I turned 62 on Thursday.

I celebrated by getting a massage, eating my favorite chocolate cake, and pricing books.

Lots and lots of books.

And then, after the cake, I went back to work.

Before you start feeling sorry for me, don’t - nobody made me do it.

After spending 33 years working in financial services, I retired in May and am now helping build something my wife and I have talked about for years: our own used bookstore.

We hope to open Book & Cranny in about a month.

And there is a lot to do: Books to sort. Books to clean. Books to price. Shelves to fill. Inventory to enter. Systems to learn. Marketing to figure out.

There is always one more thing I could be doing.

And therein lies the problem.

I thought I understood work - turns out, after 33 years, I still have something to learn.

Although apparently none of this should come as a surprise.

I recently came across some of my elementary-school report cards.

In second grade, my teacher, Ms. Hoekendorf - on whom I had an HUGE crush - wrote:

“Richard has shown great progress with his creative writing. He does an excellent job of it—and seems to enjoy it.”

So far, so good.

Then came this:

“He also seems to be doing better in scheduling his time and in getting things done—although he does need to be reminded occasionally.”

Two years later, Mrs. Seaborg was less subtle.

She cautioned my parents that I needed to understand that long-term assignments “must be dealt with from the beginning” and that I needed to “plan ahead.”

Then she delivered the verdict:

“His crash programs are not too good.”

Ouch…(although she finished it with, “Otherwise, everything is fine”)

Apparently I’ve been working on this particular development opportunity for more than half a century.

And now I’ve created the ultimate test.

When you work for someone else, many of the boundaries around work are created for you. Meetings end. Coworkers go home. Vacations begin. Friday eventually becomes Saturday.

But when you own the business, things are different.

There is no whistle.

No one tells you it’s time to stop.

And when the business happens to be something you’re genuinely excited about building, the problem gets even harder.

You want to keep going.

One more book.

One more shelf.

One more hour.

I’ll stop when I’m caught up.

Except I’ve discovered something about owning a business:

You’re never caught up.

That realization reminded me of a short video I recently watched from Tim Ferriss (You can watch it HERE). In it, he describes a principle he tries to follow during stressful periods:

“Make before you manage.”

Before opening email, answering messages and beginning the endless work of managing the day, make something.

Write. Draw. Create.

Do something generative before spending the day being reactive.

I’ve been thinking about that idea all week because it reminds me of another phrase I heard countless times during my career in financial services:

Pay yourself first.

In personal finance, the idea is simple. Before spending your paycheck on everything competing for it, put something aside for your future.

What if the same principle applies to time?

What if, before giving the day away to everything demanding our attention, we put something aside for ourselves?

Exercise. Reading. Writing. A walk. A conversation.

Maybe even doing absolutely nothing.

I’m discovering that uncertainty makes this especially difficult.

I’m retired, but I’m working. I’m a bookseller, but our bookstore isn’t open yet. I’m building something I’ve never built before, without knowing exactly what it will look like—or whether it will work the way we hope.

And uncertainty creates its own temptation:

Do more.

Another box. Another task. Another hour.

Doing something feels like progress. And progress feels like control.

But I’m beginning to understand that you can’t work your way out of uncertainty.

Sometimes you simply have to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Which may mean the most important skill I’m learning isn’t how to price a book, manage inventory or run a bookstore.

It’s learning how to stop working when the work isn’t finished.

Because it won’t be.

The work itself will never tell me when I’ve done enough.

I have to decide that.

Maybe that’s what boundaries really are.

Not barriers that keep us from doing our best work, but choices that allow us to keep doing it.

More than fifty years later, maybe I’m finally beginning to understand what Mrs. Seaborg was trying to tell me.

The goal isn’t simply to get everything done.

It’s to develop a way of working that doesn’t require a crash program to do it.

At 62, after a lifetime of working, I’m still learning how to work.

Make before you manage.

Pay yourself first.

And occasionally, eat the chocolate cake before going back to the books.

Make it a great week! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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A few years ago, when I worked for Capital Group, I traveled to Boston for a series of meetings. I was excited because it had been several years since my wife and I had visited. I was also excited because one of my best friends was attending Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a National Security Fellowship, and I planned to meet up with him.

After my meetings concluded, I rode the T to Harvard Square, where we met at one of the most crowded Starbucks I had ever seen.

Our plan was to catch up and then sit in on one of his graduate-level classes.

While I don’t remember the name of the class, I remember the subject that evening: the role of propaganda in totalitarian regimes.

We watched Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph of the Will, documenting the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg the previous year.

I had never heard of Leni Riefenstahl. But I never forgot her.

Fast-forward almost fifteen years.

This week, while sorting through a box of books on African art for our bookstore, I pulled out a large photography book published in 1974.

The Last of the Nuba.

The photographer?

Leni Riefenstahl.

That stopped me.

What was the woman who created one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious propaganda films doing photographing the Nuba people of Sudan nearly forty years later?

So, naturally, I started digging.

Riefenstahl’s story after World War II is complicated. She was arrested and investigated after the war and went through several denazification proceedings. Although she had never been an official member of the Nazi Party, she was ultimately classified as a Nazi “fellow traveler” - essentially, a sympathizer.

Her filmmaking career never recovered.

But Riefenstahl lived a remarkably long life. She was in her early thirties when she made Triumph of the Will and lived to be 101. Yesterday would have been her 124th birthday.

Think about that.

She had nearly seven decades of life remaining after the fall of Nazi Germany.

Eventually, she turned to photography. In the 1960s, she traveled to Sudan and spent time photographing the Nuba people. The resulting photographs became The Last of the Nuba.

I spent some time looking through the book this week.

The photographs are striking. To my eye, many seem beautiful and respectful, depicting people whose lives and culture were dramatically different from Riefenstahl’s European upbringing.

But even this work became controversial.

Critics questioned whether Riefenstahl’s fascination with strong bodies, physical beauty, ritual and athleticism represented something genuinely new—or whether the same aesthetic sensibilities visible in her earlier work had simply found a different subject.

There’s an irony in this. Whatever judgment we make about Riefenstahl and the choices that followed her for the rest of her life, these photographs have outlived her. After decades of war, famine and displacement in Sudan, they now preserve a glimpse of Nuba communities and traditions that the intervening half-century has profoundly changed—and, in some cases, may have swept away altogether.

The woman who could never escape the historical record she created in her thirties eventually created another historical record whose value may actually have increased with time.

And now I wasn’t just researching a book anymore - I was back in philosophy class.

Can a bad person create good art? Can a bad person do good things?

For that matter, who gets to decide whether someone is a bad person?

Can we separate art from the artist?

Can someone reinvent herself without honestly confronting what came before?

Does doing good work later in life compensate for terrible choices made earlier?

Does redemption require remorse?

And perhaps most difficult: Who gets to decide when someone has earned a second act?

Riefenstahl spent much of the remainder of her life defending herself and disputing the degree of responsibility she bore for her association with Hitler and the Nazi regime.

But history never really allowed her to outrun it.

There’s something sobering about that.

We make decisions today without knowing how long we may have to live with them.

Most of us will never face anything remotely approaching Riefenstahl’s moral circumstances. But all of us carry our earlier selves into whatever comes next.

Our accomplishments.

Our failures.

Our mistakes.

Our reputations.

The things we’re proud of—and perhaps a few things we wish we could do over.

A second act doesn’t erase the first.

It has to live in conversation with it.

