Walk down any public street in any city in the western world. What do you see? You see hundreds if not thousands of people overweight, getting old, falling apart, and barely able to walk. How does this happen? How do they let themselves fall so far?
Once you start taking care of your health, you start to see this kind of thing everywhere. Do you want motivation to eat right and exercise? Just walk around out in public for a while and look at people. I mean really look. Look at how unhealthy they are. Look at how overweight and sickly they are. That will give you all the motivation you need.
The weirdest thing about all of this is that these people have no desire to change. They don’t even think about changing. They honestly think this is acceptable. They’re so far in denial that they just accept it. Why?
They keep eating the same crappy food and living the same sedentary lifestyles even when these people know perfectly well that their lifestyles are killing them. People would rather die a slow, miserable, painful death by deterioration than change their daily routines.
There’s a very simple explanation for this. We’re told that we lose bone density, elasticity, and mental acuity as we age, but this is all nonsense.
The need for social acceptance, approval, and group belonging peaks in adolescence. This is the time when it’s the most important that we fit into a group, that our peers approve of us, and where we mold ourselves to become more acceptable to the people around us.
This tendency falls off a cliff once we hit our twenties. The need for social approval, acceptance, and acquiring social capital declines thereafter. We learn through life experience that the need to be authentic and congruent within ourselves vastly outweighs the need to seek others’ approval.
By the time we hit our forties and fifties, we just don’t care anymore whether other people approve of us. We become entrenched in our own ways and it becomes astronomically more difficult to change.
Some people develop the habit of self-improvement and personal development in their younger years. These people get into the habit of working out every day. They develop a regular diet that maintains their health. These people develop the habit of improvement and success. They ingrain the mindsets of adaptability, positive change, problem-solving, and agility to pivot when something is proven not to work anymore.
Then there are the people who don’t develop these habits early in life. These are the people who get to their forties, fifties, and sixties, put on a bunch of unnecessary weight, develop health problems, and don’t have the skills, practice, or muscle memory to change their lives.
These people become so entrenched in their old ways that they can’t change even when they know they should.
It isn’t impossible for an older person to change their life, change their lifestyle, change their physique, get healthy, become entrepreneurial, and even to change their entire personality depending on the circumstances.
It’s just vastly easier if the person has gone this process before. The more a person develops the ability to adapt, change, and improve, the easier it gets with time. Eventually, this tendency to keep growing, adapting, and improving becomes the thing ingrained as the person’s way of life.
Because of the way I was raised, I was forced into a decades-long process of development, change, re-learning, and improvement. By the time I left home, I had to completely discard everything I’d learned and all the development I’d done in the first twenty years of my life. I had to start over in my twenties and re-learn how to do everything, how to talk to people, how to handle my finances and my employment—literally everything. Nothing I took from my childhood helped me, so I had to redo all of that development in my twenties and thirties.
This period lasted until I got to be about forty. That’s when I became a professional writer and my life actually started to make sense. Things didn’t really start to work until I hit forty.
This period of development, change, improvement, and adaptation allowed me to pivot into a completely different career in my fifties and become a successful author publishing my own work.
However old you are, start this process right now.
There’s an old saying: The right time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.
You will never regret improving your life. You will regret the time you wasted by not improving your life. The sooner you start, the better progress you’ll make and the easier it will get to keep going.
A tiny fraction of people over the age of fifty are aging well. These people aren’t falling apart. They aren’t overweight. Some of these people are competing in their first marathons and bodybuilding shows in their fifties and sixties. These people are running their own businesses and becoming more successful than ever.
You can’t age this way by sitting on the couch. These people all exercise, eat the right food at the right time, and make a deliberate effort to manage their thinking, motivation, and habits.
To do anything less is to throw your life away. It’s the ultimate sign of disrespect for yourself and for the preciousness of life. Is that really what you want? Do you really want to throw your life away just because you’re too lazy to do anything about it?
Start now. You’re already behind the eight-ball and you have plenty of catching up to do. It isn’t too late. Every step you take in the right direction is one less step you won’t be taking in the wrong direction. Nothing is inevitable. Choose life.
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