Richard Banfield: Why Wait For Retirement?
At 54, Richard Banfield is entering what he calls his “second harvest.” He’s industry-famous in the digital design space, having authored five books, founded an agency, and routinely given talks at conferences all over the world. His career is at a moment when most people press on, collecting more accolades and high salaries before stopping to retire.
Partly accelerated by a tragic loss, Richard is doing the opposite. He’s transitioned into flexible advisory and fractional executive roles, taking what he calls “thin-sliced” retirements throughout the year.
We cover…
How to embrace “thin-sliced” retirement and remove “what ifs” from your mind.
Earning money in the U.S. and spending it in Europe.
The agency we have when something bad happens to us.
How Richard’s approach to life results in an unconventional educational experience for his two children.
You’ll enjoy Richard’s story if you have…
…seen success in your field, but are ready to change the role work has in your life.
…doubts about the idea of conventional retirement and want some other options.
…children and want to bring them along for sabbatical adventures.
…just moved to the other side of 40.
Tell me about this stage of life you are in. You’ve called them “life experiments.” Is it a sabbatical? And are you in the middle of it now?
It’s all of those things. Right now, I'm experiencing what I’m calling “thin-sliced retirement.” Instead of taking one big sabbatical or a long retirement at the end of your career, you instead take a slice of it and you insert it into your existing life. Instead of taking one big six month thing or a year long thing, you take a six week thing and then a two week thing and then a three week thing. Between that, you do regular stuff like working or taking care of family.
I spoke to a guy yesterday and he's like, “I've been working the same job forever, I'm retiring next year and I'm going to go play golf.” I happen to think that that's also like turning the hourglass upside down and saying, “now I'm ready to die.”
You've got a lot of evidence to show that as soon as somebody is retired, they’re more likely to die.
We all have stories of the person in our lives who stopped working and then didn't last too long. Because retirement can be a tacit acknowledgement that they're disengaging from the world.
Exactly. Primarily because they're lonely, right? As soon as you stop connecting with other human beings, the only thing you really have to talk about is the aches and pains that you have.
And then the aches and pains become the only thing that you can insert into a conversation. “My back is so bad, I can't do this. I used to be able to play golf, but now I can't do that.”
And then people don't want to hang around you because you're just a crotchety old complainer. And then eventually the only people you'll interact with are the medical people that you pay to take care of you.
Any time you are taking care of other people or yourself through a relationship, things are getting better. Any time you're not and you're getting more insulated, that's the worst thing you can do to somebody.
If you are trying to punish somebody, what do you do? You put them in solitary confinement. Retirements become self-imposed imprisonments. My approach is to thin-slice the retirement into opportunities that look like that, but aren't as permanent or lonely or dysfunctional.
A friend of mine, he's 35. He took almost a year off to learn how to play the classical piano and learn Spanish. So that's all he did, for eight hours a day. And then he came back to work. He had a thing to do and he had a community to connect around that. For example, he was actually performing with other people.
There’s a version of that that looks different for each person. And that's the experiment everyone needs to run for themselves: what's good for me is not going to be good for you.
Sounds like you’re down on the idea of retirement.
That's probably what you've discovered in your sabbatical conversations already. The old idea of: you work, then you stop working, and then you retire — That idea is probably only good for a small group of people. And then the system that organizes itself around that idea is broken as well.
Will my children even be able to get social security? 401ks are a bit of a joke. So, what does it look like to be 50?
The way I'm thinking about it is what I call the “second harvest.” And the second harvest is when you had the first 50 years of your life or the first 40 years of your life, whenever you start to experience midlife crisis-type feelings.
Instead of thinking, this is the top of that curve and now I'm on the way down, you think, “No, I'm only halfway and I'm going to turbo charge it. Now I've got wisdom, I've got network, I've got friends, I've got money, I've got ideas.”
And then you start leveraging those things and trying to figure out how you are going to be more connected, more creative, more romantic, all the things that you think you're not going to be able to do.
It’s redefining middle and old age.
