Growing bolder isn’t just a mindset — it’s a way of life. In this inspiring episode, Marc Middleton, founder of Growing Bolder, shares what he’s learned from interviewing thousands of older adults who are redefining what it means to age. From swimming again after 40 years to seeing people start art careers at 100, Marc’s stories prove that it’s never too late to find purpose, passion, and community. He dives into the science of longevity, the importance of staying socially connected, and why having a growth mindset can dramatically improve your health span. Whether you’re looking to reignite your zest for life or want to break free from outdated ideas about aging, this episode is packed with wisdom and practical insights for growing bolder every day.

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The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.

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Growing Bolder: How To Embrace Aging And Live Life To The Fullest With Marc Middleton

I’m excited about this episode because we have a guest here, Mr. Marc Middleton, who’s the Founder and CEO of a company called Growing Bolder. Every week, he’s reaching millions of people through his media company, engaging people with very inspiring stories of people who have lived their lives well and have lived fully alive. He has a ton of wisdom, experience, and expertise to share with us. He himself is also living out this message of growing bolder. I’m excited for you folks to learn from him. I’m excited to learn from him. I’m sure we are all going to be inspired together. Let’s dive in.

Marc, you’ve interviewed over 3,500 people who have lived fully engaged full lives and have lived many decades oftentimes. Have you had any themes or patterns emerge from all of your years of interviews that you could share with us about what it takes to live a life well lived, a healthy, long, active, and engaged life?

Research will back this up. The cool thing about centenarians is that it is an incredibly diverse group. There are more women than men that’s changing gradually, but beyond that, rich, poor, urban, rural, Black, White, overweight, and underweight. What that says to us is it’s possible for about anybody and everybody. What we have learned and what you know is that, genetics is only responsible for, some say 15% and some say 25% of our active longevity. The other 75% is lifestyle.

Lifestyle Choices And Active Longevity: The Key Factors

To your question, what have we learned from older adults about the lifestyle choices that lead to active longevity? There are some common themes, and they are the obvious ones. They enjoy life. They have a to-do list. I was stunned to see that most centenarians still have a to-do list, and it may not be like yours or mine on a digital tablet.

It may not have the same life changing items that you have on yours. It might be feed the cat. It might be call junior and talk to junior, but they have things that they want to do and things that they look forward to. Beyond a certain point, unhappy people stop living. There’s something to be said for a desire to live, a zest for life. They all have some, joie de vivre. They have a joy for life that makes them want to give up.

They have a purpose, and the purpose is probably not the same as yours and mine, but it is a purpose. It’s something that they feel good about. We have interviewed 95-year-olds that are volunteers for Meals on Wheels and helping deliver meals to home bound 80-year-olds because it makes them feel good.

At Shell Point, an amazing community, your volunteer group is phenomenal. It is what keeps them going. They have a purpose. They have a zest for life and are socially connected. Beyond a certain age, you are not going to find any active centenarians that are not socially connected. They wither away. We need to be socially connected.

They either have people that visit them, in a community that supports them, encouraged, and have an ability to mourn and move on. Probably the single most common denominator among older adults is loss. If you live long enough, you are going to lose some of your hearing, some of your eyesight, your keys, your ability to drive, your spouse, your friends, or your kids. The sheer sum of all of that loss is too much for many people. They get broken down by it. Active centenarians that still enjoy life, which is a key, somehow have the ability to mourn and move on. Now they have the ability to adapt and to accommodate to the challenges that life gives them, and still be able to find a way to extract joy out of their life. How’s that?

That’s fantastic. You said so many amazing things there. When you think about your own life, you’ve been successful. You have this amazing company Growing Bolder. You are reaching sometimes millions of people in a given week like the stories you are telling now. How have you found your passion? You are living out your passions and continuing to pursue your passions. You have a zest for life. What are some of the things that you are doing to live out the message that you preach?

Finding Your Passion: Living Out The Growing Bolder Message

I’m impacted every day by the stories that we tell. I always say and I believe it. It’s not just for the people that we try to connect with, but our own individual lives. It’s not the research and the opinion of experts. Lord knows I quote experts and I share research, but the thing that flips the switch in individuals, the thing that has flipped my switch and continues is the examples of others that we can relate to.

