This One Study Will Change How You Think About Your Entire Life: The Cornell Legacy Project

Life is incredibly short. It passes by faster than you think it will. When you come to the end of your life, you are going to value people and experiences over things. Not one person, not a single person said, "I wish I'd spent more time accumulating more things."

Hmm. Today on the Mel Robbins Podcast, we have life lessons from 90-year-olds with Professor Karl Pillemer from Cornell. Once you hear these lessons, your life will never be the same.

Unless you have a compelling reason to say no, always say yes. If you're offered a new responsibility, offered a new opportunity, in general, have your principle be, that may take me out of my comfort zone, but I'm going to say yes. And I'm telling you that thousands of people told me this. You absolutely are much more likely to regret things that you didn't do than things you did. I would encourage you folks to say yes rather than no. This was one of the most profound regrets. Over and over, people said, "I wish I had expressed love more. I wish I had asked for forgiveness," because that is a truly time-limited possibility.

Say what you need to say. Take the backpack off. Free yourself of the emotional weight of waiting for the right time, and that freedom is available to you literally right now.

You can't assume that people understand how much you love them, how much you care about them, how proud you are of them.

Say it now. Please help me welcome Dr. Karl Pillemer to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

It is such a pleasure to be here, Mel. I just can't wait for our discussion.

I have been waiting nine years-

(laughs)

... to meet you in person, so I'm thrilled that you're here, and here's where I wanna 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 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 wanna 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. Uh, 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. Uh, so it's a question of discerning what you can control and what you can't. And what would you do if that was, uh, the wisdom you were gonna base your life on? Well, there are some things you really would do. One of those is you would stop waiting for things like, uh, um, 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 a day, and the elders told me all kinds of things, a colored bird on the lawn, a phone call from a friend, the silly antics of the dog. You would treat moments, and conversations, and days, uh, with people you love as precious rather than routine that you're just walking through. Those are all part 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, uh, that's really the essence of it. Uh, you know, these are sailors on the sea of time who've gotten to the end of this journey.