Here’s some fun information to chew on – instead of that Halloween candy or Wendy’s S’Awesome Bacon Classic Double.
According to fitness experts Steve and Becky Holman at Old School New Body, our body starts aging faster than normal when we hit 40. Now, for most of you reading this, that isn’t exactly revelatory since we creak and groan our way out of our bedrooms each morning and likely have for some time.
What is a bit revelatory is that, without proper nutrients and exercise, our bodies – men and women alike – will age about 6 months EXTRA for every year that passes.
So if you’re 40 and LazyBoy, Law and Order reruns, and Carl’s Jr are your best friends, that means when you hit 44, you’ll likely look and feel 48 (or older if Carl’s is a frequent stop).
Then by the time you hit 60, you might look and feel 70, look and feel 85 at 70, so on and so on.
I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of folks that have done a lot to confirm these findings.
I’m pleased to say, however, that I know a few that seemed to have reversed that. My wife, Linda, 72, would be one of those. I like to think I would be one also – but to claim that would unleash my narcissistic, arrogant tendencies which are already overworked.
Wait a minute. Screw worrying about the narcissism and arrogance – I AM ONE!
I’d better be. I’ve been studying this stuff, preaching/teaching it anywhere/ any way I can and trying to live it for the last 15+ years.
But back to my wife. She has been a wonderful nutrition gatekeeper for years. It all started a couple of decades ago when she joined Weightwatchers and began to understand more about nutrition values and calorie counts. She dropped 30 pounds, moved on from Weight Watcher but kept the nutritional awareness.
Our refrigerator and pantry began to transform and has steadily gotten better as we have both become students of good nutrition and learned more about how to avoid all the bad options available to us – which, by the way, overwhelm the good options available within our industrial, corporate-driven food system.
She was a gonzo Jazzerciser for years and now continues to keep pace with youngers in each Zumba class she attends, which is 4-6 days a week. And our diet has gradually migrated to where we are 90% plant-based.
Food Rules
We consider ourselves “flexitarians”, a term borrowed from Michael Pollan, renowned author, journalist and food activist and author of a wonderful guidebook on eating right, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”.
Meat is a rare event, chicken and fish are occasional. Dairy for me – gone.
And that same gatekeeper has discovered plant-based meals that are even tastier than the traditional meat- and chicken-based meals that were standard fare for us for years. Amazing what can be done with different combinations of vegetables and healthy spices.
I’ve taken the advice I learned years ago from Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the best-selling and highly transformational book “Younger Next Year”. (See “Harry’s Rule” in the Appendix of that book.) In addition to having “stopped eating crap”, most weeks I hit my target of 45 minutes of aerobic exercise six days with three of those days adding an additional 30+ minutes of aggressive strength training.
By the way, the math on that is 3.5% of my 168 hour week. I think any of us can find 3.5% in our week to look better and live longer. That is if it’s important. But Western lifestyle stats would say it’s a lot tougher than I realize and maybe not that important relative to – well, who knows what. Maybe we can hang the blame on Netflix or Hulu.
I’m grateful today that 30 years ago, I stopped letting anything crowd out exercise on my calendar. You don’t want to be around me if I can’t exercise due to injury or illness. It’s best to lock me in a closet when that happens. I’m sour enough on a good day.
I guess if we get honest and just boil it down, the outside reflects what we do to the inside. I’ve come to appreciate that our bodies are essentially 24 x 7 immune systems of cells that, for us Westerners on the Standard American Diet (SAD) and living our sedentary lifestyle, are often working overtime to keep us healthy despite our naïve efforts to make it difficult for them.
Those cells actually crave frequent positive stress and thrive in it. Not the adrenaline or cortisol or norepinephrine morning-commute, late-for-a-meeting type of stress but the type of stress that raises the oxygen levels in the bloodstream. Dr. Lodge, in the aforementioned book Y-N-Y will provide you with an understandable description of the biology of all that,
Let’s just call it exercise to keep it dirt simple.
After a while, without proper diet and adequate exercise, cells just sort of give it up and check out early and the internal and external deterioration accelerates.
But, let’s not forget the inevitable.
Steve and Becky appear to be 50-year old hard-bodies who aggressively market their stupefying good looks and rippled torsos to sell their own version of a “new” exercise program. Probably one that will have you looking good in less time and less effort- that seems to be a common theme for exercise programs these days.
They appeal because they sell the idea of delaying the inevitable. Which is: you and I are going to wrinkle up, droop and die.
I’m all for delaying the inevitable and looking as good as I can along the way. And I’ve learned that diet and exercise are pivotal to both. And that shortcuts and diets don’t work.
But at some point, one has to look beyond the physical and accept eyebags, turkey necks, high foreheads and hair in the wrong places as part of the divine plan, perhaps meant to remind us that the inevitable is drawing closer.
So, for my wife and me, it’s pretty simple. Accept the inevitable but do what we can to delay it, look and feel as good as we can along the way, and accept the sags, droops, and wrinkles as ultimately unavoidable.
Of course, there is the option to have multiple encounters with a scalpel – a thought that has crossed my mind some mornings as the bags under my eyes stare back at me in the mirror. But now I’m taking pride in them because they don’t become that prominent without having been around a while. And being around a while means you’ve got something to offer to someone, somewhere, sometime.
