The Question Forbes’ Top Coach Says You Must Answer

speaker-1 (00:08.728)
Welcome back everybody. Today we have Richard Leiter here. Richard is a well-known coach. I’ve already done an introduction, but Richard, it always sounds better if it comes from the person that I’m talking to. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I consider myself to be a pioneer, quote unquote, in the purpose movement worldwide. So I’ve been studying the power of purpose in lives, health, longevity, leadership for 50 years. So I’ve learned a few things and I have still a lot to learn. So that’s my background. My background is in counseling psychology.

And I’m the founder of Inventure, not Adventure, but Inventure, the purpose company, which studies all those things I just mentioned. So I hope we can touch on a lot of those today with you, Neil.

Well, since you’re bringing it up, let’s talk about, tell me about the Inventure.

Well, let’s see.

speaker-0 (01:22.062)
Backward dinosaurs roamed the earth. met a guy and spent a week with Victor Frankel. Oh, really? Yeah. Who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, who I consider to be the true pioneer in the purpose movement. You know, for those who don’t know his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, it’s a classic book. And he was in three different concentration camps. He’s a

neurobacteria.

I have one of his sayings on my wall. This is the-

I actually studied with him after graduate school for a period of time. so I’m not bragging about it, but I’m just saying I did have an experience of his wisdom. And he said the last of the freedoms in life is choice. It’s you choose what you want your life to be about in that moment, in spite of the concentration camp or whatever else.

I decided that I wanted to be about choice in life. And that’s what we’re talking about here today. So inventure actually came from the fact that I was on the board of an adventure company called Outward Bound, which is in Canada, US, it’s worldwide. But I was on the board of trustees and really learned a lot about inventuring through the adventure.

speaker-0 (02:57.176)
process of outward bound. So that’s where that actual word came from.

speaker-1 (03:06.424)
Just go back to that Victor Frankl, the saying I have here on my wall that I try and always keep it focused on is don’t aim at success. It’s probably well known. The more you aim at it and make it your final target, the more you’re going to miss it. For true success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. It must ensue. And it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.

Listen to what your conscious commands you to do and carry it out to the best of your knowledge.

Yeah, no, that’s brilliant. And he said, which I’ll never forgive, could go on your wall as well, is in my indelibly in my brain is that he said, don’t ask what is my purpose? Ask this, what is life asking of me now in this situation? And he actually, when he got out of the concentration camp and healed, he weighed 87 pounds.

He went back to his neuroscience work and he was out speaking and he said this, say yes to life in spite of everything. Say yes to life in spite of everything. a whole lot of different things like that. And so he said, you could be in the concentration camp and give somebody a crust of bread, a slurp of soup, a hug.

a kind word, hope for the future. He said, that’s the best you can do. And he said in life, that’s the best we can do as well.

speaker-1 (04:52.018)
You mentioned the purpose movement. What is the purpose movement? you said it sounds like you are a pioneer in that. Tell me about the purpose movement.

Well, purpose can be considered kind of airy-fairy or light or something. But now we know that purpose is fundamental. Fundamental kneel to health, to happiness, to longevity. People who have a reason to get up in the morning tend to live seven to 10 years longer than those who don’t. Maybe you can go on and on and look at the science. I did a US PBS special,

on the power of purpose. It was shown in 400 cities across the country. But before I did the actual showing or filming of that, I went out, compliments of PBS, to neuroscience labs across the country, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, other places, to find out what do we know about purpose in the brain, purpose in healing, purpose in happiness, purpose in longevity.

And I found that there’s a lot of science right now, Nobel laureates who have won the Nobel Prize based on the science of purpose in certain ways. So when I came at it with counseling, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, all of a sudden is being backed up by all of us, the science. So the movement is moved from. Let’s say the soft side to the science side.

in the last decades. so now you can’t, I mean, your doctor is going to prescribe, Neil, when you have a checkup, you need a reason to get up in the morning. I’ve done what I can on the physical side, but you need a mental side or emotional or spiritual side in addition to that.

speaker-1 (06:54.814)
Yeah, I have a relationship with the UCLA Longevity Center. And a few weeks ago, excuse me, I’d interviewed Dr. Helen Labretsky, and her focus is all three areas, mind, body, and soul. And it’s interesting for me and my generation, your generation, where

We always thought of just about the body, the true traditional Western medicine, without thinking about the integration of all three.

That’s right.

