I Called Myself Retired

In July 2022 I sold the software company I had spent twenty nine years building. Within days I said one word about myself that did more damage than any hard year before it.

I called myself retired.

I meant it as a description. A fact about my calendar. It worked as a verdict.

A label is a verdict wearing a description

Here is what actually happened in the moment I said it. I did not describe a situation. I handed myself a story, and the story had rules I had not agreed to.

The word retired says your time is done. It says the contribution has already been made, past tense, and what remains is maintenance. It says the people who followed you followed the version of you that existed before the sale, and that version is over now. None of that was true about me. All of it was true about the word.

So I lived inside it. Six months or so of questioning nearly everything I had built and everything I was. Not because anything had changed on the outside. The company sold well. My marriage was strong. My health was already bad but it had been bad for a while. Nothing new arrived. I just started obeying a sentence I had spoken about myself, out loud, as though it were a diagnosis instead of a guess.

That is what a label does. It does not argue with you. It does not present evidence. It compresses a whole story into one word and hands it back to you already decided, and you start behaving as though the decision were made somewhere outside yourself.

Nobody imposed it

I want to be precise about this, because it would be easier to tell it the other way.

Nobody made me say it. There was no board, no press release, no advisor telling me to step back. The word was the expected next move, the thing people say after an exit like that, and I picked it up because it was sitting there. External pressure almost never shows up as pressure. It shows up as the next reasonable sounding step that everyone in the room already assumes, and it asks you to just go along quietly.

Which means it wore the costume of a personal decision. I would have told you at the time that I chose it. I did choose it. I just had not examined it, and the difference between a choice and a reflex is whether you looked at it first.

What did not pull me out

Not a vision. Not clarity. Not a new goal.

I want to say that plainly because the standard version of this story has a moment in it where the fog lifts and the person sees the future. That did not happen to me and I do not think it happens to most people. Waiting for it is its own kind of trap, because while you wait you are still living inside the label.

What did

Research.

I went back through thirty years of my own decisions the way I would dig into anyone else's problem. Not asking how I felt about them. Asking whether they held up.

What I found surprised me. The posture I had taken toward my teams, treating their growth as the actual point of the work rather than the software we shipped, was not just a nice way to run a company. It held up against the research on what makes teams perform and what makes people stay. My instincts had been right for reasons I had not fully understood while I was living them.

That is a different thing from encouragement. Encouragement is somebody telling you that you still matter. This was evidence, produced by me, about me, that the way I had led was sound. You cannot argue a label away with a feeling. You can retire it with proof.

There was a second piece, and it came from an unlikely place. Bob Goff writes in the faith and leadership space, and the thing people know about him is that he answers his own email. I wrote to him more or less on a whim, half expecting nothing, and asked what he does when he is struggling to move something forward.

He answered personally, and the answer was short. He zooms out, looks at the whole picture, then zooms back in.

That gave a name to what I had already started doing without one. Take the thirty thousand foot view of everything you have built, find the actual line running through it, then come back down to the next right step in front of you. It has changed real decisions for me in the last few months, including goals I have since let go of because they did not survive the zoomed out view.

The part that applies to you

Most of what I write is about leading other people. This one is not. This one is about the sentences you say about yourself, usually in passing, usually without noticing.

I am too old for this. I am not technical. I am just the operations guy. I am not a writer. I am retired.

Those are not observations. Every one of them is a verdict, and you will obey it long after you have forgotten you said it.

So three things, in the order I actually did them.

Watch the labels. Not the ones other people put on you. Those you will notice and resist. The ones you put on yourself, quietly, because they were the expected next word. Mine nearly finished me off before the real work even started.

Stop looking forward for the answer. Look back. Go find your own decisions, the ones that actually cost you something, and ask honestly whether they hold up. If they do, you are not standing on a feeling anymore. You are standing on a record.

Then zoom out before you plan the next mile. Far enough to see the whole shape of the thing. Some of what you are carrying will not survive that view, and letting it go is the point, not the cost.

That is not comfort. It is a foundation. You can build a next chapter on a foundation. I did.

Where the rest of it is

This came out of an interview I did with Authority Magazine about hard won lessons. We also got into the thirty four months I spent covering a gym's losses out of my own pocket, the doctor who told me in 2021 that my labs were not borderline but bad, and the years I spent running toward everyone else's fire while one was already burning in my own body.

It is a long read and an honest one. You can find it here: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/bart-paden-of-archetype-original-i-learned-this-the-hard-way-here-are-the-hard-won-lessons-that-eefe959e7821