Finding Purpose After 60 | Why I Created The Genuine Mentor

A personal reflection on leadership, mentoring, career purpose, and giving away what experience has taught me.

As I get closer to retirement, I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose. Not because I feel lost, but because I want to make sure the next chapter of my life is spent doing something that truly matters.

I recently read a quote that made me stop and rethink something I thought I had already figured out.

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”— Pablo Picasso

For the last few years, I have believed I understood why I was building The Genuine Mentor. That belief has not changed, but this quote caused me to revisit the journey that brought me here.

Interestingly, I ended up at the same destination. I just took a different road to get there.

The quote came from a section in a book about living a purposeful life. It described purpose as aligning your actions, values, and energy with what truly matters to you. The chapter then offered ten ideas to help people discover that purpose.

As I read through those ten ideas, I realized something important. I was not really searching for purpose anymore. At 62 years old, I was validating the purpose I had already found.

So I decided to compare each of the book’s ideas with my own life, my career, and the experiences that eventually led me to build The Genuine Mentor.

Finding Purpose After 60

When you are younger, purpose can feel like something far away. It feels like something you are supposed to chase, discover, or somehow stumble across if you are lucky enough. But finding purpose after 60 changes the complete conversation.

But at this stage of my life, I do not see it that way anymore.

Purpose is not always something brand new. Sometimes it is something that has been quietly showing up for decades. Sometimes it is hidden inside the work that fulfilled you, the conversations that stayed with you, the people you helped, and the moments that made you feel like your time mattered. I just didn’t recognize it until someone asked me the right question.

That is what happened for me.

The ten ideas from the book became more than a list. They became checkpoints. Each one gave me a way to look back and ask, “Was this already present in my life?”

The answer was yes. Not perfectly. Not always clearly. But yes.

1. Identify Your Core Values

The book suggests that understanding what matters most to you helps guide your life.

When I reflected on my own career, the obvious answers came first: my wife, my family, and the people I love. Those are the values most of us would name quickly, and they have always mattered deeply to me.

But professionally, another value kept showing up over and over again.

Helping other people grow.

I did not always recognize it as a defining value while I was living it, but looking back, it influenced almost every leadership decision I made. The moments that stayed with me were not just the business wins or the completed projects. They were the times when someone developed confidence, learned something new, or moved into a better opportunity because somebody took the time to invest in them.

That mattered to me then. It matters to me even more now.

2. What Brings You Joy?

The book encourages you to identify the activities that naturally energize you.

For me, one answer stood above the rest: mentoring new leaders.

I have enjoyed many parts of my career. I have had different roles, different responsibilities, and many different challenges. But nothing has been more rewarding than watching someone grow into leadership.

Watching someone gain confidence, develop new skills, and eventually move into bigger opportunities was always more rewarding than my own promotions.

There is something powerful about seeing a person start to believe in themselves. You can almost see the shift happen. They stop waiting for permission. They begin asking better questions. They take ownership. They start to see themselves differently.

That has always brought me joy.

3. Follow Your Curiosity

Curiosity often leads us toward purpose.

I have always enjoyed learning. Throughout my career I moved through different positions, embraced new challenges, and constantly studied subjects that interested me. My work allowed me to try different jobs, learn new skills, and understand the business from multiple angles.

Looking back, that curiosity was not random. It was preparing me for experiences I would later use to help others.

Every role taught me something. Every challenge gave me another perspective. Every difficult season added something to the way I understood leadership, people, responsibility, and growth.

At the time, I probably thought I was just doing the next job in front of me. Now I can see that all of those experiences were building a foundation.

4. Set Meaningful Goals

The book recommends setting goals that reflect your values.

For me, my biggest goal was always to take care of my family. That has been a driving force throughout my life and career.

But years ago, I also started thinking differently about goals. I began moving away from goals as the only measure and started focusing more on habits.

A diet eventually ends. A habit does not.

That idea changed the way I thought about growth. A goal can get you moving, but habits shape who you become. Small daily decisions, repeated over time, create the kind of person and leader you eventually become.

The same principle applies to leadership. You do not become a strong leader because of one meeting, one class, or one title. You become a strong leader through repeated habits: listening, following through, being honest, staying calm, giving feedback, owning mistakes, and helping people grow.

5. Use Your Strengths Intentionally

The book encourages using your strengths in service of others.

Hard work became one of my defining traits. I hope my children saw enough of that example to develop that same value in their own lives. Work ethic matters. Effort matters. Showing up matters.

At work, that same value of hard work helped me succeed. But another strength quietly emerged over time: calmness.

Remaining steady during difficult situations often helped others stay steady as well. When things were stressful, tense, or uncertain, I learned that a calm demeanor could become a form of leadership. People watch how you respond. They listen not only to your words, but to your tone, your pace, and your reaction under pressure.

That consistency built trust.

And trust is one of the greatest leadership strengths a person can develop.

6. Practice Self-Reflection

Purpose requires honest reflection.

Like many people, I have often been my own toughest critic. I have spent a lot of my career under my own scrutiny. If I did not feel like I was improving as a person and as a leader, I was looking for ways to improve.

That internal pressure was not always comfortable, but it pushed me to keep learning.

