Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash
Your financial planner just called you to a special meeting in his office to deliver some news. It’s all good. You’ve hit your investment goals and are financially prepared to retire!
You started a diligent, leveraged savings plan at 28 and now, 35 years later and with his help along the way, you’ve ridden out a half-dozen market corrections, survived a couple of job changes and plenty of “normal” life challenges but never wavered from your savings plan and have become one of the estimated 11 million millionaires in the U.S.
Congratulations!! Retirement day. Retirement nirvana at last!!
You are about to step into one the most potentially dangerous times of your life.
Your financial planner’s good news is called the “Liberation Stage”, number three of the five stages of retirement defined by Dr. Ken Dychtwald of AgeWave. The coveted retirement day!
His organization defined these five stages after interviewing 55,000 baby-boomers who were in retirement.
You can revisit these five stages in my January 6, 2018 article.
AgeWave identified the two stages preceding retirement as the “Imagination Stage” (5-15 years before expected retirement) and the “Anticipation Stage” (5 years before retirement).
Their research showed that 85-90% of pre-retirees in both these preliminary stages expected to be happy and 75-80% expected to achieve their dreams in retirement.
The average duration of Stage Three – the “Liberation Stage”? One year!
On average, it appears that it takes about a year for the reality of retirement to take hold.
Stage four and five – “Reorientation Stage” and “Reconciliation Stage” – revealed a different story than that expected in pre-retirement with only 40% of retirees achieving their happiness and retirement dreams.
A “gap analysis” needed.
A test score of 40% reminds me of what I achieved on most of my civil engineering courses in my first year of college before I was politely and appropriately asked to exit the institution for a while and come back for another probationary try at something else, like, well anything but engineering.
If retirement doesn’t seem to get even a fist pump for over half of those stepping into it, what’s missing? After all, it is that “nirvana” phase that consumed 35-40 years of our lives to get to and that promised us – at least in the financial services ads – a life of freedom, comfort, and fun.
Why are we coming up a bit short on that promise for the majority of retirees?
It’s a fertile area for pontification, philosophical waxing, and slicing-and-dicing. I’ll abandon my tendency to excel in all three of those boring, alienating methods and submit a single theory behind the gap.
It’s a simple triumvirate:
No plan
No people
No purpose
No plan
We know that 2 of 3 retirees enter retirement with little or no non-financial plan. They expect their retirement to “evolve” and take care of itself. They expect the transition to freedom and leisure to be fulfilling. They enter retirement unaware that retirement is like an iceberg – 80% of the realities of retirement are hidden from view and not discussed or planned for.
No people
Those work cohorts who promised to “stay in touch” as they wolfed down a slice of your retirement cake aren’t calling – or returning your calls to schedule a “lunch to reminisce”. It seems they have their own set of challenges and you aren’t coming to mind a whole lot – not since about 30 seconds after you left the building.
So your “friends list” begins to narrow significantly unless you proactively rebuild it. Certainly deeper and broader engagement with family is vital and an opportunity to make up for lost time. But that’s not likely an arena in which to find new and different levels of mental stimulation and social engagement.
That sitcom and lazyboy are tempting substitutes for proactively building a new social network.
We now have research that tells us that a lack of social engagement is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s the newest entrant into the list of things that kill us early.
No purpose
Egad, not this purpose thing again!!
Yep. Face it – you had a purpose before retirement, even if it was no more than showing up and building someone else’s dream for the money to get you to retirement nirvana. Now even that shallow purpose is gone and the potential for serious drifting sets in after you’ve completed the third cleaning and rearranging of the garage and basement storage space.
Five rounds of golf a week isn’t changing your handicap much but the obligatory 19th hole with fellow drifters is adding inches to the waistline.
If you are fortunate, at some point early in your post-career life, your soul delivers a groin kick and says that it’s tired of being only a consumer and not a producer and that if this continues, the reward may be serious health, wellness, and sanity issues.
It’s just suggesting that the soul exists to serve, not take. It’s kind of a divine thing that’s built into us that gets barnacled over in our pursuit of comfort and convenience and adherence to convention, conformity, and comparison.
Give it some space.
Take a year – do the fun stuff. Visit Machu Pichu and the Buddhist ruins and float the Rhine. Bore your family and declining circle of friends with your endless photos of places they have no interest in visiting – or have already visited. Do the country club thing for a year and get it out of your system.
But while you are at it, do some serious reflecting on this simple string of questions:
Why am I here”
Am I meant to be “leisurely” for the next 20,30,40 years?
Isn’t there somebody/some entity I can help with the 55+ years of accumulated experience and the innate talents that I have?
