Can Curiosity Keep Us Young? Growing Young with William Louey

William Louey explores how staying curious keeps the mind sharp, the heart open, and life full of inspiration. From photography to travel, William Louey shares how asking questions and seeking beauty in the world helps him stay young at heart.

Now in his mid-60s, William Louey reflects on how lifelong curiosity has helped him navigate personal loss, embrace change, and continue discovering new ways to live with intention. For him, the true measure of life isn’t just longevity - but happiness, health, and meaningful connection.

William Louey highlights physical fitness, lifelong learning, open-mindedness, and genuine communication as the key ingredients to ageing well - mentally, emotionally, and physically.

Transcript: Can Curiosity Keep us Young? Growing Young with William Louey 

William Louey: Well, I'm not really looking for the length of life, I'm looking for quality.  Being happy every second of your life counts. And, and so I'm not, I mean, of course, if you have a long life and you're healthy and you can feel free to move about and I do keep a very healthy body. I go to the gym every day and I'm very conscious about weight training. Being, you know, having a long life is not quite as important as being healthy and strong and happy. 

I think remaining curious is very important to stay young and healthy because when you're curious you like to learn new things, and when you travel, you look at things that you have never seen before and you get a lot of inspiration. 

For example, I'm very interested in photography and so every time I go on holiday, I would research on what the scenery is going to be like. And I used what kind of lens I'm going to be using, what kind of what kind of camera I'm going to be using, what kind of pose I'm going to do for this particular scenery. So, you know, using your brain is very important. And in other words, keeping curious is the most important thing. 

I mean, ageing is natural, but you know, I'm not going to be afraid of ageing, the most important thing is to, to age well and to be able to do the things that you can do. I'm nearly 66 years old and I can still squat like 500 pounds, you know, in the gym and, and a lot of my friends say, oh, be careful, you know, you're going to hurt yourself. But I started this since I was 18 years old. So it's not that I just started yesterday. So I think don't be satisfied. 

Who inspires me to be healthy? 

William Louey: A lot of people actually. I mean, when I look at, when I watch a movie and I see some of the actors, you know, who are much younger than they look or, you know, I go to the gym and then I see people who are so, you know, like so hardworking and, and it's not really one particular person. It's like, Oh, I want to be like that person, you know, I want to keep, you know, having my 32 inch waist and I don't want to, you know, like increasing my, you know, my, the size of my clothing. And I want to, you know, I've been wearing the same clothes since I was 18 years old. So it's not anyone particular person who inspired me, but a lot of people. 

It's very important to have this healthy mentality. My tip for people is you always like to reach out to people and meeting new friends, meeting new people who have, who are from different countries. I was very lucky. I went to a boarding school in England and I was 12 years old at the time. It was 1973. You can count how, how old I am and, and I was very lucky that there were 17 nationalities in the school. 

And so I, you know, I had friends from Africa, I had a friend from Egypt, Japan, America. And people have different, you know, religion, people have different skin colour. But to me, because I was brought up with them and racism never came into my head. 

So, so I always like to meet different people and learn about their culture. And that is again, curiosity. And I think that whatever makes you happy is for me is to meet different people. And I have the perfect job because every day I, you know, I have 15,000 employees in my company and it's impossible to meet all of them. But you know, every day I meet some, you know, somebody who tells me about their experience and I can learn from them as well as they can learn from me. So, communication is very important.