Your Attitude May Not Get You Past 78.9

A couple of blogs ago, I mentioned that I started taking the advice of a large squadron of very successful writers, who have persuaded me that learning the craft of writing is “unglamorous blue-collar work” and that I should “just write.”

Duh!

So I’m holding fast to writing at least 500 words a day on something in my mental wheelhouse (positive aging, health and wellness, career/life management in the third age, etc.)

I’ve found the easiest way to hit that daily goal is to pick a question submitted on Quora.com which is, according to Wikipedia, “an American question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions.”

It’s been around since 2009 and has a user base of around 300 million active users.

I’ve been answering at least one question a day for a few months now and, quite shockingly, have had, as of this writing, over 885,000 views of my posts in Quora and achieved #1 Quora writer on the planet in one category (Longevity) and climbed into the top ten in two others (Health and Fitness).

It’ll be a tough position to hold but is a nice ego-stroke while it lasts.

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This Quora question hit my email this week:

“What should you do daily in order to live super healthy when you become 70?”

Smack into my wheelhouse!

I think my response is pretty good. Probably not good enough to go viral like one post did where I answered the question “What is the best anti-aging workout?  It went viral with 445,000 Quora views.

I decided to let you determine if this latest one is good so I’m reposting it here for this week’s blog, with some modification and additions.  You be the judge and let me know what you think.

P.S. If you’ve been tagging along with me on this 2 ½ year blogging journey, you’ve heard some of this before.  But I believe “repetition is the mother of learning” still applies.

“What should you do daily in order to live super healthy when you become 70?”

The components of good health that will carry us into our 70s and beyond in good health are not complicated and we’ve known them for a long time. Sad to say, individually, we choose to be naive to them, find them too difficult and inconvenient and end up not doing them.

I suggest that the most important “daily” activity to insure being super healthy late into life is to remind ourselves each day that we have an inheritance of good health and an obligation to maintain it.

We aren’t inclined to put the components of good health – nutrition, exercise, social engagement, continuous learning, sense of purpose/service – in place without an attitude that honors this inheritance.

This point was driven home to me several years ago when I stumbled across the book “Dare to Be 100” written by Dr. Walter Bortz, a semi-retired Stanford University geriatric physician.

In this timeless book, he lays out a simple roadmap for good health using the acronym D-A-R-E:

  • D=Diet
  • A=Attitude
  • R=Renewal/rejuvenation
  • E=Exercise

The D, R, and E are biological compass points for living to 100 (which, BTW, we all should be able to do). But attitude is the most important and the most difficult because, as Dr. Bortz says, “it’s in attitude that we find all the planning and decision-making that facilitate the biological steps. It is possible to live to 100 by chance, but not likely.”

So living healthily into our 70s and beyond isn’t going to happen by chance either and will only happen with a commitment to a discipline that builds the simple components of diet, exercise, social engagement, having a cause bigger than yourself, and continuous learning into a lifestyle.

It’s important to remember that there is no biological reason for any of us not to live to 100 or beyond.

The body has demonstrated that it can last 122 years and 164 days which is the benchmark for longevity set by a Parisian woman named Jeanne Calment. (Yeah, I know – you may have heard that this has been debunked.  Look again – the debunking has been debunked.)

The right attitude acknowledges this as our whole-life potential and the inheritance that we should honor.

Will we get to 122 1/2? Not likely. But with an attitude that acknowledges that the body is designed for a longer life than we experience on average, we enhance our chances of getting closer to it than if we accept that average life span as our destiny.

On average, at an overall average lifespan in the U.S. of around 80 (78.9 for men, 81.1 for women), we achieve only about 66% of that “whole life potential.”

With the exception of the consequences of the infrequent “blueprint error/genetic defect”, we die early in our culture simply because of our lifestyles. Our declines as we move into our 60s and 70s are thirty-year problems of lifestyle, not disease. We are more victims of our own healthcare illiteracy and lack of discipline than anything else.