The Growing Bolder, we call that the someone like me effect. I don’t mean me. I just mean when we can see ourselves and others, that’s when we believe the research and the opinion of experts. When we can see someone like us doing something that we didn’t think we could do or we never imagined doing, then it’s game on.

I see that all the time. I swam in college and back in the day, nobody continued to swim. There was no professional swimming. Once I graduated from college, I quit swimming. It was the example of people we do stories on that got me back in the pool after many years. I didn’t swim a stroke for many years. Now, I can’t live without it. It’s one of the greatest gifts that my parents gave me. It was the encouragement to get involved in swimming.

I went through it twenty years after college when I thought, “Why didn’t I play golf or tennis or something that had some social benefits?” Now, that I swim three days a week, I realize the physical benefits, and I’m so grateful. I did that because of the people and the stories that we do. We have been at this for decades now. As I get older, I pay as much attention and maybe more personally to the older adults that we do stories on. It’s encouraging.

As you get older, you begin to feel the effects of aging. You can’t ignore it. It happens. People tell us about it and we talk about it, but pretty soon, you sprain your ankle getting out of bed. Things happen. We are biological beings. When they begin to happen, I rely on the examples of the people that we do stories on that are still happily engaged in life in their 80s, 90s, and 100s. That’s where the game is played. It’s all about health span and quality of life. It’s not about longevity. Longevity is great if you can have a health span that aligns with it. If not, it’s a curse.

We don’t want to be unhealthy and decrepit for a long time at the end. We want to be healthy all the way to the end.

We have always tried to do this with Growing Bolder. I always feel like I have to give a disclaimer because we do show stories of older adults that are happily engaged in life. The stories that are easy for someone to dismiss as, “That’s not possible.” “That’s a bunch of BS.” “That’s not me.” I always give the disclaimer that there are no guarantees. If you are looking for a guarantee, look somewhere else. Bad things happen to good people.

Despite our best efforts, we still may not get to where we want to get. You can do everything right and it still may not be enough, but if you do make the right lifestyle choices, surround yourself with people who encourage you, socially connected, don’t drink, don’t smoke, and do these things. You dramatically increase the possibility that you are going to live a life that is fun until the very end. Isn’t that what we all want?

The work you are doing is very inspiring. You are drawing these stories out. As you said, we are able to find ourselves and therefore, people have a vision. I like to think if it’s possible for one human, if one person can do it, then it’s humanly possible. If one person breaks the barrier and you are drawing these stories out from hundreds or even thousands of people to give us a vision for what’s possible.

The boundaries of possibility and opportunity are being redrawn every day. You and I are sitting in a unique position in that we are trying to change the culture of aging for all time. It’s not just for ourselves. Sometimes, I do feel selfish because I do want to change what about growing older. It’s not for those that are in our care or in our communities. It’s for everybody for all time because we have all grown up.

I know this is going to sound like I’m the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I do believe that we are all the victims of a very subtle form of mass hypnosis, cultural hypnosis, and media hypnosis. They have done research studies that show by the time children are three years old, they have a very negative view of aging. They don’t want to get older. “Old people are stinky.” “Old people are stupid.” “Old people are unhealthy.” “Old people are unhappy.”

Our culture continues to reinforce those kinds of things. When you get to be a little bit older than you because you are a young man. When you get to be in your 40s and 50s, and you begin to feel aches and pains. Immediately you say it’s aging or the beginning of the slippery slope into decline, disease, and disability. It’s the beginning of the end, and I have been depreciated by culture in a way that nobody cares about me.

We are hounded this way. The pro aging industry that’s out there that makes you fear every wrinkle, regret every pound that you put on, and feel less than when you start losing your hair. We still have a TV show, but I was a sportscaster and a newscaster for 30 years. I can’t tell you the number of companies that do hair restoration that reached out to me because I was on TV every night, that said, “We are going to give you one heck of a deal. We are going to fix your hairline and it’s not going to cost you anything.” I said, “I’m not interested.” They said, “It’s not going to cost you anything.” Again, I said, “I’m not interested.”

I don’t want to fight that battle every day wondering what’s happening to my hair and worrying about those things. In general, that’s what our culture has done to us. It makes us resent growing older. In Growing Bolder, the simple switch that we have made, we don’t deny the reality of our mortality. We choose to look at aging through a prism of opportunity, possibility, passion, and purpose, instead of simply loss and limitation. That’s what the culture has led us to believe. Making that shift in mindset can have a tremendous impact on how we age.

