporate job.  But my retirement probably would not pass muster with the retirement police because for the last five years I’ve also earned roughly $100,000 a year doing some light consulting.  That may not sound like light work, but believe me, my rates are high and my overhead is zero so it only amounts to about eight hours a week of work. 

But I am tired of it.  I do not need the income and I’m just not getting enough of a kick out of the work to keep doing it.  One of the things nobody tells you about financial independence is that it makes it very hard to lie to yourself about how much you like your job.  When your pay no longer impacts your net worth or your lifestyle you get a much clearer picture of how much value the job brings to your life.  For a lot of reasons nobody but me would care about, this job has run its course in my life.

I might do some more consulting in areas I am more engaged in than the niche regulatory work I’ve been doing, or not, it isn’t a priority either way.  Finding something to fill up those eight hours is an ongoing project, but that isn’t the topic for this post. 

This is about how to fund our life when the income stops rolling in from a 9 to 5 or a 1099 contractor job.  I had thought about having to do that someday but that day is now on the horizon. I’ve read a number of posts about it and there are some general concepts that seem to be common.  One is not to touch ROTH’s if you plan on leaving inheritances, which I do.  Another is to pull down the tax deferred IRA’s prior to reaching RMD age but not hard enough to get into higher tax brackets.  A third is to fill in the remaining gap with taxable brokerage account withdrawals. A fourth has to do with backdoor Roth’s but I don’t think they offer me much at this point in life.

My initial plan is to take about half of what we spend ($100K per year, pretax) from the IRA I rolled my 401K into.  That’s a Vanguard account that is in index funds, both stock and bond funds.  Then the other half would come from Personal Capital who manages a 70-30 stock/cash-REIT’s-bond-commodity-alternatives portfolio for us.  Most of that is not taxable except for capital gains and dividends.  I think that would be fairly tax efficient. 

That would be the plan for the next five years until my wife and I would start taking Social Security based on my income record.  She will actually start taking her’s based on her income record later this year, but it isn’t a lot because she elected to be a stay at home mom early in our marriage. She doesn’t have a lot of work years that she paid into the system but she also gets a nominal teacher retirement pension. When I start taking Social Security in 2026 and she switches taking half of my full retirement benefit we will be getting a total of over $70,000 in today’s dollars.  At that point we’ll have to ratchet back our automatic withdrawals from Vanguard and Personal Capital significantly because that would push us way over $100K in inflation adjusted dollars.  At age 72 our IRA’s required minimum distributions will come into play and I’ll stop withdrawing anything at all from Personal Capital’s taxable account.  At that point Social Security and the RMD will be providing more income than we will need. 

At least that is my initial game plan, I will talk that over with my investment advisors at Personal Capital and Vanguard.  If I find that monthly automated withdrawals don’t work then I may switch to a cash bucket I fund once a year from the same sources that does offer automated payments. I know my Personal Capital Cash account offers that. 

I think for someone of, eh, mature age like me this is a simpler puzzle to solve than for a true early retiree.  Since I was already past age 59.5 when I retired I had full access to all my accounts.  I also only had to pay for the crazily high priced private medical insurance for five years before Medicare took over.  The only real issue for me is optimizing the amount of taxes we pay over the rest of my and my wife’s lives, and that isn’t something that can truly be assured because nobody knows what future tax policy will look like. For someone in their thirties or forties there are a myriad of issues to resolve including children’s care and education, health insurance, aging parents, longevity risk and divorce risk.

I mostly blog about career and retirement tips, I never have claimed to have the personal finance acumen of many of the bloggers in this space.  I mostly relied on higher pay than I deserved and lower spending that we could afford to gain financial independence.  I don’t even manage our own portfolios, I’m willing to pay others to do that as long as they are low fee advisors. So I’m asking for advice here from you, please let me know what you think in the comments.

How would you automate withdrawals from various retirement accounts to simulate a monthly paycheck? 

Would you set up withdrawals from accounts in a different order?  Considering we’ve got IRA’s, ROTH IRA’s, inherited IRA’s, CD’s, savings accounts and taxable brokerage accounts.

Do you intend to have an automatic monthly “paycheck” show up in your bank account each month after you retire or to just pull what you need when you need it?

Should I get an independent fee based advisor to look over my “plan”?

As usual if you don’t see a comment box just click on the title at the top of this post!

It has been a week of observations.  Five months of my billing to one of my main clients came in the mail. It was around $20,000 after tax, money I do not need but still enjoy earning for some perverse reason.  And that led to my first observation.  I received the check on Monday, January 3rd and deposited it on Tuesday, January 4th, the same day my wife and I got a $1,200 direct deposit from the IRS as part of the phase two stimulus package.  So that’s good, right?  A one day increase of over $20K in our net worth, outstanding!   

Except when I checked our net worth the very next day it had actually dropped by $15,000.  Because my portfolio fell more in one day than I made working for that client for six months!  That’s sobering, to say the least.  And it just points out what all long time investors know, making income in retirement doesn’t impact your net worth very much compared to the normal swings in the stock market. Then, when I checked the market value of my investments today, my net worth is back up $25,000 higher than it was earlier in the week without my depositing any more money. It actually makes earning money at my stage of life seem like a waste of time.  

The second observation has to do with the $1,200 stimulus money.  I never disclose my exact net worth but I have gone on the record as having already been a self made multimillionaire  prior to inheriting another million a few years ago. I don’t say self made to discount the number of random advantages I had in a capitalist marketplace, I had a boat load of help and advantages that got me where I am. I just mean I didn’t inherit most of my money, just a slice of it.  

I didn’t FIRE because I enjoyed my work and consequently I stored up too much money, or at least more than I’ll ever spend. So the idea that the government should be sending me and my wife money to help us survive these tough times seems, well, I don’t have the right word for it.  Maybe ludicrous, absurd or misguided?  And that’s on top of the $2,400 we got with the first round. The reason we did qualify is that our adjusted gross income (AGI) on our 2019 income tax filing was less than $150,000.  Not much less, but still we qualified for the full amount of stimulus relief.  And that is because passive income, like growth in our investments, for the most part, isn’t counted as income unless you withdraw the money from a IRA/401K or are paid dividends in a taxable account. 

So my millions can make tens of thousands  more and it won’t show up as a penny of income. But the fact is its there, its ours and we can spend it any time we want to.   It is as real as any other form of money even if the IRS doesn’t “see” it.  Its very similar to the way some FIRE millionaires get subsidized health care under the Affordable Care Act. The test to qualify is based on AGI and ignores most of their assets and all of their tax deferred growth.  Do I like the system?  Sure I do.  Is it fair?  I think so, because I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes in the higher tax brackets already and I’ll also eventually pay taxes on my tax sheltered investments when I draw out required minimum distributions (RMD’s).  Should the way the stimulus money is qualified for be revised? Maybe.  

The third observation this week was that Covid is getting real.  So far I had known only a handful of people who had tested positive.   And while a couple of my friends did have to seek medical care nobody had any lasting known impacts from the virus.  But that changed this week when one of our friends’ grown kids died of Covid. He was not a senior citizen, he was someone relatively young and healthy.  Someone much younger and lower risk than me.  I think we all relate to the risk based on what we have seen in our own circle of friends and acquaintances.  It has changed my perception of the risk of the virus.

