Gary & Max Sirak: Episode 762

Transcript

[0:00:29] JB: We typically think of retirement as what happens at the finish line but according to Gary Sirak, retirement is really just the beginning of another long race. If you’re not prepared to run it, you could literally be bored to death. Gary’s a financial analyst but this book isn’t about money, it’s about how you’ll spend your days to make it through that race, you’ll need to have a concrete plan. Gary and his son, Max Sirak have put together the new book, How to Retire and Not Die: The three P’s that will keep you young. On Author Hour today, they discuss what it means to have a plan and how to create it, how to develop and exercise passion and purpose and why the work we do before retirement tends to get a bad rap. Hi Author Hour listeners, I’m here today with Gary Sirak and Max Sirak, authors of How to Retire and Not Die: The Three P’s that Will Keep You Young. Gary and Max, thank you so much for being with us today.

[0:01:28] Gary & Max Sirak: Thank you for having us.

[0:01:30] MS: Yeah, thrilled to be here.

[0:01:32] JB: Before we dig in, can you all tell us a little bit about who you are and how this project came to be?

[0:01:40] Gary & Max Sirak: Sure, I’ve been in the financial services business, we own a third-generation financial services company in Canton Ohio and I’ve spent most of my career if not all of it helping people prepare for retirement and especially the money side of it but it became pretty apparent to me that retirement wasn’t all about money and there’s much more to retirement than how much you got in your bank and how much you’re getting every month. That really was how this book came into be and how Max and I started working on it.

[0:02:09] MS: Then, meantime, in your second book, The American Dream Revisited, I helped him finish one of the chapters in that book at place that he was stuck and from that experience, I think when it came time to write book number three, he decided to give me a call and see if I would help out with that.

[0:02:27] Gary & Max Sirak: It’s been a great experience and really nice because we get to talk a lot so it was fun. Max lives in Colorado, I live in Ohio, it allowed us to communicate a bunch more than we normally would have communicated.

[0:02:39] JB: That’s great. Also, somewhat related to some of the advice in this book about how to spend retirement time but we’ll get to that maybe in a little bit. Gary, you describe retirement as a marathon that you climb a mountain to get to, what does that mean? Well, everybody, you have a work career and it’s not a straight up line. You move from job to job, you might move towns, you might move states, countries, what I figured out when I talked to people is that no one’s career was a straight line. I mean, I can count them on one hand. To me, it seems like everybody’s climbing this marathon mountain to get to the top to retirement where they can plant their flag and kick back and have a cold one in their easy chair. That’s kind of how I saw the marathon and I said okay, at the finish line, everybody’s really happy and celebrating and that’s kind of what retirement looks like, at least from the outside in but not really the way it works. How does it work?

[0:03:36] Gary & Max Sirak: Well, then you have this interesting 26 year after you’ve climbed the mountain, you got this 26-year marathon that you have to run or live and basically, that’s kind of how this thing stretches out so you have this mountain, you’re climbing, when you get to the top, you think, “Oh it’s cool, I’m good” then you find out, “Wait, I got 26 years more to live of my life, maybe, what do I do? I don’t have any plan” and that’s really why I wrote the book. It’s to help those people figure out what that plan is.

[0:04:04] JB: Okay, great. You make it sound like retirement is hard.

[0:04:09] Gary & Max Sirak: What did I use, Max? It’s a full contact sport.

[0:04:11] MS: I don’t think that made it into the book.

[0:04:14] Gary & Max Sirak: No, it didn’t, but it is a full-time – didn’t you cut that? Darn. Anyway, I like that line. Yeah, it’s a full contact sport, it’s not kids play. All of a sudden, you go from five days a week working, six, maybe to all of a sudden, you have seven days off, it’s a big difference. You were from two weeks’ vacation to 52 weeks. You got to figure out how to fill that time and so many people, most people haven’t filled it at all.

[0:04:38] JB: What’s the danger of not planning appropriately for what to do during retirement?

[0:04:44] Gary & Max Sirak: Well, throughout my career, the results are rather devastating. I mean, if you want to know why I really wrote the book, I got tired of visiting people in hospitals and friends of mine in just really bad situations and that whole terminology being bored to death isn’t a mistake. That’s not a – it’s a real game. I mean, you can be bored to the point where you don’t have anything to do and the next thing you know, you get sick and you're going to doctors and yeah, you just need to have something more in your life.

[0:05:11] JB: That would be the common mistake people make is that they don’t plan.

[0:05:14] Gary & Max Sirak: Correct.

[0:05:16] JB: You all argue that work meets certain needs. What are those and how do you advise people to make sure those needs continue to be met after they stop working?

