Retirement and the “No-Work” Danger Zone

Photo by Raúl Nájera on Unsplash

Here’s a theory to ponder:  retirement can cause brain-rot!

Brain rot?  Never heard of it?  Well, I hadn’t either – I kinda just made it up.

I just wanted to get your attention.

But the thought came to me after I stumbled across a YouTube featuring spiritual elder Rabbi Zalman Schachter  talking about “harvesting a lifetime.”  The Rabbi’s point is that as we move into our autumn years we bring forward an “essential insight” unique to each of us.

He insightfully refers to it as the “ripening” of the advanced portions of our brain (neo-cortex) as we have moved through life’s events, experiences, failures, victories.

As a spiritual mentor, Rabbi Schachter helps people bring forward this essential insight, emphasizing that our purpose is to “harvest” that insight and pass it on.

Unharvested crops rot

I grew up in the world of farming.  My grandparents were homesteading farmers in Wyoming; my uncles lived and died as farmers.

Every year for a farmer is a scramble to “pass on” their crop, be it potatoes, beans, beets or wheat, before it rotted in the field.

There’s not much that’s more unpleasant than the smell of a field of uncollected and rotting potatoes.

Is it too extreme to suggest that a failure to “harvest” this “essential insight” crop that we are carrying may lead to a sort of brain rot?  Perhaps not smelly, but certainly observable – as in drifting listlessness or dying early, its most severe form.

We know that, historically, the lifespan of humans who move into a retirement that binges on leisure is significantly shorter than those who remain active and engaged in some form of meaningful work.  In fact, the RP2000 Mortality Study of men 50-70 released by the Society of Actuaries showed that the death rates of those still working were roughly half the death rates of men the same age who were fully retired.

What if the “work” we entered into in our third stage of life was a harvesting of this “essential insight” and sharing it forward to preserve it and give it an opportunity to grow even more in the hands and minds of its recipients?

Rabbi Schachter uses a softer word to describe the fact that we tend to let our brains – and our bodies – rot as we enter the later phases of our lives.   He uses the word “diminishes.”

He maintains that we diminish because we don’t see the possibilities.

Why do we miss the possibilities?

I submit that our ability to see the possibilities of harvesting and passing on this essential insight is stolen away from many of us by the insidious penetration of our psyche by the concept of an off-the-cliff, labor-to-leisure retirement.

Many of us can hardly wait to shut down our creative nature (even more than what a mind-numbing 40-year job has done) and “retire” (derived from the French verb “retirer” which means to “retreat, go backward”) and further continue the assassination of our essential insight.

We not only fail to see the possibilities, but we tag work in the post-career as something to avoid.  We seem to believe that creativity dies at 65 and that post-career work will tag us as a “loser” or an “unfortunate”.

Creativity is work.  Work is creativity.

I like where the Rabbi took me with this.  His message reminds us that this third-age, post-career period of our lives is a time when we can, perhaps for the first time, fully engage in “soul work” i.e. work that emanates from the heart and incorporates the creativity of deep interests and passions that have been crusted over by a multi-decade quest for money, status, and security.

His message is that we can shake off the crust and shed the barnacles from what is for many the empty years of marginally-inspiring, money-chasing employment and bring forward what we learned and use it to advance our world.

I’m reminded that my story to this point is unspectacular against the worldly standard of wealth, status, title – in fact, it’s kinda messy.  But, my mess is my message – and that’s true for you too.  Our messes are a big part of the essential insight that we can bring forward.

It’s helpful to understand and accept that there are no failures – only experiments and research and development.  Even when that awareness doesn’t show up until the seventh decade.

Let me wrap with a quote from a new reading “project” that I started this week:  Laurence G. Boldt’s “Zen and the art of Making a Living: A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design” 

“Most of our lives, we are chasing food, sex, attention, knowledge, security, and – most of all – money.  Without the real engagement of our souls, all this can seem quite empty as the years go by.  For the soul too has its demands.  It has a way of letting us know when we neglect or abandon its imperatives  – authenticity and responsibility, joy and compassion.  At some point, many come to realize that listening to their hearts and souls isn’t a luxury but an essential part of their psychological and spiritual health.”

Are “soul”, “authenticity”, “joy”, “passion”, “purpose”, “essential insights” part of your internal dialog as you move into or toward this third age of your life?  Or is it still just “money”, “security”, “escape”?

Tough – but essential – questions.

Your thoughts and comments are welcomed and appreciated.

 

 

Wishing You the Best!