So now, well, go ahead.

No, keep going, keep going.

speaker-0 (07:41.388)
Well, now we know that one of my favorite quotes about purpose is from the American philosopher, E. B. White, who said this. He said, I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. Well, it makes it easier to plan the day because a well lived life is about both saving and saver.

It’s not just happiness in the classic sense. It’s about saving, not literally saving, but about contributing. As Frankl and you just said about serving, know, the kind of a spoiler alert. What are we here for? What’s the point of the exercise? We’re here to serve. does that does not mean being a servant, but it means bringing your life and your gifts to the world in certain ways. And that’s the power of purpose.

I found when I was younger, I wasn’t chasing so much my purpose as I was chasing a paycheck, a way of bringing revenue in. And I was never getting where I expected of myself to go. Now that I’m stepping back away from that chase of the paycheck, things are flowing a lot easier, if that makes sense.

Right.

speaker-0 (09:05.74)
Yeah, totally. Purpose and a paycheck. I mean, it’s reality for all of us, but it’s not either or, it’s both.

Would you suggest that a lot of the people that are successful didn’t chase the paycheck? They chased something that they really were focused on, that vision?

It depends on age and stage, think. know, midlife, many people have who are living now 20, 30, maybe longer years. You know, earlier in life had to chase the paycheck because they had to make a living. had whatever they ended up doing. And so but at a certain point in life, they push the pause button and say, this isn’t what I was expecting. And

get real, though I still need to make a living or I need to do that. So in many ways, midlife is the, they call it the U curve of happiness in the research world worldwide. But the U curve of happiness, the U, the dip is in midlife when we say, I don’t want to do this any longer. I signed up for this, but now what do I do? What’s next? So the what’s next moment,

is something I’ve been studying for a long time.

speaker-1 (10:30.902)
Is that part of that midlife crisis that we always hear about?

It’s a great question, Neil, but it’s not crisis. It’s a chrysalis. It’s a point where we start to undo what we have created and look at what do we need to do to do what’s next. And usually we look at the finances and health, which are essential. But I always talk about the three M’s, money, medicine, and meaning.

We need enough money to go the whole route. need, that’s the paycheck. We need medicine, not literal, literally medicine, but health. We want to be healthy. But then we know, or we need to know about meaning because we all know people and you know people and you’ve interviewed people who are very successful on the money and the medicine side, but have not a reason to get up in the morning.

And they’re not a lot of fun to be around. They’re kind of depressed. They’re, you know, unhappy and thought, well, this isn’t what I was expecting. So I’ve been studying that, whole thing I created. can’t remember what they called in Canada, but in us is AARP. And I created AARP’s longevity lab, which like you were mentioning earlier,

Yeah.

speaker-0 (12:03.17)
looks at what do we know about healthy aging? And so I created that lab, was called the Life Reimagined Institute. And I co-authored a book called Life Reimagined. And so the point is not about the book, but the point is that at certain points in our life, in a longer life, we’re living now, we need to reimagine what’s next.

I interviewed Dr. Riley Moyn a few weeks back and his four phases of retirement. said that first phase is the vacation where everybody says, can do whatever I want, that sort of thing. But somewhere between six months and two years after you retire, all of a it hits you, like, is that it? And then all of sudden the loss phase.

Yeah.

speaker-1 (12:57.59)
occurs where your loss of purpose, your loss of you realize you’re not the young man you used to be young woman that you.

You lose your identity, lose your relationships, you lose a lot of those things you just mentioned.

So how do you go about

By the way, say to people, take a moratorium if you’re considering retirement or this what’s next moment. A moratorium means do a lot of exploration, a lot of curiosity, but no choosing, no decisions. Do not force yourself into, I should do this, I should do that, or I could do this. Just explore. You haven’t had a chance to do that. If you have the chance to do that,

And people oftentimes are, I said, in isolation is fatal. Don’t go it alone. Have a sounding board or have a group that you, at least one individual or committed listener was not trying to fix you and do what they did, but is trying to help you answer these questions. But, you know, take a moratorium, have a sounding board, and you’ll be amazed at what you come up with.

speaker-1 (14:16.184)
Sonny, I spent most of my adult life making sure that others were okay. I was married, I had two kids, so I’m chasing the money to make sure there’s a roof over the head. too. Me too. Driving the kids left, right and center. I have a totem pole that I view of priorities. My kids, A and B, I have two kids. Then my wife.

then my job, then I have a couple of dogs because if I don’t deal with the dogs, they’re going to die, then myself, and then my extended family. But the problem is I never got to myself because I would look at, have I done everything I possibly could for ABCD? Right.

