A man’s critical and important years (Part One)

 

Based on my own lifetime experiences and as I advance in age, I sometimes wonder what years have the most impact on a man throughout his lifetime. When I look at my own observations I enjoyed the best moments, made the most satisfying and lasting just over a time span that lasted a little more than a decade until my mid-twenties. 

It’s been so intense and so lasting that still more than half a century later it immediately stands out in any of my life retrospective to make me wonder why exciting recent events still pale in comparison? After that relatively short period nothing has made a stronger impression on me in spite of a satisfying family life, a great career and, until now, an enjoyable retirement. In researching deeper, here is what I found. 

The time period from birth to 5 years old builds a male's foundational brain structure. During these first years, a child's brain grows faster than at any other time in life and any experience during this period wire the brain for how stress, emotions, and relationships will be handled later in life.

It’s when a child builds over one million new neural connections every second. It’s also a time when safe and loving care creates a baseline for trust and mental health. Likewise negative experiences or abuse in these years will affect physical brain development and lead to long-term health risks. 

Then, adolescence and young adulthood (ages 12 to 25) will have the greatest impact on men’s lifelong identity, behavior, and success. This period of time is when a young man figures out who he is and takes his place in society. The brain undergoes a massive remodeling process, starting with emotional centers and finishing with the prefrontal cortex (the area responsible for planning and impulse control) around age 25. 

During that period, friends and social groups heavily influence values, risk-taking, and confidence. At the same time, the drive for reward is high, making this a critical time for education, career habits, and avoiding dangerous behaviors, and I haven't even mentioned my musical tastes! It’s when finding positive mentors and good experiences during these years will be able to reverse or heal earlier childhood struggles. 

In fact, this information made me realize why my youth has such a determining impact on me and why I remain so much attached to this dozen years as it defined who I would be until now and where that development would take me. 

This emotional attachment is so strong that it’s been anchoring my entire persona, still overshadows my family life as well as my other accomplishments and still continues to remain the center of my life despite its inexorable drift away from my present reality. 

Tomorrow we’ll see if females undergo the same process as males do...

Old feet, new problems…

As we age and remain quite active (running, walking, etc) can we say that the soles of our feet have a harder time fully absorbing body weight and impacts, and that it may lead to a variety of foot problems? It’s a very reasonable assumption, and the short answer is yes. 

As we age, the feet absorb impact less effectively, and this can contribute to problems like metatarsalgia, plantar fat‑pad atrophy, and arthritis. Yet, the relationship is indirect, and staying active is still one of the best things we can do for foot health. It’s obvious that with age, the feet lose some of their natural shock‑absorbing ability — mainly because the fat pads thin, the ligaments stiffen, and the tendons lose elasticity. 

This can increase stress on the forefoot and joints, making conditions like metatarsalgia more likely. But activity itself isn’t the problem, moving a lot like I do ends up protecting my joints. For sure, aging isn’t kind on our body and our feet as the thinning cushions under the heel and metatarsal heads reduce shock absorption and increase pressure on bones and nerves.

Our tendons and ligaments don’t fare any better as our collagen stiffens with age and makes our feet less adaptable to uneven surfaces and repetitive impact. The arch can also flatten slightly over time, shifting load toward the forefoot, finally years of walking and running contribute to mild degenerative changes that reflect normal aging but still not a disease. 

These changes don’t mean our feet “fail,” but they now handle load differently. All this new reality is why older runners and walkers often switch to softer shoes with generous cushioning, avoid long downhill itineraries and adopt a shorter stride length. It’s called adaptation, not deterioration! 

Our feet don’t “absorb less weight” because they’re weak but because their biological cushioning system changes. Our muscles may still be strong, our cardiovascular system excellent, but the fat pads and connective tissues don’t seem to care and keep on getting thinner as we age, no matter what we try to do to stop that process...

Year forty-one in Park City

We just quietly celebrated our 41st year living full time in Park City. 

Our experience has been great and continues to be to this day, even if we clearly are not as young anymore, we have witnessed an exponential growth all around us, even the planet population has almost doubled from 4.87 billion in 1985 to about 8.31 billion today!

But our little neighborhood has remained as calm and peaceful as it used to be, the access to town and skiing super easy, the weather continues to be terrific even if it now feels a little bit warmer (we have absolutely no doubt that climate change is real and is here, not just to stay, but will get much worse). 

We used to say: “We don’t need air-conditioning in Park City!” Today, this has become a debatable subject. On the plus side, we now have many more tall trees (our town has turned into an urban forest) with more wildlife keeping us company whether we’re enjoying it or not and, finally, the deepening feeling that we made the absolutely right choice the day we decided to move here.

Leveraging memories for growth (Part Two)

As we look back into our memories, a failed business venture, a badly chosen relationship, an opportunity we missed, a foolish argument, an impulsive decision, a misplaced trust and a career choice we later regretted, are so many “arrows” we can label: “Don't you repeat it again!” 

So, the ideal tool is the one that enables us a way to spot these bad situations earlier next time in order to turn regret into preparedness. Sure, as I mentioned yesterday, that exercise should not get us into a nostalgia trap. Maybe instead of “nostalgia” we should call it “rumination”. Nostalgia says, those were wonderful times. “I wish I could go back...” while rumination suggests “Why in the world did I do that? If only I had…”

Neither of the two necessarily make us learn from past experiences. What I’m proposing instead is a third relationship with the past by revisiting it, extracting the lesson, and leaving it there. In other words, our memory should be treated more as a laboratory than a museum. 

