RETIREMENT ISN'T WORKING

"The work is hard
The pay is small
So take your time
And sod them all"
- engraved on a china plate on my father's wall

Work was pretty much always a means to an end for me. That end was generally money, although I've been known to take jobs because of their location, to get experience at something so I could get a job doing something else and, on rare occasions, because I enjoyed the work. But mostly it was money and what money could buy, and work was the unpleasant crap you had to do to get the money. If you were lucky enough to be bright or talented, you could make more money for each hour, but I never really could think of a job that sounded like it would be better than sitting on a tropical beach somewhere, with blond chicks in bikinis bringing me champagne on ice......sorry, where was I?

I remember dreaming of retirement when I was still in high school. I read stories of men who started out selling oranges from a barrow at 13 and ended up being billionaire owners of supermarket chains...I heard of people retiring at 35, of people becoming millionaires in their twenties.

I was pretty good at mental arithmetic as a kid. I knew how much a million dollars was. In cash, it's a thousand dollars a week for twenty years. And they say you can't retire on that? Try me...

Success seemed like a natural progression for me. I'd known I was smarter than the average bear from an early age. I didn't feel particularly gifted, and I was crap at anything that involved hand-eye co-ordination or any activity associated with the generation of sweat. But I can't recall a time in my early years when I didn't take it for granted that I would attend University and roll into some very well paid job that allowed me to live the life of luxury to which I'd quickly become accustomed. The dreams of an eleven year old kid...the downside was that no-one - at least no-one I was prepared to listen to - wised me up that work was involved. I knew I had talent. I knew I was bright. The education systems in two different English-speaking countries taught me to be brilliant at passing exams. Once, on a good day, I scored 148 on an official IQ test. Ask me to catch a fish or change the tube on a bicycle and I'd have floundered.

My own belief in my ability was sufficiently confirmed by secondary education, however, and I had that mental picture of the hammock on the beach and the champagne....I would have taken up smoking just so I could light a cigar with a $50 note...

School was mundane, I was smart enough to be able to cruise and still get decent grades...through high school, I had a different dream every week of what I wanted to do when I finished school for good...travelling loomed large as an idea, but what to do to pay for it was a blank wall...when I'd started high school, guys leaving the senior years were still getting drafted to go to Vietnam; by 1975 and my senior years, the war was over, conscription was over, the best of the hippie era was still hanging around, the sexual revolution had switched from free love to porn and swinging in the suburbs, and pot and acid were making way for speed and coke.....there was a darker edge to the world after the innocence and naivete of the 60s, and Life was just starting to open up for a kid in his mid-teens....ambition? ask me later....a lot later.....to cut a long story short, I cruised all the way to a bare fall-over-the-line pass in my University entry exams, gave away the whole idea of higher education as a bad one, and took a job loading clay sewer pipes on and off trucks... I learned to drive a car, a motorbike, forklift and four ton truck within a year and a half...for over 30 years now, I've looked back on that time, that job, as a watershed... one of those Sliding Doors moments when the path I could have taken took a sharp turn into a whole different life...by the time came around to try the Uni exams again, I was too used to the freedom and to the money.

Well, for a kid who had always been soft and clumsy I took to manual labour like a man possessed...after 3 months, I took up rugby union and played my first senior game the day before my 18th birthday...on the way out to my first game, I asked a mate what a 'second row forward' was supposed to do - "Do what the older blokes tell ya. And if you see a bloke from the other side with the ball, knock him over and kick shit out of him until he lets it go"...I played two seasons, ended up playing men's A Grade alongside ex-internationals, and that was the only rule I ever knew...

The die was cast...I was born-again blue-collar...I worked semi-skilled physical jobs for another 5 years, until my first child announced her impending arrival a few months hence. I dusted off my brain, and went back to being paid for what I knew rather than for what I did...in what could be seen as synchronicity, I got my old bosses job at the sewer pipe yard....less than a year later, I'd moved to the Big City and got me a collar and tie job, and notched the hamster wheel into 4th gear....

I've changed jobs a lot. Regardless of what field it is, as soon as I reach a level of competence that I think is sufficient, the interest factor starts to plummet...in my experience, we learn 80% of all we need to know pretty damn quick if we put the effort in...and in the vast majority of cases, in my book, 80% is plenty good enough to get the job done.

