Noticing Forgetfulnss Can be a Good Sign

Today I want to talk about the human memory. Most young people don’t think about this but, when you get a little older and start forgetting things, it can be a little scary. So, regardless of age, this information could prove to be very helpful and is something you can share with both old and young friends and family.

Complaints and concerns about memory issues come up a lot with people 60 years and older. They often worry that it might be Alzheimer’s. However, the vast majority of forgetfulness in people 60 and older does not turn out to be dementia, including Alzheimer’s. 

In most cases, as you will see, a little loss of memory is not that serious. If you worry that you might be suffering from memory loss, here’s a quote from professor Bruno Dubois, director of the Institute of Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease, that should help alleviate your concerns:

If anyone is aware of their memory problems, they do not have Alzheimer’s.

It’s estimated that more than 80% of people with Alzheimer’s are, on some level, unaware of their forgetfulness. They suffer from what’s known as anosognosia, which is the inability to recognize that one has a cognitive problem or other disability. So, being aware of your forgetfulness is a good sign that you aren’t likely to develop the disease.

Common issues with forgetfulness that you don’t need to worry about include:

• Forgetting the name of a person
• Going to a room and not remembering what you went there for
• Blanking on a movie title or actor or actress
• Forgetting where you left glasses or keys

After 60 years of age, most people have difficulty with these things, but these lapses generally indicate a characteristic due to the passage of years, not a disease. Even knowing this, many people may still be concerned about their symptoms, so I think it’s important to share additional statements like these by Professor Dubois: 

Those who are conscious of being forgetful have no serious problem with memory.

Dubois also notes that:

The more we complain about memory loss, the less likely we are to suffer from memory sickness.

Wow! Was I ever thrilled to learn all of this since my memory is not what it used to be. I do feel a lot better!

Now, this is not to say that just because some forgetfulness is common, you shouldn’t work on your brain and try to keep it young. You can do that easily. Just constantly introduce it to novel experiences and learn new things. Stay active, socialize, travel, and challenge yourself all the time. 

Keeping your memory sharp sure sounds like a good time, doesn’t it?

Our World in Perspective

One of my good, long-term friends, Richard Biasetti, sent me the following. I thought it was super great info, so I wanted to share it with you. I hope you like it as much as I did! Richard is a great guy I met many, many years ago when we both lived in Ankara, Turkey!

Earth’s Population Statistics in Perspective

The population of Earth is around 7.8 billion. For most people, this is a large figure. However, if you condensed 7.8 billion into 100 persons and then converted that into various statistics about where and how people live, the resulting analysis is much easier to comprehend. So, out of 100 people:

11 are in Europe
5 are in North America
9 are in South America
15 are in Africa
60 are in Asia

49 live in the countryside
51 live in cities

75 have mobile phones
25 do not

30 have internet access
70 do not have the availability to go online

7 received a university education
93 did not attend college

83 can read
17 are illiterate

33 are Christians
22 are Muslims
14 are Hindus
7 are Buddhists
12 are other religions
12 have no religious beliefs

26 will live less than 14 years
66 will die between 15 – 64 years of age
8 are over 65 years old

What do these statistics tell us?

Well, if you can read, have a mobile phone, can surf the internet, and have gone to college, you are in a minuscule privileged lot — in that less than 7% category. Those privileges are something to be truly grateful for.

Of our 100 persons in the world, only 8 will live or exceed the age of 65. If you are over 65 years old, if you did not leave this world before the age of 64 like 92 other people will, this knowledge this should help you be content & grateful. It tells us to cherish life, grasp the moment, for you are immensely blessed amongst mankind.

It often helps to look at our life from a relative perspective compared to what other people have and endure. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t all work to build the best life we can, but we also should take time to appreciate what we have.

Of Repetition and Courage

In the foreword of my book, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living, I included a great quote from my friend and mentor Paul J. Meyer of Waco, Texas. He said, “Rather than read a thousand different books, find a few that are powerful and life-changing and read them many times. Wait between readings for the material to sift through your brain, then read the book again. With the repetition, you’ll remember more of the information and more of what you learn will really sink in.” Being taught this from my wonderful friend helped my life in so many areas that I couldn’t count them all, but one of the big things this practice has done for me is to boost my courage to do the things I want to do.

