David Carpenter On Life After Retirement: Designing A Future Where You Can Thrive
Retirement is not the end. Rather, it is a new beginning and an opportunity for you to thrive. Just because you’ve put a stop to your day job doesn’t mean everything else about your life stops as well. David Carpenter is the founder of Thriving Into Retirement, and in this episode, he shares how you can thrive after retirement because there’s more to life than just making a living. He joins host Chad Burmeister to talk about how you can design an enriching future after retirement.
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David Carpenter On Life After Retirement: Designing A Future Where You Can Thrive
I've got a local with me from down the street in Colorado Springs. Maybe 60 minutes down the street. We get to see this amazing place every day called Garden of the Gods Road. If you've never been there, it's this park that has a cool red rock that can only be called Garden of the Gods appropriately. Dave Carpenter is the Founder of Thriving Into Retirement. I learned that 10,000 people reach the age of 65 per day, so that means there are a lot of people thriving into retirement. That's some of the things we're going to talk about. Dave has experienced with IBM, Cognizant, Perot Systems, a long career in IT, and now he's moving to Thriving Into Retirement. Dave, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Retirement: We’re never glad while going through an awful time but when we come off the other side, those are the things that had the biggest contribution to making us who we are today.
Thank you, Chad. It’s good to be here.
I don't get to talk to too many Colorado folks. Out of probably 35 or 40 episodes, you may be the first in Colorado. I'm happy we get to have another Coloradan. Are you a native Coloradan or are you a transplant?
I’m a transplant but I got here as soon as I could. I moved here over 28 years ago so I feel like a native.
I would say that's native. I moved when I was five from Wisconsin so I'm about as close to a native as you can get. My brother moved when he was two so he's close, but we are still Cheeseheads by birth. Before we dive in, help me understand what is Thriving Into Retirement. What does that mean? What are you helping people do?
For me, this is a bridge into retirement. One thing when I talk about retirement, and this is probably going to be a more common theme going forward, is that it doesn't necessarily mean hanging up the laptop, turn on the TV, and doing nothing for the rest of your life. It's more, "What does that next chapter look like? What purpose or objective are you looking to achieve for the next segment of your life?" For me, this is a company that I've started with a website involved. It's an exciting way to get people thinking about all aspects of what it means to thrive into retirement. Just like in what we call the rest of your life, what you earn for a living is not the full picture of how awesome your life is. There are many aspects that would determine that, and retirement is no different.
The first thing that people think of when you talk about retiring is, how much money do you have saved up? That's important but that's not the whole picture. What we're striving to do with Thriving Into Retirement is to provide some insights in the form of blogs and articles into the various aspects of your life, and what might it mean to give focused attention to those as you prepare to thrive into retirement. It's meant to provide a number of resources for people beginning to think about what it might look like to have an awesome retirement.
For me, I think of it like going up to the Grand Canyon, and then there's a big ditch there. How do I get across to the other side? What's all involved? There are a lot of things like paperwork. What am I going to do with my day? What about if my ski passes to Winter Park? All those kinds of fun decisions in life. What you're doing is neat. Let's rewind the tape a little. I like to let our audience get to know you a little bit to understand where your perspective is coming from by rewinding all the way back to 6, 7, 8. Some of our first memories as kids before the world put blinders on us and expectations of what our life should or shouldn't be. We have a passion for what's out there. What was yours? What were you passionate about when you were younger?
One thing I loved to do starting about when I was six years old was play hockey. I grew up playing ice hockey, so that was always a passion of mine. Right around that time, 6, 7, 8 years old, even though I can barely write a complete sentence, I had this idea in my mind that I wanted to be able to write for a living. Those seeds were planted in me early on.
We didn't talk about where you came from before the transplant. Which state was that in?
California, of all places. I grew up in Southern California. This was before the arrival of Wayne Gretzky in Los Angeles with the Kings. Nevertheless, it was a fairly popular sport and then grew even more once Gretzky arrived. I grew up from an early age, playing hockey.
