Tag Archives: working

Introducing the inaugural winner of the Victory Lap Retirement [VLR] Award

Posted By |
Author Ernie Zelinski

Picking the first winner of the VLR [Victory Lap Retirement] Award was easy for me. Some might consider me a little biased, but how could I not give the award to my friend and mentor Ernie Zelinski?

After all it was Ernie’s books How to Retire Happy, Wild and Free and The Joy of Not Working that basically salvaged my life and gave me the courage to leave a 36-year banking career that was slowly killing me.

If I had read Ernie’s book earlier, I would have probably exited my corporate job even sooner than I did.

Ernie is an interesting guy, who learned early in life that he wasn’t cut out for the corporate world.

He’s a true free spirit, always has been, always will be and I just love his personal story. At the age of 29 he bailed (some might say was fired) from his job as a professional engineer. I say bailed because subconsciously we sometimes do things that will end up giving ourselves the result that we really want, as in “I know if I do this they will probably fire me” and in Ernie’s case they actually did.

In Ernie’s own words: “I Truly believe that had I not left corporate life, I would either be dead today, or suffering from some serious stress-induced illness.” Yours truly was also on this path. Thanks for showing me the way Ernie!

Continue Reading…

Review — The Defining Decade: Why your Twenties matter

Posted By |

41UYuubxN8L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_It was a few years ago now that my mom came to me and told me about this book I just absolutely had to read.

As with most things my mother tells me, I nodded, then continued on as if nothing was said. She gave me a copy of the book but I just put it on my shelf, along with many other parental recommendations that I never quite had the time to pick up and get to.

This past January, though, I was sitting around with my friends and they were all panicking about this book they were reading, and how their lives weren’t where they should be for our age, and how their entire perspective had shifted after reading it. Naturally, I was intrigued. What is this book and why is it so powerful as to elicit such a panic from my friends?

As luck would have it, the book they were discussing was the same book my mother had tried to get me to read years before, and I knew exactly where it was sitting on my shelf. I picked up The Defining Decade as soon as I got home that evening, and didn’t put it down ’til it was done.

‘The Defining Decade’ by Meg Jay, PhD is, as cliché as it may sound, a call to action. Continue Reading…