Let me quote Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the best-selling and life-changing book  “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond”.

“The simple fact is that we know perfectly well what to do. Some 70 percent of premature death and aging are lifestyle-related. Heart attacks, strokes, the common cancers, diabetes, most falls, fractures, and serious injuries, and many more illnesses are primarily caused by the way we live. If we had the will to do it, we could eliminate more than half of all disease in men and women over fifty. Not delay it, eliminate it.”

I believe that statement has attitude written all over it, as well as a call to learn about our biological inheritance, how it works and how to treat it.

I’m two months short of 78 and approach each day with an acquired understanding of how my body and mind work at the cellular level (thanks to Dr. Lodge).  I set a preposterous age goal of 112 ½ at age 75 because I wanted a third of my life left to get things done that didn’t happen in the first two-thirds.

I have no illusions about getting there. I was guilty of some marginal health habits in my first fifty years and before I acquired this self-care awareness. But I know my attitude will get me a lot closer – and healthier along the way – than if I accepted only living to the average lifespan of 78.9 for men in the U.S.

If that were my attitude, I should be getting my affairs in order – which I’m not.  I don’t need that drag on my attitude.

Average isn’t healthy

I started re-reading “Younger Next Year” again this week for the fifth time.  It was good to be reminded of Dr. Lodge’s description of how he watched so many of his patients of 20-30 years simply start a gradual decline and accept an average lifespan as destiny.

He realized that he, along with our medical establishment, had failed them by providing them with good medical care but not great health care. He admitted that he “like most doctors in America, had been doing the wrong job well. Modern medicine does not concern itself with lifestyle problems.  Doctors don’t treat them, medical schools don’t teach them and insurers don’t pay to solve them.”

We forget – or didn’t learn along the way – that what we’ve come to accept as normal ailments and deterioration are not a normal part of growing old. In Dr. Lodge’s words “they are an outrage. An outrage that we have simply gotten used to because we set the bar so shamefully low.” (See “Whole-life chart above!)

I’m going to ignore 78.9 as it flies by, which it will as each day does now. It’s just an attitude, accepting of an eventual demise but not one conceding to a “bar set so shamefully low.”

How’s your attitude about your long-term health?

  • Is it infected with illiteracy about how your biology works? (Remedy: Chapters 3 & 4 of Younger Next Year)
  • Is it infected with a belief that your “DNA is your destiny” or that your genetics determines your lifespan (which, BTW, it does not.)
  • Is it infected with lifestyle habits spawned by comfort, convenience, conformity, and cultural expectations?
  • Is it infected with a longevity goal “set so shamefully low?”

Can I suggest that 78.9 should be just a signpost reminding you that you are well beyond average and that it is merely a mid-point in your healthy third-age journey to 100 or beyond?

As I immersed myself this morning in the challenging chapter 3 of “Younger Next Year”, Dr. Lodge rocked my world for the fifth time with the reminder that we have “- stepped outside of the crucible of our biological evolution” and with a “- remarkable triumph of ego over intellect, we simply assume that we were ‘made’ for this life: that we were purpose-built for life in the twenty-first century.  That is a deeply mistaken view, and one we must get over.” 

He reminds us that the great problem of our times is “surfeit (excess abundance) and idleness” with bodies and minds that still instinctively respond to the abundance as preparation for famine as we did 300 millennia ago when we barely survived winters and hid from saber-tooths.  Now, no famine is coming but our biology hasn’t caught up with change.

We have lots to eat with nothing that can eat us.

He concludes:

“Our lifestyle – especially in retirement, especially in this wonderful country – is a disease more deadly than cancer, war or plague.  We live longer because of modern medicine, but many of us live wretchedly and many of us die much younger than we should.  The point is that we have to learn to cure ourselves, or, in the midst of all that plenty, we will live and prematurely die in unnecessary pain – in bodies that believe they are in the grip of famine.”