I always had high regard for ice hockey skaters because I was a roller skater. Skate City had this thing where you could play in a roller hockey tournament. I was skating around people. I remember this one season, we had boy-girl mixed teams. It was cool because I remember being so good. My dad gave me the stick back that I used. Mine was the blue one and my brother was the yellow one. His has a lot lighter use than mine. It's all rubbed-off stickers. I remember going down the court and shooting but then, there's a time where it flips and you go, “It's not about me.” I was all about me in the early days. Maybe a season in and I'm like, “That girl is good at what she's doing. Let me dump it off to you and then you score. Now, let me let you drive and you dump it to me.” We got into this rhythm where it was fun to be able to teach other people the skills that I had learned. It’s way more fun and goosebumps in that than doing it myself.
Retirement: You don’t have to be the king of the world sitting on top of the mountain to still add value and help people.
From an early age, I taught the value of teamwork and what it means to be part of a team and an important cog in the wheel but still, the whole team needs to do great together.
There are positions in hockey just like every other role. What was your position usually?
I always played goalie. I was the crazy one and dumb enough to stand in front of those slap shots coming in at nine miles an hour.
I've been watching some of the tournaments when the Avs didn't make it and the Tampa Bay Lightning did. Knights are out too and it's down to the finals.
They're golfing too.
In too hot Arizona or in hot Vegas. The goalie is a very important piece. Think about how that now ties into what you're doing now. The teamwork piece, more specifically the role of the goalie, I wonder if there's some tell of why you like to take the slap shots in the face, and now what you did in the IT world. Maybe you were taking slap shots to the face all your life.
One thing that taught me is the idea of the buck stops here. You're the last line of defense. It’s certainly a part of the team, but you had a function that was unique in that. If somebody else on the team makes a mistake, you're there to cover for them. If you make a mistake, it shows up on the scoreboard. Maybe that's how I ended up leaning towards a leadership role. One in which I felt like it was important to me to try to make the team succeed together and not, “It's all about me,” or, “It’s all about you.” It's how can we succeed as a team. If you have a team that succeeds together or fails together, I always prefer to try to help us to succeed.
Can I write in Dave Carpenter for President in 2024? It feels like we could use someone that takes a different view of the world these days. A normal business leader is all I need. Maybe a goalie from a hockey team would work. On all sides of the fence, we all need a little something new. Tell me about a painful memory. This is a podcast, so you don't have to share your deepest, darkest painful memories, but everybody faces something. Somebody may be reading that's going through something in life. Maybe they've just lost their job or they're unemployed or whatever. We had a neighbor that I learned didn't make it through COVID. Across the street, there are twenty cars parked up down the street. I go out and take the trash out every week, “Bob, how are you doing?” I found out Bob's made it to the other side and I'm like, “What? How is that even possible?” We all go through stuff. What's one of those mountains you had to go through? Looking back, how did that help you become who you are now?
Life is woven throughout with stories of painful memories and challenges we had to overcome. While we're in them, we never think, “I'm glad I'm going through this awful time.” When we come out the other side and we look back, usually those are the things that we can point to that had probably the biggest contribution to making us who we are now. Probably one big challenge that I faced which turned into a painful memory was when I worked for several large global consulting firms. There was one particular situation where there was a huge implementation that was important to the company as a whole. It was a multibillion-dollar multi-year deal. It was way behind schedule and a lot of trouble already and nothing had been accomplished that should have been accomplished.
I was asked to step in, take over a piece of it, and do what I could to get this crucial piece back on track. I agreed to do that as a good company guy. It required regular travel back and forth from Colorado to New York City. That required 80 or more hours a week worth of work, evenings, weekends, working on the plane. I poured a lot of my life into that program for the better part of three years. I'm not trying to say it was all about me. I was bringing the team together and encouraging a lot of people to bring forth their best effort.
After all of that, we were able to get things back on track and catch things up. For a brief period of time, the company was happy and the client was happy. It was a golden time when we were able to get things back on track. Everybody seemed happy. That was the good news there. You get over the mountaintop. Unfortunately, with all good things, it had to come to an end. The way this came to an end was probably the most painful part. For a little while, we were all sitting on top of the world, but then there was a leadership change at the senior executive level within the company. It came all about the bottom line and the dollars and cents.
