Does Your Retirement Have an Endurance Quotient? Pay Attention to the Millennials.

Endurance quotient? Hmmm. Whassat?

Merriam Webster: endure = last, persist.

Remember back in your 40s, 50s (maybe even 60s for you slow-to-awaken, like yours truly) when those “legacy” thoughts made their uncomfortable, uninvited entrance into your thought stream, sometimes intensified as engagement with the grape deepened.

Like:

  • Why am I here?
  • Is this all there is?
  • Oh s**t! I’ve got fewer days ahead than behind.
  • Why haven’t I gotten to where I thought I’d be at this point or where culture says I should be (this is called “shoulding on yourself” – common at this mid-point).

All thoughts that bring us face-to-face with the question of how we are going to endure in our second half/third-age/post-career life.

We should deal with these purposefully and not just default to the prevailing path of no resistance: done at 65, wind down, kick back, hop on the accelerating downslope of declining health and lack of purpose, and forget about anything resembling a legacy – thinking it’s too complicated and takes too much thought and energy.

 

Don’t go there. It’s too important.

Maybe we can learn from the millennials!

Once we stop throwing rocks at the millennials and early GenXers, we may notice something worthy of our attention when it comes to a new, different, and healthier lifestyle and perspective on retirement.

I recently came across a GenX writer on Medium.com who I feel is saying some things about retirement that we Boomers and pre-boomers need to pay attention to.

Rocco Pendola is a Californian whose byline on Medium.com says:  “I write about doing life and personal finance, focusing on the psychology of our relationships with other people and money. I’m anti-guru, pro-empowerment.”

An iconoclast – my kinda guy!

One of his recent posts entitled “Retiring at Age 61 Might Be This Year’s Most Depressing Thought. There’s a better way than what the investing establishment sells.”

It’s a worthy read. In it, Rocco excoriates the financial services industry and the media for not reporting what is really going on in the GenX and Millennial world.  And he introduces a taste of the emerging mindset that this group is beginning to demonstrate.

Here’s an extract from the article for you to ponder:

They don’t tell you about the  of young people reconsidering the entire concept of traditional retirement (credit the media for starting to finally cover this!). They don’t talk about young people living , which means different things to different people, but almost always includes some form of work for the duration.

, the millennial generation does things differently than those who came before them, particularly the upper end of Generation X and certainly many baby boomers.

They:

  • Focus on… physical health.
  • Focus on securing consistent work that . That you can do if you find yourself physically unhealthy.
  • Focus on… mental health.
  • Focus on… the mindset to do work that endures for eternity.
  • Focus on finding a partner who lives simply but likes nice things. Who you can just be with. Every outing isn’t a trip to Rome. But, if you’re lucky, you can make something like that happen one or more times per year.
  • Focus on .
  • Focus on allocating that cash flow amid  as to have cash surpluses every month.

These things comprise the cornerstones of the move away from conventional retirement and toward the much more realistic, hopeful, vibrant, and life-affirming concept of semi-retirement.

If you’ve done the math and don’t think you can “retire” until you’re 61, please reconsider.

There might not be a more depressing thought, assuming you buy into what the word “retire” has always meant. That you work a job you don’t necessarily like all that much, live a little along the way, and set yourself up to really live when you’re really, really old and probably won’t be able to live all that well anyway.

The road to traditional retirement can beat you down.

Living the semi-retired life means you don’t stress yourself out over having to meet some out-sized number by the time you’re sixty-something.

It also means you set yourself up for healthier old age by making your physical and mental health a priority — not the 9-to-5 grind — when you’re young.

OUCH!

Tough words for all of us 20th-century “retirement relics!”

Semi-retire at 35? Heresy!

Work until you die – at something you’ve learned to be good at and that you like and helps fix this messy world? I don’t think that line will fall from the lips of a financial planner.

Think cash flow? And an insanely low cost of living?  How’s that gonna go down in a “consumption is king” culture?