Thanks for being a loyal subscriber and reader in 2018!  

Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons.

www.makeagingwork.com

Are Your Genetics Trapping Your Mindset?

Me:  So, John – how long do you expect to live?

John:  Well, I’ve never been asked that question.  Probably mid-eighties.

Me:  John, you’re 72 and healthy – why the mid-eighties?

John:  Oh, genetics, I suppose.  My dad died at 63.  My mom was in her late eighties.

Me:  Suppose I told you that we’ve determined that genetics may play, at most, a 30% role in our longevity and virtually no affect after age 65 – would that influence how you began to feel about how long you will live?

John:  Well, maybe – I’ve never heard that.  I’ve always assumed genetics determined how long I would live.

Thus went a portion of a multi-faceted, catch-up discussion over lunch this week with a friend of mine – a fellow executive recruiter with whom I’ve shared some of my passions for living healthy, not retiring, staying productive.

John’s a guy that subscribes to all of that, so we’ve hit it off well in the several years we’ve known each other.  He’s an energetic, engaging, fun guy to be around. He continues to maintain a successful IT recruiting business, started at “mid-life” 22 years ago after an extended stint in big-company CIO roles.

He has no intention of retiring.

His rationale is pretty simple:

  1. He still enjoys recruiting, although it’s gotten a lot tougher with the advent of the internet and the fact that a number of his key client contacts have retired or died early. He admits to some complacency and the need to resurrect some of the old success habits that got him where he is.
  2. He would go stir-crazy if he retired. John is an extrovert that is empowered by being around people.  He told me he can’t sit still for more than a couple of hours before he has to talk to somebody, live or on the phone. (NOTE:  that has a lot to do with his consistent success as a recruiter.  Mildly demented total introverts, like me, don’t show up in the stats of highly successful recruiters).
  3. The money is still good in recruiting and he’s good at it. Why quit?  What would I retire to, he asks?
  4. He’s in a business that is largely age insensitive. You find a needy client the problem-solving candidate they need, they could give a rip if you are 12 or 92.
  5. He has the lifestyle he wants: good income, industry reputation, total control of his calendar; a “significant other” that he enjoys spending time with (he’s divorced 20+ years with no intent to re-marry); large but dwindling circle of close friends that he consistently spends time with (maybe a few early deaths amongst friends has influenced his perspective on his own length of life – I didn’t probe that.)

Summary:  FREEDOM!

John’s a healthy guy.  He eats right – lots of fish, no meat.  He is slender. He does a little bit of strength training (not enough, I told him.)  He is a gonzo road biker, doing long rides multiple times per week with friends.

I chuckled as he complained that his average mph has dropped in the last ten years from 17 mph to 13mph on the extended road trips.  In the same breath, he proudly states that he hasn’t found many 40-year olds that can keep up with him even today.

Why check out early?

Given all this about John, I was a bit surprised to have him set such a limited time horizon for himself.  It seemed out of sync with the rest of John’s thinking and lifestyle.   That is until I realized that, like so many other 20th- century myths that we have brought forward, he was coming from the outdated assumption that genetics drives our longevity.  He was surprised to hear that this isn’t the case and that our longevity is largely driven by the lifestyle choices we have made and will continue to make.

I think – I hope – I sensed a bit of awakening on his part to the possibility that a mid-eighties demise is accepting an unnecessary shortfall.  He is certainly doing the things that would say that maintaining his current level of energy, drive, and vitality at the age he expected to die is a very real possibility.

When we injected the theory of “self-fulfilling prophecy” into the discussion I believe some new lights came on.

I reminded him of my own personal longevity goal of 112 ½ and how setting a WIG (wildly improbable goal) like that has changed my perspective on what I want to do in this third act and my optimism about being able to do it.

Like all others I share this goal with, he thinks that kind of threshold is a bit nutty.  But I’m predicting that when he hits 85 and he’s still kicking it – be it recruiting, biking, or whatever – he will have a different viewpoint.

John does, and will continue to, qualify as an “audacious ager.”  I love meeting and learning from audacious agers.  If you know of others like John that I could talk with, please send them along.

 

Why Do We Insist on Dying Early?

Maybe you saw the November 30, 2019 Associated Press article in your local paper entitled: “CDC: Life expectancy in U.S. declining.”

I found it buried on page 15A in the birdcage-bottom-quality newspaper we have here in Denver.  No space for this newsflash in the front portion of our paper.  More of the attention there was dedicated to the announcement of the city council’s pending approval of a “supervised drug-use site” where addicts can come to get clean needles and shoot-up under the watchful eye of a “public servant.”