Given that this was a global company, there was a sense of that labor arbitrage. In other words, trading low-cost, offshore resources for a lot of the high-cost resources we have on-site. That became more important than any ability to achieve great results. Myself and a number of key people within my team were let go from the company. It was eye-opening how quickly that happened. I had my immediate manager who loved all the work that we have done and had nothing to do with the decision to move people out of the company.
He said, “Picture yourself standing at the edge of a pond and you toss a pebble into the middle of that pond and there are some ripples that go out from that spot to the edge of the pond and disappear." That's how these large companies view us. We're maybe that ripple traveling across the surface of the pond for a little while. You get to the edge and it’s like, "Who are you?” The way that whole thing went down was painful. After achieving such great results and all of us pouring so much of our lives into that engagement for so long for it to fall apart so quickly like that was painful. It's probably the best way to put it.
It reminds me of a YouTube video of Steve Jobs about NeXT. He had a team that poured it all in. He's such a great visionary that anybody would have followed him into that, and then it didn't play out as planned. He learned a lesson as a leader. I was at a Living a Better Story event in Utah. Arjun Sen is a friend of ours and he happened to work with some big celebrities. Tiger Woods is one of his customers. He's always looking at the world in a different way. There was this crankshaft on a glass table and it's probably twelve inches around the first crank. There are some little ones and some big ones, and then there's the ripple at the end of the shore like you talked about. It's a big table, maybe 6 feet around.
He said, “Chad, you're the CEO of a company. What I want you to think about is when you're turning that crankshaft, look at the one way down there. It's running 100 miles an hour, and the one you're turning is just going like this, so it feels like you made a tiny little move. The guy that's on the planes, trains and automobiles are working 80 hours a week, putting in blood, sweat and tears.” It’s like, “Woah.” It's interesting looking at it from both perspectives. I'm sure the leader of the company was waking up every day having pains and thoughts about, “What am I going to do? I've got a board to answer to.” You're doing your part and everybody else is doing their part. It makes you look at the world. There's not a right or wrong answer. It just is. What's the takeaway? That happened in the middle or early part of your career, and now you've had a lot of experience since then.
It was later on in my career. I did move on from that company. I was at that crossroads in my career about, should I pursue a CTO or CIO level role continuing on the growth trajectory? Should I perhaps continue in a leadership capacity but not try to take that next step, and enable other things and other priorities to happen in my life to take center stage?” This other thing had taken center stage for so long in recent years. I wouldn't say it had a negative impact on any of my relationships but it wasn't necessarily where I wanted it to be focusing 100% of my attention.
It did cause me to take a step back and say, “What is it that I would like my next step to look like?” It led me down the path. You don't have to be king of the world sitting on top of the mountain to still add value and to help people both in my IT career. It also enables a few more cycles in the day for me to maybe spin up this little entrepreneurial startup with the idea of maybe growing that into something that could help people longer-term and maybe more people. Who knows? It did cause me to take that step back and think about and reflect on what I want the next stage in my life to look like.
I remember in my MBA, it was probably IBM if I think about it. It was one of the big companies. There was a professor who showed you as a leader, and then the employee works with you and there's a big circle at the top and a little one at the bottom. He would say, “Your job as the manager is to lead from the front in the beginning. Over time, the big circle starts to drift off to the little circle, and then the little circle by the employee becomes the big circle.” It shows a neat visual. He said, “There’s a point where you’re in a job and within 18 to 24 months, most people learn 80% of the job that they're currently in. By the time you're at that stage, it's like, ‘Give me more.’”
Retirement: We all have greatness within us, and that lesson has helped me work with people, reach people, and to help them achieve more than they ever thought they could.