If you’ve read the book (please don’t tell me you haven’t!), you know that Dr. Lodge’s main solution is exercise and that he does a marvelous job of convincing readers of the validity of that recommendation by explaining its impact at the cellular level.

From it, we have “Harry’s Rules” which I leave as the call to action with this article (along with reading the book), to help us all get well past 78.9 and 81.1. Without an attitude committing to something like this, that is likely to be our fate.

Harry’s Rules

  1. Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.
  2. Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.
  3. Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.
  4. Spend less than you make.
  5. Quit eating crap!
  6. Care.
  7. Connect and commit.

Let me know your thoughts – scroll down and leave a comment.

Our tribe is growing rapidly, thanks to your consistent support and spreading the word along with folks catching my diatribes on Quora.  If you haven’t joined, trip on over to www.makeagingwork.com, join the list and receive a copy of my free ebook “Achieving Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

Are You the Author of Your Life?  Probably not.

 

Author: The person who originated or gave existence to anything and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created. (Wikipedia)

Last week, I finished an excellent book by NPR journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife.” One page received my personal trifecta treatment for importance and follow up – totally highlighted, paper-clipped, and tabbed with a blue tab.

A comment by an Israeli psychiatrist, Carlo Strenger, earned the page that status:

“To become the author of our own lives, we need to accept that we have not chosen the base materials of who we are.  We can only choose to shape them with a clear view of our strengths and weaknesses.”

It was the “author of our own lives” and the “base materials” part of the sentence that snagged me.

It took me back two quarter-centuries. Egad! What does it say when you can begin to think of your life in quarter centuries?

That was my college graduation year -1969.

After nine years and runs at three different majors, I made it to the stage to receive the faux-leather-bound document that is now God-knows-where. Enough credit-hours for at least one Master-degree illogically spread across civil engineering (one year), journalism (1 ½ years) and, finally, a B.S. in Business Administration (3 years).

OK, I’m sure you did the math: 9 years minus 5 ½ years = 3 ½ years.  Yep – a full third of a decade between college stints spent in aimless wandering and squandering while I confirmed that the male brain doesn’t reach maturity until around age 24 which was when I returned to campus for the final run.

 

Base materials?

I may be a crowd of one, but I don’t recall a professor or advisor in my final months before graduation ever uttering anything resembling “author of your life”, “base materials” or “strengths and weaknesses.”

Conventional counsel at that point was to sign up for as many campus interviews as you can with the companies that offered the best combo of salary and location.

Look for a fit with my “base materials”?  Uh, say what? Who knew I had any, least of all me.

So, I ended up leaving Wyoming for Pennsylvania and a career-launch selling ceiling tile.

Try that one on for excitement!!

The 20-40-20 Plan

I, and every campus compatriot I hung with, jumped on the same wagon and life-cycle plan. The one that prevailed then and still does. The one we had been indoctrinated into by parents, professors, and peers: 20 years of learning, 40 years of earning, 20 years of retirement nirvana.

Aside from some basic and mandatory IQ and basic skills tests in junior high and high school (which, BTW, suggested I should remain on my uncle’s Farmall driving in circles), I don’t recall ever being challenged to determine what my “base materials” were back then.

So the author for the first 20 years (27 for me) was cultural expectations: getta degree; getta job.

For the next forty, it was the same author but with the expectations ratcheted up: getta wife; getta house; getta family;  getta mini-van;  getta Labrador retriever; getta title; getta 401K; getta retirement.

Base materials, strengths and weaknesses be damned! Onward we marched because, well, that’s what we were expected to do. If latent, closeted desires or dreams tried to surface along the way, we tamped them down in favor of the model.

That is until we could no longer.  For some, and increasingly common today, the model collapsed with a job loss.

For others, it was an existential thing such as an internal force that calls for something with more meaning or realizing that we were at a professional dead end.

Strenger brings an interesting perspective to this.  He says that “changing courses in midlife is not a luxury but an ‘existential necessity.’”

