CEO Coach: The best way to approach 2026 is to assume you will live to be 130 years old

Ready for a paradigm shift in your career?

I was at Fortune’s Global Forum this year in Riyadh, minding my own business, sitting in the back row, answering emails and half-listening. So Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, in a panel on life expectancy and healthy lifespan, said something…

“The biggest influence on your health is the number one answer to a question.”

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Antennas connected. Can you guess what the question is? I couldn’t!

“How old do you think you’ll live?”

Read it again, think a little and say your answer out loud.

The longer you expect to live, the more you tend to behave younger and the better you take care of yourself.

Dr. Zhavoronkov went on to say that some people suggest that AI and super-AI will radically affect our life expectancy and healthy lifespan within the next few years. They will accelerate research and discoveries, cure cancer, come close to reversing aging, etc.

But he said: “Our projections indicate that in the next 10 years, that’s not going to happen. But in the next 10 years, it will.”

Then he looked around at the audience and said, “Many of you will live to be 130.”

Okay, doctor, you got my attention — I closed the laptop.

Absolute silence. We all reacted to hearing this the same way you are reacting now to reading it.

The paradigm has just changed.

But that’s the curious thing about paradigms: they usually impose themselves on you, unless you’re the one who provokes them. Your answer to the question about how old you expect to live affects your health.

If you think you might not live until, say, 75 (the age I lost my father, suddenly), you may be making subconscious decisions that help this become a reality.

But, if you thought that there was at least a chance that advances would allow you to reach 130, what changes would that bring about in your way of thinking? What changes would you like to make in your work, your career and your life?

We, who were in the audience, talked about it afterwards, and I sat next to Alex at lunch. First: do we believe it? Totally, partially or not at all? If it just, as my friend John Nugent says, “points you in the right direction,” what changes?

Well, that kind of changes… everything. How you eat and sleep. How you think about your finances. Your job. Your family. Your legacy. The world. How do you view physical activity?

What does this change for you?

I learned, as a CEO coach, that no one gets there alone. To be sustainable, it has to be social. My wife, Maria, and I have been taking HIIT classes two to three times a week for a few years.

In the first few weeks, I did everything I could to not vomit. Every time the trainer turned his back, I stopped until he started to turn towards me again!

Apart from the inevitable absences and relapses, we continued to stay strong, and we both lost around 7 kilos, gained muscle mass and felt 10 years younger.

There are a few lessons there for me, but the main one is the discipline of just keeping going and making it not solitary, but social.

Whatever you want to support, make it social. I remember working with friends after college organizing volunteer programs on campuses across the country, and one of our philosophies was, “Half of social justice is social.”

If volunteering is a burden, how terrible, who would want to? But if there is laughter, color, food, style, music and fun, then it is pleasurable — and that is fundamental to sustainability. It’s the same thing with your “fun time”.

If you like dancing, playing sports, hiking or walking/running/cycling, the biggest factor is finding your tribe, friends to do it with. Social = sustainable. Never learned these activities?

Ah, sorry, if you have decades ahead of you, what excuse is there to say you don’t have time to learn something new? Hmm. I’m sure we could find some good excuses out there…

Maybe you have “10 thousand hours” still unused. Whatever it is that you never learned or never did, just turn the key to the paradigm. Lifelong learning is born from expectations. What expectations do you have for your life? What was left unfinished?

No matter what goals you have or will now set, the more you have a learning mindset, the more you will achieve.

Another big mindset shift associated with living longer is how we think about stress.

If we have at least one or two more decades that we never planned to have, that great crisis that we may be experiencing now (at work or at home) takes on another perspective.

Years from now, you might look back and say, “Okay, it was hard, but it was just something to deal with.”

No one knows exactly what your “time” is, but what if you have more time than you thought?

I was invited to a conversation with the chancellor of the California education system. He called me the next day and said, “I was really skeptical about making a call with a coach and I wanted to apologize. You asked me a question that I thought was really silly, I gave a flippant answer, but then I was thinking about it all night. The answer I gave is not the answer I want.”

My silly question was: if your career was a mountain, would you be going up or down?

Everything is changing. I can give you 130 reasons for you to change too.