As a human being, you want to learn and grow and continue to be better at what you're doing. There's a point where you get to, “Is a director big enough? Is a VP big enough? Do I need to be a CIO of a big company?” There's a point where you have to look yourself in the mirror and say, “My goal is not to rule the world and to buy an airplane. There are better things than that.” For some people, that may well be and that's okay. It's important to look in the mirror and understand not what other people are expecting of you, but what you were made to do and be in life. That's what I've learned. This one's a little interesting because you're doing this business now. You've been in IT. What would change everything if you could snap your fingers and say, “I've got it.” Some people might think of a physical thing. I don't think that's probably your scenario. What would that be if you could change one major thing?
I have a full-time job in IT. As many waking hours as I can, I spend and stay awake to work on this other entrepreneurial venture. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now that I'm starting to get it off the ground a little bit more, I need to be providing content for it. I've been doing a lot of research and probably doing more and more of that would be helpful. If I could have that, snap my fingers and have it go anywhere I want, it would probably be that I would be able to make that shift. It’s like cold turkey overnight as opposed to gradually growing it to set aside my full-time IT endeavor. Not to sit there and do nothing but to be able to focus attention on this other venture so I could get off the ground quicker and with the goal of trying to help more people over time. That would probably be it if I could get that going sooner rather than later.
It's funny because I was sent this button called the Easy Button from Staples. TK Kader was the CEO of ToutApp, which was a big player in the space. They sold to Marketo. He became the Head of Strategy for Marketo and he helped them sell to Adobe. In a ten-year span, he went from being a self-admitted overweight kid to CEO to a major player in strategy to successful entrepreneur in shape, mentally, physically, spiritually and all of it. When he left, he created a program for new entrepreneurs to teach them how he did it and how to mentally get your arm around it.
My biggest challenge was always cashflow and it’s still is. He sent me the Easy Button and it reminds me every day that if you want to get in front of the financial stuff, you have the math skills to do it. You've got the selling skills to do it. He's like, “Just do it.” I put garbage in my head that gets in the way of that equation. Thinking of your IT background and your ability to build systems, build teams, and run teams efficiently, you probably have the Easy Button sitting on your desk to make it fast forward to the end of the tape quicker. For whatever reason, there's that mountain that we put in our way to get there.
Thriving Into Retirement is my immediate term focus, but I also got in mind that I'd like to work towards multiple income streams. Potentially, even do independent consulting as a part-time thing as well. I’m looking to leverage my experience and expertise and optimize the different ways in which I can help people or organizations to thrive.
It's funny because sometimes the trainer needs another trainer. You can help people with Thriving Into Retirement and that's how it works. As the CEO of a prospecting company that uses AI for sales, sometimes you look in the mirror and go, “We haven't been using all that stuff. What happened there?” This is fun. I like the conversation. Let's flip this question on its head. I once walked through an exercise with this smart guy. He did it in an hour. I'm going to shorten this to two minutes. He took me through this exercise where you go out into a field and there's this large bird like a joust that you played when you're a kid. You can jump on the bird and it flies you safely twenty years into the future. You get to meet your future self. You shake your hand and you're like, “Dave, good to see you. You look pretty good.”
You take inventory of the whole scene. Where are the houses? Is it on a hill? Is it in a field? All of it. You look around and you notice what's in the house. You wrap it up and you say in passing, “Is there any advice you would give me? You're my future self. What do you tell me?” You’d get back on the bird and you come back to now. I run that exercise sometimes and it's fun because you can visualize that with such clarity. Mine was in the Mediterranean somewhere. I was a little windblown looking like maybe the Marlboro Man or something with the white shirt and everything. I’m like, “What if I don't want it to end like that? What if I don't want it to be like that in twenty years?” There are two things you can get out of it. One is what did you see and what would you want to see? Thinking through that, we did it and fast forward, but what comes to mind from that exercise for you twenty years from now and coming back?
One of the things that I would be looking to do with the next chapter of my life is my wife and I have a significant bucket list of travel destinations both within this great country in which we reside as well as internationally. We've traveled to various places in the world and there are places we want to go back to and plenty of other places that we'd like to go see. That would be part of it. We have been able to check off some things on our bucket list. Ideally, the bucket list hasn't gotten any shorter because for every place we go visit, we meet somebody that says, “If you like this place, you should go here and here.” If anything, the list has gotten a little bit longer but we're still checking things off as we go. That would be part of it.
