“Use it or lose it” requires travelling out of our comfort zone

A Sharp­Brains read­er just for­ward­ed this very thought­ful let­ter by invest­ing leg­end Byron Wien, as a liv­ing exam­ple of many prin­ci­ples espoused by our new book. The let­ter fea­tures twen­ty excel­lent life lessons learned, includ­ing the five below. Enjoy! (bold empha­sis mine)

Byron Wien Dis­cuss­es Lessons Learned in His First 80 Years:

“1. Con­cen­trate on find­ing a big idea that will make an impact on the peo­ple you want to influence…If you want to be suc­cess­ful and live a long, stim­u­lat­ing life, keep your­self at risk intel­lec­tu­al­ly all the time.
6. Evolve.  Try to think of your life in phas­es so you can avoid a burn-out.  Do the num­bers crunch­ing in the ear­ly phase of your career.  Try devel­op­ing con­cepts lat­er on.  Stay at risk through­out the process.
7. Trav­el exten­sive­ly.  Try to get every­where before you wear out.  Attempt to meet local inter­est­ing peo­ple where you trav­el and keep in con­tact with them through­out your life.  See them when you return to a place.
19. Every year try doing some­thing you have nev­er done before that is total­ly out of your com­fort zone.  It could be run­ning a marathon, attend­ing a con­fer­ence that inter­ests you on an off-beat sub­ject that will be pop­u­lat­ed by peo­ple very dif­fer­ent from your usu­al cir­cle of asso­ciates and friends or trav­el­ing to an obscure des­ti­na­tion alone.  This will add to the essen­tial process of self-dis­cov­ery.
20. Nev­er retire.  If you work for­ev­er, you can live for­ev­er.  I know there is an abun­dance of bio­log­i­cal evi­dence against this the­o­ry, but I’m going with it any­way.”