By Dan Beenken

Today, I’m going to talk about the “R” word. (No, not raisins—yuck!) Retirement: the final frontier!

When we hear of someone’s retirement, many will ask, "What are you retiring from?" For the next couple of paragraphs, I want to flip that a bit. What are you retiring TO? This is the question to be asking, and the question all business owners need to take the time to process.

What am I going to do next? How will I make this next stage of my life meaningful to me?Where will I find purpose? What will I enjoy? What will get me out of the house and keep my spouse off my case?

The answers to these questions are as diverse as we are. It's not my place to say what your answers should be. What I do want to mention here (and you knew I’d have something to say) is it better be good! Golf and keeping tabs on the grandkids probably isn’t going to cut it for someone who has spent a lifetime building or growing a family business.

A few weeks in to your new life of relaxation, you are probably going to start peering back in the office. You’re going to tell your spouse you are going to stop by to say, “hi,” bring in doughnuts, check in how a project is going or some other nonsense. You know why you are there: you can’t stand it anymore! The purpose you had at work is missing, along with the relationships, power and prestige, hasn’t been replaced in a real-enough way, and it's killing you! And now you are back in the office, and its killing the rest of your family!

I’ll stop there in case this is starting to sound too real right now. In the next part of this series, we are going to talk about what we can do with ourselves to find meaning and purpose. And no, it will not be a YouTube video on how to learn to crochet. You can get that here if you need it, and somehow this thing has 22 million views!