In Chapter One of my book, I explained that “it doesn’t matter how old you are—you can be a young buck or an old fart. However, sometimes the young may lack the courage to go for something BIG or they may doubt they have enough experience or knowledge or resources to make it happen. And those who are older sometimes fall into the thinking trap that it’s too late—that somehow they’ve run out of time.”.

In that same chapter, I also observed that a tragic thing can happen to your life as you’re on the way to your death. That thing that some call a midlife crisis can hit you hard. During this time you can begin to run out of steam, stagnate, lose confidence and trust in yourself, and even give up on life. Because of this, many people die inside long before they’re buried. I have to admit that most of these things started happening to me as well, although not until about the age of 70.

Make no mistake, even young folks can experience this! There are too many in their 30s and younger who quit on themselves and never reach their full potential. Others think they have all the time in the world and never quite grab a hold of their lives or find direction and true purpose. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Anyone can greatly improve their life and find the courage to rebuild their passion for living. I’ll talk about that next week.

One more thing. Are you as amazed as I am when so-called coincidences pop up? While writing this blog, another great friend, a basketball buddy (and the guy on our high school team that was key to our winning the finals game in the last 20 seconds of our tournament in Rome, Italy), Ed Beckcom called. And you know where he called me from? Waco, Texas, where Paul J Meyer is from! Wow. I do think that these things we call coincidences are really our brain waves traveling all over the globe to bring us the most unexpected connections. 

The Challenge of Retirement

For those of you that have recently retired, or if you are approaching retirement and doing some planning, there are a few unexpected surprises that might be waiting for you. At least there were for me.

I had looked forward to being retired and having all that extra time to do anything I wanted to like travel, play more tennis, and just have a great time. Well, I must tell you, when that day arrived, I was in for an enormous surprise.

I don’t think most of us realize what a great challenge retirement can be. It didn’t hit me immediately, but after a few months of it, I found myself going stir crazy. I came to realize that we humans need structure and a routine. Without that, we can become very frustrated. I talked to a few friends that had retired a year or so before I did and they told me that the same thing hit them. We all need a reason to get out of bed in the morning and I didn’t have any routine or daily plans to motivate me.

At that point, I began to see how very important things like going to the office and interacting with others were for us humans. I missed the social part of my work life and struggled with feelings of worthlessness because I wasn’t producing anything. We thrive on being productive which helps those around us and lifts our brain and lives to a higher level. Sure, I can travel more and have great fun hanging out with my kids, grandkids, and friends, but we need to be contributing to our lives and the world around us in some way as well.

My advice to everyone is to plan for retirement, not just financially, but in what you will do with your time. Make lists and talk with others that have retired or are heading that way fairly soon to see what, if anything, they are planning. It’s a good idea to look at your life and think about what brings you the greatest pleasure and what stimulates your brain and then see if you can build your retirement around those things.

Patrice Jenkins, PhD, wrote a brilliant book called What Will I Do All Day? Wisdom to Get Over Retirement and on with Living. In the book, she offers some great advice: Creating meaningful work in retirement provides an opportunity to step out of your comfort zone. If you’d like to, you can redefine yourself try something new and different. In retirement, you have the freedom to be anything that suits you.

Even if you are many years away from retirement, it’s not too early to do some thinking and planning now. I think you will be very glad that you did when those retirement days come around.

The Mutual Benefits of Writing

Life can be so very interesting and exciting. It’s amazing to me that such a great source of excitement and energy, as well as fascinating discoveries for my brain, comes from just writing. I’ve found, over the years that I’ve been writing, that my words can affect me as much as they can affect any reader.

Whether it’s a book or my weekly blog, and especially if I’m writing about a subject that I’m not very good at or one that I’m not actively doing, I often find that the writing gets me thinking about it, and I begin changing and improving myself. So, not only do I write about it, writing about it makes me do it as well. I’ve said this many times over the years — whenever I preach or write to others, I am also talking to myself!

Whether it’s reading more, exercising, getting more social, or, actually, pretty much anything, I do more of the helpful things I write about after I write about it. I guess the process of writing about a behavior or habit makes an impression on my brain and that little nudge can make a big, big difference in my life. What the brain is reminded of can really make a huge difference in the lives of so many of us humans, including both good and bad things.

