For Mike Sokol, 'Retirement' Is Just a Word

Howdy! I'm Keith Ward, and this is my newsletter about the ups and downs of growing old. If you like it, please subscribe (and pass it along to others, too).

Let's get to it...

-----

Mike Sokol, in his natural environment: learning about new stuff

Some people think getting old means slowing down.

Mike Sokol is the counter-argument to that belief.

Mike is 68 years old, and will be 69 next month. That means he’s past retirement age. He says he’ll take his “official” retirement at 70. That doesn’t mean, however, that he’ll retire. It’s not something he even contemplates. Retirement for him means the government will supplement his income. But retirement, i.e., the act of not working all day? He can’t imagine it.

“I’m not going to retire,” Mike says. “Why would I retire? The older you are, the more you know about stuff, and the more valuable you are.”

The phrase “the more you know about stuff” is the key to knowing Mike Sokol. “Stuff” is anything and everything he doesn’t know about now. He has a craving to learn—about anything—and his fertile mind never stops working.

The evidence can be seen in a wide variety of ways. Mike runs the hugely popular RVelectricity site on Substack. He’s written thousands of articles for both print and online media, including leading RV lifestyle site RV Travel, and professional audio magazines. He’s taught electrical safety all over the country. He’s set up audio for presidential inaugurations and musical superstars. He’s been a computer systems integrator back when it was hard.

Yeah, Mike’s done a few things in his time. He lives just outside of Hagerstown, MD, with Linda, his wife of 36 years. He has three sons, including a pair of identical twins. He’s lived there most of his life, and has lived enough for two or three people already.

Mike says he’s been self-taught in electronics “since I was four.” He worked for Corning as a mechanical engineer in the 1970s, and at the same time got his Master’s Electrician license “just because I could.”

Following his IT work, his main gig for the next 15 years was audio production. A lot of that time Mike was teaching churches how to set up proper audio and mixing, and served as a visiting professor at schools like Peabody Conservatory and Julliard, instructing students on surround sound production.

He describes himself in those days as a “hired gun” who set up and ran audio when musical acts were in the local area, which for him includes Baltimore and Washington D.C. Mike says he’s done sound for artists as diverse as Beyonce, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jimmy Buffet, Black Sabbath (“The loudest concert I ever did,” he says), Martina McBride and others.

He’s one of those people whose mind is always churning, turning over ideas. Everything that happens to him is an opportunity to learn. That led to his next major career turning point.

Shocking Discovery

“Twelve years ago or so,” Mike says, “around 2010, one of my pro sound guys said he felt a shock feeling the side of a tour bus. He said “I don’t understand this.” I Googled, and found that people in RVs were having this happen” as well.

So, Mike being Mike, he started researching the phenomenon and experimenting. It’s a process he’s done all his life, and it’s how he learns. He said his audio work had made him a grounding expert by that point (“making stuff safe so nobody died” is how he puts it). He was a trained OSHA power safety expert, and was soon an RV electricity expert.

Whew.

Mike is drawn to things he doesn’t know, calling them “Shiny bits. I consider all the things I know as my toolbox. I see something that looks like an interesting challenge, and I don’t know how to do it… and I can apply my background” to it, incorporating his existing knowledge to help him ease his way into understanding the new stuff.

He says his insatiable curiosity is “the key” to his go-go-go attitude. “I want to know, I want to learn. I want to do experiments.” It’s what continues to drive him.

Mike also believes we all have that spark of curiosity in us, and age doesn’t—or shouldn’t—diminish it. “For me, it’s [important] to find something interesting you don’t know about and learn it. Whatever it may be. Whether it’s polar bears or astronomy.”

And given the reach of the Internet, the universe of things to learn is inexhaustible. “Now we have no excuse, now you can learn any darn thing you want,” Mike says.

Paying the Toll

Of course, age does demand its due, and Mike can’t do everything at 68 that he could at 28. “When I was 50 and doing live sound stuff, the longest I was up was 44 hours without sleeping. I can’t do that anymore,” he says.

There are other accommodations to age, Mike explains. “Now I don’t like to drive more than 10 hours in a day. I used to be able to do 20 or 22 hours straight.”

He also says he’s “cut in half” a lot of the really strenuous stuff he used to do. He also takes time to relax now—a foreign concept when he was younger. “I try to take time for lunch, working in the garden, cutting the grass. Now we can take a vacation for 10 days.”

Other affects of aging have afflicted Mike, including declining eyesight, moderately high cholesterol, and moderately high blood pressure. He deals with those issues, but sees them as minor annoyances rather than insurmountable obstacles. Indeed, all you have to do is talk to him for 10 minutes to realize his mind hasn’t slowed down any—it still exceeds posted speed limits.

For Mike, the learning is all. For instance, he’s started to look into the world of artificial intelligence lately, and you can almost hear the gears working in his head as he discusses it.

Those gears are greased by obtaining new knowledge, and not accepting that there’s an age limit on it. His own father, in fact, serves as a warning to him of what happens when others set your boundaries of what’s possible.

“The day my dad retired he stopped doing anything… and that was it. He did that for 30 years and died. That’s a bad example” for others to follow, Mike says.

Still, many do just that, and Mike calls it a tragedy. “If you think that you’re going to be dead tomorrow, you don’t do anything. I ask myself, What can I do that helps me learn something?”

Mike Sokol lives by that philosophy. He sums it up with a simple phrase, but one that has defined his life:

“Just go find something to do!”

(Take the poll question, and please feel free to comment below.)