53: Are You in the Sweet Spot of Life?

Midlife doesn't have to be a crisis.

In this episode of Up Your Average, Keith and Doug teach how to navigate midlife when family, work, and health issues converge.

By listening, you will learn:

• Why midlife is the sweet spot of life
• What to do when everything goes wrong
• How to eliminate unnecessary stressors

Connect with Keith and Doug at https://www.gimbalfinancial.com.

What is Up Your Average?

Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.

Doug: 00:00

If you're in this sweet spot, chances are you're tempted to say this, I am losing my mind right now because you're dealing with, you know, probably pretty complex lives at work and complex things. And then you go home and like the milk's been sitting out for two hours. And so you're tempted to think I am losing my mind.

Caleb: 00:24

Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.

Keith: 00:44

Good morning, Douglas. What's up? Good morning. You know, I like that purple. That makes me smile.

Doug: 00:51

Well, like I said, Bearcats in the house. Muncie Central Bearcats, eight state championships in basketball, and

Keith: 00:59

the

Doug: 00:59

Marion Giants, they also have eight, and they have purple as well. So if you want to be a winner, change your colors to purple.

Keith: 01:11

Purple, royalty. It's a big deal. You should add purple to your wardrobe to simply improve your day to know that you're royal.

Doug: 01:22

Or if you want to just buy some clothes that are 50% off, you get purple because the navy blue is not gonna be 50% off. You get 50 off on a purple one.

Keith: 01:34

So today we're gonna talk about Paul Williams one more time, and I think we're gonna be talking about it for a while, but I think we need to give him a break after this week. But I kind of titled this one, The Sweet Spot, and I got feedback from Vince, Ryan, Ryan, Wes, Cameron, Mitch. I was just kind of getting their feedback about this idea. And even when I think about it, I was thinking about wardrobe before you came sporting the purple.

Doug: 02:06

Okay.

Keith: 02:07

So I may not look like that I have selection process in my wardrobe, but there is one brand that probably is the greatest dominator of my wardrobe.

Doug: 02:24

Okay. I was gonna make a smart aleck comment right there, and I just filtered it with my brain.

Keith: 02:31

He's dear to

Doug: 02:31

hell of goodwill. That's not a brain.

Keith: 02:35

Go ahead. So I do wear the flying pig one, which is old school. Like, my brands are definitely old dudes. The Oh. My pig one is Brooks Brothers.

Keith: 02:48

I I I

Doug: 02:48

would Well, that's what you're looking at right here.

Keith: 02:51

That's a Brooks Brothers?

Doug: 02:52

This would be a Brooks Brothers.

Keith: 02:53

That's old school, I'm told, but but the other old school that my kids give me a hard time about and I don't care is life is good.

Doug: 03:00

Yeah. I like that one. I I always like the one with the alligator on it. And Caroline and I were talking about this because Warner asked us when we were kids, what luxuries were there in life that you just wanted? And one of the things we wanted were name brand clothes.

Doug: 03:17

I don't know if that's a thing anymore for like for people to want that, but in Muncie, like your options were limited. So if you had something from Indianapolis, that was pretty prime.

Keith: 03:29

If our friend Mike Kinghorn is watching, he'll appreciate this because he was my avid basher in the day. And in Evansville in the seventies, it was a hard time. Yeah, man. It was an industrial city. And the guy I went to they called my high school Evansville Harrison the cake eaters because they were known to be the rich guys.

Doug: 03:48

Okay.

Keith: 03:49

But I went there living on the other side of the tracks, so I wasn't one. And the rich guys wore eyes on. Oh, yeah.

Doug: 03:59

Yeah. If you had the alligators, you were you were pretty cool. I never had I never had that.

