What’s Next For You in Retirement

Michelle: 00:35

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here for another episode of Decluttering 55 Plus with Michelle Pasloff. It’s here that we talk with authorities, geeks, and experts of all kinds about next level clutter. Conventional clutter is papers, clothes, and other stuff. Next level clutter are areas of life that many of us like to sweep under the carpet and put off another day or forever because they may be confronting or confounding. Instead, we bring these topics that are especially important as we age into the light of day so that we can straighten things out. This is a clutter cleaning process in and of itself. Things we may cover include health, fitness, and eating, digital decluttering, social relationships, preparing a memoir, deciding where to live and what to do in retirement, getting our financial papers and legal papers in order, and even planning our final arrangements. Every week is different. Today we’re going to talk about what’s next after retirement. And we’re going to do that with Dr. James R. Gregory. Dr. Gregory was formerly the owner of a top branding consulting company in New York City, a business he owned with his wife Evelyn for more than 40 years. He was also a renowned author of business books. After selling the company and retiring, Dr. Gregory moved out of New York City, headed straight from the boardroom to the classroom, and he earned a doctorate degree from the University of South Florida. Then he did what every PhD does. He started painting and writing novels. The latest is Killer App, and he’s going to tell us all about that in a minute. Although every retiree’s choice of life after work is different, let’s learn something and be inspired by Dr. Gregory’s journey. Dr. Gregory said I can call him Jim, so let’s get talking. Welcome, Jim. How are you today?

Dr. Gregory: 02:29

I’m wonderful, Michelle. Thank you for the invitation to join you on your show.

Michelle: 02:33

Absolutely. Where are we talking to you from?

Dr. Gregory: 02:36

I’m currently at our home in Williamsburg, Virginia. I spend half the year in Bradenton, Florida, which we’re practically neighbors, but right now I’m in Virginia.

Michelle: 02:48

Very good. How’s the weather there?

Dr. Gregory: 02:50

Hot.

Michelle: 02:52

It’s hot here, but at least it’s raining.

Dr. Gregory: 02:54

My new part it’s hotter and more humid in Williamsburg than it is in Florida, in our house in Florida. I check every day, and uh that’s one of the things I’ve discovered is you don’t come here for the cool weather.

Michelle: 03:08

Ah, okay. How did you decide to come there? Leaving New York City is really uh being a former New Yorker myself, I understand the attachment we get to the greatest city on earth. But I was wondering how you decided to pack up your bags and leave New York, and how long ago was that?

Dr. Gregory: 03:25

Well, I I moved to Florida right after I sold my business in 2013. But I went to school in uh my undergraduate work was at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and they persuaded me to join their board of trustees of the foundation. And uh I was here so often that I decided to look around to see if I could find a house here. And we found a great place in Williamsburg. We love Williamsburg, and I bought it.

Michelle: 03:54

How did you decide in the first place to retire? I have a friend in New York, and she’s been thinking about that she’s gonna retire. She’s actually been retired, but she doesn’t know it. And I was wondering what you would advise somebody who’s resistant to retiring because they don’t know what to do next. How did you decide?

Dr. Gregory: 04:12

Well, my wife and I started this business in New York when we were both 23 years old. By the way, we we met on a a subway in New York, so it doesn’t get any more New York than that.

Michelle: 04:23

It doesn’t get any more romantic. Oh my God.

Dr. Gregory: 04:26

That’s right. So we we uh started this business together and built it from scratch and really developed into something neat. The vision was to build an advertising agency. The actuality was that we built a consulting business based on brands, the image of companies. And I wrote a number of business books on the subject, which really differentiated us and built us up over time. But after my fourth book, uh, after traveling the world a couple times, uh, after launching uh various offices around the world, we had had enough. It was a starting to be a grind. And we just both decided that it was time to hang up our spikes. And Evelyn decided a little sooner than I did. But without her in the business, it wasn’t as much fun. And I said, let’s do something else. Let’s uh let’s try something else.

Michelle: 05:14

Aaron Powell Well, how long before you actually sold the company did you say, okay, it’s time to call it quits?

Dr. Gregory: 05:21

Uh we had talked about retiring and selling the business for years, and it takes time to prepare to position the company and to prepare the financials and to get it set up so that it is sellable. And so I I would say the earliest was about 10 years before we sold the company. But really, the last three years we were really focused on selling it and prepared the company for sort of it’s not like you wake up one day and you go, okay, tomorrow I’m packing my bags and moving south.

Michelle: 05:50

You had a lot of advanced thought and planning that went into this transition.

Dr. Gregory: 05:54

Absolutely.

Michelle: 05:55

You know, after you were gonna retire, what you wanted to do, how long did you start planning once that actually occurred and you were successful at getting the big bucks for the business? How did you decide what you were gonna do next?