And now, as a brand-new bookseller, Riefenstahl has presented me with another question I never encountered in philosophy class:

What do I do with the book?

Does putting The Last of the Nuba on our shelves somehow endorse its creator?

Should controversial books be excluded because of the people who created them?

Or is a bookstore precisely the place where difficult books and uncomfortable ideas belong?

I think I know my answer.

I’m going to put it on the shelf.

Not because I’ve decided Riefenstahl was redeemed.

I haven’t.

Not because I can neatly separate the art from the artist.

I’m not sure I can.

I’m putting it there because one book, pulled unexpectedly from one box, forced me to wrestle with questions about art, responsibility, redemption, reputation and second acts.

Twenty-two-year-old philosophy-major me would have loved debating those questions in a classroom.

Sixty-something bookstore-owner me now has to decide what to do with the book.

Maybe that’s one of the things a good bookstore should do.

Not give us all the answers.

Give us better questions.

Make it a great week! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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A couple years ago, while preparing an ASQ presentation on emotional intelligence and self-improvement, I found myself tracking down the origins of one of the oldest pieces of advice in Western philosophy:

Know Thyself.

This advice has always appealed to me. Self-awareness is foundational to emotional intelligence and especially important for leaders. More broadly, knowing yourself allows you to focus your time and attention on things that align with who you are and what you value.

I had always associated those words with the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates.

Turns out, I was wrong.

Socrates certainly embraced the idea, but “Know Thyself” was one of the famous maxims inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in central Greece.

The Oracle at Delphi has always fascinated me.

So when I came across an old tourist guide to Delphi this week while sorting books for our shop, I found myself going down the rabbit hole again.

My understanding of the Oracle had always been fairly simple.

You traveled to Delphi. You made the appropriate offering or sacrifice. You asked your question. The Pythia—the priestess who served as Apollo’s oracle—consulted the god and gave you an answer.

Something like an ancient Greek advice column.

Even the 2006 movie 300 depicts a version of this. King Leonidas wants to lead the Spartans against the enormous Persian army invading Greece. Before doing so, he seeks the blessing of the Ephors, who consult an Oracle. Her prophecy is then used to tell Leonidas that Sparta must not march against the Persians.

Leonidas, of course, finds another interpretation of what he should do and heads north with 300 men.

It makes for great cinema.

The real Oracle was considerably more complicated.

After finding the tourist guide, I pulled out my Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth & Religion and reread its entry on Delphi.

One sentence stopped me:

“Ambiguity is the idiom of prophecy.”

The Greeks understood there were limits to human access to knowledge about the future. The god might provide a sign, but that sign still had to pass through human beings.

The Pythia made her pronouncements. Other temple officials, including men known as prophetai, apparently played some role in the process, although scholars still debate exactly what that role was.

And then, ultimately, someone had to decide what the prophecy meant.

That’s where things get interesting.

The god might speak ambiguously.

Or perhaps the message was clear but the person receiving it misunderstood.

Either way, human fallibility intervened.

Which brings me back to those two words inscribed at Delphi:

Know Thyself.

Maybe there’s a connection between these ideas.

People traveled enormous distances to Delphi seeking knowledge about things they could not possibly know.

Should I go to war?

Will I succeed?

What does the future hold?

But before seeking answers about the world, there at Delphi was a reminder to understand something closer to home.

Yourself.

Because every answer requires an interpreter.

And every interpreter brings something to the interpretation.

Our hopes.

Our fears.

Our experiences.

Our ambitions.

Our biases.

And perhaps most dangerously, what we desperately want the answer to be.

Maybe this also helps explain the enduring appeal of horoscopes and zodiac signs: we read a few broadly worded sentences and somehow find ourselves in them. We aren’t always looking for information as much as we’re looking for answers.

But here’s the rub: two people can receive exactly the same information and reach completely different conclusions.

Leaders see this constantly.

A disappointing result can be interpreted as an employee problem, a process problem, a strategy problem, or merely a temporary setback.

Customer feedback can confirm what we already believe—or force us to question it.

Data may be objective.

Our interpretation of it rarely is.

And today we have more oracles than the ancient Greeks could possibly have imagined.

Experts.

Forecasts.

Polls.

Algorithms.

Data.

And yes, even artificial intelligence.

We consult them because we want answers.

But ultimately, someone still has to decide what those answers mean and what to do with them.

Which may be why that ancient advice remains so important.

Knowing yourself isn’t simply about identifying your strengths and weaknesses.

It’s understanding how you affect what you see.

The Greeks went to Delphi hoping to learn something about the future.

More than two thousand years later, perhaps the most useful advice they left us was about something else entirely.

Before interpreting the oracle, understand the interpreter.

Know Thyself.

Make it a great week! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

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When I was in high school we were assigned to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in English class. I don’t remember much about it today beyond the basic plot.

When I got to college as a declared English major, two other Hawthorne assignments made a much bigger impression on me. First, there was The Blithedale Romance, his fictionalized account of the time he spent at a New England utopian community. Then there was his short story Young Goodman Brown, a wonderfully strange morality tale about trust, betrayal, and a kind of lurid curiosity.

One thing I somehow managed NOT to read as an English major was Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Frankly, I’m surprised I wasn’t required to read it at some point. Maybe assigning all 135 chapters would have been asking too much for one semester.

So, as an adult approaching retirement, I decided to give it a go.

All 135 chapters.

I was thinking about both Melville and Hawthorne this week because we marked two interesting anniversaries.

Last Saturday, August 1st, was Melville’s 207th birthday. Then, on August 5th, 1850, Melville and Hawthorne met at a picnic in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

Melville was 31. Hawthorne was 46.

The two quickly developed an intense intellectual friendship. They lived only a few miles apart and spent considerable time together during a remarkably productive period in American literature. Hawthorne was working on The House of the Seven Gables. Melville was working on the book that would become Moby-Dick, which he ultimately dedicated to Hawthorne.

And here I am, 5 months after starting, still trying to finish it.

I’m currently about halfway through the book. I would love to tell you that I’ve been steadily knocking out chapters every night.

I haven’t.

I’ve been stuck around Chapter 54 for weeks.

Moby-Dick can be a challenging book. One minute Melville is telling an exciting story about Ishmael, Queequeg, Captain Ahab, and the crew of the Pequod. The next, he’s explaining the anatomy of whales, describing nineteenth-century whaling practices, or launching into a philosophical digression that leaves you wondering what happened to the story.

Melville’s birthday reminded me that it was time to climb back aboard.

But it also made me wonder: Why read hard things?

Nobody is assigning me Moby-Dick.

There won’t be a test. Nobody will give me a better grade, a promotion, or even a gold star if I eventually reach Chapter 135.

I could put it back on the shelf tomorrow and spend those hours reading something easier.

So why continue?

Partly because I want to know for myself what all the commotion is about.

Moby-Dick wasn’t particularly successful during Melville’s lifetime. His reputation faded, and the book wouldn’t achieve its place as one of the defining works of American literature until decades after his death.

I want to encounter that book myself, not merely know what other people have said about it.

But I think there’s another reason - not everything worth doing needs to be optimized for ease.

Hard books make demands on us.

They require attention.

Patience.

Discipline.

Sometimes they require us to admit that we don’t understand what the author is trying to tell us and keep going anyway.

Perhaps that’s part of their value.

One lesson I learned years ago while struggling through Homer’s Odyssey was to take notes as I read. I knew I would forget characters, events, and ideas, so I started writing things down on 3x5 cards.

I’m doing the same thing with Melville.

