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The last post was The Journey Begins and I left off with the dawn of my new retirement. The first few months of retirement were filled with stress from selling our house and moving to a new state. Even with the stress of all that, I knew it was the right decision. When I would tell people I was about to retire, I was met with A LOT of “you’re too young to retire”. I was three months away from turning 60 and I am guessing that because I was too young to collect social security, I was too young? It may be that the perception is that when you retire, you should atrophy and wait to die. It didn’t sound too inviting to me. So maybe I should have played it safe; however, I never lived my life making common-sense choices. I made them based on what made me happy and what my intuition was telling me. It was telling me, with every fiber of my being, that there was something else I needed to be doing.
I kept telling people I was not retiring but changing careers and building an empire. They laughed at me but I was dead serious. I knew I was on the right path because when I visualized what I wanted to do I felt excitement and knew I was no longer doing justice to career as a Tuberculosis Public Health Nurse which was my passion for 25 years. It was another one of those intuitions that I needed to follow and to date; now at 60 years old, I can still attest it always worked out in the long run. I always needed a goal that was out of reach and loved working hard to obtain it. So the decision to build an empire at 59 seemed a great way to spend my 4th quarter of life because I am pretty sure I won’t let myself die until I reach it. The plan is to make it to 90 and then reevaluate if I want to go for 104.
Once we finally settled in, I started a routine. I think that is an important part of post-retirement life. I didn’t want to wake up with a panic attack knowing that I had days ahead of me with nothing to do. I started with the things I was trying to fit in during pre-retirement and didn’t have time to do on a regular basis. I committed to daily meditation with Depak Chopra, yoga with my daily yoga app, and journaling with the help of journals I bought from Oprah’s Daily Insider. I felt I would need all of them to keep me inspired to fulfill my goal of building an empire. My next goal was to set up my office space and create an environment that I enjoyed. I am surrounded by my vision board and positive artifacts around me, which include my home-made OP Dolls that I talk to and assure them that one day they will come to life. I believe that they are looking forward to it. I assembled a support team like Jack Canfields book The Success Principles suggested. It consisted of my husband, who would agree to staff meetings if I served adult beverages, and my two dogs, who reluctantly agreed to star in social media posts.
I also bought a pet rock because when I was a kid they were all the rage. I decided even if my ideas are not good you just have to make people think they are good. To be honest, this is the first true pet rock I own. My dad would not give me money to buy one in the day so I made my own. Maybe that was my first spark of getting creative.
The next part of the journey was building a website which I knew nothing about. I did take some of my skills I learned while working in the Education Department of the The Global TB Institute to help me with the basics. This leads me to believe that every part of our journey here on earth is necessary even if we don’t appreciate all the experiences we must endure to get here.
I began with a quest for information and bought some books on how to start a website like WordPress for Dummies. I found another great site that really gave great step-by-step instructions on how to create a website called Udemy . I used blue host as my web hosting site and to secure and purchase my domain name The Op Stop.
In my next educational post, I will cover how to self-publish your book on Amazon Kindle Direct