Dr. Gregory: 06:07

Well, that’s where it became a little fuzzy. And I thought, like most retirees, well, all my friends played golf, and I thought, gee, I’ll take it up and really do well. I love tennis and thought I would just be playing tennis all the time. And it turns out that I am really lousy at golf and hate it. And even though I live on a golf course in Florida and I live on a golf course here in Virginia, I don’t play golf.

Michelle: 06:35

The rolling hills are nice though.

Dr. Gregory: 06:37

Yeah, the the hills and the landscaping. I mean, I’ve considered like I’ve got a five-acre lawn in my backyard and just people come visiting, you know, passing through. But I didn’t care a lot for golf and just decided there had to be something, something else. And then I got hurt at tennis, so I couldn’t play again. And uh all of a sudden, panic stricken, I decided I need to needed to find something else.

Michelle: 07:05

And how did you land on writing novels or painting?

Dr. Gregory: 07:10

I understand that’s again again. It’s a kind of a convoluted story. I gave a speech at the University of South Florida to their uh master’s degree students uh about corporate branding, which was a subject I knew in depth. And in the front row was Dean Moez Lam, who was the dean of the business school. And afterwards I had lunch with him. And he said, So what are you doing? And I said, Well, I like tennis, but I got hurt. And he said, What else are you doing? I said, I wanted to try to play golf and I’m lousy. And he said, Well, what big ideas do you have? You know, those are fine sports, and that’s that’s always good to do, but where’s your big ideas? And I said, I don’t know. I guess I always wanted to write. And uh I also had some other ideas about the work that I had done in corporate branding in terms of measuring the brands and doing analytics around the brands. He said, you know, you are a perfect candidate for our doctoral program here at USF. He’s a great salesman. And and I immediately went home from that luncheon and said to Evelyn, I figured it out. I’m gonna go for a doctoral program.

Michelle: 08:21

Well, you read it.

Dr. Gregory: 08:23

Yeah, after she fainted, after she fainted and came around, she said, you know what, that’ll keep you occupied, really occupied for a couple of years. So why don’t you go ahead and do that? And it did. It was a tough road, man. That you know, a doctoral program is no easy thing. And for three years I was uh nose to the grindstone.

Michelle: 08:46

Wow. And working on something they’re supposed to get easier when you retire, right?

Dr. Gregory: 08:51

Yeah, yes, exactly. But my undergraduate work was in fine arts, and my graduate, you know, doing this doctoral program was in statistics and business, and it’s just like two opposite ends of the spectrum. And I had no background in statistics other than what I did at work. And I I had PhDs on staff, and we’d always argue. So I found the intellectual stimulation around talking about statistics and what they can and can’t do and how the brand works and how it creates value. I found that to be great fun. Actually, figuring out how it works is not fun at all. That was where the tough.

Michelle: 09:34

So do you regret having done it, or are you glad and proud that you’re I’m glad and proud.

Dr. Gregory: 09:40

I’m glad and proud, uh, although it was three big years out of, you know, uh that was all-encompassing, all-consuming. So there are mixed feelings about it, but I am happy that I did it. My wife and the people that I that I know closely that I’ve worked with in on my writing and and that sort of thing said that my writing skills improved, my ability to do research improved, all of those things, those peripheral things around a doctoral program, all helped my other projects that I had going.

Michelle: 10:16

How did you get to writing your novel? And not only you wrote business books, so it’s not like you were unaccustomed to being behind the computer tapping out a book, but a novel and a business book are two different things. How did you take the leap to novel writing and your latest novel?

Dr. Gregory: 10:34

Business books are entirely different. It’s a whole different process, it’s a whole different way of writing and style of writing, and you’re trying to convince the reader to do a certain thing. Novel writing is entertainment for the reader. It should be anyway, it shouldn’t be work. So I made the transition. The first thing I did was wrote a book about kind of my memoir, but it’s it’s also a fiction because I didn’t want to have to get approvals from all my former clients. But this tells the story about how my wife and I built this business together.

Michelle: 11:08

What’s the name of that?

Dr. Gregory: 11:10

Small Fortunes. Small Fortunes. It’s three trilogies in in one book, three novellas in one book. And uh great fun. It’s a fun read, it’s an interesting read, and uh talks about how my wife and I were able to work together. Some if some, you know, a husband and wife team out there working together, this is a fun book to read. And where do people is that on Amazon or uh Amazon is where where most of my books are sold. Uh Barnes and Noble or anywhere you know books are sold, it’s available. The second book was a true novel. This is Zephyr’s War. And this reflects on my time that I spent in Ukraine uh giving keynote speeches for that area. And this is before the war, okay, but you could see a prelude to war. You could see the tension, you could see the demonstrations on the streets, the anger, the the frustration between the Russians and the Ukrainians. And so I wrote a book about a Ukrainian capitalist versus the Russian mafia. And it is a true, you know, high-stakes horror story. Uh, you know, it’s a high tension, but also a fun and rewarding read. It’s it’s a neat book. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

Michelle: 12:30

You looked into your own life and you looked there for the inspiration for the topics of these novels?