If I stumbled into my funeral just in time to hear my eulogy, what would I want the eulogist to be saying?
The dangers of an unplanned post-career life are physical, mental and emotional deterioration and an accelerated dash to a shortened finish line.
You don’t deserve that; you weren’t designed for that.
Our post-career choices are to be selfish (consumer) or selfless (producer).
Our society sure could use us for the latter.
Think About It – You Can Slow or Accelerate Your Aging!
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Your telomeres are listening to you!! And they may not like what they are hearing.
OK, buffo – what’s a telomere?
Think of that little plastic wrap at the end of a shoelace that keeps it from fraying. You do wear laced shoes occasionally, don’t you? Or have recently enough to remember that little essential component, right?
Now transfer that visual to a chromosome which is in your DNA which is in your cells which are in your body to the tune of 35 trillion, give or take a few trillion.
Got the visual? OK – that little shoelacey-type thingy at the end of your chromosomes is a “noncoding DNA”. What does that mean?
I have NO idea.
Let’s just go with telomeres and call it good. The length of those telomeres at the end of each of your chromosomes is important. When they get real short, that cell in which they reside checks out and stops dividing. That’s called cell senescence – as in, DEAD!
So if we were able to keep those shoe-lacey-type thingies long, our cells would stay alive and, if I understand basic biology, that means our bodies would stay alive longer.
Some really smart people tell us that this works because telomeres keep the genetic material in the cell from unraveling. Unraveling genetics does sound like something to avoid if we have the option.
Apparently, we do have some options to prevent it from happening, at least according to two of those aforementioned “smart people” – researchers Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel.
I did learn about telomeres because I read Mses. Blackburn’s and Epel’s book last year – The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer.
I believe their book was (maybe still is) considered a breakthrough publication on the topic. If you need to go deep on the topic, slog through it. And believe me, it’s a slog. I read a lot of heavy stuff and this one nearly got sent to used-book heaven unfinished because of the academic- and researchese-writing style. It’s a good substitute for a melatonin fix should you need one.
But I digress.
A good friend forwarded me this article, which is excerpted from that book: “Could your thoughts make you age faster?” I think it pretty much says in 1686 words what it took the authors 383 pages to say in their book about what you need to know about telomeres and your role in their length.
This excerpted message cuts to the chase: your thoughts and lifestyle decision shorten or lengthen your telomeres.
Mses. Blackburn and Epel put it this way (bolding is mine):
“The foods you eat, your response to challenges, the amount of exercise you get, and many other factors appear to influence your telomeres and can prevent premature aging at the cellular level. One of the keys to enjoying good health is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal. People who score high on measures of cynical hostility have shorter telomeres. People who score high on measures of cynical hostility tend to get more cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and often die at younger ages.”
OMG, yet another part of our body that doesn’t like bad food, laziness and “stinkin’ thinkin”.
We’ve known for like forever that stress-released hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are devastating over the long haul. In fact, Mayo Clinic weighs in with this from one of their website articles:
The long-term activation of the stress-response system — and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones — can disrupt almost all your body’s processes. This puts you at increased risk of numerous health problems, including:
The more we poke around and digitally-dissect this transport system we walk around in, the more we seem to end up coming back to the same conclusion.
We are what we think, eat and do – all elements we can control.
Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Get these under control and live forever.
Well, for whatever the reasons (which are legion), we’re not very good at it even though the solution isn’t all that complicated (not to be confused with easy).
The late Dr. Harry Lodge, co-author of the life-transforming book, “Younger Next Year” put the solution simply with his “Harry’s Rules”
Why can’t we do this – and “die young, as late as possible” – like maybe around 100 or more?
Need a reminder to do the right thing?
That thingy at the end of the shoelace is called an aglet. Buy a bunch of shoelaces, paint the aglets red and hang them throughout the house/office/car, especially in the vicinity of the lazy boy and the fridge. And maybe one in your pocket at all times to pull out when the resistance takes your thoughts into the toilet.
Your aglets won’t get shorter, but just maybe your telomeres won’t either – because, remember, they are watching and listening to you.
Retired? You May Be About to Waste the Most Productive, Fulfilling Time of Your Life?
Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash
Your financial planner just called you to a special meeting in his office to deliver some news. It’s all good. You’ve hit your investment goals and are financially prepared to retire!
You started a diligent, leveraged savings plan at 28 and now, 35 years later and with his help along the way, you’ve ridden out a half-dozen market corrections, survived a couple of job changes and plenty of “normal” life challenges but never wavered from your savings plan and have become one of the estimated 11 million millionaires in the U.S.