Truthfully, this formula for looking as good as you can and feeling better than most for your age is so incredibly simple – eat right and exercise. But I’ll be the first to confess it’s incredibly difficult because of the habit changes that it entails. Plus neither activity scores real high on the fun scale.
The famous fitness, exercise, and nutrition expert Jack LaLanne, who made it to 95, was once asked why he liked exercise so much. His response: “I’ve never liked it. I just like the results.”
Like nearly everything we do in life, it gets down to choice. We know what works and what hinders. Yet we succumb to comfort and convenience and let our 35 trillion cells burn themselves out early and send us on to an early, saggy, droopy, stooped demise.
And then complain about what the mirror feeds back to us.
It can all get pretty comical, can’t it?
Stop the Careening Age Bus
Here’s some fun information to chew on – instead of that Halloween candy or Wendy’s S’Awesome Bacon Classic Double.
According to fitness experts Steve and Becky Holman at Old School New Body, our body starts aging faster than normal when we hit 40. Now, for most of you reading this, that isn’t exactly revelatory since we creak and groan our way out of our bedrooms each morning and likely have for some time.
What is a bit revelatory is that, without proper nutrients and exercise, our bodies – men and women alike – will age about 6 months EXTRA for every year that passes.
So if you’re 40 and LazyBoy, Law and Order reruns, and Carl’s Jr are your best friends, that means when you hit 44, you’ll likely look and feel 48 (or older if Carl’s is a frequent stop).
Then by the time you hit 60, you might look and feel 70, look and feel 85 at 70, so on and so on.
I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of folks that have done a lot to confirm these findings.
I’m pleased to say, however, that I know a few that seemed to have reversed that. My wife, Linda, 72, would be one of those. I like to think I would be one also – but to claim that would unleash my narcissistic, arrogant tendencies which are already overworked.
Wait a minute. Screw worrying about the narcissism and arrogance – I AM ONE!
I’d better be. I’ve been studying this stuff, preaching/teaching it anywhere/ any way I can and trying to live it for the last 15+ years.
But back to my wife. She has been a wonderful nutrition gatekeeper for years. It all started a couple of decades ago when she joined Weightwatchers and began to understand more about nutrition values and calorie counts. She dropped 30 pounds, moved on from Weight Watcher but kept the nutritional awareness.
Our refrigerator and pantry began to transform and has steadily gotten better as we have both become students of good nutrition and learned more about how to avoid all the bad options available to us – which, by the way, overwhelm the good options available within our industrial, corporate-driven food system.
She was a gonzo Jazzerciser for years and now continues to keep pace with youngers in each Zumba class she attends, which is 4-6 days a week. And our diet has gradually migrated to where we are 90% plant-based.
Food Rules
We consider ourselves “flexitarians”, a term borrowed from Michael Pollan, renowned author, journalist and food activist and author of a wonderful guidebook on eating right, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”.
Meat is a rare event, chicken and fish are occasional. Dairy for me – gone.
I’ve taken the advice I learned years ago from Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the best-selling and highly transformational book “Younger Next Year”. (See “Harry’s Rule” in the Appendix of that book.) In addition to having “stopped eating crap”, most weeks I hit my target of 45 minutes of aerobic exercise six days with three of those days adding an additional 30+ minutes of aggressive strength training.
By the way, the math on that is 3.5% of my 168 hour week. I think any of us can find 3.5% in our week to look better and live longer. That is if it’s important. But Western lifestyle stats would say it’s a lot tougher than I realize and maybe not that important relative to – well, who knows what. Maybe we can hang the blame on Netflix or Hulu.
I’m grateful today that 30 years ago, I stopped letting anything crowd out exercise on my calendar. You don’t want to be around me if I can’t exercise due to injury or illness. It’s best to lock me in a closet when that happens. I’m sour enough on a good day.
I guess if we get honest and just boil it down, the outside reflects what we do to the inside. I’ve come to appreciate that our bodies are essentially 24 x 7 immune systems of cells that, for us Westerners on the Standard American Diet (SAD) and living our sedentary lifestyle, are often working overtime to keep us healthy despite our naïve efforts to make it difficult for them.
Those cells actually crave frequent positive stress and thrive in it. Not the adrenaline or cortisol or norepinephrine morning-commute, late-for-a-meeting type of stress but the type of stress that raises the oxygen levels in the bloodstream. Dr. Lodge, in the aforementioned book Y-N-Y will provide you with an understandable description of the biology of all that,
Let’s just call it exercise to keep it dirt simple.
After a while, without proper diet and adequate exercise, cells just sort of give it up and check out early and the internal and external deterioration accelerates.
But, let’s not forget the inevitable.
Steve and Becky appear to be 50-year old hard-bodies who aggressively market their stupefying good looks and rippled torsos to sell their own version of a “new” exercise program. Probably one that will have you looking good in less time and less effort- that seems to be a common theme for exercise programs these days.
They appeal because they sell the idea of delaying the inevitable. Which is: you and I are going to wrinkle up, droop and die.
I’m all for delaying the inevitable and looking as good as I can along the way. And I’ve learned that diet and exercise are pivotal to both. And that shortcuts and diets don’t work.
But at some point, one has to look beyond the physical and accept eyebags, turkey necks, high foreheads and hair in the wrong places as part of the divine plan, perhaps meant to remind us that the inevitable is drawing closer.
