Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Midlife Happiness project, where we share inspiring stories to bring some happy into your life.
Well, we are here with my friend Scott. He is a recently retired CEO. He has four children. He has a son and a daughter. But then he also has two stepsons, and he's happily married. And I'm so delighted that you could come on this show, Scott.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Well, Sarah, what an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Absolutely. So let's just get down to it. What is your thing, the thing that you have invited, embraced into your life since becoming an empty nester that's really brought you happiness?
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm going to call it giving back. And to me, that's a way to apply my experience and contacts to help nonprofits, universities, individuals, companies, kind of my local business community. So I do that through board service, through volunteer nonprofit board service, through some young leader mentoring and working with students in the university here as well. So it's something that I focused on as I was facing this kind of empty nest. And what would life after retirement look like? So I call it giving back.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: And let me ask you this. Did you plan for this before you retired?
Some people find themselves, you know, they retire and then they have this sort of identity crisis, and then they start reinventing things or switching it up. Is this something that you anticipated? So you started before you retired?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I did. It's something that I was exposed to earlier in my career. Some of it just working with boards, having coaches and mentors, obviously people that have done really great things and you learn from them. They help quite a bit. And when I was at Hydroflask in particular, we had a really strong board, but none of us had built a brand before, a consumer brand, an outdoor brand. So one of the things we decided to do was, let's go recruit people that have done that. And we ended up with three awesome advisory board members that have built brands like the North Face, Mountain Hardware, Timberland, Smartwool, Nike, super great people. And I learned so much about how do you build a brand that really connects and is authentic with consumers, and how do you have a culture and a healthy workplace that reinforces that brand? And, you know, what does leadership look like over the course of those years? That a brand is growing. And so from both the board we had that were successful tech entrepreneurs and very, very smart individuals with our advisors, I got so much out of that by being on the other side of the table. And I thought, wow, if I could give back like that, if I could help CEO's that are earlier in their journey. That seems really fulfilling. That seems really interesting to me. And I had the opportunity to kind of dip my toes in the water. So after Hydroflask was acquired, the whole leadership team stayed on, including me. And yet I was approached by a younger entrepreneur to start an outdoor subscription box company. And he said, hey, would you join our board? And I got approval from the parent company that had acquired us. I said, I think this will make me a better leader to get out of my reality and work with another leader. And then shortly after that, I was invited to join the advocacy and advisory board of the branch campus of Oregon State University here in Bend, Oregon. And we had helped provide some seed capital to the school to create a four year outdoor products degree program.
And so they're like, well, you have a vested interest in our university. Come join our board, work with students, work with the faculty, help lobby, if you will, and Salem for funding to grow our campus. And so it's just been great in terms of getting out of your own head, of your own world, being inspired and impressed by young leaders and just the talent they have and the passion they have, and then the students of these programs and our future leaders, just how they see the world and their courage and so forth. It's just great. So, been fulfilling as well.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: So I love this in that you're giving back, and obviously that makes you happy, brings you joy that you can share your expertise, your experience with these people, but especially with regard to this younger community, it sort of sounds to me like you're also learning from them.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's how they see the world's different. You know, they're just, this is the workforce of today, and they don't. They're just. They have different views. They face a different world than we face. So, of course it's going to be different. Times have changed. There's the prevalence of technology. There's just. It seems like a crisis of the week is unfolding in our worlds together. So, yeah, just seeing how they do things differently and how they want to lead, who they want to work for, who they want to follow, what they're passionate about. And so, yeah, I'm learning a lot, and it's great. It makes me a better board member in working with CEO's and leadership teams on. Okay, how do you create that kind of culture that is inclusive of multiple generations and gets the most out of the opportunity and your workforce and the times are different. Times are very different nowadays.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: Absolutely. So the other thing that you and I were chatting about and I think you can offer an interesting perspective. You're clearly somebody who just doesn't like the idea of retirement.