Consistent work that endures? Work that you can do if you find yourself physically unhealthy? That four-letter word is supposed to end on or about 65, isn’t it?

They’re reading different manuals!

Maybe we need to subscribe.

For sure, we need to pay attention. This is going to be the model.

I relate because I’ve considered myself semi-retired for some time as I’ve sought that purpose sweet spot:

The concept of an endurance component really resonates with me as I intend to do what I am doing to the end – because I can. And because those four circles are intersecting for me.

We know traditional retirement is dying a fast death and that 50+ years of the same financial services industry vocation-to-vacation drumbeat is fading.

Who would have thought those lazy, over-protected, self-entitled Millennials may drive the final stake in both.

Forums like Medium.com may not be your thing (there’s some pretty edgy stuff over there), but I encourage you to check out what Rocco is saying. It won’t harm any of us “Modern Elders” to be more generative and crawl inside the mind of a forward-thinking GenXer.

Does your third age have an endurance component? Let us know what you think of this idea? We’d love to have your feedback. Leave a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

How Much Do Doctors Actually Know About Nutrition? You Won’t Like the Answer.

“The mission of medicine is to protect, defend, and advance the human condition. That mission cannot be fulfilled if diet is neglected.”
Dr. Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

Another boring annual physical exam last month.

We both like it that way, my doc and I. He and I have been doing this thing for nearly 25 years.

That’s a lot of digital exams. Neither of us enjoys those. At least, I don’t think he does. His facial expression doesn’t change during the probe.

The session wrap is usually something like: “Everything looks good. Keep doing what you are doing.”

Thing is, he doesn’t really know what I’m doing.

Across 2 1/2 decades, he’s never initiated a conversation about diet or exercise.

With no disrespect intended, my doc is 25 pounds overweight, walking on two replaced knees in his mid-60s.

I’m 79, only slightly overweight with two mildly arthritic but fully functional knees, despite 17 years of 5X/week pick-up basketball and five years of running before that.

I understand why neither of those topics would be initiated by him proactively.

Y’see, that would suggest prevention.

Prevention doesn’t line up with his training, nor does it fit the business model of the profitable “not-for-profit” health system he recently joined.

Offer preventive advice? Then I might stop showing up. That’s a problem with a staff payroll and two pontoon boats on Lake Powell to support.

The history of our medical system isn’t helping us in the 21st century

There’s no mystery here. He grew up in a medical system that grew up fixing things over the last 110 years – a job they did quite well. The problem is that the methodology didn’t change and it all turned into a huge, expensive drug and surgery dispensary we erroneously call a healthcare system.

Want advice on prevention? Don’t expect it from a healthcare and pharma system that would collapse if we all got self-care savvy. Or from a government that, well – can you spell “clueless?”

We’re on our own!

Here’s an example:

As Doc was typing some final notes into his electronic medical record, he did comment on my lowered LDL and total cholesterol, commenting rhetorically that it was a good thing.

I seized the opportunity to comment that I had been working to swing my diet more and more away from meat and dairy and more to a plant-based diet.

Thinking that it might spawn a discussion, it just drew out this comment: “I like my meat. I don’t think much about that.”

I rest my case.

I really do love the guy. We have great conversations. It’s easy to light him up with a topic like politics, climate change, state of the country – virtually anything outside of healthcare. And he’s a smart guy with a broad awareness outside of healthcare.

I’ll stay with him as long as he practices. But his role is that of a partner in my self-care, not the arbiter. I understand the shortfall of his expertise because of the system in which he grew up and chooses to remain in.

I’ll get what I need in the diet and exercise realm elsewhere.

To that end – – –

I’ve long been a fan – as I suspect some of you are – of Dr. Michael Greger, M.D., a general practitioner, clinical nutritionist, and founder of the popular Nutrition Facts website.

He released a 5-minute video recently that I want to share with you that takes this topic of nutritional training within the medical profession deeper. I hope it will further elevate your understanding of this shortfall and inspire you to consider the importance of taking control of this component of your health.

