I'm sixty, and I'm cutting my practice in half

On Monday I said no to two things I actually wanted to do.

One of them was a collaboration, the kind of thing I would have jumped at a few years ago. Good people, real upside, the sort of opportunity you feel a little proud just to be asked about. I said no to it, and I said no to the second one right after, and then I waited for the regret to show up.

It didn't.

What showed up instead was a heavy blanket fog lifting off me. I sat there for a second, genuinely surprised by how light I felt. So I kept going: I looked at the next 30, 60, 90 days and pulled out three or four more commitments that had quietly crept onto the calendar. By the time I was done, I could breathe again.

I told my wife that night, she didn't try to talk me out of it and said “yeah, let's not do that, but let's do this”. That is usually how the important calls go in my life.

Someone I trust holds up a mirror, and I finally admit the thing I already knew.

Walking into the fourth quarter

And what I already knew was simple. I'm sixty, I just turned it. Somewhere in my mid-fifties, a thought started seeping in that I have not been able to shake since: I'm walking into the fourth quarter.

I think about a life the way you'd think about a game, in four quarters. In the first quarter you can blow the whole thing up. You can hand-grenade your life doing something foolish, and plenty of people do, but nobody wins the game in the first quarter.

The second quarter is where you lay a foundation. Then there's halftime, where if you're smart you catch your breath. The third quarter is where you decide whether to take it up a notch, and I've watched good people just quietly retire in their mid-forties instead.

I never understood that: the fourth quarter, the way I see it, is the part where you give back and finally reap what you spent thirty years planting.

I'm writing a book about this, called Fourth Quarter Mindset. It started as a passing thought and it has refused to leave me alone since.

Cutting it in half on purpose

So last year I made a decision that surprises people when I say it out loud. In two years, I'm cutting my practice in half.

Some of that is being decided for me. I've got a couple of big private equity groups and a gigantic franchise in my book of clients, and they're heading toward being sold or acquired. 

But most of it is a choice.

I've been doing more than 150 session days a year, one year I did around 170. I love the work, I still get a charge out of a hard session, but I'm good. I don't need to prove the number to anyone anymore, least of all myself.

What I want now is to go deeper with the clients I keep, and there will be half as many of them. Some have been with me ten, twelve years and will stay. Others will graduate, because two years was exactly enough and we both know it.

The point is that I get to be intentional about who is in the room with me for the next stretch. I'll do more one-on-one executive coaching, which sits at the top left of my Delegate and Elevate, in the love-to-do-and-good-at-it corner. The speaking has started to roll on its own, and I plan to coach through the age of eighty (so I've got twenty more years to spend well).

If that sounds like slowing down, it isn't. It's the same move I made once before, just one level deeper.

The first time I subtracted

For years, before I joined this community, back in what I jokingly call my illegal implementer days, I was a water beetle. I skated across the surface of everything: a little scaling-up work, some Rockefeller Habits, some Lencioni, a bit of EOS® when the book first came out… I was busy, and I was spread so thin that none of it went deep. It wasn't good, and part of me knew it.

The turn came when I finally slowed down and picked one thing.

I decided I wanted to be the best EOS® coach I could possibly be, and I pointed everything at that. I fixed the story I was telling myself, and got deliberate about who I spent my time with. The practice took off, not because I added anything, but because I stopped splitting myself across things that were never going to add up.

Cutting my practice in half is that same decision, ten years on: subtraction again, focus again. Just at a stage of life where the math on my remaining time has gotten a lot more honest.

What the freedom is for

I should tell you that none of this is discipline for its own sake: my degree is in recreation and leisure studies.

I've been having fun all my life, and I've stopped apologizing for it. I'm the guy lying on the floor at the back of the room at QCE because I learn better that way. When you build a life you actually love, and you show up as your real self inside it, the right people tend to find you. I've watched it happen for thirty years. The version of me that pretends to be a buttoned-up professional never attracted anyone worth keeping.

That is what the freed-up time is for.

A couple of years ago my wife and I finally got our kids off to school and gave ourselves a gift: two months in Italy. I was over there, half a world away from my session rooms, and the practice did not fall apart. If anything, some of the clearest decisions of my career happened on that trip, with no calendar screaming at me. That is the kind of thing the fourth quarter is supposed to buy, and you don't get it by accident. You get it by saying no.

I live in Solana Beach now. My back door is more or less the ocean. Some mornings I look at the surf before anything else, and I'll walk out for six or seven minutes and just watch the tide come in. I'm not out there to find anything. I've spent a career learning that the good stuff finds you once you stop grabbing at all of it.

We have a lot of control we don't always choose to take. On Monday I took a little of it back. The fog lifted. I plan to keep it that way.