What became visible only after your working life slowed down or ended?

I'm the only president that's ever visited Africa south of the Sahara Desert. I went to two (African) countries while I was president, and I didn't know the potential of that continent, nor the challenges that faced those people. Now I do. To a much greater extent I didn't understand the [widespread] problems in our own country, from a personal point of view. I was dealing with billions of dollars that would be allocated for education or health or welfare or housing, or whatever. But I didn't know from a personal point of view the people that actually were in need or that were the recipients of those quite often inadequate and ill-designed programs.

No two weeks have been the same since I retired. Since this is my fifth year out of professional basketball, I'm at a point where I want to evaluate and make a decision whether I want more consistency and continuity, or I want things to continue in that mode. This is a transitional time.

If I were to give advice to young people, high-achieving young people for example, I'd have to say, don't neglect your family. Politics is important, sitting at the head table is glamorous. Traveling around the world, trying to do something for world peace was wonderful. But family and friends and faith are what really matter in life. And I know that. I see it so clearly now.

The day I retired from teaching, again, was one of the most satisfying days of my life and it was sad, but when I — the day I retired, I went home and I was by myself and I was having a glass of wine. I was thinking about the lunch the teachers gave me that day. The retirement lunch. And I was able to look back on that life, that 30 years in the classroom, and say — I was able to congratulate myself. I'm glad I did that. That was good. I felt useful, that I don't think I would have felt if I had gone into business or something like that.

In 1990 I retired from my firm, I.M. Pei & Partners, and for two years I didn't do much. Then I started to get kind of antsy, so I decided, I'm going to do some more work. And I chose to do work outside the U.S. because I've spent 45 years here and I wanted to learn more about what's happening in the rest of the world.

Then at the time of retirement, that's a big problem in Sweden, as a retired person, because then you are pushed off. I was fortunate even from that point of view because I got a very good research collaboration agreement with Upjohn, the American Upjohn company. So that could help me to go on with my research.

Now, it's been very hard for me to accept that. I never - I felt like - I always felt like I could blow it and nothing would never happen until this happened. So now, it's - no matter how hard I practice, it just seem like I can't do the plays I did.

So when I leave the court, I'm going to have more than enough to do, just to carry on, maybe telling something of our journey to people who didn't go through that. And also reflecting on our successes on the court, which have been enormous, but also accepting the criticisms of our failures.

I retired sort of willy-nilly and only after I started writing the column did I suddenly discover there were all these things out there that I hadn't learned about. And so my mission became to try to educate future retirees about what they were going to face and what they needed to know.

Kopp ’89 Discusses Education Reform, Looking Beyond the Classroom | Princeton Alumni Weekly

I ignored my stand-up career for 25 years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

But then the amazing thing is to look back. It looks like it all was a straight line. You can see the straight line of light and that makes us who we are.

But I continued to think that illness happened to patients and not to doctors, even though I was now retired. Twenty months after I had my brain scanned, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. I had had typical symptoms for years, steadily getting worse, but it took me a long time before I could bring myself to ask for help. I thought I was being stoical when in reality I was being a coward.

What I discovered was that there are four distinct phases that most of us move through in retirement, and as you'll see, it's not always a smooth ride. Phase one is the vacation phase, and that's just what it's like. You wake up when you want. You do what you want all day. And the best part is that there is no set routine. And for most folks, phase one lasts for about a year or so, and then strangely, it begins to lose its luster. We begin to feel a bit bored, and we ask ourselves, is that all there is to retirement?

But it happened and it was only after I retired tired and looked back on my career that I realized the strong connection between what I did and my success. And I know that I would not be in as good a place as I am today had I not done that.

There are things that I really am interested in doing that I can't do if I continue to do what I'm doing. And I - teaching would be a big thing for me. I'm an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins and teach business communications and ethics, so very different from what I do on a daily basis.

I wish that I could be around 15 years from now, 100 years ... .

I go in every day to the office. I don't accomplish hardly anything. I mean, in terms of – it just takes me way longer to do things. And Greg is so good. It was kind of embarrassing how good he is, because he has covered – you know, we've got about 200 businesses within Berkshire, you know, that came about, and I can't name the manager's names or their wives names, or – and I haven't seen them, you know, in a long time.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.