Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀

With yesterday’s announcement that Microsoft is offering 60,000 employees a buyout, its a good time to remember that nobody cares about your old title.

I mean that kindly. The day you leave, the title goes to the next person on the org chart. Your email bounces. The meeting invites stop. Slack is silent. The building doesn't notice.

That stings. It's also the best news you'll get, because your title was never the most valuable part.

Let's get into it.

"So, what do you do?"

Every retired executive knows the moment. Somebody at a dinner party asks the question, and for the first time in thirty years you don't have a one-line answer.

You're not alone in noticing. One r/retirement thread asking "Do you care about your former career after retiring?" drew nearly 500 upvotes and more than 500 comments. My agents flagged that same thread six separate times this year.

The researchers have noticed too. Mark Lamberti ran four public companies over a 33-year career. After he left, he went back to school and co-wrote a study with Charlene Lew of the Gordon Institute of Business Science, interviewing retired public-company CEOs about what came next. His summary:

"CEOs experience a profound void upon retirement that goes beyond the loss of position."

They found two stages. First, a stretch of uncertainty and self-doubt the researchers call liminality. Then emergence, when a new identity takes shape. The people who came through it well didn't skip the first stage. They worked through it on purpose.

Here's the uncomfortable part. Your title was never yours. You were renting it from the company. When the lease ended, it went back.

What did you own? The stuff that walked out the door with you:

Arthur Brooks makes the case with cognitive science in From Strength to Strength. Psychologist Raymond Cattell split intelligence into two kinds. Fluid intelligence — speed, raw problem-solving — peaks early. Crystallized intelligence — synthesis, judgment, knowing what matters — keeps building for decades.

Most corporate titles pay you for the first kind. You leave carrying the second. That's not a loss. It's a currency swap, and the new currency appreciates.

Sol Price built FedMart into a 40-store chain, sold control to a German company in 1975, and was out of his own company within the year. He was about 60. In July 1976 he opened a warehouse store in San Diego called Price Club. It merged with Costco in 1993. The title went away. The retailer's instincts didn't.

Jimmy Carter lost the biggest title in the world in 1980, at 56. Two years later he and Rosalynn founded the Carter Center. He spent the next four decades on election monitoring, disease eradication and building houses with Habitat for Humanity, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Whatever you think of his presidency, he redefined what an ex-president does.

Neither of them tried to get the old title back. Both used what the title had been sitting on top of.

Joy Levin, a retirement coach who works with federal executives, put it well in Government Executive in September: "Retirement advice usually covers what to retire toward, but rarely what to retire with."

Planning covers the money. Almost nobody plans for what the title quietly gave you:

None of that disappears because the title did. You just have to supply it yourself now. That's what a second act actually is: rebuilding those four things around what you own, not what you rented.

Three questions. Ten minutes. Write the answers down.

That third answer is a draft of your next title. This time, it's one you own.

Now go launch something 🚀

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In 1968, Robert Pirsig took a 17-day motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California with his eleven-year-old son on the back. The book that came out of it, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was turned down by 121 publishers before William Morrow took a chance on it in 1974. It has sold more than five million copies.

On a failed mountain hike, Pirsig tells his son:

"To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top."

A corporate career trains you to live for the summit — the next title, the next promotion. Retirement takes the summit away, and it can feel like there's nothing left to climb.

Let AI interview you.

Most of us are bad at listing our own strengths. We've done them so long they feel like nothing. An AI assistant is a patient interviewer with no reason to flatter you.

Open Claude or ChatGPT and paste this:

Ten minutes in, you'll have a list you'd never have written yourself.

Founders podcast, #304: Sol Price.

David Senra on the man who was pushed out of his own company, started over at about 60, and taught Jim Sinegal, Sam Walton, Jeff Bezos and Bernie Marcus along the way. The best late-career founder story in the catalog. Good road-trip listening.

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