So, for my wife and me, it’s pretty simple. Accept the inevitable but do what we can to delay it, look and feel as good as we can along the way, and accept the sags, droops, and wrinkles as ultimately unavoidable.
Of course, there is the option to have multiple encounters with a scalpel – a thought that has crossed my mind some mornings as the bags under my eyes stare back at me in the mirror. But now I’m taking pride in them because they don’t become that prominent without having been around a while. And being around a while means you’ve got something to offer to someone, somewhere, sometime.
The famous fitness, exercise, and nutrition expert Jack LaLanne, who made it to 95, was once asked why he liked exercise so much. His response: “I’ve never liked it. I just like the results.”
Like nearly everything we do in life, it gets down to choice. We know what works and what hinders. Yet we succumb to comfort and convenience and let our 35 trillion cells burn themselves out early and send us on to an early, saggy, droopy, stooped demise.
And then complain about what the mirror feeds back to us.
It can all get pretty comical, can’t it?
I’m 25 and want to retire early. What is my best strategy moving forward?
I’m an information gatherer – probably to the excess. I guess it’s just part of my wiring. In this quest for information, I’m a sucker for signing up to services like Medium.org, the Quora Digest at Quora.com, and others.
Quora is kind of a strange concept – a Q&A site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users in the form of opinions. It’s an information exchange site that discourages low-quality answers and requires users to use their real name to sign up.
Kind of a Wikipedia on the fly with identifiable culprits.
I don’t pay much attention to it, which begs the question of why I let it invade my inbox. A question I’ll someday need to address relative to lots of stuff that invades my inbox.
That’s more than you wanted to know about Quora – and certainly about one of my many quirks.
But I couldn’t pass up one Quora conversation that caught my eye last week. The topic submitted was this:
I’m 25 and want to retire early. What is my best strategy moving forward?
I had to respond. The question hit me two ways:
So I’m sharing my response. I have no clue if he got it, read it or gives a damn. And my response has a touch of a rant in it, but – well, it’s just the way I feel about it.
Some will agree, some will be offended, many will find it a yawner. Let me know which you are at the end in the comment section.
Young man:
Perhaps, at 25, you could consider an alternate view: why retire at all? Consider that “retire” comes from the French verb that means “to retreat, go backward, move to a place of seclusion.”
Fortunately, we are beginning to realize that labor-to-leisure/vocation-to-vacation retirement has more downsides than upsides. It’s a concept trying to stand on 20th-century legs, promoted and glamorized by the financial services industry. Retirement didn’t exist 150 years ago and doesn’t exist in nature. It is, fundamentally, an unnatural, politically-motivated notion whose genesis goes back 80 years.
The reality of retirement is that it’s less about the “numbers” and more about achieving a fulfilling life. Some, including myself, are predicting that “unretirement” or “semi-retirement” will become the new prestige rather than traditional retirement, especially early retirement.
Some of the leading voices on lifetime achievement and purposeful living refer to retirement as the “ultimate casualty” where mental, physical, social and spiritual qualities go to die a slow death.
If you are doing what you truly “want” to do and are using your core talents and working toward that deep inner dream, then why would you retire and deny society the impact you can bring forward?
Retirement can be a deeply selfish move by denying us all the deep inner talent and skill you are gifted with.
Most people retire “from” something and rarely “to” something. For many, retirement affords them the opportunity to get away from something that they have tolerated for years rather than something that inspired them daily and that used their core talents.
You are in a position to be way ahead in this game and be a “game changer” or “world changer”. Rather than think retirement, think impact. When you connect your unique ability or essential self with a vision for your life, a desire for retirement is going to fade away – and we all benefit much more.
Good luck to you!
Gary
Wealthy? Check! Healthy? Not so much!
Maybe you saw the news article in your local paper this week from The Washington Post announcing that for the first time in a decade, the United States was crowned the world’s most competitive economy by the World Economic Forum in Davos.
I wasn’t on their invitation list so I didn’t know it was going on, or who makes up the forum. Without my help, they scored the U.S. at 85.6 out of 100 against metrics that included infrastructure, information and communications technology, macroeconomic stability, health, skills and labor market.
Whew! So glad we were able to claw our way back to the top.
But wait. Three paragraphs later we see that the Forum also pointed out that the U.S. “is far behind most advanced economies in health, with life expectancy six years behind competitors Singapore and Japan.”
Maybe if we knew how to get healthy, that 85.6 could have bumped up against 100.
The fact is, we do know how to get healthy but it’s apparently just not a priority for most of us – until it is. That’s usually after the fit hits the shan. Then we are “all in” – and desperate to catch the horse long after it left the barn.
We know all we need to know
OK, I’m going to sound like a broken record so I hope you’ll forgive another rant or two. Repetition is still the mother of learning last time I checked.
Fact: The five major killers in the U.S. are heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and dementia. That hasn’t changed in decades, other than some repositioning in the stack ranking. Diabetes is now slowly working its way to the top as the biggest health threat. Our own American Medical Association recently announced that half of our American population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic and 70% don’t know it. OUCH!
Fact: All five are, for the most part, lifestyle diseases and are subject to intervention. Genetics plays, at most, a 30% role in the development of these diseases. In the words of Dr. David Katz, a physician at the Yale School of Medicine, and founder of an organization called the Academy of Lifestyle Medicine:
“We already know all that we need to know to reduce, by 80%, the five major killers in our country. We don’t need any more fancy drugs or equipment or more Nobel Prizes. We know all we need to know today.”