[0:05:28] MS: Yeah, I think that work gets kind of a bum rep, right? We scapegoat it for a lot of things, we blame it for a lot of our aggravation and frustration and of course, it is and can contain those but it also gives us a lot and it gives us structure, it gives us social connection, it gives us money. Obviously, there is a sense of identity and value and worth that come from work and for people who are lucky and fortunate in what they’ve done for their jobs. There’s also passion that can come through work and a purpose. The thing is, just because you stop working, doesn’t mean that your needs for those things are going to go away and so, you need to have a plan to how you're going to meet those.

[0:06:15] JB: Okay, well, you mentioned passion, purpose and a plan there and these are the three P’s, right?

[0:06:22] MS: Correct.

[0:06:22] JB: Tell us about these three P’s and why they’ll help keep us young?

[0:06:27] Gary & Max Sirak: The three P’s really are key to the whole game. If you do not have purpose and you don’t have passion, you get up in the morning and you don’t have anything to do and that’s really a bad way to start your day. Having some purpose, having something you want to do for yourself and that’s the passion part, purpose is what you do for other people. Where I find a lot of people who come to see me, literally, think. “Oh well, I’m going to babysit” I said, “Great”, for your grandson. I said, “Wonderful, how many days a week?” “Well, one” I said, “Okay, what are you going to do with the other six?” They’ve got to have some reason to get up in the morning and get moving and they need a real plan, something that they can live by because they’ve been working off of plans their whole life on schedules, to me or similar to plans. Your time is set for you, well, all of a sudden, you time this and say you need to do that. It’s critically important to a healthy retirement and a happy one.

[0:07:21] MS: Yeah, we use a really simple definition of passion and purpose that my dad just mentioned, right? Passion is the stuff that you do for yourself and purpose is what you do that contributes for others and we have a handful of exercises to kind of sort of help people get in touch with both of those things and places where they might be able to find those things and then we have a scaffolding that we recommend for your schedule. A real simple way to build that plan that is all important.

[0:07:53] JB: Yeah, let’s get into the how. Although, I guess, before you dig into the how, you also talk about mindset, we can talk about that for a minute here if you want as well. How can we get into the right retirement mindset?

[0:08:07] Gary & Max Sirak: Wow, I have seen so many side of that curve. What happens is, I meet with somebody and I just had someone in yesterday and we were discussing how they felt about retirement and actually, they were pretty glum about it. They were excited not to be working but they weren’t very excited about what they weren’t going to do because they didn’t know what it was going to be and all of a sudden, they were – I could see it, their mood change quite a bit and we had a discussion about mindset and one of them so I said, “Listen, you have to have a pretty positive attitude about this because it carries over. If you’re negative about being retired and you’re unhappy and you’re bored and all that stuff” I said, “That’s going to carry over and not going to be healthy for you.” I think having a positive mindset about this is a really a big deal.

[0:08:50] MS: Yeah, I think a lot of people, anytime you're dealing with an ending, right? There’s grief that goes with what’s been lost or taken or what you are leaving behind but there’s also the opportunity of new beginnings and the creation that is inherent in those endings and so where you put your mind matters. Are you retiring form something or to something? Carol Dweck and The Growth Mindset, I think are valid places to start like you’ve got to have your mind right if you want to have a good retirement.

[0:09:26] JB: Tell us more about the growth mindset?

[0:09:28] MS: Retirement is a marathon, like we said, there’s some connotations to running a marathon, it’s not easy, it takes a little bit of work. Some miles are going to be more difficult than others and some will feel like a breeze. It’s a matter of thinking that you can do it and that making little bits of progressed every step, being more important than getting it perfect and getting it right and understanding that it’s a process and that if you continued to practice, you will get better at retirement but to expect that you’re going to be great at it from go, I mean, that’s just not how the world works. Rarely are we ever good at anything the first time we try it.

[0:10:08] JB: Yeah, if you could just get my six-year-old to understand that.

[0:10:14] Gary & Max Sirak: Yeah, that pretty much hits it right on the head. I’ll give you a great example, there’s a friend of mine who decided to learn how to play guitar and he retired and he’s been doing YouTube guitar lessons and he asked me if I would come over and listen to him play his guitar because no one else would and “I said sure, I would do that.” I went over and afterwards and he said, “What do you think?” I said, “Well, you have a lot of time” I said you should use it on YouTube and I said, “You know, you’ve made great progress because at least you know where the strings are” but I said, “But you got a lot of work to do” and he laughed and said, “You know what? It’s kind of cool. I am having fun and I’m getting better every day” and I said, “That’s a great attitude.” Two years later, he’s still not any good but he is still having fun and he is getting better every day.

