Chapter 1: What are the biggest regrets of people in their 80s, 90s, and 100s?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. If you could go back in time and spend just a few minutes with your younger self, let's say your 15-year-old, your 20, your 30-year-old self, I bet you would know exactly what you'd say because you have important advice to give. You have some valuable lessons that you would share.
You would say, look, here's exactly what you should do right now. But hear me out, hear me out. Wouldn't it be amazing if every once in a while, you could time travel forward to the future and get advice from the older, wiser version of you? Wouldn't you love to find out what changes you could make in your life right now while you still have the chance? Psst, I got a little secret for you.
You can. Because today, you and I are hopping in a time machine and going to the future to hear the life lessons that every single 90-year-old wishes they knew when they were your age. That's what we're doing. See, I have this amazing guest here in our Boston studios, and he is the perfect person to share these life lessons with you.
If you've ever wondered, what is the secret to living a happy life? What are the biggest regrets that people have at the end of their life? And at the end, what really matters?
Chapter 2: How can we avoid the common regrets of the elderly?
And what doesn't? Well, you're about to find out. And once you hear these life lessons from 80, 90, and 100-year-olds, you will never be the same again.
It's true. It's true.
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited that you're here. It's always an honor to be together and to get to spend time with you. If you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.
And I can't wait for you to meet today's guest, Dr. Carl Pillemer, and learn the life lessons from people in their 80s, 90s, and even in their 100s These are life lessons you didn't know you needed to hear. Professor Pillemer is one of the world's leading researchers on aging and family relationships.
He's the Hazel E. Reed Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and Professor of Gerontology in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. He's also the founder of the Cornell Legacy Project. It's a massive, decade-long study capturing those hard-won life lessons that you're about to learn today.
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Chapter 3: What simple shifts lead to lasting happiness?
His best-selling books, 30 Lessons for Living and 30 Lessons for Loving, are blueprints for how to live a life with more meaning, fewer regrets, stronger relationships, and the happiness you deserve. He's also the author of Fault Lines, Fractured Families, and How to Mend Them. Professor Pillemer has published over 150 peer-reviewed studies. His work has been cited more than 26,000 times.
And I am so personally excited to have this conversation because Professor Pillemer's work has impacted me and changed my life. so much so that I cite his work in my first book, The Five-Second Rule. I've discussed it and taught it on stages around the world. I reference it every single chance that I get.
Can you tell I'm so excited that he has taken the time to come here to our studios in downtown Boston? So please help me welcome Dr. Carl Pillemer to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
It's such a pleasure to be here, Mel.
I just can't wait for our discussion. I have been waiting nine years to meet you in person, so I'm thrilled that you're here. And here's where I want to start. Could you speak directly to the person who's with us right now and share with them what could change about their life or the life of somebody that they care about?
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Chapter 4: What advice do older adults give about living a fulfilling life?
who they share this episode with, if they take everything that you're about to share with us and teach to us today, and they apply it to their own life.
I want to share with you a lesson that many people learn too late. One of the things older people have told me over and over is that life is incredibly short. It passes by faster than you think it will. There's a corollary to that which is even more important, and that's that happiness and fulfillment and purpose are not a destination that you will arrive at when conditions are somehow perfect.
Instead, happiness and fulfillment and purpose are the product of choices you make amidst the kind of circumstances in which you find yourself. So it's a question of discerning what you can control and what you can't. And what would you do if that was the wisdom you were going to base your life on? Well, there are some things you really would do.
One of those is you would stop waiting for things like to travel or express love or find a more meaningful job. You would make more conscious choices to be happy and to optimize your current situation. You would focus on what's working rather than what's not. You would savor small things throughout the course of the day.
And the elders told me all kinds of things, a colored bird on the lawn, a phone call from a friend, the silly headaches of the dog. You would treat people.
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Chapter 5: How can we make the most of our relationships?
moments and conversations and days with people you love as precious rather than routine that you're just walking through. Those are all part of of what you can do if you embrace this elder wisdom about life being extremely short and that life can't be deferred. And so that's kind of where, I mean, I think that's really the essence of it. These are sailors on the sea of time.
