Mental fitness in my old age is something I want to maintain. I am fortunate that neither of my parents showed any signs of dementia or diminished mental capacity. My mother lived to 90 and was still able to talk knowledgeably about British and Canadian politics (somewhat disparagingly). She was more enthusiastic when discussing horse racing, Formula 1 motor racing, cricket, rugby and her grandchildren right up to the last time I saw her, two weeks before she died.
My father was still active mentally and physically when, at age 65, he was murdered by terrorists in Rhodesia.
Success And Mental Fitness
Twice a week on The Yakking Show, my cohost Kathleen and I interview successful business leaders. Toward the end of each episode, we ask a standard question; “In your experience, is there one characteristic, habit, or mindset that sets successful people apart from those who are not?” The answers fall in a narrow range of soft skills and attitudes.
- Curiosity
- Constant Learning
- Asking Questions
- Perseverance
- Focus
- Determination
- Empathy
It’s interesting that in over 200 interviews, no one has mentioned getting an MBA, working for a Fortune 500 company, being lucky, or being born in a certain era, city, or country.
All those characteristics or values help us develop and maintain mental fitness.
We have compiled two 30-minute episodes of those “Success Secrets” for our Premium members. I am giving readers of this blog access to the first video with this link. We will soon be publishing the next two episodes, you will have to subscribe as a Premium member to watch them and other exclusive episodes.
How To Retain Mental Fitness
The best way to retain mental fitness is to continuously exercise our brains. That means mastering unfamiliar skills, learning new languages, playing musical instruments, reading about unfamiliar topics and talking to people with different opinions and perspectives.
At the age of almost 73 and from the generation that started work before the advent of personal computers, smartphones, and the Internet, just keeping up with new developments in technology has been a lifelong exercise. I was fortunate that in the mid-1980s, still in the corporate world, I was the first manager in a large company to get budget approval for an IBM PC. That gave me a head start on many of my age. It started an interest in keeping up to date that has served me well ever since.
In this post I wrote about learning to play the guitar in my 60s after a lifetime of believing a junior school teacher who told me I was “absolutely useless at music.”
New Technology
My most recent challenge was to learn how to set up an Airtable database and automations to manage the guests and episodes for our podcast and video show. I had been told that it was a difficult application to understand. At first glance, it did look complicated. However, once I started and studied the comprehensive documentation, it was not that difficult. It has saved us hours of time with its ability to trigger repetitive tasks – follow-up emails and status adjustments.
I can recommend it to anyone who needs to keep track of records with many fields that require updating and follow-up.
Habits
In my last post, I wrote about habits and how I had found it difficult to get back into my daily early morning walk habit after breaking the routine over winter. Well, after starting again in April, I have not missed a weekday morning walk. The sun is rising earlier which makes it easier, but after the first few days, the habit took over and now it’s easy to keep it up.
How are you doing with your habits? Nurturing the good ones and breaking the bad ones?
Tools We Use
Here are some of the tools we use to produce the Yakking Show podcast.
Hostgator for website hosting.
Podbean for podcast hosting
Airtable for organizing our guest bookings and automations.
Calendly for scheduling our guest interviews.
Zoom for recording Interviews
Power Director for editing video
Audacity for editing audio
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