Who Should Read This Book Looking for some way to make your life better? Something that will give you more control over your future? Do you need a way to overcome some of the mistakes you have made in the past? Are you between thirty-three and sixty-five years old? If so, you need a guide to making your life count. What can you do? Give my six-step program a try. It has made a big difference for me, and can do the same for you. Let this book guide you through the maze of conflicting paths that you encounter in your life. These six steps will give you the confidence you need to face the many challenges life puts in your way. It will give you the necessary time to consider what you want in your future. What Are the Six Steps? Step One is getting control over you body. You start by walking. Then you add small additional changes to your physical activities. Finally, you regularize your exercise while adding new and interesting ways of exercising. Step Two is getting the proper amount of nutrients. This will turn out to be less difficult than it sounds once you are in the exercise mode. You will avoid much of the four harmful food groups - fat, fried, fast, and frozen - along with caffeine, sugar, and sodium. Quickly, you will start noticing how much better you feel. Step Three is improving your brain's performance. This will come from learning challenging new material. This will be good for your brain's capacity, and interesting as well. Step Four is learning to make the best of the challenges at work. Your work represents your opportunity to direct your life toward accomplishments and satisfaction. You need to establish goals to strive for. Volunteer work also is important in this area. Step Five is the problem of financial responsibility. It will require some delay in economic gratification, as you position yourself to handle your health costs and pension. Step Six is the last step, and includes control over distractions such as television that today have almost no upside. In controlling distractions, we create time for the activities that make our lives worthwhile. This gives us time to meet our expectations and to find the joy that surrounds us.

Controlling Your Future

6 Steps to a Better LifeBy Richard Norgaard

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Richard Norgaard
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4389-1817-4

Contents

Chapter 1: The Challenge................................................................................15Chapter 2: Where Did I Come From? Who Am I?.............................................................23Chapter 3: Our Changing Lifestyle.......................................................................29Chapter 4: How Long Can You Expect to Live?.............................................................37Chapter 5: Physical Fitness Comes First.................................................................45Chapter 6: R U Ready....................................................................................55Chapter 7: Making Our Move to Level 2...................................................................69Chapter 8: Weightlifting and Stretching.................................................................81Chapter 9: Putting Excitement Into Exercise by Reaching Level 3 and Perhaps Level 4.....................93Chapter 10: Our Overweight Problem......................................................................107Chapter 11: Losing Weight...............................................................................121Chapter 12: Issues in Eating............................................................................135Chapter 13: Exercising the Brain........................................................................145Chapter 14: Training the Brain..........................................................................159Chapter 15: Work and Discipline.........................................................................171Chapter 16: Why We Work.................................................................................183Chapter 17: Volunteering................................................................................195Chapter 18: An Important Lesson in Financial Economics..................................................207Chapter 19: The Borrowing Problem.......................................................................217Chapter 20: Investing Your Savings......................................................................227Chapter 21: Sources of Funds for Retirement or Old Age..................................................241Chapter 22: Choices in Personal Investment..............................................................251Chapter 23: The Distraction Disease.....................................................................261Chapter 24: The Good Life...............................................................................275Chapter 25: Conclusion..................................................................................285Appendix One............................................................................................291Appendix Two............................................................................................293Appendix Three..........................................................................................295Appendix Four...........................................................................................297

Chapter One

The Challenge

June is a real-estate agent in St. Louis, and her husband, Ray, is a stockbroker. The last two years have been very difficult for both of them. June's sales are off significantly due to falling housing prices and heavy competition from other agents. She has lost several listings from people who wouldn't drop their price sufficiently to attract buyers. Ray is a full-service broker, and finds competing with discount brokers ever more difficult.

Their energy in their work is down, they are stressed out a lot, and they find it hard to be optimistic. They occasionally get sick, and it seems to linger. They are both forty-eight years old and financially solvent. They can weather the current downturn, but something is missing.

They do have a membership in a local gym, but their work leaves them no time for exercise. As a result, their weight has climbed. June feels harassed and harried. She thinks she needs a vacation, but there is just no time for it. Sometimes it seems they are on a treadmill to nowhere. What can the two of them do to turn things around?

