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Erik
I am about to turn 50. And...
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Emily
Me, too.
00:00:04:21 - 00:00:29:22
Erik
And so is Emily. I'm going to get there first. I just want you to know that. I'm going win. But we have learned a lot in our forties, and. We're not going to tell you everything that we learned in our forties, but we’re going to talk about some of it today. And it's all going to start with a John Cougar Mellencamp song called Glory Days. Did he sing that song?
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Erik
John Mellencamp? I thought it was... Bruce Springsteen.
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Emily
Let me look this up.
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Erik
No.
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Erik
Well, Emily's looking that up, Welcome to the work of Great podcast. I am Erik Orton.
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Emily
I'm Emily Orton
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Erik
And here we talk about personal growth turning 50. Family connection and raising our kids. We're going to fact-check ourselves right now.
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Emily
Erik wins again. Bruce Springsteen.
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Erik
Bruce Springsteen. Bam! That's like catalog of musical knowledge right here. Just north of my eyeballs.
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Emily
Yes.
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Erik
Okay, so Bruce Springsteen's glory days. Emily, what were we talking about? The glory days.
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Emily
Well, I remember hearing that song in high school and thinking, I don't believe it. It's singing about how kind of a high school football season and all of that is is the glory days. And even while I was in it, I was like, how depressing is that to think that I'm going to peak out at graduation? You know. I just thought, I'm going to be around for a long time.
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Emily
And I, I loved my experience in high school. I had great friends from someone so in touch with and I had a great experience. But I in no way, shape or form ever believed that that was going to be kind of my glory days. Right. And even now, when I have nightmares just about being in high school again. I’m like, wait I don't have to go to high school again. I graduated.
00:02:08:14 - 00:02:21:16
Emily
I’m done. And then I realize, aw it’s just a dream. And things just keep getting so much better. And I think that's why things that we have learned in our nearly 100 collective years.
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Erik
Wow. Don’t. No, No. You know, you can give that for like a business profile like amongst us. We have a collective years experience of this... Age wise, no. But I will say this. I know that when I was a young man, I had a vision of what 40 would look like, and I didn't really have a clear vision of what 50 would look like, but I knew it just fell old.
00:02:46:02 - 00:03:09:09
Erik
And I have to say that I am happy to report that I have proved myself wrong I am so grateful to be wrong in this category. And we've talked about it before, but I'm going to talk about it again. Turning 40, I turned 40 and we were living on a sailboat in the Caribbean. And a quick recap. If you’re new, we lived on a sailboat for a year with our five kids in the Caribbean back in 2014.
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Erik
And it was really impactful for us. And here's what happened. I'm going to talk about and talk about my weight Emily. Hey... going to talk about.
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Emily
What could go weight? And we write a book about our trip called Seven at Sea. And we thought if we really wanted to sell this book in America, they call it How to Lose Twenty Pounds without trying.
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Erik
And that's all right. So why.
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Emily
Don't you tell that.
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Erik
Story? So I had been working an office job for a long time, and it's not very active and always had lots of lower back pain and just was kind of low energy, little pudgy little weight. You know, it's not like in like tail, just like, you know, not a lot of color in my skin. Sunshine wise. You were always handsome to me. Thank you. You’re very kind.
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Erik
And so one of the cool things that happened was that you're living on this boat and you're I didn't have a scale. You barely even had mirrors to see what we looked like. So, like, you could see our faces. We didn't have we did not have a full length mirror. So I never saw what my body looked like.
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Erik
unless it was in a photograph. But we came home and after a year, stepped on a scale. And I was like, whoa. I mean, I knew I dropped weight because I could see it. I mean it was physically noticable.
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Emily
It was an ongoing joke that you could barely keep you swim trunks on because...
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Erik
they were so lose. You should be so lucky. All right. Sorry. Sorry. So. Okay, so I finally weigh myself. I'm like, Wow, I dropped 20 pounds. And guess what? Guess how many times I worked out? One time. I tried to do push ups on the deck of the boat one time, and trying to do push-ups on a boat is like the quickest way to get a bloody nose because, like, you're trying to do a push up in the boat is wobbling ever so slightly in the boat.
