Teresa Amabile grew up near Buffalo, New York, the third of seven children. Her parents were first-generation Americans who used their childhood Italian language when they didn’t want the kids to understand what they were saying. Her father and his brothers were entrepreneurs who ran a food importing, packing, and distribution business. Neither of her parents attended college but they did set a very clear expectation that all seven children would do so.

“My dad was always thinking of creative ideas for his business and talking about them at the dinner table,” Amabile says on a call from Amherst, Massachusetts—her home with life partner and collaborator Steven Kramer since 2018. “We spent most of our vacations at a lake in New York or Ontario, and he would engage us in creative thinking about what we’d do, in addition to the hours we’d spend getting there in the car. We invented a lot of games to keep us occupied.” When the local Catholic newspaper ran a jingle-writing contest, with a trip to Europe as the grand prize, Amabile’s parents put the family to work. “Mine won,” she says, “So my parents got their trip; and, by the way, they got to meet Pope John XXIII.” Creativity, it seemed, had real value.

Amabile also spent hours talking with two of her younger sisters about behavior they observed in other family members or in classmates at school: “Why did they act that way? What were they thinking? My psychological-mindedness developed very early,” she explains. As an undergraduate, Amabile majored in chemistry because she enjoyed the intellectual challenge of science. It wasn’t until her junior year that she took a psychology course to fulfill an elective requirement—and immediately fell in love. “I was doing very well in chemistry, but I didn’t want to think about it when I wasn’t in the lab,” she says. “With psychology, I devoured everything I could find.” It was too late to switch majors by that point but Amabile stacked her last two years of study with as many psych courses as possible before applying to Stanford University, where she received a PhD in psychology in 1977.

Today, as the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita, Amabile, 74, can look back on more than four decades dedicated to researching creativity, motivation, and innovation. “The golden thread that runs through all the research I’ve done is my interest in the inner lives of ordinary people,” she says. A celebrated author of books, articles, and case studies, Amabile, who joined the HBS faculty in 1995, is a veteran of the classroom and the recipient of too many accolades to list—but finding her groove took a few years.

Early on, her research took place in the lab, which offered a controlled environment that made it possible to nail down causality as she measured intrinsic motivation and creativity. After a few years, though, Amabile started to feel dissatisfied: Yes, her findings could clearly show cause and effect—but only by asking her subjects to engage in highly stylized activities within highly controlled conditions. The results “told me not much at all about people’s motivations, emotions, and creativity in their real-world, everyday jobs.” By the mid-1980s Amabile had started looking for ways to see into—and better understand—peoples’ inner lives at work.

She began by simply talking to people. Between teaching executive sessions at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, she interviewed her R&D scientist-students about moments when they experienced low and high creativity on the job. Her aha moment happened as she listened to a lab worker describe how, as a new employee, he was given a solo project to get his feet wet. The task was a make-work problem, considered virtually impossible to complete, but the worker—who was given full freedom to experiment—in fact succeeded. “I still remember what he said,” Amabile recalls. “‘Because I didn’t know the problem couldn’t be solved, I just went ahead and solved it.’ I thought, oh, my gosh, there’s no way I could have discovered that in the lab.”

The insight changed everything about how Amabile approached her work. In 2011 she published The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Coauthored with Kramer, the book draws on nearly 12,000 daily diary entries by 238 employees, offering a direct view of the factors that affect their creativity, productivity, work commitment, and collegiality. Amabile and Kramer found that simply making progress on meaningful work—however small the step forward—is the single most important driver of employee happiness, intrinsic motivation, and, in turn, creativity and productivity. “We were able to understand so much about people’s everyday inner work lives,” Amabile says of that groundbreaking research, which gave rise to what is now known as “the progress principle.”

Amabile was just entering her 60s when The Progress Principle was published. She wasn’t ready to retire but it was on her mind. “I started wondering, okay, if making progress on meaningful work is so important, what happens when people leave their meaningful work? As long as I’ve got breath and a functioning brain, I can continue my meaningful work—my research and writing—in some way. But the academic profession is unusual in that respect. I wanted to find out what it’s like for people in corporate professions to make the decision to retire and live through that transition.” That curiosity led to Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You. Coauthored with Lotte Bailyn of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Marcy Crary of Bentley University, and Douglas T. Hall and Kathy E. Kram of Boston University, the book, published in October, draws on more than 200 interviews with 120 people, zeroing in on 14 “stars” to tell their stories in greater detail.

