Hansen Mark Victor - How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life

How to Make
the Rest of Your Life

the Best of Your Life

How to Make
the Rest of Your Life

the Best of Your Life

Mark Victor Hansen
and Art Linkletter

2006 by Hansen & Hansen LLC and Art Linkletter

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

Scripture quotations noted KJV are from The Holy Bible, KING JAMES VERSION.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hansen, Mark Victor.
How to make the rest of your life the best of your life / Mark Victor Hansen and Art Linkletter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7852-1890-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7852-8926-5 (tradepaper)
1. Older peopleLife skills guides. 2. AgingPsychological aspects.
3. Old ageSocial aspects. I. Linkletter, Art, 1912 II. Title.

HQ1061.H3368 2006
646.7'9dc22

2006013614

Printed in the United States of America

08 09 10 11 12 QW 6 5 4 3 2

This book is dedicated to the 76.9 million Baby Boomers, the Echo Boomers who will come after them, and the millions of people over sixty-five today. May the next fifty years of your lives be the most amazing ever.

Acknowledgments

E very great book is a dream before it becomes a reality. Art Linkletter and I are longtime friends. I asked him to do a book with me, and bless his heart, he said it would be fun.

When I was invited to dinner with Sam Moore, chairman of the board of Thomas Nelson Publishers, we liked each other from the get-go. I told him that I wanted to write a book with Art Linkletter. Sam pointed his finger in my face and said, I want it. It is a beautiful thing in the publishing business to be wanted, loved, cherished, respected, encouraged, and paid to write something that will serve a vast amount of hungry readers. Thank you, Sam.

Jillian Manus, the best agent in the world, said, Lets do it. With the brilliant legal, accounting, and permissions help of my wife, Patty Hansen, and our extraordinary attorney, Ken Browning, we were ready to write.

Our superb helper of helpers was Tim Vandehey. What he did touched our souls. Tim captured the essence of who we are and where we wanted to go. We loved him, had him on every interview, and gave him assignment after assignment, and he handled each one flawlessly. Together, we roared with laughter, had fun, learned a tremendous amount, and believe we have created an important book that will serve our readers well.

My executive assistant, Debbie Lefever, was indispensable as always, arranging conference calls with celebrities and making scheduling nightmares look like childs play. Arts executive assistant, Jennifer Kramer, smiled and navigated the worlds busiest nonagenarians calendar masterfully.

Jonathan Merkh, Publisher of Nelson Books, has confidently listened to and agreed to our endless requests. We deeply thank him for his unwavering belief in this project. Ted Squires, an executive vice president with Thomas Nelson, has been a friend, confidant, and marketers dream since the conception of this project. Many thanks to Belinda Bass for her wonderful design work, and to our editor, Paula Major, for her boundless patience with our endless revisions and rerevisions and her help making this a timeless read.

We thank our many old and new friends who generously gave their time in interviews: Dr. Ken Dychtwald, Dan Burrus, Norman Lear, Dr. Walter Bortz, Sallie Foley, Dr. Steven Austad, Dr. Michael Elstein, Jack LaLanne, Dr. Gary Small, Paul Zane Pilzer, Donald Ray Haas, Cheryl Bartholomew, Barbara Morris, our incredible Senior Acheivers and Senior Athletes, and any others we may have overlooked inadvertently. We dreamed this book; you were all part of the Dream Team that made it a reality.

Finally, nothing would have been possible without the loving support we receive each day from our wives, Patty Hansen and Lois Linkletter. They are the solid bedrock from which we can soar in our flights of breakthrough thinking. They also contributed generously with specific insights to each iteration of this book.

We treasure you, our fans and readers, for reading, absorbing, and using the principles in the book and sharing them with those whom you love and care about. Again, thank you for reading our work.

In the many areas of life, its customary to save the best for last. Thus, we acknowledge and honor the presence of the Higher Power from whom we receive so many gifts and enlightened insights. As youll see in this book, the Higher Power comes first in our lives.

ART LINKLETTER AND MARK VICTOR HANSEN

Contents

T his book is a love letter to the Baby Boomers of America, all 76 million of you men and women born between 1946 and 1964. You have precipitated many economic changes in our country in the last half-century, and as you age, youre going to bring about many moredrastic onesespecially in the cost of Medicare.

In the last one hundred years, think about how much health-care costs have risen. Instead of living until forty-seven (the average life expectancy at the turn of the twentieth century), we now live to seventy-seven, with many of us, myself included, living far beyond that. The spending per capita for health care has gone from $143 in 1960 to over $5,670 in 2003. Even adjusted for inflation, thats an enormous increase. In 1985, as a nation we spent $427 billion for health care. But thats nothing; one projection has future costs by 2008 at $2.055 trillion, with one-third of the lower income group uninsured! Medicare now costs as much as Social Security, and by 2015 it will cost more than the budget for Social Security and the Defense Department combined.

In short, we are living at a time when change is happening everywhere... turbulently and rapidly. The Industrial Revolution is over, and we are living in the era of Information and Communication. By 2050, one of every four Americans will be over 65. But while older Americans have been growing as a class, since 1965 there has been a dearth of birth. The younger generation is marrying later and having fewer children than the Boomers, so there are fewer under-20s looking for beginning or part-time jobs. This opens the door for retiring Boomers who have spent all their money on careless living and must work at least part-time to pad their so-called entitlement pensions. And even those entitlements must change. They will change. Its inevitable.

This book, then, aims to answer the Big Question: Fine, I can live longer, but can I live better? Mark and I have assembled a cast of outstanding authorities on health, business, sex, money, and more to share their wisdom on the ways that older Americans can take advantage of every opportunity in the coming years.

When I go to a doctor or a business consultant, I believe in whats called due diligence. In other words, I find out his qualifications and his past record and then decide if I find him pleasant and accommodating to work with. So fair is fair. I should expect to provide you with the same kind of information about me. Following are some of my experiences in the field of gerontology.