Our diet is the #1 cause of early death in our country. Our healthcare and pharma system is doing little to change that but is profiting mightily from it. It’s time we took control.

Click the picture and enjoy the link:

 

The average life expectancy is 78 years, while the retirement age is 67. We work for 50 years to be free for 11. Does that sound like a fair deal?

 

Most of us over 50 have been “culturally indoctrinated” under what I call the “20–40–20” plan – 20 years of learn; 40 years of earn; 20 years of leisure. It’s a linear life model that still pervades our thinking, co-authored by our educational system and boosted along by a very powerful financial services industry. Retirement has become a pseudo-entitlement, an earned right that we mysteriously feel obligated to do at the risk of being considered “weird” if we don’t.

Alas, that final 20 doesn’t materialize for lots of folks. What I find perplexing is why we refuse to acknowledge that it is the very act of retirement that may keep that final nirvanic 20 from happening.

HELLOOOO!

Perhaps we should awaken to the fact that retirement, which means to “withdraw”, “go backward”, “retreat to a place of safety and seclusion” is an unnatural act that goes against our biology and neurology.

Retirement is an unnatural act. It doesn’t exist in nature (have you ever seen a retired coyote, bear, turtle, maple tree?) and it didn’t exist anywhere in the world 150 years ago. Its origin (Germany, 1880’s; U.S., 1935) was purely political, not humanitarian.

Ever heard the phrase “use it or lose it”? Traditional full-stop, off-the-cliff, labor-to-leisure retirement takes us in the direction of “losing it” mentally and physically.

We are made to grow, learn, serve, contribute regardless of age. Our Euro-American concept of retirement says “you’re done” at a certain age. In the U.S. that’s 65, an arbitrarily chosen age that establishes an “artificial finish line” that has nothing to do with anything other than the fact that we decided to pick that number 86 years ago for political reasons when the average life span was 62.

So, is it a “fair deal”?

I say “hell yes” – with the caveat that decisions have consequences.

If you decide to fully retire, then be prepared to accept the potential negative consequences of the deal that you struck with your mind and body. Your mind and body will play the cards you deal them.

If you choose to retire physically and become sedentary, your body will respond in kind. If you choose to retire mentally and become one with the La-Z-Boy and TV, your brain will respond accordingly. If you retire and become a hermit and socially isolated, both your mind and body may reward you with early senescence.

We ignore what medical and bio-scientific research has learned over the last 50 years about how we work biologically and neurologically. We will lose some brain size as we age but we don’t lose brainpower unless we choose to. Our bodies can remain strong much longer into late life than we give them the chance to do.

What is a fair deal?

Maybe a better deal is the type struck by those who don’t retire. The world is replete with examples counter to the “unfair deal” that our Euro-American concept of retirement has wrought. Studies of centenarians across the world have revealed that rarely do they retire. The cultures on the planet with the longest average life spans don’t have retirement in their vocabulary nor do they have retirement homes.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole concept of retirement. In fact, that time has come. Many are doing just that, recognizing that we’ve been conned into believing that retirement is the “right deal” only to discover that the rewards promised by the concept aren’t always there upon arrival.

There is a growing movement away from traditional retirement into unretirement or to semi-retirement. Many are recognizing that the second-half or third-age of life is a time for a new “take-off” and not a “landing.” Those of us who advocate for this attitude have a battle on our hands, facing rampant ageism, the powerful youth culture-orientation at the corporate level, stupid government policies, and the pervasiveness of the entitlement attitude so powerfully cultivated by the 20th-century indoctrination and financial services industry.

Most centenarians have the real “fair deal”.

They:

  • Don’t retire
  • Keep working
  • Pay attention to their biology – stay active physically and mentally
  • Give back, pay forward, share their wisdom
  • Don’t go with the crowd

Research of centenarians revealed that only 3 1/2% retired and 92% worked for over 60 years. Work seems to be a biological necessity.

Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan, is arguably the most successful entrepreneur coach on the planet and a favorite virtual mentor of mine. He proudly feels he has successfully “disenfranchised” most of the 18,000 entrepreneurs he has trained from the idea of retirement.

He tags retirement as the “ultimate casualty.” In his view, “stopping to retire means you are ready to return your bits back to the universe.”

A retired Stanford psychologist refers to retirement as “statutory senility.”

I’ve heard it referred to as a “shortened path to the ultimate leisure – death.”

A time of trampolines

I’ll share a quote from a favorite book, “Dare to Be 100”, written by retired Stanford geriatric physician, Dr. Walter Bortz. Step #59 of his “99 Steps to 100” is entitled: “Think When, Where, and Why Retire.” Within that step he says:

“Retirement should be viewed not as a time of rocking chairs but of trampolines – try out things that have intrigued you, but were never before open to exploration. Think of retirement not as an end but as a beginning, a graduation, a whole set of new opportunities that can enrich and reward. Retirement is an active – not a passive – process. Anticipate it decades in advance, plan for it, and execute it in a well-rehearsed fashion. Of course, this does not imply that it should be rigid in outline. Keep your options open – give new directions a chance.”

Sage advice from a sage who is 91 years old and still out there advocating for robust aging.

Do you have a plan for your “third age?”

Are you into or heading into that “final 11?” How ready are you for this life phase? Regardless of where you are financially, it’s good to start with a baseline. Here’s a simple tool – let’s call it a Retirement Transition Wheel to help establish where you are in 12 key areas of a successful transition into a purposeful third age. Select your level of comfort or satisfaction for each area and see where your wheel is out of balance. It should provide clues to what work needs to be done to achieve a successful, healthy, and purposeful third age.

Life is simply a series of choices. Nowhere on the full lifescape are the choices more critical than those made during this transition phase. Traditional retirement is a stale narrative and one of those options that we are discovering may not be the wisest choice.

Let us know how you feel about all this? We know that 2 of 3 retirees have entered retirement without a non-financial plan. If you are the exception, we’d like to know what worked and what you would do differently. If you aren’t retired, are you beginning to view it differently? Or does traditional retirement still appeal to you? We appreciate and grow from your feedback. Leave us a comment or drop an email to gary@makeagingwork.com

Is Your Age a “Jail Sentence?” Or a “Gateway?”

A 64-year old woman recently found me through one of my blogs and engaged me about my career transition coaching services for folks at mid-life and beyond.

She is gainfully employed in her 20th year with her employer, but concerned about some changes that she finds unattractive and unsettling. She’s feeling trapped because her options are to go along with the changes or be asked to leave.

With her having three degrees (two bachelor’s, one master’s) and 20 years of continuous employment with the same company, I assumed this conversation was headed for a discussion about transitioning to retirement.

That was a brief, and dead-end, conversation.

Retirement isn’t an option because she and her husband have less than $40,000 in retirement savings. He has always been self-employed with no retirement savings plan. She has never earned more than $45,000 a year.

As a couple, they are not unlike a disturbingly high percentage of the American population.

As we reviewed her plight, she instinctively understood that her age was a major variable in any plans going forward.

It felt like a jail sentence to her.

I told her that it could be, depending on the choices she makes at this point and the mindset she adopts.

We discussed her options:

  1. Suck it up, stay where you are, and adapt.
  2. Quit and enter the job market to find another position.
  3. Do a hybrid – suck it up, stay where you are but test the job market or other alternatives.

I will cross-body block her if she heads to #2 and the ageism therein.

This is a classic example of how mindset works for or against an individual. The thought of age 64 being anything other than a ball and chain is difficult under her circumstances.

This is a work-in-progress and part of my mission is to talk her down from the ledge that says the future is grim.

I want to expose her to a “gateway mindset.”