It's more of a perhaps transition. And you had used the term downshifting, and I thought that this was fascinating. And a lot of people can relate to this. It's very scary to retire and sort of leave this sort of life that they had where they were in a position of being a decision maker and utilizing a very specific set of skills. And, you know, this was such a huge part of their life that the idea of just sort of pulling the plug on that and, you know, moving to Florida and playing golf might be most people's sort of game plan, but I think when push comes to shove and it actually happens for a lot of people, it's kind of disappointing. So can you speak to this?
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Absolutely. What a great topic. And I have to just acknowledge that you get to a point where through luck, privilege, great support from people around you, and obviously hard work, you have this opportunity to downshift, I call it. So retire, I think it's a prior word, but there's a lot of go still left in you. So what do you do and what does that look like? And I remember sitting down, I was meeting with my primary care physician for like an annual checkup. Quick funny story on this. He's like, so how's it going? What do you do for work and how you healthy? Are you happy? I said, by the way, I'm probably two years out from, you know, kind of a planned retirement from this role I've been working on. We've sold this company. I've been running it for a couple years. I'm helping to integrate it into this larger company. We've agreed I can stay three years. I agreed to stay four years. Everything's going great. Right off in the sunset. He goes, well, what are you going to do? I said, well, you know, I want to travel. I really like to get better at golf, and I want to snowboard and mountain bike a lot more, too. And he just sighed. He looked at me and goes, let me tell you about a friend of mine. He was early at Microsoft. He's had a great career. He retired some time ago, and he just wanted to travel and work on his golf. And he's battling depression nine months later. Because what's missing is all that meaning of purpose and a calling and talent and community and connection. You can't just only play. He goes, you're going to be missing out on something. We had a nice long chat. It was probably like 45 minutes. When was the last time you saw your doctor hang out for 45 minutes? Right, right, exactly. So I'm like, this guy's amazing. I love my doctor. So a year later, I'm like calling the schedule, I'm like, I want to go see doctor, so. And so they said, oh, honey, he retired. I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. Like, he wasn't just talking to me. He was trying to figure out his own game plan after seeing a friend go off into this would be great, this would be great. And it's like not great in terms of that's all.
And so for me, it didn't help that I probably did focus more on my golf game and I got worse. So that was like not very fulfilling.
But again, like I said, I had a few, I had a board and a volunteer board I was already on and I'd seen the impact that boards can have and board members and I'd been approached by some younger CEO's to do some paid mentoring and was getting a lot out of that.
I was lucky, I guess. I had some of this there. I had this moment with this physician to kind of wake me up, you know, that there's maybe danger ahead, if you will, and to not lose part of your life where maybe some of your talents and some of your purpose and some of your inspiration comes from. Just find a way to make sure that's part of your ongoing life. So that was great. And like I said, it's just different kind of challenge in this transition.
My life was very structured before. It's like Monday through Friday, seven or 08:00 a.m. Till whenever you go home and a lot of travel, a lot of thinking about a company and a challenge and what have you to a lot of variety and less structure. Some things just are set and scheduled and there's that. And there's a lot of ad hoc things that happen too.
Making sure that you identify like what is that that you want to hold on to and being open minded to.
It's really rewarding not to have it be the focus of me, but others.
But yeah, it's just different. So I think I'm still learning to be good at this. It's not as easy as you would think. For a variety of reasons. It can be a challenge, this transition.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Now, since you are doing some of these mentoring with younger people, has this had some sort of impact or has changed maybe your perspective with your own kids because theyre young adults who are starting off. And I ask this because personally, for me, when my kids left home, I did what many moms did, had a sort of, again, an identity crisis. Well, if I'm not their mom, two, four, seven, then what am I? But that, you know, I got good with. But what did happen is as I saw them grow and mature, you start to relate to them as adults.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: You're right about that, because some of the people I've worked with are closer to my children's age than mine by far. So how they lead, how they think about life, how they prioritize family is great. I think it's actually better than how we did it, for sure. There was kind of like this compartmentalization that I remember. It's like, oh, no, you're in this time where it's like divide and conquer. Someone's just got to grind themselves into a pulp to provide, and someone's got to just hopefully raise a family which is like, you know, impossibly hard almost on their own, just like, we'll come back again and hopefully it all works out.
And I just think our, you know, there's, that there's working for just jerks, you know, just like, this is what you do. You put your time in. And I look at my daughter, she will not work for jerks. You know, she will not.
