The Longevity Mindset: Add Decades to Your Life and Feel Good Doing It

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:26:09 | Recorded on March 18th, 2025

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We all juggle countless worries every day. But when one of them is your health, you really only have one worry.

Optimal health is elusive when pursued within our current sick care system. Many experience a slow, reactive, and one-size-fits-all approach because the system’s incentives are misaligned. Its infrastructure and economic backing are built around disease management, not disease prevention.

Years ago, I left the conventional system to practice medicine in the concierge model, where my team and I answer only to our members — not insurance companies, big hospital systems, or anyone besides the person we’re serving. We aim to provide the structure and support for members to achieve health goals as ambitious as their professional and personal aspirations.

Let’s cover some of the key areas that everyone should be thinking about and focus on a mental paradigm shift away from the current sick care model.

Longer Life Is Possible

I deeply believe that most people have the potential to add two to three decades of vibrant living to their lifespan. While there will always be outliers, today’s convergence of technology, medical advancements, and a true doctor-patient partnership — where both are the only stakeholders — can completely reshape our understanding of health, aging, and possibility.

If you knew with certainty that you could add 25 years of vibrant living to your life, how would you live differently? Would you love differently? Invest differently? Make different decisions? What kind of impact could you have on the world?

Even if you fell short and added only 15 years, how valuable would that be to you?

For the first time in documented human history, adding this kind of time to your lifespan is within reach.

The New Longevity Framework

High-achievers often excel in their personal and professional lives, but have one glaring blind spot: their health. They move forward with confidence in their finances and relationships, yet they lack the same certainty about their well-being. There’s a lot of guessing and unknowns.

Our goal is to provide health confidence that matches the stability and foresight high-achievers experience in other areas of their lives.

Instead of just a standard annual physical followed by generic advice to eat better, exercise, and sleep more, we use a comprehensive 10-part longevity framework to view health and create a clear roadmap for the future.

If living a long, vibrant life is a priority for you, this framework will be invaluable.

1. Believe It’s Possible

The very first step is to believe adding decades of vibrant living to your life is possible. Without that belief, you’ll never even start the journey.

2. Believe It’s Worth It

Even if you believe longevity is possible, you have to believe the effort is worth it. Otherwise, you won’t put in the energy long enough to achieve the benefit. Just as we invest financially because we believe in its long-term value, we must invest in our health with the same conviction.

3. Be Your Own Advocate

I can’t beat the self-advocacy drum hard enough. No one will advocate for you like you will. If you rely solely on the sick care system, you’ll be placed in the same generalized pipeline as everyone else. An exceptional outcome requires a proactive, individualized approach with you at the helm.

4. Find Your Team

You have a wealth team, a work team — why not a health team? If an area of your health is lacking, you’re likely missing a key person. The right expert will bring the proactive knowledge, strategy, and accountability you need.

5. Stop Smoking

If you smoke, nothing else in this post matters. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death on the planet. If you aim to live a long time, stopping smoking has to happen today.

The good news? The human body is resilient. If you quit today and don’t already have lung cancer, your risk approaches that of a non-smoker within 12 months.

6. Delay Metabolic Disease

Assuming you don’t smoke, delaying metabolic disease is the holy grail of health.

Metabolism is the scientific phrase we use to describe biochemical and physiological processes of taking potential energy from food and turning it into usable, intracellular energy. And metabolic disease is the number one disease on the planet.

Metabolic disease describes a state of energy dysregulation, an inability to manage the amount of potential energy you’re consuming. It includes conditions like obesity, insulin resistance, and diabetes. Diabetes is really just advanced energy dysregulation, and it’s so prevalent now that nothing will outpace its impact worldwide in the next 20 years.

The goal, of course, is to prevent metabolic disease. But prevention starts with delay. If you prevent metabolic disease long enough, you never get it.

