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Susan Dabbar never really retired. She just keeps climbing uphill.

She's designed nuclear submarines, played professional poker in Russia, built and sold an educational consulting practice. Then, at an age when most people retire, she launched PROVOKEDmagazine, a media company for women over 60 that's already hit 45,000 subscribers with a team of 20+ writers.

For Susan, every new chapter is just another hard problem worth solving.

Here, she breaks down exactly how she thinks every time she starts over.

You designed nuclear submarines, played professional poker in Russia, and built a consulting company while moving to Kazakhstan. You sold that business, retired; and came back to become a founder again in your 60s. What is it about you that keeps choosing the harder path?

Susan: You know, I'm just one of those people who chooses the harder path, because there's a thrill in building something from nothing that nobody has really touched yet. I have a pattern of doing that, and there's real satisfaction in it. I go overdrive, and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing than building a business. It's just the way I'm wired.

But I do have moments on that uphill climb where I need to catch my breath. I was about a year into being an engineer in the Navy shipyard when I looked up at the bow of an aircraft carrier. And I said to myself, “what am I doing here?”

I'm good at being an engineer, I'm competent, but this just feels all wrong. There are moments like that, when climbing uphill is exciting, but your second thought and it doesn’t seem like a good idea.

That was right at the beginning of my career, and it was one of those moments where you ask yourself, “am I on the wrong path or just in a hard season?” There's a real distinction there. 

A hard season means there's no finish line I'm going to recognize, but I know I can push through it. A wrong path means even if the conditions were perfect, I still wouldn't choose it, and that's when you can get off of it and adjust.

A lot of career stories could have ended where yours tried to end. What happened during your “retirement” that brought you back into the game?

Susan: My last big business was my educational consulting business. I ran it for 15 years and sold it when I was 60. I muddled around for about two years, telling myself I was retired. We traveled, we did all the things, and we were moving again, which we did three times in three years during that stretch.

When I was sixty-three, I started feeling a little untethered again, because I wasn't building anything.

I'd redone a couple of houses, but once the dust settled, I was done with all that. We'd go to these dinner parties with smart, interesting people sitting around the table, and I noticed I was getting skipped over. I wasn't being asked anything, because as far as anyone was concerned, I was retired.

And I hated that feeling. I'd come home from these dinners thinking, my life story is way more interesting than the one you just spent twenty minutes on, and nobody even asked. I've been called a lot of things in my life, but never boring.

I sat down and started asking myself the hard questions, “if I were going to go at something one more time, go at it hard, with everything I've got, what would that even look like?”

That's what got me moving again.

What led you to building PROVOKEDmagazine?

Susan: I started out the way any good business does, looking for where the opportunities are. It's about finding white space, a real gap between what exists and what the market actually needs, or a real problem worth solving.

That one came naturally, because for women, you just look. You go online, or you look at the magazines still on the shelf in a drugstore or an airport. You ask where did the publications go that we all used to love, that our mothers and aunts and grandmothers grew up on?

There are tons of blogs, Substacks, and magazines out there, but they don't talk to women over sixty. Women over 50 get a little more attention, but once you hit 60, we're completely off the grid. It's like we don't matter, or we don't exist.

But we do exist. We're vibrant, we're the largest voting bloc, we have the most money in the planet, and we're the largest demographic of women in the planet.

Brands are just starting to come around, but it's taken a lot of mouthy women like me to get that recognition. I thought, I'm going to start a media company, I'm going to start a magazine. And now, here I am.

You've done so many fun things from that moment with the aircraft carrier. Where does PROVOKEDmagazine stack up in the list of fun stuff Susan's done?

Susan: From an entrepreneur's standpoint, this is probably the most fun I've ever had. It's also the most money I've ever spent, so scary – big risk and lots of chips on the table, but it’s really fun. It makes me feel like I'm in the mix. It's a very interesting thing to talk about, and I'm not “boring” anymore.

On the corporate side, I worked at Disney for a couple of years, and that was genuinely one of the best jobs on earth. They call it the happiest place on earth, and I've never been surrounded by so many brilliant, creative people as I was there.

I had a few good corporate touch points along the way, but building PROVOKEDmagazine is something else. It's fascinating to be this invigorated and excited at my age. It's very, very cool. Very rewarding.

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