Staying Current, Connected, Involved & Relevant on a Continuing Arete Journey

On Wednesday, I turn 80. I suppose a birthday with that large a zero attached to it is supposed to
cause some serious looking backward … taking stock of where I’ve been, what I’ve accomplished,
what I might have done differently.

I’ve done some of that. Eight decades gives you plenty of material.

I’ve built businesses and lost one. I’ve spent years inside corporations, including getting fired three times because my personal sense of values didn’t always coexist peacefully with “going with the flow.”

I’ve worked in turnarounds, coached CEOs, facilitated peer advisory groups for more than 25 years, mentored younger leaders, watched businesses succeed and fail, and sat alongside owners as they wrestled with some of the hardest decisions of their lives.

I’ve also been married, raised a family, watched five grandchildren begin making their own way in the
world, pursued wildlife photography with something approaching obsession, survived cancer and major surgery, and learned a few things about vulnerability that the younger version of me probably wasn’t quite ready to learn.

So there is plenty to look back on … I’m just more interested in what’s next.

I don’t want my world to become smaller

Several years ago, I began using four words as something of a personal discipline:

Current | Connected | Involved | Relevant.

C | C | I | R.

The idea was pretty simple. I had watched enough people grow older to notice that aging itself wasn’t necessarily what diminished them. Their worlds gradually became smaller. They stopped learning. Their circle of relationships narrowed. They became less involved in things that stretched them. Eventually, without quite realizing when it happened, they became less relevant to the world around them.

I intend to age differently.

This isn’t about trying to stay young. At 80, I have absolutely no interest in pretending I’m 50. I’ve already been 50, and there were parts of it I wouldn’t particularly care to repeat.

It is about remaining engaged with life … and that takes work.

Staying Current means being willing to become a beginner again

Experience is an interesting thing. The longer we live, the more of it we accumulate, and the easier it becomes to believe that experience gives us the answer.

Sometimes it does. And sometimes experience simply gives us a more sophisticated set of old assumptions.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of years learning about artificial intelligence. I use ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. I’m experimenting with how AI changes my work as an executive coach, how it can make peer advisory work better, how it changes research and writing, and how it may affect the businesses of the CEOs I work with.

I’m also acutely aware that there are people 50 years younger than I am who understand parts of this world far better than I do. Good. Their understanding is something I can learn from … every day.

Every day is a school day.

I’ve carried that phrase with me since my rock-n-roll band days, when Bob Johnson first said it to me. It has become more important with age, not less. Staying Current means retaining enough curiosity and humility to become a beginner again … and again.

Connection doesn’t happen automatically

Some of the relationships that matter most to me today cross generations. I learn from CEOs and entrepreneurs. I learn from younger people who see the world differently. I learn from my family. I learn from people who disagree with me.

And I still spend one day each month sitting with a group of business owners who are willing to talk about what is really happening in their businesses and their lives. That kind of connection doesn’t simply fill a calendar. It changes how we think.

Over 26 years of peer advisory facilitation, I’ve watched this happen repeatedly. Put accomplished people around a table where vulnerability-based trust actually exists and something changes. Someone asks a question you haven’t asked yourself. Someone sees the paradigm you’re trapped inside. Someone challenges the story you’ve been telling yourself.

We rarely grow in isolation. Connection is the fertilizer of growth.

As we age, connection requires more intentionality. Professional networks change. Friends move or die. Family members build lives of their own. The gravitational pull toward a smaller, more comfortable circle is real. I work at resisting that pull and creating connections that expand my world and the worlds of those connections.

Being Involved means having something that still asks something of you

I’ve never been particularly attracted to the traditional concept of retirement. That doesn’t mean I think everyone should work forever. Far from it. The concept of Arete is that everyone’s journey is unique. Your Arete can’t be compared to mine. We are each on our own path, and that is particularly true of aging.

I do think we need something that asks something of us.

At 80, I still coach CEOs and facilitate a peer advisory group. I’m building CEOIQ® Renaissance around the challenges entrepreneurs face as they prepare to leave businesses that have defined much of their adult lives. I write. I mentor. I photograph wildlife. I’m learning AI. I’m developing new intellectual property when it would be perfectly reasonable at my age to stop creating new things and simply enjoy what I’ve already built.