Go figure.

For the third year in a row, our life expectancy has been trending the wrong direction.  After a century of near-meteoric growth (47 in 1910; 78 in 2015), we’ve found a number of ways to turn it in the other direction.

“We’ve never seen anything like this” says the overseer of the CDC death statistics.  Cancer was the only one of the top ten killers that receded in 2017, albeit only slightly.   Seven of the ten increased.  The biggie, heart disease, has stopped falling; the other biggies, suicide, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s,  continue to climb.

I find it interesting that CDC officials wouldn’t speculate about what’s behind the declining life expectancy – and then, in the next breath, hint that a “sense of hopelessness” may have something to do with it, further suggesting that “financial struggles, widening income gap, and divisive politics” are contributing, concluding that therein lies the hopelessness, which therein leads to increased drug, which therein may explain much of this pull-back.

Drug deaths, while certainly a concern, still haven’t cracked the list of top ten killers in the U.S.

The food industry gets another pass

Burger King and Carl’s Junior never got a pixel of ink in the article!  Nor did Coke or Mountain Dew. The meat industry gets yet another pass from the CDC. 

Now it’s Trump-era politics and class identity instead of sugar, fat and salt that are bending the longevity curve? 

Color me skeptical.

Let’s not hang curve-bending clogged arteries and visceral fat on putrid Potomac politics.

This same CDC seems to have a short-term memory.  In 2017, the organization revealed research that suggests 1 of 3 adults in the U.S. has prediabetes and, of this group, 9 of 10 don’t know they have it.  

I’m no medical expert, but I’m confident saying that divisive politics or financial struggles are not likely to appear on the list of things that causes prediabetes, cancer or heart disease.

Oh, I hear your counter argument:  it’s the worrying related to those types of issues that is bumping up the cortisol and adrenaline thus contributing to these diseases. 

Maybe so.

Permit me to provide a very quick, effective tutorial on preventing worry.

DON’T!!  There you have it – probono.  You’re welcome.

It’s the most egregious use of imagination imaginable – and 95% of our worries never materialize.

Maybe someday we’ll get real.

With all the hysteria and new attention, it’s not likely drug deaths will crack the top-ten list of killers.  All current ten killers are considered preventable, some to greater degrees than others.  We’ve known for decades what we need to do to prevent these killers but we persist in killing ourselves slowly by ignoring the fundamentals of how our cells work.

The universe has established a lifespan benchmark of 122 ½years (reference Ms. Jeanne Calment) and we did a marvelous job of creeping toward that in the 20th century.  But with the low-hanging fruit already picked i.e. infant mortality, elimination/reduction of infectious diseases, washing hands before surgery, etc. , we seem to have become Sisyphean and lost the enthusiasm about continuing to push the longevity boulder up the hill.

We still only achieve about 66% of that full-life potential, even though we know what it takes to realize more of it.  

We’ve become complacent in understanding our biology;  we’ve allowed a deceptive food-industry to take our taste buds captive;  we cling to the 20th century model of labor-to-leisure retirement and become  sedentary and disconnected, thus contributing to a persistent “live short, die long” life curve of gradual and extended frailty.

The solution is a pretty simple plan, really.

  • Stop eating crap – cook at home, leave the meat on the cow and pig.
  • Get off your arse and your heart rate up at least three days a week, preferably five.
  • Go lift a few weights a couple of days a week.
  • Rebuild a “friends list” and do something with it – like connect.
  • Burn/Goodwill the Lazyboy and take the batteries out of the remote.
  • Don’t stop working – find a “third age” sense of purpose.
  • Never stop learning.  Become part of the 5% of our population that reads 95% of the books.
  • Spend a little time learning how your body works at the cellular level – it’ll help motivate you to follow through on the above.

Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach says that people die early for three reasons:

  1. No money
  2. No friends
  3. No purpose

Hard to argue.  A sense of purpose is a principal driver that can help us turn the curve back up.  Plus it will render you immune to Trumpian-politics, CNN/Fox, stock market swings and Facebook narcissism.

What can be bad about that?

A Berry Important but Nutty Solution to Cognitive Decline

Photo by Trang Doan from Pexels

I just finished another boring breakfast – the same one I have 7 out of 7 days:  oatmeal or bran flakes over a bed of strawberries. sliced banana, and almond milk with a side order of whole-grain toast with a thin layer of organic peanut butter and a touch of honey.   Then a mixed handful of dry-roasted almonds and raw walnuts.