Those notes have become breadcrumbs, allowing me to look backward, remember where I’ve been, and occasionally recognize connections I missed the first time.

I think there’s a leadership lesson in that too.

We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to make things faster, easier, and more efficient. As someone who has spent years studying Lean and continuous improvement, I certainly understand why.

But efficiency isn’t always the objective.

Sometimes the struggle is doing something useful.

It forces us to concentrate, develop patience, wrestle with ambiguity, and stay with something longer than is comfortable.

Maybe the point of reading a difficult book isn’t simply to finish it.

Maybe it’s to make sure it leaves something behind when you do.

So sometime this week, I’ll reopen Moby-Dick to Chapter 54.

I don’t know how quickly I’ll make it to Chapter 135.

But after 175 years, I figure Melville can wait for me a little longer.

And I’ll keep reading.

Make it a great week! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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OK, I have a confession: it’s been two weeks since the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Imax epic on Homer’s Odyssey and I have not seen it. It’s not that I’m avoiding it. I’ll see it if I see it.

I took a Classics course in college where we had to read parts of it. Later, as an adult, I attempted reading it again. I made notes so I could refer back to refresh my memory. I have a couple different translations of it but have no plans to reread it.

What I have enjoyed though, is witnessing all the hype. The critics are in full hysteria. People don’t like his departure from the original source material (even though it probably wasn’t written down for the first 1,000 years and so changed with each retelling as storytellers were reciting it from memory); people don’t like how he altered certain characters or other casting controversies; people are quibbling with the special effects.

Like the story itself, none of this is new. In fact, approximately 2,000 years ago, Roman statesman and stoic philosopher Seneca noticed the same trend - 2,000 years ago! In one of his letters to Lucilius, Seneca states, “and are you more concerned to find out where Ulysses’ wanderings took him than to find a way of putting an end to your own perpetual wanderings?” and then later, “Why go into the question of whether or not Penelope completely took in her contemporaries and was far from being the model of wifely purity…teach me instead what purity is, how much value there is in it…”

When I first read those lines several years ago, I thought Seneca was simply criticizing people for getting lost in academic details.

Reading them again this week, I think he was saying something much deeper: He wasn’t dismissing scholarship - He was asking us to remember why we study in the first place.

The purpose of great books isn’t merely to settle historical debates.

It’s to illuminate our own lives.

That’s a very different way of reading.

When I was younger, I often read to acquire information:

Who wrote it?

When was it written?

Which translation is best?

What really happened?

Those are worthwhile questions.

But increasingly, I find myself asking different ones - What is this book trying to teach me? What assumption is it challenging? How should I live differently after reading it?

In other words, I’ve become less interested in mastering the book. I’m more interested in allowing the book to master me.

Perhaps that’s why the arguments surrounding Nolan’s film have amused me more than they’ve bothered me.

People are passionately debating whether a character should have looked different, whether a scene should have been omitted, or whether Homer intended something else entirely.

Meanwhile, Homer himself is still quietly asking the same questions he has been asking readers for nearly three thousand years.

What kind of person are you becoming?

How do you respond to temptation?

To pride?

To perseverance?

To home?

Those questions haven’t aged a day.

Seneca understood that.

The details matter, but they aren’t the destination.

As leaders, I think we fall into the same trap.

We debate processes while forgetting purpose.

We argue over wording while overlooking meaning.

We spend meetings discussing how we’re going to do something before agreeing on why we’re doing it in the first place.

Sometimes the most important question isn’t whether we interpreted the story correctly.

It’s whether the story interpreted us.

The older I get, the more I appreciate books that refuse to stay safely on the shelf.

The best ones don’t simply entertain us.

They interrogate us.

They expose us.

They invite us to become wiser than we were before we opened the first page.

Maybe that’s why Homer is still being argued about nearly three thousand years after his poems were first recited - not because everyone agrees about him, but because every generation finds itself somewhere inside the story.

And perhaps Seneca’s advice is just as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago.

By all means, discuss the movie.

But don’t miss the point.

Make it a great week. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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One of the first things my wife and I did after I retired was tackle projects that had been waiting for years.

Like so many families, we had accumulated boxes of old bills, receipts, statements, and paperwork that needed to be shredded, filed, or discarded. We also returned to a project we had started last summer but never finished: cleaning out our basement.

Retirement has a funny way of removing excuses.

With both of our children now grown—our son already out on his own and our daughter preparing to move into her new apartment in just a few weeks—it finally felt like the right time to sort through the things we’d been saving for decades.

Among them were a couple hundred children’s books.

Some had belonged to our kids. Some had belonged to my wife. And a few had survived from my own childhood. There were books signed by their authors, books too worn to justify keeping, and books that instantly transported me back fifty years.

One of them was The Little Engine That Could.

I’d venture to guess most of us know the story. A little blue engine agrees to pull a stranded train full of toys, books, food, and candy over a mountain after repeating to itself, “I think I can. I think I can.”

As I flipped through the pages, memories came rushing back.

I remembered staring at the colorful illustrations of the toys and wishing they were mine. I remembered being fascinated by two full pages devoted to fruit, milk...and candy. My six-year-old self barely noticed the spinach. I was focused on the peppermint drops and lollipops. They looked absolutely delicious.

And, of course, I remembered the famous refrain.

“I think I can.”

For most of my life, I thought that was the entire point of the story.

Then I read it again.

What surprised me wasn’t what I remembered.

It was what I had forgotten.

Before the Little Blue Engine ever appears, three other engines have the opportunity to help.

The first—a shiny new passenger engine—declines because carrying passengers is more important.

The second—a powerful freight engine—refuses because he’s hauling machines that print books and newspapers for grown-ups.

The third—an old worn-out engine—simply says he’s too tired.

“I can not. I can not. I can not.”

I had completely forgotten about all three of them.

Somehow, over the years, my memory had reduced the entire story to one optimistic sentence.

That made me wonder.

Why had I remembered the little blue engine but forgotten everyone else?

Perhaps because that’s how children read stories.

As a child, I wasn’t thinking about responsibility or competing priorities or exhaustion. I wasn’t evaluating excuses. I simply imagined myself as the hero climbing the mountain.

But reading the story again more than fifty years later, I found myself noticing something entirely different.

The story hadn’t changed.

I had.

At this stage of life, I recognize those other engines more than I ever did as a child.

Too busy.

Too important.

Too tired.

Those aren’t just the excuses of fictional locomotives.

They’re the reasons many of us give—often quite legitimately—for passing by opportunities to help, encourage, or simply say yes.

What struck me most was that the Little Blue Engine didn’t begin with confidence.

It began with willingness.

Only after agreeing to help did it start repeating, “I think I can.”

I’d never noticed that before.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts of revisiting old books.

We don’t reread them because the stories have changed.

We reread them because we have.

The older I get, the more I appreciate that good books don’t simply preserve words on a page. They preserve moments in our own lives. Every decade or so, they invite us back—not to see whether the story is different, but to discover how differently we now read it.

This week, while cleaning out a basement and deciding which childhood books to keep, I realized that an old favorite had been patiently waiting half a century to teach me something I wasn’t yet old enough to notice the first time.

Maybe that’s why some books are worth holding onto.

Not because they never change.

But because we do.

Make it a great week! Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope you’re having a wonderful summer!

When my wife and I lived in Virginia, we made it a point to visit the mountains as often as possible. The Blue Ridge, especially the Shenandoah Valley and Skyline Drive, remain some of the most beautiful stretches of roadway I’ve ever experienced.