Fact: the meteoric rise in U.S. average life expectancy appears to have peaked, actually going backward in 2015. We’ve gotten very good at finding ways to kill ourselves early in the face of all that we know about how to do the opposite.
Fact: We’re getting bigger, but not any taller. This at the same time that Americans now spend more eating out than they do cooking at home.
Fact: The Standard American Diet (SAD) is deplorable and is killing us early. According to the website Forks Over Knives:
There’s a good reason we abbreviate standard American diet to S.A.D. The standard American diet leads to standard American diseases that lead to standard American deaths.
Fact: Our healthcare system cares little about what we eat and our food industry cares little about our health. Need proof? (1) Has your primary care physician ever initiated a conversation with you about what you eat? Not! There’s no box to check for that category in his electronic medical record. (2) Burger King just confirmed that meat and cheese cause nightmare diseases. The fast-food chain just launched the “Nightmare King” sandwich – a quarter pound of beef, a chicken filet, cheese, bacon mayonnaise and onions – which they openly claim is “clinically proven to induce nightmares.”
Fact: We’ve gotten very sedentary. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics just this year announced that only 23% of Americans meet national physical activity guidelines which, for adults, are 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week. Do the math: that means we can’t find .007% of our week to get our heart rate up. But we can find, on average 49 hours (29%) to veg out in front of the TV or on social media. A lack of physical exercise is now being equated to the equivalent of having a major disease.
What Can We Do?
Few things are simpler and more impactful than taking charge of our own health. The biggest overall killer is healthcare illiteracy combined with complacency and lethargy, all of which are addressable.
The formula is simple – but not easy, considering the deeply ingrained habits we function in.
Here’s an optimized plan as offered up by Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the best-selling book “Younger Next Year.” It’s referred to as “Harry’s Rules”:
Simple, but not easy. SAD if we don’t.
How To Make Aging Work
I added to my hero list this week.
During another boring 24-Hour Fitness workout this week, my aging I-pod Classic served up a James Altucher podcast interview with William Shatner of Startrek, Boston Legal, and Priceline fame.
It’s obvious Shatner doesn’t spend much time thinking about his endpoint. He’s too busy.
He subscribes to George Burn’s viewpoint on dying:
“How can I die? I’m booked”
And
“As long as you’re working, you stay young.”
One of Shatner’s opening comments was that “all the 87 year-olds I know are dead. They didn’t follow my advice – I told them ‘don’t die’, but they died. Why did they die? Because they changed their mind about living”.
No mystery to him about it. “They decided they were through.”
He’s far from through.
Try the schedule described above and see if you could make it happen, at any age, let alone 87.
It strikes me that Shatner epitomizes the merits of refusing to retire and of continuing to work. He validates what we need more of to sustain – in fact, build – our vigor and vitality as we enter and move through the third stage of life.
For example:
On this last point, I’m reminded of one of the principles espoused by world-renowned entrepreneurial/business coach Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach. Sullivan opposes completing one’s life. He argues persuasively that our culturally-infused notion that it’s important to “wrap up one’s life” and “leave a legacy” is like planning for a funeral and is counter-productive and life-shortening.
This leave-a-legacy mindset is a product of what Sullivan calls one of the many “general narratives” that our culture instills in us that rob us of the potential we can bring forward into this third stage of life. It’s a general narrative that says “I’ve only got 70 or 80 years on this mudball so I should start winding down as I approach that period of my life.”
That’s giving up on one’s uniqueness and on one’s self as a creator. It’s apparent that Shatner and Sullivan don’t buy into that general narrative.
At 74, Sullivan’s whole idea for his future– and for the professional and personal lives of his coaching students – is an “ever-expanding incompleteness” as opposed to bringing life to some sort of legacy. He teaches “always expanding one’s present into a bigger future” with “each tomorrow starting at a higher level.” Any legacy – if it were important – will take care of itself.
We waste energy worrying about when the end is coming. It’s not for us to determine – nature owns that and has her own unpredictable timetable.
Sullivan intends to leave a total mess of in-process creative projects for his team to straighten out or complete when he checks out – a rather refreshing new spin on the concept of a legacy. I suspect this is a concept that resonates with Shatner as well.
Shatner, Sullivan and probably hundreds or thousands of other third-act participants are busting several myths (or “general narratives”) that need busting. To name a few:
Fascination and motivation lie available for the taking for all of us by creating every day; by striving to make our future bigger than our past regardless of age. It starts with rediscovering what we are uniquely gifted to be able to do and linking that with a vision and sense of purpose for this third act.
I’ll wrap by adding to the overuse of an overused but important cliché:
It’s never too late to start, but always too early to quit.
Do you have a unique giftedness deep inside that cultural expectations/general narratives have stolen or covered over – one that you can resurrect and apply against a vision for your future that is bigger than your past? Does the concept of an “incomplete life” versus a “legacy” resonate with you? Your thoughts on either or both are welcome – scroll down and give us your thoughts.
Retirement: Where Good Habits Go to Die and Bad Habits Flourish.
For starters this week, click on and read this humorous article “What Day Is it? The Muddled Confusion of a Recent Retiree.”