Sam is thirty-seven years old and obese. He joins a small army of 34 percent of all Americans. He has tried dieting using the Atkins diet and Weight Watchers. He can get his weight down, but then it goes up again. He is a yo-yo dieter. At five foot ten, he weighs 225 pounds. He wants to weigh 190.

His problem is that something always seems to come up. His wife gets laid off from her job. His son is doing poorly in school. His boss is making his life miserable. His father gets prostate cancer. He feels like there is a black rain cloud over his head.

His knees are sore. He used to run some and occasionally go to a gym, but right now it is too painful. He's getting pressure from his wife to lose weight because his stomach is lapping his belt, and his sex drive is way down. He knows he needs to cut down on the food he eats, but he has to eat on the run and food gives him comfort. He just doesn't know what to do.

May was recently divorced. In the divorce settlement she got their modest home, child support, and some alimony. With her job, she and the two children are scraping by. She has modest savings in her 401k from work, but it can't be touched. She refinanced her house with an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) in order to get money that she spent on a new car, clothes, furniture to replace the pieces her ex had taken, and a vacation to help her get over the divorce.

She thought things would turn out all right, but the bills are coming due. The fact that she is forty years old is weighing on her, and recently the bank told her the ARM interest rate has been increased from 6.5 percent to 10.5 percent. She has two credit cards; one is maxed out.

This wasn't the way she thought it would be. Before the divorce, the two of them were doing fine. They had money for extras and good savings. Two households have made a huge dent in their finances. Both she and her ex are in a bind. What can she do?

Al is fifty. He is a middle manager making enough to support his wife and two children in a modest home in the suburbs. He is a little overweight and doesn't exercise, but that is not the problem. He is an IT manager, and there is talk that his division is going to be outsourced. The company can get the same output in India at less than half the current cost.

Al was happy to graduate from college and didn't plan on ever going back, but his skills are both out-of-date and limited. Finding a job anywhere near his current salary seems impossible. He is bewildered by this turn of events.

Ed and Mary Bell are both sixty-six. They retired at sixty-two when they were eligible for Social Security and moved to Florida from Ohio. They bought a small condo, and Ed golfed while Mary Bell shopped. They loved the casual clothes and warm weather. This year, Mary Bell was diagnosed with breast cancer, but she survived with an operation, chemotherapy, and radiation. It was expensive.

This brush with death has made them reevaluate their lives. A great uneasiness has come over them. Somehow the retired life in Florida isn't turning out right, and they miss their friends in Ohio-and, believe it not, the changing seasons.

Welcome to the Real World

Welcome to the real world. It isn't the world of glamour, movies, or television. It is a world in which you are responsible for your future. Your choices determine what will happen to you, and there are no reruns. If you are under-exercised, overweight, and in any difficulty in your finances, you are in a category with most of us.

All of the people described above represent common problems that any one of us can face. Life is not fair, and disaster can strike any one of us at any time. How you deal with it depends on the control you have over yourself. Are you willing to put off some immediate gratification in order to improve your future? This applies to the exercise we get, how much we eat, how much time we spend in learning, the type of job we seek, and how we view life.

For all of the people described above, there is a common thread: It is their lack of total fitness-that is, physical, mental, and financial fitness. The people described here are out of control, or more specifically, their discipline is weak. What can they do to get back on track? Problems like getting and spending, watching too much television, long hours in the car, unsatisfactory issues on the job, unsatisfactory personal life, are getting them down. Their problem is insufficient discipline-they aren't fit enough.

Why has this occurred? It is a problem shared by all of us. Our world has changed in the last sixty years, and we have failed to recognize how these changes have impacted on our lives. There have been two major changes. The first is affluence. That doesn't sound bad, does it?

Affluence has meant we can have lives we couldn't have imagined sixty years ago. Food is cheap, really cheap. Clothes are well within anyone's budget. We have ample shelter. Recently, people could get a home loan without any money or even a job. Our country is overflowing with money. So why is it bad? It has caused us to demand immediate gratification. We want to keep up with the Joneses. We are not using our newfound wealth wisely.

