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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.
To let go of some things in your life that you worked hard for—but that are now holding you back. To adopt parts of life that will make you happy, even if they don’t make you special. To face decline—and even death—with courage and confidence. To
And whether we are famous or not, almost nothing feels worse than becoming irrelevant, or even useless, to others who once held us in esteem.
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.
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.
if you can repurpose your professional life to rely more on crystallized intelligence—your peak will come later but your decline will happen much, much later, if ever. And if you can go from one type to the other—well, then you have cracked the code.
However, there always exists the ability to redesign your career less on innovation and more on instruction as the years pass, thus playing to your strengths with age.
“Just as one uses a burning candle to light others with,” says the elderly archery teacher in Eugen Herrigel’s famous book Zen in the Art of Archery, “so the teacher transfers the spirit of the right art from heart to heart, that it may be illumined.”
Cicero believed three things about older age. First, that it should be dedicated to service, not goofing off. Second, our greatest gift later in life is wisdom, in which learning and thought create a worldview that can enrich others. Third, our natural ability at this point is counsel: mentoring, advising, and teaching others, in a way that does not amass worldly rewards of money, power, or prestige.
Meanwhile, when Bach saw the back half of his fluid intelligence curve, he jumped with both feet onto his crystallized intelligence curve and never looked back. When he fell behind as an innovator, he reinvented himself as an instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, respected—if not as famous as he once had been—and, by all accounts, happy.
No matter how you find your passion, early on, pursue it with a white-hot flame, dedicating it to the good of the world. But hold your success lightly—be ready to change as your abilities change.
Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important. Excellence is always its own reward, and this is how you can be most excellent as you age.
What all addictions have in common is that they involve an unhealthy relationship with something unworthy of human love, be it booze, gambling, applause, or—yes—work. Work is the dominant relationship in a workaholic’s life.
And so it is with workaholism. What workaholics truly crave isn’t work per se; it is success. They kill themselves working for money, power, and prestige because these are forms of approval, applause, and compliments—which, like all addictive things, from cocaine to social media, stimulate the neurotransmitter dopamine.[8]
It was, for example, one of the key themes of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote, “As soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one.”[13]
on that objectification of people as workers ruins happiness.
note, workplace objectification leads to burnout, job dissatisfaction, depression, and sexual harassment.
same person—in other words, with self-objectification, which scholars define as viewing oneself from a third-person perspective that does not consider one’s full humanity.[16]
There have been no studies of happiness and competence when we professionally self-objectify, when we think “I am my job.”
Love and fun are sacrificed for another day of work, in search of a positive internal answer to the question “Am I successful yet?” We become cardboard cutouts of real people.
our medium, which is our message. We love the image of ourselves as successful, not ourselves in true life.
At its root, self-objectification is a problem of pride.
Buddhists use the word māna, which in Sanskrit refers to an inflated mind that disregards others in favor of the self and leads to one’s own suffering.
Saint Augustine astutely observed that “every other kind of sin has to do with the commission of evil deeds, whereas pride lurks even in good works in order to destroy them.”[23]
When I consider myself better than others—when “better” is at the core of my identity—then failure is unthinkable. It would excommunicate myself from my objectified self. It is like a little death.
Many success addicts confess that they feel like losers when they see someone else who is yet more successful. Success is fundamentally positional, meaning it enhances our position in social hierarchies.
what you have is a problem and you want to solve it, that what you have been doing isn’t working, and that you want to be happy. This is always the first step in recovery from an addiction, by the way. The first step in Alcoholics Anonymous’s program is “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” 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:
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The point is that the symbols of your specialness have encrusted you like a ton of barnacles. Not only are these things incapable of bringing you any real satisfaction; they’re making you too heavy to jump to your next curve.[30] You need to chip a bunch of them away. But which ones?
That’s because you Westerners see art as being created from nothing. In the East, we believe the art already exists, and our job is simply to reveal it. It is not visible because we add something, but because we take away the parts that are not the art.”
Meanwhile, most Eastern philosophy warns that this acquisitiveness leads to materialism and vanity, which derails the search for happiness by obscuring one’s essential nature.[1]
According to more Eastern thinking, this is backward. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find our second curve.
To get off the first curve and onto the second, instead of adding more and more to our lives, we need to understand why this doesn’t work and then start taking things away.
But as attachments—the focus of our life’s attention and as ends instead of means—the problem is simple: they cannot bring us the deep satisfaction we desire.
Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want
“He has most who needs least. Don’t create needs for yourself.”[19]
Personally, I have gone in the other direction instead by compiling a “reverse bucket list” to make the ideas in this chapter practical and workable in my life.
Each year on my birthday, I list my worldly wants and attachments—the stuff that fits under Thomas’s categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor. I try to be completely honest. I don’t list stuff I don’t actually want, like a boat or a house on Cape Cod. Rather, I go to my weaknesses, which usually involve the admiration of others. I’m embarrassed to admit that, but it’s true. I imagine myself in five years. I am happy and at peace. I am enjoying my life for the most part; I’m satisfied and living a life of purpose and meaning. I imagine myself saying to my wife, “You know, I have to say
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Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things. Buddhist
When I tell my graduate students, who are mostly in their late twenties, to contemplate the fact that they have fifty or sixty Thanksgivings left, and twenty or thirty with their parents, they looked pretty shocked. And it’s not just young people—remember that the average American considers the beginning of “old age” to be six years after the average person dies. We avoid thinking realistically about the length of our lives and our time left, lulling us into the false belief that we have all the time in the world. This expunges the urgency of life changes, such as jumping onto the second
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In his book The Road to Character, the writer David Brooks (a friend, but no relation) distinguishes between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”[10] Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual and require no comparison. Your eulogy virtues are what you really would want people to talk about at your funeral. As in, “He was kind and deeply spiritual,” and not, “He had a lot of frequent flier miles.”
Furthermore, keeping and building your eulogy virtues is inherently rewarding.
If I had one year left in my career and my life, how would I structure this coming month? What would be on my to-do list? What would I choose not to worry about?
In the words of sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne, “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.”[14]
“This body, too,” Buddhist monks are taught to say about their own bodies, “such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate.”
“Don’t you see that I am a person who could be utterly forgotten without batting an eye?”
As Buddhist monk and writer Matthieu Ricard puts it, “Our grasping to the perception of a ‘self’ as a separate entity leads to an increasing feeling of vulnerability and insecurity. It also reinforces self-centeredness, mental rumination, and thoughts of hope and fear, and distances ourselves from others. This imagined
self becomes the constant victim hit by life’s events.”[3]
No matter your religious views, the point is helpful and instructive: humans are naturally interconnected—biologically, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually. Creating an isolated ...
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Many strivers have spent their adult lives under the illusion of their solitariness and now suffer the result. Their root systems are withered and unhealthy. Less metaphorically, they are simply lonely. The lessons in this chapter focus on how to build—or rebuild—a proper root system.
TED Talk, “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness,”