Keith: 04:03

And you're too you're probably too young to appreciate it. But the knockoff of Izod was from the LaTiger or something LaTigre. I Instead of

Doug: 04:14

having a I may have had that. I may have had that. I love a good narco for a

Keith: 04:20

That's all that's all I can get. And I'm pretty sure my Keith Horns place 11 since Carrie La Tigre. That's good. That's really good. So so I'm gonna jump into the reason I was talking about life is good is life is hard.

Keith: 04:36

Like, if you can just accept that into your paradigm that you don't expect it to be easy, but I can make a hard time good anytime I choose to just simply by even wearing one of those shirts because I know life is good even in the midst of my difficulties. Right? Yeah. And so I came up with this idea a number of years ago. I called it the sweet spot, and I just believe it's true.

Keith: 05:00

And so I just want to share that out with some friends who are watching today and kind of give you the idea of what that is. And so it's a season of life. Right? And in the season of life, I drew a time span zero to 80 there, and that comes from Psalm 9zero 10 that says the days of a man's life are 70 or 80 if he's strong. And that's just, that's part of my financial worldview.

Keith: 05:34

I just think that way for people so that we can kind of get, if we can get you into that span between 70 and 80 in good shape, you're probably gonna be pretty good going forward. And then I drew on past that, the overtime thing that, man, if you get to live that, you're healthy and you've got your capacities, man, that's a good thing. And so then the rectangle in the middle of that is what I discovered personally is the sweet spot. At that point, you have a ton of family issues going on, you have work where you've got skills, you're not a new hire anymore, so you've got some understanding and you've got some earning ability going on there. Your work could be just really hitting the straightaway on that.

Keith: 06:21

And then your health is probably still, it had started to deteriorate too much because you've, but it's at that point where there's a lot of risk that your health can turn south because you get so busy. And then along with the family, you know, if add twenty, twenty five years to where you are, that's gonna probably give you maybe thirty today, give you an idea of where your parents might be in this situation. And so all those things are gonna be taking a toll on your time management, right? And I didn't realize that I was getting into that sweet spot when I did and I got overwhelmed quickly and had to step back and think about it. So that's what the sweet spot is and

Doug: 07:06

Now why do you call it the sweet spot?

Keith: 07:09

You've got all those things. Yeah, if you go forward twenty years, you're probably not gonna have your parents anymore, right? And you go forward twenty more years, you're not gonna be raising kids, right? And not that it's not sweet out there later, it's just some of those relationships aren't gonna be available anymore, and trying to When you're when

Doug: 07:29

you're when you're out there later, you're you're part of somebody's sweet spot. That's the joy I'm gonna give my kids someday. As I'm gonna I'm gonna give them the sweet spot.

Keith: 07:40

Yeah. And and I didn't, you know, at the front end of that sweet spot, I didn't appreciate the wisdom my parents had to offer me. And it was available to me, just didn't appreciate it. And if you wait too long, you won't maybe be able to get that from them, can get it somewhere else. But there's just a lot of stuff going on.

Keith: 08:00

And so you've got to, we went every Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember, probably up until I went to college to the shrine circus in Evansville.

Doug: 08:11

That's a good time right there, those go karts.

Keith: 08:13

There's all kinds of stuff going on. But there was always the thing where the, like somebody was spinning lights on a pole kind of thing. I haven't seen it in years, they would get a bunch of, they'd get them on their head and everything. And that's what it feels like in that sweet spot, you're spinning plates. And so what I thought we could do is just offer some thoughts and feedback to our friends and see if this doesn't help some folks in the days ahead.

Keith: 08:44

So I think what I asked you was to throw out two or three ideas you would give somebody in that sweet spot to think about. Really, I think what we're talking about is time management at some high level, but there's practical things that they can do in that. So I'll let you go first.

Doug: 09:03

Well, I've got this friend who has a disabled son and whenever I call him, I say, hey, how's it going? And he runs a business and all this stuff. And I say, how's it going? And he says, we're holding on with both hands. And that was the first thing I thought of when I saw your question is sometimes best thing you can do is just hold on with both hands.