Yeah, so that’s brilliant synopsis really of, I think for all of us in certain ways. And yet we know that if we don’t pay attention to meaning at some point, we may not talk about it the way we’re talking about it here. But having a reason to get up in the morning is fundamental to health, I said, to health, to healing, to happiness, et cetera. What is that?

So I talk about purpose with a big P purpose and the little P purpose. And when I ever, when I mentioned that in front of a group, there’s a sigh of relief in the room. go, thank God we’re talking about the little P purpose. Cause I can do that. But the big P purpose is kind of my legacy and all the things I should have, could have done, you know, with my life and my family and all those things you just listed.

in your totem pole. But the little p-purpose is this. Every day there are 1440, 1440 purpose moments in a day. If you’re sleeping, that’ll be less than that, but let’s just use that as the number. Means that there’s one minute each day that you can make a difference in one person’s life. You can call them, you can hug, like in the concentration camp, you can hug them, you can give them a kind word.

speaker-0 (16:32.306)
a slurp of soup or email or know whatever in your own your own life and so when I talk with people I say look take this let me do it right here

take out somewhere, you probably have a post-it and right on that post-it, grow and give. And you will know what purpose is all about because, take that post-it and put it on your mirror. Grow and give. Put it on your mirror and tomorrow morning when you get up, ask yourself, how am going to grow and give for life today? And at the end of the day, before you go to bed at night,

You know, ask yourself, how did I grow and give today? If you do that for five to seven days, you will have a felt sense of what Neil and I are talking about here with purpose. And that is that purpose actually feels good. It makes me feel more alive. It makes me feel relevant. You know, whatever you want to put, put on that. But the little P purpose is what I teach about.

and what I think that your listeners will want to know about, well, how do I find my little pea purpose? Well, every single day when you wake up in the morning, you can grow and give for life.

So big P versus little p is like the macro versus the micro.

speaker-0 (18:01.848)
That’s right. And the, and the micro leads to the macro. In other words, if you’ve, if you have a life filled with purpose moments, it’ll, can name it differently than grow and give, but grow and give is kind of the universal purpose that I’ve studied and pioneered for 50 years.

Part of the reason, well.

Does that make sense? Does that make sense though in terms of practical listener, you know, something I can actually do.

Yeah, absolutely. Let’s put it this way.

My career prior to this podcast was in IT. And what really got me out of bed with IT was learning the new technologies. And it was changing continuously. But for the last 10 years, IT change has slowed dramatically compared to where it was when I first started. I started back in 88, before there were even networks, that sort of

speaker-0 (19:07.715)
Yep.

I missed that learning. So part of this podcast and the reason why I talk with people like yourself is to learn, to understand various different things. it’s allowing me to broaden my mindset. And by turning around and providing these conversations with others, it allows me to share what I’m

And to bring it into your own world, own life, your own choices. so, you know, I’ve been interviewing people over the age of 65 for decades, asking them, if you could live your life over again, what would you do differently? And three things have come up consistently over the years. So picture whoever that is in your own life, in your own family or your own.

community. And they say three things. Number one, I would be more reflective the second time around, which is what you’re helping people do. And I said, well, why weren’t you more reflective? And we’re talking years ago, not today with cell phones and you know, all the they said, too busy, too busy. And then I said, well, when did you reflect? And they said, crisis, you know, could be

Divorce could be illness, could be job related, could be financial. But when I had to reflect, I reflected, but in the meantime, I was too busy. Second thing they said, if they could live their life over, they would take more risks the second time around. And the risks were to do things they knew about themselves. They didn’t like their career. They didn’t like what they were doing, but they had to pay the paycheck like you were just saying a minute ago. So they stuck with it.

speaker-0 (21:02.734)
And then all of sudden they’re in midlife saying, God, I did this for all these years for others. Now what about me? I hated it. I didn’t hate it, but I disliked it. so, and the third thing is every single person I’ve interviewed literally thousands of people, not hundreds, have said the same thing. And that is I want my life to matter. Mattering matters. I don’t want to check out here and die without having.

it made some sort of impact. And usually it goes to family and it goes to, you know, but it goes beyond that. It goes to the fact that as human beings, we want our lives to matter. That’s the point of the exercise. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing here?

