Find something you truly love to do and retire for the rest of your life.
—James Hartley Click Sr.
(father of Tucson RMIT Jim Click)
Based on what you have read so far, it should not surprise you that retirement is anathema to RMITs. RMITs believe that retirement is hazardous to their wealth and, even more important, hazardous to their health. Because their definition of success is about enjoying the journey, they simply can’t fathom a life of leisure, of daily golf games, or God forbid of sitting on the front porch watching life pass them by. Instead, they envision a future much the same as their past—a life filled with activity, business building, and continuing wealth-creation opportunities. When I asked coffee king Bob Stiller of Green Mountain Roasters about his thoughts on retirement, he shot back, “I don’t have any!” Sacramento’s Buzz Oates, who is in his eighties, says, “My life would be boring if I were to retire.” Ron Rice of Daytona Beach notes, “I think retire is something you do to your car every three years, period.” Like all of us, even RMITs have to re-tire their automobiles, but they certainly don’t plan to retire themselves. Stiller, Oates, Rice, and their fellow RMITs believe that retirement is not only hazardous to your wealth and health, but hazardous to your fun, too. When you love what you do, you can’t imagine suddenly not doing it any longer. Retirement is particularly detrimental to the self-identity of active and ambitious people. For RMITs, their work not only defines them but is their single greatest avocation as well.
“I want my tombstone to read, THIS IS HIS LAST REAL ESTATE DEAL,” says Wichita’s multibillionaire Phil Ruffin. “There is always another mountain to climb, another deal to do, another party to attend.” A high school dropout whose first job was flipping burgers, Ruffin knows something about deals, as well as about never slowing down to rest on your laurels. In his seventies now, Ruffin recently sold thirty-four of the forty-one acres he owns directly on the Las Vegas Strip for $41 million an acre. He also recently married a former Miss Ukraine, calls Donald Trump his best friend (The Donald was The Best Man at his wedding), and travels wherever the next deal takes him aboard his new $70 million Boeing Business Jet. “Retirement? Hell no. You just can’t do it. Why would you ever retire when you’re living this large and having this much fun?” Boston’s Pete Nicholas of Boston Scientific agrees: “Most great successes never believe they have achieved the ultimate end point. They are never really done.” In fact, this belief that they are never finished is the jet fuel that keeps their minds sharp and their private planes soaring.
Iowa’s pesticide prince, Dennis Albaugh, isn’t done, either. He enjoys the good life as a vintage car collector, golf lover (he has his own golf course in his backyard in Iowa), racehorse aficionado, and boater when he’s at his home in Florida. He says, “Retirement is not in the cards. I have created a life where I can do pretty much anything I want. Why would I ever retire?” Tucson’s Jim Click can’t imagine slowing down or giving up the fun of selling another car: “I love what I’m doing so much that I have been retired all my life,” he says. His father—who once poignantly said to his son, “Find something you love and retire for the rest of your life”—would be proud.
Eschewing retirement does not mean that RMITs are stuck in a static, lifelong mold, however. Instead they are masters of continual personal reinvention. They are not just serial entrepreneurs, they are serial change artists. Hollis, New Hampshire’s Pat McGovern still runs the company he started with the $5,000 proceeds from the sale of his car, but he has also invested $350 million in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. “Our research has conclusively proven that we are all capable of neurogenesis—the ability to grow new neurons. The problem with retirement is that, too often, people don’t continue to actively engage their brains and therefore don’t continue to grow those new neurons.” He adds, “I often run into friends of mine who have sold their companies and now have millions in cash, but aren’t finding retirement to be revitalizing. In this information age in which we live, where we are defined by what we do, to find ourselves suddenly with little to occupy our minds is simply not healthy. Learning promotes longevity.”
RMITs simply can’t imagine giving up what they love most, the wealth-creation mechanism that has made them the richest person in town. They also know that retirement is a relatively recent concept. It made sense in the industrial age, when brawn was often favored over brains; physical prowess over wisdom and experience. Retirement was not a part of the agricultural society; members of the sixty-plus generation were counted on to provide experience even when they could no longer physically plow a field. Likewise today’s information era. Knowledge, experience, and wisdom don’t dissipate as we approach our sixth, seventh, or eighth decades of life. For generations that have been defined by what they do, in fact, to suddenly not be engaged intellectually in a valuable endeavor seems antithetical to our very being. For RMITs, retirement isn’t just an antiquated concept, but a false expectation that society has placed upon older Americans, and often more nightmare than dream come true.
Certainly there comes a time in even the lives of RMITs when they can no longer do certain things as well as they could in their more youthful years. That doesn’t stop them from maximizing the skills they still have in new or different ventures. Bill Kellogg of Milwaukee is not running the giant department store Kohl’s today, but he is running his own venture capital business, investing in promising new entrepreneurs with powerful new ideas. He brings both his capital and his wisdom to these burgeoning enterprises. Kellogg is creating additional wealth while helping others achieve their goals. Bob Stone of Carrollton, Georgia, has turned the reins of his company, Systems and Methods, over to his children to run on a day-to-day basis, but that move allows him to spend more time building his real estate development business while still keeping his chairman-of-the-board eye on the family enterprise. He’s as busy as ever—just diversifying his wealth-creation portfolio. Chicago’s Sam Zell made his name and fortune in real estate, but he is now making his big moves in the world of legacy media (old media, as many call it today). No doubt this “professional opportunist” is growing new neurons as he learns a whole new industry and attempts to turn around the fortunes of some of America’s most legendary newspapers, owned by his Tribune Company.
The move from intellectual engagement and cultural excitement to the somnambulant lifestyle in the Sunbelt is not a choice RMITs make. Retirement may have made sense when folks were worn out after a lifetime of production-line labor, but today it simply does not pay, physically or fiscally. Don’t retire, reinvent.
• Retirement is hazardous to your health and your wealth.
• The brain needs continual stimulation—the greatest source for that sustenance is work.
• RMITs are in a constant state of reinvention.
• Love what you do and “retire” for the rest of your life doing it.