7. Hunt for Killers

My mission is to help people live long lives and feel great while doing so. That starts by identifying the biggest threats, the diseases that are statistically most likely to take you off the planet.

Heart disease is the number one killer, by far. Cancer is second. Dementia ranks fifth. Metabolic diseases, like diabetes and obesity, either earn a spot in or contribute to six of the top ten.

If living a long time is important to you, then you and your health team must have an active strategy for seeking out early signs of top killers like heart disease, cancer, and dementia.

8. Prioritize Early Diagnosis

Speed to diagnosis is one of the most important elements of the longevity equation. An early cancer diagnosis generally means less invasive, less difficult treatment and a better outcome. Spotting early signs of heart disease means more runway to change habits and reverse course before irreversible damage occurs.

New medical technologies now enable early screening for many of the top killers, but they aren’t often part of routine care in the conventional sick care system. You need to know what to ask for, and have a doctor who’s familiar with the options.

9. Pursue Health Multipliers

Just as there are wealth multipliers, there are health multipliers: activities and behaviors that yield disproportionately high returns.

For example, according to my reading of the leading science on longevity today, perhaps nothing is more useful for longevity than strength training. Almost all chronic diseases and aging processes involve sarcopenia, or the loss of lean skeletal muscle. Any activity that increases or preserves our lean mass goes a long way to preserving our quality and quantity of life.

10. Never Retire

When I say never retire, I mean retire in the traditional sense: working hard all your life so one day, if you’re lucky, you get to do nothing.

Retirement, in this sense, is a death sentence. When you send your mind to pasture, your body follows. Mortality rates within 12 months after retirement are staggering, almost unbelievable.

It doesn’t help that as we age, we’re surrounded by more and more suffering and death. We’re herd creatures, and we’re impacted by the condition and mindset of those around us.

Instead of going the traditional route, redefine retirement. Work only for reasons that matter to you. Stay engaged, and consistently add younger, energetic people to your circle who bring fresh perspectives and vibrancy into your life.

My Experience Using New Technologies to Hunt for Disease

For cardiovascular screening, the most innovative test offered in conventional medicine is typically a calcium score. The problem? This score only alerts you to calcified plaque in your arteries. But calcified plaque is stable, end-stage plaque. Heart attacks and strokes most often occur due to unstable, non-calcified plaques rupturing and sending clots to your heart or brain.

Soft plaque is the real danger, but a calcium score gives you zero optics on your actual cardiovascular risk.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t realize the limitations of calcium scores until recent years. My own calcium score was decent, and I thought I deserved a pat on the back for my cardiovascular health. Until I got my Cleerly scan.

If you’re 50 or over, I highly recommend adding the relatively new Cleerly test to your baseline screening routine. Cleerly provides a 3D image of your heart and arteries, similar to what a heart catheterization would provide, except without the risk of going through an invasive procedure. You simply go in for a CT scan, the images get uploaded to an AI-based platform, and you get to see exactly how much soft and calcified plaque is lurking in your system.

My Cleerly test results showed 10 times the amount of soft plaque in my arteries as calcified plaque, some of it in very dangerous locations. After about two weeks of anger and frustration, I realized what a gift I’d been given.

Now that I knew my specific risks, I could make personalized decisions about how to address that soft plaque, and I did. Soon, I’ll repeat my Cleerly test and find out exactly how effective those steps have been, what I might need to adjust, and where I should stay the course.

Final Thoughts

Medical innovation is advancing rapidly, yet conventional sick care continues to lag behind. Many doctors aren’t aware of emerging technologies, and insurance companies don’t cover them — at least not yet. (Medicare is toying with the idea of covering Cleerly!)

This is why a new longevity framework is essential. In the sick care system, no one will advocate for you except you. Not your insurance company, and maybe not even your doctor.

If you want to live a long life and feel great doing it, the traditional system won’t get you there. Consider trying a new approach, one that cuts out the noise and puts you and your chosen team in control of your health and future!