By the time I left Bangkok for Bali at fifty, I had spent thirty years doing what was expected. Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok — corporate life in IT and banking across Asia, the kind of career that looks impressive from the outside and feels increasingly hollow from the inside. I was burning out in ways I didn't want to admit, and I knew that if I didn't make a completely different kind of move, I was going to keep going until there was nothing left to move with.
I didn't arrive in Bali with a plan. I arrived with the need for one. What grew from that — slowly at first, then with a momentum I hadn't expected — was a villa management company that eventually ran sixty properties and employed sixty-five people. I built it from nothing over nine years. Last year, I sold it.
"The surprising thing about starting over at fifty isn't how hard it is. It's how much more alive you feel than you did at thirty-five, doing everything right."
That experience — thirty years of corporate life as the first chapter, nine years building something entirely my own in Bali as the second — is the foundation of what Unretiring is about. But this publication isn't a retrospective. It's the third chapter, which is just beginning. And the thing I've learned from the first two is that the most interesting work tends to happen after you've stopped doing what was expected of you.
The conventional story is a quiet one. Wind down. Simplify. Stop taking risks. Organise your life around the absence of the things that used to define it — work, ambition, structure, challenge. Accept, gracefully, that the most interesting chapters are behind you.
I don't believe that. And I suspect you don't either, or you wouldn't be here.
The years after a long career are not a conclusion. They are, if you approach them correctly, the most interesting chapter you'll have — the one where the obligations finally fall away and what's left is entirely yours to construct. The question is whether you construct it deliberately, or let the conventional script construct it for you.
Unretiring exists to help with the deliberate version. Through the design of the spaces you live in. The places in the world worth living. The purpose worth pursuing. The challenge worth taking on. The life worth building — whether it's your second chapter or your third.