I don’t think most of us fully realize the great power of the brain and how we can direct it to help us accomplish almost anything we want to do in our lives. When we spend time writing about a particular subject, our brains take the hint and push us to do more about it. That is one huge benefit we can get from writing. Whether we write it in a letter to someone or in a journal or diary (or, for me, writing in my weekly blog), we usually come to understand and retain that information as well as having a chance to learn a lot about ourselves.

Wow, having now written about all the good stuff writing can do for me, I’ve decided to do a lot more of it. How about you?

Statistics Are on Your Side

So many things in our lives can be looked at as a matter of statistical probabilities. To me, one of those statistics that people either don’t know about or haven’t really considered is the chance of dying in an airplane. I think this lack of knowledge may be why so many people are afraid to fly to the extent that they rarely or never do. Or if they do fly, it’s not very often and they spend most of the flight scared senseless.

It’s too bad that fear of flying is so common. There is so much of our great world to see and explore. I love visiting new countries and meeting people that are so different from me. I find those differences fascinating. Those experiences are part of why I think this fear of flying is such a crazy thing. It seems like people would want to get over that fear for the chance of having all those wonderful experiences.

The thing is, the statistics about the safety of flying are impressive and should be encouraging. The odds of dying on a commercial airplane are around 1 in 11,000,000. That’s 11 million! In 2019, the chance of your plane having an accident with any fatalities on board was one in 5.58 million flights. Those are very great odds and should take most, if not all, of your flying fears and set them aside. Take those odds and compare them to dying in a car, which was around 1 out of 9000 in 2019. Also consider that, in the United States, there has not been a fatal commercial flight since 2009. That’s how safe flying is these days!

The comfort found in those statistics can also be found in statistics about other things, such as starting and running your own business or investing in more or bigger real estate deals as well as finding great deals. Starting a small business, which most people think is a terribly hard thing to do, has a success rate of 80% after two years and over half will continue to have viable businesses after five years. That’s pretty encouraging, especially if you’re one of those who work hard and work smart! And investing in real estate has long been considered one of the best ways to have a successful financial life.

It’s not a bad idea for all of us to do a bit of research on anything that we fear, especially those things that hold us back from enjoying life or being successful. You can look up statistics on almost anything online.

You not only have great access to statistics on the Internet, but you can also find people who can help encourage you with their success and maybe even give you a leg up on your own. People who have done what you want to do and have been very successful are a wonderful source and can lift your goals, objectives, and success to great heights. My mentors have been a huge part of my success. And finding mentors greatly increases your statistical chances of succeeding and reaching your goals!

Narrow Your Focus

I know I’ve been talking a lot lately about acting on your goals, but there are smart ways to go about that and not so useful ways. So, this week, I wanted to talk about a really important part of taking action that makes the action you take not only more productive but makes it far more likely that you’ll achieve those goals. What I want to talk about is summed up really well in this quote:

Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all of your energies on a limited set of targets. — Nido Qubein

How true. Trying to work on all of your goals at once requires that you split your time and resources among them. That makes it far less likely that you’ll accomplish what you’re after, or at least not to the extent that you might have hoped. But what if you spend all your time and resources on just one goal?

For example, maybe you’d like to be a great at a bunch of sports like tennis, baseball, hockey, and football. Can you imagine trying to work out, learn, practice, and play all four of those sports at the same time? You might be able to do it, but you wouldn’t be great at any one of them. Now, if you picked just one sport and put all your energy and practice time into improving your skills and stamina in it, don’t you think you’d be very good, if not great, at it in a fairly short span of time?

If you have set multiple goals this year, take a step back and choose just one or two to work on for now. Pick the most important or the most urgent. If you choose two, try to pick ones that are in two very different areas of your life. For instance, you can work on jumpstarting a new career while aiming to do some sort of exercise every day. With those goals, you won’t be trying to focus on more than one objective during any one part of your day.

I’m not saying you need to put aside or forget your other goals. You can always work a little here and there on them, preparing for the time when you can give them the focus needed to work on them productively. You just need to keep in mind that you should concentrate on a “limited set of targets” so you have enough energy and enthusiasm to take the action needed and be super successful!

2022: A Year of Action

Here we are again. We have a whole new year in front of us and many of us are making plans, renewing commitments, and generally trying to figure out what we want to accomplish this year. I know I have more than a few things that I’m ready to get to work on!

Regardless of what any of us plan to do, there is one thing we all have in common. We MUST take action, real solid action, for any plan, goal, or dream to become reality.

That first step, the one that shows true action and commitment, is more important than any other step you take because it will be the impetus and motivation for every step afterwards. But don’t fool yourself about what a first step is.

Reading a book, looking stuff up on the internet, or asking your friends’ opinions may feel like first steps, but they are really just part of the planning, and planning is not what actually makes things happen. The first real step occurs when you invest something valuable or take a real risk with your money, time, or ego.

For example:

• Throwing out all the junk food in your house is a true first step to a better diet.
• Paying a lawyer to draw up your business organization papers shows a real commitment to starting on your entrepreneurial path.
• Joining a writer’s group that requires you to write 10 pages a week makes you accountable and shows yourself and other how serious you are about writing that novel.

So, what is that first important, substantial, and invested step you need to take to get your plans rolling? If you’re not sure, take the time to write out what your first steps are. Then ask yourself which of those steps require so kind of personal, time, or financial investment. The ones that do are your first real steps, the ones that will get you truly get you on your way. So, make those your priority.

If you feel like you might still need a little push to take those first substantial steps, or you need some additional inspiration, try reading my book again, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living. If you haven’t read it, then definitely get a copy and read it. Then get to work.

Let’s see what wonderful things we can make happen in 2022 by taking action now!

Mindful Aging

Wow, the end of 2021 is already here, just a few more days. Time is such an interesting thing and I find it fascinating that the passage of time seems to change its speed depending on your age and/or things you have planned in your life. When most of us were young, anxious to be old enough to get our driver’s license, time seemed to be moving so very, very slowly. I remember counting down the days until I could get mine. But things do change, especially when you get older.

At my age now, just a little more than 3 months until I hit 78, the years seem to speed up. I can remember, easily, the new year’s celebration I was at last year at my good tennis friend Al Ficker’s house in Kauai. It’s like it was just a couple of months ago. Wow, this year just flew by in a flash.

I am re-reading the great book by Jo Ann Jenkins called Disrupt Aging. I’ve written and talked about her book in previous posts. There are so many good and smart things she says about “really owning your age” and being proud of whatever that age number is. I loved her quote about a woman who said, “No one’s going to deprive me of my age.”

Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Encore.org, and author of The Big Shift wrote, “In Disrupt Aging, Jenkins offers the generational call to action we’ve been waiting for—to break free from outmoded ideas about age, to embrace the rich possibilities present in the decades opening up beyond fifty, and to join a growing movement of individuals determined to live lives infused with purpose. Beautifully written, full of humor and inspiration, and powerfully argued, this book offers the definitive map for making the most of the longevity revolution, as individuals and as a nation.”

Jo Ann has so many good thoughts and ideas for our lives as we age, such as:

• The best life includes contributing to the well-being of others.
• Try new things and take chances…don’t live in fear of aging.
• Focus on health, wealth and self. 
• This is a time to shift from “mindless aging” to mindful living.

If you are retired now, take a hard look at your life and determine your thoughts about aging. How can you age more mindfully? And if you are not retired yet, then it’s a good time to start making plans for what you are going to do when retired. Yes, write it down, make lists, set priorities and write down your future schedule. You’ll be glad you did when you finally retire.

And when you do retire, as well as right now, be sure to strive for always living in the right now moment!

The Responsibility of Knowledge

Here is a very simple thing to think about for our lives as we head into a new year. 2022 is going to be a good one for you, especially anticipate having the best for you, your family, and your friends and then work hard to make it that way.

I just read a great little piece by Carlos Castaneda about what it means to be “a man of knowledge”. I wanted to share it with you, my readers. I did change it a bit to make it a “person” of knowledge as I this applies to all humans, not just men.

A [person] of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what [they] will think when [they have] finished acting… [They] know that [their] life will be over altogether too soon… [they] know, because [they] see that nothing is more important than anything else… Thus a person of knowledge endeavors, and sweats, and puffs, and if one looks at [them, they are] just like any other ordinary [person], except that the folly of life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a [person] of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to [them. Their] controlled folly makes [them] say that what [they do] matters and makes [them] act as if it did, and yet [they know] that it doesn’t; so when [this person] fulfills [their] acts [they] retreat in peace, and whether [their] acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is in no way any part of [their] concern.

So, what are you doing, or will you be doing, with the knowledge you have? I think that would be a great focus for the new year. Let’s look at our lives and consider the things that we know but aren’t acting on and make it a goal to act on all this great knowledge we have.

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