Cutting-edge medical developments are exciting and starting to hold out promises of extension to lifespan and health. Gene therapy, adult stem cells, epigenetics, swarms of miniature robots coursing through the bloodstream targeting infections and cancer alike are just some of the wonders being developed. Sounds amazing, and if you think it sounds like science fiction, think back to the technology and medicine available 20 years ago.
The reality is that technology is changing at a pace never before known in history (google Moore’s Law). Thomas L. Friedman puts it well; we’re living in the Age of Accelerations. Our language is changing too – google as a verb for example.
So if technology and medical science can radically alter our environment and bodies, allowing us to live healthily and for longer and longer, then how do we keep up mentally?
Age won’t be defined by our biological age but instead by our ability to engage with the world around us.
Active Golden Years
My friend Hailey’s grandfather, at age 101, amazed me. While heartily chomping on pizza (ok very good genes here) he told me about the recycling website that he created and ran, and an online newsletter he published organising recycling action in his local community. Sounds pretty exciting, right? what if I tell you that conversation took place in 1999. Jaw dropping.
How did he do it? Yes through a miracle of good health, and other complex factors. But also he kept his mind active and his interest engaged in the world around him.
Since that’s the secret, why would we develop mental inflexibility at all? Why as we get older would we tend to become more rigid in our thinking and less in touch with the world around us?
It’s all down to survival. As children, we’re taught how the world works and what we need to do to cope with the challenges we will face in our lives. Our brains retain this vital information, develop the right neural networks to process the information about our world and how to survive and ideally thrive in it. We lay down patterns of thought as neural highways in our brains.
Neuroscience tells us that our brains have plasticity – that they can create new neural links and even grow new brain cells. This is a drastic change from the old view that brain cells progressively die as we get older, and the ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. We now know that to be a lie, and the truth really is that there’s life in the old dog yet.
It’s possible and doable to keep upgrading our minds, we just need to have a good strategy for keeping ourselves mentally flexible. And the secret is not Sudoku.
Here are two great ways to stay mentally fit and flexible, and not become a dinosaur lost and confused in a world that you don’t understand.
Learn to Use the Tech
First is to look around you and keep looking around you. Just like Hailey’s grandad, take an interest in the world as it is TODAY. Lifelong learning is not simply a buzzword but an imperative for staying mentally young.
In business too, it’s easy to get so focused on working in and on our businesses that we don’t take the time to look up, look around and see which way the wind is blowing. As technology and society ever more rapidly, we need to be continually learning about our new environment and learning how to survive in this new world.
On a most practical and fundamental level, the little things add up. When you get a new gadget, car, appliance take the time to learn how to use it. Throwing your hands up and saying ‘oh it’s too complicated’ … that’s how you become a living dinosaur.
Use the new technologies as they come along, social media for example. Be as comfortable in your tech environment as a child. Don’t just ask the kids to do it for you. After all, how did they figure it out?
In the business world, keep current with the newest trends. Technology is advancing at such a dizzying pace that how we engage with customers constantly changes. And no, you don’t have to drown in technical press releases. Henry Ford set a great precedent back in the last century; hire a tech-savvy advisor to give you the overview.
For or serious lifelong learning if you prefer, go along to a customer-engagement workshop and see what people are excited about. Today we’re talking about social media, in a few we’re likely to have a whole new framework to work in.
Lifetime learning and engaging in your environment is one key.
Purge Mental Ruts
The second, and arguably the most important thing you can do in order to stay mentally flexible, nimble and young is to actively drop a very nasty habit, something that’s even an addiction for many; ‘being right’.
I’m not kidding. how we love to be right! Certainly for me as I was growing up it was an absolute requirement. It may sound like nothing much, but this is actually a deep psychological and emotional pattern, trained into us very young.
It’s simple really, as children when we were right, good, clean, tidy we may have got smiles, praise and approval for our behaviour. It was encouraged in families and school. However when we made a mistake – were wrong – noisy, messy or inconvenient most of us experienced a withdrawal of that disapproval or even punishment.
Our child minds concluded that when I’m right I’m worth something (accepted, loved) and when I’m wrong I’m not. I’m worthless, bad, not good enough etc. So we learned to put a lot of effort into not making mistakes, into being right and hiding our faults.
Our biology then backed up that conclusion because for survival we had to have an accurate understanding of our environment. Survival says once we’ve learned something that works, then stick with it. We needed to be right to survive both physically and emotionally.
It’s little wonder that being right becomes part of our identity and we get attached to being right, hate being wrong and will argue our point of view forever.
This very survival trait that was helpful in an agrarian world that didn’t change much from one generation to another. Unfortunately, it cripples us in this Age of Acceleration. If we get stuck in outdated ideas, approaches and habits of thought we can easily be obsolete by age 40. In business too, we will find our attitudes, skills and the very business decisions we make can become quickly outdated, ineffective and uncompetitive. All by our insistence on being right.
Luckily there is a solution for this problem too, a very simple one in fact.
Be Wrong
Learn to be wrong. Or rather, teach your mind that it’s ok to be wrong.
When you notice you’ve made a mistake (are wrong) admit it first to yourself and then to someone else (a trusted person who won’t cut your head off for it).
This can be a very difficult thing to start to do – because we really do believe the lie that being wrong equals I’m bad. And our biology is reluctant to let go of an attitude learned because at that time it seemed to be useful.
Yes, this is simple, but it’s not an easy or comfortable thing to do.
You can test how attached are you to being right? Go along to a talk or lecture on a subject you already know you disagree with. Politics, religion and community meetings are all great subjects for this wild experiment.
Don’t speak or ask questions, just listen and simply notice what you think and how you feel. What do you judge about the person speaking with a radically different viewpoint to your own? Are they stupid, incompetent, ignorant, inferior, biased etc? Pay attention to your body – are you getting physically tense, angry even? This is what we do when we’re holding on to being right.
Letting go of being right is also very necessary to staying young mentally.
Start with being wrong about small things and build up. Each time you admit you’re wrong, your system takes note. “Hmm, I was wrong and did not get murdered for it.” If this sounds simplistic, remember that we’re rewiring conclusions you made as a small child.
It gradually becomes emotionally safer to be wrong as we build new evidence that it’s ok. We start to relax about it and it becomes easier and easier.
And here the miracle start to happen. You see, in order to learn we HAVE TO make mistakes. Think of a baby learning to walk and falling down many, many times. In order to reap the benefits of brain we must develop new mental pathways to keep up with our changing environment.
Create a True Open Mind
When the mind doesn’t have to defend existing concepts (being right) it then naturally opens up to other possibilities, sees other points of view and we can literally embrace change. This is a young mind. The ideal mind, as martial artists have been saying for thousands of years, is a ‘beginners mind’. Spacious, ready and willing to make mistakes and learn new things.
Something rather special happens when we tell the truth about our mistakes to other people too – we feel more connected to them. We feel more comfortable and happier. Other people often respond to your truth-telling by relaxing themselves. When you are ok with making mistakes, it makes others less afraid of making mistakes too.
Entire corporate cultures are now being created with this ethos and it this is yet another way in which radical social change is happening in the most progressive companies.
Our world is changing and so can we. Exciting times indeed.