My first mini retirement...at 22

Well, that happened

The Retirement Revolutionary

In his book The 4-hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss begs people to test retirement before they are old and beautiful, and insists you’ll learn some life-changing lessons by doing so.

You’ll get a better feel for whether decades of boring work or office drama are really worth it, just for the ability to sit on the sand with a White Claw every day at 65.

And, he bets that you’ll discover a few things, including:

1. Retirement can be boring, especially if you are a doer.

2. Real wealth is control of one’s time and mobility, money is merely an instrument.

Tim is extreme by most standards. Here is what led him to his first retirement.

Seeing his Princeton peers normalize 100-hour/week investment banking jobs — trading vitality and meaning for Nobu dinners and chronic stress — contributed to suicidal ideations.

He went to pick up a book on suicide at his local library, his final step of research, but was forced to reconsider his deadly plan due to a phone call from his mom.

Tim had applied to check out the book under his family’s home address. So his mother called him with confusion when she received a note from the library saying “the suicide book is ready for pick up.” This conversation with his mom stopped him in his tracks.

After graduation, Tim landed a sales gig. He optimized his role to do it in half the time and get off early.

Corporate higher-ups did not value this. They valued perceived effort more than his actual output.

He wanted freedom and fulfillment, which his 9-5 did not deliver, so he sprinted towards the fences to start his entrepreneurial journey. To help motivate his new path, he developed an anti-vision — a vision of the future that meant he truly failed. And what did it look like?

A fat man driving a red Ferrari.

This symbolized trading health and meaning for status and hedonism.

But once he started “entrepreneuring,” the devil wore a new dress.

A dress he had sewn.

Fulfillment and freedom did not come as he worked 90+ hours/week to try to make his startup supplement business generate continuous income. He realized his methods were unsustainable so, despite fearing the crumbling of his business, he took a break.

He “retired” — for a bit.

When he returned, he realized his internet supplement business thrived without him. The monthly revenue barely diminished. The fires he was putting out daily would have burnt out themselves and never needed a power hose to spray them for 14 hours a day.

Okay, this is my blog, not Tim’s. So, I’ll stop engaging you by regurgitating his story and ideas. But there are some lessons from his story that weave into my last 10 months. In this article, I share the three main lessons learned from my “mini-retirement #1.”

Retirement at 22

I might have been the most tenured Incoming BCG Associate on Earth.

For 18 months, that read as my LinkedIn headline because BCG gave me an option as to when I wanted to return.

As a “recovering Type A”, I had to fight my inclination to choose the earliest possible return date. Starting early would keep me ahead, right? That would keep me on the path of prestige and building career capital?

And the most difficult question: Am I seriously going to forego $60,000 to have free time from June to December?

But I realized that would be living in fear. It would have been me saying that I am not creative enough to fill the time with as instrumentally valuable and meaningful moments as that which a firm assigns.

So, I took my first mini-retirement. 10 months with total control of my calendar from when I graduated in March.

And holy shit. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

What follows are three of the most important lessons from my last 10 months. They might not resonate at all with you and that is okay. We might be wired a bit differently. But I’m sure a few of you would have had a very similar experience to me.

1. You are born a million men, and you die as one.

College can be a self-limiting community. Frequently, your major becomes your core identity. There is little expectation or normalization of the “renaissance man” — the person who dabbles in art, engineering, athletics, and more.

Specialization is often praised. The seemingly smartest kids in a major jockey for a prestigious job, making you feel stupid to not also pursue that job. You must choose an identity quickly or you will not make sense to others. And it feels good to make sense to others.

Quickly, you form communities surrounding the identities you decided when you were 18 years old. These communities become your continuous feedback loop as to who you are, and leaving those communities would be damn disorienting.

But leaving them is extremely empowering if you are comfortable greeting a world that does not have any idea of who the hell you are.

Living in Yokohama, Japan for 5 months during my study abroad was my first experience of radically new environments. And it shifted me. It shined a light on what was truly important and what was important because others thought so.

I didn’t focus on just classes — my time was filled with poetry, music, language learning, exercise, and meditation.

The past 10-month stint was my second experience of creating time and space largely away from big communities. But this time, I had no exams or external objectives. I spent most of my time away from my familiar communities by living in my childhood home in San Diego.

This time, I figured out the fictions that used to be true because I had believed them — my self-limiting or self-defining beliefs.

I think people with ambition and a desire to grow and introspect should try to step away from their communities or typical daily races.

This makes it much easier to learn:

Nearly everything can be learned or done given enough time, energy, and a little intelligence. You are an artist, technician, socialite, creative, athlete, and entrepreneur. But until you have time and space, you may never realize these identities.

I have wonderfully supportive friends, but if I had to consistently see them as I was creating content, outputting original music, networking oh so much, getting my real estate license, and so many other brilliant, silly things, I could feel friction from being unconventional.

Many of these unconventional things have informed my habits and identities and I have never felt more true to myself.

You are born a million humans, and yes, you will die as one…but try to die as one who is satisfyingly, honestly you by creating time and space for yourself to learn who the hell you are.

2. I can’t sit on the beach without wishing I had a surfboard.

I am not a surfer. At least I do not look like one when I attempt to conquer a rising wave that instead feeds me to the ocean floor.

Yet, I would not enjoy resting on the sand all day as a beautiful ocean taunts me with a challenge. I will never enjoy a white claw on a beach for back-to-back-to-back days. It is just not in my nature. And that is okay.

In many crowds, you will be judged for continuing to try and do things. Untamed ambition is looked down upon. But, frequently those crowds have not found arenas where actualized ambition is what it means to feel alive.

I believe those who prefer rest over all else are often those who haven’t seen effort rewarded—whether in education, relationships, or personal growth. Rest has its time and place, but if your work leaves you begging for it, take note. It may signal that your effort isn’t being effectively rewarded.

When I created time and space, I naturally felt the urge to create value. This reassured me that I don’t need to fear failure if I leave a job; I will always strive to build something valuable for myself or the world.

My mini-retirement taught me that if given time and space, I will give a satisfying effort. An effort that delivers much more satisfaction than a simple paycheck could.

So, thankfully, I can’t sit on the beach without wishing I had a surfboard.

3. Community is the most important ingredient in my recipe for happiness.

Yes, communities can limit you. They can trap you in a role you didn’t choose, but they’re also what gives your life so much more meaning. Growth is something you largely do alone, but joy comes from sharing it and allowing your growth to better others’ lives.

The people you love — who love you no matter what you do — make all your effort to become a more compassionate and capable person even more worth it.

A life well-lived is not one in isolation. I isolated a lot the past couple months and every time I stepped back into a community, I felt a sense of awe and joy of how lucky we are to have one another.

Yes, there are moments in life where isolation is the vehicle for introspection. But, I am beyond grateful and see it as my life mission to develop and grow not just for me, but to more effectively have a loving impact on others’ lives. For me, that is true fulfillment—being able to say, “I had a loving impact.”

Experiencing isolation has increased my appreciation for community. However, in my next mini-retirement, I hope I can do so in or with community.

In Closing

There will be another mini-retirement in my 20s, maybe several.

Your paycheck matters of course, but there are so many ways to make money out there and if you save, invest effectively, and live below your means during said retirement, it is extremely doable. Not to mention, you will probably start building something potentially profitable if you create all that time and space and you have similar energy to me.

I am excited to embark upon my next chapter of intense professional growth at BCG and play more of the games of life. However, as I step into what many call “the real world,” I hope to never use the expression “well, in the real world” to justify long stretches of unfulfillment, a lack of play, or a lack of love.

As always, smile at strangers and trust your curiosity :)