There’s no more prominent career transition than the transfer of power from one American president to the next. Presidents enter office knowing they have a finite amount of time to make their mark in the Oval Office. But even though they’ve usually spent their professional lives climbing to the top of the mountain, most of the time they haven’t planned what happens when they return to life as an ordinary citizen. What do you do after the most important job you’ll ever hold?
As any former corporate chief executive or business leader knows, this question is not unique to U.S. presidents. The former presidents offer two centuries of lessons for anyone starting to think about one of the toughest questions in career and life management: What’s next?
Here we lay out the paths pursued by seven former U.S. presidents after the highest office in the land and what options they illustrate for senior executives considering what’s possible in their own career or life transition.
1. Thomas Jefferson became a founder (again).
Thomas Jefferson was a lifelong founder, whether it be his founding ideas behind the Declaration of Independence, his contributions to the Library of Congress after its collection was destroyed in the War of 1812, or even his lifelong commitment to building the perfect home at Monticello.
In 1819, one of America’s Founding Fathers finally had the chance to do what he’d always wanted: become a founder again as the “father” of the University of Virginia.
Building a university was a lifelong passion from his earliest days as a student at William & Mary, and he continued to develop his thinking even while in his prominent public roles. He thought education could drive progress and was the key to the U.S.’s survival as an independent country. He relied on his professional network — in his case, political allies from Richmond and Washington, like fellow Virginian presidents James Madison and James Monroe, who were essential to securing the necessary governmental support and approvals. This is what mattered most to him — Jefferson listed founding the University of Virginia on his tombstone, and not his role as president of the United States.
As was the case with Jefferson, serial entrepreneurs often have one big idea lingering in the back of their minds. A contemporary example is Sir Richard Branson, who started his first enterprise at age 16 and went on to found the Virgin Group, which now includes 40 companies in 35 countries. But also like Jefferson, who described the University of Virginia as an idea that took “forty years birth and nursing,” Branson also always had a vision for his lifetime accomplishment: Virgin Galactic, whose first mission into space he said he had “dreamt about since [he] was a kid.”
2. John Quincy Adams had a greater impact after his tenure as president.
As corporate CEOs often learn, the most important job you’ll ever have is not always what it’s cracked up to be. John Quincy Adams learned this the hard way. He entered the White House under a cloud of suspicion because of an alleged “corrupt bargain” with Speaker of the House Henry Clay that allowed him to beat out Andrew Jackson, who’d actually won more votes.
That wasn’t how things were supposed to go. Practically from birth, his parents, John and Abigail Adams, had set John Quincy Adams on a path to the presidency, and he’d accomplished extraordinary feats of public service. He’d served as an ambassador, senator, and secretary of state. But after one relatively inconsequential term in the White House, Jackson defeated Adams in a rematch in 1828.
Two years later, however, Adams ran for the House of Representatives, and in a much lower position, he found a much higher calling. He served for nearly two decades in the chamber, becoming its leading abolitionist. He successfully argued a case in front of the Supreme Court to defend the rights of slaves who had escaped from their shackles aboard the slave ship Amistad. As a result, he developed the kind of national following he never had as president, and he helped turn the abolitionist cause from a fringe movement into a more mainstream ideology.
Just as Adams had a greater impact after leaving the Oval Office, in our own time, Bill Gates may be the most powerful example of a corporate leader’s greater impact after leaving the corner office. He left behind his position at Microsoft, one of the most powerful jobs in the world, and with his then-wife Melinda, went on to build a world-class philanthropic organization that’s made a difference in global humanitarian and educational causes. The foundation, which has offered more than $71 billion in grants to date, also created a new and impactful operating model. “For our foundation, that means looking for market failures — that is, areas where the public and private sectors may not have enough incentive to step in, so progress is unlikely if philanthropies don’t act,” CEO Mark Suzman wrote in the foundation’s 2024 annual letter