Exactly. The truth is, things have changed. I'm 54. You know who was 54?
Dorothy on Golden Girls.
That's what a 54-year-old looked like 20, 30 years ago to society. Society said, “That's what your 50s are. You move to Florida, you look like that, you behave like that. You interact with others. Like you dress like that.”
God help us.
Dorothy from Golden Girls.
You said that the “thin-sliced” approach “looks different for each person.” How did you approach that discovery? How did you figure out what worked for you?
I come out of the product design world and I spend most of the years that I was working, creating products, either for other people who are working in companies where I did that. What I discovered is the design thinking design creation process starts with a question. What is your hypothesis? What is the problem you're trying to solve?
And then from there, what you do is you go through a phase called “divergent thinking,” where you come up with as many crazy ideas as you can. It’s kind of like brainstorming. And then from there, you start to pick a handful of those things and say, “Which of these could I experiment with? How would we be able to test my hypothesis or the assumptions that I have?” And then you go and do that.
In a design sprint, you do that in the space of four or five days. So it's a really, really quick exercise. And so what I try to do is apply that to my life. For example, something that a lot of people think about is, “Could I go and live in another country?” That’s a cool and interesting idea, but is it realistic? Could I actually do that?
Instead of moving over there and giving everything up in the states and starting from scratch, and going through all that kind of sad goodbyes thing, I said, “We're just going to move to Europe for three months.” 90 days is the length of time allowed by a Schengen visa. And so we knew that we could do that.
We spent 90 days traveling in Europe and we went to Portugal and then we went to Spain and we're doing these over long periods of time, like three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, like really getting into it, having to rent an apartment, go to the local grocery store, get your hair cut, do the laundry at the local laundromat, buy the things that you would need to do buy if you were just like running a normal household. And we started to learn if this is something I wanted to do. We had to answer what living there is like, beyond the vacation experience.
The design sprint or the design thinking process was really something I just applied to a bunch of different assumptions I had. And then over the period of years, I would create these experiments and each experiment would give me more data and more data would then allow me to say, that's something I can do.
Or when I heard somebody saying, “My God, I'd love to live in Greece!” I'd be like, “I actually have an answer to that already. I don't need to do that. I don't even think like that anymore because I know that I've come up with an answer to the question.”
Where I landed there is that I want to make money in the U.S. but I want to spend it in Europe. Maybe one day we do move there, but at least we'll have more knowledge and more understanding.
The idea being that the “thin slices” focus you? Because you’re removing “what ifs” from your mind?
100%. So the idea that a question or a concern or whatever it might be is living rent free in my mind, that drives me nuts.
Now, there are some things you're not going to be able to find answers to, and that's okay as well. The real arc of my story is that I was married to Kristy. And Kristy was very ill with cancer and she has subsequently passed away.
That experience escalated my attempts to answer questions via thin-sliced retirement. Because suddenly this beautiful 37-year-old wife of mine was no longer there. If that can happen to a 37 year old, that could happen to anybody. And then my best friend lost his wife as well. She was also 37.
Bad things can happen to wonderful people. And so that really made me think about this stuff a lot more and made me want to get the answers. A lot of the questions that I have are things like “Could I have a good relationship in the future? Could that even be possible? Who's going to settle down with a middle-aged guy with kids?” There are lots of questions that you have in your mind that are just living there rent free.
This process of life experiments doesn’t necessarily mean traveling the world. After Kristy’s death. I actually chose to be single and celibate for two years following that. I've never done that before.
I thought that, given the wounds that I've just sustained, I should just be single. I should be celibate. I should not even look out. I don't even want to answer that question. So sometimes you might have a question like, “could I ever love again or could I ever be in a relationship again?”
You might want to postpone that for a deliberate reason to experience something else. And what happens when you're single and celibate for a long time is that you stop looking for somebody else to answer your questions for you.
There's nobody to blame, right? There's only you when the dishwasher isn't unpacked. There's only you when the bill's unpaid. There's only you when the kids are frustrated with you or not doing well at school. And so you have to deal with all that stuff. And then that prepares you for answering the question that you may have had two years ago, which is, “Could I be in a relationship?” Well, now you've got better answers.
