I Now Have a Personal Motto… Should All Retirees Have One?

Yes, it’s true, I have adopted a new personal motto recently. Given that I spend a lot of time, thinking and writing about retirement, the question that arose out of that event for me was, would it be a good idea for all retirees to be thinking about developing a personal motto?

I won’t really attempt to answer the “should retirees have a motto” question in this article, but I think it would be a good intellectual exercise for anyone to undertake in the retirement phase of the life cycle. It involves a lot of personal reflection and drilling down into the essence of who we are. We certainly should all have rich, interesting experiences behind us at this point in the game to do so.

I came to my new personal motto as a function of my recent health issue. In case you missed me writing about it a year or so ago, that terrible evil bug Sepsis almost took me down in 2019-2020. To give the “Reader’s Digest” version of it all, I spent five weeks intubated, and in a drug induced coma in our local ICU and followed that up with three more months of hospital stay where they went about the business of teaching me how to walk again, and basically perform all of the basic personal functions that we take for granted.

I would like to think that I’m now quite hale and hearty. I no longer have fingertips or toes as a result of the necrosis caused by the use of vasopressor drugs to keep the blood flowing through my body, but that really does not stop me from doing anything. I am happy to report that I am even back to golfing on a regular basis. So, it’s all good. The title photo above was taken during my third month in hospital, and I was on the mend but still mostly being pushed around in a wheelchair.

One of the things that came out of all of this was that I received an inordinate amount of praise for how I dealt with the incident and the long healing involved. Most of the compliments family and friends showered me with are too embarrassing to mention. I did not see it that way. I didn’t think I had done anything special or unusual.

I suppose the one thing that I could take credit for, and what probably helped, was that I am generally a positive person. If asked if I am a “half glass full or half glass empty” person, I always say I am more of a “the glass is overflowing” kind of person. So, that probably prevented me from getting too down about my situation, and likely very useful during my long arduous recovery.

At the end of it, this ongoing talk about how I had pulled myself through all the drama caused me to think about and reflect on why it didn’t bother me that much, and how I was able to deal with it in a relatively positive way. And essentially what I came up with was that I didn’t feel I was worthy of extra credit or praise for doing it, but the difficult situation did allow me to find out a lot about myself during the process… and I was very happy with what I found out. When the chips are down, I am up for the fight! Way to go Greg! 🙂

Louise Penny Got Involved

That event didn’t immediately make me think that I should develop a motto for myself wrapped around the experience. That happened one day, while I was reading a Louise Penny book, and read, or in fact reread, a phrase that she has used a few times in her novels, that being, “things are strongest, when they are broken”. This immediately made me think “hey, that’s you”! The result was a few months later I decided to embrace it as my personal mantra.

However, when I decided to adopt the phrase, I had forgotten where it was in the book… probably forgot what book it was too… so, I simply searched the phrase and her name online. That was very successful, because it had been cited several times by others. The problem that arose was that I discovered that two slightly different phrases are referenced online, “things are strongest when they are broken”, but most frequently “things are strongest where they’re broken”.

Given this minor dilemma, I was not prepared to start pulling Louise Penny’s books off the bookshelf, and going through them all to see which phrase she had used… I suspect she might have used both phrases in various books. I decided that I was essentially broken all over… all my vital organs were trying to fail at the same time… so I thought “where” was generally correct, but because it fit me in totality, I stuck with “when”. I don’t think Ms. Penny will mind if I modify her quote. I was told that she is a lovely person.

I wonder how Ms. Penny came up with the phrase. Perhaps she was inspired by Hemingway. Although, he did take a much more pessimistic overview of the concept.

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms

Perhaps I’ll write her and ask.

The Retiree’s Official Motto

Let’s formalize this and get it out there publicly…

“Things are Strongest When They are Broken.”

That felt good. 🙂

Previous Moto

When I came up with this idea about adopting a personal motto, I was feeling kind of smug and was wondering why I had not thought of this idea before. Then it dawned on me that in fact I had had an earlier motto… duh!

In all fairness, it really was not my personal motto, although it probably should’ve been. It was the motto that I shared with my students when I was teaching; at that time, I was trying to get them all to make it their personal motto.

It was just three words:
“Success, Balance, Ownership”

Let me break it down for you. The “Success” part of the phrase meant that I wanted my students to focus on being as successful as they could be. That meant not worrying about how anyone else was performing but to get them to focus on just thinking about the things they needed to improve on and focus on being just a little bit better each and every day.

“Balance” meant that I expected them to work hard, but that I also expected them to be able to set aside their work and enjoy themselves when it was appropriate as well. In my later years, as I became a seriously experienced teacher, I never assigned homework on weekends. The kids loved it, and it also served the purpose of getting them thinking about what a balanced lifestyle actually meant… work hard, play hard.

