Leisure is not the goal – What?!#

After having busted the myths of the dubious virtues of claiming too much busyness and the erroneous notion of balance, I somehow wasn’t too surprised to read Rory Vaden’s next exposé on another of our cherished notions of time management.

I mean, isn’t that the American dream? You work like crazy for 40 years, sell your soul to the man, and then finally retire in your golden years to a leisurely life of hobbies and travel?

Well, as most of us baby-boomers have to face, things aren’t quite working out that way that anymore. In fact, traditional sources of income (think social security, retirement pensions, return on savings) are dwindling, retirement costs are rising, our life expectancy and health care costs are rising, and the reality is that we will have to adjust our vision of our “golden years.”

So, before we all sink in to doom and gloom, let’s look at it another way. As Rory Vaden states, it took him spending time with those successful people he refers to as the “Multipliers” to realize “that work isn’t something to be endured, that we should try to avoid whenever possible, and it isn’t something that should be a finish line that you race to so one day you can stop.”

The key to embracing this new reality, I believe, is doing work that we love, that we are passionate about – then work is, as Vaden states, freedom and joy.

So if you are, like me, one of those baby boomers who are in the process of amending our expectations of those golden years– then let’s get busy finding that passion and purpose if we haven’t already, so we can be fully engaged in our glorious, productive, passionate lives – today and tomorrow.  Think?










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