I've never aimed for 100%, not that I can remember...I recognised a long time ago that if Perfect was my bench mark in life, I'd spend a lot of that life being frustrated, angry and disappointed....at University, a 70% mark on a paper will get you a Distinction; 80% gets you a High Distinction...it's the professorial equivalent of awarding a gold star or an elephant stamp on the back of your hand...for all that I've read that adults and kids learn differently, I disagree - you stick 30 adults in a class room and they will revert to acting like school kids before lunchtime on Day One...I digress...so, if I get a 90% for anything in life, I think I'm doing extra-ordinarily well. To me 90% is more than most of us are capable of achieving on a regular basis, even on an occasional basis to be quite honest; frankly, there are times when you'd be happy if you could get staff to turn up....so, from where I'm sitting, once we have achieved 80% of our ability to do a job perfectly, it will take 4 times more effort from here on in to learn and develop that last 20%, and I often question the opportunity cost of being an expert....being an expert isn't something I think I've ever aspired to (although I guess I've had some expertise thrust upon me....but that's a whole other story...)....bottom line, when I get to 80% of my potential in a particular job, that's as close as I need to be, I'm competent, and from here on in every day is going to be pretty much the same....in other words, it's time to move on to something else I know nothing about, yet...that's just me...

It's only been recently that I've been turning my head to this all over again...after a few decades of personal finances booming and busting and booming again, back a couple of years ago I made The Big Decision, the one where I finally put my money where my mouth was and got off the hamster wheel..my kids were grown, owning my own home again wasn't that important to me...so, for those who came in late, I put everything I needed into a backpack, boxed a few sentimental favourites, sold everything else, gave away what I couldn't sell, and flew away...

These days, I have everything I need and I don't need much...I have enough put away so I don't have to sit in the dark eating dog food when I'm in my 80s, but that's a few years off yet....my home renovation skills allow me a roof over my head and all the food I need....but I could do with some pocket money, you know? And there's the rub - after so many years of resenting work as an intrusion on my time, looking forward to an early retirement or at least semi-retirement, and being able to do a lot more of what I want, more often - I'm finding that I enjoy life more when I've got something to do, a reason to get out of bed every so often, a challenge to put myself to and maybe learn something, something new...

I find that I enjoy making things more than I used to....I take my time more, and try and do it right the first time...it's for me now, and I have the time....I've never enjoyed gardening so much...I've never enjoyed gardening, really....and after years of believing that I had the mechanical aptitude of a goldfish, I am actually cultivating the ability to take things apart, fix or replace the broken bits, and put them back together again...I've been riding motorbikes since the mid 70s, mostly Hondas and Kawasakis....I would have been happy to learn how to fix them, but they just never really broke down....hmm...well, last year I bought a Harley Davidson, and things have changed a bit...I've done more motorcycle mechanics in the last 14 or 15 months than in the previous 35 years put together. And I love it. "Sportsters - turning riders into mechanics since 1957" Harleys are very simple to work on. They have to be.

It's something special to take a broken motorcycle, work out what's wrong with it, take it apart and put it back together - and then demonstrate your confidence in your work by taking it down the street for a ride that's fast enough to kill you if you forgot to tighten up something important....it's been a late addition to my enjoyment of motorcycling, but not too late to be put to good measure...

You'll see that at the time of posting, I'm currently wading through 'Shop Class As Soulcraft' by Matt Crawford...his writing style isn't grabbing me, but he and I are on the same wavelength - life is about more than just what's in your mind. There are few things more deeply satisfying than the physical creation of something, whether it be a quilt, a basket full of fresh vegetables, or an armchair...it's a feeling that our high paid desk jobs lack....there's a lot of things I could turn my hand to right now, and I'm as sure as I can be that I could go back to my old life and pretty much pick up where I left off....but I can't think of any good reasons to do that....give me a job that doesn't take up all my time, and pays me enough to pay for gas and put a bit aside for parts, coffee and hotel rooms....preferably a job that, at the end of the day, I can look at something and think "I made that".

Yes, that would do nicely.