Is there a difference in view of matter between a man and a woman?

That’s a fabulous question.

Yes and no. mean, everybody’s an experiment of one. you know, it differentiates according to the person, not just the gender. But I say, you know, men want to matter through their work and their contribution to their family. Like you said in your totem, women want to matter just. Period to to other friends. You know, when you ask, who are your committed listeners?

speaker-0 (22:30.73)
men oftentimes don’t have a committed listener. And women have many committed listeners who may or may not be their spouse or their, you know, but they have a network in certain ways. you know, they’re perhaps you could say wired a little bit differently. But I think that’s changing now in certain ways is a really good question is one that comes up a lot.

It’s, it’s, when you say committed listener, what do you mean? My first thought was because I’m doing this podcast that that’s, but I suspect you’re meaning something different.

Well, would never coach anybody and I coach famous CEOs and not as famous people, but I would not coach people unless they had a sounding board. A sounding board were people that they talked to other than me as a professional that they’re paying to talk to. And so I’d say, and oftentimes the most successful people did not have a sounding board. were isolation.

In isolation, they were going it alone in certain ways, and they were lonely. And they didn’t have somebody. So a committed listener in a sounding board, there are four characters, a committed listener, a wise elder, a wise younger, and a purpose partner, somebody who could hold your feet to the fire and say, well, Neil, you said you’re going to do this, but you didn’t do that. What can I do to help you do that? Which could also be the committed listener. But a committed listener

is a person, may not be your spouse or your partner or your whomever, but as somebody who cares versus cures, they’re not saying, well, if I were you, what I would do is this. say, Neil, tell me a little more about that. Tell me a little more about what you’re thinking about that. Give me a little bit more insight into that. They’re about bringing out your story as opposed to putting in their story. So without a committed listener, as we age, we’re

speaker-0 (24:36.436)
oftentimes really devastated in a lot of ways. I was in Denver recently and I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I was in Denver, Colorado and I was going to do a speech at the Noble Institute of Longevity at Denver University. So I get to the airport, I get an Uber driver and

I get in and he says, where are going? And I tell him where we’re going. And I’m going to give this speech at the Nobel Institute. And he said, Mr. Leiter, you said, you know how old I am? And I said, no. How would I know that? And he said, well, and he turns to the mirror and turns it so he can see me. He said, I’m 83. And I went, 83? And you’re an Uber driver. Wow. What got you to drive that? And he said, I retired at 65. And I was

at home, watching too much TV, drinking too much. Then my wife got sick and I had to take care of her and then she died. And then I had to figure out what do I do? I can’t just sit on the couch here and watch this and et cetera. said, so I was a salesperson in a marketing type company. I decided I would try Uber just to see what it was like. And he said, I get to meet interesting people like you, Mr. Leiter. And he said,

And he said, he said this to me, which I mentioned to you a little bit earlier, Neil, he said, isolation is fatal. Staying at home alone without something to do and somebody to learn from or to, you know, to have some sort of contact. And I find Uber, I don’t need the money, but he said, I need the relationships.

I had that conversation with somebody last week. can’t remember who it was where I said that part of what I do is I get out of this house daily to go do the food shopping because if I otherwise like I could be like my dad and just do it once a week, but then I’d never leave this house simply because everything I do is remote.

speaker-0 (26:53.922)
Right in front of

Exactly. So I intentionally go food shopping daily, just so can get out of the house. I’m on first name basis with the people up at the supermarket. Yeah. I come in, we have conversations, that sort of thing, just to just to see people.

Right, exactly. That’s exactly what I was talking about with the Uber driver. And he was saying the same thing. And then he said, so where do I drop you off? And I said, well, I’m going to the Hotel Moxie in downtown Denver. Because tomorrow is when I’m doing my gig at the DU, Denver University. He said, Mr. Leiter, Hotel Moxie, the average age of people there is about 30 years old. And how old are you? And I said, well.

I’m And he said, 81 at the Hotel Moxie, you’re going to be like the village elder. And I said, it’s fine with me. It doesn’t matter. I need to get out with people who are not like me, like you do at the supermarket.

