You Can't Waterski When You Are 90

I am conscious I haven’t written about the markets and investing recently, but I am not sure there is a huge update since our detailed client letter in January. The market went up a lot in January, then came down a bit in February and has been all over the place in March (a couple of bank failures in the US over the past few days hasn’t helped volatility).

That’s what the market does. We ignore all that noise and focus on the long-term trend.

I want to tell you about some things that have impacted me in the last few weeks. All have served as a reminder that we only get one shot at this thing called life and we really need to figure out how to do it well. Like, really well. Because it can all change in an instant.

I am incredibly focused on my health right now – avoiding getting sick and being proactive. I want to live longer and better. I am a regular listener of Peter Attia’s podcast – he focuses on exactly that. Many of his conversations go deep into science and medicine but some go into the bucket of ‘mental and emotional health’. Two recent ones got me thinking about topics that I have written about in the past (many times, probably).

Peter interviewed Ric Elias (twice actually). Ric is a super successful business owner, but that wasn’t really the focus of the conversations. Ric was on the plane that crash landed in the Hudson River. It was a pretty unique life experience. To have a moment where you know with 100% certainty that you are going to die, yet walk away, physically unscathed – that’s unusual!

Not many of us get that. He had 90 seconds to “say goodbye to his life”. Everything changes in that instant.

Everything can change in any instant.

He said it wasn’t scary. It was sad. He experienced profound sadness at the things he had not done, the people he hadn’t hugged enough, how much he had let his ego drive him, how often he had tried to be ‘right’ instead of happy and most importantly, how he had not focused on the most important thing in his life….his kids.

A powerful part of the conversation was when Peter asked about the relationship between happiness and wealth. Does he think they are uncoupled, correlated positively or correlated negatively?

Ric’s answer:

“I think we decide what they are. Some of the happiest people in the world have no wealth. So they cannot be coupled. Now, wealth can give you a set of conveniences that allows you to solve for whatever your priorities are. That might heighten your ability to do that and that might give you more happiness. Or for many people you pursue wealth your whole life because that’s what our society wants and when you get there you just feel so empty and then you feel so guilty for all you sacrificed for it. And then you are in the worst place because you got what you wanted and then it was a mirage and it meant nothing. There are so many people out there who feel like, oh my goodness, I was running the wrong race. We talk a lot in life around the best way to run a race – no one steps back and asks, am I running the right race?”

Ric believes he was given the ultimate gift, the gift to be able to say goodbye to his life and then open his eyes and realise he had a second chance.

In that moment he was forced to process his own death, and I’m not sure that’s something most of us can do. We would live life very differently if we could. With his gift comes huge responsibility. In his new life he makes sure he doesn’t postpone anything and he focuses on being healthy.

Don’t postpone anything and focus on your health.

You can find his incredible conversations here and here.

A few days before coming across Ric Elias I had listened to Peter Attia interview Bill Perkins, the author of “Die with Zero”. He comes at the same topic from a different angle, but the conclusion is the same.

Bill is also a super successful businessman, a hedge fund manager actually (not usually a sector of the population that I would think about taking life advice from). He talks so articulately about balancing health, wealth and time.

His point is, what’s the use of being rich and old? After all, if you could trade places with Warren Buffett, would you? Of course not. It’s not worth having $100 billion if you are 92 years old. You’d opt to be a broke 20-year-old over being Warren Buffett. Right?

The answer to that question tells us a lot about what we actually value in life.

For Bill it all started to make sense when he read ‘Your Money or Your life’ (a classic). The book challenges you to work out what your true hourly wage is. For example, if you are a lawyer earning $500k per year, working 3,000 hours a year (including all your BD, emailing at the weekend, getting to work, getting ready for your work etc.), you earn $166 an hour.

Let’s say you buy a shirt for $166, that cost you an hour of your life. If we think like that, we start thinking about everything in time, not money. Bill’s theory is that if we start thinking about things in terms of hours of our life and we realise we have finite hours, we get closer to our values. That’s a key step in moving away from living life on autopilot.

“Everyone says, I want to be rich before I’m 30 or rich before 40, no one’s out there saying I want to be rich before I’m 86. So intuitively, there’s something about the utility of money that it’s not as valuable to you later on in life.”

I often say that we are not solving for money, we are solving for happiness. Bill explains it as solving for net fulfillment, and fulfillment has three variables – your wealth, your health and your time. It’s not just about getting the quantity of the three variables right, you also have to get the order right. Bill talks about this as the seasons of life. Some activities translate nicely into the next season of life, and some don’t. You only have one season of life to climb into bed and read books to your children. They won’t be interested in that when they are an adult (or even a teenager). If you get the order wrong, you miss it. The season has gone.

There is an incredible power to the realization that we have seasons of life and that over time our body decays, however hard we work at it. Some things we can only do now.

It comes back to..…don’t postpone anything and focus on your health.

Think about how this looks for you. What’s the thing that you have been putting off that you should do now? Maybe it’s a conversation, maybe it’s a trip, maybe it’s leaving a job that is maximizing your wealth at the sacrifice of your health and your time (and perhaps the people you love). What season of life are you in now and what are the things you need to do now because you won’t be able to do them in the next season? It could be anything from climbing a mountain to bathing your kids.

We probably won’t get a chance like Ric, a chance to face our life and death head-on. Perhaps though we can stop and think and by avoiding the autopilot that society puts us on, we can edge closer to a life that we can look back on and feel was the best, the absolute best we could have had.