Discover Your Purpose: The Courage to Come Out of Retirement

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Greetings to everyone joining us today for our podcast. You're listening to the Living to 100 Club, and I'm your host, Joe Casciani. You can find this conversation and all past conversations on our website livingto100.club. In addition to my podcasting, I'm a public speaker, and I present to community organizations and senior groups on topics related to aging well and managing setbacks. And on my website, you'll see options to sign up for one-on-one resilience coaching for anyone wanting more personal time to talk. I also provide consulting and training on clinical topics like depression and dementia. Now, to our podcast where we discuss successful aging, staying positive, and making more informed decisions. Today, our guest is George Georgian. George will share his insights about embracing later life. We'll examine conventional approaches to retirement, learn how to make choices to prosper, and learn how to fulfill our true potential. Sit back as we talk about our growth mindset and how do we find ways to grow. First, a little background on George. With a business degree from Bradford University in England and a master's degree in journalism from New York University, George has been in business for 40 years, a chartered marketer for 35 years, a partner in the U.S. Commercial real estate firm for 35 years, and a financial advisor for 5 years in the 1990s. George is an Emmy Award-winning producer, a distinguished Toastmaster, and author of 10 books under his belt. His 10th book, Spirit of Gratitude: Crises Our Opportunities, gained him international media recognition. And his online program Dare to Discover Your Purpose is a pioneering program and the first of its kind serving the retiring baby boomer market. His work is all about helping retiring baby boomers recreate a life of purpose, passion, and potential. George, welcome to our program today.

Delighted to be here, Joe.

Thank you. Great. Glad to have you with us. I'm looking forward to our conversation. I always like to open by asking our guests to tell us briefly about the journey that brought you to where you are today.

I guess, um, the journey started in 2007, um, when at the early age of 52, I was diagnosed with bone tumor and given 6 months to live. And that changes your whole perspective on things. But it wasn't just that, it was 3 separate unrelated storms converging to, if you like, change the course of my life. First was my wife's father had a stroke and we went to visit him and within a week he was dead. Then we were moving homes This is all happening in January of 2007. We were moving homes, uh, which was a nightmare in itself. And thirdly, I had gone for a colonoscopy only to discover that I have a— I had a bone tumor sitting on my pelvis, unbeknownst to me, and it was the size of a large eggplant. So, um, as you can imagine, um, my my world completely careered and created.

Yeah, heavy duty.

Yeah, and it kind of changes the course of your life and also how you think about things. And all the things, I suppose, that, um, I thought were important in life, things that I was trying to achieve and aim for, turned out to be nonsense really at the end of the day.. And one of the most important components in life, money aside, is time. Money is replaceable, time is not. And luckily the bone tumor woke me up because for 3 weeks while they were doing tests and various other things, I was under this damn sword of Damocles on me that, you know, that was it, my time's up. Fortunately, the diagnosis wasn't so much wrong because the oncologist did say to me that in 98% of cases, a bone tumor is secondary cancer and it would have spread around your body, but we need to do tests to confirm. Fortunately, I belong to that 2% club.

Wow.

And so I've always considered myself to be living on bonus time since 2007, as you can imagine. And it's, um, you know, I've always been in business, in marketing, creating, um, and it took me a while to find myself because of my mindset and my mental programming. Um, in 2007, after my, you know, I was diagnosed, um, uh, I was told it was a benign tumor but aggressive, so they had to operate They took out the tumor, but I had to convalesce for 6 months. I had to learn how to walk again.

Sure.