Yep. Yep. No, the one thing though about at our age is that our support system, the people that are around us, we start to lose them. So like my dad is 94 most, a lot of the viewers will be aware of this. My aunt died a week and a half ago. She was 97. And my dad said he is now the last of that age of that generation.

speaker-0 (28:11.723)
We do.

speaker-0 (28:29.516)
Right. Yeah.

and he is now, brother and I have to step up a little bit more just to make sure that we’re interacting with him. And I keep telling him he’s got to get out of the house. You know, it’s not that he needs a retirement home. He still lives in the same place I grew up in, but he needs to get out, see people find some way, or form of being out amongst others.

Exactly. Does he live in the same community as you?

No, unfortunately. the problem here in Vancouver, think of, think of Vancouver as a triangle. One side is the ocean. One side is the mountains and the last side is the border. Yeah. I’m down by the border. He’s up by the mountains and it takes a hour and a half to get to, but you know, my brother is closer. So you’ll get there on a regular basis.

No, but that’s a good example of if he were to pick a sounding board, who do think he would pick?

speaker-1 (29:43.118)
And that’s the thing, I don’t know who he… I know that when there’s something he wants to seriously discuss, he’ll talk with me. If it’s just shooting the breeze, he’ll talk with my brother. Yeah.

Yeah.

speaker-0 (29:58.286)
So there is the thing that when I was doing the PBS special, one of the imminent neurologists in the US held up a pill and he said, see this pill? This pill will help with sleep apnea, will reduce macroscopic stroke by 41%, will add seven to 10 years to your life and will

that cure.

Alzheimer’s, but will help with the quality of life if you have Alzheimer’s. Would you buy this pill? And he said, of course, who wouldn’t? How much is it? He says, free. And I said, what do mean free? He said, purpose is we now measurably fundamental. You need to eat well, you need exercise, you need to sleep, you need all those things with aging. But he said, without purpose, others don’t activate.

in the way that we know they could or should. So that’s why I think purpose is fundamental to health, healing, happiness and longevity. And would you say your dad has a purpose beyond just getting up in the morning and eating breakfast?

He did until around six, eight months ago. So when he was forced into retirement at age 61, I’ll tell you another story in a little bit. so one of the things that he was always into was genealogy. And so he started doing that. And he’s got like my my family back a thousand years.

speaker-1 (31:47.852)
my cousin’s wife, he found a link into, what was the, there was a Holy Roman Emperor. I can’t remember his name. And because of that link took it back to before Christ. It was, he’s always been involved in that. He’s done 66 different families, full branches, written a book about it. Yeah.

Wow.

So he’s really been doing a lot of that. And then around six, eight months ago, he said, you know what? I’m tired. I don’t want to do it anymore. And now he’s just sitting there reading, which has me worried.

Well, rather than not, I mean, he’s reading, he’s doing something.

It’s not a purpose. It’s a letting life come to you type thing. Yeah.

speaker-0 (32:41.57)
Purpose is always beyond the self. That’s the one universal. It’s beyond just your own happiness or your own health or your own. It’s always about somehow contributing. so, you know, I’ve been leading walking safaris. We talked about in venture. I’ve been leading in venture expeditions in Tanzania, East Africa for 30 years, 30 years since covid. I haven’t led one, but up until that time I did every year.

And I have spent a lot of time with your relatives. They call them the original people, the hunter gatherers that a lot of this stuff came from, supposedly. Our lives came from. so sitting around the fire with elder hunter gatherers and looking at life. And one of the hunter gatherers, his name was Kampala. And he’d never been more than 50 kilometers.

from where we were sitting in East Africa. And he was in his late 70s at the time. And I was writing a book called, Claiming Your Place at the Fire, one of my 12 books. And Claiming Your Place at the Fire was about why do the wisest of the elders sit the closest to the fire? And where would I sit if I were an older person at the time? And the

They said, because we have the stories, we have the wisdom, we have the knowledge, et cetera. That’s why we set the closest to the fire, not because it’s warmer. And this one elder named Kampala said, Richard, you’ve been interviewing us for your book, but do you mind if I ask you a question? I said, sure. He said, what are the two most important days in the life of a haza? We’ve been around 75 to 100,000 years.

How did we They’re a total sharing culture. They share everything. But he said, the two most important days are when you survive childbirth, is something that’s a big deal there. And the second thing is when you determine why you were born, what’s the point? What are you doing here? What do you bring to our community? Some are hunters, some are gatherers, some are whatever they are.

speaker-0 (35:07.958)
And I said, wow, I’ve studied this all over the world. Here I am with an ancient person, ancient from the history, learning that, you know, we need to share and we need to figure out how to share. And that’s what purpose is all about.

pull this back to the retirement side of things. Because I think if I remember correctly, while I was prepping for this interview, you had either written a book or written a blog focused on purpose around retirement.