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Erik
You can kind of come up quicker than you think. It's going to smack.
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Emily
Comes up to meet you.
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Erik
So I did not work out, but I was relatively active on the boat and we ate differently. We ate better, out in nature, more sunshine and all that sort of stuff. So here's the thing. You think that, up until this point, I thought it was inevitable. I just thought, this is what happens when you turn 40. You're coming up on your forties.
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Erik
That life, your body just, you know, gets pudgier and softer and rounder.
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Emily
You just gotta plan on it.
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Erik
And that that's just how it goes You know your eyesight dims you're hearing starts to go all that stuff that kind of like you know it gets associated with old age. And I and I think that there are certain aspects of it that are beyond our control. But there's a surprising amount, in my opinion, that is within our control and we get to decide what our forties look like, what our fifties look like or our sixties look like and what our nineties look like. Because, it's none of it is written in stone.
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Erik
So much of it is socialized that this is what getting old looks like and it doesn't have to. So I'm talking a lot here.
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Emily
So what happened though? You got home, you got on scale. What did you discover?
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Erik
Turns out I was wrong. Well, I already said that I lost twenty pounds. Yeah, And.
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Emily
Right. You discovered you lost twenty pounds But what else did that bring to your mind is actually even more impactful and shocking then to have dropped twenty pounds without realizing it.
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Erik
Well, I guess first I learned that it was not inevitable, that it did not have to be that way and that, as I'm fond of saying, I saw myself in a new way. this can be different if I just have a different level of physical activity and be different. If I eat a little bit different, it can be different if I have more fun outside, more in the elements, because all the things that I had struggled with physically prior to that, my lower back pain.
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Erik
I mean, all sort of I took the low key ailments of aging were gone. Like 100% gone. So back to Emily's joke about the best way to lose 20 pounds. About, you know. What was it again...? Without without trying. How to Lose Twenty Pounds Without Trying? Step one, go buy a sailboat.
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Emily
Buy a sailboat. So live on it. Yeah. And I think that's really important. A discovery that you had a choice. The choice was always there. But you didn't know there was a choice. You thought you were on an inevitable track. There was nothing you could do about it. So why would you change your behavior? This is just how life goes, right?
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Emily
Like a law, like gravity. Don't fight it. And so you discovered that it wasn't inevitable that you had a choice. And then with that information, you decided to start making different choices. Up to then, you hadn't consciously made any effort to adjust your activity or even that happened because you changed the environment. Right. Yeah. And I know Erik mentioned earlier that we ate better and that whole health world, like, what does that even mean?
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Emily
I can just say specifically for us, we were eating predominantly shelf stable foods, but we made a really strong effort, shelf.
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Erik
Stable... for the lay people here like me.
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Emily
That's like saying canned stuff. Stuff that’s in boxes. Pasta. Rice. It’s not a lot of fresh produce. And may not be what most people consider eating better. But because we had such a tiny refrigerator and we didn’t want to put a lot of leftovers in there... There was no room for that kind of thing. We tried to realize how much food does our family actually eat? And it turns out to get to full,
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Emily
We actually eat about half the amount that what we ate when we were living on land, because I would make a giant pot of whatever we were having, the big casserole and we just continue sitting there and keep eating and we would eat twice as much than we needed to be satisfied. So we still eat a lot of the same foods.
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Emily
It wasn't like we were eating all vegan or some special diet we were eating, the kind of things that were available in the Caribbean grocery stores and that could last the longest on a sailboat in a humid environment. So you just eat vegetables and fruits. But we mostly ate canned foods and box foods but we just ate about half.
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Erik
So that's the first lesson of being in our forties. It's just eat half as much. But just cut your diet in half and you'll be great.
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Emily
I'm just saying what was happening. And in addition to that we got a ton of sunshine and vitamin D and we were in salt water
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Emily
which helped us to be healthy. And we slept on the solar schedule. I mean, there were a variety of elements that were part of what felt healthy in our bodies But the main point is that you realize it wasn't inevitable. And so when we returned to environment where you had previously been sedentary. You started making different choices.