Doug: 09:28

And I love that visual picture. But yeah, thanks for asking me the questions. I answered them to myself in order of importance.

Keith: 09:41

Yeah, the original Paul Williams, who we took this hypothetical link from, he had four kids and I didn't really know anybody at that time that had him. So you guys, that's who you guys are, so you can offer some real insight to that.

Doug: 09:56

Well, I appreciate it. Yes, we have four kids. Thankfully, our parents have been in really good health overall. And so I don't have any experience on that side. And if it comes, I hope that with enough grace, we'd do really well with it.

Doug: 10:16

But the first piece of counsel I might give someone is to pause, and especially if you're a doer, I would just encourage you to pause and think and pray, and then organize, organize your team. Normally opposites attract in a marriage, if you're married, you have someone who has some gifts that you just don't have. And so it's a great time to just say, for me personally, was, you know, Caroline is very gifted at running a schedule. I think our dinners are planned out until next February, and so to have someone who is gifted with organization has been huge for us, because we like to say yes to our kids. If they wanna do something, we like to say, let's go, and to be able to balance out the calendar and make that all happen is huge.

Doug: 11:12

And if it were up to me, we'd be running pretty scattered. So just pausing and organizing and thinking who could help me with this? Who could I onboard my team to help me? Is a really good thing to do.

Keith: 11:27

Man, order is such an important aspect because you have mathematical things working against you if you don't have order, particularly if you have multiple kids, but with one child, then you have to just organize that one. Then when you get to two, you've doubled the amount of things you need to organize, and then it just keeps geometrically expanding with more and more kids.

Doug: 11:50

I'm always tempted to not have quiet in my life. Even when I mow the grass, I'll listen to a podcast, but I think it's just crucial to have some quiet in your life and pause and really think how's this gonna work.

Keith: 12:03

Man, it's hard and it seemed really hard to get that in that sweet spot for me because there was a lot of noise.

Doug: 12:12

Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that I thought of was to set your own hours, and maybe this is part of the time management piece, but if you can set your, you got twenty four hours to do a lot of really great stuff. And if you begin with the end in mind, you know, for me, it's go to bed before eleven. You know, that's how I start is, you know, set some hours, think, okay, when am I gonna go to bed?

Doug: 12:36

And then before, you know, in between that wake up time and bedtime, you have time to get your work done, to break a sweat. You should at least break a sweat every day doing something. And that helps get your mind right, especially when you have a lot of people tugging on you. It's more of a mental game than a physical game. But the main thing in that twenty four hours, how to encourage someone, and I didn't figure out this, I didn't figure this out for a long time, is to slow down and just spend generous time with the people that you love and that you trust.

Doug: 13:16

And then other meetings that are coming your way, just start saying no to them. Man.

Keith: 13:23

That is profound. That word, I think it even makes it a priority to figure out who you are to be able to say no, because I know when I first learned to say no, there was some self confidence in that because you may hurt somebody's feelings when you tell them no.

Doug: 13:42

And it feels good to spend generous time with people that you love and trust. It might mean that you're doing stuff that doesn't seem all that productive, but you've said no to enough stuff where you have that kind of flexibility.

Keith: 13:54

And love my parents and my in laws. And when I was in that sweet spot, I set a goal, and I'm not as goal driven at this season in life as I was then, to be in one weekend in their house with all five kids every month. Like, one weekend a month, I was in one of those two houses, that was a and lot. Like, that was we exposed, you know, grandma and grandpa to the kids, but eventually we had to back off of that because the kids' lives got more active. Right.

Keith: 14:28

Telling them how it was, you know, kind of hurt their feelings along the way, but we had to guard our own sanity along the way.

Doug: 14:34

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, those couple things come to mind when I talk about the sweet spot and then the last piece, and this piece kind of comes easy for me most days, but is just to smile and laugh. I mean, I don't, you know it, but just to smile and laugh at your situation and understand that this is just a season. Like when you're a teenager, you think like, oh my goodness, I just I'm in this season of my life. When am I gonna be able to live my dreams, all this stuff.

