My #1 Favorite Book

Within days after beginning the work on Platinum Living, I discovered Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed my Life. I was just finishing work on the Introduction for my book. I was making the point that it would be great to prioritize our living in the 15-20 good years that we have left with the perspective of those who don't have as long. As they say, "Nobody on their death bed ever wishes they had spent more time at the office."

Shortly after I wrote those very words, I discovered Chasing Daylight, which is the autobiographical story of a man who had to deal with that very issue, having been given a three month "death sentence" by his doctor. For more about this book, the original review is below:

Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed my Life, by Gene O'Kelly - You must read this book. In April of 2005, at the age of 53 and in the prime of a high powered career as CEO of a “big four” accounting firm, the author Eugene O'Kelly was diagnosed with a rare brain disease, and given a three month “death sentence.” Before his death in September of that year, he devoted much of his precious remaining time to the writing of this book. And believe it or not, his premise is that his “death sentence,” specifically the advance notice of his impending death, was the greatest blessing he could have received. On page 6 of Chasing Daylight, he writes:

“It’s just about impossible for me to imagine going back to that other way of thinking, when this new way has enriched me so. I lost something precious, but I also gained something precious.”

Needless to say, I found this book to be a greatly challenging, and a wonderful resource in addressing “rest of your life” issues. My wife Melanie, who has very different tastes in reading (she loves fiction, I'm exclusively nonfiction), also recommends it. In our 38 years of marriage, I don't think there has been any other book that we both recommend. Melanie has suggested that we make it a point to re-read it annually, as a sort of perspective booster shot... Can't say I disagree with that.

So read this book! It will probably change your life.

(To order this book from Amazon.com, just click on the link at the top of the right hand column)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Benefits of Delaying Social Security

I occasionally plow through dreary assessments of how little we boomers are inclined to save and the risks that creates with our retirement prospects…. I do this reading for you, so you won’t have to :-) Occasionally a gem of wisdom will pop out, making it all worthwhile. And those, of course I will pass along. So from an Economic and Budget Issue Brief from the Congressional Budget Office, dated March 14, 2004, entitled “The Retirement Prospects of the Baby Boomers,” comes an excellent and concise summary from a section entitled “The Effects of Delaying Retirement”: "For households facing shortfalls in their retirement savings, relatively small changes in behavior can have surprisingly large effects. Because people who retire at 62 can expect to live another 20 years, each year they postpone retirement reduces their need for retirement savings by about 5 percent. An extra year of work also increases their Social Security benefits by several percent. Taken together, those effects
Read more

Pay Back Your Social Security
It Could Be the Best Annuity You Could Buy

The above title was the original title of yesterday's post , which later became " Social Security Decisions: Important But Not Irrevocable - You Have Much More Flexibility Than You May Think ." I actually posted it with the "Annuity" title above, but after sleeping on it overnight, I realized that yesterday's article was really about flexibility, an important issue in its own right. I have written before about flexibility. The general rule is, "Given two equally attractive decisions, always choose the one that is more "reversible," (i.e. allows you to change your mind later) Flexibilty is a key element in any personal financial decision, and retirement decisions are no exception. In fact, I think flexibility becomes MORE important as you get older, as youre "wiggle room" for creating alternatives diminishes the older you get. And I wrote on this before, in my original article, " Don't Do It ," as a major reason why
Read more

How Long Will You Live? Just Click Here!

I just came across a short blog article on the Seattle PI web site that it turns out was written by one of our Platinum recommended bloggers, Rita Robison. I recommended Rita's blog, The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide , in an article on March 19th. The title of Rita's article was " I'm going to live to be 97. How about you? " You can probably see how that caught my attention. Rita has found a website with a very neat " life expectancy calculator " that asks you a series of questions as it calculates your life expectancy. One of the neat things about it is that it does these calculations as you go along, so even if the ultimate estimate is not accurate (it seems a little generous to me), it's very instructive to go through the exercise. There's nothing like watching your life expectancy drop as you move the slider down to "light exercise" from "moderate exercise," or admit to higher stress levels, how much alcohol you d
Read more