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Erik
Sort of. I think it's... I think it's worth admitting that I promptly, like within a few weeks or months I gained 20 pounds back.
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Emily
You gained 40 pounds back. No. You gained 20 back and then 20 more.
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Erik
No, no, no. I gained 20 back, so I was back to where I was before. And then I realized, you know what I remembered? I have a choice here. All the things you're talking about, this is not inevitable. It's not like I have to just stay at this weight. And I became conscious of it, and then I became I became deliberate, about deliberate about what I was eating, my level of physical activity.
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Erik
And that's when I dropped 40 pounds.
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Emily
Okay.
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Erik
So I dropped 20 without being without trying, you know, and then gained it all back. And then I was like, you know what? I already know that it doesn't have to be. So I have control of the situation. I went to work on it. And then I dropped first 20 and then went another 20 because I was working towards some big goals that I had already checked out on because I thought, well, you know, now that I'm my forties, it's too late to do this.
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Erik
It's too late to climb El Cap. And it turns out I was wrong twice.
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Emily
So you were wrong twice. You were wrong when you thought that weight gain was inevitable with age and you were wrong when you thought you were too old to climb El Cap.
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Erik
Exactly. Glory days, my eye! So this is not necessarily an episode about diet.
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Emily
It's just a metaphor. It’s just a metaphor. So.
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Erik
But I want to talk about, you know, our forties I think I, I can honestly say my forties has been my favorite decade of life hands down and a lot of great things happened when I was ten. A lot of things happened when I was twenty and prior to that. And in my thirties, you know, that decade between 20 and 30.
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Erik
Emily and I got married and all of our kids were born. All of born in those ten years. A little bit...
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Emily
Yeah.
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Erik
Yeah. 34 when the last child was born. So anyway, so great things have happened, but I've really loved being 40 and I'm pretty dang excited about what 50 years holds, 50 and beyond holds. And so I'm kind of like, this might sound a little negative, but we've got I hear people say, I can't, you know, now that I'm getting older.
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Emily
Okay, I have a story about this. Yeah. So it actually kind of surprised me. So I was I was just working at a fundraiser and we were setting up decorations. And at one point, one of the other women was going to stand on a metal folding chair. Right. Which I was going to hold the metal folding chair and she was going to reach up to the ceiling.
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Emily
It was and she was tall, pretty close to what she was reaching to. And and I and I was doing to hold the metal chair for her and she was like, no, no, no. I don't stand on metal chairs. I'm 40 now. Like, those days are behind me. And there may be any number of reasons you might not want to stand on a metal chair, but the fact that your chronological number is 40, it just didn't seem like it needed to be one of them.
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Emily
And so anyway, I was so surprised and I and I came home thinking, Oh my gosh. I'm 43 and I stood up on that metal chair. That's how old I was at the time.
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Erik
You are a wild woman.
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Emily
I stood up on that metal chair and I stuck that piece of tape to the ceiling and everything went fine. And I and I felt young and limber and I came home and just thought I never want to use that as an excuse, like my knees gave out on me. Fine. That can happen at any age, but as long as my knees are working different parts of my body, sometimes I just keep doing these things for as long as I can.
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Emily
I don't want to set those limitations in place for myself. Let them come to me. So that’s how I felt about it.
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Erik
Like I want to run with that, because I think that's an important thing, is to say this is where self-talk is important. And if you say to yourself, now that I'm 40 or 45 or 50 or whatever age you are, and you sort of predetermined in your mind what that age, what you're capable of or what you're not capable of or what you're willing to do or not want to do based on some arbitrary gauge.
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Erik
I ‘m gonna fight you on that. Push back. I’m gonna push back a little bit because I think, well, here's the thing. You can decide for yourself, but don't let other people tell you if you say, you know what, 50 is the age that I'm going to really, that's when I insert whatever like you want to do an Ironman marathon or whatever.
00:15:08:21 - 00:15:21:14
Erik
I don't, but you know, you might say, well, that's only for people in their thirties. Don't let anybody tell you what 40 should look like or what what limits are, or 50.
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Emily
Or 60 or.