Doug: 15:06

But just to smile and laugh, it'll help you remember that this is just a small part of your life. And there's gonna be better days ahead. There's probably some good jokes in that sweet spot. I mean, some like, are you kidding me? Is this really happening right now?

Doug: 15:25

I mean, that kind of stuff.

Keith: 15:27

I find myself injecting some of that in other people's sweet spot where I assume they're in the sweet spot. I kind of have the history of knowing a lot of what's going on in the world. And so my barista Keely is getting married Sunday and she went to try on her dress. I think it was last Friday or whatever, Thursday. And I'm not even gonna say who the bridal shop was, but they said, We altered it so poorly, we can't even fix it.

Keith: 15:57

Oh no. A week before her wedding. I'm smiling inside because I know it matters to her today, but it's not going to matter twenty years from now. And so I pulled open my phone and told her, Keely, here's what I do, is when I started RVing, I got the realization if I take a selfie when something blows up, I'll laugh about it six months from now. It may not laugh about this six months from now, but you've got a story for the rest of your life.

Keith: 16:29

So today I was in there and they were playing the song that was telling you to just let them know you love them. And so I asked her when the last time she just called her fiance to tell him that she loved him and she told me, well, works in the back there.

Doug: 16:50

So

Keith: 16:50

I That's cool. Didn't ask him,

Doug: 16:52

when was the last school?

Keith: 16:53

So I made both of them smile in this really difficult time.

Doug: 16:56

And I think you really gotta, you gotta give yourself some grace. Like if you're in this sweet spot, chances are you're tempted to say this, I am losing my mind right now. Because you're dealing with, you know, probably pretty complex lives at work and complex things. And then you go home and like the milk's been sitting out for two hours. And so you're tempted to think I am losing my mind.

Doug: 17:24

And when you express silly stuff like that, you just, and your kids laugh at you and it just raises the temperature even more. You kinda, you just gotta laugh at yourself first and not laugh at others, but laugh at yourself first and realize this is just a small stage of life.

Keith: 17:43

And quite frankly, you could, I don't know about how far losing your mind is, but I know getting overwhelmed with concerns and worry, you could actually do that, which I did inside that sweet spot. But you can also grab hold of things with both hands and come out of it. We've mentioned Carney's book a number of times, but I'll hold out one more time for you. How to stop worrying and start living. I would add this to your high priority read list because you may not need it today, but there may be a day that you might need some of those things and then

Doug: 18:20

You can listen to it while you're mowing your grass.

Keith: 18:22

Yeah, our friend Vince said that's how he liked it most best. He was just singing his praises to me yesterday and he said, the audible version is really a good thing.

Doug: 18:31

Stacking stuff is also important during this sweet spot. You can accomplish a lot at one time. I know Caroline, she'd always bring me dinner to the basketball games. And so I'd be sitting in the stands having dinner, and my friends would be ripping me because my wife brought me dinner. But when you can stack stuff together, you can maybe do two, three things at one time.

Doug: 18:54

I think that's always a good idea.

Keith: 18:56

Yeah, so Doug was stacking his meal and the game and Caroline was stacking one of the things that evidently she does, but also stacking, fixing that meal and saying, I love you, Doug. And those things can get stacked too. Yeah. And I just called to tell you I love you. You can do that right now.

Keith: 19:18

Well,

Doug: 19:21

that's what I think. But enough about what I think. What do you think?

Keith: 19:25

I think I put in a lot more than what I gave you credit to do. But I went back to the things we've harp on over and over again, think differently, buy wisdom, like what you do and some other things. But I just outlined mine into those kind of first three bullet points. Think differently. Back in our podcast Up Your Average Number forty five and forty six that you can see on YouTube.

Doug: 19:52

Please like and subscribe.