I’m a career coach working with professionals wrestling with a mid-life course correction – some by choice (internal), some not (external, as in blindside gut-punch).  I’ve never suggested to a professional that has been gut-punched that they are going through an “existential necessity.”

Nor have I suggested that it’s time that they become the author of their life.

Maybe I need to get some guts about suggesting both.  I think Strenger is onto something from his years of working with clients in transition.

He makes the point that if people are to thrive and not just survive in midlife, they must make the change.  To fail to do so will exact a price.

Strenger states: “If people don’t take a hard look at what kind of changes they want to make, in the end, those changes are going to be forced on them.  The basic idea is: Don’t wait until the changes are forced on you.  Be proactive.”

What is that price if we don’t?

If life authorship has been relinquished to cultural expectations, there is a risk, in Strenger’s words, “of resigning ourselves to our growing limitations and throwing in the towel at 65” and “trudging on to retirement, something that almost no one can afford to do.”

In other words, succumbing to retirement – that ultimate casualty – when it’s likely there are 20-30 years of productive life left buoyed by an accumulation of assets built over forty, fifty, sixty years.

At mid-life, we have enough biography to know ourselves, what we’re good at and where we stink, what empowers us and what doesn’t.

Our choices become (1) letting that biography author us into the next phase honoring our essence (Strenger calls it our “thus and no other”) or (2) remain authorless, captive of cultural expectations, and accepting that we haven’t chosen the “base materials” of who we are.

Slow starter

Strenger’s words were “déjà vu all over again” for me.  My “base materials” were closeted until I reached my 60s and, even then, slow to emerge.

Thirty-five years of meeting cultural expectations in the corporate world gave way at age sixty to an attempt at entrepreneurism by starting my own healthcare recruiting business.  Within that experience came a gradual evolution that surfaced my “base materials” and “strengths and weaknesses” and the authoring of the life that I’ll finish out with – writing, coaching, teaching, speaking on issues involving achievement of a meaningful, fulfilling post-career life.

I can relate to how difficult it is to accept your “base materials” when they don’t line up with cultural indoctrinations. Despite what a plethora of personality and strengths assessments that I took through my 40s and 50s told me about myself, I rejected their consistent message and remained outside of my “base materials”  for nearly four decades in favor of the cultural mold I stepped into in 1969.

Steering between Scylla and Charybdis 

Strenger invokes the idiom from Greek mythology of sailing the strait between Scylla (six headed rock monster) and Charybdis (dangerous whirlpool) to make the point that a mid-life effort to recapture authorship and resurrect “base materials” calls for some careful steering.

He refers to Scylla as the choice of “resigning ourselves to our growing limitations and throwing in the towel at 65” (retirement) and Charybdis as “the illusion that, in midlife, we can enjoy ‘boundless change’ which requires a ground-up radical transformation” (the lawyer who becomes a chef or the doctor who becomes an organic farmer), the latter being “more seductive and more likely to flame out.”

Successfully steering between the two can come from putting accumulated skills and experiences up against innate – and perhaps, closeted – talents and dreams to see“how these can be reconfigured in a way that would be more appropriate to your needs today, that will be more satisfactory to you”, as Strenger suggests.

This can be tough!

This last year, I’ve had the good fortune to engage several mid-life C-suite healthcare executives who are in transition, most from an unexpected gut-punch that is common in this eternally volatile industry. Being laid-off unexpectedly at 52 or 55 or 58 and facing an increasingly difficult and competitive C-suite job market brings considerable angst.  A lofty lifestyle combined with being sandwiched between kids in college and aging parents places “provision” ahead of “aspiration” for most.  It’s rare for a conversation to head toward a discussion of “base materials” and anything other than hanging in with more of the same until time to throw in the towel, at or around 65.

It reminds me again of how much of a thief the number “65” is.

 

 

Aristotle and Your “Curve of Happiness”

Image by Couleur from Pixabay

I hope you don’t think I have a big-word fetish.  Last week I dumped a doozy on you with “oligodencrocytes.”  Judging from the positive response and zero unsubscribes from last week, I’m sensing you have a tolerance level for an occasional esoteric linguistic trip.

