In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Dana Sand chats with Tom French, chair of the Trustees of Reservations and McKinsey senior partner emeritus, about The Gap Years: Climbing, Skiing, and the Journey Back (Brandeis University Press, April 2026). French reflects on reconnecting with the passions of his youth—mountaineering and cross-country ski racing—after a 33-year business career. By kicking off retirement with gap year expeditions, French discovered meaning in pursuing old dreams and personal adventure. An edited version of the conversation follows.
What led you to step ‘out of the flow,’ as you put it, and return to the adventures of your youth?
Tom French: As I thought about the classic, “So what am I going to do?” when I retired at age 60, something hit me. It was tied to the fact that at other times in my life, I had stepped out of what felt like “the flow” and taken, in one case, a year off and, in another case, three years off. I took a year to defer admission to college and spent it living in the Arctic Circle in Sweden. I got out of college and spent three years all over the world, planning and leading expedition trips. Those step-out-of-it and just-go-do-something wildly different experiences became some of the most rewarding experiences of my life and absolutely defined who I became as an adult and as a businessperson.
Those step-out-of-it and just-go-do-something wildly different experiences became some of the most rewarding experiences of my life and absolutely defined who I became as an adult and as a businessperson.
So here I was at age 60, and I wondered if it would be as meaningful to take a break and do something a little different as I had years before. The more I thought about it, the more I said, “I think it could be.” The related thing going on was I did have interests—I’d call them passions—things I had done with intensity in my youth. One was mountaineering. I did a lot of climbing growing up. It meant a ton to me. I also did competitive cross-country ski racing, which really became my life. I was a nationally ranked racer who’d spent my life trying to ski race fast. Eventually, I put all that away, ended up in business, and happily ended up focusing on raising a family and doing a bunch of other things.
Yet here I was at age 60, and there were things I thought of as largely in my past: climbing big mountains and ski racing. I had an idea: Is it still there? What would it be like as a 60-year-old to jump back in? And is there as much meaning in it in one’s 60s as there was in one’s 20s and 30s? All of that came together.
You describe travel as deeply enriching but losing its magic when done perpetually. How has your relationship with travel and expeditions changed over time, and how do you balance the pull of adventure with the rhythms of daily life?
My relationship with travel and adventure has evolved almost naturally because I lived it intensely for a number of years, particularly in my early and mid-20s. There came a time when I was living the dream—it felt like a dream for a year or two or three. I was beyond grateful for what I was doing. It was amazing. Yet I realized if I kept doing it, it would lose some of the magic.
I reengaged with that choice set, or that dilemma, again later in life. I didn’t have that dilemma for 33 years working at McKinsey, and then I retired and jumped back into it. For three solid years, between 60 and 63, I was living the dream again. I was on mountains all over the world, in exotic places, and loving every second of it. I also realized I now had the freedom to keep doing it if I wanted to.
I came right back and faced the same challenge: “I absolutely love this, but do I want to do this for all of my 60s—for an entire decade?” I don’t think it would stay as special. I’m still wrestling with it, but where I’ve landed, in part, is the same realization I had back in my 20s: If you do it nonstop forever, it loses some of the magic—or at least it would for me.
But here’s the twist: I can still do some of it. I’ve gotten to a place where I want to spend about half my time doing some of that traditional [post-career] stuff, but the way I refer to it is “halftime gap year,” and that’s working for me. I realized I don’t have to do it full-on, full-time, but if I organize my life appropriately, I can still get meaningful doses of it.
How have mountaineering and endurance sports shaped your approach to leadership?
Expedition leaders have long been studied because good expedition leaders make a huge difference in the outcome of the teams they’re leading. What has become clearest to me on the mountaineering side is that the really exceptional leaders transcend just establishing plans—“We’re going to go here today, there tomorrow, climb that peak”—or giving directives—“This is how you get from point A to point B.” Their magic is in building strong teams. Nurturing the chemistry of the group—that is often under a fair amount of stress and comprised of different people—and creating a cohesion and a sense of mutual accountability is what makes an expedition leader great. The best expedition leaders build this into their expeditions and climbing teams. They get power from it—power I never fully appreciated until I spent three years climbing mountains all over the world again.
Nurturing the chemistry of the group—that is often under a fair amount of stress and comprised of different people—and creating a cohesion and a sense of mutual accountability is what makes an expedition leader great.