Keith: 19:54

Please like and subscribe that will really make us happy. I said, we were just basically talking about defining a worldview, because if you don't have a direction you're going, you're gonna get sucked into a lot of things that will consume your time that are unnecessary. And then you may not figure out that they were unnecessary till you're beyond that sweet spot. So you might get sucked into things that are not valuable at all. So I would just say define what's valuable to That's thinking differently because I think a lot of people just get caught moving and it goes back to what you're talking about order, that you have to have a certain order to be able to spend the time and the things that matter.

Doug: 20:33

Waste a lot of time and waste a lot of money if they're not defined.

Keith: 20:37

And brain space, right? Like, don't give people a lot of space in my brain unnecessarily, and you can, because you get sucked into things, can do that. And I don't think that's healthy. This, you know, inside of thinking differently and define your worldview, I put the idea about family matters. That word matters is always kind of a, it's one of those words that you can go a couple ways with that they do, valuable matters means valuable.

Keith: 21:06

And it also matters means issues. And so there's family issues and family matters And get to one of the family matters things is I would not neglect my marriage. So when Caroline brings the food to the game, she's not neglecting it. She's telling you, love you. And if you just called to say, I love you, that's probably a wise thing to do from time to time.

Keith: 21:29

Just pick up the phone because the kids can pull away from your priority, which I believe your marriage is a higher priority than your children. Like I've lived that way my whole life. And so if my kids try to get in between kind I let them know pretty quickly that they've chosen poorly. And if you have made the mistake of elevating the kids too high, today's a good day to step back from that and do something for your spouse to reinforce that. You can, because of the craziness that a lot of family matters like marriage challenges can pop up.

Keith: 22:03

And definitely if that happens, you to press the brakes on other things. You need to throw everything out and make sure that those high priority parts of your worldview are taken care of. Kids, the family matters with the kids. We had some health issues when our kids were young and that can sure send your stress level pretty high. And the particular one we had was called kidney reflux and we have one of them with a heart challenge.

Keith: 22:35

And thankfully both of those things, they grew out of them. Well, I'll just stick with those, but those health matters, then all of a sudden priorities kick in when those things happen, right? So that was kind of a thing that weighed on us and how to manage that or direct that or trust God with that. And then the other one that today I think is really heavy on the minds of a lot of people is schooling, like the schooling decisions. And I have a lot of opinions about that, but I think that's for another podcast because I think that is a worthy pursuit of your time to think through the schooling issues for your kids.

Keith: 23:17

Money Matters is thinking differently about money matters. One of our friends I was talking to today, he's been fortunate to have a large income and he's not finding the new house that he wants. And I suggested to him, why don't you buy half the house that you want or a third of the house that you want and get that decision out of your mind for a while. He wants to get out of the house he's in. And I said, why don't you get out of that house and go to a third of the house that you want, breathe a little bit, you're going to be in the general area in the school system you want, and then you can find that perfect house at that point in time.

Keith: 23:57

And that's just thinking differently about a situation because sometimes if you get too focused, even on a financial thing, you might get stuck in a place that stresses you out and takes more time than it needs. Career pursuits, that's right there thinking differently. My dad, my brother, my nephew, my nephew's son, my dad, my grandfather, and I think my grandfather's dad. Maybe I have to go back and look at it. They're all named Ralph.

Keith: 24:32

So I just, I love that name. I do too. Yeah, makes me, I can't say without smiling, but with career pursuits, I think I discovered in my 20s or 30s that part of the reason that my childhood was really pretty uneventful with stresses and things was Ralph said no to his career. And that's a big step. I didn't understand it at the time.

Doug: 24:57

It's a big deal.

Keith: 24:57

But then I figured it out when I looked back because he was, I think a gifted engineer for Whirlpool and they had a factory and a system in Evansville, but you had to migrate around the country to get up to, I don't think it was, I forget what it was. It was one of the Lake Michigan towns up there in Michigan. That's where the headquarters is. To get there, you had to travel. And he just told him, no, he's not gonna leave the Evansville thing.