Do the swings in the market sometimes make your paycheck look anemic in comparison, or is that just me?

What about the stimulus money, is it obscene to give it to multimillionaires who qualify based on the way people are screened only on adjusted gross income?  Are ACA healthcare subsidies any different?

Do you view the risk of the Covid virus based on your personal experiences and those of your friends and family or do you judge risk based on the science that is available? 

As always, if you can’t see the comment box just click on the title at the top of this post.

There were three of us in college, all engineering students and all avid outdoorsmen.  We hunted, fished, hiked, skied and canoed our way through our four year degrees in chemical and mechanical engineering and got together at least annually for many years after that.  I ended up in Arkansas, Miles ended up designing nuclear reactors in Silicon Valley and Cam ended up all over the place.  We had virtually the same BS engineering degrees but our lives took different paths.  

In my case I married my college girlfriend as soon as we both graduated and I went back to work where I had interned the summer before.  Who knew I’d be there for the next 38 years and eventually would be running the company.  Well, I sort of knew, or at least hoped to make it work out like that. But Miles and Cam moved around a little bit more.  In Miles case after the nuclear industry dried up he went into automotive manufacturing back in Arkansas.  Like me he then became a lifer at that company and like me he retired slightly early at the age of 60, financially independent. 

I saved and invested more than enough for retirement and then inherited a tidy sum to top off the nest egg.  I also kept earning six figures annually in retirement by doing some light niche consulting that paid extremely well.  Miles had made a good living but had not hit upper management like I had so he had not accumulated as much in investments.  However he had a keen eye when it came to finding rental property and accumulated nearly a dozen rent houses by the time he retired.  He was generating a significant passive income as well as growing his net worth as the houses appreciated.  His wife loved the people aspect of mentoring the young families renting from them.  So me and Miles were living retirements we enjoyed with more money than we cared to spend.  

Not so with Cam, he seemed to move from job to job pretty often.  He also moved from one industrial sector to the next.  He gained a wide skill set but also one that wasn’t as deep as mine or Miles’  And where I was the gifted fast mover in my company and Miles was the key technical guy at his, Cam was stuck in middle management and did not develop the reputation of technical or managerial excellence needed to protect him from office politics.  He never had many good things to say about his bosses or coworkers.  And apparently the feelings were mutual.  Rather than trading his existing job for a better one when he changed employers he seemed to move into the same level job over and over.  His current job had seemed to be one in which he had turned the corner.  He had moved to a higher level of management with international responsibility over plants in several countries.  It was nice seeing Cam win bigger than he had in the past, especially since he was now 66 years old and job hopping doesn’t work as well as it did when he was younger.  But alas, Covid decimated his company’s prospects, as it has to so many, and the last I heard he was only working a part time schedule and was expecting to lose his job any day.  

Are there great life lessons to be learned from the three of us?  Maybe some small ones.  The two of us who have been married for forty plus years to the same and only spouses have plenty of money and the one who is married to his third wife has much less.  The two of us who have outdoor hobbies of hiking and running and golf and tennis and cycling are financially independent while the one whose hobby is gambling at casinos is not. The two of us with mostly older used cars and who live frugally were able to retire early and the one with two Mercedes and a brand new $50,000 pickup truck is still working at 66. 

We are all still friends and still try to get together, though with aging parents in the picture it is hard for both of them to get away.  And I try not to judge, I’ve been extremely lucky and privileged in life.  Most, maybe all of my good fortune didn’t come through hard work. It was pretty much my destiny to show up at the right time with the right skill set to make millions without ever working very hard.  I think that was true for Miles as well and though he made less, he still made well over average wages.  Our wives were also a huge part of our success in business, but we had dated others that might not have been great partners in life.  That’s luck too, finding a soul mate.  Cam didn’t, at least not the first two times and that cost him his savings, and his relationships with his kids.  Its hard to know how much a career suffers when there is chaos at home, but I’m sure it is a significant factor working against success.  Just as having a warm and loving home and a strong relationship with your kids gives you super powers in the office. 

So I count my blessings and am glad Miles shares the same peace and security.  And for Cam I hope things get much much better.   

What about your friends, do you see a stark contrast in the outcomes they face?

How much of your own success do you think is a result of your choices versus where fate dropped you on this planet?

If you’ve read my blog you probably have seen that I have had one of the cushiest gigs in retirement imaginable.  I work about eight hours a week and get paid expenses plus right at six figures a year in income.  That works out to $250 an hour.  But its even better than that because the pay is flat fee, I get it even if there is no work to be done that week or that month.  I’ve had this arrangement for the last five years.  Sweet, right?  

So now I’m considering stopping paid work altogether.  I’m turning 65 next week, and I have more money than I will ever spend and I’m just not really excited about continuing to do what I’ve been doing.  I think it is time to reinvent that part of my life, to replace eight hours of work with something else that could be a different type of paid work or might not be any kind of work at all.  

I’ve got a full life without work.  I chair a college board of trustees.  That brings with it board meetings, committee meetings, commencements, an occasional speech or interview and opportunities to rub shoulders with the Governor, politicians and government agencies.  We have a local charitable foundation that runs a clinic, health and fitness facility, hospice house and a few other missions in the community.  I also chair the board there and like the college there are meetings, committees, press, speeches, etc.  I volunteer with my University and serve on the advisory board of the engineering department.  I’m a member of the local and state Chamber of Commerce’s.  I’m active in my church. 

I have multiple hobbies.  My wife and I are up to run before 5 AM with a group of friends three days a week.  We both play tennis several times each week and do drills with each other in addition. We also play on several tennis teams across the state. We play pickle ball, though we are new at it and not nearly as good as we are at tennis.  We bass fish, actually do all kinds of fishing on local lakes, trout streams and even off shore ocean fishing.  We cook together frequently, she is the master, I am the grasshopper.  We read.  We watch movies, though that is an individual sport for us.  She doesn’t get that Die Hard is the best Christmas movie ever. 

We hike, a lot.  We spent ten years hiking to every waterfall in the official book of Arkansas waterfalls by Tim Ernst.  These are not waterfalls on nice trails, these involved life threatening bushwhacks through cliffs and over extreme terrain.  That’s why it took ten years.  We ride off road trails, Arkansas has some of the best in the country and we have a little side by side two seat ATV that will go anywhere, almost.  We ski, not often but we enjoy it.  We travel all over the US, by car mostly.  Every year we have several multi-thousand mile trips out west, up north or across Texas to hike, ride off road, to fish or to see our kids who live far away.  Of course I blog a little as well.  We travel overseas too, this year was to have been a hiking trip in Switzerland. But Covid happened so maybe next year, or the next. 

