“Ancora Imparo” is an Italian phrase that means “Yet, I am learning.” The phrase is often attributed to Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and Renaissance man Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (Michelangelo). He is said to have made the statement when he was 87 while working on St. Peter’s Basilica. For most of us, we let our schooling interfere with our education; we do not heed the sage words of Mark Twain, who advised, “Do not let your schooling interfere with your education.” We often equate formal schooling with the end of our education. Schooling is for a certain period, but education is a lifelong pursuit that never ends.

Many twelve-step programs, which are mutual aid initiatives that support recovery from substance and behavioural addictions, have a set of meditation for participants. One such meditation is the “Just for Today,” where addicts are compelled to make progress just for today. There are various versions of the prayer/meditation, but the common theme is the importance of making daily progress toward recovery. As anyone who has battled with addiction can testify, stopping a bad habit can be extremely hard, whether it is social media, pornography, compulsive eating, gossiping or time wasting. The key to changing any behaviour or compulsion is just to do it today, conquer many days and with time, you will slay the compulsion dragon.

Sweat is the fluid secreted by sweat glands in our skin, and it is our body’s natural cooling mechanism. We sweat when our body temperature rises from exercise, hormonal shifts, heat, nervousness or stress. Sweat keeps our body’s internal temperature at about 98.6°F (37°C). Sweating is a form of thermoregulation, the ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different. In humans, we achieve this thermoregulatory function through fluid secretion by the eccrine glands. Sweat is our skin’s mechanism for preventing overheating and increasing blood circulation.

In Latin, alter ego literally means “second I”. An alter ego can be thought of as a person’s clone or second self. A professional alter ego might be a trusted aide who knows exactly what the boss wants done. A personal alter ego might be a close friend who is almost like a twin. Alter ego can also refer to the second, hidden side of one’s own self. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll is a good-hearted, honorable man; but after taking a potion, his alter ego, the loathsome and diabolical Mr. Hyde, takes over his personality. ¹

We are living longer as a species as the average life expectancy has increased considerably over the years. In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021, this had more than doubled to 71 years. ¹ According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Lifespan is the duration of existence of an individual, the average length of life of a kind of organism or of a material object, especially in a particular environment or under specified circumstances, while Healthspan is the length of time that the person is healthy—not just alive. ² Healthspan is the period of life spent in good health, free from the chronic diseases and disabilities of aging. ³

We cannot control the length of our lives, which is somewhat predetermined by our lifespan, but we can do something about our healthspan by making decisions that would make us live a healthy life. As author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn often said, “Life is the struggle to keep death at a respectable distance. Death wants to move in prematurely. Life’s job is to keep pushing back! For most of us, we live our young adulthood striving for wealth while we use our old age using that same wealth to care for our health. By optimizing for one’s health, one has a fighting chance for old age not to be as stressful as usual.

One of the significant hallmarks of the highly successful in any profession, sport, field or sector is their ability to go the extra mile. They understand what it takes to go to the next level, from good to great. First, you must stay consistent with the process and then get intense with the relentless pursuit of your goals and objectives. As the American author and motivational speaker often said: “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure. Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices.” Success is never an accident, and failure doesn’t just happen overnight; both occur due to our efforts day in and day out. Your input determines your output to get what you have never gotten; you’ve got to do what you have never done.

Once upon a time, a group of villagers instructed their young shepherd, “When you see a wolf, cry wolf, and we’ll come with guns and pitchforks.  The next day, the boy was tending his sheep when he saw a lion in the distance. He cried out, “Lion, lion!” But no one came. The lion killed several sheep. The shepherd boy was distraught. “Why didn’t you come when I called?” he asked the villagers. There are no lions in this part of the country,” the older men replied. “The wolves are what you have to look out for. The young shepherd learned a valuable lesson: People respond to what they are prepared to believe. And what prepares them for what they believe is their experience. ¹

Life will happen to us all at some point; whatever goes wrong will eventually go wrong (Murphy’s Law). It is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when. The proverbial wolf/devil will eventually show when we least expect it, and the situation could make or break us. The father of American Psychology, William James, once quipped, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.” Our superpower as humans is the ability to choose the direction we want to go and the approach we want to take. We can either let the trials and tribulations that confront us constantly make us bitter, or we choose to get better, let it lessen our resolve, or learn the lesson.

