From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

by Arthur C. Brooks

What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn’t just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers. I came to call this the “striver’s curse”: people who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their relationships lacking.

In my field of economics, we have something called “Stein’s law,” named after the famous economist Herbert Stein from the 1970s: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”[1]

So profound was his influence that his celebrity has never wavered since his death in 1882. And yet Darwin died considering his career to be a disappointment.

In 1859, at age fifty, he published his magnum opus and crowning achievement, On the Origin of Species, a bestseller explaining his theory of evolution that made him into a household name and changed science forever.

For most people, the implicit belief is that aging and its effect on professional performance are something that happen far in the future. This attitude explains all kinds of funny survey results. For example, when asked in 2009 what “being old” means, the most popular response among Americans was “turning eighty-five.”[2] In other words, the average American (who lives to seventy-nine) dies six years before entering old age.

Here is the reality: in practically every high-skill profession, decline sets in sometime between one’s late thirties and early fifties.

Of course, Nobel winners might be different than ordinary scientists. Jones, with a coauthor, dug deeper into the data on researchers in physics, chemistry, and medicine who had highly cited work, as well as patents and various prizes. They found that peak performance is occurring at later ages than in the past, principally because the knowledge required to do cutting-edge work has increased so much over the decades. Still, since 1985, the peak age is not old: for physicists, fifty; for chemistry, forty-six; and for medicine, forty-five. After that, innovation drops precipitously.

It’s sort of reassuring to have a doctor who reminds people my age of Marcus Welby, MD. However, one recent Canadian study looked at 80 percent of the country’s anesthesiologists and patient litigation against them over a ten-year period. The researchers found that physicians over sixty-five are 50 percent more likely than younger doctors (under fifty-one) at being found at fault for malpractice.

Fluid intelligence isn’t the only kind—there is also crystallized intelligence. This is defined as the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past. Think once again about the metaphor of a vast library. But this time, instead of regretting how slow the librarian is, marvel at the size of the book collection your librarian is wandering around in, and the fact that he knows where to find a book, even if it takes him a while. Crystallized intelligence, relying as it does on a stock of knowledge, tends to increase with age through one’s forties, fifties, and sixties—and does not diminish until quite late in life, if at all. Cattell himself described the two intelligences in this way: “[Fluid intelligence] is conceptualized as the decontextualized ability to solve abstract problems, while crystallized intelligence represents a person’s knowledge gained during life by acculturation and learning.”[6] Translation: When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them.

The point is not to find jobs for the elderly; it is to glean the wisdom and experience from people who have seen a lot, have already made every stupid mistake in the book, and can teach the younger folks before they make avoidable errors.

Working hard and enjoying it doesn’t make you a workaholic. However, I have met a lot of people who cross over into workaholism, and I am guilty of this myself. Here are, in my opinion, better questions: 1. Do you fail to reserve part of your energy for your loved ones after work and stop working only when you are a desiccated husk of a human being? 2. Do you sneak around to work? For example, when your spouse leaves the house on a Sunday, do you immediately turn to work and then put it away before she or he returns so that it is not apparent what you were doing? 3. Does it make you anxious and unhappy when someone—such as your spouse—suggests you take time away from work for activities with loved ones, even when nothing in your work is unusually pressing? (By the way, I’m feeling a bit angry and defensive as I write this.)

Marital dissolution often occurs.[6] The workaholic then rationalizes the breakup as a case of ingratitude. As one man told me when I was writing this book, “My wife wants the nice things that come from money but is angry with me for doing what it takes to earn that money.”

As philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Confessions, “I was not afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace; and that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything else in the world.”[26]

Social comparison, fear of failure, and perfectionism are like Dante’s prideful sea of ice, freezing you in place with thoughts of what others will think of you—or, worse, what you will think of yourself—if you do not succeed at something. These are the fruits of success addiction. And to top it off, it leads to withdrawal.