And in the process, I also had to work with my father-in-law, late father-in-law's estate. I had to deal with the estate matters, which ended up with me having to fund a litigation. So I thought, you know, how long can a litigation take? You know, 12 months, 18 months tops, you know. I mean, this is on top of the perfect storm. I get given this gift, so to speak, and, um, it's taken 14 years and we're only now coming to an end on that. Well, so it's been a roller coaster. So from 2007 until 2016, um, I was still gung-ho fighting, and this for me was kind of a cause. It wasn't just money, it was a cause, um, that had to be corrected. And so I fought gallantly, valiantly, but in 2016 my body started sending signals. I was sleeping in the afternoons, feeling unwell. Cut a long story short, went to the doctor. Doctor said, your testosterone levels and your thyroid levels are on the floor. They're like the lowest you know, and he said, I can't help you if you don't help yourself. What's going on in your life? So I told him, he said, you got to deal with this litigation, you got to sort it. And there was no win-win with the— with my, um, opponent. So I hadn't— I couldn't surrender. I'd fought too long to surrender. So I decided to take something I want— I'd wanted to do for a long time. I went on a 30-day silent retreat. In North Wales where there's more sheep than humans. Beautiful landscape, beautiful landscape. And so for 30 days in that total silence, I went through what is called an Ignatian retreat, a spiritual retreat. And in the process, you're cut off from all outside noise—no TV, radio, email, phones, nothing. And for 30 days in that silence, I did an audit on my life, and I was looking for a way out of the quagmire that I was in.

You just listened to the internal noise?

Yes, listening to them. Well, actually listening to my voice that had been suppressed all those years, you know, uh, driven by outside factors, whether it's pleasing people or trying to achieve something. And starting to listen to that inner voice of myself, the, my vulnerable self, the true self, let me sort of think, I want to do something worthwhile now, something worthy. And it took me about a year or maybe just under a year to find a mentor for me. You know, I'm in my 60s, you know, how do you find a mentor after 60? You know, fortunately, a coach And fortunately, I found a guy called Bob Proctor who's been a, who's been a sort of a mindset mentor for, for 50 years. In fact, he passed away recently, as, um, yes, I know. Yeah, as you may have heard. Um, and so I spent about 18 months learning with him because I'd read a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill about 20 years ago. And the one thing I've taken from that book was persistence. And the reason I bring that up is because I was the least persistent person on the planet. And so I took that persistence and I made it, you know, I, I worked on it. And in a sense, the litigation that I was involved with in for 14 years was the very thing I had needed to remain persistent. Whereas for me, it's always been a deal maker. I would have closed that deal within 12 months, you know, shut it down. But the universe, God, whatever you call him, made sure that I stayed on track, persistently remaining, uh, and, and fighting. So after Bob Proctor, I decided, you know, what is it I wanted to do? The answer doesn't come immediately, so it took me a while before I realized that actually retiring boomers, the very people I've been avoiding all my life, were the people I needed to serve.

Sure. Yeah, after some heavy life-changing events, you look back and you saw, I mean, you really had a very successful career in marketing and business and finance, and here you were and looking at what's next and what should I pursue. And I love that story because it It does allow you to start to open new doors. I use that expression all the time. What's on the other side of this door? What can I learn about myself? What can I share with others? Yeah, you called yourself an aggregator of all of this fund of information. How do you, how do you mean that? What do you, what do you refer to when you call yourself an aggregator?

That's a really good question. Uh, the way I look at it is that I'm a voracious reader and have always been a voracious reader, and not necessarily just in the topic or subject matters that I'm involved in. I, I look for tangential things. I love history, I love politics, I love psychology, and I've always read books that I found interesting. And I don't just read them. On many occasions, I will— if a book is really good, I will read it twice. And not just that, I will highlight it, I will make notes, I extricate the essence of the book. Because I find that once I've got the essence of the book, I park it in my little constellation of knowledge and distill it. A little bit like a chef, I suppose, who picks up recipes and then makes it his own. And, and so I've, for example, I've always been fascinated by ancient history— Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius— and their books. And they teach us so much about old age and about life and how it's the crises in our lives that actually form us and reveal who we really are. We know ourselves until we're hit by a crisis, and then we have to deal with it.

How we respond to these crises is so important.