The second problem is, our lives have become sedentary. We drive or fly everywhere. We spend a good share of our day in our car. We go to work in a cubicle and emerge eight hours later. We get home tired and flop in our easy chair and turn on the television. Legs seem almost obsolete. This is a huge problem, because legs are important for far more than just getting us from our car to the mall, or our recliner to the fridge.

These changes-affluence and being sedentary-have come on us rapidly and unexpectedly. We didn't see them coming, so we have reacted by going with the flow. It seemed the easiest thing to do. We have allowed ourselves to become distracted by ever more things, newer and faster cars, bigger houses, longer vacations, earlier retirements, and to top it all off , we are living longer.

Ask yourself, where has this gotten me? Is my life better than it ever was? Am I leading the life I really want? Am I happy with the way things are working out? Do I feel good about my accomplishments?

Our need for instant gratification may be our biggest challenge. There is the siren's seductive call to acquire things that the advertisers tell us will make our lives better. Most of us obey this call and fill our lives with detritus. Maybe we feel good about this, but what have we accomplished?

I believe we have lost our way in this material world. We have let our bodies and minds go to seed. We need to get a grip. We do this by improving our discipline, and it is the only way to go. The problem is, we have adjusted to indolence. Our brains simply don't want discipline, so we have to ease into it.

It would be nice to tell you that the way to get discipline is to make up your mind to focus more on your life and on your job, but it doesn't work that way. Your brain has gotten slack, and likes it that way. It won't suddenly decide it needs discipline. Consider those who smoke and take drugs. If they decide it is time to stop, will the brain just let go of the pleasurable feeling it gets from these drugs? Not likely.

The slack brain likes spending everything you make and more, but overspending leads to bankruptcy, which new laws have made very undesirable. So what should you do? You must relearn discipline in gradual steps. In this book, I will explain the reason our discipline is weak, and why it is never too late to relearn or strengthen your discipline.

Finding the Good Life

Almost everyone knows there is something missing in his or her life. Perhaps it is the uneasy feeling we get from a past memory, or from missing someone we cared about. It may come from questioning goals in life that we have avoided thinking about. It might be the result of waking up at night and wondering about death and what it means. Whatever causes you to question yourself is less important that what you do about it.

To find yourself, to recognize who you are and where you are going, you need to take certain steps. Your doubts and fears will not be assuaged easily. You will not find the path to the good life quickly. It will come slowly or not at all. You must undertake this voyage one step at a time.

This book is organized into six steps. These steps are meant to help you improve your discipline and lead you to the good life. You can think of these steps in terms of fitness. Most of us think of fitness as physical fitness, but physical fitness is only one of many types of fitness, including nutritional fitness, mental fitness, work fitness, financial fitness, and spiritual fitness.

The next three chapters cover the trends in our society. These are followed by the six-step program that leads to the good life-that is, a life of total fitness, whatever your age.

Think of these steps as floors in a lighthouse. You climb progressively up the stairs, floor by floor, until you reach the top where the beacon shines. When you see the light of the beacon you become the light, for the light is wisdom, and it is very difficult to reach because each step is a challenge. Many will not make it to the top. They will rationalize their excuses for failure, and that is easy to do.

On the other hand, reaching the top is something we all want because in doing so, we will learn what life is about; we will have lived the "good life." The good life is to today's philosophers what Valhalla was to the North men, what Nirvana is to Buddhists, or what heaven is to Christians. It is not real, nor need it be. It is a goal to strive for, because you only reach it after you leave your body. It is the striving that counts.

So climbing lighthouse steps is a process of pushing yourself up to reach a higher and broader path of learning, while keeping your body and mind prepared to reach even higher.

Chapter Two

Where Did I Come From? Who Am I?

Where did we come from? We are products of stardust and the atoms and molecules formed in a supernova explosion. We are the result of billions of years of evolution on earth. Who are we? We are each one of 6.3 billion Homo sapiens, a species still evolving.