The Wisdom Of Aging: Letting Go And Focusing On What Matters Most

I like to think it takes a lifetime to gain wisdom. We have all these people now that are living into their 80s, 90s, and even into their 100s, and they have lived 8 to 10 decades and accumulated so much wisdom. You are helping to unlock a lot of that wisdom for the world, for humanity, and for all of us to learn from it.

Thank you for that. We do learn that as you get older, less is more, and a little can be a lot. We did a pledge show for PBS, and we brought in 5 or 6 different experts. One of them is Dr. Bill Thomas, who is a geriatrician. Maybe the most world-renowned geriatrician. He deinstitutionalized nursing homes. He was on our stage live and had a quote that I use all the time. He said, “People in this country think that aging is a problem. Aging is not a problem. It’s a process that enables you to let go of that which matters least so that you can focus on that which matters most.”

'People in this country think that aging is a problem. Aging is not a problem. It's a process that enables you to let go of that which matters least so that you can focus on that which matters most.' Share on X

That is profound. A lot of us will fight. I will fight till the end losing physical capability because that’s important. Some of the things that aging claims destroys people. When in truth, it’s forcing us to focus on that which matters most, and that which matters most is being a good person. Which matters most is enjoying the daily miracles that happen in front of all of us every single day, being kind and empathetic, supporting and encouraging other people, and being a good person. When you get older, those are the things that if you focus on, you can still not find joy in your life, but maybe greater joy than you’ve ever had.

How To Mourn Loss And Maintain A Zest for Life

I want to come back to something that you said about as you age, you are going to lose things. You are going to lose your keys, friends, or loved ones. My grandmother’s 98 and she’s completely healthy. She exercises 3 or 4 days a week. She lives in a life plan community similar to Shell Point up in the DC area. The last time I was with her I was asking her about this. Many of her friends have passed on, but she still has that zest for life. I wonder how one becomes good at mourning loss and so that you can maintain that zest for life. Do you have any thoughts or wisdom around that?

Part of it is the nature of the person. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of selfishness in a positive way. I have met a lot of active centenarians that you might describe as selfish. They love life and they want to keep on, but it’s having passions and purpose. We had a tour of Shell Point and I got to tell you, I was blown away by much of what I saw at the art center. It’s the Tribby Arts Center. Wandering through that and seeing the studios for glass, quilting, pottery, and literature are the things that help you mourn and move on. Encouragement is one of the things that help you mourn and move on.

If you lose a lot or lose a spouse or close relationships, and you don’t have people to support you. It’s easy to go to a dark place that you don’t ever recover from. We talk a lot about the power of positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale wrote a book a long time ago, his classic, The Power of Positive Thinking. That positivity is everywhere, but research will show that negative begets negative more than positive begets positive.

I can encourage an older adult to do something, and they may or may not do it. They like the encouragement. I can discourage an older adult from doing something, and that’s all it takes. One person tell you, “You can’t do this.” “You don’t have the ability to do this.” “You are going to fail at this.” “You are going to embarrass yourself.” Having people that encourage you, but mostly don’t discourage you in the face of loss is critically important.

We did an interview again. If we read something about any older adult doing something cool, we run them down if we can and if you can find them. The problem is a lot of them don’t live alone. They don’t have an email address, and you have to find the community that they are in. There was a woman named Fran Lebowitz that we ran down because I read where she had her first ever one-woman art show at the age of 100 in Philadelphia.

Her first ever show sold out everything. She was an abstract expressionist, and I wanted to talk to her because what I read about her, she had only ever done one drawing in her life. It was a drawing of her then 4 or 5-year-old daughter when Fran was in her late twenties, and she put it away. She was in a senior living community outside of Philadelphia and was going through a box of stuff with another resident there. The resident pulled out that one simple drawing of the young girl and said, “Who’s this? Who did this?” Fran said, “That was my daughter. I did that decades ago.” Her friend said, “What? You’ve got artistic talent.”

That was all Fran needed to hear, was one person encouraging her that she had artistic talent. It took her six years. She was 78 at the time, and enrolled in the Philadelphia Academy of Art, or something like that. She started taking classes, commuting from her senior living community, and finally got her degree. She was painting the whole time, and at the age of 101, she had her first ever one-woman show in Philadelphia and sold everything out. It’s something she had never thought of doing and didn’t do until someone encouraged her. That was at the age of 78. That’s what kept her going in the face of loss. Now she had a passion, had encouragement, and had something she liked doing.