Life is pretty full without my consulting gig, its only a few hours a week in any event.  But it has served a purpose.  It has kept my employability alive, l have no gap in my resume thanks to consulting.  I’ve done some other gigs in addition to the main ones, like expert witnessing and chemical plant operations consulting.  Even a little paid lobbyist work. All that contributed to my making over $100K per year in retirement in spite of not working very many hours. And since we spend about $100K it has allowed us not to dip into our investment income at all. It also has kept me socially active in my old world of business.  I deal with many of the same people I dealt with in my 9 to 5 job.  It kept me feeling plugged into the network of movers and shakers and politicians.  It kept my name in the news from time to time. All things I enjoy.  But the work itself, I really don’t enjoy that part much.  I became an expert in the narrow niche I consult in because I knew I could monetize it in retirement, not because I had a passion for it, and maybe that was a mistake.  It pays well but when you are past needing more money then without passion it becomes drudgery.  I’ve never been good at doing a good job if I wasn’t having fun.  And that’s the problem, I’m not having fun at it now.  So I’m going to quit.  

I know what I do have a passion for, what I truly enjoyed most in my career.  It was mentoring and teaching less experienced people about engineering and giving them career advice.  Or it could be in the personal finance mentoring area, but that is already a crowded field and I’m not a real expert.   We have a local university that has a fledgling engineering department, I am going to try to see if there is some way I can get involved over there.  Failing that I’m going to need to invent something  else. I’m open to suggestions.  

What say you?  What should I replace that eight hour work week with? 

How do I find a part time gig that fits my passion to mentor, paid or volunteer?

As usual, if you don’t see a comment box just click on the title of the post.

Seems like every week somebody posts a blog about how to get a raise.  Generally the advice is to gather up a list of your accomplishments, check sites like Glassdoor or Salary.com to see what the market is for your position in your area and to set a meeting with your boss.  Then to tactfully, yet forcefully, make a case for why they should pay you more money.  Sounds reasonable, right?  Wrong.  Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! That’s a great technique to get a 2.5% cost of living adjustment but it is a terrible way to ever get paid big money.  

Who am I to be critical of this common advice?  Well, I’m the boss, that’s who.  I started out as an entry level engineer, just like everyone starts out at an entry level, but I did not stay there for long.  I had people working for me within a couple of years and over time had more and more people until when I retired slightly early, I had 711 people that I was responsible for.  Needless to say, a big part of my job was figuring out what to pay everyone.  What starting salaries, what raises, what bonuses.  I had employees making from $32,000 to well over $200,000.  So I’m speaking from experience when it comes to the thought process that goes through a boss’s mind when it comes to figuring out what kind of raise you deserve.  I also artfully managed to increase my pay from the first years figure to twenty four times that amount my last year, over a thirty plus year career, averaging around 9% annual increases. So I know what worked to get consistently large raises.  

With hundreds of employees, obviously they did not all work directly for me.  We had a few levels of management between most of the entry level jobs and mine, so I depended on each employee’s supervisor to rank their departments or teams in order of the value of each employee to that team.  It wasn’t based on seniority, just on merit, so it wasn’t unusual for some younger employees to make more than older ones doing the same kind of work.  The way annual raises worked was that I was given a budget by my Fortune 500 CEO for the total of all raises, something like 3%.  And I could give anyone as much, or as little as I chose, as long as the total didn’t go over 3% of our total payroll.  So in effect, if I gave one person 15% then I had to cut twelve other people down to 2% to make up the difference.  That sounds cruel I know, but I did not make the rules of the game.  My job was to protect the highest value employees first and we would take our chances with the ones who could be more easily replaced.  If this is starting to make you feel like you now know why most people only get  2% raises, then you are catching on.  

My job was to determine who I had to protect.  Those were my rock stars, the people I did not feel we could flourish without.   It was hard to attain that status, you had to check two difficult boxes.  One, you had to be in a job that was directly tied to profitability.  Second, you had to have mad skills, skills that only 5 or 10% of your peers could match.  At our facility that was usually limited to engineers, they designed and optimized the operations of the production equipment and it was easy to measure the money they made the company.  Frankly, at the plant level we could get by with average accountants and logistics types so I did not have to stretch to protect those jobs, it was strictly cost of living type raises for them.  But for rock star engineers and operations supervisors I paid what I had to, because it was nearly impossible to replace them with other rock stars.  Finding that one out of ten or twenty is an arduous task, considering my competition was also constantly looking for them.  

You would think we would have had constant turnover of the average employees.  And I’m using average as a label for everyone that wasn’t a rock star, out of convenience. Not to say they were average or uniform in terms of ability.  Of course some of those were not great employees and some were highly skilled, they would have been rockstars themselves at another company.  But we did not need their expertise enough for them to qualify as such in our business.  Take a biochemist for instance, a world class biochemist at Merck Pharmaceuticals can command kingly wages, because he is obviously and closely tied to the profits of the company.  But at our facility he would be running routine environmental analyses, something that would not require the same mad skills as a Merck researcher.   Having a world class chemist doesn’t offer much more value than a barely average chemist if you are only running a few basic tests over and over. And that isn’t the chemist’s fault but it is a real problem if you find yourself in a position that isn’t seen to be tightly linked to paying the bills.  On the other hand our chief chemist was a rock star and he was compensated to reflect that, because we had to have him to help solve problems nobody else could. 

Surprisingly we did not have much turnover, even in the jobs that did not get the bigger raises, and I’m not sure why.  Maybe it was human inertia, our isolated rural location or the fact that we offered stable long term employment with good benefits. A lot of people settle for working in jobs they do not really enjoy and that they feel under paid doing.  I’ve always felt that work can and should be one of your favorite hobbies, you just have to find something that you can learn to be really good at. But like most companies it seemed that many of our employees were just working to pay the bills. 

We actually had higher turnover with our rock star employees.  The downside of employing superstar talent is that their reputation gets out there and it isn’t long before you find yourself in a bidding war to keep them satisfied.  And that’s where my personal experience comes into the picture.  You see, even though this post is about how to get a raise, I never asked for a raise in my life.  And I never left my company. And I got great raises anyway.  So how did I do that?

I did it by becoming my own boss’s number one rock star employee.  I asked questions constantly and cultivated a personality of curiosity about the business, starting with my own job duties but spreading out way past what I was assigned.  Note, when you are asking questions learn to be very careful about who you ask.  It is OK to ask your boss deep and complicated questions that you couldn’t be expected to answer on your own. For all other questions,  never ask anyone higher up in the organization.  If it is a question that you can answer for yourself or by asking a peer, then do that.  Contrary to popular opinion there are lots of stupid questions and if you ask your boss or one of his peers stupid questions, that is going to reflect badly on you

 Some other things I did included memorizing the complicated arrangement of processing equipment and piping in our facility.  These mini complexes were the size of city blocks with millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment all connected together by piping. We had process flow diagrams that showed how the raw materials flowed through the equipment and were converted to valuable fuels and chemical products and these were very complex drawings.  I took them home and studied them until I could draw them from memory.  Having the intimate details of the actual equipment that made 100% of our company’s profits embedded in my brain gave me a superpower over my competition. 

I applied that kind of obsessive overkill to learning everything I could and as my skill set grew I found I was having the time of my life. I became indispensable to my boss, himself a rock star employee destined to eventually run the corporation, and became his most trusted assistant.  The market was hot for young engineers at that time and I was getting calls every week from chemical and oil companies offering me 10 to 20% raises to jump ship and work for them.  I loved my job and had no interest in leaving, but it occurred to me that my boss did not know that for certain.  So I started passing on the best offers I received, especially local ones that wouldn’t require me to move.  I never made a threat, in fact every time I would tell him how much a company had offered me I would also tell him I wasn’t interested in leaving, that I loved what I was doing. But he got the message that my value on the job market was escalating faster than my paycheck.  And that scared him because he recognized that his path to the top was in no small part bolstered by my skills, skills that he couldn’t easily replace.

