DIFFERENT STROKES
Over the past twenty years, I have discussed plans for retirement with many friends, colleagues, and mentors. One fact is patently clear – there are a lot of ways to approach it and a wide range of attitudes regarding this transition.
Some people can’t wait to retire. Even among this group, there is a huge diversity of reasons and intentions. Some want to fish or play golf every day; some want to just take it easy after working hard for decades; and some have a whole other “career” mapped out.
At the other end of the spectrum are the people who never want to retire. They want to “die with their boots on,” and keep working right up until the end. For this group, there are many obstacles that could derail those plans – but that’s a topic for another day.
The group in which I find myself lies somewhere in between these two extremes. We want to stay busy – and in fact the thought of not having something “programmed” to do almost every day is daunting or even frightening. We are the people that need to plan ahead, to find something (or things) to retire to, rather than to retire from their old job.
The goal of this blog is to share with readers my own thoughts about how develop that plan, but more importantly, to discover how others have done it or plan to do it.
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About Me
- greenhand
- David P. Green, MD has been practicing and teaching orthopaedic and hand surgeon for more than 40 years. He is best known as the editor of two widely used orthopaedic and hand surgery textbooks: 1) Rockwood and Green’s Fractures (now in its 6th edition, recently translated into Chinese), and 2) Green’s Operative Hand Surgery (now in its 5th edition, translated into Japanese and Spanish editions.). Born in El Paso, Texas in 1936, he is a graduate of Pomona College, Baylor Medical School, and the New York Orthopaedic Hospital (NYOH) residency program. In 1997 he was named Outstanding Alumnus of the NYOH. He is a past President of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. He also has a keen interest in history, and has published a book entitled Place Names of San Antonio, a compilation of some 600 mini-biographies of people for whom streets, schools, parks, libraries, businesses, and other places are named in his hometown.
I belong to the “slow quitters,” which means that I plan to continue working till the end of my days, in some capacity. I work only one full day a week. All others are half days. I have a need to get up early every day and have a place to go where I am needed, but I have cut the number of hours I work, the number of patients I see, no longer do emergencies, and try to delegate the more tedious or long surgeries to my younger associates (even though I believe that I can still do surgeries as well if not better than my partners).
ReplyDeleteMy experiences in “retirement” have been different than those of some of your other physician bloggers. At age 66, it was my decision to cease operating as I wanted my last operation to be done as well an any I’d ever done, as close to perfect as possible. I wanted to stop operating at the top of my game, and not fade away slowly until someone had to point out to me that it was time for me to quit.
ReplyDeleteAfter making that decision and closing that aspect of my career, fortunately other doors opened. Having been in full time academic practice with various administrative roles my entire career, I was offered the opportunity by the CEO and Dean of our Academic Health Center to become the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and have very much enjoyed this for the past 7 years. This fabulous opportunity to mentor and advise chairs, center directors, and senior faculty at some point must end, and then who knows what may await around the next turn.
You and I have observed persons in ours as well as other professions for whom retirement is a goal to be reached and once arrived at they can stop “work” and begin to “live” (start to collect their pensions and dip into savings and engage the right side of their brains). This view of retirement is the majority concept. It is what most in the working population have been looking forward to without much thought to what happens after the tired ‘retirement’ party is over other than taking a few reminders home.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of living a life of joy and affection from the time one becomes conscious until arriving at the final unconsciousness is critical, in my estimation. This idea allows one the freedom to approach every change as a transition filled with opportunities. The word retirement is merely a codified social event that has not constrained me. OK. So, my cup is always half full.
C.M. Richmond, VA