If you want to be happy, you have to state your honest aspiration to be happy, to be willing to be a little less special in worldly terms, and thus to stop objectifying yourself. You must state your desire to lighten your load with pride’s opposing virtue: humility.

From putting my career before the people in my life, deliver me. From distracting myself from life with work, deliver me. From my drive to be superior to others, deliver me. From the allure of the world’s empty promises, deliver me. From my feelings of professional superiority, deliver me. From allowing my pride to supplant my love, deliver me. From the pains of withdrawing from my addiction, deliver me. From the dread of falling into decline and being forgotten, deliver me.

He actually said to me once, quoting the entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes approvingly, “He who dies with the most toys, wins.”[3] I remember thinking, “Actually, he who dies with the most toys, dies.”

Over the next several days, the truth emerged to Siddhartha—that release from suffering comes not from renunciation of the things of the world, but from release from attachment to those things. A Middle Way shunned both ascetic extremism and sensuous indulgence, because both are attachments and thus lead to dissatisfaction. At the moment of this realization, Siddhartha became the Buddha.

If you base your sense of self-worth on success, you tend to go from victory to victory to avoid feeling awful. That is pure homeostasis at work. The buzz from success is neutralized quickly, leaving a hangover feeling. Knowing you will be looking for the bump again very soon, your brain ultimately adjusts to a baseline feeling of anti-success. After a while, you need constant success hits just not to feel like a failure. That’s what we social scientists refer to as the “hedonic treadmill.” You run and run but make no real progress toward your goal—you simply avoid being thrown off the back from stopping or slowing down. So let’s return to our equation and update it to reflect all this more accurately: Satisfaction = Continually getting what you want

Unfortunately, it often feels like we can’t stop the comparison game. From this, we get another equation: Success = Continually having more than others

Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph of Córdoba in tenth-century Spain. Al-Rahman was an absolute ruler who lived in complete luxury. Here’s how he assessed his own life at about age seventy: I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.[15] Fame, riches, and pleasure beyond imagination. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But, as he goes on to write, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.

Dissatisfaction is the malady that makes us chase our worldly rewards to ever-greater heights. The futility of attaining satisfaction is one of the reasons that professional decline is so painful: Desperate to achieve enough to be satisfied, we find that instead we are going backward. We are slowly falling off the back of the hedonic treadmill. In our hearts, we know this, of course. But, even with this knowledge, the problem seems unsolvable. One astonishing proof of this is that the inventor of the term “hedonic treadmill,” Philip Brickman—the celebrated psychologist also responsible for showing that winning the lottery brings no lasting satisfaction—died by suicide, throwing himself off a building across the street from his office at the University of Michigan.[16]

Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want

Your satisfaction is what you have, divided by what you want.

As you increase your haves without managing your wants, your wants will proliferate and sprawl. You can easily be less and less satisfied as you move up the success ladder, because your wants will always outstrip your haves. And when they do, your satisfaction will fall.

Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.

The clearest message that we get from this . . . study is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” Further, “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest at age eighty.”

In her book The Lonely Century, Noreena Hertz shows that in terms of health outcomes, loneliness is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes per day and is worse than obesity.[12] It is also strongly associated with cognitive decline and dementia.

Sharing weakness is hard because it is the ultimate act of subversion against your special, objectified self. You won’t go down without a fight! If you are reluctant to embrace your weaknesses, start by imagining the peace in your heart from no longer pretending you are not weak.

In his fourteenth-century Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri nicely sums up a fear many of us have had: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark For the straightforward pathway had been lost.[2]

“Man was made for conflict, not for rest,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.[13] “In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.”

At the nexus of enjoyable and meaningful is interesting. Interest is considered by many neuroscientists to be a positive primary emotion, processed in the limbic system of the brain.[26] Something that truly interests you is intensely pleasurable; it also must have meaning in order to hold your interest. Thus, “Is this work deeply interesting to me?” is a helpful litmus test of whether a new activity is your new marshmallow.