The Flourless Cake
Have you ever baked a cake? I've baked a few in my life, and fortunately, it was under the watchful eye of my mom. As a kid, I remember using her cookbook to determine the exact ingredients in the exact ratios. My favorite ingredient was the sugar, of course. After all, that's what made the cake actually taste good. If I had my way, I probably would have elected to replace the gross-tasting flour with even more sugar. If sugar is what makes it taste good, then why not let the sugar dominate!?!? Can you imagine how bad that all-sugar, no-flour cake would have tasted? It would have been a disaster.
During a recent conversation with a client, I asked both spouses what they wanted. They both shared a similar answer. In short, their objective in life was to retire as early as possible (late 40s or early 50s) and spend more time with family.
Curious about where this was going, I asked, "And what else?"
The husband looked confused, so he cleared the air: "Nothing else. We're just going to spend time with friends and family."
Wanting to be sure I understood, I asked one more follow-up: "But nothing else?"
"Nope, we're going to relax and just spend our time with friends and family. Travel, too.....probably with family"
Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion that will be met with a violent backlash, but this seems like a flourless cake. Relaxing and spending time with loved ones is the sugar. It tastes good! It's fun. It's enjoyable. It gives life flavor. But if all we're adding to the batter is sugar, like my childhood baking example above, that's going to be one disaster of a cake.
Work. Purpose. Impact. Service. These are the flour. They don't always taste as good as the sugar, but they are what make a cake a cake. They balance out the ingredients to create something beautiful.....something delicious.
Just as we shouldn't have a flourless cake, we also shouldn't have a sugarless cake. While it might come out of the oven actually looking like a cake, it probably tastes dull and bland. Nobody wants that cake, either! We gotta have the sugar, too!
Our obsession with and idolization of retirement is turning us into a bunch of flourless cakes. We glorify a life of leisure so much in our culture that we forget to add all the ingredients to the bowl in healthy ratios.
My goal isn't to turn an entire generation into a bunch of work-obsessed robots. Rather, I deeply desire for people to see the good in their work. Further, if people understood how much value work adds to their lives, they would quit racing to the finish line (i.e., retirement) and instead pursue work that actually matters to them. Lots of sugar for taste, a healthy amount of flour to give it body, in a ratio that makes it light and fluffy. That sounds like an absolutely delicious cake!
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