Become powerful: what actually works in life's second half

Sixteen moves that build personal power—a pathway to healthy longevity.

Travel has a way of exciting new ideas, new spirits, new ways of thinking. The farther from home you go, the bigger your thoughts and ideas become. During my recent two weeks in Sydney, my first experience of Australia, I caught myself contemplating the notion of becoming powerful.

I don’t mean just physically or professionally. But rather powerful in life, like a gemlike flame¹.

We all need to think about becoming powerful, or more powerful, after 45, after 50, after 60—a number I’m going to hit in about 4 weeks (a fact that continues to blow the mind of this surfing, sprinting, ego-lifting, occasionally sophomoric 42-year-old-at-heart².) Not the cartoon version of the word, mind you, but the more durable, effective, positive and gratifying kind of powerful that forces us to figure out what we want from the remainder of our lives.

Becoming powerful, or more powerful, as we age is a potent form of longevity. When you begin pulling within range of mastery over the life areas you care about most, your relationship with the world begins to change. Negativity starts bouncing off you instead of sticking; optimism radiates from you, like a broadcast signal that beckons other like minds; and bullshit stops bothering to even ring your buzzer…or maybe you just stop noticing when it does.

I think of personal power as manifesting in six forms: physical, nutritional, emotional, cognitive, spiritual and social. (Not coincidentally, these are also the manifestations of strength this Substack is built on.) To bring those six forms to life requires building actions, habits, mindsets—choose the descriptor that works for you—that allow you to flex each of them, as you would any developed muscle.

These are my 16 ways to become powerful, or more powerful, in life’s second half. I elaborate on each below.

16 power moves for your second half

1. Pay attention

2. Persist—90% of power is not quitting

3. Eat the Fritos, move on

4. Choose action over inertia

5. Know why you deserve it

6. Constantly ask “What if?”

7. Embrace beginner’s mind

8. Get wet and sandy

9. Schedule bullshit time

10. Carve out your morning 10

11. Feed your body, brain & soul

12. Be kind to your carcass

13. Look better each month

14. Spend your no’s

15. Practice mattering

16. Lift heavy things

How to put each power move into action

1. Pay attention

We live in a distraction economy that is lethal to a quiet mind. Your attention is a currency, and how you spend it says a lot about what you value or don’t value. I’ve come to think of this formula: attention = satisfaction. When you talk with a friend, cook a steak, do a split squat, watch a film or debate a strategy, the more you focus, really tune into what is happening in the moment to the exclusion of everything else, the more enjoyable and meaningful is the conversation, the oven-finished filet, the workout, the cinematic plot or the strategy session. Depth is powerful.

Two Harvard guys built an iPhone app that pinged 2,250 people at random moments and collected about 250,000 reports on what they were doing and how they felt. People’s minds were somewhere other than the task at hand almost half the time. Where the mind was predicted happiness better than what the body was doing. Paying attention is a skill that happens to force you to put the phone down, leave it off or—radical as it sounds—off your person or in another room. Paying attention, by the way, also means to yourself, including understanding when you need to veg out.

2. Persist—90% of power is not quitting

Some readers may have noticed that I end many of my replies to comments on AGING with STRENGTH articles with a familiar imperative: “Keep going.” There are so many advantages to refusing to quit. What so often separates people who achieve big things from those who don’t is plain, boring persistence.

I’ve been strength training for 47 years. Nothing about that requires talent. It requires showing up month after month, and putting up with the misery of working my way back from weakness after each of my seven orthopedic surgeries. It took me about 10,000 hours to develop expertise in writing, fitness, parenting, kicking a soccer ball, and journalism. I’m still working on surfing, tennis and Substacking.

Expertise = power. Becoming an expert through persistence makes you powerful.

3. Eat the Fritos, move on

If you’re like me, you will eat the entire, party-size bag in one sitting. This will happen on a random Tuesday evening, and the chips are not the problem. The problem starts about ninety seconds later, when you decide in the bad light of that moment that you are a flabby, undisciplined piece of crap who, late in his sixth decade, still eats whole bags of Fritos, and then spend the next four days castigating yourself for eating 9,000 ultraprocessed calories. But that’s not powerful. Powerful is forgiving yourself for not being a machine, taking a moment to inquire what may have prompted the lapse, and moving on. Self-forgiveness = powerful.

Two Berkeley psychologists ran four experiments on exactly this question: does going easy on yourself after a screwup make you soft? The opposite. People told to respond to a personal failing with some kindness came back more motivated to fix it, and studied harder after a bad test, than people who got a pep talk about their self-esteem or nothing at all.

4. Choose action over inertia

I’m convinced that most powerful people have watched “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town,” the 1970 stop-motion animation classic, because they all tend to follow its central admonition: Put one foot in front of the other. Powerful people keep moving forward, they choose creating over deliberating, and accept imperfections as a cost of labor. My least productive weeks are the ones I spend re-reading, re-tweaking what I’ve already published instead of churning out the next imperfect article, live interview or audiocast. Reviewing may feel like work, but it’s yesterday’s. Becoming powerful means habitually pushing into new territory—just like young Kris Kringle.

Steven Levitt built a website where people stuck on a real decision—quit the job, end the relationship, move—flipped a virtual coin and reported back. More than 20,000 coin tosses later, people the coin told to make the change were more likely to make it, more satisfied with the decision, and measurably happier six months on than those told to stay put.

5. Know why you deserve it