1.6. Your Marginal Decade Exercise

As useful as the Timeline Exercise is to remind us of why we want to do the work, it does little to help with what you want to do as you age. You’ll find thousands of training programs for running a 5k, racing an Ironman, or getting a perfect beach body on the internet. None of those things have much to do with living a long, healthy life—that’s where the Marginal Decade exercise comes in.

 

By figuring out exactly what you want to do in your Marginal Decade, you can gain insight into how you must train for your Marginal Decade. Let’s say that another way: having a goal to run a marathon points you toward a particular training regimen. Having a goal to play on the floor with your grandchildren (and get up off the floor under your own power) does the same thing, you’re just not used to setting such goals. With goals like these, you can figure out what you’ll need to be able to do at the end so you can reverse engineer a plan around what you need to be doing today.

 

This way, planning for the end becomes our roadmap for making everything between then and now excellent. We’ve designed this activity to help get you started answering this question: What are your Marginal Decade goals?