Why take that risk if another ten thousand dollars a year would make it go away?  And year after year the offers kept coming in and the company kept giving me great raises.  There were a few years when the economy was in deep recession that I didn’t get much of a raise, but not many.  And because raises are compounding, just like interest, I stayed near the top of the pay range for my position nationwide.  

Since I recognized that the outside job offers were key to getting pay increases I nurtured my relationship to the recruiters who were bringing the offers to me.  They would have stopped calling me once they realized I had no real interest in leaving, except for one thing.  I had a network of people both inside my corporation and with our competition and I could refer other people who were unhappy with their jobs to these same recruiters.  They placed a number of these people, so they kept calling. I’d tell them no, but I’d also steer them to others who were ready for a move.  Because my referrals helped other rock stars move up at other companies my network kept growing and I started receiving job offers from some of them.  It was one of those virtuous circles where helping others was also helping myself. 

The final part of earning more money at your day job is frequent advancement.  Nothing gets you raises like getting promoted.  I started as a summer intern and worked my way to the very top job.  And every promotion brought with it a significant pay hike.  Plus it also put me at the bottom of the wage range for that job, at first, which made it very easy for the company to keep giving me nice raises.  If you stay at the same job level you will eventually top out for your job.   Other companies will lose interest in you once you’ve topped out because you will have priced yourself out of the market.  For those reasons you have to see a clear path upward, if not it is time to leave that company and move to one that has more opportunity.  I was very fortunate in that I never had to switch employers to keep moving up.  But that was no accident, I selected that company out of eight that offered me a job upon graduating from college, because I felt that I could advance to the top there.  

That’s all there is to it, find a job you can master, not just one you can be pretty good at, and then do the hard stuff to separate you from your competition. And find a place to do it where it is critical to company profits and everyone knows it.  And cultivate a network outside of your company that will bring job offers to you with enough frequency that your boss knows you have options.  And finally, make sure you can see a path to the top levels of earning at your company. If you lose sight of the path, leave.  

The simple truth is your boss, or her boss, or their boss has a limited pot of cash to distribute.  Any dollar he gives you is probably coming out of someone else’s pocket.  I’m not trashing having an abundant mindset here, I’m just saying the person handing out the money doesn’t have one when he is deciding on your annual raise.  So to get an outsized raise you have to be a larger than life employee.  You have to be in the right job at the right company and you have to be marvelous at it.   And you have to be in demand.  I think most people could do that, but it won’t happen by accident. And the steps to achieve it may not appeal to you in the least.  That’s OK, maximizing your compensation at a 9 to 5 may not be your thing, side gigs or your own business are better plans for a lot of people.  But it worked for me, allowed me to enjoy my career and then to walk away on my own terms at the time of my choice. 

So do you think my ideas for getting better raises still work or is it just more “Ok, Boomer” nonsense.  

Does anything I wrote sound unethical or sketchy?  

What has worked best for you in terms of getting pay raises?

Oh, and if you don’t see a comment box just click on the title of the post at the top.

If you took a poll in  this space, the personal finance/FIRE/retirement/investing/frugality space about what kind of job is the best kind to have, I think I could predict the results.  Near the top would be entrepreneurship, which would include owning your own business, free lancing, rental real estate, blogging, YouTube personality, influencer, etc.  Near the bottom would be corporate 9 to 5 cubicle dwelling drone.  Makes sense doesn’t it?  What thoughts fill your dreams when it comes to ideal work?  Autonomy, control of your time, purpose, a share of the profits instead of a pittance doled out by a heartless megacorp.  How could you ever become the next Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs working in a cubicle doing soul sucking drudge work? But out on your own, making your own rules?  The sky is the limit!

I truly get that concept, even though I worked for over thirty years for the same large corporation.  But I also have had the privilege of having close friends who owned their own businesses, some quite successful.  These weren’t just passing acquaintances but people I’ve been real with, ran marathons with, gone on road trips with and lived life with.   So I do have an opinion informed by years of dialogue and observation, about the two ends of the employment scale.  An opinion based on actual life experiences and conversations. 

When it comes to the corporate 9 to 5, I know it well.  For over three decades, starting as summer intern and ending up as the head Fred, you could say I’ve seen it all.  I’ve seen some of my peers who languished in that world, they literally dreaded work and lived for the weekend.  They had topped out early in their career and were just treading water until they could retire and start living.  To me they had sad lives.  They were poster children for what is wrong with the rat race.  But there were others, ones who had great starts and made it up to middle management, then either from lack of talent or the skewed perception of senior management, just did not have what it takes to keep moving up in the organization.  They were making good six figure paychecks but they also were working crazy long hours, were always on call and the constant stress of a demanding job with no future rewards in sight was beating them down.  Most of them made it to retirement but sadly some of those did not live to enjoy a long life of leisure and purpose.  Whether their early demise was the legacy of work frustration and stress is impossible to know.  But I’ve had one widow look me in the eye and tell me my former employer killed her husband. 

And then there was another path for a smaller number of fortunate people.  I was one of those.  Those annoying types that look forward to going into work on Monday mornings because it is one of their most exciting and fulfilling hobbies.  Yes, that was me.  And I can explain what made work such a kick.  I was a nerdy brainy kid in school, and smart teachers and parents guided me toward a career that rewarded those traits, chemical engineering. In college I found I had a knack for understanding how the different disciplines of engineering fit together to solve real world problems.  But it was the work world that lit my fuse and unlocked my potential.  I had always been intensely competitive but had never had an arena to compete in that suited my talents, until I found it in the work world where I was competing with other young engineers. I had finally found my game, and I loved it!  I was given raises, promotions and accolades and just kept moving up the ladder until my pay and responsibilities exceeded my most wishful dreams.  

So from my experience the corporate life was not a great one for many but could be incredible for a few.  But what about the life of an entrepreneur?  Most of my career wasn’t spent in the internet age.  I had no experience with my friends being internet influencers or YouTube personalities.  They were not life coaches or online marketers.  My entrepreneurial friends were people who ran brick and mortar service  businesses  The three that came to mind were Tom, Chip and Bill, three friends who took the path of running their own companies. 