Our response is paramount. It's not— I think we think that when we are hit by a crisis that it's the end of the world, woe is me, it's all over. But actually, it's a new beginning for us. It's a new opportunity. And in fact, my previous book, Spirit of Gratitude, Crisis or Opportunities, uh, 12 stories taken out from my spiritual audit, if you like, in, in, in Wales with that 30-day retreat where I distilled these stories, um, events in my life. Because one of the things they ask you to do is bring to memory events in your life that were good and events in your life that were not good or difficult times. And given the time I had, I was able to— and I'm a writer, so I write everything down, everything that comes to mind, to my heart, I wrote everything down. And what I discovered was, in kind of reflecting on that, was that none of the opportunities would have arisen without the preceding crisis.

Of course, sure.

That was, you know, that was kind of like the, the string, uh, of my life, as it were.. And for me, that was a— it seems obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me. And so that's what I took from that. But coming back to your question about as the aggregator, what do I mean by that? Well, I've read, as I said, you know, Cicero, Seneca. I love Cicero's On Old Age. He's a terrific guy, terrific guy. I mean, one of the ones that has me splitting myself is When he talks about in old age, he says sex is highly overrated. And I had— that had me splitting because, um, for us in the West, um, in our age, sex is paramount in the minds of people. Even in their, in their 80s, they're still thinking about sex. It's so endemic. I don't know how to explain it. It's the— it's kind of seeped through the culture. Into our minds, and it— we've kind of lost our focus. And I think Cicero understood that. And this is some of the wonderful thing is because he, he didn't talk out of, uh, lack of experience. He talked from experience. He divorced his wife after his daughter died, remarried a woman the age of his daughter, and within a year he was divorced. And he said, that's enough for me, I can't deal with this anymore, there's nothing to talk about. We can't communicate.

Go back to writing.

So, you know, those are the, um, the ancients. And also from the Eastern mystics like Rumi, Lao Tzu, and Confucius. Um, and then coming back to the West again, some of the early self-help gurus. And I've got people like James Allen, Thomas Troward, and Neville Goddard, for example. And I'm— we'll go into more detail later if you need, but And then of course, more lately we had Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, and Dale Carnegie. And further out, Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, more recent people. And from the science perspective, I, I'm, I really, really love the work of Dr. Bruce Lipton, um, Dr. Joe Dispenza, and Dr. Maxwell Maltz, the surgeon. The plastic surgeon who discovered that self-image is hugely important and no plastic surgery can help you if your self-image, if the story you have, the picture you have of yourself in your mind is distorted. No plastic surgery can help you. Um, and, and, um, from the psychologists, it's, um, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with her interviews of people on their deathbeds and what we learn from that. Professor Robert Emmons, the gratitude psychologist, and Dr. Carol Dweck on mindset. So I aggregate the information from all these people because the topic that we're talking about here, the knowledge in aging, is like an elephant, and most of us are either holding one foot or one leg and think that's the elephant. And there's this whole area outside that we've got no idea about, right?

The rest of the elephant.

Yes. And one has to be kind of humble and recognize that, you know, everybody's got a different perspective and understanding of this. And the more you read, the more you talk, the more you realize that you've got to approach this topic in a humble way, because everybody out there is actually—

can teach you something about this. Sure. Sure. So I love the word distilling all of this content, and as it comes in, you kind of reformulate it in your own mind, and it allows you to express your own unique individual thoughts and recommendations and insights. And this is what caused you to write your, your latest book, Dare, Dare to Discover Your Purpose? That's right.

In fact, that was, um, I had actually worked on the program Dare to Discover Your Purpose during the pandemic. We couldn't go out, we couldn't do anything. And I thought, you know what, I'm not going to worry about what's happening in the world outside. I've got no control over that. And since I'm at home, I'm actually going to sit down and, and, and work on the program. And so I took 8 modules, which was kind of processed. I, I laid the tracks down on my processing of how I went through this. And then I laid down the tracks, as it were. And, uh, it was— the modules were like 30-minute videos initially, uh, with an exercise to follow. And each exercise built on the previous exercise, so that by the 8th exercise, you, you have a blueprint. And like, like an architect, you— I help people to download what it is they want in their life going forward. And put it down on a blueprint, if you like. And they're halfway home because that blueprint can be changed, adapted, but they've got it down halfway in the physical world.