Throughout the day, I make frequent visits to the fridge (my incentive to get out of my chair more frequently) and snack on a few grapes or blueberries.

I’m pleased to report that this week I didn’t put my car keys in the refrigerator, I didn’t end up at Target when I was headed to 24-Hour Fitness, didn’t mark the wrong ball on the putting green – and my socks matched all week.

I think I’m doing pretty well for a near-octogenarian in the brain department – so far.  Oh, there are still words or names that get stuck somewhere between the neocortex and my tongue, but that’s pretty normal I’m told.

Is my seemingly-normal septuagenaric brain due to my nutty, fruity breakfast routine?  Obviously, it’s much bigger than just that.

I don’t have any Alzheimer’s history in my family so apparently, the APOE4 gene isn’t present.

I’ve been an avid exerciser for 40+ years – gotta believe that may be helping.

And I suppose reading a book a week for the last 10+ years, trying to write something new every day and continuing to add a new level to my guitar-playing every week may help me keep the neural connections somewhat normal.

But evidence would say that being berry nutty on a daily basis certainly isn’t hurting.

In my April 30, 2018 blog, I confessed to being a fan of Dr. Michael Greger, practicing physician and prolific blogger/podcaster on issues of nutrition and good health at www.nutritionfacts.org.

Dr. Greger continues to release near-daily content with provocative research-backed findings on nutritional paths to greater health and longevity.

To add support to my berry nutty routine, I’ll refer you to Dr. Greger’s article on this very topic.  Click here to view. It’s his latest four-minute video regarding the benefits of berries and nuts for maintaining and improving cognition as we age.

Maybe just one little step to help keep that 2 1/2 lbs of fatty acid from getting old before its time.

Enjoy!

Modeling the New Retirementality

Meet Per Karlqvist, optician, business owner, husband, father of two daughters, granddad of two, golfer, traveler, and socially-active septuagenarian – and a model of the new retirement mentality that is slowly taking hold in our culture.

I met Per for coffee this week after hearing some intriguing parts of his story from his son-in-law who I met for the first time in a golf foursome I played with a few weeks ago.  As his son-in-law spoke proudly of how Per inspired him, had helped his golf game and of how Per had essentially shunned traditional retirement and “re-started” a business career in his late sixties, I knew I needed to meet him and dig into the details.

A native of Sweden, trained there as an optician, Per and his wife came to the U.S. in 1974, where he obtained a green card and worked as an optician in New York state, Chicago and then Ft. Morgan, Colorado before taking the bold step to start his own optical business in Denver in 1979.  (He and his wife achieved dual citizenship in 2012.)

Trim, athletic in appearance, dressed younger than his years and, as you’d expect, fashionably bespectacled, Per leaves no doubt of well-above-average energy and vitality for his age group.

I wanted to take the conversation to their lifestyle because I already knew it was a bit different than that of other 70-year-olds that I know. But first, I needed to understand the story behind Per’s return to Denver and his business restart.

It unfolds like this:  Per had built a very successful optometry/optician business in Denver and decided to sell it to an interested optometrist a few years ago.  He and his wife then decided on a change of scenery and moved to Jacksonville, Florida where, rather than join the ranks of the Florida-retired, he began a sales job with an optical supply company.  After a year, they apparently had had enough of Florida and decided to return to Colorado.  Fortunately, the optical company he sold for had an open sales position in Colorado and he was able to continue in that role in Denver for another year.

Then the story took an interesting twist.  The optometrist who bought his business abruptly walked away from it and left the keys to the building with the bank (I’m sure there’s more to that story but Per diplomatically spared me the details).

Per negotiated with the bank and took it back, no doubt at a favorable cost relative to what he had sold it for.

But there was a caveat attached to this re-start.

One of his daughters, who had worked in his business for a number of years in front office admin jobs through high school had decided to follow in her father’s footsteps, somewhat, and was studying to earn her Doctor of Optometry (O.D.) degree.

He took the business back with a commitment from her that she would join him in the business, help him rebuild it and eventually take it over.

And that’s where it is now.  His daughter is full-time as an O.D. in the practice as his partner, joined by another part-time O.D. and with Per as the head optician along with a couple of other opticians.  The business is off and flying again – in fact, in the midst of a major remodel and expansion of their current facility with Per committing 50 hours a week in dual roles as the head optician and overseer of the renovation project.

A balanced semi-retirement lifestyle.