Unlocking the jail cell

Her limbic system – lizard brain, if you will – will put and keep her in jail if she allows it. Her lizard brain is there to protect her from things like saber-tooth tigers, warring tribes, starvation. The amygdala was doing it 200,000 years ago and still does, sans the tigers. Possibility thinking will need to do an override of an amygdala that’s just doing its job.

So we’re going to build a gateway through that protectionist biological process. Here are the pieces:

  1. Raised self-awareness
  2. Deep-dive skills inventory
  3. Separate the important from the urgent
  4. Walk to the edge of the comfort zone and peer over the edge using #1-3

Raised self-awareness

At this life juncture, it will be essential for her to reacquaint herself with her essence, her “one and no other.” What is it that she’s exceptional at doing, that lights her up, that makes time disappear as she does it? What would she be doing if time and money weren’t a consideration?

This could be helped along with some personal assessments such as DISC, Strengthsfinder, Enneagram to resurrect and reactive those latent talents and dreams.

Deep-dive skills inventory

Equipped with this raised self-awareness, it’s time to replay the life experience and work history tapes. What has she made happen that she is recognized for? What type of advice do people come to her for? Has she been acknowledged for a “uniqueness” in what she has done over the 20 years?

Separate the important from the urgent

This is where it can get a bit dicey and where an objective mindset is key. The urgent will dominate if you are trying to get out of jail.

The urgent says (with a boost from the amygdala):

  • I’ve got to find another job, quickly.
  • Who could possibly want a 64-year old woman with my narrow experience?
  • I’ll never be able to retire.

The important says:

  • I need to protect my health (she is contending with some challenges in this area).
  • I need to continue to support my live-in daughter and granddaughter while my daughter attends medical school.
  • I need to adopt a new mindset for this next phase built on optimism and confidence in my abilities.

Walk to the edge of the comfort zone and peer over the edge using pieces #1-3.

Very little significance happens inside the comfort zone. Jumping too far out is scary and may not be very productive. Stepping to the edge with full awareness of talents, skills, and experiences and beginning to evaluate opportunities makes sense at this point.

Stay tuned – news at 11:00

As I said, this is a work in progress. I’m going to suggest to her when we next meet that we take a stroll out to the edge of her comfort zone, look over the edge, and do some brainstorming.

  • Maybe we explore the possibility that her perception of this company change is wrong and could, in fact, be a new way for her to continue to gain a new skill, polish her favorable position within the company, gain new favor, increase her income, and avoid having to deal with ageism and a job search. That’s the “suck it up” part.
  •  Maybe we take that talents and skills inventory, polish up her resume and LinkedIn presence and test the job market in positions related to what she does now or that call for the deep skills we know she has – all while she is heads down in her new position with her current employer. That’s a hybrid possibility.
  • Maybe we explore moving her toward a self-sustaining “semi-retirement” or “lifestyle business” while she is employed with an eye toward capitalizing on developed skills, her experience, and her interest in nutrition (her second bachelor’s is in nutrition). Another hybrid.

I’ll try to remember to come back with a report on how this all turns out.

I think of the legions of folks out there who are in similar situations but don’t take action because of fear, laziness, or a pollyannish optimism that it will all work out somehow. The 50s and 60s surface some of the biggest decisions one can make. A turning point with “go to jail, do not pass Go” implications. Or a gateway to the most productive, meaningful, purposeful time of life.

Trust yourself and choose wisely.

 

 

The Best Advice For Someone Who Recently Turned 60. (P.S. The Best Is Yet To Come!)

It feels weird.

I’m only nine months from the twentieth anniversary of my 60th birthday. OMG, how did that happen?

I was recently asked on a forum what advice I would have for someone turning 60. Granted, they say advice is worth what you pay for it and it was a free forum, but since I’ve been there and done the 60-year-old thing many times over I felt reasonably qualified to riff on the topic.

