#1: Choose Your Own Adventure

Careers Are Easy, Choice Is Hard

I just turned 61. If you assume most of us humans will live to around 80, turning 60+ means I have entered the fourth quarter of life.

Not an original analogy, I know. More of a sports cliché. But for a guy like me who has played football and has loved the sport for my entire life, it’s one way to think about where I am right now. And you know what? I kind of like being at the start of the fourth quarter.

Because you’ve done a lot of the hard work. You’ve built a foundation that enables you to pick your own path. Now it is up to you.

Prepare for armchair philosophy!

In life and in football, the first quarter represents the unknown. As a result, the human response is to prepare a script. In football, you’re executing scripted plays that you think will work, based on what you know so far.

In life, those “plays” are growing up. You crawl onto the “field” as a baby, move on to preschool then grade school, ideally high school and, hopefully, trade school or college. By the time you finish the first quarter, you’re have a good sense of what you know and can do. Now you need to go out and execute it.

Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering if this is when I last had hair. You’re pretty close. This is 8th grade middle school football, I played defensive tackle and clearly security was lacking because they let my mom come talk to me on the sideline during the game.

That’s what the second quarter is all about. At 21, you may well not know exactly what you want to do in life, and that’s OK. Many people, though, will have settled on their college major, or at least have identified something they want to do more often and, perhaps, be paid for it.

So from 20 to 40, you are establishing your career and working – pushing, experimenting, making mistakes, readjusting your sights –toward a goal. On the field, that goal is to win. In life, the goal is more complex. Get promoted? Make tons of money? Buy a house? Get married? Raise a family? In the second quarter, most of us decide what we want and, through our careers, start working diligently toward it.

The third quarter is when it all comes together. You have set your goal (or more goals), you have experience, now it is about execution. Get that bag. Win that ‘chip. Stuff that 401(k). Raise those upstanding young citizens you call your kids. If you choose wisely, while you are doing all that, you are also enjoying it. The years from age 40 to 60 can fly by because most of the time, you are fully engaged in whatever you need to do to reach your goal.

Then the fourth quarter starts. For some of us, the reaction is, “It’s about time, I can finally do what I want.” For others, it might be, “Oh, shit.” Your response depends largely on what you achieved in “the game” so far, how you view the seasons of life and aging and whether you made it with relatively few scars and good health.

That’s where I am now. We saved enough, and planned enough, to be financially OK – especially with my wife now working.

For years I’ve joked with my wife that I want the epitaph on my gravestone to be, “Next!” Nothing makes me happier than being fully engaged in something new. A succession of new things, well, that’s my dream.

And now I get to *choose* what to do each day. Well, most days. On some days, my wife chooses what I do. But I digress.

Somehow, I’m actually “living the dream.” Not sure how long it will last, or where it will take me.

One thing I do know: It’s clear what the biggest pitfall of this exciting fourth quarter might be. In the words of Styx, it’s “… too much time on my hands.” When you love to know what’s next, boredom is surprising, scary and unhealthy.

This substack is about the transition from decades of doing what you must to a point in your life when you can choose what’s next. There will also be diversions down old paths and lessons that I promise will lead back to a point. Mostly of the time.

Come join me as I explore … what’s next.