For me, this also gets into the thinking about what a thriving retirement looks like. What is the most central or most important to you as you look forward? For me, one of those answers is connecting at a human level with family members. I've got three grown kids. One of them bought a house with her husband and they're starting to talk about getting their family going. My wife and I are excited about the prospect of having our first grandchild sometime in the not-too-distant future. We're excited about that. Everybody strives to be the best grandparent ever, so that would be part of it. Also, connecting at a human level with friends that we've had and have had over the years and other family members. We started to do a little bit of traveling around and meeting people in person.
Especially with COVID, it taught you the value of direct human contact. We’re getting back out and doing that. It’s focusing on the priorities and doing what you need to do. Put your head down and go make it happen. I don't want to hang it up and do nothing. Setting up some possible business models that would enable me to have that laptop lifestyle so I could work a couple of hours a day perhaps, maybe sometimes more, sometimes less, but average out to that. We can go and be wherever we want to be in the world with people that we cherish doing that.
I read this book, Metahuman. Have you ever heard of that book? It's Deepak Chopra and it’s thick. In the beginning, it talks about two birds on a tree and one's looking forward and one's looking over there. It's you. If you go above yourself and look down and go, "Oh." After reading that book, and it's been a while, so I don't remember all the specifics, but it almost feels like what if you played yourself in a video game? You said, "What's important to you?" Your spirit knows what your body needs and what your mind needs. For me, traveling and even being stuck in an airport for four hours, I was like, "That's awesome." I didn't mind because I was like, "This is cool." To be in an airport and to stay at a hotel with cold air conditioning because I don't turn it that low in my own house and eating at a nice restaurant that you'd never been to before. Sometimes it's fun to take the 30,000-foot view and say, "What's important to you in the next days, weeks, months, year?” Play the game proactively versus reactively as most of us play it.
I added that book to my reading list.
It’s deep. Some of those you take parts and leave parts. I don't know how much of a Christian man he was but to each his own. There's a lot of interesting knowledge that's hidden in all of these different places. Have you ever seen the show O, Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas? To me, that's the best because when he goes through, he meets all these different people, shapes, sizes and countries. When you're talking about traveling, it's fun to see other people's perspectives on life. That's such a huge reward, connecting at a human level. The last question before we part is around faith. To some people, it's everything. To other people, not so much. What role does faith play in your life and how you live your life out?
For me, it has become everything. It didn't start that way but that's the way it's evolved for me. It has become an increasingly important part of my journey. I realized that at some point in my journey, you don't have to be a pastor, missionary, official or you don't have to have an officially religious job to serve God. I can bring glory and honor to Him right where I am. Sometimes, I'm convinced that He puts us in a variety of places. We're not all pastors and missionaries because it's an opportunity for us to be a pastor and a missionary right where we sit and working with people in technology.
More often than not, the vast majority of the people I work with are not believers. It's all over the spectrum. Some people believe in other faiths and some people not at all. It's a great opportunity for me to serve people. I'm not trying to have an overblown impression of myself because I know I don't do a good job of it. To be the Bible to people that I need, to live and lead in such a way that would bring God glory and honor, I can't do that on my own. When I do it well, I give all the credit to God. That's been an important realization for me. It's helped me to realize it's not all about me. Out of that, I have tried to live and lead in such a way that is consistent with kingdom principles.
It’s fun sometimes when you get up in the morning, you walk down the stairs, you look out and it's a blue sky, a rainy day or snowing. It doesn't matter. I go, “That's amazing. How did I get the opportunity to open my eyes, breathe in a breath and see all this?” You're going to have bad days and great days but every day is incredible if you think about it.
We all have greatness within us. That lesson has helped me to work with people and reach people to help them achieve more than they ever thought they could achieve. It's all by seeing that kernel of greatness within everyone.
Did you do much in mobile application development in your IT work over the years?
Not a lot. I've had teams that worked on that thing but never directly myself. I did come up through the ranks as a developer but they didn't have mobile phones at the time when I was writing code.
