I reckon most men at our stage of life have a pension forecast tucked away somewhere...
...and pretty much no idea what they'll actually do with the time it's going to pay for.
This is the first proper issue of More to Play For, so I wanted to start here.
There could be twenty years between leaving your main career and slowing down for good. Most of us plan the money for those years in detail. The years themselves we leave blank.
Planning a life you can't picture yet is hard, and most of us put it off.
And when we do try, most of us make the same mistake.
In 2013, the psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson asked more than 19,000 people, aged 18 to 68, two questions. How much had they changed over the last ten years? And how much did they expect to change over the next ten?
At every age, people said they'd changed a lot.
At every age, they expected to change very little from here on.
The researchers called it the end of history illusion. We look back and see how far we've come, then assume the person we are today is the finished version.
When you sit down to plan the next twenty years, you're planning for the man you are now...
...and he isn't the one who'll be living them.
If you'd told me in 2012, when I sold my business, that 14 years later I'd have ditched my plan to become a therapist and would be coaching men on how to live the best second half of life, and writing a book about it to boot, I'd have thought you were crazy.
Some cultures have never treated the years from 50 and beyond as leftovers, or a time of slow decline.
In Japan, the sixtieth birthday is called kanreki. By the old zodiac calendar, sixty years completes a full cycle back to the year you were born. People celebrate in a red cap and a red waistcoat, because the Japanese word for baby, akachan, contains the word for red.
It's treated as a second spring.
The same birthday that plenty of us dread as the true start of winding down, another culture marks as being born again.
I'm not suggesting anyone buys a red waistcoat. But I like the thinking behind it.
So what do you do with all that?
I wouldn't try to write the twenty-year plan this week. I'd pick a direction instead, and then keep checking in with the man you're turning into, because he'll keep surprising you.
Think about where you were ten years ago, and how little of today you'd have guessed.
Now imagine the next ten could hold as much change again.
That's what More to Play For is about.
I'd love to hear from you.
If you knew it wasn't too late, what would you start? Reply with the first thing that occurs to you. The thought you have before you talk yourself out of it.
Matt
Sources: Quoidbach, Gilbert and Wilson, 'The end of history illusion', Science (2013) · Japan Society, '60 and sitting pretty: the kanreki rebirth'