It’s been a 19 1/3-year journey that has earned me a Master’s degree in Screw-Ups and a Ph.D. in Toe Stubbing. Which forces me to invoke (hide behind?) a fundamental success principle:

There are no failures – only research and development.

The experiences and decisions in my late 50s and early 60s played a big role in developing the roadmap for the rest of my life. I’m sharing some of what I’ve learned in hopes that there may be a pearl or two for those at this juncture to help develop a roadmap for their own “third age” or “post-mid-life-transition” phase of life.

The late 50s and early 60s present us with some of the most critical and significant decisions we will make in our lives.

Here are three pieces of advice to those 60 years old or greater that have been part of my two-decade discovery journey:

1. Reject the conventional, decades-old cultural expectations for what lies ahead. By that, I mean viewing this next phase as a time to “wind down and come in for a landing.” At 60, we are typically carrying forward decades of “retirement indoctrination.” We may be part of the growing number who are unprepared financially for traditional retirement and fearful of the subtle condemnation that our culture lays on us if we don’t retire on or before that sacred number 65. Or we may be financially prepared for this anticipated nirvanic experience and convinced we have earned and are entitled to the self-indulgence it allows.

Either attitude has peril embedded in it.

The traditional leisure-based, “vocation-to-vacation” model for this post-mid-life or post-career phase of life still persists, with the help of a powerful but relatively unchanged financial services industry. It’s a model with 85-year-old legs, conceived for political reasons in 1935 and establishing an artificial finish line of 65 when the average American didn’t make it past 62.

Back then, facing 3–5 years of retirement, it made sense for your parents or grandparents to head to the beach or the golf course or Leisure World. Today, with us living 20–40 years longer, the model doesn’t fit. Thirty years of golf or bingo, bridge and boche ball, and the bulging waistline that accompanies it doesn’t make any sense.

My advice for this life juncture is to re-define retirement. Understand that you may be going forward with a mindset that is out of step with the world around you – not to mention your biology – if traditional retirement is the model for the balance of your life.

2. Take some time to reflect, reassess, and resurrect. Have you had questions like these bouncing around in your head? “Why am I here?” “Is this all there is?” “Is it too late to leave a footprint?” Or my favorite: “Is it true that the number of people attending my funeral will largely depend on the weather?”

If so, you are in a healthy spot. This is the perfect time to respond to those healthy questions and carve out some time – alone or with a supportive partner – to reflect on what your life has amounted to. But, with an eye on the positive.

We don’t reach 60 without doing a lot of things right. We got there consciously or unconsciously using some skills that were wired into us at conception.

There is also a chance that some of those natural, inborn skills or talents were “barnacled over” as you dedicated yourself to “provision” rather than “aspiration” and helped build someone else’s dream with your career.

It’s a good time, if you haven’t, to do some basic personality or strengths assessments (DISC, Strengthsfinders, Enneagram, etc.) to uncover or remind you of how you are wired up.

Chances are fairly high that you have been operating outside of your core talents and strengths.  I certainly was, for the better part of 35 years chasing the 20th-century linear life model (Learn-Work-Retire). We all do it in the interests of providing and meeting cultural expectations defined for us by the “big Ps” in our lives – parents, peers, professors, preachers, politicians, and pundits.

I finally had to acknowledge that fact in my mid-sixties after leaving corporate life at 60, starting my own recruiting business, and realizing that my corporate experience – although successful by monetary and title standards – was never aligned with my core “uniqueness”, my “one and no other.”

I ignored the results of multiple assessments that were consistent in suggesting that I was at my best in a learning and teaching mode. My career in sales and marketing wasn’t ideally aligned with that. Yet I forged on, yielding to cultural expectations and rejecting the input of the assessments.

My venture into the recruiting business gradually moved me in the direction of these core talents and strengths to where now I feel that I am achieving the intersection of what I’m best equipped to do, what I’m good at, and a need that exists in the marketplace.

The Japanese called it “ikigai” – a reason for being. Or a reason to get up in the morning. I’m getting closer to “ikigai” day-by-day. But I had to shed some deep-seated cultural influences.