We will all have moments in life where we come to a new realization, a paradigm shift, where we’ve had enough, and we take the steering wheel of our life. Author Jim Rohn refers to it as the day that turns your life around; the father of American psychology, William James, calls it mental rearrangement; German Sociologist Max Weber coined the term metanoia to capture a massive change in a person’s outlook. Other names for this phenomenon include inflection points, crossroads, U-turns, crises, pivots, monster curveballs, ampersands, life quakes etc. These moments come in different shapes, sizes and forms. These life-changing moments are usually an opportunity for a rebirth, as the character of George Clooney in the movie “Up in the Air” remarked.

I started meditating consistently during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. It was a very stressful period, and I was looking for a tool to help with my anxiety and state of mind. I stumbled upon a YouTube ad campaign by the mindfulness app Calm that featured four-time NBA champion Lebron James. The calm session featuring Lebron: Train Your Mind with LeBron James was so good that I immediately signed up for a premium version after finishing the session.

Lebron James was drafted by his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, as the first overall pick of the 2003 NBA draft. He is in his 20th season as an NBA star and still playing at a very top level. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest NBA players of all time. One of the insights Lebron shared in his Calm session is the amount of time and resources he spent on maintaining his body. Lebron reportedly spends around 1.5 million dollars yearly to care for his body. The 38-year-old NBA superstar takes care of his body using hyperbaric chambers, cryotherapy, NormaTec leg boots, trainers, personal chefs, and a consistent routine.

“There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.”― Mahatma Gandhi

One of the deepest truisms in life is that everybody eventually dies. Everybody dies, but not everyone lives, as we mostly get stuck in the trap of trying to get ahead in life, so we stop truly living. We lead a life of quiet desperation, autopilot, trance, and sleepwalking throughout our precious time here. We spend our youth trying to keep up with the Joneses, amassing wealth while ignoring our health, and we devote old age to using that same wealth to care for our health. You cannot fit a wheelchair in a Lamborghini; live your life to the fullest while you are still here and try to be of service to the world around you because everybody dies in the end.

Most of us live in someday isle, wherein we delay living our lives and we postpone almost everything to a future we are not promised. We delay starting the business until we have enough money in the bank, we delay going on the adventure of life until we are retired, and we wait living our life until everything is aligned. The reality of life is that everything will never be aligned; you just have to keep showing up day in and day out while creating your luck. As Author MJ DeMarco, observed, “Someday – The legendary place where your hopes, dreams, goals, and aspirations all magically come to fruition. Someday is dangerous and paralyzing. It traps you in the land of Nowheresville.” To live a worthy life, you have to start from somewhere by living one day at a time. You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. This is not a drill, it is the real deal; we all die eventually – Start Living.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” To be yourself in a world where what is wrong is right and what is right is wrong is extremely tough. It takes a lot of courage to separate oneself from the crowd, go against the grain, stand alone where everyone is thinking the same, and think for yourself in a world where groupthink is the norm is the greatest accomplishment. The internet and social media have normalized crowd, mob and group thinking, black and white thinking; you are either for us or against us thinking.

Leaving it all on the floor is a sports metaphor that refers to playing hard and giving your all in a game. As the saying goes, “We play the way we train.” Your effort in training would eventually show up during game time. It involves having a passionate approach to playing or participating in a game. We get rewarded in public for what we have diligently practiced in public. The former boxing heavyweight champion Joe Frazier was right when he said, “You can map out a fight plan or a life plan, but when the action starts, it may not go the way you planned, and you’re down to your reflexes – that means your [preparation:]. That’s where your roadwork shows. If you cheated on that in the dark of the morning, well, you’re going to get found out now, under the bright lights.”

You are what you consume, the food, media, people, vibrations, and energies that you allow into your life ultimately determine your attitude and overall well-being. Eating junk food produces a junk body, consuming negative news produces negative thought patterns, and surrounding yourself with toxic people leads to a toxic personality. As the saying goes “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. Your input ultimately determines your output. We live in a world of consumerism where we are compelled to consume more than we produce, a world with an overwhelming array of drugs to numb our pain. Depending on your personality, the array of choices of drugs is limitless from social media, food, pornography, news, texting, new media binging, retail therapy, and a host of other dopamine-inducing coping tools.