Per confirmed my expectation that he would have a nuanced view of retirement.  Having sped on past the age 65 guidepost, I’m not sure that retirement is a concept that Per has given much thought to at all.  Certainly, the thought of an “off-the-cliff” transition from vocation-to-vacation doesn’t resonate with him.

In many ways, Per is acting out the new retirement mentality.   He is a model for the vitality and contribution that those in the “third act” of life can continue to bring to our society but that is so often sacrificed at the age-65-altar of winding down, withdrawing and withering away.

Per appears to be in the semi-retirement mold wherein he balances a very healthy combination of work, family, leisure, travel and social engagement.

While he is currently working 50 hours a week in his business because of the renovation project, he expects to transition to 20 hours a week or so and spend more time with the other dimensions of his life, especially travel which he and his wife enjoy.

A 3-year old granddaughter and a 2 1/2-year-old grandson will no doubt also benefit greatly from that balanced lifestyle.

The thing I appreciate the most about Per’s attitude and approach to this third stage of life is his commitment to paying forward by combining his energy with his natural talents and acquired skills and experience for the benefit of others by rebuilding a family business that should thrive and live on beyond his life.

I hope to get a chance to play golf with Per someday soon to learn even more about his background and what drives him so that I can share even more of his example with others.

Oh, and judging from the golf swing his son-in-law has developed with his help, I stand to gain doing something with my embarrassing 22.7 handicap.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

A friend of mine sent me this video filmed at the 2005 Super Bowl.  I share it as a reminder of how things have changed for us culturally in a mere 13 years.  How refreshing to see players, black and white, singing the national anthem and respecting the flag.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let’s strive to bring back that unity and respect.

We’re stalled – but we’re still great!

Confessions of An Addict

I’m an addict!

No, you won’t find needle marks on my arms or between my toes.  I haven’t joined the opioid crowd. I had my single, daily beer today – that was it.  My computers are free of porn sites.  And I haven’t spun a roulette wheel or said “hit me” at a blackjack table in 20 years.  And I’ve never bought a lottery ticket.

My addiction would be viewed by most as hardly an addiction, or as something harmful.  But I assure you, viewing it from this side, it is, without question, a harmful addiction with its own unique destructive power.

Like all addictions, it started slowly and has continued to layer on over the last 30 years.  Not unlike how other addictions get started.

As with other addictions, mine is also difficult to reverse or shed.  And like recovery from other addictions, the other side is bright and promising.

What is the addiction?

I’m addicted to learning!

I hear your eyebrows raising.  Whaaa?

Perhaps a better way to describe my addiction is “information accumulation.” And its start was innocent enough.  It came with exposure to the world of “positive thinking”, “self-help”, and “personal development” in the early 1980’s through books and audio programs by Robert Schuler, Dale Carnegie, Brian Tracy, Denis Waitley, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill, Tom Hopkins, to name but a few.

What started as reading maybe a book in a month has grown to a book a week or more to where I’ve averaged over 70 books a year for the last 6 years.  And not a novel in that mix.

Hey, I get it if you don’t relate to this.  I’m a rather unproud outlier in this area.

The addiction deepened and took on a new dimension with the advent of the internet and browsers (1990’s)  to the point today where my high-speed access, Evernote, Feedly, Medium.org,  blog subscriptions and alerts galore have enabled the learning and accumulation addiction to reach the point of total overwhelm.

Is there a 12-step program for this?  Perhaps an “Accumulation Anonymous” chapter somewhere?  If you know of one, write me.  I need one, fast!

So why the need for a detox?

Blame Tim Ferris, author of “Four-hour Work Week”.  OK, I confess – my addiction has caused me to read this book four times.   That’s nuts, relatively speaking.  I get it.

The reason I keep going back to Ferris’ book, and others, is I am caught in a destructive mindset that says the “answer” to my inaction and procrastination lies in the next book, or blog, or podcast, or whatever escape mechanism chooses to raise its head.  I subconsciously am hoping for the emergence of a magic bullet from the next element I dive into to move me to action.

Chapter 5 of Ferris’ book is unkind – in a positive way.  It’s confrontational – in a transformational way.  His transformational unkindness reminds me that I’m caught in a trap of inventing things to do to avoid the important. That’s what my accumulation has become.

I’ve come to realize that all the motivation, self-help material that I’ve consumed has been incredibly helpful and moved me out of my comfort zone and helped me grow.  But I’ve reached the point that I am now in the rut of consuming without changing, consuming without creating at an acceptable level and, most concerning, consuming without being conscious of, or remembering, what I’ve learned.