True.

Tell me about what your research has found, what you’ve done with regards to that timeframe. You already hinted at it about before you retire, start trying different things.

Yeah, I mean, the book that I think we were talking about is called, who, not what. You know, the question, what do you want to be when you grow up? Bad question. Who do you want to be when you grow old? And the subtitle is the path of purposeful aging. So the obvious answer is have a reason to get up in the morning, have a purpose and grow and give like we talked about earlier.

speaker-0 (36:24.78)
And so with retirement.

Purpose is verb. It’s action. It’s what we do, not what we think about doing or just thinking about your dad’s legacy. You know, now that he’s no longer wanting to do the research or do the, you know, so what will his legacy be? Does he care about that or not? But so retirement.

in many ways, if you’re going to live 20, 30, 40 years longer, that’s as long as you worked. As long as you lived for a paycheck. Is that all about

skiing or golf or knitting or whatever it is that you’re up to. No, we want to remain connected, relevant, part of community, part of the world in certain ways. so like my Uber driver, he wanted to stay

learning, curiosity. A big part of retirement is what are you, Neil, what are you curious about? You know, beyond going to the grocery store to get out of there and do that. And you’re curious because you created this thing we’re doing right here. And if you’re not curious, I was backstage recently with the founder of TED, you know, Ted Talk. Yep. His name is Richard.

speaker-1 (37:57.92)
The TED Talks, yeah.

Saul Warman. He’s in his late 80s, maybe his 90s now, but we’re backstage and he said, so Mr. Leiter, I understand you’re this guru on purpose. What are you going to talk about? he said, duh, purpose. And I said, so Richard, what are you going to talk about? He said, I’m going to talk about curiosity. I founded Ted in the early 80s because I was curious. He’s a architect, urban planner type.

But he said, I was curious about tech net how technology T entertainment E and design D Ted, how they all came together to solve the world’s problems today. So he said, I created these things called the ultimate dinner party where I would invite someone from T E and D together, you know, like seven or eight people, not a whole lot of people, maybe 10 at the most to talk about a question that I was.

dwelling about on and he said, then I put it on stage and I found people were so, they wanted to be at the dinner party, it wasn’t so they would come. And ultimately that became Ted, which he then sold to Chris Anderson. But.

So he said, don’t you think that curiosity in retirement is fundamental? And I said, absolutely. If you’re not curious about yourself and your own life and growth and the curiosity about others in the world outside of you, you’re going to die. And I said, yeah, I write about this. I’ve written about this extensively. call it inner kill, kind of dramatic, inner kill, the art of dying without knowing it.

speaker-1 (39:47.89)
Okay

You know people who are suffering from inner kill. They’re fine on the outside, but on the inside, and you don’t want to go to dinner with them because it’s going to be a drag.

Yeah. I’m interviewing on Friday in four days, Dr. Catherine Rickwood. She’s down in Australia. Her entire point or conversation in research is about changing the concept of work and retirement. Right now, if you look at the history of retirement, that was created in mid 1800s.

and it was well past the average death age.

Yeah, it was in Germany at time.

speaker-1 (40:35.636)
Yeah. And she’s saying that in essence, we’ve artificially changed how we live. I’m wondering, and this is something that I’m going to end up asking her, whether retirement is unnatural, whether if we remove that construct of retirement, we change the way we work, we change the way we live. And it’s not so much a job as focusing on what

our purposes and providing to society through our purpose as opposed to payment for time.

Right. No, got it. Totally. I mean, that’s what I’ve written about. And that’s the book. Who do you want to be when you grow old is about the path of purposeful aging. We want to remain relevant. We want to like the hunter gatherers who I, you know, I’ve been with for many, many years in Africa, where we came from the original people, so to speak, said, you know, we’re in community and

when they are in community, they don’t retire and go off and sit in the bush under a tree. They raise the kids. They don’t necessarily go out and hunt and gather, but they support the family system or the social system, so to speak, in certain ways until they die. And so I think in many ways people are

The old model of retirement, a fixed mindset was this, grow, earn, and retire.

speaker-0 (42:22.134)
grow, earn, retire. Now it’s grow, earn. And the U curve then is reinvent yourself and reimagine yourself because some of the happiest research, the happiest times in life on research about longevity is that we’re happier when we’re growing and without all those pressures to raise kids and raise the income, but we’re still relevant. We’re still doing things that are relevant to our communities and our world. so

You say relevant yourself by doing what you’re doing right now, right?

