Have you heard the one about the difference between management and leadership?
This comes from Stephen Covey’s classic “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“.
Envision a group of producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. The leader is the one
who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”But how do the managers
often respond? “Shut up! We’re making progress.”
Covey, Stephen R.. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People . Mango Media.
That’s a great analogy for the commonly accepted idea of a “career”.
We’ve all been trekking through the same jungle as our grandparents did.
But guess what? It’s THE WRONG JUNGLE!
Here’s the story we’re told today:
Get good grades.Go to a good college.Get a good job.Work your way up the corporate ladder.Save.Retire
once you’ve saved enough.
All of that is more or less true.
But the timing is totally wrong.
For our grandparents, the story was similar, but with one major difference.
Get good grades.Go to a good college.Get a good job.Work at that job until your eligible to receive your
pension.Retire.
You see the idea of working until 65 came from when retirement was paid for by your employer.
You work long enough to get income from your pension (around 65) which combined with Social Security
was enough to retire on.
Then the 401k came around midway through our parents career. It was too late for them to pivot. So
they passed the same story down to us.
Our generation is fully empowered empowered with the 401k. Empowered with do-it-yourself investing.
Empowered with all sorts of leverage that is now at our fingertips.
And yet we haven’t updated our story. We just assume we’ll need to work until 65 too just like our
parents and their parents before them.
Maybe a better analogy would be – we’re trekking through the same jungle, but now we’ve got chainsaws
instead of machetes. And GPS instead of a compass. And a local guide instead of a map.
But no one’s told us we can use those tools to carve a new path and create a shortcut to retirement.
Since we started calculating Financial Zen Years last quarter for our members, we’ve discovered that
everyone is much, MUCH closer than they ever realized.
And no one is forecasted to retire at 65!
So it’s time to throw away the “retire at 65” story.
That was our parents story. It’s not ours
