How to 70
A close family member turned 70 recently.
The night before his milestone birthday, we sat down for a small, intimate dinner—just a few of us gathered for a calm prelude to the big group celebration planned for the next day. It was the kind of evening where time slows down, and the conversations naturally become intentional.
The restaurant was loud, and it was hard to hear each other. For him, it’s sometimes harder to hear in general, so I had to be very pointed and specific with my questions. I didn’t mind. If anything, it made me more thoughtful and intentional in how I asked.
Finding a moment of quiet, I leaned in and asked him:
“In your 70 years, what’s the one piece of advice you’d want to give to someone else?”
I knew this was a big question—an impossible one, really. How do you distill seven decades of life into a single piece of advice? But I also knew he’d be giving a speech at his celebration the next day, so maybe this would help him reflect on what he might want to share with a larger audience.
He didn’t hesitate. His answer was simple, true, and, unfortunately, often forgotten:
“Don’t sweat the small stuff in life.”
I paused. I smiled. I let out a long, quiet sigh.
At that moment, his words felt like a wave of calm to me. I felt my shoulders drop, my jaw unclench, and the tension I didn’t even realize I’d been holding start to dissolve. His advice was like dropping a dot of food coloring into a glass of water—it spread instantly, coloring everything with its truth.
We started talking about how much of our mental and emotional energy we spend on things that simply don’t matter.
Take something as trivial as choosing a restaurant. We spend so much time deciding where to go, then agonizing over what to order, and later wondering if we made the right choice. We let our entire mood depend on how good the food is, how attentive the service feels, or how the ambiance matches our expectations. All of that energy—spent on something we likely won’t even remember a week from now.
And that’s just one example. When we zoomed out to look at the broader picture of life, we both acknowledged how many daily stressors, arguments, and moments of overthinking turn out to be inconsequential.
So, why do we let the small stuff weigh us down? Maybe it’s because, in the moment, everything feels important. It’s easy to let a bad meeting or a wrong turn on the way to dinner snowball into something bigger. But instead, what if we see it for what it is—a passing inconvenience.
As we talked, I realized how much I admired his clarity at 70. It wasn’t just advice—it was a philosophy, one that had likely taken decades of experience, reflection, and perspective to fully understand.
By the time I’m 70, I hope I have this understanding deeply ingrained in me too. I hope I’ve learned to let go of what doesn’t matter, to harness my life energy toward what really does, and to live in a way that brings joy to myself and those around me.
And that is how I learned to 70.
