Every so often, it's essential, I think, to re-establish a baseline.
Your values, your purpose, what you're trying to achieve, what you're trying to do, that type of thing.
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine a little while ago; we were talking about pensions (I'm at that age).
It turns out that in about 8 weeks' time, I can actually claim my NHS pension, and I'm seriously considering that as a prospect.
I stopped paying that in 2015, but I was 21 years into that, and I'm not entirely confident about the fact that it will be here five years after that.
What that did do is it made me think back to the time when I started paying my NHS pension in August 1994.
I was working in the dental school in Glasgow as a junior house officer in my first few weeks, and my first paycheck came in, and my pension contribution was something in the region of £60.
I decided that I was mental to pay that out of a wage of £13,800 per year, and therefore I decided to try and opt out of the NHS pension scheme.
For one reason or another, one of the senior people in the department found out I was trying to do that and came and spoke to me (this would probably never happen now), and he actually definitely and totally told me, “To stop being a d**k”.
He spoke to me for a little while about trying to imagine what it would be like when it came time to collect that pension and how I would want to turn back to the person I was then and shake them and tell them not to be so stupid or so flippant or so greedy in the moment.
He helped me to establish a baseline.
From then on, I understood that it was important to think further on, not just think now; maybe that was a real watershed for me.
The friend I was speaking to doesn't have any pension provision to speak of.
They’re in their late 40s.
They've definitely earned enough money to put some stuff away, and they have a little bit away, but not that much.
They told me they were beginning to panic about it, and I started to speak to them about possibilities and options that they had (I've learned a bit about this over the years).
They shut down when I started to talk about it, though, and started to tell me about the new car that we were going to buy and how nice it was.
Life is just a series of choices, isn't it? And choices give us freedom, or they don't.
You can't always make the right choices, but you can learn from them, and you can make the next choices based on a framework, a baseline of values and thoughts and needs and wishes or not.
Blog Post Number - 4718