Keeping those passions alive or finding new ones.

We chatted with a guy in your pottery studio, and he said, “That’s what Shell Point is all about. It’s not a retirement community. It’s a reinvention community.” He was in pottery and he was a marketing management guy. Now, he is running your pottery studio. Since 1900, we have gained, on average, 10,000 additional days of life, 27.5 years. The question is, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to continue to live in a way that we are programmed to live?

The exciting part about everything that we do is the power of our mind. What our mind believes, our body embraces. Our psychology drives our physiology, and I believe this with everything. You can have somebody lifting weights. If they believe that it’s working, it’s positive, it’s doing, and the results are going to be far more impressive.

If you have somebody in an art class and they believe that they have got artistic talent and do this, the power of belief in everything that we do transforms the results in doing it. That’s what I like to think that Growing Bolder brings to the party because I’m not one of these smart scientists and physicians that you have on your show on a regular basis. I just know what I have learned from other older adults, what we have paid attention to and what they have taught us. What we have learned more than anything else is the power of our mindset about life and how that is going to drive the daily lifestyle choices that we make.

Mindset: The Biggest Factor In Extending Healthspan

It’s probably the biggest factor in extending our health span and living a longer, healthier, and happier life. It’s probably the mindset.

It is because it’s what drives everything else. You talk a lot about longevity, and I love it, too. Everybody that’s involved in this, but where I diverge from this frantic obsession with immortality, and we see it all the time. I call it the Billionaire Boys Club in Silicon Valley, and it’s going to be great. It’s like the space program eventually gave us Tang, the powdered orange juice. We are going to learn from all of the money that’s being spent to try to increase lifespan, but I firmly believe there’s never going to be anything invented that will give you vitality outside. They may increase lifespan.

I have no doubt they are going to dramatically increase lifespan, but will they increase health span? If they don’t, back to our earlier point, it’s a curse. We have to enjoy our life, and the only thing that does that, the only thing that facilitates loving our life, living a life is having health. That’s determined by the daily lifestyle choices that we make. I always say, “Who’s your primary care physician? Who’s your primary care provider?” You are, period.

People can tell you stuff, but you are the only one that can actualize it. Back to your point, mindset is the thing that makes us get out of bed and exercise. Mindset is the thing that makes us realize we got to stop eating the things that are killing us and start eating the things that give us energy, and makes us engage with other people in a way that’s positive. Mindset is what makes us take the risk of enrolling in a class where we might fail and makes us realize that failure is a good thing. It is mindset.

Personal Habits And Practices For Staying Fit And Healthy

I want to learn a little bit about your own personal habits and practices. I know you are a master swimmer. You are swimming 3 or 4 days a week. Tell us a little bit about your own practices. How do you stay fit, healthy, and maintain your positive mindset?

You can read about stuff. You start growing older and you start feeling and realizing it. It’s constantly making adjustments. You can’t eat what you used to eat, which is constantly eliminating things that you used to do and things that you used to eat. I work pretty hard. I’m not a fanatic at any of it, but yes, I swim three days a week. I usually run one day a week. I want to say bored easily. I have dumbbells sitting in my house next to the dining room table that I will walk by and do those. I have a jump rope outside in the pool area. I have got a chin up bar. I do a little bit of all different things all the time, but I probably don’t sleep enough. That’s one of the keys to healthy active aging.

I don’t want to say I run Growing Bolder because I got people that do far more than I do, but Growing Bolder is a constant business challenge. That keeps my mind active. I write a lot. I read a good bit. I take probably fifteen supplements a day. The jury is out, still on whether those are good or bad. If I read something that interests me, I will investigate it. If a lot of people that I trust and think are smart are taking it, then I will take some of that. It’s fun. I don’t want to say it’s a game because it’s more than that, but as you get older, if you are paying attention, you realize, “I can’t eat this anymore. I have got to exercise more.”