We've gotten to the end of this journey. And one of the things they really know about is how to use this extremely limited lifetime that we have.
You've spent over 20 years at Cornell researching the biggest life lessons, the biggest regrets, the tactical advice that people in their 80s or 90s, even 100 and beyond have. You call it the legacy project. Could you tell the person that is listening right now a little bit about the legacy project and what it's about?
Sure. I'd been a gerontologist for around 25 years. I was in my early 50s, and I had a powerful revelation that all I was studying was the problems of older people, and older people as problems. So I really had the idea...
Chapter 6: What role does gratitude play in happiness as we age?
What do older people know that younger people don't? And could I find that information and distill it in a usable form? The one thing people don't realize, and one thing that we've lost in our age segregated society, which is one of the most age segregated now that's ever existed,
is that it's only been in about the last 150 years or so that people have gone to anyone other than the oldest person they knew for advice about life. And we know from anthropological studies that older people were absolutely critical to human survival.
If you were in your 50s and everybody else was dying in their 20s and 30s and you knew what to do in a drought or what to do in a famine or where better land was, people have found that older individuals were key to human survival.
We're at the risk of losing what is honestly an extremely natural human process, which is not asking older people for their stories or their anecdotes, but asking them for their practical advice for living. If I can tell one story, I can say that there was a moment in which this revelation occurred. I was starting to think about, you know, that I was on the wrong track.
Because also we scientists get funding for solving human problems. So you don't get so much money for trying to figure out why people are happy. So I had that problem focus. And I was doing research in a nursing home. And the nurses knew I liked interesting older people, and they introduced me to somebody who I called June Driscoll in the book.
And I went in, and it was like a typical nursing homeroom.
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Chapter 7: How can we approach life decisions to minimize regret?
This was a very frail woman. She couldn't get out of bed. I imagine only had a few more months to live. And I asked her how she was doing. And in this strong voice, she said, just great. I've had my bath. I'm watching my programs. It's a nice day outside. And I was so surprised that I asked her, how could this be? And she said, look, I grew up in terrible poverty.
I didn't have three square meals a day. Now I'm being taken care of. I have a place to live. I have people who are caring for me. Why would I be unhappy?
Chapter 8: What practical steps can we take to live intentionally now?
And that's when she said, the thing that got me to write the book, first of all, she said, young man, and in my mid-50s, that was nice. But she said, young man, you will realize when you get to be my age that happiness is a choice and not a condition. And that you learn to be happy in spite of things. So I thought that, hmm, I mean, it just sent me on this quest.
You know, I'm sure you've had this every once in a while. Something happens when you realize you're about to go on a journey that for me led, you know, talking to these hundreds of people over many years, but where I just had to understand how can there be this paradox of happiness and aging where many older people
despite all the problems they have, have solved some of life's individual problems and are very happy. How could we find that out and not waste that resource?
You know, I'm actually reading from your blockbuster bestselling book, 30 Lessons for Living. This is page 232. What's different about aging is that you don't have 50 more years when you're 80.
Yeah.
And if you really take that into consideration, there's something about limited time that focuses the aperture that you have, the lens that you have on life about what matters. Because if you really, let's say that you're listening right now in your teens or 20s or 30s or 40s or heck, like me in my 50s, if you knew you only had
one year or a week to live, notice how quickly you would only focus on the things that actually were important. And so much of the crap that occupies your mind and your energy would just drift to the side because you would suddenly know you have limited time. So you focus on what matters.
And what I love about your work is the practical advice that you're about to hear and the specific things to really think about and focus on and change now come from a group of thousands of people. who had that exact experience. I have limited time.
So by God, I'm going to wake up and spend that time on the things that actually matter because I'm learning from the things that I regret that I didn't do earlier. And I think that's the opportunity of this conversation. What is the biggest takeaway from your research about how to live a happy, successful, and healthy life? There are some runners up.
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