Perform Well to Your Last Breath

There is no overtime in life. Therefore it benefits us to perform with as much gusto as we can until our very last breath.

In a very real sense, the adversary all of us will eventually face is death. For this reason a question you must ask yourself is, How do I want to die? Do you want to end up living in a nursing home for the last decade of your life because you can no longer take care of yourself? Do you want to spend your final years partially paralyzed by a stroke? Would you look forward to the pain and limited mobility of arthritis or the hassle of having to replace a knee or hip because the joint was just worn out by overuse or abuse? Would you enjoy being extremely overweight and suffering from obesity-related illnesses such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease?

Or do you want to enjoy life, playing and working for as many years as possible?

I often ask my clients, “If how you live is determined by how you want to die, what performance strategies must you develop to work and live with gusto?” While the average life span for men is seventyeight and for women is eighty-two, that figure has been steadily increasing. In fact researchers are projecting that by the year 2025, sixty-two million people will be over the age of sixty-five, and by 2040 as many as one million people will celebrate their hundredth birthday. Many of us will live much longer than our parents did.

The choice we face is this: Do we want to spend our later years as a drain on society, suffering from health problems that are largely avoidable? Or do we want to remain a good prospect for as long as possible, performing with energy and a zest for life?

Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the physician who did the first heart transplant, said, “I want to die ‘young’ as late as possible.” I love to share this with my clients. When I repeated this to one woman, she told me, “That reminds me of my Great Aunt Ruth. She always walked everywhere—miles and miles per week, ate right, and kept her joy for living alive by traveling the world with her children and cultivating friends of all ages. She ran her own business, retired, then managed to keep active and live independently all the way up to the age of ninety-one. At that point she had a stroke that partially paralyzed her and put her into a nursing home. The last eight months of her life were hard for all of us, but at least we knew that she had lived the first ninety-one years with good health and gusto.”

There is no overtime in life, no going back onto the field for one last play. The lifestyle choices we make every day truly determine the level of our performance, whether we remain a good prospect or become suspect. It’s up to us to make sure we’re choosing wisely.