But I was interested in more than just the scenery.

One of our favorite stops was Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, home to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. The Appalachian Trail passes directly through town on its 2,190-mile journey from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in northern Maine.

To say I was fascinated by the Appalachian Trail would be an understatement.

I read books about it.

We hiked sections of it whenever we could.

I dreamed that one day, after retirement, I would walk the entire trail myself.

Then life happened.

A demanding career.

Raising a family.

Being a husband.

Being a son.

Somewhere along the way, I slowly realized that my dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail was probably less about hiking than it was about escape.

It represented a simpler life.

A slower pace.

A chance to disappear into the woods for a few months while the rest of the world continued without me.

Then this week I read about Dale Sanders.

If all goes according to plan, Dale—known on the trail as “Grey Beard”—will soon become the oldest person ever to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail.

At ninety-one years old.

What’s even more remarkable is that he’ll be breaking the very record he set when he completed the trail at eighty-two (Watch the New York Times story HERE).

But impressive as that accomplishment is, it wasn’t what stopped me.

It was something much simpler.

Reflecting on his hike at age eighty-two, Sanders said:

“It changed my life.”

Think about that.

Changed.

His.

Life.

At eighty-two.

Those words have been echoing in my mind all week.

Not because they describe an extraordinary hike.

Because they challenge an ordinary assumption.

Many of us quietly believe that life changes young people.

College changes us.

Marriage changes us.

Children change us.

Our first job changes us.

Failure changes us.

By the time we reach retirement, however, we often assume the major chapters have already been written.

Perhaps we’ll enjoy life.

Perhaps we’ll slow down.

Perhaps we’ll finally get around to doing a few things we’ve postponed.

But changed?

Really changed?

We don’t often expect that.

Yet here’s a man in his eighties saying that one experience fundamentally altered the course of his life.

Now, nearly a decade later, he’s doing it again.

It made me wonder:

When did we decide there was an expiration date on growth?

Leadership is often described as helping other people develop.

Perhaps one of the most important forms of leadership is refusing to believe that our own development is finished.

Curiosity has no retirement age.

Learning has no retirement age.

Purpose has no retirement age.

Transformation has no retirement age.

Over the past few months I’ve written about unpacking boxes, following rabbit holes, building thoughtful systems, and discovering new patterns in retirement.

Looking back, I realize those essays have all been asking the same question without my realizing it.

Who am I still capable of becoming?

I don’t know whether I’ll ever hike the Appalachian Trail.

Maybe I will.

Maybe I won’t.

Oddly enough, that no longer feels like the most important part of the dream.

The more important question is whether I’m still willing to let new experiences reshape me.

Because if a ninety-one-year-old can set out to discover who he might still become...

Perhaps the rest of us have fewer excuses than we think.

Make it a great week, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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Today is the birthday of two of my favorite writers: Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whose straightforward and deeply human poetry has stayed with me for years, and Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden taught me to appreciate the extraordinary hidden within ordinary life.

I was thinking about both of them today as my wife and I spent another afternoon preparing our bookstore.

We still don’t have bookshelves.

The walls are painted. The floors are finished. More than 5,000 books are waiting patiently in their boxes.

But before a single book goes onto a shelf, I’ve spent far more time thinking about tables than books.

Not multiplication tables or periodic tables.

The folding kind.

As many of you know, we purchased these books from a retired college professor now in his late nineties who could no longer manage his remarkable collection. In a few weeks, once the shelving is installed, we’ll begin the long process of opening every box, researching thousands of titles, pricing them, and deciding where they belong.

That sounds simple enough.

It isn’t.

If I simply start opening boxes, I’ll quickly find myself doing what I love most: researching every interesting book I discover.

One book leads to another. One author introduces three more. An unfamiliar subject opens an entirely new rabbit hole.

Before long, I’ve spent an hour happily reading…and processed only a handful of books.

So before we’ve unpacked a single box, I’ve been trying to design a system.

My current thinking involves three folding tables.

The first is for books that are straightforward. More common titles. Standard editions. Books that can be priced quickly and moved along.

The second is for books that deserve another look. Perhaps they’re older, unusual, or require a little more research before making a decision.

The third table is reserved for the books that make me stop.

Signed copies.

Scarce editions.

Unexpected discoveries.

The books that deserve my full attention.

Will the system work?

I honestly don’t know. In fact, I’m almost certain it won’t work perfectly.

We’ll learn something after the first fifty boxes. Something else after the first hundred.

The system will evolve. It will have to evolve.

And the funny thing is, these three tables don’t even solve the whole problem.

Their job is simply to get 5,000 books out of boxes, cleaned, evaluated, priced, and onto shelves.

After that comes an entirely different challenge: building the inventory system that will track where every book lives, when it sells, and what we’ve learned from each sale.

In other words, this first system exists largely to make the next system possible.

That’s exactly what good systems are supposed to do. We build one system not to finish the journey, but to make the next stage possible.

One of the lessons I carried with me from years of studying Lean thinking is that we often misunderstand improvement.

We imagine that successful people begin with the perfect system.

More often, they begin with a thoughtful system.

Then they observe. They adjust. They iterate. They improve.

The goal isn’t perfection before you start.

The goal is learning once you do.

As I stood looking around that overflowing room this afternoon, I realized this little three-table thought experiment has very little to do with books.

It’s really about attention.

About focus.

Most of us don’t struggle because we fail to recognize extraordinary opportunities.

We struggle because the ordinary consumes the time the extraordinary requires.

Every email looks urgent.

Every meeting seems necessary.

Every paper on the desk asks to be handled.

Every notification insists on being seen.

Without realizing it, we allow the routine to crowd out the remarkable.

Good systems don’t eliminate decisions.

They preserve our attention for the decisions that matter most.

Retirement has given me something I rarely had during my working years: the time to linger over remarkable books.

Ironically, that makes having a system even more important.

Because without one, I could happily spend an entire afternoon researching a single volume while four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others patiently waited their turn.

Perhaps that’s true of life as well.

The best systems aren’t built because we expect everything to go according to plan.

They’re built because we know it won’t.

They give us a place to begin, the discipline to keep moving, and the humility to improve along the way.

The books can wait a few more weeks.

For now, I’m still thinking about the tables.

Make it a great week, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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For those of you here in the United States, I hope you had a safe and festive Fourth of July as we celebrated America’s 250th birthday.

One of the personal traditions I started several years ago after visiting Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the nearby house where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence is to actually read the Declaration itself—all 1,320 words of it—every Fourth of July.

I’m always struck by Jefferson’s poetic language, his careful word choice, and the almost rhythmic structure of the grievances against King George III. Like many famous documents, we tend to know the opening lines but rarely take the time to read the whole thing.

This year, however, another idea caught my attention.

While reading historian Eric Foner’s introduction to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, he described three ideas that lay at the heart of the American republican experiment:

Virtue – the willingness to subordinate selfish interests to the good of the whole.

Equality – the belief that every person deserves equal standing before the law and equal dignity as a citizen.

Independence – the ability to resist outside coercion and govern oneself.

Those three words stayed with me long after I closed the book.

Then, a few days later, I read an essay by economist Romina Boccia describing the day she became an American citizen after living and working in this country for nearly fifteen years (read her complete essay HERE).

She wrote about standing with sixty-nine other new citizens representing forty-one different countries. As each nation was called, those born there stood and were applauded before sitting back down—not as Argentinians, Germans, Ghanaians, or Zimbabweans, but as Americans.

