From the lowest common denominator of

“If you’re not aging, you’re dead,”

to loftier sentiments from Ramit Sethi

“At the moment when we accept our weaknesses and stop deciding to grow, we’re the best we’re ever going to be. It’s all downhill from there.”

There’s something about being human that pulls us forward if we let ourselves experience a minor discomfort.

The upside of the concept of retirement is to invest in ourselves, to do hard things, take on new challenges and do work on behalf of what gives us joy, fulfillment, and the feeling of being alive.

Our years accumulating the means to live without a regular paycheck have ended. The roadmap of how to live and what to do has also ended.

When they invented retirement, not long ago, the average life expectancy was only a short while after retirement age. Most died before retirement.

Today, your life expectancy can be decades after retirement age.

With all these years, we can take back how we handled hard, challenging and work as youngsters. Go back to before we intermingled the concept of responsibility with those feelings.

Think about it. Start with what you know about learning to walk. Learning to walk is work and yet most of us don’t quit. If the youngsters I encounter today learning to walk are any sign, it was fun. You can see joy in their faces as they master this skill.

Maybe you and a few friends built a fort — without adult supervision or help. You enjoyed everything you figured out for yourselves along the way. And you worked hard both mentally and physically.

Retirement presents the opportunity for us to untangle responsibility from hard, challenging, and work. We can get rid of the thought of failure. If it happens, even an epic failure is unlikely to leave you living on the street eating dog food at this stage.

When you try new things, learn new skills, you are likely to make a few mistakes.

Somewhere along the way, there was a shift in your thinking, feeling, do cycle. When we learned to walk, every time we fell down we wanted to get back up and try again. It felt good to try again.

At some point, failing and trying again became a negative. Someone noticed and made a comment. The thought of failing scared us, or made us feel embarrassed.

Mind you, none of this was a life-threatening failure. Just the need to learn more and try again type.

You’ve seen this loop play out in others. The co-worker who didn’t want to learn anything new. How often do you recognize it in yourself?

Separate responsibility from working for what you want

Retirement is an opportunity to re-program our thinking, feeling, doing loop again. The opportunity to embrace failure and rather than thinking there’s something wrong with us and feeling bad, we can choose to at least feel neutral about needing to learn more. Start over and try again to get where you want to be.

You are once again at a point where you can be and do anything your imagination dreams of.

Are you willing to spend just ten minutes a day learning more about what you still imagine doing with your life?

Ten minutes a day sounds easy. Investing ten minutes a day every day is more likely to result in learning what you want to learn, creating what you want to create. Just like learning to walk. You didn’t try for an hour one day and then stop trying for days on end because you were mad at yourself for not getting it. You kept working at it until you mastered it.

I’ve filled my day with distractions. From screens to the well worn thought that I’m retired and can do whatever I want whenever I want. I am often distracted from spending ten minutes a day to learn to speak and understand Spanish.

What have you always dreamed of doing or being? Are you willing to spend ten minutes a day learning how to be or do that?