So what is the acronym? What does DARE represent?

DARE represents— well, first, let me take a step back. DARE requires— DARE means courage in a sense. It requires a certain element of courage because for a lot of people retiring, Their whole mind and life has been predicated on reaching this point and to enjoy the fruits of their work, or so they've been led to believe. But the landscape has changed. They've just been given another 25 years of life or 30 years of life, and they've got no clue how to negotiate this divide. On top of that, of course, whatever money they needed for that retirement has been lessened. So now they're almost guaranteed to outlive their savings. So I think I'm going off track to answer your question, what DARE is about. So you kind of need courage to come out of retirement and to what I would call unretire. Ah, good. Okay.

And to unretire, you need to kind of have courage to emerge out of that, take yourself off of that usual trajectory and re-examine what all of the options are.

Exactly, because my take is, is that you don't want to find out that you missed out on something on your deathbed. Hence my reading Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's work, where she says a lot of people on their deathbeds were very angry because they hadn't lived their lives. They'd lived the lives that was expected of them. They were still waiting for instructions. The people who gave them instructions are long gone.

There's a great line of an Italian novelist, Cesare Pavese, and he said, "The real affliction of old age is remorse," which captures exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah, remorse is a terrible place to be, but I don't think it's too late unless, of course, you've already lost your cognitive abilities. Or you're physically incapable of moving around. I still think that, you know, when, when someone retires at 65 or whatever, they can actually sit down and do an audit on their lives. And I love taking them back into their past, not because I'm a psychologist, because I'm not, or a psychiatrist, because I'm not, but the exercise of looking back on your life, looking back at the crises in your life and the opportunities that came up, and I show them how resilient and strong they were to have gone through those. And what they're facing now in retirement is another crisis. But let's even examine the word crisis. Crisis, the word has been, if you like, abused. It's been overused, abused, and it's lost its meaning. When we talk about crisis, everybody thinks it's the end of the world, you know, go to the supermarket, buy food, go into the bunker, the Russians are coming. Well, the Russians are really coming now, but a different crisis in a different— yeah, but crisis, the word crisis actually just means a turning point. That's all it means. And retirement is, in the true sense of the word, a turning point.

That's a great description. That's a great explanation, George, because it does— it just redefines the opportunity that comes from crisis rather than a dead end or hit the wall. It's really time to stop and say, okay, let's see where we are now.

Let's see what we can do. Absolutely. And the question is, when you're at that point, Joe, is what am I missing here? You know, the question to ask is, in retirement, what am I missing here? What is it I'm not seeing? Because clearly in retirement, it's a dead end. I mean, where do you go from here? Um, and you know, what do you do? There's nobody out there telling you, you know, there, there's another way. There's a much better way than where you are now. Where you're guaranteed you will not outlive your savings, you know, where your health is going to be great because you're going to be engaged socially, mentally, and so on. But to come back to DARE, DARE is not just a word about courage. I'm going to add this before I explain the acronym. There was a physician and psychiatrist and psychologist named Oh Lord, his name's gone. David Hitchens, uh, who wrote a book called Power Versus Force. And he was— he had actually calibrated using megahertz, I think is the word he used, um, calibrated using muscle, um, muscle testing, emotions, calibrating emotions. And what he discovered, that was that all the very low emotions are shame, fear, anger. Those are low emotions, low vibrations. Joy, peace, love are like in the 700s. Courage, in his calculation, was the pivotal point that turns from negative to positive. In other words, the low vibrations below courage are all the bad ones you don't want to be in. Of course, we as humans always fall down onto those emotions, but it's how quickly we can re-emerge back up and not allow us— allow it to consume us.

