There is a growing consensus of people who are qualified for retirement, but aren’t necessarily ready to stop working. Dr. Hans Finzel says that retooling your profession is a helpful way to find meaningful work after the retirement years have officially started. He shares a practical example,
“I was out in a little town in California recently with my daughter, her husband, and my wife. We went to this coffee shop. This older couple, in their mid-sixties, are running this coffee shop and they said, ‘We’ve wanted to move to the city for twenty years! It took us twenty years to get here, but now we live in our dream.’
“Sometimes it’s actually getting around to doing something you wanted to do your whole life.”
Dr. Finzel speaks to fellow baby boomers about finding deep passion and purpose from within.
“Our generation, we grew up in the sixties and seventies and I think one of the characteristics of the boomer generation was they wanted to make a difference. We want to change the world and we became the most materialistic generation America’s ever seen, but I still think there’s that passion in our hearts to make a difference.
“So what happens when you have to retire or you reach the retirement years? You have to find a new purpose.”
Finding a new purpose later in life isn’t always about our own interests or hobbies. It can be about reaching out to the next generation. Dr. Finzel shares a few examples,
“There are so many things we can do later in life. For one thing we can give back; volunteer, we can make a difference, we can mentor young people, etc. It’s probably a new purpose, or maybe an old dormant purpose that you suppressed years ago that you need to rekindle.”
Retirement does not have to mean the end of purpose but the start of a new dream and passion.
Dr. Hans Finzel is a successful author, speaker and trusted authority in the field of leadership. For 20 years he served as President of international non-profit WorldVenture, working in over 65 countries. Hans speaks, writes and teaches on practical leadership principles from the real world—not just the classroom.
Finding purpose and meaning later in life
