Years ago, when I was romancing my wife Laurie, I convinced her that “I was a 14-year-old kid trapped in a senior citizen’s body.” That was then and this is now. I have just completed writing a book that is full of advice about how to live the second half of your life. This, incidentally, starts when you are 38.5 years old. The anticipated life span of Americans today is 78.5. In comparison, in 1900 the life span of Americans was less than 40 years of age.
You just don’t sit down and write a book and get it published. I have been gathering information from a lot of my friends who are still winning masters ski races in their age group, climbing mountains, inventing things and charging ahead as though they were in their twenties.
The best way to do that is to get rid of stress, which is the No. 1 killer of Americans. Stress produces Cortisol, which dehydrates cells, and the first cells it dehydrates are your brain cells.
The best way to get rid of stress as you age is to lower your physical expectations. That’s because anyone who says they can ski or play golf as well at 50 as they could at 25 was really lousy at 25.
While you are lowering your physical expectations you have to also change your attitude on a regular basis. Monthly, weekly, daily, yes even hourly, sometimes. Remember that your parents thought the music you listened to was trash just like the music your kids listen to today that you think is trash.
The working title of the book is, “How Old Would You be if You Didn’t Know When You Were Born?” Once you finish writing a book you have to find an agent who will represent you because the publishing houses will not accept a manuscript that is just mailed to them. The competition for a publisher is really fierce, as of last year there were 174,000 different books published in the U.S. Now that is competition on a very large scale. We constantly read about the famous people who get a $1 million advance and that is one or two out of those 174,000 authors. To get that kind of an advance you have to be the former President of the United States or a big name celebrity of some kind. Invariably they will have a ghost writer do all of their work because they are too busy cranking up the old bank account giving speeches or performing in some other manner.
I have found that doing the research on my aging book has been exciting and very rewarding for me. The science of age extension is complex and the total of medical advances in the last 100 years greater than those discovered in the last 1,000 years. The search for a cure for the common cold was first recorded in China in 208 B.C. and they still don’t have one!
My search for a publisher has taken some interesting twists and turns and so far I have almost 60 rejection slips from all types of publishers. This is OK because I believe in what I am writing so much I might end up publishing it myself as I have done with eight of my last nine books, including “Wine, Women, Warren and Skis,” which is now in its 14th edition and approaching 150,000 copies.
Did you know that when all of your muscles ache after that first day of skiing, that four or five Rolaids will get rid of the aches in about a half hour? There are hundreds of these old-time and little-known medical tricks in the book. When you have a splinter somewhere in your body, heat up a Coca Cola bottle and then put the mouth of the bottle over the splinter. Wrap a cold rag around the bottle and the vacuum caused by cooling of the air in the bottle will suck the splinter right out.
But you haven’t yet told me how old you would be if you didn’t know when you were born. Think about it! I was 65 years old when I windsurfed from Maui to Molokai in Hawaii. What are you going to be doing the year you become eligible for Social Security?