Yeah.

And if you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?

I’d be trying to find something else.

speaker-0 (43:06.647)
You’re not unlike me or your listeners.

Yeah, for me it’s and I’ll be honest, that’s been my entire career even up to this point is yes, I was doing something. But it was really, yeah, but it was for that paycheck. wasn’t making me feel fulfilled and happy.

Sorry.

speaker-0 (43:27.788)
Yeah, you didn’t choose what you were being relevant about at the time, but now you can and you’re making a difference and I’m sure whether it’s me or anyone else, you’re making a difference in a lot of lives, I’m sure.

speaker-1 (43:45.006)
There is…

And I remember years ago, decades ago, somebody saying that you go through four career changes. I’m wondering whether those career changes are you trying to find a new purpose? Whether it’s, you you come to the end and you say, I’ve been doing this for ages. I went through one of those career changes around the turn of the century. When I say that, makes me feel so freaking old.

Hahaha!

But I had fallen into sales engineering and I never wanted to be in sales. I wanted to be designing and building. So around the turn of the century, I made a career change.

speaker-1 (44:33.598)
Now I’m past that. What I was doing is no longer fulfilling. So now it’s, I’m also at the retirement age. I’m trying to find something new and the podcast is fulfilling that. So I’m just wondering whether this is just part of that career change as opposed to finding something to do while I’m in retirement.

Well, it’s the way that I would re-language that is that there’s a job, a career and a calling. So the calling is what is calling you at a deeper level beyond the paycheck. So you start out by, like I did, I had to have a job. had a child. had a, then I had a career where I was

And then along the way, this is a sub story to that. I had what I call a side hustle. While I was the number three in the US, it’s now called US bank. It used to be called First Bank, but it was now called US bank, the biggest bank in the US. it

I was the number three person in HR, which used to be called personnel, by the way, but HR. But I had something which I called a side hustle. And my side hustle was called Lunch Hour Limited. Lunch Hour Limited means, Neil, if you buy me lunch, I’ll coach you on what’s next in your life because whatever reason you’re interested and curious about your career or your job, et cetera. And I had…

a waiting list of people. I almost never ate lunch because I was so into the coaching part of it, which was my professional training anyway at the time. the CEO of US Bank didn’t think this was a good idea that his HR person was coaching people during lunch hour, et cetera. So I left to do that full time.

speaker-0 (46:55.99)
And I call that in venture, know, in venture expeditions, et cetera. Like, but my lunch hour limit, my side hustle was called lunch hour limited. You buy me lunch, I coach you. And during that hour, I found that this was really my calling. I didn’t know it exactly at the time, but this is what I love to do. And I wanted to do more of it. And I ended up. Mortgaging my house and doing things that so I could do it full time. And,

ended up, of course, you here we are, decades later and books later, etc. But the point is, is that at different times in our life, we get to some realization, but maybe, well, I can’t do it because I paid the bills, etc. But you’re calling, the call is there for life. Yeah. What you’re doing right now was with you back then, not that I’m going to be Neil, I’m going do this exactly.

but what you were curious about was there. True?

Riley was saying that when people find that purpose, that thing to do, they go through a period of trial and error. at the end of the day, what they end up focusing on is actually a very small core component of their personality.

speaker-0 (48:22.712)
Well, mine was I love people’s stories and helping them to clarify what’s core to their stories. And I realized that by making a living in the HR world. But I didn’t like anything about HR other than that part of it.

And that part is core to who you were. It’s that trial and error phase when you get into retirement where most people haven’t figured out what that core part is. Doing that trial and error is trying to find what that core part is. Do you have any tricks or any ways of helping people figure out what that core purpose is?

Well, mean, there’s a lot. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I do for a living. So there’s a lot of tricks, so to speak, ways to look at that. But I’ll use myself as an example. When I was a kid, my parents would ship me off to summer camp. And I thought summer camp was like the greatest thing in the world because, and when I grew up, I didn’t think about this until lately, but when I grew up,

I would love to be a summer camp counselor or the, you know, the whatever. Well, I ended up leading expeditions in Africa and doing other things like that, which go back to my love of nature and my love of summer camp. So it’s not like summer camp was the epiphany, but it was a clue. So we have clues earlier in life about what we love. And so I cannot tell you how many.

