The Key to Longevity
Hint: It’s not a pill, program or app
I graduated from a fairly prestigious design college in the mid-80’s. Art Center College of Design was considered as rigorous as any Ivy League school at the time, described by alumni as “med school without the blood.” It attracted the best of the best from around the country as well as internationally and the workload from day 1 was intense. It was a pressure cooker with a high attrition rate. ”All-nighters” were commonplace, often multiple times a week. This petrified me. The one thing I can’t do is stay up late (let alone all night) unless under very special and rare circumstances. To make matters worse, my functionality really dips about 7:00 PM and wanes completely after 9:00 PM, rendering me essentially useless. Somehow, I needed to figure out how to complete the demanding class and studio schedule and subsequent enormous load of course-related project homework, by early evening.
Knowing late nights simply weren’t an option, I learned to schedule my time during the day so rigidly that I would finish before I started to get bleary in the evening. On my non-school days, I worked all morning, then at mid-day, assessed what I still needed to do, and set time limits accordingly. Watching the clock as my self-imposed deadline approached, I would work faster. If that still wasn’t going to cut it, I’d adjust my approach or reassess if I really needed a particular direction. This may sound silly since the deadline was something I set, but I knew myself—if I didn’t meet my deadline, I wouldn’t achieve my goal, and if I missed my goal and had to wade into the dreaded late-night hour it would impact my work and would have a domino effect for the week… the month… the term ahead.
Priorities
This inability to work late into the night was only one of the challenges I faced in order to achieve what I had envisioned myself to be: a decent designer with a good job. The first hurdle for a bit of a wayward high school graduate was just getting into college. The path I charted hinged on Art Center, a revered college that I knew would train me well and open doors. Admission relied almost solely on a portfolio that had a 1-in7 chance of being accepted. Therefore, my foremost goal in the two years following high school was to build an impressive portfolio. I took a slew of art and design classes at a community college, and enhanced them with small design jobs, until I created a portfolio that I thought might have a chance in the highly competitive admissions process. Fortunately, my hard work paid off and I was admitted to Art Center in the spring semester of 1983.
Looking back, I believe that the key to my success was that becoming a designer was the priority that drove everything else in my life. Upon further contemplation, I realized that all of the major accomplishments of my life had similarly fused a tremendous desire and determination to achieve a goal with the sheer will to see it through. A single-minded focus on achieving a healthy pregnancy and baby after 40 compelled me to get serious about my health when my husband and I were trying to conceive. Once pregnant, the aspiration to be a participant rather than a spectator in our son’s life spurred me on to another goal to obtain a different state of health and fitness. Now that our son is a teenager, I have my sights set firmly on being a viable, happy, healthy, productive ninety-something—a new priority to back into, rooted in the requisite foundation of desire, determination, and will.
Recently, a friend and I were discussing her mid-seventies in-laws who are facing a few health challenges and she was asking if I had any advice. I told her I would be happy to provide some ideas and practices to implement, but I also warned her: if her in-laws were content with what they regarded as an inevitable age-related decline, nothing I said would be of any consequence.
At that moment, I had a new clarity as to the importance of desire in creating priorities. It is truly the foundation. It is what determines the outcome. While I believe change can be nurtured…there has to be a spark of desire to spur it to become the priority.
Strategic tools
I believe we can assemble a toolbox of strategies to achieve our goals. Once determination and hard work got me into school, I set the goal to graduate at top of my class. In order to do so, I broke that overall goal into bite-sized milestones throughout the trimesters. I found that setting small goals every couple of weeks helped to propel me towards the larger objective and incentivized me to keep going. Similarly, with health, determining achievable goals is an important first step in realizing success. I establish small nutritional, fitness, and well-being objectives each day, which — incrementally and collectively—add up to an overall lifestyle.
One of my greatest obstacles to achieving my desired grades in college was the veritable amount of homework. Identifying this as an obstacle was the first step in eliminating it, which I did with the time management strategies that I developed early on. The same tactic applies to obstacles to good health, fitness and well-being: identify them and develop a strategy to eliminate them. For instance, an obstacle to staying fit is scheduling time into my day. Inevitably, fire drills come up that need to be taken care of, which can often push and even cancel my plans. To eliminate this obstacle, I exercise first thing in the morning, waking around 5:00 AM so I can fit everything into my morning-getting-ready routine. Rarely does something come up at O Dark Hundred that causes me to miss early morning exercises!
A hindrance to good nutrition is packaged and processed food, so I shop the supermarket perimeter, frequent the farmer’s market, and make nearly all our food, including our family Saturday night treat of homemade pizza. Eating out poses many obstacles to eating healthy; consequently, we rarely eat out, and I’ve opted out of fast food entirely. Advertising encourages poor consumer choices, so I simply steer clear of traditional marketing avenues including TV, magazines and social media.
Making hard choices
My parents didn’t have a college savings account for my education, so they funded what their second mortgage could bear and student loans financed the balance—$70,000 worth of student loans in 1986. Knowing the sacrifice my parents were making and understanding the enormous personal responsibility of those loans motivated me to make hard choices to save money both while in school and once I graduated. I lived very modestly for the first several years after graduating and am proud to say I successfully paid off that loan in under 5 years.
Good health, likewise, requires making hard choices and a careful evaluation of consequences. Do I exercise or scroll through social media? Do I limit myself to one glass of wine or have two or three and feel crummy in the morning? Do I make our own food so my family doesn’t consume ingredients we can’t pronounce, or do I hit the easy button and buy takeout? Do I push myself to go walking or sit at a coffee shop? We are faced with impactful choices daily that have an easy path and a more difficult one. In choosing the sometimes harder option, I know I’ll lead a healthier, more productive, more fulfilling life.
Key to longevity
While I think I willed myself through college, it was also my highest priority and I poured all my energy into it. I was very disciplined and developed many tools to succeed. I have applied the valuable lessons from those formative college years to my Ageosophy. Longevity is the ultimate priority in my life. I visualize who I want to be and the life I hope to lead. This, in turn, establishes goals. Goals illuminate the obstacles to be eliminated and the choices that need to be made. Thanks to my college years, I understand my limitations and how to work within them. I learned that failure is not an option and hard work leads to success.
All underpinned by desire, determination and commitment.
The key to longevity is not found in a pill or an app or an expensive program (although they can be very useful tools which we will dive into later). The key is within YOU: YOUR desire to prioritize health and well-being as a lifestyle. That is the foundation of gaining and maintaining control for a lifetime.
In case you’re wondering, I only had to pull one all-nighter during my entire time at Art Center and I did graduate at the top of my class with distinction.
Do you need help developing your health and longevity goals? Perhaps the Ten Tenets of Ageosophy will inspire you.
Have bad habits you need to break and replace with better habits? Atomic Habits by James Clear could be very helpful.
How can I help you? I’m happy to answer questions in the once-a-month Ask Ageosophy, please post your questions in the comments below or send me an email.