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Erik
You know, I can't speak from experience but for those years. But I know I guess just that be conscious of it and be the ultra conscious of the subliminal messages that you might be taking in about what's what's possible or even appropriate for somebody your age. Because... I feel like I'm living my life backwards.
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Emily
And yeah, that's true because we're in our forties sleeping in the back of a minivan camping out in Yosemite, like oh I think we were supposed to do this in our twenties, but here we are.
00:16:00:15 - 00:16:31:17
Erik
Yeah. So anyway, just, I guess just being conscious of letting your perception of what your life looks like at your age be very careful about whether those messages are coming from outside of you or from inside of you. And my hope is that they'll come from inside of you and that they will be more abundant, more prosperous, more healthy, more vibrant, more adventurous than what other people might think.
00:16:31:19 - 00:16:35:19
Erik
I hope you get to exceed their expectations and your own.
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Emily
And I would say for me, the secret to life like youth life is people who are easily delighted, who have something that they're looking forward to and who are curious. And so they are learning something and that is not dependent on the age that you might be. And lately Erik's been listening to some books and and this one this guy is 70 years old and he just set a 25 year plan. And I just thought...
00:17:11:09 - 00:17:32:15
Emily
That's awesome. Like, always be having something that you're looking forward to. We are all going to exit this life at some point, and we're not going to have all the ends ties up like a bow. And for me personally, I just I just want to go out in the middle. I will just have a lot of things in the mix.
00:17:32:15 - 00:17:46:18
Emily
I want to stay current on my relationships and keep them healthy, but I want to always be making plans learning, being curious about something, and just always being willing to be delighted.
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Erik
Do you remember how old you were when we went to go see U2 in New York?
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Emily
Yeah, we're probably in our early 30s.
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Erik
I don't remember exactly what year it was, but I remember just thinking Bono and the Edge and the whole the whole gang, Adam and Larry, they just knocked it out of the park and they're like, I don't know, 15 year older than us. I don’t know exactly. But I’m just like these guys are, you know, not quite my dad's age, but they're older than me.
00:18:23:00 - 00:18:49:10
Erik
And we had an incredible time at this show. And I just remember thinking, This is awesome. These guys are leaning into it. And now 15 years down the road, you know, I haven't seen their show in Vegas but they’re playing at The Sphere. And there's still at it. I mean, Larry's gotten shoulder surgery or something, the drummer. And he's not playing these shows, but they're still at it.
00:18:49:10 - 00:18:57:21
Erik
They're still leveling up. They're still defining what they're not letting anybody say, well, a certain age you got to like, give it a rest, guys.
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Emily
I mean, look at Dolly Parton. She's just a new album and she's almost 80.
00:19:04:14 - 00:19:08:20
Erik
Yeah. And it's like high on the charts. We've talked about this before.
00:19:08:20 - 00:19:36:13
Emily
Yeah. Saying look for it. Look for your examples of people who are like, That's how I want to do, um, getting older. I, I like to say growing bolder instead of growing older. I didn't make that up, but I, you know, collected it once I saw that phrase. And I love that. Like as we get wiser and wiser, we should hopefully be just getting better and better.
00:19:36:15 - 00:19:55:13
Erik
So. So this is not a comprehensive recap on our 40’s or anything like that. But just as we approach 50, we want to take stock and say, you know what? Bruce Springsteen's song Glory Days, it's a terrible way to live. If you’ve peaked at 18 to 25 I'm sorry.
00:19:55:15 - 00:19:57:05
Emily
Great song, great song.
00:19:57:07 - 00:20:18:13
Erik
But I hope that you know, that life can just keep getting better and better and better and I hope you have the joy and privilege of discovering that. And what I've found is that my 30’s were awesome, my 40’s even better, and I fully expect my 50’s to top it. So I'm excited for this birthday, for this next decade. And I’m excited we get to to it together.
00:20:18:15 - 00:20:18:19
Emily
Yeah.
00:20:18:22 - 00:20:22:07
Erik
It’s going to awesome. Anything else?
00:20:22:09 - 00:20:23:10
Emily
What's the right?
00:20:23:12 - 00:20:25:17
Erik
What could go right guys? Thanks for listening.