[0:10:54] JB: That’s great. Okay, so how do we put together a plan? What are some of the exercises and tools you suggest people use?

[0:11:03] Gary & Max Sirak: The first thing I do is trying to help them figure out what it is they’d like to do and I use something called the wish list and that came out of me sitting in an exercise one day listening to somebody talk and I was actually thinking about something I really want to be doing in that lecture. I kind of thought about, “Oh wish list. I wish I was doing this instead of working.” That’s really how that became a factor in the book. There is a whole bunch of things throughout life that I thought, “Oh, I’d like to do that. If I was working I’d do this, I would do that” and that really was one of the first pieces.

[0:11:36] MS: There is also something that we called the retirement key, which is exercise where you look at your life and you step back and you break things down into three categories, what do you like, what do you love and what do you hate and by going through those exercises and filling out those lists, that begins to put you on a path towards filling out your plan. You know, we recommend that again, we’re not trying to make you too busy in retirement. You are supposed to have enough time to enjoy it, so really all we’re hoping to get people to do is schedule three different activities each day. Three steps, three steps a day that’s all you need and if you are smart and you can get those steps to meet all of those needs we talked about with work, then you know, that’s the path to that happy long successful retirement with any luck.

[0:12:31] JB: Making lists and deciding to do three things a day, these things aren’t difficult. It sounds like the problem is just that we aren’t doing them.

[0:12:42] Gary & Max Sirak: That would be very correct. It’s kind of interesting how many people and actually the exact same reaction you just had, “Oh that’s not that hard to do.” I said, “Okay, try it for a while and tell me how that works” and then they come back and say, “Well, that’s way harder than I thought it was” and part of this is because you actually have to put effort into it and you have to sit and think and you have to decide what really fits your needs and meets your wants and in paper it sounds simple but in reality, it does do some – you have to do some deep dives I think.

[0:13:10] MS: I think too, it goes back to the whole mountain and marathon, right? So many people view retirement as the finish line and haven’t even thought for a second about what they’re going to do when they get there. “What do you mean when I get there? I’m going to be retired, it’s going to be great” and that’s not always how it goes.

[0:13:28] JB: Can we talk a little bit about purpose? That’s a real buzz word these days and everyone is hearing how important it is to figure out what your purpose is. How do you actually do that?

[0:13:41] Gary & Max Sirak: I’ll let you handle that Max.

[0:13:43] MS: Okay, so very kind of you. You know, purpose, right? Like you said, it is a big buzz word and there is a lot of buzz around it and rightfully so. It is one of the three piece that you need but I think that it doesn’t have to be this huge archetypal unified concept of like, “This one thing is my purpose.” We break it down to just making sure you are doing stuff for other people that helps other people and so that can be filled in a myriad ways, right? There’s whether you are volunteering or you could be mentoring someone or you could be babysitting or you could be sitting with a friend or you could be helping a loved one. I think we could get so stuck into this, you know, these lofty highfalutin ideas of purpose that we sort of miss the forest for the trees, when really it is just about making sure you are connected to others and helping them.

[0:14:46] Gary & Max Sirak: It’s very interesting. I’ve had so many people that I’ve come across who have looked for what their purpose is and found it kind of by accident. I had one client of mine who was very good at baking and realized there is a whole shortage of baked goods in some of these assisted living places. She would bake and bring cookies over or brownies or whatever they were and another one got involved with meals on wheels and just said, “Wow, there’s people that don’t have food. I’m going to get into that” and she drove for meals on wheels for a couple of days a week. I have another guy that, his purpose, he’s a communications guy, loves to talk to people so he found himself as a starter at a golf course and I asked him about it and he said, “You know, Gary said they’re always late, they are always slow. My purpose is to keep these people okay and happy while they are waiting to tee off” and he said, “And so I have jokes and I talk to them” and he said, “It’s really interesting but I really enjoy that and I get up every morning and I think oh, this would be a fun day. I will meet someone new” and so it is different ways to find purpose. It doesn’t have to be earthshattering. It just has to be something that like Max said, you are doing for someone else.

[0:15:48] JB: That’s helpful, thank you. Well, I think it can be intimidating to some people. I mean, my life’s purpose, it sounds like something a hero in a movie would set out to discover on a journey to the gods or something.