Assuming so, let’s go on another one. This time, I’m going to invoke a really old friend of all of us  – Aristotle,  he of Greek legend and fame and one with considerable currency on the personal development front.

Before I dive in too deep, let me confess that I’m drawing much of today’s content from a fabulous book that fell in my path recently entitled “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife” by veteran NPR journalist and correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

If you invest in it, I think you will enjoy the trip, especially through chapter five entitled “It’s the Thought That Counts.”  It was in that chapter that Aristotle resurfaced.

Thinking about your thinking

Apparently the Greeks thought a lot about thinking.  They debated a lot about happiness.  One side of the debate was “hedonia” from which we get our word hedonism, described in the book as happiness coming from “satisfying appetites, having a good beer, a good meal, and good sex.”

What’s not to like, right?

Aristotle, on the other hand, enters the debate rather curmudgeon-like, asking questions like “What is a good life?” explicitly saying it’s not hedonia but rather something more than that.

He wrote that “- the highest of all human goods is the realization of our own true potential” and suggested that we all emerge on this mudball with unique human capacities and abilities.

Deepening his role as a party-pooper. he called it “the daimen” and suggested, according to Hagerty, “that our task in life is to figure out what those unique capacities are, and then to do our very best to bring them into reality.”

This brings us our big-word-of-the-week: eudaimonia (not to be confused with those healthful, green immature soybeans).

From it, we derive “eudaimonic happiness.”  It is about “striving, working hard, purposeful engagement, the kind of effort that may be stressful or even painful in the short run but over the long run brings meaning and a wildly profitable return on investment.”

 Going “blue collar”

I needed that big word and definition.  You see, I’ve committed to writing at least 500 words a day on something to somebody or some thing (this blog, Quora.com, Medium.com, guest blog, etc.) taking the advice of a large squadron of very successful writers, who have persuaded me that learning the craft of writing is unglamorous blue-collar work.

Since my start, and as of 12/31/19, I had missed only 38 out of 203 days and have missed 0 days over the last three months.  That has produced, since I started tracking in mid-June 2019, over 110,000 words.  For you non-writers, that’s roughly equivalent to 2-4 self-help books or 1 1/2 of Ms. Hagerty’s masterpiece.

How does my commitment stack up against Ari’s eudaimonic happiness checklist?

  • Striving? Check.
  • Working hard? Check – some days the words flow, most days not.  Some days, 30 minutes; most days, 1-2 hours.
  • Purposeful engagement? Check. Feeling good about the mission/quest and the encouraging feedback. Positive comments, upvotes, claps, likes are increasing along with a steady climb in new subscribers to this weekly diatribe.
  • Stressful? Check. Yeah, it pushes me out to the edge of my comfort zone which I consider the kind of positive stress I need.
  • Painful in the short run? Check. Reference Working Hard above.
  • Meaning?  A subjective check. Yeah – I think I’m touching a soul now and then. And I know I’m incrementally getting better at the craft I’ve chosen to finish out with.
  • Wildly profitable ROI?  NOT! Missing in action! I took my 110,000-word tracking sheet to King Soopers to use to buy some Zyrtek.   I was ushered out, gently, sniffling all the way.

So, where’s the eudaimonia?

No, I wasn’t dropped on my head as a child?  Yes, I’m feeling “eudaimonic happiness” despite the absence of anything resembling ROI presently, or a clear vision of where it may come from.

Hagerty helped me understand why, illogically, I feel that way.  She suggests that there are two types of happiness: short-term happiness and long-term meaning.

As a septuagenarian feeling eudaimonic happiness, I’m not in a very exclusive club.  Most folks, by this age or earlier, have “matured” past short-term happiness into seeking something with long-term meaning.   If we haven’t begun to make that transition in mid-life we can end up stuck permanently in an unhappiness rut – or on a “hedonia” track.  You know what I’m referring to – the trophy wife, red convertible, radical career change sort of track.