So courage is on the— on both sides of this line.

Yeah, courage is the platform from which you can take— you can go up. And so, and that was just pure serendipity, uh, for me. I mean, I, I only recognized that after I'd done my program. It's not like I had planned that. I just thought it was an interesting, um, addition to, uh, to what I'm saying. But DARE is the acronym for Discover, Assimilate, Rewire, and Expand. Let me just delve a little bit more into this. Um, and again, it was my journey. It was predicated on my journey. And there, uh, sorry, the D in Discover is about discovering what retirement is and what it is not. And you ask people what they— what their interpretation of retirement is, and everyone will give you a different meaning. Everybody's got their own idea of what retirement is. Pretty much like everyone will give you a different explanation of what Trump represents for them. If everybody's got their own understanding, it's got nothing to do with the man. Sure. Or nothing to do with the word retirement. It's their perception, their understanding of retirement. And so what I do is I say, okay, fine, we're all entitled to our opinions, fair enough, but let's look at the facts. First of all, let's look at the history of retirement. Who created this thing? Why did they create it? And is it, is it good for us? And I had to go all the way back to Caesar Augustus, who created the Aerarium Militare, the, um, Imperial Roman Army pension fund. And the reason he did that is because he was a smart guy. Now, he was a savvy guy because he recognized if he was going to rule the Roman Empire, he didn't want to end up like his uncle, So he wanted the army to be on his side, and that's the reason he provided them with a pension fund. And he put his own family's money, 6 million sesterces at his time, of that money into the Aerarium Militaris so that the Imperial Roman Army could grow. And all the old generals and soldiers who'd gone through a minimum of 25 campaigns over their lifetime, would end up happy and contented, and they wouldn't be plotting against him. Now, that fund grew and grew and grew, but just like Social Security in the United States, the Senate got its paws on, on it. And of course, they borrowed against it, etc., etc., and within two lives, within the lives of two emperors, it had disappeared. But so I studied that. I studied how Lincoln introduced pensions to recruit soldiers for the Union Army, how Bismarck introduced it to thwart the Marxists, right?

He said age at 65 because the average life expectancy at the time was 55, is the story. Exactly, exactly.

But he was smart because he realized most of them weren't going to make it, so the fund was always going to be full. Sure. Um, but if we use Bismarck's rule, retirement should be at the age of 90 for us now. 7 years above the life expectancy. It's 83 now, add 7, we got 90. Now of course that's politically, um, volatile, so no politician's ever going to say that, but it leaves us civil society to be talking about it and offering this up. So I studied about retirement and why it was done. It was never for our own benefit. It was always for either politics or later on for the corporates. Golden handcuffs for the employees to hold them in. So that's the history. Then I studied the impact of health after the age of 65, and you go to the Centers for Disease Control and you've got your information there. Health literally skyrockets after 65. Um, you know, not when you're 64, 65. Why? Um, you know, people have lost their sense of purpose. You know, there's nothing to continue for. If you've got something to live for, you will live.

That's a big risk factor, of course. No, no mission, no purpose. Yeah, correct. So we got this, this is about discover.

Assimilate is learning about new information about our minds. It's about understanding that contrary to what we've been educated with is that our conscious mind is paramount. Well, it's not. The subconscious mind is 100 million times stronger and more powerful and nobody's taught us how to handle that. The only people who understood about the subconscious mind, in my view, were the Jesuits, um, because they understood if you give me a child till the age of 7, I will give you the man. And the reason, of course, was they knew that if they could impress on a child what is right and what is wrong, that child, when it grew up, became an adult, no matter how much they wavered, they would come back to the path.

The basics were always there. Yes.

