What is your Life Curve?
ALTI am beyond the halfway point in my life. For the last few years, I have been viewing the rest of my life through a kind of negative lens. My physical peak is behind me. I have wondered if my professional peak is behind me as well. My wife and I have been actively engaged in aging parent activities for multiple years. Focusing end-of-life issues rubs off on you.
However, my stage of life has all sorts of positives that can get obscured. You have the experience and wisdom to help guide your children, friends, and professional connections. You likely, and hopefully, do not have the financial strains and worries from earlier in life. Your deeper self-knowledge enables you to spend more time on the things that truly matter to you. So, there is lots of stuff to look forward to over the rest of my life.
As usual, I started thinking about how to frame this internal debate as a conceptual model. Whenever I do that, I more likely see a path away from the negative and towards the positive. I have been thinking about a mental framework that I thought you might find interesting.
Maximizing Life
Identifying and fulfilling potential, in others and myself, has always been a personal focus and is core to management and leadership. I believe if you do a good job at that, you greatly increase the chance that you are living a satisfying life. You identified your core strengths, applied them to add value, learned how to apply them more and more effectively and efficiently, and delivered increasing value. It is a virtuous cycle. You grow and evolve. I believe this applies to work and home.
Another way to say this is that you are maximizing your life. What “maximizing your life” means changes as your life changes. It involves stages like getting an education, finding a partner, getting established professionally, raising kids who are good people, pursuing a passion/hobby, etc. What you are focused on changes depending on your phase in life. There is also a discussion here about the elements of you that remain largely consistent across those life stages, but that is for another time and is covered in many of my other posts.
Are you looking backward or forward? If you are looking backward, you are watching phases of life fade away. That is where I have been stuck at times the last few years. If you are looking forward, you are plotting a course into the next phases of life.
There is also a tendency to compare the phases of life. We have all heard the saying that comparison is the thief of happiness. Yes, some phases of life are better than others. There is some debate about that as each life phase should be viewed and valued differently. But, unless there is something to be learned, what is the point of comparing? Instead, we should view the phases of life as different. We should go into them objectively versus evaluating them like previous phases of life.
Another perspective on maximizing the phases of your life is being aware of what has meaning to you. What do you value? If you identity what has meaning and value to you in each phase of life, maximizing that phase is simply pursuing and working towards that meaning and value.
To help reframe my perspective on the phases of life, I have been thinking about how you would plot them on a graph. The x-axis is time and the y-axis is life maximization. By doing this, I was quickly able to see how I needed to change my perspective.
Bell Curve
We all largely accept the bell curve. Similar to how we accept things like the pareto principle (the 80/20 rule). Maybe the life maximization is a bell curve?
The immediate observation is that life would only have one peak. Once you reach that peak, life is all downhill. That’s sort of depressing. But, I have met people who view life in this way. Maybe they were an elite athlete and that somehow always comes up. The peak in their past that dominates their assessment of their life. In their mind, they will never approach that peak again. Thankfully, life does not only have one peak. So, there is a graph that is a better fit for life maximization.
Late Peak
You might view life as getting better and better over time. You see your successes, personal and professional, as building on each other. Maybe the life maximization curve is a late peak?
The immediate observation is that you peak late in life. And once you do peak, you go downhill fast. I do not think this graph is quite right. All life stages do not incrementally build upon the life stages that came before. Further, I think that how you define life maximization changes over time along with your priorities and what has meaning. The objective is to always be pursuing life maximization for your stage in life. Thus, your peak for life maximization in earlier stages can be equivalent to the peak in later stages. So, there is a graph that is a better fit for life maximization.
High Plateau
Life maximization does not have just one peak. Maybe you were a successful athlete then a successful professional while being a good husband and parent? There are all sorts of areas in which you can be maximizing your life in the different phases of your life. Maybe the life maximization graph is a high plateau?
The immediate observation is that you are at peak life maximization at all times. I suppose that is possible if you have overlapping life stages that compensate for one another. When one is down the other is up so that you are always at peak life maximization. However, life is a series of ups and downs. One key to life is mitigating the downs so that they do not bring the whole life maximization curve down. So, the high plateau is aspirational if not unrealistic. So, there is a graph is a better fit for life maximization.
Evolving High Plateau
Life maximization could be like the high plateau, but the plateau is a sine wave of smaller ups and down. Maybe the life maximization graph is an evolving high plateau?
The immediate observation is that this might capture it. You learn how to maximize early life phases. As you enter new life phases you have to learn how to maximize life within them. Thus, there is a downward movement as you enter a new life phase and an upward movement as you learn and grow. Given you often have multiple life phases going on at the same time, there are multiple overlapping life maximization lines. I think you could also argue that the slope of the sine wave plateau may have a slight upward trajectory. So, it could incorporate elements of the late peak perspective. That makes sense to me. As one gets older one has the experience and wisdom to adapt more quickly to changes in life phase. Thus, you are able to maximize situations more quickly.
What do you think?
How to you view life maximization? Which curve applies to your current perspective? If it is not the evolving high plateau, should it be?
Thank you for reading my leadership blog post. I hope you found it interesting and thought provoking.
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