[0:16:03] Gary & Max Sirak: Yeah but they’re not quite that complex. Yeah but people make it pretty – I mean, there is some pretty heavy duty conversations that I’ve sat and listened to and I say, “Oh okay” and they say, “What’s your purpose?” I said, “You know, I kind of like to go to – I like to eat barbecued ribs.” I mean, they are looking at me like, you know? But I was kind of making light of it because the reality of it is people do take it very, very serious and I think it’s important but I don’t think it is critical to the fact that you are trying to save the world.

[0:16:27] MS: Talk about a high bar, right? Like what is this unifying theory of my life and what I’m here for? You know, that’s – how do you even begin? I think it also fits into something we wanted to do with this book is to keep it like a little more lighthearted in tone because yeah, thinking about that stuff in that way will trip you up and probably not going to lead to that happy successful retirement that you want.

[0:16:53] JB: Well, speaking of the lighthearted nature of this book, what was it like? I guess Max, I’ll ask you to work with your dad in this kind of way.

[0:17:01] MS: Super funny in that I gave him a draft of the book and let’s call it March or I got the draft – okay, I gave him a draft of the book that was not funny, that was not humorous and not tongue and cheek and he returned the entire manuscript to me with one note, “Hey, can we make this funnier?” and luckily, that happened on let’s call it March 15th of 2020. Given the year that we had, I had a nice fun project to work on, how can I make this book funnier?

[0:17:33] Gary & Max Sirak: It was a little darker than I wanted so we made it a little lighter than we kind of softened it a bit.

[0:17:39] JB: Yeah, well I think it’s been effective. Has it been difficult to sort of give over all of your ideas in your words to your child?

[0:17:48] Gary & Max Sirak: Well, that was interesting too. We did how many hours of interviews Max?

[0:17:54] MS: Oh, I bet there was 24, 26 hours of interviews.

[0:17:59] Gary & Max Sirak: It was brutal on Max, pretty easy on me. I just had to talk so Max would ask me questions and I would go off and wherever I was going off and they eventually said, “Hey dad, can we talk about this?” I said, “Sure” so we did a lot of conversations and quite frankly, it was a lot of fun because we were able to communicate and discuss things and concepts and I learned a lot from Max. I mean Max did a ton of research on this and he would bring things up I had no idea anything about this, “Oh, I like that. Let’s put that in the book.” He said, “Well, I already did.” I said, “Good” so we had lots of conversations like that.

[0:18:29] JB: Obviously, one of the big takeaways here is that you want your readers to actually make a plan and to that and the book will take them through that process including the exercises and by the end of the book, your readers will have created plans. What else do want readers to walk away with after putting down this book?

[0:18:49] Gary & Max Sirak: That there is a really bright light at the end of this retirement tunnel. I mean the reality of it is you get to retirement that there is a light there and there’s a door to open as Max referred to it. You know, something stops and something opens and there’s a whole bunch of possibilities. I mean, realistically that’s what I’m after. I just want people to look at this in a different way because so many come in there so focused on money and they really don’t get it and then once they get it, there’s this real shock to their system and I just want to let people know there’s an answer to that shock. It doesn’t have to be that way, it can work out really well if you spend some time.

[0:19:25] MS: Yeah, I would add that pie in the sky, we mentioned the importance of finding a good retirement role model and so with any luck, if someone reads through this book and does the exercises we recommend and really takes the time with it and gets good at being retired that they can then become the retirement role model for their peers and sort of pass along what they’ve learned and help other people retire and not die.

[0:19:54] JB: All right. Well, Gary and Max, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. Again listeners, the book is, as you said, How to Retire and Not Die: The three P’s that will keep you young. Gary and Max, in addition to reading the book, where can people go to learn more about you and your work?

[0:20:08] Gary & Max Sirak: garysirak.com.

[0:20:11] MS: That would be the best place.

[0:20:12] Gary & Max Sirak: That would be the only place actually. It’s interesting, are there others? No, that’s it so that would be the place to go, yep.

[0:20:19] JB: That’s Gary Sirak.

[0:20:24] Gary & Max Sirak: Yes.

[0:20:25] JB: Dot com.

[0:20:25] Gary & Max Sirak: Yes.

[0:20:26] JB: All right, thank so much.

[0:20:28] Gary & Max Sirak: Hey, thank you.

[0:20:29] MS: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

[0:20:30] Gary & Max Sirak: Yeah, it’s really been fun. Thank you.

[0:20:34] JB: Thanks for joining us for this episode of The Author Hour Podcast. You can get Gary Sirak and Max Sirak’s book, How to Retire and Not Die: The three P’s that will keep you young, on Amazon. You can also find a transcript of this episode as well as previous episodes on our website, authorhour.co. Make sure to subscribe to The Author Hour Podcast for more interviews and insights into life-changing books.