Yeah. But I think what the Jesuits didn't know was that there is a way to rework that programming. And of course, that's what modern science and psychology has— have given us. And in a sense, you, you can't erase programs, uh, at least let me say there are a lot of good programs you don't want to erase— digesting, sleeping, walking— those are good programs. The bad programs are the ones that sabotage us now when we want to do something new. And, and, and so understanding the subconscious mind for me and how to rewire it was interesting. And, and, and I, and I learned that with Bob Proctor. Because he, he was doing that, um, for the last 50 years. And it's about— you can't erase it, but you can record over it like a tape recorder. And that's what Dr. Bruce Lipton talks about in his, in, in his book, um, uh, The Biology of Belief.

That's right, yes, biology. Yes.

So anyway, um, the point is, is that— so you've got to discover what retirement is, what it's not. We move to assimilate which is about getting an understanding of how our minds actually work. And then we move to the third section, the R in DARE. And R is about how to rewire. And that takes us to what I call visioneering. It's what architects do. They imagine what a building is going to look like. They put it down on a blueprint. And then it's so much easier for other people to know exactly what the architect means when they want it that way, and the building comes up. So in a sense, what I try and do is help people create— download the blueprint of what they want from their mind onto a one-page document, ultimately, and that gives them something to work with. So I'm not giving them the final document, but I've done most of the work with them to get them to generate that from which they can then take it themselves and take it forward. Um, so the other one I— the other sort of example I use about rewiring, and, um, is, for example, take a basketball player. The basketball player, not dissimilarly to a cat, who's trying to negotiate jumping a wall, they will look up, they will— the cat will look up, it will look down, it will look up, it will look down. It'll do this a dozen times, and then suddenly, before you know it, they're up there. Because the cat, in its mind, is already mentally there before it actually— and in this, in the same way, a basketball player will his— it's not just his mind is in the— his mind has already laid tracks for that ball to go into the basket. All he now has to do is make sure that every cell of his body now believes that's going to be the case, and then he puts it in. And in a sense, that's the sort of the biology of belief. Your, your entire— your cells, your physical body is energized to bring it to, um, to completion.

So visualizing, creating the blueprint, visualizing the end, the destination, and putting the mindset in place to being there. Correct. Yeah, just one thing, I'm a part of us rather than how to reach out to it, it becomes us, that we become the goal, so to speak, we become the destination. We become the blueprint.

Yeah. And, and here's the interesting thing: it's not the thought that's the important bit, it's the feeling. And the question I ask is, how do you want to feel? And the answer comes from that. Not when you ask people what, you know, what, what's your purpose? What do you want to do in your life? Most people are stumped. They don't know because they've had a story in their head all their lives about doing something else because that's the way they've been taught or whatever it is. So they've forgotten about serving themselves and who they are. But they do get to the answer when you ask them, how do you want to feel in this new place that you are thinking about? That they know. So I start with the feeling and then move to the thinking. The thinking gets in the way.

And when you can envision how you will feel when you reach that point and act as if you are there, I mean, that's, that's generating that progress. I mean, one of the strategies is, I think, to really kind of imagine how you feel when you've reached that goal, and that puts you in that place of success already. It's like a downhill skier How do you think you'll feel when you've navigated all the twists and turns? And how will you feel when you've reached the bottom with a winning score? And that feeling helps to put the person in that place in advance. Exactly.

But I'd go one stage further. Yeah. I get them to imagine and to do 3, if you like, to give me 3 scenes in their mind's eye of how will they know they've achieved their goals. So now they've got to give me 3, you know, they can't give abstract words. I want physical video. I want an actual video of what's going to tell you that you've actually achieved your goal or what it is you want to do. So I get 3 videos out of them mentally, right, which is now in writing and it's down. They can't undo it. It's done now. Secondly, I use the kinesthetic and auditory factors as well. I ask them, you know, what will you hear people saying? And the other one is, what will you hear yourself say? And lastly, how do you feel? You know, etc. So we're creating, if you like, the DNA of this blueprint that you desire and want. And, you know, and we even ask them, do you see anything here that, that you would be uncomfortable about? Because we want to make sure that there's nothing in there that they're uncomfortable, because if they are, it means they're going to sabotage it. So once they've done that, okay, we've rewired their minds for them, we've helped them achieve what they want. We've got it down on paper on a blueprint. The next bit is expand, right? Now, obviously in the rewiring, we've got purpose. The purpose is in that last section of rewiring. So as we move to the E of DARE for expand, because your mindset's now been shifted, suddenly opportunities you hadn't seen before appear. Or as former— the, the late Wayne Dyer would say, if you change the way you look at something, what you look at changes. Of course, of course.

