Most people get goals all wrong.

Humans perform best with three levels of goals:

• Mission-level goals
• High hard goals
• Clear goals

The first two are obvious, but the last is painfully overlooked (and it triggers flow): 🧵👇 Mission-level goals are lifetime goals.

High, hard goals are the multi-year achievements required to achieve those lifetime goals.

Clear goals are the daily actions needed to accomplish those high hard goals.

Here's the key:

After the age of 35, most people make one huge mistake.

It's a mistake that ages you faster, hurts performance, and causes mental and physical decline.

Luckily, it's a mistake that's easy to avoid.

Want to know what it is? 👇 It's the mistake of setting aside "childish" things.

It's the mistake of throwing away hobbies, activities, and passions that fueled you in your youth...

...And replacing them with late nights, early mornings, and taxes.

But science tells us that this is misguided:

You can get paid to grow old.

I mean this literally.

I know because I spent years traveling the globe and having hundreds of discussions with CEOs about what skills mattered most in the 21st century

And they all said the same thing: Creativity and empathy are the attributes they need most in their companies.

They also happen to be the traits that are the most difficult to hire for and train for.

So what does this have to do with growing old and getting paid?

Turns out, a LOT: 👇

Even at the ripe age of 92, we have access to legitimate cognitive superpowers.

But only if we train our brains and bodies to take full advantage of them as we age.

How do I know?

And if I'm right, how do we train these powers?

It all started with a violin👇 About a decade back, I was researching rare and expensive musical instruments.

And learned that nearly half of the most valuable instruments in history were crafted by a single man: Antonio Stradivarius.

This feat alone was impressive.

But what I learned next left me baffled:

Growing old is not a death sentence.

Most of us arrive in our fifties feeling that the cage––of the body & brain––has gotten smaller.

But really, we’re in a prison of our own making.

What’s actually shrunk is our mindset.

Harvard's “Counterclockwise Study" changes everything: For five days straight, a group of eighty-year-old men pretended to be twenty years younger.

Psychologist Ellen Langer analyzed the results and noticed:

Just pretending to be younger shifted their mindset and boosted their mood.

But the bigger change was physical:

Once you reach 50, if you’re not moving forward, you’re sliding backwards.

Here's the rule:

TRAIN LIKE A PRO, RECOVER LIKE A PRO

If you want to kick ass until you kick the bucket, you must train for old age like a professional athlete.

Studies prove something stunning: 🧵👇 With proper training, we can retain 70% of our physical abilities until even very late in life.

Better still, since the brain figures out how to compensate for some of what is lost, we can perform as though we’ve retained even more of those skills.

But there's a catch:

Remember: The next time the voice in your head says, “You’re too old for this shit”—the voice is lying.

The truth? You’re too old NOT to do this shit.

It turns out, as you get older, many so-called “off limits” activities are anti-aging medicines and longevity panaceas.

🧵 👇 Sports like skiing, mountain biking, and surfing all produce feelings of mastery and control.

They require:

• Fine motor performance
• Fast twitch muscle response
• Agility
• Strength
• Stamina
• Balance
• Flexibility

…and a tolerance for risk.

Why this matters:

Everything we thought we knew about aging is wrong.

Before the 1970s, scientists thought of aging as a long, slow rot.

Everyone agreed: depression, loneliness, and cognitive decline were inevitable, and there was nothing we could do about these facts.

Not so fast: 🧵👇 Enter the godfather of peak performance aging, Gene Cohen.

The Baby Boomers were the largest generation in US history. Cohen knew that If mental health outcomes for these older adults didn’t improve, the Boomer drain on public resources would be immense.

So here's what he did: