Once you have admitted a mistake, you no longer need to explain or justify.
You can then get on with the rest of your life. You can make new decisions and choose new directions. You can focus your special talents and abilities on doing things that can have a great future for you.
Take Your Whole Life into Consideration
Put your current life and your past investments, your sunk costs in your education and career into perspective. Ask this question, “How long do I intend to live?” Asking and answering this question immediately lengthens your time perspective.
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Most people have never decided upon exactly how long they intend to live.
They say, “I am going to live to be 100.” But they are really not serious because they have no definite plans to get to 100 years of age.
The average life expectancy today is 76 years for men and 79 years for women. This means that half of the population will die above those ages, and half of the population will die below. Because you are reading this book, you are probably better educated, more intelligent about your health habits, earn a higher income and are therefore much more likely to beat the averages. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that you will live to be 90 years old, or more.
The formula that insurance companies use to predict your age is to take 2/3
of the number of years between your current age and 100 and then add that to your current age. This will estimate your average life expectancy for actuarial and insurance purposes. If you are forty years old today, 2/3 of the distance between 40 and 100 is 40. Therefore, your calculated age or life expectancy is 80 years. The big companies can write insurance policies based on these projections all day long, and they are seldom wrong.
Add Ten Years to Your Life
Many people are still stuck in the 20th century paradigm of retiring at 65.
This age for retirement was set in 1935, when social security and old age pensions were first introduced. At that time, the life expectancy of the average working American was 62 years. Most people worked jobs requiring physical labor in those days, making and moving things and objects. By the 349
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time a working person reached the age of 62 or 65, he or she would be like a worn out piece of machinery. Their average life expectancy was approximately 2.7 years after retirement.
Today however, everything has changed. Today, most people are knowledge workers. They work with their minds rather than with their muscles. They become sharper and smarter with age and experience. They get older and better. Simultaneously, an explosion of invention, innovation and discovery in medicine and medical procedures has boosted the life expectancy of people in the industrialized world by almost 30 years in the last century alone.
What this means, in the simplest terms, is that the equivalent of age 65 for retirement in 1935 is age 75 for retirement in the 21st century. When you hit the age of 60 of 65, you will still be at the top of your game. You will be sharp and alert, and possessed of all your faculties. You will be bright, creative and enjoy high levels of physical, mental and emotional energy.
There is no way that you will want to retire to a rocking chair and just laze around for twenty or twenty-five years.
From this day forward, think of yourself working productively to the age of 75. Of course, once you become financially independent, you will not work because you have to, but because you want to. You will work at different jobs, doing different things that allow you to specialize in those tasks and activities that you most enjoy. But it is not likely that you will ever retire.
Even if you do, you will have ten extra years of active work before you stop.
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Most of Your Life Lies Ahead
Coming back to you current job, and to the sunk costs of the past, look forward and imagine that you have several decades of productive work life ahead of you. From that perspective, what would you really like to do with your life in the coming years? If you could work at any job at all, what would it be? If you could work in any industry, or in any part of the country, performing any particular function, and you were free to choose, what would you choose for yourself? All these options are open to you today.
There was a wonderful story in the newspaper recently. It was about a woman who had come from a limited family background and only finished high school. Her first job was as a nurse’s aide. But she was both ambitious and determined. By working hard and studying evenings and weekends, she eventually became a registered nurse. She took additional courses and was promoted. She eventually became a head nurse in her hospital. Meanwhile, she married and had two children.
When she was forty years old, it dawned on her that she could be a doctor, if she put her mind to it. Her exposure to other doctors had convinced her that they were no smarter than she was. She sat down with her family and told them of her dream. Her husband and her teenage children supported her completely. From that day forward, they took care of all the family work responsibilities so that she could return to school, complete the necessary courses, and become a doctor.
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At the age of 48, she graduated with honors with a degree in pediatric medicine. By the time she was 50, she was established in a medical practice working with children. She was deriving more joy and satisfaction out of her life and work than she ever thought possible.
Think About Your Future
Today it is not uncommon to see men and women going back to college or university in their forties and fifties, spending several years earning advanced degrees, and then coming out and going into professional practice at the age of fifty or fifty-five. They then settle in to practice their specialty for the next ten to twenty years. And this is possible for you as well.
No matter what you have done or failed to do, in the past, your future can be unlimited. You can decide, right now, that you are going to go to work on yourself and prepare yourself to do the kind of job that you love to do. You are going to do work that fills you with the greatest joy and satisfaction possible. You then set it as a goal, make a plan and then start to work. You do something everyday to increase your knowledge and upgrade your skills, which moves you faster toward doing the work that you were meant to do in the field that is ideal for you.
Sometimes people complain that it may take several years to achieve the level of knowledge and skill that will enable them to do what they love to do. But as I said earlier, “The time is going to pass anyway!” Five years from now, you will be five years older. Ten years from now, you will be ten years older. If there is something that you would really like to do that 352
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requires years of advance preparation, the best time to get started is right now. The time is going to pass anyway.
Because of the dynamic nature of the job market, the average person in America will have ten major full time jobs lasting two years or more, and as many as four or five different careers over the course of his or her working lifetime. Look at your current job and ask yourself if this is what you would like to do for the rest of your life. If it is not, then sit down and decide what it is that you would like to do, and what you would have to do to get into that position.
Working in the wrong job is a way of not only wasting your time, but your life. Working at the right job for you is one of the very best ways of living a long life of happiness and fulfillment. It is a way of assuring that you get the greatest possible value out of your time and your life.
Perhaps the Greatest Time Waster of All
Perhaps the greatest time waster of all in life is getting into and staying in the wrong relationship. It is absolutely amazing how many people get married early in life, or begin living with someone in their twenties, and then stay in a situation where they are unhappy year after year. They don’t stop to think that these years are gone forever. They can never be recaptured.