What is the Heisenberg principle? The mere act of measuring something will change it in itself. Exactly. As you try to understand and measure it, it changes completely.

Um, and so the expansion side again is something again from my reading has brought this about, and I've been able to distill it in my, in my program, is what a lot of people think is woo-woo— gratitude. And hence the title of my previous book, Spirit of Gratitude. Um, it's about if— and here's the— let me just give the concept out front first. Being grateful, thankful for what we have in our lives gives us a sense of contentment. It makes us pleasant with other people. Now we're not talking about being grateful in the social polite way of being grateful— thank you very much for, for this, or whatever it is, or please and thank you. We're not talking about social graces here, although that's also part of the culture, but It's the essence of being grateful internally for what one already has. That's countercultural. Our entire consumer society is based on the predict— that you are not satisfied, you are continually dissatisfied because you need to continually buy. And that's been the last 70 years of our consumer society, which thankfully is changing. And if one is grateful for what one already has— and we're not talking about physical things necessarily, material things, which we have relationships, you know, family, friends, etc. You know, what you put in is what you get out. And when you're grateful, it's amazing how much new good stuff comes into your life. And let's look at the corollary. If you're always dissatisfied, no matter how much money you make, how much you achieve, you're never going to be happy. Because the soon as you achieve what you aim to get, something new has to come in. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a void that's unquenchable.

Yeah, there's the line, I forget who said it, but we can never have enough of the stuff we don't need.

Very true, very true. And so with this gratitude thing, I discovered something else which was fascinating because it brings it back into the mindset. Now we know from, um, Dr. Robert Emmons of University of California at Berkeley, the gratitude psychologist, they've done so many studies on gratitude And one of the, uh, I mean, he says there is sort of gratitude gives you more buck for your money because you're grateful for things you have, right? Um, it also makes you very stress resilient, and when you become unwell, you recover much more quickly because it's all related to mindset. When you're in that grateful mindset. It's not the, um, there's a lot of people going on about gratitude and this and that, but I don't think they totally understand this, the science behind the gratitude. And I delved into more of the spiritual aspect of gratitude, that all religions have gratitude embedded in, in them. Doesn't matter what, you know, and again, I've looked at them, you know, whether you're going not just Christianity, Judaism, um, has the Psalms of Thanksgiving The Catholics have the Eucharist, which itself means thanksgiving in Greek. The Hindus have it, the Buddhists, every, every, almost every religion that I've touched on has an element of gratitude embedded in their creed, so to speak. But more than that, I did, I did some research on a philosopher called Martin Heidegger, German philosopher, who wrote extensively on this. But he, he specifically said thankfulness is the pathway into thinking. Thankfulness is the pathway into thinking. And I had to do a little bit more research to understand what he taught, what he meant by this. And he went down to not just the, the neurological side of it, but the linguistic side of it. The word think and thank originate from a German word, thanken, um, or thank, T-H-A-N-C. And his interpretation of that was that you couldn't be thinking correctly if you weren't thankful. So you go back to medieval times, if you, you know, you had to be thankful the piece of crust of bread that you had, you know. You, you couldn't afford to be greedy because you'd be stupid, if that makes sense. In other words, you have to be grateful to be thinking properly. And so You know, you extrapolate that to fast forward 2,000 years to today. If you're grateful, you know, for things in your life, supposing you're a salesperson or whatever you do in your work, you're far more likely to endear yourself to the people around you, your co-workers, your clients, your employees. If you're a grateful person, you can bring out the best in them. And you can move mountains using gratefulness as opposed to thinking about the costs of everything and knowing the value of nothing.