And finally, “Ownership” was me wanting them to remind themselves that they were in fact, in charge of their own learning, and that ultimately, they were in charge of their own lives. Taking ownership for their learning was just the first step in that process, and that can be done at any age.

Not a bad motto for anyone really. 🙂

The First Time I Admired Someone Else’s “Motto”

OK, technically, it wasn’t the individual’s motto – just a phrase he used. I began my business career in sales like so many people have done over the years. And of course, I got myself immersed in learning about how to make that happen and how to achieve at a high level. This meant doing a lot of reading, talking to people, and attending workshops.

The first sales workshop I ever attended was one offered by Tom Hopkins. Tom was one of those high achieving real estate salesman who I’m sure is now making way more money doing workshops and selling books. I checked; he is still at it.

As I was sitting there, listening to him, I noticed that he regularly referred to his very first book, which had just come out… and was available for sale at the workshop… of course. My young cynical mind said to myself “Ha! That’s what this is all about, you selling books to all of us. There is no way I am falling for that.” I still had the book until about a year ago when I gave away all my business books 🙂

What struck me, and what has stuck with me all these years later, was a phrase that he liked to use and cite. He went into great detail to explain where it had originated. I don’t remember the exact context. I’m not sure if he was speaking about himself or about someone who mentored him in sales. Anyway, whoever it was had a job selling things door to door… probably vacuum cleaners.

As you can imagine, selling things, door-to-door is mostly about failure. Just like hitting in baseball. We must remember that getting a meagre three hits in ten at bats in baseball (batting .300) makes you an astoundingly good hitter. As Tom explained, the trick in these losing sales situations, just like in hitting, is to focus on the few wins.

Apparently, this individual calculated that he made one sale for every ten sales calls he made… he was only batting .100… not good. Making lemonade out of lemons, he realized that when he did make that one successful sale, he made himself $100. That was an average of $10 per sales call. So apparently when this individual got shut down and left without making a sale, he always said aloud to himself as he walked away “thanks for the ten bucks” knowing that on average he was making $10 for every attempted sale he made.

Good stuff! Focusing on the wins is always a good thing to do in life after you analyze and learn from the failures, of course.

So, Should You Have a Personal Motto?

Why not? At very least if you give it some thought it will probably get you thinking about things like: what is important to me, what have been the guiding principles of my life, and how am going to approach the last major portion of my life… the Retirement years? And it might just be a fun, enlightening thing to do.

I suppose some consideration should be given to understanding exactly what a motto is. Here are a couple of definitions I found in online dictionaries.

: a short sentence or phrase chosen as encapsulating the beliefs or ideals guiding an individual, family, or institution.

: a short expression of a guiding principle

Whether you choose to do this or not is entirely up to you, of course. But if you’re thinking about doing it and are trying to figure out how to tackle it, you could probably have a go at the following approach. With due apologies to a website out there in “Ye Olde Inter-web” whose general approach I used to develop this framework and which I forgot to bookmark so I am unable to reference here. Mea Culpa.

Motto Development

Here are my six suggested steps:

1. 1. Give some thought to whether you just want a general motto or something very specific. It could be about how you’ve lived your entire life or how you want to approach things going forward. It should probably have some sort of positive message. Something like “My life has sucked so far; I hope it gets better” is probably not a good one.
   2. It should speak to things that are important to you, themes or events that have been dominant in your life, or things you want to focus on in the future.
   3. Sit down and jot out a list of individual words that capture the things that come to mind.
   4. Then take those words and see if you can organize them into a statement. I don’t think the length is really important. You may have more or less to say about yourself than my seven words. Try and see if you can come up with a few different similar phases to ponder.
   5. Get someone whose opinion you really value and respect to provide some feedback on the one or small number that you to which you have distilled it all down.
   6. Finally, make some sort of public announcement about your motto, e. g. Send out an email to all your friends and family. 

I’m not sure if my own new motto actually follows the guidelines I’ve just laid out. It is more of a “this is how I managed to survive an incredibly tough situation, so it seems that I can handle tough situations” statement. Nevertheless, it is a personal statement that is important to me – as any personal motto should be.

Oh, and I Have a Theme Song Now as Well!

While watching the Ricky Gervais show “After Life” I was struck during one episode by a Bob Dylan song they played that I couldn’t recall ever hearing before. After Life is a fantastic, dark comedy about death, a debilitating loss, the contemplation of suicide, and how one man deals with all that. And it has some incredibly delightful, awkward, and quirky characters. The song totally fit the mood of the series. And for me, at this point, it speaks to “what’s left” in the life game.

I am a very upbeat, positive person, but I love melancholic tunes. And this is one of the great ones.

The song is:

“Not Dark Yet”

As in…  “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”.  Have a listen!

A personal motto. Have some fun with it!