GP67: Live Life in the Yellow: with Nick Searl

And, you know, you've had an incredible career and you're at a point now where, as you say, you've got that ability to decide where you spend your time, what fills your diary.

And how do you decide that? You know, is it, are you sort of...

Thinking, okay, I want to do things I really enjoy or things that are really impactful or things I'm really good at.

Is it a mixture of all of that? How are you sort of deciding how you use your valuable time, really?

I mean, there is a temptation, you know, amongst it.

For anybody who's been in, you know, a long-term career where it's all very structured and all the rest of it, is you kind of make a plan.

And, you know, you write it all down and you say, this is what I want to do and this is my purpose in life and this is...

And you kind of go, there it is.

This is the new version of me and it's written in a spreadsheet, therefore it must work.

And it's not like that at all.

It's messy.

It's messy as hell.

The only way I can describe it is...

You know, for a lot of teenagers who are trying to figure out, you know, who are they? What do they want to do? Where do they want to go? What's my identity? You know, all that messy stuff of trying to figure out who you are when you're in your teenage years and you're emerging into further education.

It's like it's starting to fall into place a little bit.

When you stop full time, it's a bit like doing that all over again, except you have to let a load of stuff go in order to be able to go through that discovery and kind of figure out, OK, what do I look like now? Because, you know, I hear quite a lot of people who've, in inverted commas, retired.

And when they're asked the question, what do you do? They say, I used to.

And they still define themselves by what they've just spent 35 years doing.

And, you know, that has all sorts of connotations.

You've never letting go of anything.

You're never giving yourself the mental space to kind of create something new, a new version of yourself.

So it's not a straightforward thing.

It is genuinely, sometimes it's quite confusing.

And sometimes you don't really know.

You sit there like, well, what am I supposed to do now? And you sit with that.