Dr. Gregory: 12:36

Yes. Uh is the it could be just a spark of an idea. And that’s what this was. It was a spark of a of a concept that happened while I was there. It was a a conversation between a Russian journalist and a and my Ukrainian handler, and the the argument they got in into right in front of me sparked the reason for this book. And it was a very interesting experience. I I I have to say, it was one of and you know, it didn’t follow that discussion, but it gave witness to the the fact that it was very high intensity.

Michelle: 13:11

Do you outline the book first and then write, or do you get into it right and it unfolds in the process of the writing?

Dr. Gregory: 13:18

How does that is a great question. Most writers are encouraged to create an outline. I do not. My way style of writing is to write the first sentence for that sentence and that first paragraph. If that inspires me to continue, then I continue until I run out of ideas on that. So uh that’s why some of my ideas are novellas and others are are full novels. I don’t keep writing just to fill up the pages. And so uh no, I I do not use an outline. I you know, I have a vague understanding of where I’m going, but I like the spontaneity of developing the story, developing the uh the back and forth in my mind. It works so well. The ending of that book I struggled with for months. So it was unfinished. All of a sudden, one night I had a dream, it finished the whole story, I wrote up, wrote it down, and the end. It works. That’s the way my mind works.

Michelle: 14:20

Now, presumably your wife isn’t also writing novels, is that right?

Dr. Gregory: 14:24

She does not write novels.

Michelle: 14:25

For 40 years, you woke up in the morning and you both went to work together, and now you’re doing one thing and she’s doing the other. How is that? How is life after retirement in terms of your day job versus your love life?

Dr. Gregory: 14:40

She has always been 100% supportive of the things that I do, my goals, my aspirations, 100% supportive. The only time she has not been supportive turned out to be my mistake. You know, it was a mistake that I if I did said no, I’m gonna do it another way, invariably I suffered for it. Not from her, but from the reality that she saw. And she’s so she’s a great judge of character, a brilliant business person, but kind of shy that way. She doesn’t want it the lead role. And she’s a gardener, she’s a master gardener. She knows her stuff around that, which is really fun and exciting, and just has a lot of interests that keeps her quite busy. The only things that we we do together are things like uh archaeology. We love archaeology. We’re both studying to be archaeological students versus full professionals. We’re not gonna become professional archaeologists. No archaeology? No, I don’t think so.

Michelle: 15:43

We just do it for the do you have plans for so you got the archaeology, you have painting, you have book writing. Is there anything else on your platter ready to roll off the presses?

Dr. Gregory: 15:54

No, I I do have a project called Games We Played as Children. And that’s a new idea that I would like to write and make into a tool to get your grandchildren off of the iPads and outside for fun.

Michelle: 16:08

That’s gotta be a good seller.

Dr. Gregory: 16:10

Yeah, playing with their grandparents. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Michelle: 16:15

Well, you are definitely what this conversation inspired in me is first of all, not to think badly if things get tough. Tougher when you retire than easier for your PhD, for example. But it can also be a time of creativity. We don’t have more time to talk on this subject now, but I would urge everybody to go check out Dr. Gregory’s books. That’s James R. Gregory. And you have a website, right? Yes, it’s James R.Gregorybooks.com. And get acquainted with him because he’s fascinating and can be an inspiration to you. So thank you very much for sharing your journey from the boardroom to the classroom to novel writing. And if we’ve learned everything, I hope it’s that as long as you can imagine it, you can get in action and do it. So uh it’s not a kick up your feet, do nothing years ahead. Everything is possible. Just have to take the initiative. So on another subject, let me take the opportunity to remind you that decluttering 55 plus wisdoms to create a legacy, not a mess, is my spiralized tabletop flipbook, and it’s now at Amazon.com and www.layitflat.com. And the way that it works is it sits on your tabletop, you flip it to any page, and it will give you some inspiration to do something in the next level clutter areas. If you need inspiration to exercise, you’re going to find an illustration there. If it’s time to mend a broken relationship, you’ll be reminded on the illustrations in the book. If it’s just time to rest and relax, that’s A-OK, and you’ll find an illustration. You can leave that on your desktop to prompt you to take it easy. It’s fun to keep at your side now and for years to come. So check it out. Also, go to www.decluttering55plus.com and sign up on the Let’s Connect page so we can stay in touch with news you can use. Please share your relationships and triumphs and challenges with us. And by all means, subscribe to this show. So I want to thank you so much for joining us today. Visit again next week, and we’re going to sign off now. So be sure you have a clutter free day. Thank you for being here.