New blogger and recent retiree, Howard Fishman, takes a very refreshing swipe at the realities of transitioning from labor-to-leisure, vocation-to-vacation.
Fishman makes a seminal statement in the article (the bolding is mine):
“Since retirement, I find myself awash in days bearing little difference from days that came before. Few benchmarks punctuate time. Though busy with a hundred things on an inexhaustible “honey-do” list, nothing seems particularly celebrated if compared to the highs experienced by successful career accomplishments. There’s no discernable movement on my emotional Richter scale.”
I’m reading between the lines on Fishman’s article. This is a guy with an exemplary track record in executive management at the Fortune 500 level. Could we agree that he is whimsically lamenting a lost identity? From Richter scale strokes to no Richter scale. From a schedule with substance and impact to a – hmm, what schedule?
Many enter retirement because they’ve somehow been convinced to want to get away from having their personal Richter scale moved, even though, in the long run, positive Richter scale movement is certainly healthier than no movement.
Let’s be honest, most people retire “from something”, rarely “to something”.
Unless, of course, the interpretation of “to something” is sleeping-in, marathon TV, garage cleanup, dog walking and golf with the same un-benchmarked cronies every week.
As a culture, we are deeply brainwashed to believe that retirement is a life-portal entitlement – or obligation. To not retire is to be tagged as “unfortunate”; to retire early is to be tagged with a “badge of honor.” To admit that you are “flunking” retirement will rarely leave the lips of a retiree, especially from the male-type.
To denounce retirement is blasphemous. It’s an attack on one of the strongest – and biologically/emotionally/physically unsound – mindsets in our culture. Take this from a seasoned blasphemer.
Lost identity may be one of the most common, most unplanned-for, and most devastating of the myriad downsides to a traditional retirement.
Six months ago, you were:
Today:
The emerging dark sides of retirement that are the consequences of the above are well documented. I’m not going to bother you with them again. Click on my May 14 blog “Avoiding Retirement Chaos” for a refresher.
BEWARE the free time.
A study from Taiwan said the key to a happy retirement isn’t how much free time you have, it’s how you manage whatever free time you have. Free time -the very thing we covet in moving to retirement – is a Trojan horse. Free time can lead to loss of good habits which in turn, over the long term, can lead to early mental and physical deterioration.
Good habits like: regular exercise; social engagement; healthy diet; continued learning; service to others, spiritual development.
An unplanned, no-purpose retirement can move us to the “live short, die long” lifestyle that pervades our society, where post-retirement health and vitality gradually fade away and prolonged frailty sets in. It’s largely a choice resulting from the misuse of our time and true talents during this period between middle age and true old age.
A new prestige
As Boomers move into and past middle-age, we are seeing a gradual shift away from the notion that retirement makes sense. I predict that no-retirement/un-retirement or, at a minimum, semi-retirement will become the new prestige.
Howard Fishman perhaps illustrates the new model – one unwilling to “go quietly into the
nightnursing home.”Six months into his “traditional retirement”, he admits to needing a “do-over” and a “decompression from the whirlpool of work.” He has realized that “it’s less about how to fill the days and more about self-fulfillment to be found in those days.”
And his do-over will include “finding that old box of Crayolas and start to draw outside of the lines – just for spite and just once, for kicks – like that crazy Kindergarten kid who imagined that the sun and planets all revolved around him.”
Ah yes – resurrecting the innate creativity siphoned off by 30+ years of meeting cultural expectations.
For the Howard Fishman’s, it’s more likely to be a third-act lifestyle filled with:
• Mentoring, not movies
• Teaching, not TV
• Learning, not Lazy-Boy
• Biking, not bingo
• Philanthropy, not pickleball
• Vocation, not vacation
• Contrarian, not conformist
• Playground, not park bench
Good habits, leaving no room for bad habits.
Retired? Relative to the above thoughts, how has your retirement gone? What can you share for prospective or early retirees that can help them make this “third act” life portal the happiest, most fulfilling and productive time of life? Scroll down and leave us your thoughts – or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com. Or better yet, call me 720-344-7784 – I’d love to chat with you about this.
Regain Your Brain – for $79!!
Would $79 and 12 hours be too much for you to spend to avoid Alzheimer’s?
If so, kill this blog and return to – whatever.
Too close to home
Alzheimer’s recently became a reality for my wife and me when the wife of a dear friend, half of a close 40-year friendship, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
We feel fortunate that it hasn’t occurred in our immediate or extended family, and that, so far, this is a single incident within our reasonably normal-sized circle of friends. Nonetheless, this single incident has validated all that we’ve read or heard about the devastating impact of this brain disease – and more.
The speed with which this has transformed a beautiful, wonderful woman into one that we can’t recognize or who can’t recognize us has been stunning – and deeply saddening.
Following this development, I have had my radar up for any information related to answers to solving this devastating disease. What I have found, until very recently, has been pretty grim. This summarizes some of what I’ve found:
There’s much more I could share, but I realize that I only have people’s attention for about 1200 words/six minutes if I’m lucky, even on a life-and-death issue. So let me cut to the chase.
We’re getting answers
About 10 days ago, a promo-email hit my mailbox that my radar picked up immediately – a “free” 12-episode video series entitled “Regain Your Brain: Awakening From Alzheimer’s”.