One sentence especially caught my attention:

“America is a place where our origins matter less than our destinations.”

Then came the moment that stopped me.

The woman standing next to Boccia, originally from Ghana, leaned over and whispered,

“When we leave here today, we are free.”

I found myself reading that sentence twice.

Not because freedom is uniquely American.

But because sometimes those who choose something help those of us who inherited it appreciate it more deeply.

Her story reminded me of another ceremony eleven years ago.

Our family travelled to Parris Island to watch our son graduate from Marine Corps boot camp. It remains one of the proudest days of my life.

What I also remember is that several of the young men and women standing on that parade deck became American citizens before they became United States Marines.

In the span of a single ceremony, they chose both a new country and a commitment to defend it.

That’s a level of intentionality that deserves our respect.

Reading the Declaration each year has gradually changed the way I think about Independence Day.

As a child, it was fireworks and parades.

As an adult, it became history.

Now, I’m beginning to think it’s also about responsibility.

Freedom has never been merely the absence of restraint.

It has always carried with it the responsibility of self-government.

Perhaps that’s what Foner meant by virtue.

Not perfection.

Not agreement.

But citizens willing to place something larger than themselves alongside their own interests.

Two hundred and fifty years after Jefferson’s words were first read aloud, the American experiment continues—not because it was completed in 1776, but because every generation is asked to renew it in its own way.

Every Fourth of July, I reread the Declaration.

This year, I found myself reading something else as well.

Not just the words on the page.

But the faces of people who chose to make those words their own.

Make it a great week, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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When most people think of Toyota, they think of automobiles.

Others think of Lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, or the Toyota Production System.

But before Toyota built cars, it built looms.

In the 1920s, Sakichi Toyoda founded Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, a textile company whose innovations would eventually help fund what became one of the world’s great automobile manufacturers. It’s a fascinating piece of history that I never knew despite spending much of my career studying Lean.

Recently, while reading Learning to LEAD, Leading to LEARN by retired Toyota executive Isao Yoshino and Katie Anderson, I came across a concept that has stayed with me ever since.

In loom weaving, every fabric consists of two kinds of threads.

The warp threads run vertically. They are strong, consistent, and provide the structure of the fabric. Yoshino describes them as “the known” - the enduring beliefs, values, and purpose that give a life (or a fabric) direction.

The weft threads run horizontally. They are flexible and varied. Woven through the warp, they create the fabric’s unique texture and pattern. He calls these “the discovered” - the unexpected experiences, relationships, opportunities, and challenges that reveal themselves only as we live our lives.

Together, the warp and the weft create something neither could produce alone.

Yoshino writes:

“Just like fabric, our life story and the fulfilling of our life’s purpose is the interweaving of the known and the discovered.”

I’ve been thinking about that sentence a lot lately.

Looking back, I’m beginning to see the difference between the known and the discovered.

The known has always been there:

Books.

Curiosity.

Learning.

Writing.

Teaching.

Those were the warp. Long before I knew where I would live, what career I would pursue, or what opportunities would come my way, those threads were already there. They were present when I built a bookshelf for my bedroom in junior high. They followed me into college, into bookstores, into my professional life, and eventually into writing this newsletter.

Those things didn’t change very much.

What changed was everything woven through them.

The weft and the “discoveries” that came later:

Moving to Arizona.

A career I never expected.

A weekly newsletter.

A bookstore.

Four thousand books.

Retirement.

Looking backward, it’s tempting to think our lives are defined by the jobs we’ve held, the places we’ve lived, the promotions we’ve received, or the projects we’ve completed.

Perhaps those are simply the pattern.

The deeper structure may be something else entirely.

Over the past several weeks I’ve found myself writing about slowing down, unpacking boxes, following rabbit holes, and learning how to live differently in retirement.

At first those felt like unrelated observations.

Now I’m beginning to wonder if they are simply new threads being woven into an older fabric.

The warp hasn’t changed.

Only the pattern has.

I think leaders face a similar realization.

Organizations often spend enormous energy responding to changing markets, new technologies, and unexpected challenges. Those are important. They’re the weft.

But the organizations that endure usually know something deeper.

They know who they are.

Their values remain steady even while circumstances change.

Their purpose provides the structure that allows everything else to evolve.

Perhaps people are much the same.

Life rarely unfolds exactly as we imagine.

The discoveries are often surprising.

Sometimes joyful.

Sometimes difficult.

But if we’re fortunate, they become part of something larger than we could have designed ourselves.

Retirement hasn’t changed what was known. It has simply given me the opportunity to weave a different pattern.

Make it a great week, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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Happy Father’s Day to all the dads, grandfathers, mentors, father figures and future fathers reading this. I hope you found time today to enjoy the people and pursuits that bring you joy!

One of the most famous opening chapters in literature is called “Down the Rabbit-Hole.”

Today, when people talk about “going down a rabbit hole,” they usually mean a distraction: an unnecessary tangent, an internet search that gets out of hand, or a detour that takes us away from what we should be doing.

But before it became a modern metaphor, it was simply the title of the first chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Alice spots a White Rabbit, follows her curiosity, and suddenly finds herself tumbling into an entirely different world.

I’ve been thinking about Alice quite a bit lately.

Not because I’ve been rereading the book. In fact, I’m fairly certain it isn’t among the 230 boxes of books currently stacked in our new retail space.

But the feeling is familiar.

A few days ago, while unpacking books, I came across several biographies and critical studies of Herman Melville. Since I’m currently about halfway through Moby-Dick, I immediately found myself intrigued. One of the books discussed Pierre, or The Ambiguities, a Melville novel I had never even heard of.

Naturally, I wanted to know more.

A few boxes later, I found Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Gilgamesh, a book I’ve always meant to read but never have.

Then came several books on Surrealism. For years I had largely dismissed Surrealist art as strange, inaccessible, or simply weird. Yet after recently having a dream that somehow brought Surrealism to mind, I found myself looking through those books with fresh eyes and a growing appreciation for what the artists were trying to accomplish.

Then there were books on ancient Greek and Egyptian scientists who were calculating the size of the Earth and the distances of celestial bodies more than two thousand years ago using little more than geometry, observation, and logic.

Every box seemed to contain another doorway.

Every doorway led to three more.

At one point I found myself smiling and wondering:

Where do the discoveries end?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t.

Which reminded me of one of my favorite memories from college and graduate school.

I loved wandering through the library.

Not with a specific destination in mind, but with a willingness to follow an interesting idea wherever it led. One book would reference another. A footnote would lead to a different author. A shelf would reveal something entirely unexpected. Hours could disappear that way.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t really searching for information.

I was searching for connections.

For surprises.

For the joy of discovering something I didn’t know I was looking for.

Curiosity has always been one of my favorite traveling companions. But years ago, an old boss - who, as it happens, is now a subscriber to this newsletter - gave me a piece of feedback that has been echoing in my head lately.

Richard, you need to learn to manage your curiosity.

At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant.

Why would anyone want less curiosity?

Today, standing in a room surrounded by thousands of books, I think I finally understand what he meant.

He wasn’t warning me about curiosity.

He was warning me about unlimited curiosity.

When I was working full-time, life imposed natural constraints. There were meetings to attend, projects to complete, deadlines to meet, and responsibilities to manage. I could explore a rabbit hole for a few minutes, but eventually reality pulled me back.

Now those constraints are different.

The rabbit holes are still there.

But so is the time to explore them.

Which means the challenge has changed.