If you’re part of a team—a business team or a climber on an expedition—the more you invest in being a part of that team, the more rewards you get out of it. It’s easy not to. You can be in a super hostile environment. There’s often subtle, unstated competitiveness between different climbers on different expeditions: Who’s moving fast or who’ll get to the icefall first? It’s easy to focus very individually on, “How am I doing today? Am I going to get to the top of the mountain? Am I going to get through this incredibly hard snowstorm myself?” I went through some of this myself, just making sure I had my act together. Later, I came to realize that the more I invested in connectedness with my fellow team members, the more we all got out of it, including me.
You write candidly about setbacks, including the COVID-19 pandemic thwarting your initial plans and not summiting Mount Everest on your first attempt. What did those experiences teach you?
The fourth-century BC Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi said that true wisdom lies in the acceptance of what is. It may sound trite, but it stuck with me. On one level, it sounds awfully simplistic, but there’s a lot of complexity in the statement.
For me, wisdom in those instances was acceptance of what is. It started there. Your perceived retirement plans and life dreams just got totally blown up—and that’s what is, and now it isn’t changing. So it’s all a question of, given that, what? Similarly, you get down from Everest a year later. It was your lifelong dream, and you can’t figure out how all of a sudden, when everything was going great, a cyclone hit the mountain, and numbers of your team almost died during descent. Now you’re sitting at base camp, your dream has just gotten blown up, and you could easily feel like a failure. You say, “You know what? That is what is—how do I build on it?”
There’s an aphorism that everybody knows: The journey is worth the destination. You hear that again and again, but I actually came to conclude two things: The journey really is worth the destination—or, said another way, there’s a ton of meaning in the journey. The journey that got me to the brink of climbing Mount Everest was an intensely rewarding journey. And then the journey that got me to within several thousand feet of the summit before a cyclone hit was an intensely rewarding journey.
When I thought about it on many dimensions, the journey had been more than the destination, or all I needed. The only caveat I’d add is that, while that’s all true and good, I got home and two months later said, “The destination matters too. I want to go to the summit. Summits are summits!” And I went back. So it only goes so far.
What other lessons would you share with those considering sabbatical or retirement?
For all of us, there’s a strong felt need to have what’s next lined up. You’re spending all your energy trying to get the next gig ready or to figure out what you’ll do when you walk out the office. That creates its own set of pressures and even forces the decision a little, because you’re trying to get a whole lot done in a short amount of time.
I decided my retirement plan was to take a gap year, and what that did was lighten up all that pressure. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to have it all planned, like what office I’d walk into next, which boards I’d join, or how I’d spend my time. Merely creating that zone where I could take time and depressurize let me enjoy my final months working far more. It let me walk out the office feeling like I had some freedom. It allowed opportunities to come to me in a longer time frame. I had a window, which I branded a gap year, and things came to me in a way I didn’t have to force. I didn’t need to try to make them all come right at the moment I was retiring.
I decided my retirement plan was to take a gap year, and what that did was lighten up all that pressure. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to have it all planned.
How might someone find some of the same benefits of a gap year on a smaller scale?
My core realization is that past passions and interests aren’t necessarily locked in the past—or, as one might say, “deferred.” It could be a past passion, or it could be one you think you’ve always wanted to do but you’re waiting until you retire. You’re waiting until some day in the future. In either case, you can access them in the here and now. They can provide immense meaning, joy, and satisfaction, which certainly was the case for me.
I was blown away by how much meaning there still was in going back to things that had meant so much to me 40 years ago—[albeit] in a very different way. You’re skiing a hell of a lot slower at 60 than you were at 25. You’re climbing the world’s highest mountains in a different way at 60 than you were at 30. But it can be done whether or not you’re in the middle of a full-time job, just thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice to find some extra energy here?”—seeking some extra bit of renewal in the midst. We all have interests, either past or possible. There’s the idea that you don’t have to clinically have them in the past or in the future, but you can identify ways to drag pieces of them into the present.
In what ways did reigniting your passions later in life challenge your beliefs about aging and personal fulfillment?
One realization is that, courtesy of us being a healthier population and our healthcare system delivering what it’s delivered over the years, a number of us are lucky to have, in our 60s, a lot of energy and capabilities that people generations ago didn’t have.
Sixty looks a lot more like 40 or 50 than it does 70 or 80. That’s just an example. I certainly realize that eventually, that game runs out. Yet I’ve come to realize there are people doing things through their 60s, and frankly, all through their 70s, that I would’ve thought, “That’s what I did in my 30s, and it’s off limits to me now.” It’s not off limits. You have to decide you’re OK going slower or you might need a little more help, but no way is it off limits. I hadn’t really focused on that.