Being cheap and a knowledge-accumulator, I was all over it. I just completed about 20 hours of watching and taking extensive notes from this series. It’s a collection of interviews with some of the top neurologists, psychologists, neurosurgeons and functional medicine physicians in the country.
I’m going to try to summarize my key takeaways from the series below – a tough task because there are so many. Just let me say first that we are getting answers to solving the Alzheimer’s puzzle, but they aren’t going to come from your doctor’s office or from your local pharmacy.
More on that in a moment.
Invest in your healthy future
Here’s the deal.
The free version of the series went away – they left each video up for 24 hours. But the entire series, plus a plethora of other supplemental information is available in three different packages ranging from $79 to $189. It’s all explained here.
At a minimum, own the DVD of the video series ($79 package) and find twelve hours at your leisure to digest the information therein.
Disclaimer:
Please know, that I have no affiliation with the producing organization, nor do I stand to benefit one nickel if you purchase the series. With very few exceptions, I found it highly credible and thought-provoking. It unveils a lot of information we aren’t going to hear from our hospital-system-ensnared, insurance-company-directed primary care docs.
It addresses some questions a lot of us may be asking ourselves, such as…
Sadly, the answer to all of these questions comes down to money.
My takeaway
I’ll try to briefly summarize my take away from this experience. You may draw different conclusions should you invest in the series.
I think I hear what you’re thinking. OK, I’m 55/60/70 – isn’t it too late? Maybe. But, as with many things, it’s never too late to start but always too early to quit. If you are reading this and making some sense of it, then I say it’s not too late. This series helped me appreciate the fact that there are now ways to know if we are headed toward this disease and to take the steps to head it off and even reverse the early symptoms.
The research has been done, the treatment pathways for prevention have been laid out. But we will have to go outside our traditional disease-care system to participate.
I hope you’ll invest in this series. If you do, drop me a note or scroll down and leave a comment with your impression or with any thoughts that you have along these lines of dementia prevention.
I plan to dig more into this area of Functional Medicine and to publish more articles in the future on this emerging dimension of healthcare.
The Thief Called “65”
I had phone conversations this past week with two middle-aged (50-ish) divorced professional women that had eerily similar undertones having to do with a critical life inflection point.
These were two talented women who were facing similar challenges in re-entering the job market after an unexpected change in their professional employment status.
It wasn’t surprising to hear their rants about the rampant ageism, the age-biased corporate job application process, the HR-black hole that applicants in this age-range disappear into.
What did surprise me was a very powerful underlying fear both expressed as we went deeper into our conversation.
Both were terrified of the number “65”
Adding to their anxiety of trying to re-enter the job market was a deep-seated concern that they were seriously behind on being able to retire at the expected retirement age.
Yes, for both, the number that underscored their fear was “65”.
For both, the prospect of only having 15 years or so to get “where they were supposed to be financially at 65”not only terrifies them but seems to be driving some employment decisions that were clearly outside of what, deep down inside themselves, they really wanted to be doing.
They are making employment decisions based on a “need” to be able to retire instead of an employment decision based on what they truly “want” to do.
The number 65 is robbing them of their “essential self.”
They both are the rule, not the exception.
It reminded me once again of the power of cultural expectations. Both of these talented ladies were demonstrating a fear of the cultural-imposed stigma of not being able to “retire on time and in good shape” and were turning their back on their dreams.
It remains a “badge of honor” in our culture to retire on or before 65. To not do so says “failure” or, at a minimum, to cast one as an “unfortunate.” Take my word for it. I know I’m viewed this way by those who inquire of my status and find that, at 76, I’m not retired. I encounter few who subscribe to my outlier position of never intending to retire.
For both ladies, a key criterion for their next employment was a good 401K. I didn’t have the heart to suggest that to try to recover and build enough retirement savings in fifteen years to support another 15-30 years of “retired life” is, well – impossible.
Both expressed something radically different from the employment they were pursuing.
One said she would be running a “doggie daycare”, a dream she has been carrying since childhood. She is deeply passionate about animals and only partially satisfies that passion by having two dogs.
The other said she would like to coach people on finding their true potential but struggles with what it takes to start a coaching practice part-time that would eventually support her.
Both are tabling things that excite them to try to fit the cultural mold of retirement at 65.
Thinking about their thinking.
I asked both to think about what was so sacred about retirement at 65. Neither had a really good answer other than one that dripped of unwritten cultural
expectations.
I reminded them that 65 is an invalid, artificial finish line established 83 years ago for political reasons and at a time when the average lifespan was 63. It was never meant to provide for a lengthy “life of leisure and bliss” as it’s marketed today.
When I injected the notion that retirement is an unnatural act and, for most, the beginning of phasing out and moving toward societal irrelevance, the tone of the conversation changed a bit. That a productive life beyond 65 is not only possible but potentially the most productive and fulfilling time of life was a concept they instinctively found difficult to get their brains around.
For them to envision a re-launch or re-acceleration of life at 65 or thereabouts was laden with dissonance – as it is for most at this point in life.
Did our conversation “rock their world?” Will there be a fruitful shift in attitude and perspective? I can’t say. I just know that, for the animal-lover, the idea of removing 65 as a cultural guidepost seemed to take pressure off. The idea of not having to ever retire seemed to re-open some new possibility thinking – more of an open-mindedness to the remainder of her life as opposed to one restricted by cultural timelines and the expectations of others.