Dawn of Homo Sapiens

If we could be transported back 150,000 years, we would find that our ancestors looked much like us, except they didn't cut their hair and their skin was darker from exposure to the sun. They were slim and powerfully built, suited to their environment and to the need to survive. They communicated with each other using language. They had fire and controlled it. They had simple stone tools, spears, and vessels to carry water.

They slept in caves or under overhangs as protection from the elements and predators. They lived a nomadic communal life with shared property. Their immediate group or band was composed of relatives, and they were part of a larger tribe. The men hunted animals for meat, and the women gathered fruit, nuts, berries, and tubers. Women collected 70 percent of the caloric content of their diet and men hunted for the remaining 30 percent.

Their diet was simple. Meat gave them protein, and the remainder of their diet was heavy in fiber and carbohydrates. What they didn't have was fat, because the animals they hunted were lean. They didn't have salt and sugar except in fruit. They couldn't store food, so they had to eat everything available.

This resulted in binge eating, feast or famine. Their bodies were designed for this, as are ours. In this they (we) are like all animals. We eat whenever we can, as much as we can. Life on the plains was short and survival chancy, but with a superior brain, Homo sapiens prevailed. Strangers were welcome and food was shared. They explored by walking across the globe and eliminating their competitors.

If we could transport a few of our initial ancestors forward to today, we would discover that the only difference between us is the information that is the collected wisdom of our predecessors stored in our brains. We have been able to learn from the past through literature. That is our only internal difference. We would be heavier and slightly taller on average. They would be younger since their environment was not conducive to a long life. Overall, we are mirror images of our ancestors.

Our bodies were designed for a different life than we live today. It was a life of hunting and gathering, procreating and surviving. The entire intervening period has been one of acquiring knowledge that we store in our cerebrum first, and then in books and now in memory chips.

With this knowledge we have increased our longevity, made our lives easier, while acquiring knowledge unimaginable to our ancestors. One fact stands out: While our brains have greater knowledge that we have used to greatly improve our living conditions, our bodies are designed for the distant past, and in this respect we have used them poorly.

Our bodies were not meant to sit most of the day, and our minds were not meant to be distracted by passive entertainment for significant parts of our day. Not having to confront survival, we have let our bodies and, to a lesser extent, our minds grow slack.

Looking back over the last 150,000 years, our knowledge of our environment has expanded exponentially. What this means is that in another hundred years, our progeny will be as much ahead of us mentally as we are ahead of the cave people of the past-but, what about our bodies? They won't change, so we have to treat them differently than we do now.

We must confront the fact that our bodies need serious physical exercise in order to sustain our brains. That is what our bodies were made for-to support our brains. When we fail to exercise our body, when we overeat, we damage our body and thus our brain. Our brain is an unbelievably valuable gift. To treat it as cavalierly as we have is a cardinal sin.

Change

In our universe, 150,000 years is an instant in time. Our entire history is short. Evolutionary change takes eons to spread through the gene pool. Our genes have not changed since our species first appeared, so it is unlikely that there will be significant change in the future.

So what has changed in humans since the dawn of Homo sapiens? The answer is knowledge. We have been able to record discoveries that can be passed on efficiently to the next generation. That has made all the difference

Today our bodies have vestigial organs such as tonsils, appendix, and gall bladder, needed in the past but not today. In addition, the mutation that allowed only children to process milk has slowly disappeared so that most adults can now drink milk without harm. Even morning sickness, a reaction that prevented pregnant women from eating foods harmful to the fetus, is no longer necessary.

Evolution is the result of good and bad mutations leading to changes in our bodies that take place randomly and require long periods before they work their way into our gene pool. There is no likelihood that our bodies, developed over many millions of years, are likely to change appreciably in the next thousand generations. This is something to use to our advantage.

Our bodies are the end product of billions of years of evolution. These bodies were meant for hunting and gathering, and our organs were developed to aid in this process. We differ from other mammals primarily in the size and complexity of our brains.

The sole reason for our body is to service our brain. The only inputs to our brain come from the senses, and the only output goes to the muscles. But because we can speak, read, and write, we can communicate knowledge within and between generations.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Controlling Your Futureby Richard Norgaard Copyright © 2009 by Richard Norgaard. Excerpted by permission.
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