Iain Allan is now in his 70s, and shows no interest in retirement. He qualified as an actuary and spent his career in investments and banking. He took a strategic approach to his career, actively managing it to create and capitalise on opportunities at key points over the decades. Most recently, he has been encouraging more actuaries globally to consider career opportunities in banking, promoting this through the International Actuarial Association. 

In the investments domain, a financial option is an instrument which allows you to adjust the downside or upside potential of a given investment. One example of this is reducing or removing the chance of loss while retaining or enhancing the chance of gain. This ‘optionality’ allows you to benefit if things move in your favour. And, options are more valuable in uncertain situations (with ‘volatility’), when the path ahead is not clear – adapting as things evolve. 

A related concept in the world of bond (or fixed interest) investments is ‘convexity’, which involves rates of change. Simplistically speaking, convexity allows you to benefit whichever direction interest rates move – the best of everything! So, if you’re able to proactively steer your situation to give you optionality or even convexity, that’s incredibly helpful. 

Iain and John Young (one of his proteges) have written about the importance of creating strategic options, using examples from warfare and business. In their words: “Success comes from exploring many options and following up those that work best”. Read more for Iain’s career experiences and reflections, including his application of optionality in practice. 

Success at the Olympics is a pinnacle of sporting achievement. It requires decades of dedication, single-minded focus and sacrifice (from a very early age) to meet the standard required to represent your country. Even participating requires intense commitment, not to mention the extreme levels you need to reach to win a medal! The path is incredibly tough, fraught with risk of injury and burnout, which can derail your ambitions temporarily or permanently. 

An additional challenge faced by elite athletes, including those performing at Olympic and similar levels, is what’s next… All reach a point, perhaps in their twenties or thirties, depending on the sport, where they can’t participate at the levels they’d like to – it is no longer physically possible for them, whether injury- or age-driven. A natural quarter-life crisis of sorts...

While not comparable, we can think of qualifying as a professional from this perspective too. Years spent dedicated to studying and passing the technical requirements, step by step. Painful failures along the way that we cautiously pick ourselves up from, taking time to recover. Then one day, we finish all the exams and conditions, and are ‘qualified’. YAY! Well deserved celebrations. Once the initial euphoria passes, we start to wonder, ‘Now what?’… ‘I’ve got decades of work left. Should I study further? What other skills do I need, especially non-technical ones? What should my next goals be? How do I keep learning and remain relevant?’...

Another example of a significant transition, requiring a major mindset shift is when people leave the military, and move across into civilian life and careers. They move from a highly structured environment, perhaps with international deployments, to a foreign-to-them workforce culture. Some specific examples for athletes and servicepeople respectively are joining a physical performance troop (such as Cirque du Soleil) or becoming a financial advisor. 

I’ve written before about bouncing back, and keeping going, even after we’ve achieved success and we worry whether we can reach those heights again. These emotions are indeed relevant to big career transitions, but incomplete here: it’s also about re-imagining and remaking ourselves as we grow wiser i.e. we’re not trying to bounce back to where and who we were, but rather, pole jump to somewhere new. 

​In support of this, I came across advice on reinvention from Alexandra “Sasha” Cohen, an American figure skater who won an Olympic silver medal, and was a World Championship medallist multiple times. In her early twenties at the time, Sasha achieved her Olympic medal at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. Read more for Sasha’s reflections.

Lee Faulkner is a non-traditional actuary, born in Britain, who has lived and worked in a wide range of other countries including Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and now Hong Kong. He describes himself as ‘Latin, Asian and British’ and knows all about being an expat! As you’ll see below, Lee has a delightful sense of humour, is strongly mission-driven, and isn’t afraid of pushing beyond his comfort zone (and encouraging all of us to do the same). He’s been an English language teacher during his career too, and has started a business ‘taking on the big boys’. Here are Lee’s reflections:

“Age - the Stuff of Excuses 
I’m approaching 60 so, according to the world I’ve grown up in, I should now be thinking about winding down my career and focusing on best-buy slippers and pipes. But that feels wrong - if a life well-lived means anything it has to be sharing what you’ve learned and using your experience to help out those around you. I can’t wind down - every year I find still more ways of ratcheting up; yes, I need the cash (and yes - all those warnings about not contributing enough to a pension scheme have come home to roost!) but more importantly I have an overwhelming feeling of “not having finished”. There’s more to do. I don’t have kids, so I won’t have a biological legacy, but I have a brain and a mouth that I’m not afraid to use so they’ll be the tools of my legacy instead. 

I don’t think I could ever rest until I see professionals doing what I’ve always thought we should do - using our skills to help those that really need us, not the companies that pay us. We’ve been hiding ourselves away for too long, and now’s the time for a professional coming out!