The childhood dream very suddenly re-emerged and she literally transformed on the phone – her voice changing from one coming from fear and concern to one of excitement and passion. She reached back to childhood conversations she had with her father, who supported and encouraged her dreams but was sadly taken from her life early by a fatal heart attack.
Her story is like many – she suppressed the childhood dream to pursue a more “sensible” livelihood. It served her well – until it didn’t. Fifty, divorced, a single mom with a teen, sudden unemployment followed by severe under-employment, fear of not “measuring up” on several fronts. All a toxic brew crawling with ANTs – Automatic Negative Thoughts.
Both/And, not Either/Or
I hope this talented lady will understand that, with the removal of a culturally dictated timeline, that she needn’t give up on her childhood dream which likely is an expression of an unacknowledged or suppressed “essential self” or “unique ability.”
The reality of her circumstances requires that she stay outside her essential self some of the time to meet her obligations as a provider. To think of it as “either-or” will only increase frustration. “Both-and” works for lots of people. She needn’t give up on her dream but rather may find a way to cultivate it, perhaps as a side-hustle, while succeeding as a provider.
Regardless of the road traveled, I believe she can now move forward without the stigma of thinking she “has to” retire or that “65” holds any significant relevance. I believe she is beginning to see how this thinking is robbing her of an opportunity to re-open her dreams, passions, and creativity.
I’d bet you know someone like this – or perhaps you look at one every morning in the mirror. I can tell you, from my own personal journey, to crawl out of the thick shell of cultural expectations, to shed the barnacles of sailing in someone else’s seas is tough.
I’ve found Martha Beck, author of “Finding Your North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” to be a great source of inspirational reminders when I beat myself up with the frustrations of pursuing my essential self. Here’s one of those gems I hit this morning in my re-reading of the book:
“When you’re doing what you’re meant to do, you benefit the world in a unique and irreplaceable way. This brings money, friendship, true love, inner peace, and everything else worth living; it sounds facile, but it’s really true.”
Do you have a story about finding your “essential self” or “unique ability?” Scroll down and tell us about it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
Am I the only one that feels like 2018 just started yesterday? It’s crazy to wake up and realize almost 75% of the year is gone. Especially when you put it up against all the grand plans you had back in December or January about what this year was going to be all about.
Well, for me, some of it happened, some didn’t, some still might.
What did happen that I’m grateful for is that I completed a full year of blogging – something that I wouldn’t have believed would happen 15 months ago.
This issue is my 52nd.
And it will be very brief.
It’s a THANK YOU for being a subscriber!! I am grateful that you have hung in with me and provided me with feedback on my content.
I hope you’ll stay tuned in and continue to let me know what I can do better and what other topics you would like to have me research and write about.
My most popular articles
I scanned my 51 articles to see which was the most popular and wanted to share that info with you so you can check them out in case you may have missed them – or re-read them if you didn’t.
Here are the top three most popular over the last year. Enjoy! I look forward to providing information that you find valuable. Please let me know if I’m not.
Your Second Half Should Be Filled with These Four-letter Words
The Dirty Dozen of Accelerated Aging
Are You a Fugitive From Yourself?
Do You Want an ELF or HALF Retirement?
My thanks to Joe Polish of Genius Network for the acronyms. I’ve heard Joe refer to ELF and HALF repeatedly in his podcasts at 10xTalk.com as part of his teaching mantra for budding entrepreneurs.
Joe simply asks them: Do you want your business to be Easy, Lucrative and Fun (ELF)? Or Hard, Annoying, Lame, and Frustrating (HALF)?
It occurred to me that maybe that is an appropriate question to ask of those who are contemplating a jump into the retirement pool – or those already in the pool but still in the shallow end.
Why the question? Retirement is always ELF, right?
Easy? What can be hard about doing little or nothing – on my own schedule?
Lucrative? The lucrative thing is done. That’s why you retire, right? You ’ve earned the right to “spend” your lucrative.
Fun? It’s bound to be fun. It’s the 20-years of fun at the end of the 20th-century, 20-40-20 plan that we’ve been indoctrinated with. How could it not be fun after 10,000 days of the un-fun of commutes, bad bosses and building someone else’s dream?
A reasonable question, considering how entrenched traditional retirement is in our psyche and the “golden years” expectations we have going into it.
How could 35,000 financial planners be wrong or misleading? There are no conversations of Hard, Annoying, Lame and Frustrating as we go over the charts and graphs and talk about the vacation home, world travel, and improving golf handicap.
Well, if we peel the onion back a bit on traditional retirement we see that HALF retirements are a bit more prevalent than we expected. We have a few indicators that maybe ELF isn’t what all retirees are experiencing:
The AARP Foundation has unveiled that:
Another indicator of the fact that retirement isn’t the nirvana we’ve expected was revealed in the research conducted by the Age Wave organization, the world’s leader in understanding the effects of an aging population on the marketplace, the workplace and our lives.
In a study in which they polled 55,000 Boomers, they concluded that there are five stages to retirement. You can find these stats enthusiastically presented by AgeWave founder, Ken Dychtwald at the 26-minute point of this YouTube video along with other interesting thoughts having to do with the significance of our aging American population.
Hmmm. There seem to be some components of Hard, Annoying, Lame and Frustrating in there.
