A ‘morbid’ obsession reset my attitude to life

In this week’s episode of HELLO!’s Second Act podcast, sponsored by Gold Collagen, successful entrepreneur and host of Be Your Own Boss on ITVX, Holly Tucker, 48, opens up about divorce, business advice and her key to happiness over 40. Holly’s own perspective on life changed when she turned 40, when she started counting down the number of days she expects to have before she dies. What might sound like a morbid obsession, she found profoundly empowering. “On my 40th birthday, I worked out that I had 29,000 days on the planet and that really helped me enormously. It really made me love life more than I’ve ever loved life. Every single day I realise I’m not doing it again. I understand that the ultimate destination is when I pass, and so every single moment, or that the next chapter, is a milestone.  I now live in gratitude, and it means that I get to squeeze the lemon of life every single day.”

“It is a really positive thing to do. I talk a lot about what’s on my gravestone. I talk a lot about when I’m going to retire at 90. It’s motivating. It’s a great business or life trick. Nothing about all of this depresses me. It just makes me love life and see life for the day that it’s given me, what I could do in a day.”

As for finding happiness, Holly tells podcast host Ateh Jewel that she believes the key to healing pain in midlife is owning your own business. Having championed female-led small businesses through Holly & Co, she says women feel more empowered to succeed when they have suffered loss.

“I’m obsessed with business because I think it’s the key to happiness,” she says. “You can determine your own time. You can work around other things that are important to you in life, especially as a woman. We need to stop fearing it as much as we do – business is really just the mechanism of realising a dream. After 20 years of doing this, I have never known anything to heal someone through grief, pain, cancer, horrific times in their lives, trauma, than building their dreams. It’s like a life raft. So many businesses I know started through pain. Suddenly (the realisation) that life’s too short and that then became one of the biggest healing activities.”

Listen to the Second Act podcast now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Podcasts. This episode will be live on YouTube at 5pm.