The challenge is no longer finding interesting things.

The challenge is deciding which interesting things deserve my attention.

I think leaders face a similar challenge.

Most organizations don’t suffer from a shortage of opportunities, ideas, initiatives, or distractions. They suffer from a shortage of focus.

The ability to say “yes” is important.

The ability to say “not now” may be even more important.

Because attention, like time, is finite.

And every choice carries an opportunity cost.

So for now, I’m still opening boxes.

I’m still discovering Melville, Surrealism, ancient astronomy, and countless other unexpected treasures.

But I’m also trying to remember that curiosity works best when paired with intention.

After all, even Alice eventually had to find her way home.

Make it a great week, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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Many of you reading this know I love books. I always have.

In junior high school Industrial Arts class, while other students were building toolboxes or other projects, I chose to build a bookshelf for my bedroom. In college, I worked in a bookstore. Today, I’m writing this from my home library surrounded by more than 2,000 books.

Books have been a constant companion throughout my life.

In fact, this newsletter began three years ago as a way to share some of my favorite books on leadership and continuous improvement.

Last year, my wife and I took that affection for books a step further and purchased the private library of a friend. His collection totaled approximately 4,000 books.

For years we had talked about someday opening a small bookstore and collectibles shop in our town. At the time, however, I was still working and retirement was more than a year away. So the books went into storage.

That’s where they remained for the next eighteen months.

Until last week.

Standing in our newly rented retail space, surrounded by 230+ boxes of books, I opened the first box. Staring up at me was a 4-volume set entitled “Hours In A Library” by Victorian writer Leslie Stephen. While I had never heard of Stephen, I immediately recognized it as a great contribution to my personal “Books About Books” collection. I wanted to learn more about Stephen. I wanted to devour all 4 volumes.

Then it dawned on me: were these books to keep? To sell? Both?

This has been the joy of this project…but also the challenge.

Every box contains possibility.

Every box contains a story.

Every box contains another rabbit hole inviting me to disappear into it.

What has surprised me, however, is not the books - it’s the emotions.

For years, the idea of opening a bookstore existed mostly as a dream.

Dreams are wonderful because they allow us to imagine all the possibilities while conveniently avoiding many of the realities. Dreams are a temporary reprieve from our day-to-day.

A hypothetical bookstore has no rent.

A hypothetical bookstore has no shelving decisions.

A hypothetical bookstore never has to figure out how to make enough money to keep the lights on.

It simply exists as an idea.

Then one day, 230 boxes show up. Suddenly “someday” has an address. The dream becomes real.

And when something becomes real, it introduces new companions: uncertainty, responsibility, and risk.

As we’ve begun unpacking books and imagining what the space might become, I’ve noticed my mind immediately doing what it was trained to do over the course of a long career.

What about this?

What about that?

What if this doesn’t work?

What if we overlook something important?

What if we’re making a mistake?

Risk assessment has its place. It helps us avoid obvious pitfalls and think through consequences. But I’ve also realized that if given too much authority, that voice can prevent us from ever beginning.

At the same time, another part of me longs for something much simpler.

A comfortable chair.

A quiet library.

A good book.

No decisions to make other than turning the next page.

The irony, of course, is that the bookstore exists because of that love of books in the first place…which has led me to an unexpected realization.

Many of the things we dream about are appealing precisely because we don’t have to live with them.

We can enjoy the idea of writing a book without facing a blank page.

We can imagine starting a business without taking on the risk.

We can picture a different life without having to make different (or difficult) choices.

But eventually, if we’re serious about the dream, we have to stop imagining it and start unpacking boxes.

That’s the moment when possibility becomes responsibility.

It’s also the moment when growth begins.

So for now, we’re opening boxes.

Some of them contain books.

Some of them contain decisions.

All of them contain possibilities.

And while I still don’t know exactly what this bookstore will become, I’m beginning to suspect that’s part of the point.

Make it a great week, thanks for reading and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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Last week I wrote that every day in retirement feels a little like Saturday. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that Saturday comes with its own challenge: learning when to stop saying “later.”

Two weeks ago our kitchen soap dispenser ran out of soap.

Normally, this would not cause any philosophical drama in our house, but this time it was different.

Refilling the dispenser requires a series of awkward maneuvers involving bending, twisting, and blindly feeling around under the sink to unscrew the container. Removing it is the easy part. Refilling it is worse. Since there are no vent holes, the soap has to be poured slowly or it backs up and spills over the top. Then comes the process of bending and twisting once again to thread it back into place without being able to see what you’re doing.

Most of the time, I dread the entire process and put it off for a weekend when my frustration might be more manageable.

This time, as I felt that familiar resistance building, I caught myself thinking:

“I’ll get to that later.”

Then almost immediately another thought appeared:

“No…later is now. You’ve got the time.”

I know it’s a small thing, but like many of the small things I write about here, there are bigger implications hiding underneath.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I bought a stained-glass window at a local estate sale. We liked the colors and craftsmanship, but neither of us knew what the Latin inscription meant:

Festina Lente

Literally translated, it means:

“Make haste slowly.”

The phrase was reportedly a favorite of the Roman Emperor Augustus, who believed that rashness was often more dangerous than delay. More than a thousand years later, the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius adopted the phrase as his own, pairing a dolphin and an anchor as his printer’s mark. The dolphin represented speed and motion. The anchor represented stability and patience.

At first glance, the phrase seems contradictory. How can you hurry slowly?

But versions of the same idea continue to show up today.

In the 2001 film Black Hawk Down, members of the U.S. Delta Force repeat a simple principle:

“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

The idea isn’t that speed is bad. The idea is that precision creates speed. Mastery creates speed. Deliberate action creates speed.

For leaders, I think that’s where the lesson lies.

Festina Lente isn’t an argument against urgency. Sometimes urgency is exactly what’s required.

What it cautions against is confusing motion with progress.

We’ve all seen projects launched before they were fully understood. Decisions made before all the facts were known. Meetings called before anyone had time to think. In our rush to move quickly, we often create the very delays we’re trying to avoid.

The paradox is that slowing down at the beginning often allows us to move faster later.

A thoughtful decision usually beats a hurried one.

A focused effort usually beats a scattered one.

A finished project beats five half-started ones.

Which brings me back to the soap dispenser.

For years, “later” was one of the most useful words in my vocabulary.

I’d read that book later.

I’d organize those notes later.

I’d build that website later.

I’d refill the soap dispenser later.

Retirement has taught me that “later” is a useful word right up until it isn’t.

At some point, later becomes now.

And perhaps that’s why Festina Lente has become my retirement motto.

Move deliberately.

Don’t rush.

But don’t drift either.

Make it a great week, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday.

Richard

The Up Angle

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Over the last week, I’ve been asked two different but related questions about retirement:

“Are you bored yet?”

“Are you sad?”

Both questions came from good friends and from a place of genuine caring. But while I can think of plenty of questions that would prompt long, poetic reflections on these first few weeks of retirement, those two probably wouldn’t make the list.

The truth is, neither quite captures what retirement has felt like so far.

The closest description I can think of is this:

Every day feels a little like Saturday.

You know the feeling. You wake up without an alarm. There isn’t a packed schedule waiting for you. You have things you’d like to do, but not necessarily things you have to do. You wander from one interesting activity to another. You read a little. Work on a project. Run an errand. Call a friend. Start something, stop something, and come back to it later.

It’s not vacation. It’s not idleness. It’s simply a different relationship with time.