Keith: 25:24

And so that just stunted his career and that had a big influence on my thought process when Tobias said that. And then thinking differently, I would say during that sweet spot, my opinion to you is you have zero time for politics. Like it doesn't matter when you look at those other priorities there. Yeah. Politics, you should say no to politics and put those off until because you have free it's just gonna consume brain time and not really help with anything.

Keith: 25:57

So thinking differently, those are my ideas during the sweet spot. Secondly, is we talk about buy wisdom. And I would tell Paul Williams to buy all the wisdom you can get. And in that area where I didn't keep close tabs to it is guard your health. Because I just, all the time squeezed out my time to exercise, and I think you've done a really good job of that.

Doug: 26:28

Another way to buy wisdom, think of our friend Henry, and Henry is one of the most frugal people I know. But during this time in their life, he hired somebody to mow their lawn. I thought that was brilliant, so that he could just have that. It wouldn't be on his plate of things to do. He was taking care of parents.

Doug: 26:49

He was helping his kids, got a whole bunch of kids. And so just you can buy wisdom and it can look you could buy as much wisdom as you want, including mowing your lawn.

Keith: 26:58

And you probably, if you're not a business owner, that principle is probably maybe new to you. Like, we do that around here all the time.

Doug: 27:05

Yeah. Well, it just feels weird sometimes. Like when you're

Keith: 27:07

like Underpersonal. Yeah. Right. Right.

Doug: 27:10

Yeah. You're like, that's only for the people who wear the alligator shirts.

Keith: 27:15

Right. But when you look at, I'm gonna switch back and share the screen. When you look at the sweet spot here, it's even, you know, it's just a, it's an, it's basically an eighth of those eighty years, you don't, it's not a long period of time. And the reason I think a lot of people would be tempted to not to do that, Doug, is that our industry has caused you to be obsessed with saving money for retirement. And I would say breathe in on that.

Keith: 27:48

I had a call from a young doctor, or he texted me yesterday, how much should I put in my Roth IRA? He's in residency and all I did is I texted him back, please call me. Yeah. Because that's not even the right question you should be asking when you're in your late twenties.

Doug: 28:05

Yeah, and if he's in his residency, he is working like a dog,

Keith: 28:11

Right, And so I said, there's no way I could, he's not a client, he's a friend, but there's no way I could text him what I was trying to explain to him. And so being able to take your money and buy yourself some time, like you're talking about with Henry buying the lawnmower, there's things you can buy time with, and I would just think through that, which maybe you just need to call somebody that understands that and has been there before you.

Doug: 28:38

I'd tell that dude to go buy a Tempur Pedic mattress. Get a good night get a good night's sleep.

Keith: 28:44

I I told him better than that, Doug. I told him to trade off the Roth IRA for another kid.

Doug: 28:50

Okay. Sweet spot. Here we come.

Keith: 28:54

Tempur Pedic. Here we go. Sorry about that, folks. This is g rated. There's a number of ideas in that area of buying wisdom, but I said it for what you were just saying, and I'll switch us back the PowerPoint presentation, but when you look at this, now go to the next one.

Keith: 29:22

Here I gotta hit that, there we go. There we go. So when you look at this diagram that I drew here, in my mind, there was some span of time after the sweet spot that you would draw the line in the sand when it wasn't working right. And so this is like a mental exercise, whatever that number is, if it's put in your head, span of time between the sweet spot and that time, and even in the sweet spot is going to create unnecessary stress in your thought process. And all that comes from is this invented idea called retirement that the financial services industry has duped us all into believing is a rite of passage or a thing.

Keith: 30:13

And if you take that line out of there and do what I did, I moved it forward there. Like I pretty much mentally decided ball is in the sweet spot. I'm just gonna expand that from the time horizon I had to 70. And mathematically what that did is it gave my money the ability theoretically to quadruple what I would have had at that first line, my money could have quadrupled. And then it also reduced the amount of time I'd need to lean into that.

