You're Not The Finished Article

There's something I've noticed about getting older that has very little to do with the body.

At some point, people start talking about your life as though the interesting part has already happened.

Your best years. Your greatest achievements. The things you used to do.

Even compliments can sound suspiciously like someone reading out your retirement speech.

And if you hear it often enough, it's surprisingly easy to start thinking that way yourself.

You've had your career. Raised your family. Built a few things. Made your mistakes, hopefully learned from some of them, and collected enough stories to bore the grandchildren for years.

So what's left?

Well, quite a bloody lot, I would hope.

One of the things I enjoy most about training is that, after 44 years, I still haven't finished learning.

Think about that for a moment.

I've spent most of my life doing something, and I'm still finding better ways to do it.

Some of what I believed twenty years ago, I wouldn't dream of teaching today. Not because I was an idiot back then, although I certainly had my moments, but because experience has a wonderful way of exposing what you don't know.

And that raises an interesting question.

If I can still improve something I've been doing for more than four decades, what else am I capable of becoming better at?

I think that's where a lot of men get their thinking backwards.

We assume that getting older means gradually running out of possibilities.

But experience should give us something valuable: better judgment about which possibilities are worth pursuing.

At twenty-five, I had plenty of energy and very little patience. I could push through mistakes that would cost me dearly today.

At fifty-six, I have to be more deliberate. I can't afford to waste recovery, ignore warning signs or mistake exhaustion for achievement.

But I wouldn't trade everything I've learned for the ability to recover like a twenty-five-year-old again.

Well, perhaps for a weekend. I'm not completely unreasonable.

The point is, I'm not interested in spending the rest of my life maintaining a museum of the man I used to be.

I still want to improve.

Not necessarily at everything. And certainly not by pretending that age hasn't changed the conditions.

I want to become better at using what I have.

Better at recognizing what matters. Better at making decisions. Better at building strength that serves a purpose rather than simply impressing someone.

And I want to keep discovering things about myself that I couldn't have known ten years ago.

There's a peculiar freedom in realizing you don't have to be the man you were at thirty.

You can take everything he learned, leave behind some of his stupidity, and build someone with considerably more substance.

That's not settling for less.

That's using your experience for something.

So don't be too quick to describe yourself by what you've already done.

Those achievements matter. They brought you here.

But they aren't the whole story.

You may have another twenty or thirty years ahead of you. Perhaps more, perhaps less. None of us gets to know.

What I do know is that those years deserve more than being treated as an extended closing ceremony.

You are allowed to have ambitions that don't involve getting back to where you used to be.

You are allowed to want something new.

And you're allowed to become a man who surprises even himself.

At fifty-six, I don't believe I've seen the best of everything I have to offer.

I hope you feel the same about yourself.

Because, Brother, whatever your age, there's one thing I'd hate for you to believe.

That you're already the finished article.

— Psymon

P.S. Writing Unbreakable After 50 — The Structural Rebuild was itself proof of something I've come to believe: experience becomes far more valuable when you do something with it.

The book brings together what I've learned from decades of training, injury, rebuilding and questioning ideas I once took for granted.

It's not about returning to the man you used to be. It's about understanding what you can still build from here.

If these letters have made you look at yourself a little differently, I think you'll enjoy going deeper.

Explore Unbreakable After 50 — Paperback, eBook and Audiobook

To those who've already bought the book, thank you. I hope it challenges a few things you thought you knew.

— Psymon unbreakable-after-50.html

“The 1-Hour Breakthrough Call for Men Over 50”