I’ve even found myself jotting down notes about what we did each day, partly because I don’t want to look back six months from now and wonder, “Where did it all the time go?” The days are full, but they’re full in a different way.

That’s when I found myself thinking about a model I was introduced to more than a decade ago.

At the time, my employer was closing a service center. Hundreds of employees were facing difficult choices about whether to relocate, stay with the company, or begin something entirely new. As managers, we were introduced to the work of William Bridges and his book Managing Transitions.

Bridges argued that significant change unfolds in three stages:

Ending, Losing, Letting Go.

The Neutral Zone.

The New Beginning.

Most of us want to skip straight to the third phase. We want clarity. We want a plan. We want certainty about what comes next. We want to get going.

But Bridges believed the most important work often happens in the middle.

The Neutral Zone.

The space between what was and what will be. Some call it the Liminal Space.

Looking back, I think that’s where I am right now.

The old chapter has clearly ended. Tomorrow morning, no dashboard will need updating. No meetings will appear on my calendar. No performance reviews are waiting to be completed.

But the next chapter isn’t fully written yet either.

And surprisingly, I’m okay with that.

In fact, there may be something valuable about not rushing through this space.

As leaders, we often encounter people going through transitions—new roles, reorganizations, promotions, layoffs, relocations, retirements, and countless personal changes outside of work. The temptation is always to focus on the destination. We want to help people get to the “new beginning” as quickly as possible.

But maybe we underestimate the value of the middle.

Maybe creativity, reflection, and discovery need a little room to breathe.

For now, I’m content to spend some time there.

One Saturday at a time.

Make it a great week, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Sunday.

Richard

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But this year, Memorial Day has me thinking about something older.

Growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago, my mother would occasionally take us to Cantigny Park in nearby Wheaton. Cantigny was built on the grounds of the estate of Robert R. McCormick, eventual owner of the Chicago Tribune and a veteran of World War I. During the war he served under General John Pershing and later dedicated part of his estate to preserving the history of the 1st Infantry Division, also known as The Big Red One.

But for an 8-year-old visiting decades later, I didn’t know much of that.

I just thought it was a cool place to “play army.” I remember climbing around the tanks and imagining what it would have been like to command one. I was fascinated by military history, especially World War II. Like a lot of boys my age, I was drawn to the machinery, uniforms and stories of bravery and sacrifice.

While my mother toured the gardens, I wanted to see tanks and wander through the museum. I remember walking through a life-size recreation of a World War I trench, complete with machine-gun sounds overhead, artillery blasts, and flashing lights. To me it felt exciting, almost cinematic.

Only much later did I begin realizing that museums and memorials often work on two levels. Children see artifacts and spectacle. Adults eventually begin asking different questions: Who were these people? What happened to them afterward? What stories never made it onto the plaques?

Cantigny wasn’t just the name of a park in Illinois. It was the name of a small French village north of Paris and the site of the first major American battle of World War I.

And behind those exhibits were stories I never understood as a child.

Among them were the stories of the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment, later known as the Harlem Hellfighters, soldiers who fought with extraordinary courage despite returning home to a segregated America.

One of them was Sgt. Henry Johnson, whose extraordinary bravery under fire would eventually earn him the Medal of Honor in 2015, nearly a century later.

That timeline struck me-not because his courage suddenly appeared in 2015, but because it had always been there. Recognition simply took time to catch up.

Maybe that’s part of what memorials and remembrance ask us to do: keep looking for the stories that were missed, overlooked, or left unfinished.

But as an 8-year-old roaming the grounds of Cantigny Park, you don’t learn those stories.

You just see tanks.

You hear explosions.

You imagine heroics and adventure.

It takes time to realize history often works that way.

As children we notice the loud things: the uniforms, the battles, the spectacle.

Later we begin noticing something else:

the sacrifice

the people

the stories beneath the monuments

the names we almost missed.

Maybe that’s one of the quiet purposes of Memorial Day.

Not simply to remember that people fought.

But to remember that people lived: people who had families waiting for them. People who had plans for the future. People who worried, laughed, dreamed and expected to come home.

Memorials sometimes make history feel distant. The stories remind us that it wasn’t.

Make it a great week and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

Late last week I attended the retirement reception for a coworker who was retiring the week after I did. I was struck by the reception he received: standing room only in the office, over 350 people on the invitation list and probably 30 people (including me) dialing in on-line. People were invited to reflect on the relationship they had with him, memories of their interaction, takeaways and lessons and they all stood out, but some of the themes included:

• One person told the story of how he had the habit of, whenever someone came up to him at his desk, he would always stand up, face the person and look them in the eye. It was such a simple habit, but a powerful example of presence: giving someone your full, undivided attention and making them feel seen and heard. It clearly made an impression on that person. And on me.

• Another leader told the story of how, when he first began reporting to my friend he asked him if he had permission to call his mother. He said “Do I have permission to call your mother?” It was an unusual request, but such a powerful and memorable example of connection and care.

• I also learned that my friend always tried to end meetings on a positive, uplifting note. His reasoning was simple: if something unexpected happened before the next meeting, he didn’t want the last interaction to be negative. It was such a small habit, but one that quietly acknowledged something important: none of us knows how many more conversations we get. Positivity breeds positivity, like ripples on a lake.

We often assume leadership is only remembered in the big moments, rather than the small, daily interactions that build over time and over careers. Nobody remembers the PowerPoint deck or the spreadsheet, but they do remember how you made them feel. People remember people.

Maybe leadership is less about being impressive and more about being memorable.

Over the past week, I experienced a smaller version of the same thing after posting my retirement message on LinkedIn. The response was overwhelming…and humbling.

I heard from many people I expected to hear from. But I also heard from people I hadn’t worked with in years and, in some cases, decades.

No one wrote about projects or presentations or PowerPoints. They remembered conversations. Small interactions. Words of encouragement and impressions that stuck with them. Simple moments.

Which reminded me of something I suspect many of us underestimate: we spend years thinking our work will be remembered through what we built. But often, we’re remembered by how we showed up.

People remember people. Make it a great week, thanks for reading and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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I spent part of Friday turning in my work laptop for the last time. I was retiring almost 33 years to the day that I began in Financial Services.

I wanted to start the day with some physical activity so I went on an early morning hike with a good friend from my old employer. It was proof that relationships can endure despite distance and divides.

I logged on one last time to check my email and reply to someone who had sent me something expecting a reply. I then logged off for the last time, closed the lid on the laptop, unplugged all my equipment and drove into the office.

At first, it felt like any other workday - I badged through the security gate; drove to some visitor parking and prepared to walk into the building for the last time.

Before I got out of my truck though, I noticed something interesting. I saw 4 or 5 people struggling to exit the building with arms-full of computer equipment. They had boxes filled with monitors, Targus bags with new laptops, charging cords and everything else they’d need to set up their home office.

Then it dawned on me - they were STARTING their Vanguard journey just as I was ending mine. I could see the excitement in their faces, arms full of shiny new equipment, anxious expectations, and probably the same nervous anticipation I felt over 10 years ago when I first walked into this same building.

Any sadness I felt quickly gave way to something else when seeing their faces. I remembered my own eager excitement.

But then I also realized that while my chapter was ending here, theirs was just beginning and it was a great reminder that the world goes on, the cycle continues; organizations, like life itself, continually renew themselves. It struck me that renewal is exactly what I was witnessing there on the sidewalk. The revolving door into the building doing just that: moving me in and out to a new chapter and moving them out then in to begin again.

