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

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.

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 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.