That track can make you a permanent resident at the bottom of life’s “U-curve of Happiness.”

A happiness curve?

There has been a lot of research on the stages of happiness across the age spectrum and it’s produced a thing called the “U-curve of Happiness.”

It looks something like this:

Surprising to most, happiness generally hits bottom in mid- to late-forties and then curves back up steadily through old age.

That’s pretty counter-intuitive, counter-cultural isn’t it? In our younger years, we looked askance at older people and assumed that they are unhappy and miserable with what we perceived as deteriorating minds and bodies. Conversely, wouldn’t the pinnacle of earnings years, material accumulation, title prestige, etc. be the really happy times?

Now we’re there and, if we are fortunate, have discovered it to be false.

Research has reinforced our mid-life discovery that continued pursuit of extrinsic, image-related goals won’t serve us well and can bring on negative emotions such as shame, guilt, anger as well as recurring sicknesses and loss of energy – not to mention the occasional red ‘beemer convertible.

Conversely, we’ve learned that intrinsic goals that value personal growth, deeper relationships, and something bigger than self reward us with a better self-image and better health.  Maybe even a much longer life with good health.

Hagerty points out:

“Our bodies prefer selfless happiness to self-centeredness and will reward eudaimonia with longer life. Scientists have discovered that people who pursue eudaimonic well-being also have lower particular biomarkers for inflammation that have been linked to a number of health problems, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s disease.  These purposeful people even have lower cholesterol.”

The MIDUS touch

I encourage you to invest in Hagerty’s book. In chapter five, she shares the results of an enormous research project  conducted at the University of Wisconsin called MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) that “tracked thousands of people through their mid-life and later years, measuring their well-being in every possible way: physically, emotionally, psychologically, biologically, and neurologically.”

The conclusion of the study:  pursuing happiness can backfire, but pursuing eudaimonia rarely fails.  In chapter five, she shares the study’s six attitudes or mindsets that can predict health and well-being: 

  1. Positive relations with others
  2. Environmental mastery, or the ability to create or choose environments where you thrive and handle events as they come along.
  3. Self-acceptance, or knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
  4. Autonomy, that is independence, controlling your own behavior, and not looking for approval from others.
  5. Personal growth, meaning that you keep evolving and learning throughout your life.
  6. Purpose in life, or the search for meaning in everyday life, even when things go (horribly) wrong; a sense of direction and zest for life.

It’s the thought that counts!

Take the big words, all the research, the eloquent language, the checklists and it all returns back to one thing which Hagerty uses as the chapter title – “It’s The Thought That Counts.” 

We are nothing more than what we allow our thinking to think about what we think.

It can be both disturbing and reassuring to know that we have thought our way into our current circumstances, good or bad.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to wrap with the time-worn cliché:  the only control we have over circumstances in life is how we respond to (think about) those circumstances.

We will experience the upturn of the happiness curve only if we have our arms around that principle.

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How about you? Any “eudaimonia” happening in your life?  I’d love to hear your story.  Scroll down and leave a comment or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com with your thoughts or suggestions.

If you haven’t, join the steadily growing tribe by subscribing at www.makeagingwork.com and get a free copy of my e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

WARNING!  Retirement May Mess With Your Oligodencrocytes!

Oligo what?

Hey, I didn’t know we had them, did you?   Yet another something in the “cytes” category roaming around our bodies.

I found out I had oligodencrocytes as I was slogging through my second reading of a challenging book entitled “Deep Work; Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Georgetown University computer science professor, Cal Newport.

I bought the book in hopes of finding an inexpensive antidote to my  ADD and “shiny object syndrome.”

I’m thinking 3-4 times through this book will have saved me the stigma and expense of the therapy I really need.

So it was that on page 36 of “Deep Work”, I found out that I have oligodencrocytes.  We all do.

Why should we care? 