So, lacking an appropriate AA chapter for this, I’m putting myself into a self-designed rehab.

Here’s a glimpse of what I’m dealing with in this addiction and what I have to overcome.  Maybe some of you out there can relate, although I fear I’m part of a small crowd.

  1. I have read approximately 650 books over the last 10 years – one a week or more. It’s going to be difficult to avoid putting my nose into a book for a couple of hours in the morning.  But it’s gotta happen!
  2. There have been less than five novels in that mix. My reading and study have been very horizontal – self-development, positive psychology, health-and-wellness, nutrition, brain health, advances in bio-science, career planning, the changing retirement world – I’ll stop there although there are other topics. Boring stuff for the well-adjusted homo-sapien.
  3. I have 938 podcasts on my 10-year old Apple Classic I-pod. Embarrassingly, I’ve listened to a very large percentage of these (mostly as I work out – it’s the only way I can avoid terminal boredom with my workout routine). Perhaps it’s divine providence and a hint that rehab is necessary that this Apple relic finally gave it up and took this portable audio library with it.   A good omen!
  4. At any given point in time, I have 12-15 blogs/newsletters cluttering my email inbox, having succumbed to an offer for a free something-or-other and offering up my email address in exchange. I delete one and another one sneaks in to replace it.  The temptation to read something with each newsletter arrival has been doggedly persistent.  Equivalent, I suppose, to a quick fix. Rehab calls for finding more “unsubscribe” links.
  5. I currently have three on-line courses I’ve invested in that are in various stages of completion – one on health and wellness coaching, one on writing and self-publishing, and one on successful blogging. I forget what I learned in each one when I return to it.  Yuck!

I’m not expecting cold-sweats nor do I think I need a weekly support-group meeting to pull this off.  But it won’t be easy.

Some would say I’m trying to replace good habits.  No.  I’m going to replace an excess of good habits.  Reading, study, learning, research, stretching your mind are good – and important.  Until they aren’t.  I’ve reached that point.  Because they have gotten in the way of – as Seth Godin puts it – shipping.  Shipping to Godin – a word class “shipper” – is action, producing something.

My excess of habits has aligned itself with lizard-brain “resistance” to effectively infuse my day with procrastination and comfort level.  Not a great formula for shipping or doing something with meaning and impact, which is what my written life-goals remind me daily that I’m supposed to be doing – only to be stuffed down by my lizard brain.

Well, the “universe” spoke loud and clear these last ten days by serving up – ironically – three blog posts back-to-back-to-back on this very topic, all from different writers and sources. I’ve learned to pay attention to the universe when things like that happen.

Combined, the three blogs have motivated me to begin development of my own “12-Step and AA (Accumulation Anonymous)” program.  Here are the first six steps.  I’d have more completed but I’ve got this book and course I need to finish (yes, the withdrawal will be difficult and take a while).

  1. Step #1: Read fewer fluffy, front-loaded motivational self-help books.  After 30 years of these, I’m good with the basics.  The foundation is in place.
  2. Step #2: Read less each day (see #3); write more.
  3. Step #3: More nuanced reading; go deeper with my learning and more vertical, less horizontal with the topics.
  4. Step #4: Stop plowing through books that aren’t reaching me.  If it ain’t resonating, quit and put or give it away -don’t get hung up on the “sunk cost” of having paid for the book.  Come back to it only if, later on, it fits the “nuanced, vertical” category.
  5. Step #5: Take advantage of the positive impact of “spaced repetition” and “interleaving” on long-term memory and strong neural connections by having several books going at one time on different topics/problems and in different formats i.e. physical, Kindle and audio.
  6. Step #6: Get skilled at avoiding long books built around simple ideas.  Example:  many self-help books.  Study table of contents on Amazon before any buy.

The remaining six steps require some more time and thinking.  More to follow.

Maybe my travails will be helpful although I totally understand if this seems trivial and totally unrelatable.  I classify my issues as a “high-class problem”.  I could be sitting here lamenting my decline into dementia regretting having never read a book since high school or college graduation, which is the case for 38% and 42% or our population respectively. But it feels good to know I’m in the 5% of our population that reads 95% of the books.

Notwithstanding the whining I’ve foisted on you above, it also feels good to know that this mushy 2 ½ lbs of fatty acid between my ears is not going to be a victim of “use it or lose it” syndrome.

Any thoughts?  Or comments?  Let me know below in the comment section.