All of the stuff that we have been led to bully. There is a decline in muscle mass, bone density, and VO2 max and all the other stuff that they calculate. There is a decline in that as we age, but not at the rates that we have been led to believe. The difference is, all of the research showed that was done in previous decades was sedentary adults, older adults, which most everybody was. Now that there are master’s athletes, people like me, and many others that are leaning into it, instead of running away from it. It’s a whole new set of research subjects. What they are finding is that it’s everything we were led to believe, once again is not true. You can dramatically slow the period of decline.

One of the things I love about master’s athletes in general, and we are all athletes. We are human beings. We are by design athletes. We are made to move. When I say master’s athletes, I mean older people that are doing stuff. Not necessarily world champions or record setters or anything. Again, bad things can happen to good people. There are no guarantees, but master’s athletes in general are proving what has been a theory. The theory of compressed morbidity. They are proving it to not be a theory, but to be a fact.

We're human beings. We are, by design, athletes. We're made to move. Share on X

If you stay active, if you continue to make the right choices, you are going to dramatically decrease the period of disease, disability, and morbidity at the end of your life. You are going to compress your morbidity. That’s one of the coolest things. It’s like, “Sign me up for compressed morbidity.” At this point, pending the Billionaire Boys Club figuring out the key to your mortality. None of us are getting out of here alive. The goal is to enjoy it as long as you can and when you go in a hurry.

That’s what these older athletes are doing. They are squaring the curve and compressing their morbidity. We see this all the time. It’s bittersweet because we knew them, but we’ll interview somebody often and we hear ten months later that they passed away. When we interviewed them, they were vibrant, excited, and vital. They continued to live independently, live alone, compete, and do whatever they were doing until their period of disease, disability, and morbidity was 2 days, 2 weeks, or 2 months. It wasn’t two decades.

That’s the way to do it.

It is the way to do it, and it saves you healthcare costs. That’s the number one investment we can all make. People, if you don’t like to work out, don’t think of it as exercise. Think of it as prehabilitation. Prehabilitation is something we should all be talking about. We all know what rehabilitation is. Prehabilitation is preparing for the inevitable setbacks that we will all face. We are fooling ourselves if we think we are not going to experience health setbacks as we age. We all will.

To a very large extent, the types of interventions that are made available to us, the degree of our recovery from those interventions, the speed of our recovery, and the extent of our recovery is determined overall health and wellbeing at the time. If you want to keep on, keep it on. If you want to mourn and move on. As we talked about before, prepare for it. Understand that it’s going to happen and get ready. We should all be prehab. That’s what exercise is. Exercise is prehabilitation. Making positive lifestyle choices is prehabilitation. Eating a good diet and hanging out with cool people is prehabilitation. I have wandered through Shell Points seeing a prehabilitation movement buddy here as they are leaning in.

The Future For Growing Bolder And Mark’s Aspirations

I’m excited that we get to hang out. I get to hang out with a cool person. I’m doing it, too. Speaking of mindset, one of the things I hear often is to have this mindset, you want to have a future that’s bigger than your past. As you get to be people that are in their late 90s or pushing 100, how do they continue to have a future bigger than your past? What’s on the horizon for Growing Bolder and for yourself?

It’s a good question. From a business standpoint, that’s not necessarily what you are asking, but I will tell you. It’s difficult running a media company that targets older adults. Older adults have been devalued by everybody, including advertisers and media companies. We are doing tremendous good. We hear from people all over the world, like, “You’ve changed my mindset.” “You’ve saved my life.” “You’ve inspired my parents.” That keeps us going.

In truth, I wish we were more on autopilot. I still shovel coal into the engine every day to keep it going, and we do keep it going because we know we are doing good. We know there’s incredible opportunity, and that’s very satisfying. Everybody that works with us loves the mission. We have got a great team. We are extremely prolific like your team here. A small team of people that get stuff done.

Growing Bolder’s a great brand, so trying to figure out how best to leverage. I always say that it’s one of these brands where you can find yourself in it. I have been very careful not to try to define it too closely because Growing Bolder, for someone that’s been diagnosed with breast cancer, is facing that diagnosis, so being positive about it for someone that’s lost a spouse or has been divorced or has lost their job, or who is struggling with whatever. We all have to grow bolder in life. Older adults need to take risks, and I’m not talking about risk to our health and wellbeing, but the risk of failure or embarrassment.

To your question, what’s up for me? I know there are some risks coming up. I’m not exactly sure what they are. I’m embracing the digital age. I might have mentioned to you previously my fantasy is to one day become a digital nomad. To get growing bolder to the point where I could be sitting on a boat in the Mediterranean on my laptop, inspiring people, creating content, and making a living, frankly. I don’t want to quit work. We all have fantasies inside.