So I think that the learning there is like, wow, okay, why should they? Maybe we were wrong. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're enlightened. Then what's the implication for those that are in their forties, fifties, and are leading people in their twenties? How do they lead in a way that makes people want to show up and want to do their best and feel supported, feel seen and heard. So, yeah, I think that's something I've seen and I appreciate and I've had to kind of calibrate in some ways, applaud. That's great.
There's a different time and place, and it's mutual.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Right. Because by you doing what you're doing, you're being an amazing role model for your kids.
But then on the flip side to it, by doing this mentoring, it's giving you this sort of additional respect for your kids.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Yes, yes. And I think it's interesting because the whole mentoring and parenting, right? So we're talking about, and as children get older, like, it's not just parenting the way, and it's mentoring similar. And even the board roles are similar, which is one of the challenges, you know, especially when you're a CEO, not all the time, but it's a crisis. It's like, you just make the call and everyone just does that. So that's that. When you're on a board or you have your parent of an adult, you don't should tell them what to do. It's just not very effective. Right? Because they're smart, they kind of, they know they have the whole context of a situation. So it's really more about asking good questions and, you know, honoring what they know and their views, but, you know, sharing your experience and making not too many assumptions, you know, because other things I found is not everything's exactly like it was when we were at hydroflask. It could be a different market, a different time. You know, things have changed enough. Even they look similar. So it's not so much about like, hey, do this, but it's more about, you know, have you considered this? Or maybe an example would be, I was having lunch with a CEO the other day. He's just like, ah. He's frustrated on how the company wasn't really getting the importance of culture, and there was a battle over it, and he was kind of like, well, we have to work. We have to be accountable. And he's like, you know, he's kind of asking my advice on it. And instead of like, oh, you need to let them know that you feel like a healthy culture is important. That's not really helpful. He probably knows that. But it's more like, oh, what is your view? Or what is your vision for a healthy, high performance culture for this business in the future? How does that compare with what the people think? And then how important do they think you feel it is based off of how it's been communicated so far? So it's more about. It's a little. Almost like therapy. It's more like asking questions so that people can kind of ponder and think. And I think back to the best moments for our advisors and board. They never told us what to do as a leadership team, but they asked great questions. We really, really wanted an answer sometimes. And they were just like, tortured into, like, uh. Like, how do we frame it back in a question that has them think about the assumptions they made or what they've understood or maybe something they overlooked that were really powerful for us. So I think there's some great analogies there, and I'm learning to be better at this. You still. I think sometimes we look at our kids and still see the little kid in them. So it's like, you need to do this, you know, and like, that is not really effective for 27 year olds. Right?
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Ain't happening, nor is it effective for.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: A 35 year old CEO. So it's that, okay, shifting to step back. How do I frame this back as a question that could be helpful? How can we have a dialogue? How could. Maybe I learned something about, oh, this is different than what I thought. Wow, you're doing things I hadn't ever thought about or been exposed to. I'm learning through this exchange as well, and some of the mentoring. It is that you're just learning how the next generation thinks, approaches things.
You're inspired.
Again, it's just different world. Things are more digital hyper competition. There's different geopolitical circumstances happening now that were happening ten years ago. So, yeah, there's just different problems to solve. So there's always the opportunity to kind of learn in a give and take.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: But I also commend you for really loving and appreciating sort of this new generation and this young, sort of fresh perspective on seeing the world. Because, I mean, it's like, you know, people of our age, you know, when you listen to your parents now, it's, you get the old, you know, that would never happen in my day. And he's like, I get it. I get it. And then sometimes I hear myself say that, you know, and I think, oh, God, no. So I really do try. Sometimes it makes you nuts when younger people, you know, say certain things or are quick to sort of correct you and things. But then I do have to remind myself, like, we are in a unique position, especially of being parents to these young adult people, that we do get this fresh perspective on the world, and that is not necessarily something we would get with friends our age.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Right, right. And for a lot of the companies I work with or individuals that, you know, they sell to consumers and who is quickly taking over most of the discretionary spend for a lot of categories, and it's those next generations. And so if they think differently, if they purchase differently, if they have different reasons for doing things, if you don't understand that, there's a lot of risk and, you know, your ability to grow. And so I think that's part of it. If you get, you're a leader and you're hiring people, you're managing talent, this is your workforce increasingly. And do they, do you understand them? Can you connect with them? Do you appreciate what they bring to the table? And I think the other thing is, just like I said before, the heaviness of some of the things, and I'm trying to remember, we hit the Cold War. We had the OPEC gas crisis. It's not like we were without any dramas, but when you look at today, it's like, have we fried our planet? There's a lot of existential questions that this generation is facing, and I can empathize. You feel a little like, oh, what have we done? And this generation's the one that's going to make that difference.
