I was thinking recently about conversations I've had with my best friend Mick Curran.

Mick and I have known each other since June 1965, when we met at the swimming pool in our neighborhood in Fairfax, Va. We have had so many conversations in the last 47 years that I might have spent as much time talking with him as any other three people in my life combined.

We've had serious conversations and silly ones, conversations about the best things in our lives and the worst.

We had some interesting ones of the type that guys who are playing the back nine of life have a couple of years ago. The ones that start with "If you could change anything ..."

[caption id="attachment_1759" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Stepping back in time ..."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/time-tunnel.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1759" title="time-tunnel" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/time-tunnel-300x237.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="237" /></a>[/caption]

My question was this:

Let's say you had the opportunity for five minutes to go back in time to an earlier point in your life -- let's say just before puberty -- and meet your younger self. You can tell yourself one thing, give one piece of advice, but it can't be something serious like study hard, don't take that job, make that investment or don't marry that girl.

In fact, it can't be anything that an adult would tell a child that the child might not believe. My mother told me time and again about things that mattered and things that didn't matter, but I don't think her advice changed anything I did or didn't do. My mistake.

Ideally, you would tell yourself something that would be useful to you later that had never crossed your mind at that point.

So if I could step back into time for five minutes in the summer of 1962, the summer when I was 12 years old, I would have two words to say to my younger self:

<strong><em>"Lift weights."</em></strong>

I was reasonably athletic as a teenager, but I was not physically strong. I was skinny but flabby, which is not a great combination.

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