One of my fantasies is I see myself, for better or for worse, as a painter. I always have a canvas at home. I have never taken a lesson and I don’t have time to work on it but some days, I will paint for 90 seconds, but I like that. I have done so many stories. I’m fascinated with artists and I have done so many stories on artists, and when I do that, I quilted for a while as well. I’m a quilter, an abstract quilter. I started painting because quilting was too long, but it’s the only time I find myself in a state of flow.

I find myself in a state of mind where time goes away. I don’t think about anything, and I can feel things working through me. What I have learned from art is that art is nothing more than problem solving. Art is nothing more than stepping back and looking at what you are working on, trying to figure out what’s missing. What part of it works? What part of it doesn’t?

Art is really nothing more than problem solving. Share on X

I did multiple stories on Harold Garde, an abstract expressionist who passed away. He might have been 101 or 99. He’s a great guy. I’d go over and hang out with Harold at his house. He said that I believe that everything that I create is like a scar that hasn’t healed. I continue to work at it with the idea that if I work at it long enough, I may eventually have something of which I’m not embarrassed. The key to being a successful artist, and he was, is to being able to make mistakes and recognize that it wasn’t a mistake. He did that.

He took chances all the time, and he did something. He said, “That works. How can I turn that into something bigger and better than that?” What’s next for me? This is my passion. I wanted to move into the Tribby Arts Center, to be honest with you. I wanted to sign up for every little one of those studios there from photography, pottery, ceramics, and glass. It’s all cool. I believe in that. It’s the power of creative engagement.

There was a study done, Zack, on all of the personality traits that we have, the only one that confers additional longevity is creativity. People who are above average in creativity have lived longer on average in this study. Twelve years longer than people who are not creative and have fewer incidents of about every age-related disease. Here’s where I come in on that. We are all creative. Don’t say you are not creative.

Figuring out what to have for dinner is creativity. Figuring out what to wear in the morning is creativity. Writing email is creativity. Creativity is simply trying to put things together in a way that makes more sense to us. We are all creative. We all have to lean into the creative side of us because it’s one of the most important keys to happy, healthy, active, and vital aging.

I love what you said, you don’t want to stop. You have these passions that you are making a difference in people’s lives. I always look at it as the idea of retiring from the things I no longer want to do in order to pursue the things that I continue to be passionate about, or as you said, learning new things too as we age.

That’s the beauty of the internet these days. I tell my wife all the time, we’re always relating to stories that we did. We did a story on a guy named Rosalio Munoz, a 101-years-old. You can see the story, folks, at GrowingBolder.com. There are zillions of them, but Rosalio was pretty much the poster boy for active longevity. He had everything, a supporting family, and a very strong faith-based guy. He went to church three days a week, got a knee replacement at 94 years old, and took a vacation to Hawaii, and climbed a mountain in Hawaii at 94 years old.

We interviewed his daughter and she said, “Every time I come home from work, he is waiting for me at the front door with something that he has learned that day on the internet. Now I got home and he said, ‘Did you know there’s a planet made entirely out of diamond?’” I’m constantly saying those things to my wife that I learn every single day. It’s such a blessing to be with all the bad stuff that’s happening online these days. What a tremendous resource. I think ten times a day something will come up and we’ll look into it and try to figure it all out.

The lifespan is defined as the longest living individual in any species. That’s lifespan as opposed to life expectancy. Lifespan for human beings is 122 years and 164 days. That’s Madame Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died in 1998, the longest living human being documented lifespan in history. She took up fencing at age 88 and lived alone until she was 110. She rode her bike every day until she was 105.

She was filled with the joy of life. She wanted to continue to learn, so lifelong learning. To the point that the guy who I talked to at Shell Point, he said, “I have not come here to retire. I have come here to reinvent myself to learn.” The lifelong learning programs that you folks have and many others are leaning into as critically important.

Where To Find Growing Bolder And Learn More

Marc, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing the wisdom that you’ve acquired and also through 3,500 interviews of people who are doing amazing things. Where can people find you?

I appreciate that. We are on Facebook. I would say we have got a pretty good social media following, but I would check out Growing Bolder on Facebook but also the GrowingBolder.com. We just launched a streaming platform that’s called Watch.GrowingBolder.com but everything on Growing Bolder links to that.