Yeah, that's where I see courage. I see, you know, I see challenge. I see fear and uncertainty from these people. But in general, it's, yeah, they're doing great things and we can learn from that.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: I think your story is really, really inspiring. And again, I think a lot of people listening to this show, there are people that want to contribute, they want to give back, but they're not really sure how to do that. And so I really, really appreciate your candor today, and I think you're going to inspire a lot of people, really, and you've been a fantastic guest. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for your time. Okay, thanks, Scott.
Well, I am so glad I had the opportunity to introduce you all to my friend Scott. He clearly had a lot of really interesting things to share and definitely an inspiring guy. So let's get right to it. As always, I've done some research, and what's interesting about Scott is after having a very successful career as a CEO, Scott has found a new way of leveraging his experience and his expertise to really give back. And I really like this, this idea for the program.
He has found a new role for himself that's been both rewarding and fulfilling, even though clearly he's not a CEO anymore. He refers to not so much as being retired as downshifting. So this downshifting, from being a CEO to now being on various boards and being a mentor shows a sort of personal and professional progression. But it also speaks to something that's really interesting that I discovered when I was researching this, and it explores the idea of two different types of intelligence we have in our life. Something that's referred to as fluid intelligence. And this is primarily the ability to use logic in new situations, to think flexibly, and to solve new, new problems.
Not surprisingly, a lot of innovators and high performing executives have boatloads of fluid intelligence.
Unfortunately, however, research has found that this type of intelligence, this fluid intelligence peaks early in adulthood and starts decreasing in your thirties and forties.
However, there is good news, something called crystallized intelligence. And this is a second type of intelligence where people have the ability to use previously learned knowledge and experience that they've accumulated over the years. And since this relies on a growing base of knowledge, it tends to actually grow and develop with age.
So you can think of it as when you're young, you have these sort of this raw smarts about you, and when you get older, you have wisdom.
And so this definitely plays a part in Scott's narrative, his story, because although he's not running a company now, obviously he has a wealth of experience, expertise and knowledge, and now he's sharing that with other people who are up and comers, and he's using this crystallized intelligence and sharing his wisdom.
For many professional pursuits, particularly as a business executive, success is often driven by fluid intelligence, which means it's the ability to innovate and to quickly analyze a range of information and to make big, effective decisions. However, as this fluid intelligence decreases with age, experts suggest that shifting your focus, or what Scott referred to as downshifting to pursuits that rely more on crystallized intelligence. And Scott is a great example of this. He shifted his focus from running companies to now leveraging his experience and wisdom to now helping younger CEO's navigate the ranges of challenges that Scott has already tackled in his own personal career. So I think Scott is a perfect example of how as we get older, it's not so much that we're closing doors or looking back and saying, oh, you know, I used to be able to do this, and now that ship has sailed and that in and of itself is pretty depressing. But rather, again, we are transitioning into another phase of our life. But although we may not be as good as other certain things that we did earlier in our life, the good news is we're actually getting far better in other aspects, and Scott's definitely taking advantage of that. So although probably most of us are not necessarily in a position to be on a corporate board or even embark on professional mentoring, I think there's opportunities where all of us, as we get a little bit older, we can share our wisdom, our knowledge, our experience, our expertise in many different ways. And it gives us really something to think about, that we're in this unique position that the older you get, the wiser you get. And of course, it would be a great loss if we didn't share that. And so with that, I'll give you something to think about. Until next time, thanks for joining.