For years I had planned for contingencies: how to maintain continuity in business operations in the event of a hurricane (which I actually lived through at Capital Group/American Funds) or other disasters. Here at Vanguard, at the outset of the COVID pandemic I watched my business unit shift from a position of needing weeks or months to get people prepped to work from home, to executing it in a manner of days. And to have it happen seamlessly…that’s Business Continuity at its best. But here on the sidewalk outside our Windsor building, I was witnessing another kind of contingency planning: the need to welcome new employees and help get them set up for success in their new roles.

It was humbling and gratifying to see this in action. The whole thing felt uncommonly normal.

And maybe that’s the real reminder: none of us truly “owns” a role or title forever. We borrow them for a while.

We do our best with them.

Then eventually, we hand things off to someone else and the cycle continues.

The buildings remain.

The work continues.

New people arrive with the same nervous excitement and uncertainty we once carried ourselves.

But what lasts are the shared experiences:

The friendships.

The moments of patience, encouragement, kindness and trust that happen quietly over years of working alongside one another.

Since last week (and probably longer than that), several people have already asked me, “So what are you going to do now?”

The honest answer is: I’m still figuring that out.

But I do know this:

Next Sunday night, I’ll still be here writing.

Still reflecting.

Still learning.

Still curious about where the next chapter leads.

Some things change.

Others continue in a different form.

And maybe that’s part of renewal too.

Make it a great week, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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When our son left for Marine Corps boot camp 11 years ago, saying goodbye felt like something shifted.

His room was empty.

We didn’t know when we would see him again.

Communication would be sporadic.

There would be no “do-overs” if he forgot something.

And his new occupation carried real risk.

Having been through it myself, I had some sense of what he would experience—but the rest was unclear.

The world was different then, too. The War on Terror was still ongoing, and he was stepping into it.

It felt uncertain in a way that was hard to plan for.

There was no checklist for that moment. No way to prepare for every outcome or deal with the emotions that came with that fear and uncertainty.

You can do what you can: help him prepare, offer advice, say what matters, but at some point, you realize the rest is out of your hands.

It was very different when our daughter left for college 10 years later (I wrote about that at the time)

She was 20 miles away.

Home on weekends.

Lunch if we wanted.

The path felt…predictable.

Manageable.

As I look ahead to life after this final week of work, I’ve been thinking about that difference.

Some transitions can be planned, others can’t.

My instinct is to approach retirement the way I’ve approached most problems in my career:

Define the goal.

Build a plan.

Execute.

Measure.

Adjust.

It’s a good system.

It just may not apply here.

Because this feels like a different kind of problem.

One where the goal isn’t entirely clear.

Where the path isn’t linear.

Where you don’t really know if you’ve gotten it right until you’re already living it.

I recently heard these described as “wicked problems”—the kind you don’t solve so much as work your way into.

That sounds a lot like retirement.

Not something to figure out all at once—

but something to explore.

To test.

To adjust.

To learn as you go.

That might mean trying something new without knowing if it will stick. Following an interest just to see where it leads. Letting a week unfold without filling every hour in advance. Small experiments instead of big plans.

Which is a shift.

After years of trying to bring structure and clarity to problems, this one may require something different.

Not every problem responds to structure. Some require patience and a willingness to not have the answer right away.

Less control.

More curiosity.

Less planning.

More experimenting.

Maybe the goal isn’t to have retirement figured out before it begins.

Maybe it’s to be willing to step into it—

and discover what it can become along the way.

By this time next week, I’ll officially be retired - at least from corporate life.

Make it a great week, and I will see you next Sunday!

Richard

The Up Angle

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The next couple of weeks feel a little like preparing for a trip.

You know the feeling: you finalize your plans. You check your itinerary. Make sure you have all your details covered. Maybe you start packing. You take care of things at home: someone to feed the cat, water the plants, keep an eye on things while you’re gone.

You do the same at work. You finish what you can. Make the calls you need to make. Send the emails. Close out all the open loops. Clear the runway so you can step away without things unraveling behind you.

There’s a certain rhythm to it. A sense of completion.

But unlike most trips, this one is different.

I’m retiring in two weeks.

There’s no return date.

No packing list.

No real way to prepare for what comes next.

Most trips are about control: You decide what to bring; you plan the schedule; you know where you’re going; you know when you’re coming back.

This one doesn’t work that way.

There are things you can’t pack.

Decisions you won’t get to make.

Outcomes you no longer control.

And maybe that’s the shift.

After years of trying to guide direction and influence results, you reach a point where the work continues…just not with you at the center of it.

Over the past few days, people have started reaching out to wish me well. I got messages I didn’t expect. I had conversations that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

People want to know, “what are you going to do?”

It’s interesting what people choose to say when they know you’re leaving. It’s humbling to hear what they remember, what they appreciate, what they take the time to acknowledge.

It feels a little like saying goodbye at the gate—

even though the trip hasn’t quite started yet.

And it’s a reminder that leadership isn’t just about what you accomplish while you’re there. It’s also about what remains when you’re gone:

The habits.

The decisions.

The way people approach the work.

Most business trips are about where you’re going and what you need to get done when you get there. This one feels just as much about what you’re leaving behind.

And maybe the real preparation isn’t about having everything ready—

it’s about being willing to step forward…

even when you don’t know exactly what comes next.

Make it a great week and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

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Last week I packed my desk.

Not because of my impending retirement, though.

My company is moving us out of our current building. The lease won’t be renewed, and we’re relocating to space on the main campus—buildings we own instead of lease.

This is the second time in my career this has happened.

In fact, a similar move 11 years ago led me to leave my previous company after 22 years. At the time, we were told, We need the people, but we don’t need the space, and we were given the option to relocate out of state.

This time feels different.

My team was the first to move into this building in 2019. There was a lot of fanfare—open floor plans, standing desks, screens everywhere.

Now, we’ll be the last to leave.

And that has me thinking about endings. Not the big ones we plan for—but the quieter ones we don’t.

As I walked out of the building on Wednesday, I realized there will be a last time for everything in our work lives:

- The last time you work with a particular boss.

- The last time you sit with a particular team.

- The last time in a particular role—or even at a particular company.

Most of these last times go unnoticed.

There’s no announcement.

No marker.

No moment where you stop and say, “This is the last time.”

It just passes.

- A routine meeting that feels like any other.

- A conversation you assume you’ll have again.

- A system you stop using without much thought.

And then, at some point later, you realize it’s already behind you.

The pace of work doesn’t leave much room for reflection.

Calendars stay full. Deadlines don’t pause.

Business rarely slows down long enough for us to notice what’s ending.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

And maybe more importantly, not every ending should be rushed past.

Some deserve a little space.

A moment to acknowledge what it meant: who was part of it; what’s changing.

Not to dwell—but simply to recognize that something mattered.

Because when everything moves quickly, it’s easy to move on without ever really processing what just ended. With just a few weeks left in my career, I’ve found myself paying a little more attention.

Not in a dramatic way.

Just noticing things I might have rushed past before.

A conversation that lingers a little longer.

A walk out of the building that feels a little different.

A routine that, for the first time, doesn’t quite feel routine.

It’s easy to think of endings as something big—something obvious.

But more often, they’re quiet.

Maybe that’s the real reminder.

Not to try to capture every “last time”—that’s impossible.

But to recognize that the moments we assume will repeat…won’t always.

And to be just present enough to notice them while they’re still happening.

Make it a great week, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Richard

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