Dan Buettner

Having a purpose and knowing exactly what your values are will add additional years to your life.

Have fun, be active. Ride a bike instead of driving, for example.

The people you surround yourself with influence your behaviors, so choose friends who have healthy habits.

We often think about happiness as trying to increase our joy, but it's also about decreasing our worry. So what you get for paying those high taxes is, if you're a parent thinking about putting your child through school, you don't have to worry about it, because all education through college is free.

Diet and supplements and exercise programs aren't what is achieving longevity. Having a faith-based community can add four to 14 years.

The secret to longevity, as I see it, has less to do with diet, or even exercise, and more to do with the environment in which a person lives: social and physical. What do I mean by this? They live rewardingly inconvenient lives.

Select your friendships carefully. Gather people around you who will reinforce your lifestyle.

None of the longest-lived people ran marathons or pumped iron. They live exactly as their grandparents before them - surrounded by family and friends.

Deepen your existing spiritual commitment.

Inconvenience yourself: ditch the remote, the garage door opener, the leaf-blower; buy a bike, broom, rake, and snow shovel.

Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden.

You rarely get satisfaction sitting in an easy chair. If you work in a garden on the other hand, and it yields beautiful tomatoes, that's a good feeling.