Keith: 30:44

So that was how I expanded my time. That I changed my time horizon and it reduced my stress of worrying how much to save during that sweet spot for retirement. So I could spend money on the things like you're talking about. We could take the kids on an RV trip, or you could jump in the plane and go somewhere by just expanding your time. And you hit on some of these other time management ideas, but for as long as I can remember back to being an adult, have probably in my late twenties, had priorities in my life, like relationship priorities.

Keith: 31:19

And I just live by those priorities. And so to maintain those, I had to take the wisdom of our friend, Bob, to choose the excellent things in life over the good, which means you have to have the wisdom to know which is which. And that can be really confusing.

Doug: 31:37

Yeah.

Keith: 31:37

Like saying no to your career like my dad did, seems like that's a poor decision, right?

Doug: 31:45

Yeah, and there's times to say yes to it, and so knowing when to and when to back the throttle down, yeah.

Keith: 31:53

That point for me was the mid to late nineties. And we had guys like Mike Farmer and some other people that were helping me navigate that because I think Mike learned from maybe his own experience on how to get to kind of help you navigate it. So Mike was really influential in that sweet spot for me and thinking through that. And I put down also to slow down just kinda how you said that, that you have to, I think find slowness in that period of life. And I think the final element in there, what I thought about was life comes at you fast, was that Southwest Airlines?

Keith: 32:38

Yeah, somebody at me. Yeah, so you just have to like what you're doing. Like you may make less money liking what you're doing, but you only have so many times on this planet that's spinning around and to spend that time to chase a paycheck, I just can't tell you how.

Doug: 33:03

This is where I want to give high fives to some guys I know and walk through life with. I mean, I know a handful of guys who have left their high income earning career to do something that they like, or to give them some time back, or to give them some purpose. And that takes a ton of courage to do it.

Keith: 33:23

Well, that's where the sweet spot came from, is I had to do that. I had to tell a high paying job, I'm not really boastful about it, but I had two children and Kristen was on the way and I just didn't sense any other way out other than telling them, no, thank you. And that's when I redefined retirement as not a time, but a idea. The idea was, I'm gonna do what I want to do, which is like what you do. I'm gonna do what I want to do.

Keith: 33:52

It sounds selfish, but it goes back into your slow down and be quiet. And in the Psalms, the Psalmist said, delight yourself in the Lord and he'll give you the desires of your heart. And I just defined retirement as chasing the desires of my heart. This sweet spot, man, it is it is really difficult, Paul. And I know we too we've talked about your retirement.

Keith: 34:21

We talked about your far or your first day. But if you know anybody out there that is struggling with this sweet spot, we are here to serve you and to encourage you through that and offer you what wisdom we might have or even connect you with people that can broaden your wisdom and your insight in that. And one thing I do know about that sweet spot is that is ample in opportunities to screw it up. And you can screw up some things in that sweet spot that would seem to be irreparable, right? Yeah, it's a bit fear.

Keith: 34:56

Would say, I don't, they say fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. I don't know, but I would guess most of them happen in that, most of the divorces happen in that sweet spot. Kids get mad at the parents of those sweet spots. And what I would tell you that if you've already navigated through that sweet spot and you feel like you've blown it up, you don't have to feel that way, that there's an I'm sorry, I love you. Had I known then what I know now, I definitely wouldn't have done what I did if you blowed up your finances.

Keith: 35:28

Colonel Sanders didn't start the chicken store till he was in his mid sixties. So there is always, today is the day to live, to apologize, to make amends, and to make today your sweet spot. Even if you missed that one, there's sweet things going on today that you guys can capitalize on. What else? Anything else?

Doug: 35:51

Have a happy day. Happy

Keith: 35:52

day. Oh, happy day.