Well, we don’t have to – and most people don’t.   Can we survive without them?  Probably not.  I’m no expert, but I believe that if you don’t have them at some level, you are dead.

To understand oligodencrocytes, what they do and why they are important, we have to climb a notch higher in basic neurology and understand that we have a process going on in our brain called myelination.

It turns out our brain produces a fatty tissue called myelin that wraps around neurons as we use them, acting like an insulator that allows that neuron’s cells to fire cleaner and faster.   Oligodencrocytes are cells that trigger that myelin.  The more you use a neural circuit, the more “olis” you have that are producing more myelin to wrap and thicken that circuit.

I’m now thinking these little “oli” rascals are pretty darn important in where we end up in life.  And all this time I didn’t know they were there standing ready to help dismantle my self-inflicted ADD.

I’m likely butchering the neurological description, but I think it’s safe to say that each of us has, between our temples, a labyrinth of skinny, semi-thick and (maybe) thick neuronal circuits.  All determined by WHAT we think about and HOW MUCH we think about that WHAT.

The more we use a neural circuit to focus on one particular idea or activity, the more “olis” we ignite to help wrap another layer of myelin around that circuit.

Thick or thin?

Most of us are walking around with a mess of thin and semi-thick neuronal circuits.  Few of us have really thick circuits.  And then we marvel at – or maybe even resent – the prolific perfection of Tiger Woods, Daniel Day-Lewis, YoYo Ma, Stephen King, Jerry Rice, etc., not understanding that they simply have myelinated themselves to a very small number of very thick neuronal circuits – by what they think about and do every day, in-depth, deliberately.

I first became aware of the significance of myelination having read about it ten years ago in an excerpt from the 2008 book by Fortune editor Geoff Colvin entitled “Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else”.  With my curiosity peaked by the boldness of the title, I subsequently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers: The Story of Success” and Daniel Coyle’s “The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown”.

All three books talk about the significant role of myelination in achieving success and mastery.  The message from the books – and subsequently confirmed by tons of data and research – is that there are no prodigies, only “deep work” and “deliberate practice” behind the outliers on the performance and success scales.

In other words, high achievers are prolific “oli” and myelin generators.  By choice and design, not by chance.

When I first read about this years ago, I remember I had just decided that I was going to learn to play fingerstyle acoustic guitar after avoiding it for 40+ years of playing only plectrum-style jazz guitar.   I had dabbled a bit with it but found it took too much effort and was a distraction from my love for learning and playing jazz ballads.

But then I discovered an Australian guitarist by the name of Tommy Emmanuel when someone sent me a link to a YouTube recording of him playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.

I was immediately mentally transformed.  I could no longer reject the challenge of learning fingerstyle having witnessed it performed by a master. I decided to become a student of Tommy Emmanuel, which included not just learning technique from his CD, DVD, and online tutorials but also understanding him as a person (I’ve met him twice), what drives him and what it took for him to become what most consider to be the best acoustic guitar player on the planet.

As I struggled to make both hands do what felt very unnatural and uncomfortable while asking my brain to sync them up, I began to appreciate that this wasn’t going to happen without some serious myelination which, in turn, wasn’t going to happen without serious “deep work” and “deliberate practice”.

As I immersed myself in Tommy’s world, I set a goal of learning 10% of what he has forgotten, knowing that if I did just that, I would have put myself at a level achieved by few guitar players.

Tommy Emmanuel is highly myelinated.  As I write, he is 64.  He started playing guitar at age 4 and hasn’t looked back; he taught himself from Chet Atkins records and subsequently become one of four guitarists in the world to be designated “Certified Guitar Player” by Chet; he performs 300 days a year globally, practices every day and vows “to be better tomorrow than I am today.”

I can just imagine the thickness of that neural circuit and the number of “olis” he’s burned through to have his brain and hands do the seemingly impossible.

Myelin isn’t permanent.