We shouldn’t be surprised
A retirement based on a 20th-century model and an arbitrary and artificial finish-line of 65 or thereabouts with only a financial plan driving it can set one up for a HALF retirement.
The reality is, many people approach retirement having only invested in their careers and retirement savings, and now they need help investing in themselves.
The charts, graphs, and numbers of a financial plan ignore the fact that retirement is much like an iceberg – most of what goes on is below the surface and rarely part of financial discussions.
Estimates are that 2 of 3 retirees approach their retirement with little or no attention to the critically-important social, mental, physical and spiritual components of a HALF-avoiding non-financial plan.
If you are close to taking the plunge into retirement or are 1-5 years into your retirement, here are some critical questions to address across these four important pillars of a fulfilling, purposeful retirement:
Social:
Mental:
Physical:
Spiritual:
Attention to these four important pillars will help avoid a HALF retirement. Will it guarantee an ELF retirement?
No guarantees. Life’s twists and turns make that guarantee impossible.
Is It Too Late to Be Amazing?
I recently read a veteran career coach’s advice for displaced or dissatisfied middle-agers wishing to re-enter the job market or make a late-life career change.
His advice: In today’s changing workplace, you will have to come across as – AMAZING!
That’s worth pondering.
What makes up amazing? The reality is, most of us don’t think of ourselves as amazing, although deep down we can be – or should be.
Honesty can hurt here – truth is most of us at this mid-life point are coming off of extended stretches at or near the top of the bell curve – neither slug nor superstar. Comfortable, convenient, middle-of-the-road, don’t-rock-the-boat, needs-based existence.
So now I’m suddenly expected to move to the far right of the bell curve and be amazing? Uh, I think I’m gonna need some major help here.
This coach’s message has to do with image, personal branding, positioning, preparedness, self-confidence, energy – the components necessary to conduct a successful job search at this stage of life where the challenges are magnitudes greater than what it took 20,10, even 5 years ago.
His point is that every component of the job search process needs to be, well – amazing. The resume needs to be a Picasso in terms of content and structure; presence on LinkedIn and other social media must be top-notch; commitment to, and energy for, an effective networking strategy must be beyond the pale; elevator speech development, interviewing skills practice, attitude maintenance, self-management discipline – all need to be – amazing.
This coach’s advice is spot on – for the mechanics of a job search. Question is – is it realistic? How many can get there?
My experience in coaching folks in this position is that getting to amazing with all this requires more sustained effort and attitude adjustment than most are willing to undertake.
Why?
Because they don’t see themselves as amazing.
In their mind, all this effort may seem fraudulent, sort of like putting lipstick on a pig. Twenty-plus years in the grinding corporate world tends to bury our most amazing qualities.
Be your true amazing self at work, and you will either (1) bump up against a manager who will be threatened by you and find a way to remove the threat or (2) be seen as an outsider that doesn’t fit or belong or (3) you will realize you need to take your amazing self outside of the confines of a job.
Needs vs wants
Re-entering the job market or making a corporate career change is typically a needs-based move. It’s mortgage/groceries/college tuition/orthodontics/golf club membership/luxury car payment/retirement savings/home repair coverage.
Rarely is this type of move a “wants-based” move that acknowledges and satisfies a deep interest or passion and resurrects and ignites one’s uniqueness or essential self.
Certainly, there are exceptions, but working for someone, building someone else’s dream makes it difficult to get to the true amazing self.
By the time we have 15, 20, 25 years of this, it seems pretty late to try to be the true amazing self that one’s unique ability or essential self can produce. It’s pretty well stamped down and covered over – maybe even forgotten.
So is it too late?
There is plenty of time to be amazing, regardless of age.
Let’s just do a “what if?”
Suppose you are 55 and in good physical shape. You have a better than 50% chance that you will live to 90. That means you’ve got 42% left. With the right attitude and continued good health and wellness habits, you probably fit the “live long, die short” model – that is, your morbidity period should be short, at least shorter than for most. So, we’ll need to take a couple of percentage points off to account for your brief period of dementia, drool and Depends.
There it is. Could you make “amazing” happen for yourself with 40% – 30+ years – left?
Well, yeah!!
This is the point where most personal development pundits inject the over-worked examples of Colonel Sanders, Grandma Moses, and Ray Kroc. But I won’t do that to you.
OK bunko, tell me how to be amazing.
OK – here are five steps that will help – in order of priority:
Or understand the concept of “uniqueability”, the success principle taught by the planet’s most successful entrepreneur coach, Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach. It’s that unique giftedness that all of us have that we’ve yet to manifest. You can learn all about it and how it leads to “amazing” by listening to podcasts #137-140 at 10xTalk.com.
We’d all be amazing if it were easy. But being amazing doesn’t so much fit the way our culture thinks and works. We need a lot of non-amazing and conformity for our system to work – a lot of folks that are content at the top or to the left side of the bell curve.
But if you got this far in this article, that’s not you. You’ve already said, “I’m amazing.” And now realize it’s “never too late to start but always too soon to quit.”
Or, to paraphrase the late, great Zig Ziglar: “You don’t have to be great (amazing) to start, but you have to start to be great (amazing).”
Let me know if I can help you get your journey started. Email me gary@makeagingwork.com or call my office at 720-344-7784 and let’s chat.
If you are on that journey now, tell us how it is going – leave us a comment below.