Making that “when” decision is the first of four retirement tasks, says Amabile, followed by detaching from work, creating a provisional life structure for retirement, and consolidating that structure. Congress outlawed mandatory retirement ages in 1986 (with exceptions for safety-related roles like air-traffic controller). Australia and Canada have similar laws. So in those countries, at least, retirement is a decision, assuming the very big “if” of financial stability. And for those fortunate individuals, it is not taken lightly: “So many people struggle with the idea of retiring because of the way work intersects with relationships, identity, and life-structure issues.”

Identity issues, she adds, are particularly significant for professionals who have invested deeply in their careers. Who do we become when that large chunk of who we are and how we spend our time is gone? “This may sound silly, but even though I am still doing professional work—and am obviously talking to you about my research right now—the fact that I am no longer an active member of the HBS faculty has led to some identity issues for me,” says Amabile, who has served as Unit Head of Entrepreneurial Management as well as Senior Associate Dean and Director of Research. “Now I’m finding new ways of being a leader,” she reflects. That means serving as lead author on her current book, of course. But it also means accepting a role on the board of the Unitarian church she and Kramer joined when they moved to western Massachusetts. In Amabile’s book, this “identity bridging” involves figuring out how to retain elements of cherished preretirement identities while developing new identities—grandmother, for example—or reviving dormant identities, as one star in the book did by getting back to customizing and driving hot rods.

The three additional tasks—detaching from work, creating a provisional life structure, and consolidating that structure—can take anywhere from weeks to years, Amabile notes. “Your life structure is basically everything in your life—your activities, your relationships, the groups and organizations you belong to, the places where you spend your time,” she says. “Many people can’t imagine what that looks like once they leave work, which can be terrifying. We had people use expressions like ‘leaping into the void’ when they talked about retiring.” Amabile and her coauthors observed certain capabilities in those who did transition more easily and smoothly into retirement. Cultivating those skills can demystify, streamline, and enrich the retirement experience.

The stories of the 14 stars—gathered from multiple interviews over the course of months and years—show that there’s no single, correct way to move through the four tasks of retirement, and that it is a gradual process rather than a one-time event. Amabile became a Baker Foundation Professor in 2016, went half-time in 2017, and shifted to less than half-time the following year before officially retiring in July 2024. “With each of those changes, I did find I was psychologically detaching from that professor identity,” she reflects, referring to task two. “It’s very gradual, and I don’t know if it will ever be complete; as long as I continue to write and talk about my research, I will probably retain part of that identity.”

Relocating to Amherst from Wayland, Massachusetts—her home of 40 years—kickstarted task three, building a provisional retirement life. “That was a major restructuring…beginning to develop community out here in western Massachusetts where, let’s face it, community was initially our daughter, her husband, and our granddaughter. Now we have a network of wonderful neighbors and friends, and I feel like this new life structure is consolidating somewhat, which is the fourth and final task of the retirement transition—to feel that you’ve settled into a rhythm and a routine that works for you and is reasonably stable for the foreseeable future.”

On a warm September afternoon, Amabile is in her home office, wrapping up another full day devoted to interviews and other activities related to her book’s forthcoming publication—including this follow-up Zoom call. Her husband just pulled into the garage with their 13-year-old granddaughter, Autumn: “Having an afternoon with her each week has been a crystal, golden part of my life these last six years, and it continues to be great fun.”

Two months into official retirement, Amabile admits she doesn’t feel very “retired”—but expects that to change. When things calm down a bit, she’ll get back to the longer version of her morning routine, for example. “See that Harvard rocking chair behind me?” she asks. “When I’m done exercising, I make myself a pot of tea, and I just sit there. I look at the gorgeous trees. And I just breathe. I just try to be. I was always a human doing. Now I’m trying to become a bit more of a human being, just being.”

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