I’ve learned another thing about myelin along the way.  It isn’t permanent.  After several years of pretty disciplined deep and deliberate practice on the acoustic guitar, I’ve had to set it aside for the last several months due to a painful arthritic condition in my left thumb, a vital digit for trying to mimic Tommy Emmanuel.

Any attempt to resurrect a favorite Tommy song on my 1966 Gibson Hummingbird only generates frustration on top of the pain since it’s too painful to complete any of the songs I worked so hard to learn. It will require a joint replacement. a restart, and another commitment to deep work and deliberate practice to get back.

That once relatively thick neuronal circuit has gone skinny.

I’ll get it back.  In the meantime, I’m stimulating my “olis” and myelinating another circuit – my writing circuit.

I haven’t done serious research on “olis” but I’m pretty confident that they will stay with me as long as I want to put them to work.  I know that I can build new neurons as long as I live if I work at it. I believe scientists called it “neurogenesis”.  I take that to mean I’ve got “olis” ready to do their thing if I’ll activate them.

Dr. Roger Landry, preventive medicine physician, former Air Force flight surgeon and author of  “Live Long, Die Short: A Guide to Authentic Health and Successful Aging” points out that:

” Atrophy of the brain used to be viewed as a side effect of aging. Now, we know this may simply be a lack of use.  When we use the skills and knowledge we have, the many connections in the brain remain in the best shape they can be. Don’t use them, and they become more difficult to use through a process known as synaptic pruning, in which the brain atrophies in areas where these functions are rarely used.  Neuroplasticity and effective neurogenesis can only occur when the brain is stimulated by environment or behavior.”

There you have it – my Tommy Emmanual channel is being”synaptically pruned”.

Is retirement good for your oligodencrocytes?

The last sentence in Dr. Landry’s quote took me back to a number of retirement conversations I’ve had over the last year with recently retired or soon-to-be-retired C-level healthcare executives. Boredom is one of the most common concerns expressed by these high-functioning leaders as they enter this phase of life.

I think I’m within reasonable neurological boundaries to say that boredom is a lack of neurogenesis because retirement, for most, is a transition from an environment where the “brain is stimulated by environment and behavior” along with active oligodencrocyte/myelin production to one that starts skinnying up some pretty valuable neuronal circuits.

A multi-decade investment of “olis” and myelin is allowed to waste away. A new imbalance of leisure versus learning kicks in that isn’t conducive to maintaining or cranking that biological partnership back up to form newer thick circuits.

In other words, retirement may mess with your oligodencrocytes – and, in turn, with your myelination and enable “synaptic pruning” to take thick back to thin.

I wouldn’t want to infer that retirement may end up wasting a lot of talent, wisdom, and experience, but  – – – well, OK, that’s exactly what I’m saying!

Hey, I get it if you have zero interest in re-myelinating some of the circuits that you myelinated for decades in your job, more out of necessity than desire.  Like herding the cats that were your staff.  Or pushing through unrealistic budget creation.  Or jousting with board members.  Or writing grant proposals.  Or – – – – – –

– – -you know what you were good at then that you don’t want to do more of.

But embedded in all that accumulated experience and talent deployment, I’ll just bet there are some residual semi-thick circuits that still fire your jets, screaming for a dose of “olis”, ready to myelinate.

Drifting into retirement without a non-financial plan – which 2 of 3 new retirees do – sets the stage for dormant “olis” and de-myelination at a time when the combination of wisdom, experience, and talent are at optimum levels.

I think we can agree that life is essentially just a series of choices.  The cultural influences affecting the retirement or third age phase of life often lead us to choices counter to our biology and neurology.

Brain atrophy (READ: de-myelination) is one of those choices.

It’s a time for a new take-off, not a landing.  And your “olis” and myelin stand ready to help the re-launch.

I would love your comments.  Scroll down and let me know what you think.  If you haven’t signed up for my weekly articles like this one, you can do so at www.makeagingwork.com.  When you join our rapidly growing “tribe”, I’ll send you a free e-book entitled “Achieve Your Full-life Potential:  Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”  

Have an outrageous 2020!!