A Rhode Island man recently achieved a goal he spent nearly two decades working toward — earning his Ph.D. and becoming a physicist.
At Brown University, no less. A prestigious Ivy League university.
That accomplishment would be impressive enough, but what makes Manfred Steiner achievement truly remarkable is that he’s 90 years-old.
Steiner successfully defended his dissertation back in November, earning a degree he had always wanted after overcoming health problems that could have derailed his studies.
“But I made it,” he said. “And this was the most gratifying point in my life, to finish it.”
As a teenager in Vienna, Steiner was inspired to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein and Max Planck. But after World War II, his mother and uncle advised him that studying medicine was a better choice, so he earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1955 and emigrated to the United States, where he had a successful career studying blood and blood disorders.
“It was something like a wish that was never fulfilled, that always stuck in the back of my head,” he said. “I always thought, you know, once I’m finished with medicine, I really don’t want to spend my life just sitting around and maybe doing a little golfing or doing something like that. I wanted to keep active.”
At age 70, he started taking undergraduate classes at Brown. He was planning to take a few courses that interested him, but by 2007, he accumulated enough credits to enroll in the Ph.D. program.
Nearly two decades later, he completed that program.
Steiner’s advice is this:
“Do what you love to do. Pursue it because later in life you maybe regret it, that you didn’t do that.”
My new book, Someday Is Today, warns against this very thing. Hospice workers have reported that regret is one of the most common and painful feelings in the last days of someone’s life. Looking back over the expanse of time, people take note of the things they never did and wish they could change the past or had more time.
They planned on doing those things someday, but then they ran out of somedays.
I experienced this very same feeling when I was 21 years-old, lying on a greasy, tile floor in a McDonald’s in Brockton, Massachusetts, with a gun pressed to my head, absolutely certain that my life was coming to an end.
It wasn’t fear or anger or sadness that I was feeling in what I thought were the final moments of my life.
It was regret. And it was awful.
Manfred Steiner’s accomplishment is remarkable, but he also got lucky. The average life expectancy in the United States is 78 years old. Had he lived as long as the average American, his warning about regret would’ve come true for him.
It’s never too late, people, but someday is not tomorrow or next week or next year.
Someday Is Today.
Available wherever you get books.
