Suzanne: And welcome back everyone to Answers for Elders Radio Network with the one and only Larry Jacobson, also known as L J in my world, my former boss and amazing retirement reinvention, expert redefining retirement. Larry, welcome back. And I love that you purposely set us up for this segment because you’re a sailor and you had a very successful incentive company. World class incentives. Was it back in the Bay Area? I know that you were a superstar in the industry, and I was lucky to learn through you and then you basically sold your company. And what happened?
Larry Jacobson: Yeah. Well, I had the I’ve been in in the business for 20 years and I had now at this point was CEO and had the opportunity to sell. So I sold the company for just enough money to tease me into thinking that I could retire, which wasn’t really true. Started sailing when I was 13 years old. I was raised down in Long Beach in Southern California. for all the KKLA people. And I learned to sail down there when I was 13, taught myself in a tiny little boat down in Alameda Bay. And from the day that I had stepped foot into that tiny little boat, I thought, OK, that’s it. I’m sailing around the world and I was just a kid. I was 13 and, you know, I told my parents and friends and they’re all, “Yeah, sure you are, yeah, sure.” And that I carried that passion and that, that dream with me for 33 more years while life got in the way, I had that predefined script. And I ended up as CEO and then was able to sell the company. Ao I bought a boat and I left, I went, I left to go sailing. I saw the opportunity. I left my career. I left my, my income, my security, which I call everything from having a car in your driveway to the local grocer knowing your name. I left my home, I left my partner. I, I left my identity, and that was the most difficult. And this is what happens when people retire is they lose their identity. So if you’re a plant manager, if you’re a cop, if you’re a nurse, if you’re a doctor, a lawyer, anything, that’s what you do. That’s how you identify who you are, ask anybody at a cocktail party, you know? Hi. What do you do? They’re instantly gonna tell you their career what it is they do for a living and which doesn’t necessarily define us. But in, but in our society it tends to.
I left all this behind and I left to go sailing and I came back six years later, having sailed all the way around the world. And it was a dream come true and it was magnificent. It was life changing. It would change the way I looked at the world, it changed, everything for me and then I came home and I was lost. I thought, well, I’ve sailed all the way around the world. I made my dream come true. Now, what do I do? Because I committed career suicide. I was out of the industry and nobody knew who I was, you know, then would walk into the hotel and say, do you know who I used to be, right? And people would say no.
“So I spent three years writing my book, my memoir about the journey as around the world, which we talk about a little bit later, I guess. And I was searching, I didn’t know what I was gonna do one day. A friend of mine called, who was the CEO of a big company in San Francisco. And he said, uh, hey, Larry, can you come out and give me some advice. The following week, I went into his offices and I said, ok, I’m here. What do you need? Do you need help with personnel finance? You know, what, what is it? And he says, no, I’m the CEO I know how to run my company. He says, I want to know how you did it, how you got out, how you left, how you let go of your identity as a CEO to become a sailor and like stepping off, taking a leap of faith. I can’t even imagine. So I left all that behind. He says, I wanna do that. I said, what do you want to do? And he says, I wanna paint. I said, wow, ok. Well, so I started thinking about how I did it and I gave him some advice and he says, OK, great. The next week he had told a friend and that friend called me and he was a CEO and he wanted to know how he did it. So I went in and talked to him again, and I thought, hm, I might be on to something here, and this was in the early days of non-financial retirement coaching back in maybe 2013 or 14, something like that.
And so I, what I did is I then spent the next year, a full year reverse-engineering what I went through as I was exiting my corporate career and becoming a sailing bum if you will. And so I had to learn to, to sing Jimmy Buffett songs, right? And drink margaritas and things like that. So anyway, and that’s how I came up with the video program, Sail Into Retirement, because I thought, well, if I did this, I can figure out how I did it, and then I can make it available to other people.
Suzanne: And I think people are fearful of the unknown. Sometimes we don’t have the wherewithal, as the saying goes, you can’t see the forest for the trees. You’re so wrapped up. I know for me, I am so wrapped up in my world. Sometimes I don’t see other opportunities out there. Other things that could happen, and yet I want that for other people at the same time, I want to see people have when I say a sense of purpose, but it’s really about that fulfillment side. Are you getting everything that you want in your life? And that’s something that’s really interesting.
Larry Jacobson: Yeah. And one phrase that people I think I want everybody to think about is that when you retire, it’s not what you’re retiring from, but when are you retiring to?
Suzanne: I love that. And so often, especially those who have built successful organizations and companies that have people around them. The greatest CEOs are the ones that are at the bottom of the pyramid and they’re serving everyone through their organization, but sometimes, and very often they lose themselves. It’s that fear of the unknown. You don’t even take the time to think. Like, if I didn’t have this weight in my shoulders, what could my life be like? And that can be scary sometimes you don’t know how to get to that point.
Larry Jacobson: So that’s what you bring. I have a client who is an attorney, big shot attorney. And I will say that the bigger you are in your career, the harder you fall. But he’s a big shot attorney. His name is on the door. His name is on the side of the building and everything, and then next day he’s not.
Suzanne: So, Larry, you and I are gonna be right back right after this. In the meantime, you have some tools for people to guide. What is your website?
Larry Jacobson: Website is LarryJacobson.com.
Suzanne: And Larry and I are gonna be right back everyone right after this.