Tom has a trucking business, and it’s a pretty significant operation.  He has a lot of employees, truck drivers, office clerical, dispatchers, bookkeepers and maintenance personnel.  He operates in multiple cities.   He probably has several million invested in tractors and trailers, buildings and equipment.  He lives in a very nice house, and like me, his kids are mostly grown and gone.  What I’m really trying to compare here is not our actual jobs but the quality of our lives and how our work impacts that.  Tom is in total control of his business, he answers to nobody, no boss and no board of directors.  He should be stress free, right? I’ve spent a lot of time with Tom, he’s a warm and caring person, a devoted father and has a net worth similar to mine.  So he’s wealthy, healthy and in total control of his life.  Surely that is way better than being a corporate 9 to 5 indentured servant, right?  But no, I don’t think it is.  While I always expressed joy in relation to how I felt about my job, Tom usually expresses some level of anxiety. While I was always assured I’d get my six figure compensation no matter how our company performed Tom was always worried about how to keep his company profitable in a very complex world full of risk. He still is even though he’s reached the age I retired.   If my company failed or fell out of love with me I could get another job and a raise inside a week.  If Tom’s business fails it takes most of his financial stability with it.   In fact Tom has been actively trying to sell his operation for years and has not been successful.  His kids have no interest in working with him or taking the business over and his competitors would rather see him go under than take over his fleet. And finally while I was able to walk off into an enjoyable and fulfilling retirement on my sixtieth birthday Tom has no exit strategy at all unless he can find someone to buy him out.  In short I would never trade my corporate career for Tom’s entrepreneurial one.  

Another friend is named Chip.  He started up his own service business that serves both residential and commercial customers.  He ran it for twenty-five years and then sold it to a national chain for what sounded like a large amount at the time.  But for most of the time I’ve known him he owned and ran the business.  Chip never seemed to worry as much as Tom but he still felt the constant pressure of competition while running the business.  Unlike trucking, the barrier to entry for Chip’s business is fairly low so there were a lot of solo owner/operator competitors driving the price down for his services. Also there was competition from a household name national brand that has a near monopoly nationwide.  He did find an exit strategy but now, as an early retired guy who needs a little more money,  he doesn’t have an easy way to find good paying part time work.  His expertise as a small business owner operator is not very marketable.  As a former corporate guy, by comparison, I’ve been able to earn close to $100K every year for the five years I’ve been retired, only working about 8 hours a week.  He is currently working nearly forty hours a week in retirement to supplement his investment income.  While he successfully executed his exit strategy he came out with less than he feels he now needs. Personally I see his stress level as much higher than mine and much of it has to do with his former life as a small business owner. 

Finally there is Bill.  Bill worked for others in a couple of jobs but he knew early on he wanted to be his own boss.  So he got into a variety of construction  and outdoor service industries and later took on commercial and rental real estate. I’d guess Bill is worth at least five times what I am…or maybe he’s on the verge of being broke?  Its not clear because Bill has reinvested every cent he has made over the last thirty years and has also used debt to fuel his expansion into new ventures.  He is an incredibly hard worker and maybe the kindest guy I’ve ever known.  Personally I’m pretty sure he’ll die with the most money but is that really the best measure of success?  I would guess he works sixty to seventy hours a week.  I think he enjoys it but he also feels the pressure of having a dozen balls in the air at the same time and he also has nobody to take over from him if he ever wants an exit path.  While he has equipment and employees, a large part of the value is what is between Bill’s ears and in his stout heart.  He’s younger than me, he won’t start thinking about retirement for another 15 years, but when that happens it may be complicated for him.  I think when Bill hits 60 he will face a crisis of sorts as he tries to find an exit strategy.  My guess is he may just work until he dies.  I do think he enjoys work, but it has consumed most of the hours in his life. I would not trade with him.  

So what is the conclusion I draw from my career and those of my corporate peers versus my entrepreneurial friends?  There isn’t one.  I certainly think my path was more fun than that of Tom and Chip’s and at least as interesting and entertaining as Bill’s.  But my career was also more fun than that of most of my coworkers’ jobs.  I found meaning and purpose in my working career and still do in retirement.  I can’t say that was true for most of my corporate teammates or for my entrepreneurial friends.  I do think my exit strategy was painless and let me walk away with a seven figure 401K, sizable taxable investments and lots of consulting options. The exit strategy for my business owner friends was and is a high risk venture with no assurance that when they cash out they will have enough.  In the corporate world my billion dollar facilities did not have any of my money tied up in them.  It was the shareholders who invested the money, I was just paid well to run things.  For my three buddies it was all on them. My biggest risk, as long as I kept things legal and compliant, was having to interview for another job if I got fired.  Their biggest risk is losing everything and the public embarrassment that goes with it.  I don’t say that because there is any shame in failing but because losing a small business you’ve built over decades of sweat and tears has to be incredibly painful compared to simply changing corporate employers. 

One measure of life is how the risks you take compare to the rewards you earn.  The corporate life has much less risk but caps the rewards you can earn, for most.  The entrepreneurial life has no inherent caps but has a staggering failure rate.  And cruelly, while early failures don’t cost you much, failing after twenty or more years of building a sizable business has huge downsides both financially and emotionally. I knew I had a skill set that would make me financially comfortable regardless of who I went to work for.  That is never guaranteed for entrepreneurs.  I never cared about amassing great wealth, just about having enough.  There is no regret in me for the safer path I took.  I wonder what my friends would say if I put that question to them today?  

What about you?  Are you planning on playing it safe or taking the risk of entrepreneurship?

Is it even statistically possible to be happy in the corporate world, or was I just an outlier?

Are the risks of having brick and mortar businesses with expensive equipment and employees greater than new economy entrepreneurs face with digital, low capital investment solo businesses? 

I did something weird, I just bought a nice car.  I have often mentioned my daily driver is a 2008 Infiniti sports car that I paid $7,000 cash for a couple of years ago.  That makes me officially eccentric in the world of financially independent people with multiple millions of dollars invested.   But I’m into bargains and the EX35 I was driving was a BMW level performance car at the price of a very old Prius, which is my kind of a deal.  That car, my second EX35 just rolled over 200,000 miles on the odometer a couple of weeks ago and my wife and I began to be a little concerned about reliability.  

We do take said vehicle on road trips of over 2,000 miles on regular occasions, even during covid pandemics, so I was getting concerned that we might break down in the middle of nowhere, since we frequent remote hiking trailheads.  My sweet and brilliant wife suggested I upgrade to a newer, but not new, model with low mileage and so I did what I always do, and went to the internet.  Like you I had seen Carvana and Vroom and Shift discount car shopping sites and as someone who hates the car dealer experience I thought perhaps I could get a car and a deal without actually having to talk to another human?  

One of the problems with buying a car is figuring out which car you want.  There are hundreds of models of cars, each with dozens of available optional upgrades and they come in a rainbow of colors.  But being the crafty engineer I was I had already solved that problem.  Three cars ago I had found what felt like the perfect car for me.  First built in 2008 and then produced virtually unchanged for the next nine years INFINITI had produced, in my opinion, this perfect car, the EX35, which later became the EX37 and then later still the QX50.  I bought a slightly used 2008 model six years ago, then replaced it with another same year version  two years ago.  Since they made the same car up until 2017 I decided to look for that model with every bell and whistle possible.  

Why this particular, and somewhat funny looking, car?  Several reasons, first in the sport compact SUV space there are only three cars that have big engines with lots of horsepower and tight sports car handling.  One is an Audi, another is a BMW model and then there is the INFINITI QX50.  It has 325 horsepower on a platform that is closely related to the Nissan 370Z sports car.  And the INFINITI sold for ten to fifteen thousand dollars less than the European models it competes with.  I like fast small cars that also have the ability to carry a good bit of stuff for our road trips.  The QX50 checks all the boxes and does it at the lowest price.  Just as a note, INFINITI still sells a vehicle called the QX50 today in 2020, but it is not the same car.  They made it bigger and boxier, put a smaller engine in it and dampened down the suspension to make it a friendly family car, instead of the road beast I wanted.