That would be probably the place to check out what we are doing, and there’s feedback at GrowingBolder.com on the website. I have written a book, Growing Bolder: Defy the Cult of Youth. You can get it on Amazon. It’s still doing well. If I had to say so myself, it’s a good book. It shares everything that we have learned, this stuff that we have talked about, the secrets to active longevity. Check us out there.

You’ve inspired me, and I’m sure that you’ll be inspiring many of our readers. I thank you so much for being here with us and for sharing everything that you’ve learned.

I appreciate you having me on. I love what you folks are doing. It’s important and needed. This show is going to make a big difference in a lot of lives. You are not asking me to say anything about Shell Point, but I got to tell you what a place and what a community this is. The challenge in senior living, in general, is to turn senior living communities into the perception that many people have. It’s a place where you come to get ready for the end as opposed to a place where you come to get ready for what’s next. This is very much a what’s next community. I have been inspired to hang out here with you as well. Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Marc. I appreciate you.

You bet.

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What an amazing conversation with Marc Middleton from Growing Bolder. I hope that you were inspired and learned some things along the way as I did. A few takeaways for me is mindset. It’s such an important piece. This is the driver of everything else. If we don’t have a zest for life, a curiosity about life, and if we don’t keep learning, then there’s no reason to keep waking up every day and keep pursuing exercising and healthy eating and all the other things that are going to help us stay healthy.

That’s one of the things I enjoyed talking with Marc about, is how do we maintain that mindset that does keep us active, keep us healthy, and how much that drives everything else. Another thing that is a key takeaway was the idea of prehabilitation. That’s a word I hadn’t thought about before. We talk a lot about rehab, but we never talk about prehab. It’s like preventative healthcare, but prehabilitation.

All of those things stemming from our mindset, but exercising, eating healthy, and getting plenty of sleep. All the basics of taking good care of ourselves is pre-rehabbing or pre-rehabilitating for when challenges do come, when we do have an injury, or when we do have a loss that we have this healthy mindset and healthy body so that we can adapt and handle those things as they come. This idea also of constantly reinventing ourselves if we are staying curious. I love that idea.

He talked about the gentleman who learned something new every day and then told his daughter about it, then we are looking for things that we are learning. That keeps our minds active and engaged. I know we have talked with others on the show about the idea of neuroplasticity that at any age we can continue to make improvements in our brain health and in our physical health as well.

Our epigenome only takes about six months to change. If we are learning something new every day, we can continue to keep our brains and our minds healthy, which maintains that healthy mindset throughout our lives. I hope that you learn and enjoy this episode as much as I did, so thanks so much for reading. Until next time.

Important Links

• Marc Middleton Website
• Marc Middleton on LinkedIn
• Marc Middleton on Facebook
• Growing Bolder
• Growing Bolder on Facebook
• Shell Point
• The Power of Positive Thinking
• Growing Bolder: Defy the Cult of Youth, Live with Passion and Purpose

About Marc Middleton

Marc Middleton is Founder and CEO of Growing Bolder. One of the leading voices in the active lifestyle movement, Marc is the co-host of the Growing Bolder TV and Radio Shows, executive producer of Surviving & Thriving, editor of Growing Bolder Magazine, author of Growing Bolder: Defy the Cult of Youth, Live with Passion and Purpose and  Rock Stars of Aging, director, videographer and writer of the feature length documentary film, Conquering Kilimanjaro, and a featured blogger on the Huffington Post.

A multiple Emmy Award-winning broadcaster, Marc became one of the industry’s first bloggers—filing daily online reports from the Sydney Olympics. He was one of the first to recognize the power and influence of the rapidly growing 50+ audience and the coming cultural shift that would change everything we thought about the possibilities of life after 50.

Determined to position himself at the intersection of emerging technologies and the impending age wave, Marc took a huge risk in 2006, walking away from a news anchor job to launch the multi-platform Growing Bolder network. Since then, Growing Bolder has created one of the world’s largest libraries of active-lifestyle content, producing shows for all platforms and custom branded networks for the retirement and healthcare industries.

In his spare time, Marc practices what he preaches. He likes to paint, travel and is a multiple world record-holding masters swimmer and a nationally ranked high hurdler.