Apparently, reasonable has never been one of my strongest suits. The large organizations who “spit me out” at various points along the way would agree with that statement.

There is an irony in spending so much of my time helping exiting entrepreneurs think about what comes next. The question I’m asking them is also the question I’m asking myself.

What will you be involved in when the thing that has occupied so much of your life no longer does?

I don’t think the answer has to be another business. It could be mentoring, teaching, serving, creating, traveling, photographing, volunteering, learning something completely new or finally doing something that has been waiting 30 years for its turn.

The activity matters less than the engagement. Involvement stretches you, keeps your mind active, and requires that you stay “in the game” in whatever fashion makes sense for the stage of life you’re in.

Relevance isn’t about importance

This may be the most difficult of the four. Relevance can sound suspiciously like ego. I don’t mean it that way.

I don’t need to be the most important person in the room. One of the continuing lessons of my own Arete Journey has been learning to leash the dominance trait that served me reasonably well as a turnaround executive and serves me much less well as a facilitator and coach. I work at remembering that my role is often to help someone discover their own answer, not provide mine.

Relevance, as I use the word, means continuing to create value for someone other than myself.

The world doesn’t particularly need another 80-year-old explaining how things were done in 1985. There may, however, be value in someone who lived through 1985, 1995, 2008, 2020 and 2026 saying, I’ve been in a version of this room before. Here’s what I learned. Now let’s figure out what is different this time.

Experience has value only if we keep translating it for the world we’re actually living in. Otherwise, it becomes history.

C | C | I | R is part of my continuing Arete Journey

Arete is the ancient Greek concept of pursuing excellence and achieving one’s highest potential. I’ve used the idea for years, and my understanding of it continues to change.

At an earlier point in my life, I probably associated Arete more closely with achievement. Build something. Accomplish something. Become better at something. Push toward a higher standard.

I see more layers now.

At 80, Arete includes learning how to accept vulnerability. It includes knowing when experience is wisdom and when it has become a paradigm that needs to be challenged. It includes continuing to contribute while becoming less concerned about who gets the credit. It includes taking care of the people I love. It includes remaining curious about a world that is changing faster than it ever has.

And it includes accepting that none of this work is ever finished.

That’s an important distinction for me. I haven’t achieved C | C | I | R. I work at it. Some days I’m better at it than others. The same is true of Arete.

So, what does 80 look like from here?

I have no idea! That’s part of what makes it interesting.

I know there are photographs I haven’t taken, people I haven’t met, ideas I haven’t explored and things I haven’t learned. There are CEOs I haven’t had the privilege of working with yet. CEOIQ® Renaissance is still taking shape. AI will probably look dramatically different a year from now, much less five years from now.

And there will be collisions with reality. There always are.

No plan survives its collision with reality.

That’s a line I’ve used with advisees for years, and life keeps proving it right. The point isn’t to create a life in which nothing unexpected happens. At 80, I know better than that. The point is to keep becoming when it does.

For however many years I have ahead of me, that’s the journey I want to be on: staying Current, remaining Connected, being meaningfully Involved, and continuing to find ways to be Relevant.

Still exploring. Still learning. Still here for what’s next.

The Arete Journey continues.

Key Takeaways

• Keep giving yourself opportunities to learn from people whose knowledge differs from yours, including people much younger than you.
• Maintain relationships that can challenge your assumptions, especially as work and family patterns change.
• Choose involvement that calls for your attention and effort; your next chapter can take a different shape from anyone else’s.
• Make your experience useful to the people and circumstances in front of you, and stay willing to revise an old answer.
• Treat Arete as continuing work that includes accepting vulnerability and caring for others, with room to keep learning.

Where to Start

If you’re beginning to consider life beyond your business, the CEOIQ® Renaissance Executive Briefing is a place to start exploring the transition. You can register at ceoiq.us.

If you’re ready for a first structured conversation about your own transition, write to me at [email protected] with the subject line “Ready to Start.” We can talk about what is changing and what you want to explore.

You can begin with the briefing or a conversation, at the point that fits your circumstances.

… Ben

Author: Ben Griffin

Facilitator - CEO Peer Advisory Group; Executive Coach; Photographer