Health

I'm 42 years old as I write this. I feel every creak in my bones these days. When I was eighteen, I never creaked at all! I've seen a lot of good people leave this world, some as young as 10 years old, others 90 going on 25. Some never even had a chance at all.

Death and serious illness or incapacity will snap your head around, and put life in sharp relief for you: all the money in the world cannot substitute for your health, or the health of those you love. I have had some close calls on both counts; some we won, some we lost. I cannot tell you how much it would mean to me for my father to know my daughters, and to enjoy them growing up before our eyes.

Health is the most important of the three pillars. It's like the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. Without your health, everything else that you do or gain will seem trivial.

Input

Your fitness depends mainly on two things: input and output. Everything you put in your body is a drug. Or more accurately, everything is a chemical. We tend to think of drugs as artificial chemicals and food as healthy plants and animals, but in this age of processing, the difference is not as great as you think. In the end, it's all fuel for your body to consume, one way or the other- directly into your bloodstream, through the skin (like sunlight, which breaks down Vitamin D), or via the digestive tract. Choose wisely what you put into it.

Mary and I saw a Las Vegas comedian once who asked, "If you eat a ton of broccoli, how much will you weigh? Answer: a ton." A vegetarian diet is no promise of healthy living. I've known plenty of overweight and/or malnourished vegetarians. There are many diet and fitness gurus out there, tons of books and Websites, and lots of mystery foods and supplements claiming to offer miraculous benefits. Be suspicious. Do your homework. Find sources you trust, and even check on them. It's pretty easy to stay away from cigarettes, alcohol, and recreational drugs. It's a lot harder to stay away from chocolate (ask me, I know!).

Output

The formula for weight loss is: burn more than you eat. That means exercise, if you've already put on some extra fat. But it does not have to mean a gym, or hours of running. Simple walking will do. In truth, input (diet) is much more vital than output. You can save yourself hours of time at the gym- time you could spend doing other things- if you will just eat sensibly. If you are eating maintenance-level calories (about 1,400 for women and 1,900 for men), then just walking for 15 minutes a day in sunlight can do wonders for you. Add a quick routine of push-ups, squats (no weights), and sit-ups, plus a minute of stretching, and you can tone while you lose weight, limber up, and build strength.

Skeptical? Try it. Those same exercises are what the Marines primarily use to train their recruits. And pro athletes like Herschel Walker never set foot in the weight room after becoming an NFL running back. But he did do 1,000 sit-ups, 3,000 push-ups, 500 squats, and ran 5 miles every day.

To my daughters, to make much of time

About a year ago, I started writing a book called How to Quit Your Day Job. I have not finished it yet, because, um, I have not yet quit my day job.

Well, I have and I haven't. I am self-employed, having left my job of seven years to be a full-time actor on the Fox TV show Prison Break. But once that gig ended, I returned to my former employer as a freelance consultant.

But whatever. The point is, I was writing this book. I have great ideas about how other people should focus their lives and careers. Other people. But me, not so much. I am Mr. Career Schizophrenia. I never want to feel like I have left money on the table by walking away from a business opportunity. Having multiple talents is a blessing and a curse. It certainly makes it easier to make a living, but makes it harder to focus on any one thing (at least for me).

And focus is, in my humble opinion, perhaps the key ingredient to insanely great success. Everything else is distraction, period.

So, back to the book. As I wrote the book, it evolved from just a simple career guide to a more "how to live your life" guide, thanks to my conversations with friends and colleagues who were undergoing the same mid-life career crisis that I was: trying to find their true calling and go after it, despite the wife, kids, and mortgages.

During all the introspection inherent in this process, I realized that there are really only three (3) things that I need my daughter to learn about:

1. Health
2. Spirituality
3. Money.

That's it. Everything else is an offshoot of one of those three. What's more, my faith in the public school system's ability to teach these things (heck, to teach anything!) is rapidly eroding. I earned three degrees, including two master's degrees. I understand what college does and does not do for you. Most of what my daughter needs to learn will come from her mother and I, not school.

Well, if we are going to teach her, I realized, then we need a textbook. Aaaaaaaaand, we're back to the book. The book, currently titled Notes to my Daughter: How to have the life you want, is what the book has evolved to.

Recognizing that I am not supremely qualified in all (any?) of the above areas, I have enlisted the help of others whom I consider to be experts. Some of them may be famous, others not, but they are all people whose opinions I respect, and so I have distilled and included them in the book.

Hopefully it will prove a lot more useful to her than analytic geometry did for me.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, we've been blessed with a second beautiful daughter, Madeleine. So Notes to My Daughter becomes plural. We'll test everything out on Danielle, and then Madeleine can benefit from the second edition. ;-)