I’ve never thought about it this way, but I like it! I also see an intriguing asymmetry as we usually assume that experience makes us wiser because we lived through things, but perhaps wisdom can also be accumulated through deliberate retrospective learning. 

Imagine someone my age (78) looking back over his life and identifying 30 or 40 consequential mistakes. He might discover that five or six basic tendencies account for a surprisingly large proportion of them. Things like: 

• Acting too quickly 
• Being overly trusting 
• Avoiding difficult conversations 
• Caring too much about what others thought 
• Failing to recognize when circumstances had changed 
• Confusing confidence with competence 

The resulting insight could be far more valuable than remembering 40 individual incidents. At that point the summary shows us something like a personal history of errors and it raises a wonderful question. Could we deliberately become wiser by studying not only what happened to us, but how we repeatedly managed to get things wrong? 

As far as I am concerned, what I found were two recurring patterns. Acting too fast, indicating a need for enhanced patience, and lacking self-confidence or being shy. Call this excessive fear or timidity at times. The other, positive side of the coin is worth remembering too. In my case it was intuition and persistence that were my “best arrows…” 

Now I know and you can too if you go through the exercise!

Leveraging memories for growth (Part One)

Most of us will agree that we learn from our biggest mistakes and part of the wisdom we gain from them is to make sure not to repeat them again. This said, if we take the time and effort to “scan” our memories for all of our misguided moves or other errors we still remember, we should be able to inure the same benefits and add them to our quiver, without being sucked into the nostalgia trap, right?

I happen to believe that this basic proposition is quite sound. If a painful mistake can teach us something, we should be smart enough in learning from it so we won’t ever have to repeat the mistake again. Since we have decades of accumulated experience sitting in our memories, why not deliberately mine it? 

Sure, we need to remember an important caveat in that our memory isn't a video archive and its contents are not always totally objective recordings. They are reconstructions as with time, we tend to soften some things, exaggerate others, forget our own motivations, and sometimes rewrite ourselves as the hero—or the victim—of the story. 

As a result of that consideration, a useful "memory scan" shouldn't ask simply “What did I do wrong?” but should go deeper and more specifically, 

• What decisions did I make that turned out badly? 
• What did I fail to see at the time? 
• What warning signs did I ignore? 
• What assumption proved to be wrong? 
• What did I do repeatedly despite already knowing better? 
• What did I not do that I should have? 
• What did I learn from the experience that I subsequently forgot? 

Plus I leave one last question at the very end, “Are there patterns connecting several apparently unrelated mistakes?” That last question may be the most valuable as it can be the most actionable. One mistake is an anecdote but a recurring pattern of what leads to mistakes constitutes some serious information. 

As I mentioned above, in my "quiver" metaphor, life gives us a quiver of arrows, but we tend to think of the arrows as our successes—skills, accomplishments, good decisions or experiences. Yet, it’s fair to say that our mistakes belong in that same quiver too! 

So in the next blog we’ll take a look at these bad arrows and see how we can turn them into positive experiences that will add to our wisdom…

A slower learning pace

Over two years ago, I decided to learn Spanish from scratch and thanks to new tools tapping into modern technology, including now AI, I thought it would be a cake-walk compared to the horrible methods I used in the past and during all my youth when I set to learn English, German and Italian. 

Since my return to language learning, I found out the hard way that some “kinks” got in the way of my “gift for learning foreign languages”. 

Now, my progress is more slower and no later than yesterday, I stumbled when I was ask by my AI tutor what flowers were in my garden, I could name two or three species like daisies and columbines, but stumbled lamentably when I was looking for the equivalent names in Spanish for lavender and lupine, but couldn’t even remember them in English or French. 

I thought something might be going wrong with my memory. Sure, there’s a difference between forgetting and having trouble retrieving a word. What reassured me, however, was that this was not really a failure of knowledge. I knew perfectly well what lavender and lupine looked like; what failed me was the retrieval of their names. And that distinction may become increasingly important as we grow older. 

Perhaps learning a language later in life is less about how much we can absorb than about how quickly we can retrieve what we have already learned. The vocabulary may still be there, somewhere in the crowded attic of the brain, but finding just the right box can take a little longer. 

So I should stop blaming my “gift for languages” and start making allowances for the rather more crowded filing cabinet in my head. The good news is that curiosity is still working perfectly well—and as long as that’s the case, I intend to keep opening new drawers, even if I sometimes have to wait a little longer to find what I put in them...

Using AI as a purchasing tool (Part Three)

The sketchy details I garnered from the contractors and the guidance received through the AI estimate motivated me to go and visit the fence manufacturer located in Provo, one hour drive from Park City. '

I finally understood what the fence contractors were unable to explain about the product, not because they were ignorant, but because that smartly engineered product was precisely marketed by engineers who had no idea how to tell the full story of their wonderful product in ways that fully explained their product working potential.

Then, I realized what the “Park City curse” is, as seen by people who don’t live in our town, but work there all the time and deal with many affluent folks who don’t seem to care about what they’re asked to pay. 

So these contractors are trained by our environment never to hesitate to charge as much as the market will bear. In the process they’re blindsided by the fact that not all of their potential clients are millionaires. They should instead be sensitive to that reality, namely the potential for “real folks” that live among the überrich, and somehow leave the door ajar to invite a request for a discount. 

Let me be clear, by just asking for instance: “What don’t you like about my quote?” or “Is it a cost problem that prevents you from moving forward with the project I presented to you?” If they can easily take advantage of the super rich, good for them, but they clearly end up losing business by scaring the rest of normal people like me and the rest of us...