We're putting an app out. I'm pretty particular about some of the latest features and functions. I'm certainly a bad business buyer and out of scope in the project, you would be holding me back. It's a neat app. My son had an accident and he's okay. I'll caveat it with that. It was a burn accident. He was cooking these mail-order things on the oven. He's an engineer at the Colorado School of Mines. He follows the directions to the tee.
He finally gets to the stage where it says, “Put the panko in the hot oil.” He puts it in and it caught fire. There's no 6A or 6B that says what to do in case it catches fire. He does what a nineteen-year-old boy is supposed to do and puts it under the water faucet. It blew up. Levels 2 and 3 burns on the face and hands. This was during the time when it was negative 6-degree weather. Do you remember those days through the winter? We go to the burn center and most of the beds are taken because there's a lot of people who don't have heat. There were nineteen beds and there were 75 patients or something. They're scattered throughout. Luckily, they did make space for him.
It went from bad to okay. This is going to be good to worse. By day seven, the face gets puffier and puffier. You're worried. You're like, “What's going to happen to his nose and surgery?” All you can do is pray and we prayed a lot. My mom prayed all night the night before the surgery. I put out the post to 20,000 people on my LinkedIn following. I had more interactions with that post than any other post I've ever done. There were thousands of people praying and it worked. They took the bandages off. I was like, “It's there. What happened? This is amazing.” His eyes are amazing. He didn't breathe in. That could have been bad. He didn't open his eyes.
My point of that story is I created this app called 77Pray. What it's for is it's an accountability thing. Check the box, “Did I pray in the morning? Did I read a Bible verse?” It serves up a verse through a pop-up. We need to be reminded that in our busy worlds now, “Did you pray at night? Did you tell someone about the app?” It's going to spread virally. If we get 500 people, that's cool. I have a feeling it's going to go to a million people. It's a neat thing.
You can crowdsource a prayer. If you've got something that you're struggling with, you put it out, and you'll see how many people prayed for you last night. That's going to be neat. Now that I know another IT professional, I may need to tap on your shoulder from time to time. As we do these shows and talk to many amazing people, the human connection is where it's at. There are no left and right aisles. We're all brothers and sisters and it doesn't matter. We're all equal. I don't care if you're the CEO or you're a bottle washer, you're still the same level of power and influence under God and that's what my mission in life is. Thanks for witnessing and sharing your story. My folks are in Castle Rock, so I get halfway there sometimes. Maybe we'll have to make a special visit and see you sometime.
That sounds great. I look forward to it.
Dave, it is fabulous having you on the show. Thanks so much. If people want to get ahold of you and talk about Thriving Into Retirement, what's the best way to reach out?
There's the website ThrivingIntoRetirement.com or you can reach me at Dave@ThrivingIntoRetirement.com.
I'm sure there'll be some people reaching out here. Thanks for joining another Living A Better Story episode. We've been talking to David Carpenter from Colorado Springs, Founder of Thriving Into Retirement. I'm sure in a few years when we do the look back, he will have traveled to some cool places, built some human-to-human connections that are incredible, and witnessed God's kingdom for eternity. Thanks for being part of the ripple.
Thanks a lot, Chad. I appreciate it. God bless you.
God bless you.
Important Links:
LinkedIn - Chad Burmeister
About David Carpenter
Collaborative and results-driven technology leader, strategist, and client-focused executive with 15+ years of experience in business and operations consulting, information technologies, as well as managing clients’ digital transformation and business process outsourcing efforts. Act as a key catalyst in driving companies to success through effective strategic planning and implementation of cutting-edge technology and best change management practices.
Progressive consultant and executive acting as a driving force in achieving companies’ performance goals. Able to distill a large amount of information and comfortable taking bold calculated risks. Demonstrated strong business judgment and decision-making skills. Able to identify, articulate, and execute high-impact initiatives and strategies. Able to overcome challenges and roadblocks by applying advanced analytical and problem-solving skills. Effective at communication with cross-functional technical and business teams while fostering a collaborative environment as well as superior customer service. Adept at consultative selling and business development through building trusted partner relationships.
