Today I am four years – 48 months! – away from 60 years old. Here’s a few tips.
Don’t squander the time you’re gifted. You don’t know how much you’ve got, and you’ll lose it whether or not you’re paying attention, so pay attention. You will run out of time whether you are playing video games or saving lives, so save lives. (I’m using that as an extreme example – many of us can’t be out there saving lives, but we can all contribute meaningfully.)
Eat right and exercise. It doesn’t guarantee good health, but it greatly improves your odds. Also, like the firemen waiting for the bell, we don’t really care what they do in their downtime, as long as they are 150% ready when the bell rings. Remember that people you love count on you, so be ready if the bell rings – as healthy and strong as you can be – and a friend needs help moving, or your mom needs help changing a car tire, or you have stay up all night in a hospital waiting room.
Pay attention to the world around you, not the highlight reel on your phone. This is self-explanatory. Thanks for reading this (I get the irony here) but a highlight reel isn’t created without 10 times the number of outtakes. The thing is, outtakes and bloopers are NOT the product of the highlight reel – the highlight reel is the product of hours and hours of outtakes and bloopers.
Acquiring knowledge and experience, not money, is all that matters, BUT IT ONLY MATTERS IF YOU SHARE IT. Hoarding what you learn is just as bad as hoarding money.
But here’s where I have to contradict myself a little bit – save money. Like time, you never know when you won’t have any. But unlike time, you can bank money to ease those dry spells, and there will be dry spells, and someday you will be too old or sick or feeble to earn money, or people you love will need it more than you and you’ll wish you could give some to them. So spend a little, save a lot.
If where you are in life doesn’t match where you think you should be, and you are doing nothing about it, you’re living in a petri dish of resentment and entitlement. Be OK with who, what, and where you are, or be the change. But if you change nothing, nothing will change.
This is a grossly incomplete list, but it’s a start. Also, I tried prioritizing these ideas, but couldn’t think of any one of them being more important than the others. They all matter. Just like people.
Lastly: read, write, draw. Read everything, not just the curated crap you are fed in a timeline, to understand the world around you. Write, so that you can articulate what you understand and to work through what you don’t. Draw, so that you learn to observe the world around you.
I owe my life and whatever gifts I’ve been able to cultivate to my Kathy and my children – Corinne, Thomas, and Chloe. They have all been too kind to me, and I apologize for getting from them so much more than I have given.
But I’m not done yet. At least 48 months left!