I'm a better person because I've started to learn these things about myself. A sabbatical can also be an internal journey; it doesn't just have to be backpacking around Africa or something like that. It could be, “I'm going to take a sabbatical from the things that I'm familiar with and live the things that are uncomfortable or live the things that are unanswered and see where that takes me.”
When some people take a sabbatical it's because they voluntarily remove something from their life, often their career or work. But in this case, your journey was catalyzed by a death. By grief. That is something that happened to you, and not by choice. Do you think that makes a difference in this time of self-discovery?
Sure it did. When I was younger, I literally put on my backpack and hitchhiked through Africa as a sort of experiment. And that was a choice. I knew I could always go home if it wasn’t working out.
When something like a death happens to you there’s no going home. There’s no stopping that. You will experience the loss of a loved one.
And so sometimes these things happen to you. Sometimes you're that person who was hit by a truck or had a rocket land in your backyard. Bad shit happens to good people. And it does feel different. I think when you're choosing these things and then they're happening to you, there's a different sense of agency.
However, you start to realize that the agency exists in how you respond to that. And this is kind of Viktor Frankl stuff. If you are being owned by anything, it's the ideas in your head.
That's really kind of what was going on with me. I'm like, my God, my wife is dying. What will happen to our kids? To me? To my life?
And then I was like, those are all judgments, those are all choices. You don't think it's a choice, but it is a choice. Like it's happening to you, but you are also choosing to judge it.
What advice do you give to someone grieving as they explore what to do next or how to take control?
It's very contextual and very depends on the person and what kind of grief they've experienced.
There are two major things to consider: One is that grief is going to be very different for each person, but the consequences are almost the same. You can drown in two inches of water or you can drown in 200 feet of water. It's still drowning. You may have significant grief because you lost a child or a wife or a husband. Or you may have significant grief because you lost your job.
Now on paper, those things don't look like the same thing, but depending on who you are and what you're carrying around with you and what kind of traumas exist inside you already, you could be triggered by just about anything. Drowning is drowning. Grief is grief.
It's going to be different for everybody, but the consequences are still the same. The depth of it is still felt at that person's core.
And then the second thing is when you're thinking about recovering from grief — a lot of the advice that I got was really bad. Like the advice was, “You've got to kind of find a way to suppress that or to diminish it or to make it go away.”
Diminishing grief or diminishing pain isn't the answer. What you've got to do is expand yourself so that that thing that exists looks relatively smaller than how big you've expanded yourself. And what that means is opening your heart. You've got to find forgiveness for yourself and for others. You've got to find love for yourself.
You've got to bring that universal love to a larger, more substantial place so that the grief doesn't take up all the oxygen in the room. Your grief can't be the biggest piece of furniture. It has to be diminished not because it's getting smaller, but because you are expanding in size.
How has your life experiments and “thin-sliced retirement” approach affected your parenting style?
I told my children to have a wandering approach for the first decade of their adult life. When you finish high school, you should just go and do whatever the hell you want to. As we say, “Fuck around and find out.” Go and spend a couple of years, you know, traveling the world, go and work in some places that maybe you wouldn't necessarily get.
A family trip to the Dolomites in Northern Italy.
Go and do the things that are odd or strange or unlikely to make sense when you're older. I drove limos, I worked as a security guard, I was a scuba diving instructor, I worked at a game reserve. I did all these things that didn't really pay well and weren't necessarily the best career choices, but they created the most incredible library of experiences and stories and narratives in my mind that I could then apply later and start connecting the dots between the different parts of the universe that we live in.
It was more than “I left school. I grew up in a privileged neighborhood and then I went to a private school and I went to a private college and I got a privileged job.”
We shouldn't think of our life as linear. Instead, think of all the things that you think you want to do when you retire. Think of that golf you want to play, that fishing trip you want to do. Try and figure out how to do that upfront. Figure out how to thin-slice that continually into your existence where you build your life around the idea that you're going to be traveling or build your life around your hobbies or build your life around the people that you want to be around.
