BOOK REVIEW
Retirement Heaven or Hell, Which Will You Choose? By Mike Drak with Susan Williams and Rob Morrison, Milner & Associates, Inc.
Retiring
Thoughts Strategies to create the retirement of your dreams
O
relationships, foster good health, achieve financial indepennce upon a time people turned 65, got the gold dence, reignite your sense of adventure, tap into your spirituwatch or maybe a card and/or party, and retired to ality, find your tribes, make the most of your time, adopt the their porch and grandchildren. End of story. right attitude, and discover your purpose. Now retirement can be a bit more confusing. The age to Of course theory only takes anyone so far. It’s action that’s retire is a moving target, as is the best way to spend your regoing to take an idea into something tirement. Thanks to the term Second life-changing. To that end, Drak ends Acts, retiring has the implication that each chapter asking readers to give you should be doing something usehonest assessments of where they are ful or meaning ful. It can mean that a with a particular principle. He also once-simple step is suddenly compliincludes questions to help readers cated and fraught with confusion. strategize about how best to fully inMike Drak was forced into retirecorporate a particular principle into ment by being laid off. It could have their lives. been easy to slip into what he calls ReIn the chapter on nurturing strong tirement Hell, wasting days watching relationships, for instance, Drak asks TV and feeling sorry for himself. And, readers to consider the answers to indeed, he did do a bit of that. questions such as “Do you need more But eventually he realized that the friends?” and “Are some of your reonly way to create the retirement he lationships starting to slip away from wanted was to…create the retirement you?” He also asks readers to rate he wanted. His latest book, Retirecurrent relationships with their partment Heaven or Hell, Which Will You ner, their children and their friends on Choose?, is the result of his research Author Mike Drak a scale of 1-10. What, he asks, can you and lived experience. Consider it a start doing to shift any ratings that are not a 10? primer of sorts for helping you decide how you want to live Since part of retirement includes crafting a new—or at the next chapter. least revised—identity post job/career, Drak includes lots Drak divides retirement into nine principles that he says of suggestions and strategies for what he calls “finding your can help you create the retirement you want: nurture strong
64 55+ LIFE MAGAZINE | WINTER 2022
Photos: Book cover, courtesy Milner & Associates Inc.; author photo by Ishkhan Ghazarian.
BY JANET REYNOLDS