Stop the Careening Age Bus

 

Here’s some fun information to chew on – instead of that Halloween candy or Wendy’s  S’Awesome Bacon Classic Double.

According to fitness experts Steve and Becky Holman at Old School New Body, our body starts aging faster than normal when we hit 40.  Now, for most of you reading this, that isn’t exactly revelatory since we creak and groan our way out of our bedrooms each morning and likely have for some time.

What is a bit revelatory is that, without proper nutrients and exercise, our bodies – men and women alike – will age about 6 months EXTRA for every year that passes.

So if you’re 40 and LazyBoy, Law and Order reruns, and Carl’s Jr are your best friends, that means when you hit 44, you’ll likely look and feel 48 (or older if Carl’s is a frequent stop).

Then by the time you hit 60, you might look and feel 70, look and feel 85 at 70, so on and so on.

I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of folks that have done a lot to confirm these findings.

I’m pleased to say, however, that I know a few that seemed to have reversed that.  My wife, Linda, 72, would be one of those.   I like to think I would be one also – but to claim that would unleash my narcissistic, arrogant tendencies which are already overworked.

Wait a minute.  Screw worrying about the narcissism and arrogance – I AM ONE!

I’d better be. I’ve been studying this stuff, preaching/teaching it anywhere/ any way I can and trying to live it for the last 15+ years.

But back to my wife. She has been a wonderful nutrition gatekeeper for years.  It all started a couple of decades ago when she joined Weightwatchers and began to understand more about nutrition values and calorie counts.  She dropped 30 pounds, moved on from Weight Watcher but kept the nutritional awareness.

Our refrigerator and pantry began to transform and has steadily gotten better as we have both become students of good nutrition and learned more about how to avoid all the bad options available to us – which, by the way, overwhelm the good options available within our industrial, corporate-driven food system.

She was a gonzo Jazzerciser for years and now continues to keep pace with youngers in each Zumba class she attends, which is 4-6 days a week.  And our diet has gradually migrated to where we are 90% plant-based.

Food Rules

We consider ourselves “flexitarians”, a term borrowed from Michael Pollan, renowned author, journalist and food activist and author of a wonderful guidebook on eating right, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”.

Meat is a rare event, chicken and fish are occasional.  Dairy for me – gone.

And that same gatekeeper has discovered plant-based meals that are even tastier than the traditional meat- and chicken-based meals that were standard fare for us for years.  Amazing what can be done with different combinations of vegetables and healthy spices.

I’ve taken the advice I learned years ago from Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the best-selling and highly transformational book “Younger Next Year”.  (See “Harry’s Rule” in the Appendix of that book.)  In addition to having “stopped eating crap”, most weeks I hit my target of 45 minutes of aerobic exercise six days with three of those days adding an additional 30+ minutes of aggressive strength training.

By the way, the math on that is 3.5% of my 168 hour week.  I think any of us can find 3.5% in our week to look better and live longer.  That is if it’s important. But Western lifestyle stats would say it’s a lot tougher than I realize and maybe not that important relative to – well, who knows what.  Maybe we can hang the blame on Netflix or Hulu.

I’m grateful today that 30 years ago, I stopped letting anything crowd out exercise on my calendar. You don’t want to be around me if I can’t exercise due to injury or illness.  It’s best to lock me in a closet when that happens.  I’m sour enough on a good day.

I guess if we get honest and just boil it down, the outside reflects what we do to the inside. I’ve come to appreciate that our bodies are essentially 24 x 7 immune systems of cells that, for us Westerners on the Standard American Diet (SAD) and living our sedentary lifestyle, are often working overtime to keep us healthy despite our naïve efforts to make it difficult for them.

Those cells actually crave frequent positive stress and thrive in it.  Not the adrenaline or cortisol or norepinephrine morning-commute, late-for-a-meeting type of stress but the type of stress that raises the oxygen levels in the bloodstream.  Dr. Lodge, in the aforementioned book Y-N-Y will provide you with an understandable description of the biology of all that,

Let’s just call it exercise to keep it dirt simple.

After a while, without proper diet and adequate exercise, cells just sort of give it up and check out early and the internal and external deterioration accelerates.

But, let’s not forget the inevitable.

Steve and Becky appear to be 50-year old hard-bodies who aggressively market their stupefying good looks and rippled torsos to sell their own version of a “new” exercise program.  Probably one that will have you looking good in less time and less effort- that seems to be a common theme for exercise programs these days.

They appeal because they sell the idea of delaying the inevitable.  Which is:  you and I are going to wrinkle up, droop and die.