Did you ever feel “behind” your peers?
I grew up with really supportive parents and they were the kind of parents who said, “If you want to do something, do it.” When my friends were getting their first jobs as a senior director of something, I was like, “I think I'll just start a company and call myself CEO.”
I don't have to ask somebody to make me the CEO. I'll just make myself a CEO. And that has always been my approach. Like, I shouldn't be an author. I'm dyslexic. I'm not a particularly good writer. I don't really like writing the process. It's hard for me. And yet somehow I've managed to publish five books.
If you decide that you're an author, then what happens is that the universe starts conspiring to make you the thing you are. Whose permission are you waiting for? If you're a writer, do you need a certificate from a good school to tell you that you're a writer? Do you need a qualification? Do you need certification? Do you need validation? Or do you just need to convince yourself?
Three of the five books, written without an official certificate.
I call that domestic propaganda. The lies that we tell ourselves are the worst lies because we are the ones who decide, I need my mom to tell me that I'm okay. I need my professor to tell me that I'm qualified. I need my peers to justify what I'm doing. I’ve had people tell me that “I'm embarrassed to tell my friends what I'm doing because they'll laugh at me. They'll think that starting my jewelry business is too cutesy.” Like, what are you eight years old? Fuck it, go and do it anyway.
How have you handled the financial aspect of this kind of life experiment and these different approaches to your career?
I spent most of my early adulthood not really managing my money. It was coming in one door and I'm going out the other door. But when I started my own business, I had to internalize that this is not always my money. I've got to take care of investors' money. I've got to take care of payroll. I've got to take care of the cash flow. That matured my approach to money.
A very significant portion of my income goes into investments. Every $10,000 that comes in, probably like five or six thousand goes into like ETFs and stuff like that. And then I live a very basic life. Otherwise, like I spend most of my money on travel and the stuff that I want to do, hanging out with people.
I've got a mortgage and a car payment and kids to take to school and all that kind of stuff, then you have to have some kind of nest egg. It really depends on the season that you're in.
You bring your children with you for some of these experiments that involve traveling. How do you do that and still ensure they do things like go to school?
It's really, really simple. Don't let school get in the way of your education. That's what my dad said to me. And that's what I've carried with me. It's really easy to explain to the teachers of your children that you are going to be in London or Amsterdam or Bruges and we're going to be going to these incredible places and seeing these incredible things.
If there is a teacher out there that says, “I'd rather they do-ray-me in a circle on the carpet in an elementary school than see an art exhibition at the London portrait gallery,” then that teacher is the problem.
The goal here is education. The goal here is knowledge. The school allows you to take your kids out of school if there's a good reason. You just have to communicate that. At the beginning of the year you say “Listen, we're going to be doing a lot of traveling. These are the kinds of experiences we're going to have. These are the kinds of things that have already happened.”
My eight year old already looks like that person that we're trying to form. He's way ahead of the other kids in terms of his literacy, his ability to just navigate the world. He's got this kind of autodidactic mentality. His approach is that he’s learning and teaching himself the whole time instead of just sitting like a dumb robot in a classroom waiting to be told when to learn and how to learn.
The teachers don't always love it, but they get it. And then when they see the results, they're like, well, that's incredible.
I went into this conversation not knowing whether you were going to describe this as a phase of your life or an approach you are taking for the rest of your life. Sounds like the latter, is that accurate?
Yes. I also reserve the right to change my mind. I'm working on a project right now which could become a really big thing and require a lot of my time. And in that case, I will reevaluate what I need to do and have that conversation with myself and the family. I have strong principles, I have strong values but I'm also open to new data and new information and new knowledge.
And when I acquire that new knowledge, I update my principles, I update my values and go like, this was working, it no longer works, we should change something. Or this feels like the season to do these things, or this feels like the season to do these other things.
The things that ultimately trip you up are the narratives in your head, which mostly you've invented based on what other people have said to you.