All right. So, I am really excited that you're going to get to hear now from Barbara Bradley Hagerty. I am a crazy groupie of hers. Barbara Bradley Hagerty was a correspondent for National Public Radio for 18 years. She's a best selling author. Her current book is Life Reimagined, The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife. I met Barbara when she came to Penn to watch me do resilience training with a group of US Army soldiers, and I just thought she was incredible. I read her book, Life Reimagined, and as somebody who is entering mid-life, as a 50 year old, it has made a big difference for me. And we're going to get to hear her talk about what are the benefits of optimism. That she's found in her research around resilient adaptation to midlife. >> So, the science on optimism really suggested that optimism is basically almost a panacea. It's not quite, but it's a pretty perfect kind of defense against all sorts of things. So people who are optimistic, research shows they recover more quickly from cancer, they're less likely to have a heart attack or a stroke. People who are optimistic live 15 years longer than those who are pessimists. So it's really, really, really good to be naturally optimistic. And in the course of my reporting, I met a lot of people who were really optimistic. And one guy in particular, his name is Bob Stifle, he's kind of the poster child for optimism. One night, it was the weekend, the Friday before the Super Bowl in 2007, he started to get a really sore throat and he felt the sharp starting pain in his left leg. And so he drove himself to the hospital and promptly flatlined. All right, he had this runaway infection. They couldn't seem to stop it and he was in and out of consciousness. And when he eventually woke up, he was missing his left leg from the middle of the thigh down. He had necrotizing fascitis and they had to amputate. So, what Bob had going for him was a couple of things. One is he was naturally optimistic. And what that meant is that he was gregarious and he had developed a lot of friendships during the course of his life. And so when he woke up, there were 500 cards, get well cards on the walls in the hospital and his wife actually had to make a spreadsheet to arrange the visits that he got. He just had a surfeit of friends and those people helped him not only get through those first initial hard days but also as time went on, they'd bring other food, they'd just encourage him. He was part of a church and they, you know, they would just be very supportive of him. So that was one thing that optimism, his natural optimism brought him. The other thing was that he had a sense of gratitude and that is also something typical you see in the optimist I found out all the time. So he didn't focus on what he had lost, he focused on what he still had. He could still watch his daughter compete in a national rowing competition. He could still see his son graduate from college, he'd probably see his daughter get married and his son get married. He had the rest of his life with his wife. He actually used this as a pivot point, which you see a lot, among optimists, that I'm not going to look at the negative, I'm going to look at the positive. And they found meaning. So what they decided is, hey this is a wakeup call. We want to do what we really want to do. Which was to open up an art gallery. And he began selling, he's a cook and he began selling rubs for barbecue. So he really turned this terrible time into a meaningful time, and a time he's really happy. I mean it still hurts, right? Not having a leg, you have phantom pain. And he still has that. But what he does is he focuses not on the pain. He focuses on what he has around him and all the friends and meaning in life he has around him. And that is typical for an optimist. There was another secret that I discovered. So these were the two big insights that I think that I want to emphasize. Friendships are hugely important. It's something that we all, we discard our friendships, right, when we go and when we get serious about our career, when we start having children, those two things gobble up all of our time and all of our energy. And so we kind of discard our friendships and then we wake up and we have our kids going off to college and we're like, my goodness, what do I do now? It's not that you haven't maintained friendships but they haven't been primary in your life, we'll put it that way. So we'll talk about why this is important in a second but let me tell you kind of what I did. I decided, okay, so I left NPR on book leave, and I found myself without colleagues, writing alone, doing research, so I got to talk to people, but basically I lived a really solitary existence. And it was really, it made me feel very, very lonely. It's what I decided to do, is I decided I selected two friends, who were really my closest friends and I decided that I would see them no matter what, within two weeks. Like every two weeks, I had to see both of them. I also decided that I was going to create new friends and so I got a little bit more involved with friends at church. And this is the purposeful life thing, I joined a biking team and I joined another kind of group of 50-something biking babes, and these women have become my friends. And so one of the things I did is I said, what do I really like doing? If it's not you, if it's not biking for you, it's something else. What do I like doing? And can I invest in friendships there, because there's a double whammy. You're doing what you want to do and you're with people who are like minded. And who would like to do that as well. So the other thing that I try to do, I'm not very good at it, but you alluded to it, is I try not to say no. So I'll get an email from an acquaintance or whatever, gosh let's have drinks sometime soon. And everything in me is going no, no, no, I don't want to have drinks sometime soon [LAUGH] I want to just hang out at home, and I stare at that email and I go, say yes. And I mean not all the time but I basically, say yes. And I always have fun and so I'm making new friends.
