Retirement Tips

Retirement Investing - Taking It One Day At A Time

October 21st, 2006 by Papabear

Yesterday I wrote about re-reading parts of Dale Carnegie’s book “How To Stop Worrying and Start Living”. In the first chapter he talks about the concept of living in “one-day compartments”. That made me thing of the Christy Lane song “One Day At A Time”? About 20 years ago it seemed like a commercial was on TV every 15 minutes selling that album.

Dale Carnegie tells the story of a speech given by Dr. William Osler, founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Osler spoke to students at Yale on the secret of his success. He said he wasn’t smarter than the average person. Instead he said his success secret was to live in “day-tight compartments”.

Dr. Osler told how he had taken an ocean voyage back in the days of the great Atlantic steamships. The ship’s captain took Dr. Osler to the bridge of the ship and showed him how, with the pull of a single lever, he could activate machinery to close doors throughout the ship and divide the ship into watertight compartments. This was a great advance in making ocean voyages safer.

Dr. Osler urged his audience to take control of the machinery of their low lives and to divide their lives into “day-tight compartments” for the voyage through life. He said to seal off the dead past with its mistakes, and to seal off, for now, the future also, because the only time we can control is today.

Dr. Osler didn’t say not to prepare for the future. He said that the best possible way to prepare for the future was to concentrate on making today as productive and meaningful as possible.

That’s great advice for retirement planning and life in general. It works for retirement planning if you have 30 years left before retirement. It also works if you’re already retired. We need to make today the best day we can. We can’t change the past, and we can’t act in the future until we get there. Whether it’s retirement planning or any plans for the future, we can only act today to make tomorrow better. Like it says in the song, let’s resolve to live “One Day at a Time”.