I researched the car and the option packages it was sold with, and in 2017 the loaded version of the QX50  sold for right at $50,000!  A little rich for this value buyer but I went ahead and did a web search to see how much of a discount I could get now that those 2017 models were three or four years old.  I wanted all the cool safety features, blind spot detection, automatic braking to avoid collision, lane departure warning and assistance, intelligent cruise control that will follow the car in front of you.  Also a  360 degree camera for parking and a host of other cool stuff.  And it had to be white, that was the only color I would consider.  After a lot of searching it appeared there was only one car for sale in the entire country that met my criteria and it was on Vroom. 

I do not monetize my blog so I get nothing from Vroom for telling this story.  This is just my car story.  Vroom quoted me a price for the car just over $21,000.  There is no haggling, ever.  What they show you the first time you see the car on their website is the final price.  NADA said the car should retail for nearly $28,000.  It appeared to me that Vroom might not have added in the value of all the upgrades on the vehicle because it had every single available option and upgrade but their written description failed to list some of them.  I could tell from the photos they were there, but maybe Vroom did not include them in its pricing.   It was almost too good to be true but I took the chance and wired them the money and sat back and waited to see if what I got matched what they said I’d get.  And to be honest my net worth sometimes changes by a lot more than  $21,000 on a daily basis as the stock market climbs and falls so even if I lost the money it would only be an aggravation, not a real problem.  

  I felt there was a chance I’d end up with a bad deal, a car that just didn’t match the description.  Or that some of the options that were deal breakers for me would either not be on this particular car or might not be working properly, especially the safety driver assistance features.  Vroom had provided many photos of the vehicle including close ups of a couple of imperfections but that didn’t mean it would not show up with additional blemishes.  I awaited delivery with a mixture of anticipation and fear of disappointment.  And while they have a seven day return policy I’m not sure how easy that is to execute.  Plus the delivery fee of $600 wasn’t included in the return policy. 

Delivery was quite an adventure.  One of the things about dealing with Vroom is they move with lightning speed right up to the point where you either wire them the money or mail them a cashier’s check.  After that they kind of ghost you.  You will get an occasional form letter email about the process being underway, but a little delayed by Covid.  I also got one or two phone calls but usually those went to voice mail, because I have a life.  And you can’t call them back without getting put on endless hold.  So mostly I just waited for two weeks.  But I knew that was how it worked from reading reviews, so it did not phase me much.  Two or three days before the actual delivery you start getting calls from the driver of the car carrier semi on which your vehicle will arrive.  The “window” for delivery of my car was “probably sometime after 9 PM on Saturday night”.  I did get his cell number so I could stay in touch if needed.  Saturday was two days earlier than the previous official delivery date and as my wife and I were in another city a hundred miles away that weekend playing in the state tennis championships I ended up having to make a two hundred mile round trip that could have been avoided. 

Around 7PM the driver called me and said he would be there at 8:30PM.  He was concerned about tree limbs scratching the cars he was carrying if he had to drive his big rig on the rural road I lived on so we agreed to meet at a Walmart a few miles from my home.  Closer to 9 PM the driver pulled his six car carrier semi trailer into the parking lot.  My car was on the bottom under a couple of Ford pickup trucks and had a ton of grime on the hood but other than that, it looked good.  I held my breath as he unloaded a couple of cars to get to mine, especially as he backed mine off the trailer with very little clearances on the sides. Other than being dirty from drips and road film the car looked great!

I drove it back to the tennis tournament and played my last match.  My team did not win but my wife is now a state champion along with the rest of her team.  She’d be on her way to sectionals in Louisville and then the national championships (perhaps) in Palm Springs, except Covid cancelled all that.  My team got thrashed, although my partner and I did beat the guys that eventually won, a moral victory at best.   I finally got the car home and gave it a hand wash and wax and detailed the interior, which was already pristine.  I was pleasantly surprised that the car had every feature advertised and that everything worked.  The leather interior was even better than in the photos, because a bad place on a headrest had been repaired and a small scratch on one door had been fixed as well.  

How do I rate the performance of Vroom?  Well on this one experience I’d say they are awesome.  Cars do depreciate a lot in the first three years, but they don’t  drop over 50% in value that fast.  I can only assume Vroom has such a low overhead and efficient structure that they can thrive with a very low margin per sale.  They aren’t huge on customer service.   I went for quite a few days not having a clue when my car would show up, but because there wasn’t that much money at stake I didn’t sweat it.  I figured they would come through, and they did. And the car itself was not only portrayed accurately but the minor defects they had shown in detailed photos they repaired, at their cost, before car arrived!  And that was never part of the deal we agreed to, that was an extra they threw in for free.  

  So I guess I need to retract what I said about customer service. Perhaps what I should say is they are not big on communication, but they come through where it matters.  As I said before, Vroom has no idea who I am, writing this blog, and I simply do not collect any money for advertising or linking from my site.  I  just do this for fun.  But I suspect many of you have thought about buying a car over the internet but had some worries about whether it really was safe or not.  I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience but I’m telling you, from now on this is how I do car buying!

I think used car dealers all over the country should be feeling some fear.  I saved about $7,000 on this car, that’s a significant sum on a used car.   Just like Amazon is making brick and mortar retail stores less relevant in our daily lives why can’t internet car vendors do the same?  I think they can.  So far I think the stats show that only one percent of car buyers have done what I did.  But then again, ten years ago Amazon was just an internet book store.  The times, they are a changing.  Need a car?  Maybe you should look online.  

What about you, have you ever bought a car online?  Do you think you might the next time you buy?

Have you heard any horror stories about online car buying?

Is used the way to go on cars?  Or are you asking for someone else’s problems when you buy their old car?

I was a shy kid with very little confidence until a life changing event transformed my self esteem for the better.  I went from feeling way less than, to feeling good about who I was.  That’s another story I’ve mentioned before, so I will not go into it here.  But if you ask my friends they’ll tell you that low self esteem is no longer one of my problems, that in fact I’m annoyingly far out on the other end of the scale.  It occurred to me this morning that this metamorphosis is exactly what leadership training programs are selling.  But can you actually teach success and confidence, do those programs really work? 

There is a lot of research out there that is mostly negative towards motivational programs, however this post is not about statistics. This about my personal observations having been through a few seminars  that were designed to transform regular people into enlightened leaders, engaging public speakers and charismatic networkers.  Early on in my career, management identified me as having managerial potential so I was sent to a number of nationally known programs designed to improve these soft skills.  And I saw the same thing repeat itself over and over.  The training worked pretty well for the attendees who did not need it, and did not work at all for the ones who needed it most.  It was a classic case of the rich getting richer and the poor staying poor.  

That’s a bold observation, I know, but remember I’m not saying my thoughts are accurate or reflect on the potential of all self improvement Or leadership programs.   They are just my personal experiences and “the story I tell myself about what those experiences mean”.  And if you are at all into self improvement you’ll recognize that last part in quotes as being part of the Kool Aid. 