This is not a positive example, but it is an example. How many lawyers I have talked to over the decades who ended up going into law and going into being successful in law and hated law. They were more like an artist, they were more like a writer, they were more like something. And so when they get to midlife, they say, well, I don’t want to do law till I die, but how do I?

speaker-0 (50:37.282)
What do I do next?

Yeah, but it’s always tied to, I still need to bring in money for the family.

up to a certain point.

Yeah, but once that goes away, now it becomes doing it for its own purpose.

Right. And a lot of it has to do with not only curiosity and things that you’re interested in, but also relationships. People are feeling so often at midlife, I’ll call it despair, but if it’s not despair, it’s isolation, feeling lonely. know, Vivek Murthy, Dr. Vivek Murthy was the

speaker-0 (51:22.574)
Surgeon General of the US under both Obama and Biden, Vivek Murthy, M-U-R-T-H-Y. You should get him on the show. He’s written a book called Together. And he had the privilege as the Surgeon General of the United States to do a lot of science, a lot of research. And he said, you know, that loneliness is more

a problem here than smoking, alcoholism, obesity, loneliness is our number one disease. And he talked about loneliness as it relates to aging. And he said, you know, the fact is it’s not about necessarily being the person at the end of the hallway in the nursing home. You could be in a room full of 50 people listening to this lecture and talking with others and

feel lonely. He said it has to do with connection and connectivity at a deeper level. We want people who get us who know us and who we know them. And that’s something that isn’t taught much these days in Canada or the US, perhaps in schools about, you know, how to overcome. Well, wouldn’t necessarily be overcome loneliness, but how to be how to have EQ.

emotional intelligence to really relate to others and be related by others in certain ways. So that’s a whole other topic we could go into in way more detail, but that’s kind of a riff on what your question was.

Well, we’re getting close to the end here of this conversation. If you were to give any last pieces of advice for people either going into retirement or having just retired. And that, by the way, is the reason why I focus on that timeframe as opposed to somebody in their 80s because it’s a common transition point. It’s the transitions network. What would those pieces of advice be?

speaker-0 (53:36.75)
Well, it may sound a little bit like a commercial, but I’ll put it this way. I wrote a book, which is sold over a million copies called repacking your bags, lighten your load for the good life. And so in that book, my co author, who is a philosophy professor in academia, and I studied, well, what is the good life? And the good life is

In addition to health and money has four characteristics place people Right work and purpose. So my advice would be are you living in the place you love and what means what does that mean to you with the people you love because you could be living in the most beautiful place on earth and be lonely and isolated and unhealthy are you living in the place you love with the people who love

doing the work you love. Now that does not mean necessarily job or career. It could be avocational work. It could be caregiving. It could be a lot of different kinds of using your gifts to contribute with purpose, with a reason to get up in the morning. If you are living in the place you love, with the people you love, doing the work you love on purpose, you’re living the good life, probably the best you can do it.

So my advice would be to at least once a year live, mean, reconnect to your, to a conversation with the people you care about on the good life. And in the book repacking your bags, lighten your loads with a good life, there’s actually an inventory. And you can also go to my website, which is everything. 100 % of my website is free.

100%. So it’s Richard Leiter, L-E-I-D-E-R, RichardLeiter.com. If you go there and you go to the resource section, you can download a Good Life Inventory to ask yourself, well, am I living the good life? Here I am, Neil. Am I living the good life? Am I living in the place I love? Yeah. People I love? Yeah. With the right work? Yeah. Now with this? Well, it’s that’s purpose, the reason to get up in the morning. So that’s the best I have found.

speaker-0 (56:02.336)
in terms of helping people give that advice you’re asking.

will put links to your website as well as to your book, as well as these checklists because it’s part of your website.

It’s all free. It’s all my work.

website and people can go there and access it.

Richard, I really want to thank you very much. I love these conversations.

speaker-0 (56:28.686)
I hope this has been interesting to you and has been to me. Your questions are fabulous.

Let’s go this way, the last hour has gone by very fast.

Okay. All right.

Richard, thank you very much. I much appreciate it. Everybody, I hope you enjoyed the this interview as well. Like, subscribe to the channel and look forward to seeing you at the next interview. Richard, thank you very much. You’re welcome. Bye.

Neil, thank you for your time.