TJ Walker presents the Someday Rule: convert any "someday" into a calendar appointment within 48 hours. He introduces the 90-Year-Old Test to reveal which life areas generate the most regret, then walks through a seven-sphere model showing most people over-invest in wealth while neglecting creating, relationships, and health.
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Today on Ultimize Discover, you're getting a short practical sample from the Ultimize universe. Use this on its own, take one idea and apply it today, or go deeper at ultimize.com. Ultimize is the world's largest personal development podcast, audiobook, and online learning network. Ultimize. Here's a rule that can change your calendar this week. The next time you hear yourself say the word someday— someday I'll visit, someday I'll learn it, someday we'll take that trip— you have 48 hours to put a specific date on your calendar, even a placeholder date. Say someday, open the calendar, pick the day. That's the whole rule, and it converts wishes into appointments before they dissolve. Hi, I'm your host, TJ Walker, and this is the 90-Year-Old Test. From Ultimize, the world's largest personal development podcast, audiobook, and online learning network. Across 10 sessions, we start from you at age 90 and work backward, counting the visits you have left with the people you love, sorting your dreams by expiration date, pricing your fears the way your future self prices them, and saying the words you've been sitting on. While there's still time to say them. Nobody at 90 wishes they'd waited longer. Follow the show and let's begin. Which part of your life will you regret most? Not life in general. Which specific part? Most people have never asked that question with any precision. And the lack of precision is exactly how regret sneaks up on them. Here's the truth about regret that changes how you fight it. Regret is specific. Nobody at 90 says, I regret my life. They say, I let my friendships drift. I never took care of my body. I never made the thing I always wanted to make. Regret lives at a particular address. So if you want fewer regrets, you can't audit your life as one big blur. You need a map. For years, I've organized life into what I call the 7 spheres. And in this series, we're going to point the backward lens at every one of them. Let me walk you through the spheres the way your 90-year-old self will see them. Sphere 1, self-agency. Did I actually run my own days, or did other people's priorities run them for me? Sphere 2, health. Did I keep the machine maintained while it could still carry me to the places I wanted to go? Sphere 3, relationships. Did I genuinely show up for the people I love, or did I just intend to? Sphere 4, lifelong learning. Did I keep growing, or did I stop being curious somewhere in my 30s? Sphere 5, creating. Did I make things and put them into the world? A book, a business, a garden, anything with my fingerprints on it. Sphere 6, leisure. Did I actually have fun, real fun, or did I keep deferring it like a loan? And Sphere 7, wealth. Did I have enough? Now, notice something remarkable about that 7th sphere. At 90, it goes strangely quiet. I've never encountered an account of someone at the end of a long life whose burning regret was a slightly smaller portfolio. Yet for most ambitious people, Sphere 7 consumes the overwhelming majority of their waking hours. That's the great mismatch this series attacks. We overinvest in the sphere that generates the least regret, and we starve the spheres that generate the most. For example, picture a woman in her late 40s— sharp, accomplished, exhausted. She pulls up her calendar and sorts the last month into 7 spheres. The results: work and money, roughly 90%. Relationships, a few dinners she spent half-checking messages. Learning, nothing much. Creating, nothing that belonged to her. Her leisure sphere consisted entirely of a gym membership she'd been paying for 3 years the way you'd support a charity. Funding the mission faithfully without ever attending in person. Now, she's not lazy and she's not foolish. She's simply been navigating forward where Sphere 7 shouts out and the other 6 whisper. The backward lens reverses the volume. At 90, the whispering spheres are the ones that roar. Here's what I want you to do today, and it takes 5 minutes. Write the 7 spheres down the side of a page: self-agency, health, relationships, learning, creating, leisure, and wealth. Next to each one, a score from 1 to 10. But here's the twist: you're not scoring them. Your 90-year-old self is scoring them. Looking back at how you're living right now, This month. Be honest. Nobody sees this page but you. Then circle the lowest number. That circle is your most regret-productive sphere, the place where your future self is quietly accumulating grievances against your present self. You don't have to fix it today. You just have to know its name. In the sessions ahead, we'll move through those spheres one by one, starting with the sphere that dominates end-of-life reflection more than any other. The people you love and the shockingly small number of times you may see them again. There's something you were supposed to make and you know exactly what it is. I didn't even finish the sentence and a specific thing appeared in your mind. Could be the novel, the business, the song, the workshop in the garage. That thing has been waiting patiently, some of you know precisely how many years, And today we're going to stop negotiating with it. Human beings need to create. I don't mean that as decoration. I mean it as one of the 7 spheres of a complete life and one of the most reliable generators of end-of-life regret when it's neglected. Nobody's future self is haunted by the memo they didn't write at work. They're haunted by the thing that was theirs, the creation with their fingertips on it, that never made it out of their head and into the world. And here's what makes this sphere different from the others. In the Relationship Sphere, the obstacle is the calendar. In the Health Sphere, the obstacle is biology. In the Creating Sphere, the obstacle is almost entirely a story you tell yourself. And the story goes, I need more time before I can start. More time. More savings, more training, more certainty. The story sounds responsible. It's actually just fear wearing a sensible jacket. So, let me say this as plainly as I know how. If you've always wanted to write a novel, start writing it today. Not when you retire. Today. If you want to start a business, start it on the side now while you keep the job that pays your bills. The starting is the thing. Waiting for the perfect conditions to create is like waiting for the perfect conditions to plant a tree. The conditions matter far less than the years you lose debating them. For example, picture a woman who's wanted to write a book for 11 years. She owns 4 books about writing books. She has a folder of ideas beautifully organized. She's attended 2 conferences. The only thing she hasn't done is write page 1. She's built an entire village around the book— scaffolding, supply lines, ceremonial gates— everything except the book. Ask her what she's waiting for, and she says she's waiting until she can really commit. 11 years is a remarkable length of time to spend clearing your throat. Her 90-year-old self doesn't care whether the book was good. Read that again because it's the key that unlocks this whole sphere. At 90, the regret is never, I made it and it was mediocre or so-so. The regret is, I never found out. Your future self will forgive a clumsy first chapter instantly. What they can't forgive is a blank page defended for decades. So, we're not ending this session with a plan. We're ending it with the act itself. Right now, while this session is still running, you're going to make the first move. If your thing is a book, open anything you can type or write on and produce the first 100 words. Not good words, just first words. If your thing is a business, write one sentence to your first imaginary customer. Here's what I'd make for you. And here's what it would do for your life or your business. If your thing is a craft, a song, a garden, a course, make the smallest possible piece of it before this session ends. 100 words, one sentence, one sketch. Do it now. I'll wait. Okay. Done? Then mark today somewhere. Because you just crossed the line that separates the people who talk about the creating sphere from the people who live in it. The gap between 0 and 1 is the largest gap in the creative universe. The gap between 1 and finished is just work, and work responds to schedules. Tomorrow, add the next small piece. 100 words a day is a book in a year. An hour a night is a business in a season. Your 90-year-old self isn't asking you to be brilliant. They're asking you to be in motion. In the next session, we'll talk about the 2 spheres ambitious people abandon first and miss most and why it's never too late to be a beginner. By the way, quick question for you. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to consume content and how hard it is to actually do anything with it? I mean, you can listen to 100 episodes, read 10 books, and your habits are exactly the same. That's the gap most people never close. So if you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, I want to actually improve, go to ultimize.com. We've got free courses there for you, either on communication skills or building better habits. And it's designed to get you to actually use what you're learning, not just hear it once. No cost. No catch. Just go to ultimize.com and start. Ultimize.