Sure, and wanting more. Yes.

And which is what we've come to now. We work harder, we work longer, we work for less, our lives are miserable, but we keep going because we don't know what else to do. And this goes all the way from the CEO up top, all the way down to the janitor.

Sure. Yeah. So, uh, fascinating conversation, George. Really fascinating. You've given a total new meaning to unretire. I mean, it's, it's, uh, drilling down into all of the finer points about every step that we take when we re-examine what we do now. So who is the DARE program for? How can they access it?

Well, the DARE program is for anyone between, I suppose, the ages of 55 to 75, for people who feel stuck where they are. They don't know how to navigate post-adulthood, to use a new word. For retirement, post-adulthood, or elderhood, where, you know, I like to say to them, you don't want this part of your life to become one of diminishing returns and tiptoeing to a quiet death. You know, I take sort of heart from people like Cicero, who said, you know, Old age is the crown of life. And we need to bring that back. We need to bring that back because not only there is no other option, but the way I look at it is these 10,000 individuals who retire each day in the United States alone are people who are tiptoeing to a quiet death. And to me, one in three people, I think, by 2050 is going to be aged over 55. 1 in 3 people. And this is a huge loss to humanity. The experience, the, um, the, the energy and the wealth that these people have is just being flushed down the toilet.

Huge loss. Huge loss. Yeah.

And I just think that, you know, there's a lot of people waking up now. There's a lot of people in, in our space talking about this.

Very much so. It's, it's become a place of celebration rather than decline and negative outlook. Sure, absolutely. That's crucial. Yeah, yeah. I see that we're really out of time, George, but this is just great conversation. I really appreciate what you've done and the model that you've created because it's so important to convey this concept of what's next. There's plenty left, right? There's so much opportunity out there. To enjoy. So I really thank you for creating this and for sharing it with our listeners. Uh, what would you like our audience to take away from our conversation today? I mean, we've covered a lot of territory, but what, what do you want our listeners to, uh, take away from our conversation?

I, I, I would say that, um, the best is yet to come. You're not finished yet, you're a work in progress, and the best is yet to come. And I'm gonna have to quote Cicero again: the crown of life— old age is the crown of life. It's, um, the last part of our act, and we have to go out with a bang. And he— his thing was, um, if old people are to be respected, if Old people are respected only if they defend themselves, maintain their rights, and submit to no one. How many people do you know who are doing that? They're not raging against the night, um, and, and, and this is what they should be doing. So I'd say cultivate your own garden. That's your identity and your purpose.

Yeah, the Crown of Life. That's great. That's a beautiful concept, beautiful model.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you, Joe.

Thank you. Well, as I mentioned, George, uh, it looks like we're out of time for today, but before we wrap up, I want to remind our listeners about a co-sponsor for our program, A Mighty Good Time. Are you looking for ways to engage and stay active? Check out amightygoodtime.com. It's a one-stop shop for events and activities for those 50 and over. It's free to search and it's free to post on MightyGoodTime.com. And be sure to visit the Living to 100 Club website to sign up for our weekly podcast announcements and monthly newsletters. And while you're there, be sure to download a free copy of my 9 Tips for Living Longer. Lastly, pick up a copy of my book, Living Longer Is the New Normal, all about maintaining a positive mindset in all we do. It's on Amazon. It is an ebook or hard copy. We've been talking today with George Georgian. George, for those who might want to contact you, what's the best way for them to do that? It's georgegeorgian.com. J-E-R-G-I-A-N. georgegeorgian.com. Well, thank you again. Thank you again for being a guest on our program, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in.

Hi everyone, this is Meredith from the Senior Fitness with Meredith podcast where I discuss all things for seniors, from fitness, your health and wellness journeys, How to be all over strong and beyond.

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