The first course I participated in was in year two or three of my career.  It was an 18 week, local, one night a week seminar, a very famous one still widely marketed.  I’d identify it but I’m allergic to lawsuits, so I won’t.  Plus, I thought it was a great course and it helped me immensely in both my personal life and my career.  I have recommended it to many people.   It focused around public speaking, remembering people’s names and influencing others.    Most engineers are terrible at all three of those but I am actually pretty good at speaking and influencing, but I am still awful at remembering names. However, thanks to the course I know why.  So if my first experience was such a boon to my career and life why am I largely negative toward the concept of leadership training? 

That class had two main types of people in it.  Fast movers like me who were seen to be future leaders, sent by their companies to sharpen their talents.  The other half were strugglers.  These were genuinely nice people that were terrified to speak to just one person, much less to a room of forty strangers.  And that makes sense, because those are two groups that companies need to get the most from.  The fast movers are going to run the company some day so they are always a good investment. But why did the companies sponsor the other employees, the ones with low confidence and poor soft skills?  

 Since I later became the guy who approved training, I think I know why it made sense to management to send struggling employees to this type of training, and it is twofold.  First, it is simply out of compassion.  I know some of you will roll your eyes at the very idea that a soulless corporation would care about individuals but you could not be more wrong.  Corporations don’t really exist, they are just a collection of people, no different from me or you.  These people, the ones that gain the higher positions, can make cold hard decisions but they also love to make warm and soft ones.  The one thing I’m proudest of in my career were the struggling employees who appeared to be on their way to being terminated, that I was able to help save by moving them into a position that they could thrive in.  Finding the round hole for the round peg rather than throwing them away like a defective tool was a huge victory.  If we fired someone that meant we failed them, its an awful thing to have to do.  But if you improve the quality of their lives by putting them in a place where they can win that’s like being a miracle worker, it’s the best feeling ever. 

The second reason for investing in self improvement training for strugglers is more mercenary.  Hiring and training workers is expensive, very expensive.  And its worth investing a relatively small amount to try to turn a drowning employee into a competent swimmer, so to speak.  And remember the people deciding who and how training happens at work are the ones who have risen through the Darwinian ranks by winning in competition with their peers.  By definition the decision makers are not strugglers.  These people do not struggle at all, they are where they are because they are gifted at both technical and soft skills.  Perhaps, because of this, they simply do not understand why strugglers struggle.  The assumption may be that it is a lack of knowledge.   And they can buy training to fix that, problem solved! If it works then money is saved, if the training doesn’t work its just a small investment lost. 

So how did that work out?  I can only tell you what I saw, and remember I live in small town USA so I got to watch many of these fellow self improvement classmates of mine play out their lives over the next three decades, so I saw a lot.  Some of them also were my coworkers.   For those, I was there to see the before and after versions up close and personal.  

Let me take you back to class night, thirty years ago. First, we would meet and greet and have small talk.  The we would  go over the homework from the previous week, and last we would do a presentation, a very short speech. Usually we had prep time before at home but sometimes it was impromptu.  And it always turned out the same.  The anointed ones gave amazing presentations, after all that was why their management sent them, because they had demonstrated verbal proficiency in meetings at work.  They were funny, they made the class laugh and sometimes we made the class cry with stories so real and poignant.    Because we were open and vulnerable, because we were already brimming with self confidence to the point that we had faced most of our dragons.  We  could talk about them to anyone without shame or fear.  It was like a superpower, that confidence and self assurance. 

But the strugglers by and large were paralyzed with fear.  Maybe because there were unresolved issues in their lives.  Maybe because they had faced trauma or just had lived a life where few of their dreams had been realized.  I mean, what is confidence except personal experience with winning in life.  And when you constantly succeed in life you start expecting to succeed because that Is what your own history has taught you.   Imagine seeing someone get up and talk about how they faced their fears and overcame them if you are nowhere near being able to face your own.  Imagine someone talking about winning against tough odds when you feel like a loser most of the time.  Imagine being in a class full of the cool kids, the rich kids and you are poor and see yourself as hopelessly uncool.   Then imagine getting up right after the best speech you’ve ever heard, having to try to follow that when you are scared to death.  When you can’t be real about yourself to a room full of strangers because you just aren’t there yet. I was like that as a teenager, and its one of the purest forms of hell on earth. It is simply asking too much from someone to expect them to win in that environment if they do not already see themselves as winners. So they do poorly.  And the class votes the same cool kids as the weekly winners over and over, for eighteen weeks.

At the end of the course two things are apparent to everyone.  The great speakers have gotten even better, after all every week they get the best of show awards and all that class affirmation.  The strugglers, in almost every case, are barely better than they were in week one.  Maybe once in awhile the class becomes that epiphany in their lives when they realize they are no different than the cool kids and they start to build internal confidence.  But I did not see that in that class thirty years ago and I never saw it in any of the other leadership training I went to.  

Why?  Why can’t you teach everyone to win in business, to speak fluently and persuasively and to step out boldly in confidence?  I do not know the answer.  I do have an idea based on my own experiences.   I had to step way out of my confidence zone to transform my self image.  And while it started with a single event it was a process of continuing to step out into scary situations over and over.  I had to be the one to decide to take a huge risk and to risk a huge humiliating failure.  That isn’t something you can teach someone, because they have to decide they no longer want to feel small, and that the reward of winning is worth the risk of failure.  That’s a big hairy decision you make for yourself when you are ready to make it. The chance that you’ll have that pivotal moment in a class on a date decided by your leadership teacher is slim.  

Are self improvement programs useless?  Not useless, no, I think they help the already gifted people quite a bit.  Will they turn a struggling employee into an overnight success?  Not in my experience. It isn’t a lack of knowledge that causes self esteem and confidence problems.  And generally all seminars do is teach knowledge.  Changing how you see yourself and how you see others is much bigger than that.  

By way of disclaimer I do not consider coaching, mastermind groups, counseling, therapy or any other activity dedicated to improving the quality of your life to be at all related to what I am talking about in this post. I’m only talking about classic leadership training in an in person classroom setting. That is the only thing I have personal experience with.

What do you think?  Am I being overly critical of leadership/self improvement/motivational programs? 

Has a course changed your life or the life of someone you know? 

I’m not sure what day will be considered the day things went back to normal from the Covid19 “thing” but I’m saying that for here in rural Arkansas it was today. Let me be clear I’m not talking about normal from a political, racial or social standpoint, I’m only referring to the impact of the virus.

First let me say that unlike most of you my life has gone on virtually unchanged over the last three months. I didn’t have a job to go in to. I don’t have any payments, I’m debt free. I’ve got plenty of money and investments to live large even if I live to 110 years old. I don’t have any kids at home or any grandchildren anywhere. So my normal spring activities of running, tennis, fishing and off roading have gone on unabated because my wife and I do those things together and we don’t have to social distance from each other.

But there were a few things that did change. Our church wasn’t meeting in person, but after today it is. My board meetings for the college and the foundation I chair have switched to Zoom but after today I think they’ll resume face to face. My light consulting work was kind of dormant as my clients were dealing with the fallout from the Covid19 “thing” but now we are setting up the first real meeting with them in two weeks. And maybe the biggest change is we are headed to a friends house for a real live shrimp boil party tonight with two other couples, and without masks. Wow, an actual party!