I’m all for delaying the inevitable and looking as good as I can along the way.  And I’ve learned that diet and exercise are pivotal to both.  And that shortcuts and diets don’t work.

But at some point, one has to look beyond the physical and accept eyebags, turkey necks, high foreheads and hair in the wrong places as part of the divine plan, perhaps meant to remind us that the inevitable is drawing closer.

So, for my wife and me, it’s pretty simple.  Accept the inevitable but do what we can to delay it, look and feel as good as we can along the way, and accept the sags, droops, and wrinkles as ultimately unavoidable.

Of course, there is the option to have multiple encounters with a scalpel – a thought that has crossed my mind some mornings as the bags under my eyes stare back at me in the mirror.  But now I’m taking pride in them because they don’t become that prominent without having been around a while.  And being around a while means you’ve got something to offer to someone, somewhere, sometime.

Truthfully, this formula for looking as good as you can and feeling better than most for your age is so incredibly simple – eat right and exercise.  But I’ll be the first to confess it’s incredibly difficult because of the habit changes that it entails.  Plus neither activity scores real high on the fun scale.

 

The famous fitness, exercise, and nutrition expert Jack LaLanne, who made it to 95, was once asked why he liked exercise so much.  His response:  “I’ve never liked it.  I just like the results.”

Like nearly everything we do in life, it gets down to choice.  We know what works and what hinders.  Yet we succumb to comfort and convenience and let our 35 trillion cells burn themselves out early and send us on to an early, saggy, droopy, stooped demise.

And then complain about what the mirror feeds back to us.

It can all get pretty comical, can’t it?

I’m 25 and want to retire early.  What is my best strategy moving forward?

I’m an information gatherer – probably to the excess.  I guess it’s just part of my wiring.  In this quest for information, I’m a sucker for signing up to services like Medium.org, the Quora Digest at Quora.com, and others.

Quora is kind of a strange concept – a Q&A site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users in the form of opinions.  It’s an information exchange site that discourages low-quality answers and requires users to use their real name to sign up.

Kind of a Wikipedia on the fly with identifiable culprits.

I don’t pay much attention to it, which begs the question of why I let it invade my inbox.  A question I’ll someday need to address relative to lots of stuff that invades my inbox.

That’s more than you wanted to know about Quora – and certainly about one of my many quirks.

But I couldn’t pass up one Quora conversation that caught my eye last week.  The topic submitted was this:

I’m 25 and want to retire early.  What is my best strategy moving forward?

I had to respond.  The question hit me two ways:

  1. Why is a 25-year old already thinking retirement?
  2. It illustrates how pervasive and deep into our culture the concept continues to persist.

So I’m sharing my response.  I have no clue if he got it, read it or gives a damn.  And my response has a touch of a rant in it, but – well, it’s just the way I feel about it.

Some will agree, some will be offended, many will find it a yawner. Let me know which you are at the end in the comment section.

Young man:

Perhaps, at 25, you could consider an alternate view: why retire at all? Consider that “retire” comes from the French verb that means “to retreat, go backward, move to a place of seclusion.”

Fortunately, we are beginning to realize that labor-to-leisure/vocation-to-vacation retirement has more downsides than upsides. It’s a concept trying to stand on 20th-century legs, promoted and glamorized by the financial services industry. Retirement didn’t exist 150 years ago and doesn’t exist in nature. It is, fundamentally, an unnatural, politically-motivated notion whose genesis goes back 80 years.

The reality of retirement is that it’s less about the “numbers” and more about achieving a fulfilling life. Some, including myself, are predicting that “unretirement” or “semi-retirement” will become the new prestige rather than traditional retirement, especially early retirement.

Some of the leading voices on lifetime achievement and purposeful living refer to retirement as the “ultimate casualty” where mental, physical, social and spiritual qualities go to die a slow death.

If you are doing what you truly “want” to do and are using your core talents and working toward that deep inner dream, then why would you retire and deny society the impact you can bring forward?

Retirement can be a deeply selfish move by denying us all the deep inner talent and skill you are gifted with.

Most people retire “from” something and rarely “to” something.  For many, retirement affords them the opportunity to get away from something that they have tolerated for years rather than something that inspired them daily and that used their core talents.

You are in a position to be way ahead in this game and be a “game changer” or “world changer”. Rather than think retirement, think impact. When you connect your unique ability or essential self with a vision for your life, a desire for retirement is going to fade away – and we all benefit much more.

Good luck to you!

Gary