Congratulations!! Retirement day. Retirement nirvana at last!!
You are about to step into one the most potentially dangerous times of your life.
Your financial planner’s good news is called the “Liberation Stage”, number three of the five stages of retirement defined by Dr. Ken Dychtwald of AgeWave. The coveted retirement day!
His organization defined these five stages after interviewing 55,000 baby-boomers who were in retirement.
You can revisit these five stages in my January 6, 2018 article.
AgeWave identified the two stages preceding retirement as the “Imagination Stage” (5-15 years before expected retirement) and the “Anticipation Stage” (5 years before retirement).
Their research showed that 85-90% of pre-retirees in both these preliminary stages expected to be happy and 75-80% expected to achieve their dreams in retirement.
The average duration of Stage Three – the “Liberation Stage”? One year!
On average, it appears that it takes about a year for the reality of retirement to take hold.
Stage four and five – “Reorientation Stage” and “Reconciliation Stage” – revealed a different story than that expected in pre-retirement with only 40% of retirees achieving their happiness and retirement dreams.
A “gap analysis” needed.
A test score of 40% reminds me of what I achieved on most of my civil engineering courses in my first year of college before I was politely and appropriately asked to exit the institution for a while and come back for another probationary try at something else, like, well anything but engineering.
Why are we coming up a bit short on that promise for the majority of retirees?
It’s a fertile area for pontification, philosophical waxing, and slicing-and-dicing. I’ll abandon my tendency to excel in all three of those boring, alienating methods and submit a single theory behind the gap.
It’s a simple triumvirate:
No plan
No people
No purpose
No plan
We know that 2 of 3 retirees enter retirement with little or no non-financial plan. They expect their retirement to “evolve” and take care of itself. They expect the transition to freedom and leisure to be fulfilling. They enter retirement unaware that retirement is like an iceberg – 80% of the realities of retirement are hidden from view and not discussed or planned for.
No people
Those work cohorts who promised to “stay in touch” as they wolfed down a slice of your retirement cake aren’t calling – or returning your calls to schedule a “lunch to reminisce”. It seems they have their own set of challenges and you aren’t coming to mind a whole lot – not since about 30 seconds after you left the building.
So your “friends list” begins to narrow significantly unless you proactively rebuild it. Certainly deeper and broader engagement with family is vital and an opportunity to make up for lost time. But that’s not likely an arena in which to find new and different levels of mental stimulation and social engagement.
That sitcom and lazyboy are tempting substitutes for proactively building a new social network.
We now have research that tells us that a lack of social engagement is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s the newest entrant into the list of things that kill us early.
No purpose
Egad, not this purpose thing again!!
Yep. Face it – you had a purpose before retirement, even if it was no more than showing up and building someone else’s dream for the money to get you to retirement nirvana. Now even that shallow purpose is gone and the potential for serious drifting sets in after you’ve completed the third cleaning and rearranging of the garage and basement storage space.
Five rounds of golf a week isn’t changing your handicap much but the obligatory 19th hole with fellow drifters is adding inches to the waistline.
If you are fortunate, at some point early in your post-career life, your soul delivers a groin kick and says that it’s tired of being only a consumer and not a producer and that if this continues, the reward may be serious health, wellness, and sanity issues.
It’s just suggesting that the soul exists to serve, not take. It’s kind of a divine thing that’s built into us that gets barnacled over in our pursuit of comfort and convenience and adherence to convention, conformity, and comparison.
Give it some space.
Take a year – do the fun stuff. Visit Machu Pichu and the Buddhist ruins and float the Rhine. Bore your family and declining circle of friends with your endless photos of places they have no interest in visiting – or have already visited. Do the country club thing for a year and get it out of your system.
But while you are at it, do some serious reflecting on this simple string of questions:
Why am I here”
Am I meant to be “leisurely” for the next 20,30,40 years?
Isn’t there somebody/some entity I can help with the 55+ years of accumulated experience and the innate talents that I have?
If I stumbled into my funeral just in time to hear my eulogy, what would I want the eulogist to be saying?
The dangers of an unplanned post-career life are physical, mental and emotional deterioration and an accelerated dash to a shortened finish line.
You don’t deserve that; you weren’t designed for that.
Our post-career choices are to be selfish (consumer) or selfless (producer).
Our society sure could use us for the latter.
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:
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 thatcauses prediabetes, cancer or heart disease.
Oh, I hear yourcounter 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 andbecome 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.
Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach says that people die early for three reasons:
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’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.
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.
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.
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).
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.