The Governor also announced today that state wide all the public schools will open as scheduled in August for the next school year and classes will no longer be remote but will be held in the actual on campus classrooms. I got my haircut yesterday from my barber and it was just as normal as it used to be. This morning I met my tennis buddy and he and I played two hard sets of singles. The place we played has four outdoor courts and all of them were full of players on a weekday. We were all retired people like me or stay at home moms but everyone was out enjoying a beautiful day together. The area golf courses have been full of players as well. Our restaurants are open though they do have capacity restrictions. The Governor said we were moving to stage two Monday so I think even those will be back to normal after that.

The disease itself isn’t done yet, but at least around here it has spread at a very slow rate that hasn’t come close to straining the medical system. In fact the real medical crisis here is that hospitals and clinics are going broke because of the delays in non critical care to patients. Thankfully that’s over now too although it is still hard to find a dentist that is open for routine dental care. I know a lot of people because I’ve lived here for decades and used to have hundreds of local employees and to date I still know of nobody who has tested positive or gotten sick. Over half the cases in our county are in nursing homes and most of those in a single facility. It is surreal that in a pandemic nobody here is sick, in fact in one adjoining county there has yet to be a single person who has tested positive. I credit the very low population density and natural social distancing practiced by rural folk. We live in single family homes, often on several acres so we’ve never rubbed shoulders with neighbors, we just talk across the ditch between our houses and when we pass each other when we are out taking a walk.

Most of our large employers are in the oil, gas, chemical and defense industries. Those were all considered critical and none of them ceased operations for even a single day. Most of their workers continued to go into the plants as it wasn’t feasible to run a manufacturing complex remotely. There hasn’t been a single case of a cluster of patients at any of the chemical and oil plants here like there have been at some of the meat processing plants in other states. The nature of the work involves very few people spread out over acres of plant site so there isn’t the kind of shoulder to shoulder contact that the disease loves. Nobody in our local plants has been furrowed or had their wages or hours decreased. In fact, for most of them, like me, we received our stimulus money and actually are in even better financial shape than before Covid19 happened. Both the college and the charity I volunteer at have received forgivable bail out loans to keep paying their employees. So we are crossing our fingers that we are on the road back to normal and that things will continue to get better daily.

It is always dangerous to predict when some major event has had its day, because that is something you can only do after its over and you look back on past events. Just as we only now can confirm when the current recession first started we can’t really say what day things started to go back to normal from the Covid19 “thing”. But I’m planting my flag in the sand and saying its today for our little corner of paradise!

I suspect that for people living in metropolitan areas the feeling might be much different? Are there any city dwellers that feel like your town has turned the corner or is the future still very uncertain?

What about other rural denizens. Has your area been largely spared so far like mine? Do you think better or worse times are coming?

I’ve read a lot of articles that advise if you can’t say “Hell Yes!” Then you need to say no. They basically are conveying the idea that a life that is over committed is not a good life. It is a life of people pleasing mediocrity. And every time I see this I feel a huge wave of cognitive dissonance sweep over me. Because, you see, that’s not how I have lived my life.

First let me explain what I think is wrong with the “Hell yes or it’s a firm no” strategy of living. Very simply, it is selfish. The world, and even your precious life is not all about you, or about maximizing your own happiness. I say that for lots of reasons, maybe the foremost being that headlong pursuit of happiness is the worst way to attain it. Happiness is better found in being grateful, being content with what you already have and in helping others. Getting out of your own head and your own wish list of desires is easier if you reach out a hand to help someone else. Putting their needs ahead of your own is the antithesis of being selfish, it is being selfless. And almost every time there is an opportunity to help another person it shows up in the form of the classic yes or no decision. And it is rarely, if ever, a “Hell yes”. In fact it usually feels like a strong no at first.

Take passing a car stalled on the side of the road with an obviously stranded driver. Now this is a rural example, it may not be a safe thing to do in the metro world, but stay with me anyway. You can stop and help or drive on by. Why you would stop is no mystery, you would only do that to help someone out. You would only do it because you empathize with their plight. But the reasons why you might not stop, those are legion. Fear of intruding, fear of getting involved with someone who might not be stable or safe. You’ve got places to be and things to do and your time is important. Stop and help, that’s all about them. Drive on by, that’s all about you. And most likely you’ll never ever feel a “Hell yes” when it comes to assisting a stalled motorist. But I’ve done this many times and every time, even if I got soaked helping push a car out of the road in a pouring rainstorm, in my best suit, it felt great. It made me happy!

I’ve told the story before of a pivotal moment in my teen years that changed my entire life. Me, the shyest and most awkward wall flower in my class, agreed to take a lead role in a musical play. We performed that play many times and in front of thousands of people. I was terrified, there was no “Yes” in me at all. I was so firmly opposed to the idea of going down in flames in front of my peers that it made me shake to even consider. But I said yes, somehow I sensed that if I could do this my life could turn a corner. And it did. I went from seeing myself as a nerd with awful social skills to being kind of a cool kid in my own way. And from then on I decided to always say yes unless there were very solid reasons to say no. And fear of failure was not allowed to be a reason.

That philosophy, of always saying yes, led me from company intern to the guy that ran the division for our Fortune 500 corporation. It led me to testifying before both House and Senate committees in DC and it led me to becoming a first responder and firefighter who brought a dead coworker back to life with CPR. It got me a wonderful life partner and three great kids. It made a slightly early retirement with no money worries possible. And to be honest it led to some spectacular failures too. The kind where I now shake my head and say, “What was I thinking?” But the worst that ever happened is I learned more about myself. Looking back at even the worst of my failures, they seem more amusing now than painful.

So what about over committing and being a people pleaser. Over committing is a modern myth in my opinion. That old saying about giving a task that must be done quickly to the busiest person you know, that’s a truism because it is true! We aren’t that busy, not really. Not to the point that we can’t help someone else. If they are asking you to say yes they are just asking for help. As for pleasing people, what is that? Pleasing people is adding to their happiness, right? And that is a good thing. How helping others feel better ever got a bad name is beyond me. I think it is one of our best purposes. So mark me down as someone who sees great value in pleasing other people. That’s providing good service, that’s having happy customers, that’s having raving fans.

The day I wake up and think I need to say no to everything that doesn’t fire me up immediately is the day I start to die. I would not have finished a single one of the marathons I ran if I needed a “Hell yes” to keep running to the finish. I wouldn’t have done any of the hard things that got me ahead in the world of business. I wouldn’t have been the kind of parent that required accountability from and granted trust to my children. And I wouldn’t be the happy person I am now.

It isn’t a one time thing to say yes, in spite of misgivings and fears. You do get much better with practice but every time you say yes to something outside of your zone of comfort it is going to scare you. But that is so much better than rationalizing your way to saying no by telling yourself you are too busy. Too busy to do what? Too busy to win? Too busy to be happy by helping someone else? Too busy to change your life? You are never too busy for that.

What do you think, is this heresy to say yes instead of no? Am I full of myself and just don’t understand your life?

How do you decide when to say yes? Have you ever said yes in spite of fear, what happened?

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