That’s not all I learned; there were other things. Maybe more important is the idea that personal growth can continue or accelerate. That’s how it feels to me. It’s not, “How do I wind down gracefully after all this achievement and growth?” Growing up, perhaps you had an image of retirement as the other side of the hill. You have a nice ride and are now just coasting down the backside, enjoying the fruits of your labors or the things you’ve already learned how to do. [Now] it’s clear to me that you can grow as a person and learn new things. You can do new things.
I feel immensely grateful for everything I encountered and how I grew in my four decades in the business world. I’ve just had as learning rich, growth intensive, and rewarding a set of years as I’ve ever had in my life. I’m still having them. That’s another lesson—that it’s still there, and there’s all these new things you can go do if you decide you want to go do them. That’s a pretty satisfying and gratifying thing to realize.
My core realization is that past passions and interests aren’t necessarily locked in the past.
You emphasize the importance of encouragement and community support in your gap year journey. You also refer to the concept of ‘renting bandwidth’ by hiring guides for technical climbs. How can workplaces foster a similar culture of support to enhance performance and well-being?
This hidden gift should have been obvious to me, but it wasn’t. When I began the gap year and initially started writing about it in a blog, people would encourage me. It was so meaningful and powerful, and I felt ashamed for not having realized it. People would take time to say, “Hey, good on you, following you, rooting for you, or wishing you well,” or, “Hey, that’s really neat you’re sharing it. Keep sharing, keep posting on your blog because it means a lot to us that you’re doing it.” It was like rocket fuel for me personally, more than I ever would’ve thought. It’s just encouragement. It should be so obvious, but it really helped me stay committed to challenging situations. There were times in the mountains that were super-duper challenging, and that feeling of people rooting for me, or even paying attention, was immensely powerful.
Another concept I write about in the book is the idea of mountaineering guides as “rented bandwidth.” That’s just a different way to think about it. It’s not that they tie you to the rope and drag you up the mountain. It’s that there’s a lot of experience they’ve acquired through years of being in those situations. Unless you’ve spent years being in those situations, you don’t have the pattern recognition, the experience recognition, all that goes into it. You need that. It is a huge asset in the situation.
I picture the idea as, simply by being with you, we’re going into some situation, and you’re going to be able to execute in that situation in a way that you wouldn’t, or you wouldn’t want the risk, if I weren’t there. That’s slightly different to me, and I can see that being very powerful—letting people have at it by virtue of the bandwidth that is alongside them, whether that’s an individual or a team. That’s a pretty powerful way to get experiential bandwidth—something people can leverage and surf off of to go into environments that otherwise would look either too challenging or foreign to them. Yet you’ve derisked the environment by virtue of leveraging somebody else’s bandwidth.
After retirement, did your sense of identity and purpose evolve? How did your gap years influence what you chose to do next?
The hidden gift of my gap year project was that by following it, I ended up with a construct for what I am going to do next. When I started, I thought, “I’m retiring, and I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do next. But I’ll defer thinking about that by climbing mountains and skiing, and I’ll brand that a ‘gap year.’” That all worked, but it later became the journey itself. It gave me a construct for my next act or my next chapter.
You may or may not be familiar with the Japanese concept of Ikigai. I wasn’t familiar with it until I bumped into a fellow climber. At one point, we were walking down a high mountain valley and during one of our conversations, I learned that he’s captivated by the idea of Ikigai. Based on the concept, there are four building blocks of a fulfilling life. One of them is what you love (passion). A second is what you’re good at (talent). A third is what you can be paid for (vocation). And a fourth is what the world needs (mission).
Maybe I’ve been a management consultant too long, so I need a framework. That [Ikigai] framework all of a sudden hit me, and I thought, “That works for me.” For my whole life, those have been the building blocks, and I’ve toggled and traded off between them situationally. Some of what I love has been constant all through life. Yet I’ve come to realize that there are certain things I love more intensely now than others.
Interestingly, the biggest part of the journey for me is the mission part—what the world needs. I reached the end of my world adventure stage, and I haven’t given up on it. It’s a little self-indulgent, but also incredibly nourishing. It let me really think, “I’ve got health, I’ve got energy, I’ve got time, I’ve still got some talent. How am I going to apply that?” I’m spending more time flexing that piece of the framework right now.
Did anything surprise you while writing the book?
I talked about the power of encouragement, but effectively I have found a community of friends, supporters, and like-minded people that’s broader than the one I had before. This happened just through writing a blog, writing a book, interacting with it, and sharing ideas. What a gift! I didn’t picture that going in, but with retirement, many people do face the challenge of how their world may narrow, socially or intellectually. It’s pretty easy to have it narrow because our careers provide so much broadening.
This has been a surprise gift to me. It has broadened touchpoints with different kinds of people than I would’ve interacted with before, doing different things, feeling different things. I’m far richer for it.