Self-reflection can be difficult because it forces you to look honestly at your own choices. It asks you to admit where you could have handled something better, where you avoided something, where you let work take too much, or where you needed to grow.

But without reflection, growth becomes accidental.

I never wanted my leadership to be accidental. I wanted to get better, even when that meant looking at myself honestly.

7. Serve Others in Ways That Feel Authentic

The book reminds us that purpose often comes through serving others.

Without realizing it, I naturally gravitated toward servant leadership. I did not always call it that, but that is what it was.

I never viewed knowledge as something to protect. If I knew something that could help someone else, I shared it. If someone became smarter than me because I helped them, I considered that a success, not a threat.

Leadership should not be about holding people down so you can stay ahead. It should be about helping people rise, even if they eventually move beyond you.

That is one of the most rewarding parts of mentoring. You are not trying to create dependence. You are trying to build confidence, judgment, and capability in someone else.

8. Let Go of Distractions

This may be the area where I have struggled the most.

There were seasons when work distracted me from family more than it should have. I do not say that proudly. I say it honestly.

When you care about your work, when you are responsible, and when people depend on you, it is easy to let work take more space than it deserves.

The line can move slowly, and before you realize it, you have given your best energy to work and your leftovers to the people who matter most.

As I have gotten older, priorities have become easier to recognize and protect.

Sometimes purpose is not found by adding something new.

Sometimes it is found by removing what no longer deserves your attention.

At work, distractions can also come from things being imposed on you. Not everything urgent is meaningful. Not everything loud is important. Sometimes saying no is part of protecting the work that matters most.

9. Embrace Personal Growth

Growth has been part of my identity for as long as I can remember.

If my work stopped challenging me, I became restless. I wanted to learn. I wanted to improve. I wanted to understand more than just the job in front of me.

Every career change, every difficult assignment, and every uncomfortable situation became another opportunity to grow. Not every growth season felt good while I was in it, but looking back, those seasons shaped me.

Growth is not always exciting. Sometimes growth is frustrating. Sometimes it is humbling. Sometimes it forces you to admit that what got you here may not be enough to take you where you need to go next.

But growth matters because leadership keeps asking more of you. If you stop growing, your leadership eventually stops growing too.

10. Live With Intention

Purpose is not one big decision. It is thousands of small ones.

As someone who has lived with diabetes for many years, I make daily choices about my health because I want to be present for the people who matter most. Health is not managed once. It is managed through repeated decisions.

The same is true of leadership and purpose.

My career has been an important part of my life, and I have always wanted it to mean something beyond collecting a paycheck. Work takes too much of our time and energy to have no deeper meaning attached to it.

Living with intention means asking whether your choices are moving you toward the person you say you want to be.

That question matters at home. It matters at work. It matters in leadership.

The Question That Changed My Career

After working through those ten ideas, I realized I had unknowingly asked myself many of the same questions years earlier.

The difference was that my journey did not begin with a book.

It began with a simple question.

A leader in my company once asked me:

“If you could do anything for a living, what would it be?”

My answer came without hesitation.

“I would mentor new managers into great leaders.”

That conversation stayed with me while I was traveling. Back at my hotel room, I started filling pages with notes, trying to understand why that answer came so naturally.

As I reflected, something became clear.

I was not trying to discover what I wanted to do. I was trying to identify the part of my career that had always brought me the deepest satisfaction.

Rather than thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, I reversed the question and thought about the most rewarding part of my career.

The answer was not closing deals.

It was not promotions.

It was not titles.

It was watching managers become leaders and seeing them move into opportunities they may not have believed were possible.

For the first time, I realized I wasn’t measuring my career by what I had accomplished. I was measuring it by the people I had helped accomplish something.

Why I Created The Genuine Mentor

That realization eventually led to The Genuine Mentor.

I was already exploring coaching and mentoring, but this process gave the idea more clarity.

I could take what I had enjoyed most in my career, combine it with something I had learned how to do, and give it back to others as I moved toward the next chapter of my life.

The Genuine Mentor is not about pretending I have every answer.

It is about sharing what decades of leadership, mistakes, reflection, growth, and experience have taught me.

It is about helping new managers become better leaders. It is about helping experienced leaders slow down and remember the human side of leadership. It is about helping people understand that leadership is not just a title, a position, or a set of tasks.

Leadership is influence. Leadership is responsibility. Leadership is personal.

And mentoring leadership is about helping people grow while still getting the work done.

Purpose May Already Be Following You

As I approach retirement, I do not want to simply stop working.

I want to spend this next chapter giving away the experiences that shaped my own journey.

Maybe that is exactly what Picasso meant.

Maybe purpose is not something you stumble across.

Maybe it is something that has been quietly following you for years, hidden inside the moments that make you come alive.

For me, those moments were never about my own success.

They were about watching someone else realize they were capable of more than they believed.

They were about helping someone else discover theirs.

That is why The Genuine Mentor exists.

And I could not be more excited to see where the journey leads next.

Website Call to Action

If this message connected with you, I invite you to explore The Genuine Mentor and follow the journey.

My goal is simple: to help new and experienced leaders lead with more clarity, responsibility, and genuine care for the people they influence.

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