Don't Grow Old Too Soon!

MARK PACE

When I was nine years old I decided I wanted to run in a track meet. My father found a local meet for us to attend. When we got there, everyone was running 400’s. A 400 is once around the track and the 800, is twice around the track. Suddenly my father said, “You’re up!” I jumped up and positioned myself on the starting line. The gun went off and I burst forward running with all my might. I was doing quite well, staying ahead of everyone but by the end of the relatively short race I was beginning to run out of gas. The ache in my side, that is familiar to all runners, was really starting to get to me. But I kept pushing myself, staying ahead of the boy behind me, who was right on my heels as we crossed the finish line. I won!

Exhausted, I stepped off of the track and collapsed. All of a sudden, I heard my father hollering at me “Get up, get up...keep going. You’re not through.” As I looked up, to my immense surprise, I saw everyone was still running.

When I entered the race, I believed I was running a 400 because that’s all I had seen being run. When in reality I was actually in an 800. So I got up and painfully finished the race, out of breath and certainly out of the energy and the excitement that propelled me through the first lap. I limped around the track, crossed the finish line and to my embarrassment and shame the generous crowd applauded my effort.

Now, you may be wondering how this applies to you. What if I were to tell you, much like myself in that race, you are unaware that there is a second lap in your life, one that you are unprepared to run. Let me explain.

There is a misunderstanding and a mistake that is unnecessarily causing us to experience the greatest waste of personal wealth, health, and happiness in the history of the world. My specialty is studying how long people are supposed to live, and how they can live healthier longer lives. Here is what I have discovered.

The Misunderstanding....For the last 25 years I have asked people how long they think they’ll live. Nearly everyone has given me an estimate that I know is 20 or 30 years too short. Yes, they are truly living their lives with the belief that their life will be much shorter than it actually will be.

Just imagine running your life the same way I ran that race when I was 9. You’ll find yourself aging too fast way too soon! That unexpected inevitable last lap of almost everyone’s life becomes a painful waste of wealth, health and happiness. One that is avoidable!

It is important to know that as humans, we tend to conform to the social and cultural norms that surround us. We tend to unknowingly behave the way everyone else is behaving. This includes conforming to the social and cultural markers that indicate where we’re expected to be in our lives when we’re 45 (middle age), or 65 (retirement age), and even by 80 (death). The problem is, these markers are just plain wrong. They are outdated remnants of the social markers invented in the 1890’s when the very First retirement program was established in Germany.

The Mistake....When it was invented the concept of retirement was originally meant to correspond with the age at which the workers were dying. In 1890 that age was 70. So that was the age they used for the first retirement plan. It was later pushed back to 65 by politicians to garner public favor. Sound familiar? Thus the concept of traditional retirement at age 65 was born. The mistake began right then when the politicians created a gap, “a permanent vacation” between retirement and death. Since then, it has gotten worse. Today the average life expectancy for people in the United States is age 85. Which leaves roughly 20 years from age 65, when many people quit purposefully participating and producing in society and the time they actually die. But people with college degrees and white collar jobs will often live to age 95. That is 30 years or more of permanent vacation, all because of the mistake of conforming to retirement at 65.

What does this all have to do with you? Let’s take your money and your Financial plan. Most Planners have the same misunderstanding about life expectancy as you do. So many of the Financial planning software systems don’t even have an option for projecting to live past 95. Most of the financial plans are set up using the mid to late 80s for end of life. This results in many harmful problems. If your finances are only set up for you to live into the mid 80’s and you live into your mid to late 90’s, these erroneous financial calculations will have disastrous effects. Let’s be blunt. You will run out of money before you run out of life. That’s just one reason why I am on a mission.

I am on a mission to help people understand how long they will live and how to live healthier during those unexpected extra years. I am on this mission to help people change what they believe about what aging looks like and change the way they behave right now, so that this unnecessary waste of wealth, health, and happiness does not occur.

The Solution....What’s most exciting is when people change their beliefs and behaviors about how long they will live their lives improve right away. But, these changes only come about with experiential learning.

We as humans, are built to conform to the things we see in our society, we all want to fit in. The only way to override what we’ve learned through experience, is to create new experiences. Think about it. You didn’t learn to tie your shoe, ride a bike, drive a car, or do anything important in your life just by reading about it. In the end you truly learned something new by doing it, over and over again. This is no different, information is helpful, but reading about change has never caused change to happen.

Using the experiences we have built into our processes at the Vital Longevity Institute you can bring about the needed changes rapidly and permanently. We’ve established a series of unique techniques called the Vitalign System. They give you the ability to learn the concepts that are necessary to make changes in your belief and behavior. They also give you the ability to take the experiential action necessary to change the way you live your life. And in doing so you can live healthier longer and make major changes in the quality of every area of your life right now.

So, if you’re looking to run the whole race, looking not only to finish the second lap, but to finish strong, the Vitalign System can help you live your full life to your full potential.

Visit www.vitallifelong.com to learn more about how you can start your journey to finish strong today.