Based on experience and feedback from others, I’ve learned that the process of reflecting, assessing, acknowledging, and resurrecting latent talents and strengths can effectively put one on a path that will turn this extended period of life into the most productive, fulfilling, and purposeful time of your life.

3. Get serious about, and take control of your health. Let’s be honest – you probably haven’t done your body and brain a lot of favors up to this point. I say this with confidence because (1) I’m guilty; (2) the statistics on length of life and the level of extended morbidity and early frailty amongst our general population in this third age bear this out: (3) we let a culture that isn’t friendly to good health dictate our lifestyles.

Plan all you want for this period of extended longevity. It will be meaningless if you don’t feel good.

Dr. Mario Martinez, in his book “The Mindbody Self: How Longevity is Culturally Learned and the Causes of Health Are Inherited” makes an important point when he says:

“We inherit millennia of wisdom on how to achieve optimal health. Rather than mechanical products of our genes, we are the coauthors of their expression. With few exceptions, illnesses are only genetic propensities, not inevitable disruptions waiting their time to unfold.”

In other words, we start life with a birthright of good health. Our bodies are a collection of 35 trillion cells, or thereabouts, that have somehow been kludged together into this amazing 24×7 immune system that works its butt off to keep us healthy. That’s our inheritance.

Through our culturally-influenced lifestyles, we choose to screw that up.

Excuse my brashness, but collectively we are very healthcare illiterate. We don’t know how our bodies work and what they need to carry us through life optimally.

We succumb to a lifetime of seeking comfort and convenience and conformity. We view good health as the absence of sickness and have turned healthcare into a $35 copay experience with your doc when things skid off the tracks, within a healthcare system that only dispenses medical advice, not health advice.

Rather than adopting a lifestyle of “proactive prevention” we turn to a system designed to provide “reactive cure.”

For example, we know that over 60% of early death in our culture is due to an inappropriate diet. Yet, doctors receive no training in nutrition. So we are functioning within a healthcare system that doesn’t care much about what we eat. Or doesn’t seem to because you won’t get nutrition counseling in our “drug it or cut-it-out” system.

Couple that with a profit-driven food industry that doesn’t give a rip about our health, we are fighting challenging countervailing forces to maintain optimal health.

That’s why, regardless of age – and especially at 60 – it’s important to become the CEO of your health, become literate about how your body works at the cellular level, take charge, and change to habits that will support you with good health going forward.

It’s never too late to start. It’s always too early to quit.

The five top killers in our culture – heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, dementia – have not changed in decades. These are all lifestyle diseases and all are preventable.

We have a “whole-life potential” benchmark already established for us. We know that the body is capable of lasting 122 years and 164 days because Jeanne Calment of Paris lived that long – the longest living human on record.

Yet, on average, we fall seriously short of that benchmark, achieving only 66% of it on average.

The gap is lifestyle.

I was heavily influenced, in my 60s, by two books that helped me deepen my commitment to protecting my health, although I have been a strong health advocate and avid exerciser for over four decades.

“Dare to Be 100” by Dr. Walter Bortz, semi-retired Stanford geriatric physician helped me understand why “there is no biological reason that I shouldn’t live to 100 or beyond” and what I can do to enhance my chances of getting there.

The other was “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond.” This perennial best-seller helped me understand how my body works at the cellular level and what those cells need to support me with good health.

Let me quote Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author:

“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’ll also leave you with this guideline, also from Dr. Lodge. It’s called “Harry’s Rules” and it is a simple, hard-hitting set of rules that will enable good health and successful aging.

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.

Good luck on your journey. You are about to step into the most exciting, most exhilarating, most impactful, and fulfilling time of life.

If you so choose.

How are your 60s – or your post-60s – going? Let us know what you think about these three suggestions and PLEASE add to them. You can do that with a comment below or an email to gary@makeagingwork.com