An Introduction
You have probably heard this cliché “a fool at forty is a fool for life”. Well, if you check around you, you can tell how true this statement is. There are many people who are past forty who have nothing tangible to show for the years they have spent through life.
Through many generations since its invention, this cliché has continued to find use to show its veracity. There has been a consensus of opinion; an agreement on what people should expect from persons who have spent more than forty years on earth.
The mental list that characterizes the expectations at forty has continued to grow as man has advanced. Technological advancement has not made it any easier. The burden of the problem is even greater because the plethora of expectations has actually led to a sudden collapse in what should be expected from a life at forty.
Age forty is a threshold age. It’s the last bus stop for youth and it is the beginning of a new era, the middle ages. It is expected that to make the most of one’s middle ages and older years, the right investments should be made during youth. To enjoy a good life beyond forty, one should have gotten it right before forty.
In life, nothing just happens. There is the rule of cause and effect. The things that happen to us in our middle years, that is, the years after age forty is dependent on how we lived in the years under forty. In retrospect, age forty can be seen as a perfect benchmark between youthful years and aging years.
Everyone develops the drive to succeed in our initial years of life. But how far we go in life is dependent on what we’ve been primed to achieve early on.
One thing we should be afraid of is the tag “fool at forty”. The question that I had to ask myself while deciding to write this book was quite obvious “what qualities is a person supposed to have before he turns forty that would ensure he is no fool at forty?” This same question has got many scholars thinking.
There is that aura of achievement having lived up to age forty. You get that magical feel that you’ve lived a life time. But when you get here without the zest that you should have been running with, it makes living the rest of your life difficult.
There are unseen eyes watching you and they seem to have a scale that weighs your actions and efforts. And they are good at putting people in their place, either “wise” or “foolish”.
I don’t intend you will be foolish at forty. This is why I wrote this book! I want this book to help you as you create a direction for your life. You have to be goal oriented with the correct picture to pursue as you strive towards been the very best of your life. This however is dependent on what you are doing in your twenties and thirties.
Is this the perfect book for you? Yes! Expectations are high for you to be the best you can be for life. You’ve been entrusted with a huge responsibility to get out what is inside you for life. How much life gets from you however is dependent on what you are doing now and how much you are willing to do after now so that at forty, you can be in the best position to shoot off into life’s space.
You are like a space capsule that has been launched. Rockets lift the capsule up into space where they disembark and return bark to earth while the capsule heads on with its own fuel to its destination, one of the other planets or moon. If the rockets aren’t able to lift the capsule, or if there is a fuel leakage or some unexpected technical hitch while the rockets are lifting the capsule, that mission fails. All the efforts at that mission are grounded.
See yourself as the capsule and the rockets as all the efforts to get you up. You don’t want any problems that will hinder your lift. Your goal is to get to forty and to be able to bring out your true independent capabilities.
If you are past forty and you stumbled on this book, and perhaps you are wishing you read this book before now, don’t worry, age is often said to be just another number. You can reconfigure your mind to a younger age and decide to attack life with all the vigour of that age. You should have your mental forty pictures after you have read this book.
This generation and the next are counting on you to make the footmarks that they will see to follow. You must not disappoint them. You hold this book before you because you have been counted upon by God to deliver the goods for life and to deliver them just in time before you turn forty.
Age forty is that point where the space capsule disconnects with the rocket that shot it up and runs independently. You will certainly fulfill all that is expected of you as you pursue life’s goals. Read this book, enjoy it but put to practice what has been written inside it. Before you turn forty, the world will celebrate you!