You Are “Rare and Valuable” – Don’t Waste It By Retiring!

I’ve been pigging out recently on young, contrarian author and Georgetown University computer science professor, Cal Newport, rereading two of his books and watching lots of his many YouTube podcast interviews. The podcasts provide a welcome and productive relief of the boredom of my daily visits to the treadmill and upright bike.

I guess you could say I’m exercising a bit of “reverse generativity” and trying to be more of a “modern elder” by being willing to listen to and learn from someone less than half my age. Cal is only 38, looks 25, and talks like he’s been around forever, at least in the technology space.

As a late-stage septuagenarian, I’m not supposed to like millennials because they are so impudent, impatient, immature, uninformed.

Bad mantra! Bad idea!

Cal will bend your thinking in a very productive direction if you choose to engage and try but a few of his central messages.

Credibility? Yeah. He’s one of the youngest yet most published professors at Georgetown, has written six books, has a family, doesn’t have a social media account despite being in the technology business, doesn’t work past 5:30, and never works on the weekends. Oh, and finds time to respond to lots of requests for interviews.

Someone asked him in a podcast why he writes books and who they are for? I loved his response: “I write them for myself.” He builds them around what he wants his life to look like. What seems to fall out of his research and writing are some very powerful, insightful, and useful principles.

Passion versus Craftsman

In one of his earliest books, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, Newport takes an unpopular stand by advocating that pursuing your passion is bad career advice despite what nearly every self-help book and self-development guru would have us believe.

I’ll admit I’ve handed out that “bad advice” to a number of career coaching clients. Newport changed my thinking. He builds a very convincing, research-based argument that it is rarely passion that is the genesis of people becoming great but rather their commitment to developing “rare and valuable” skills and becoming “craftsman” through the accumulation of “career capital.”

It turns out that very few people begin careers in pursuit of their passion because (1) very few people even have a passion and (2) if they do, it is usually not related to work-life or career.

So how do people become “great?”

They get really good at something and the passion finds them.

They get so good, they can’t be ignored.

It’s Steve Jobs turning his back on being a Zen master and becoming so good at something that it produced one of the most world-changing events in history – the introduction of a music player that can make and receive phone calls.

It’s Steve Martin performing, experimenting, testing routines for 10 years in front of often-hostile audiences until he got so good that we couldn’t ignore him.

Retirement steals craftsmen.

I doubt that Steve Jobs would have retired had cancer not taken him early.

Steve Martin hasn’t shown any signs of stopping to delight us with his weirdness. Too much accumulated career capital; too many “rare and valuable” skills; too much of a “craftsman.”

Yet, thousands each year take their accumulated career capital, rare and valuable skills, and craftsman qualities and let them atrophy by buying into off-the-cliff traditional retirement.

Is that fair to a younger generation that could use the direction that years of accumulated wisdom can deliver?

Bigger yet, is it fair to the owner of that career capital and those rare and valuable skills to let them go to waste after investing thousands of hours acquiring them.

I realize that many, if not most, folks entering retirement are leaving a “job” – a way to pay the bills. They don’t acquire much career capital and no craftsman status. Some are leaving a career, the constant striving to increasingly better work not taking the time to stay put in a channel long enough to develop rare and valuable skills.

But, there are those who have pursued their work-life as a calling, an important part of their life, and a vital part of their identity. They’ve become true craftsmen.

Yet they let that identity fade away.

That can be an unfortunate consequence of succumbing to the traditional retirement mindset – career capital, deep craftsmanship, and rare and valuable skills relegated to the trash heap.

Enter – Capstone Career

Last week, I introduced the idea of a Capstone Career, a fitting way to celebrate craftsmanship, deep career capital, and those rare and valuable skills to preserve identity, stiff-arm boredom, maintain relevance, and maintain better health.

We can’t all be either of the aforementioned Steves, but we can still be “so good they can’t ignore us” in our own unique way – and make the world a better place during our post-career life.

Are you using your career capital in this second half or third age? What are your rare and valuable skills? Are they still vibrating – or getting stale? What are you doing to maintain your craftsman status?

Share your stories with a comment below.

John says:

March 9, 2021 at 3:41 pm

Gary, Nice article! I believe that we do have skills and talents that need to be shared and if possible even create some “pay” for what we know or what wisdom we have acquired. I wonder how much society allows us to do this. Comments like, “when are you going to retire?” keep popping up. So, the push to push us out is strong.
Listening and really listening so well that you really begin to understand where the other is coming from. Respect and love enter into the equation for what contributions made. Taking delight in other’s stories is the richness that I believe we downplay in ourselves. Focusing on not just the thinking but the emotion coming along can really open up insight into what is permissable as well as possible to resolve certain concerns or situations.
Always working to keep open to all possibilities, staying positive and practicing wellness both physical and mental each day.