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.

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

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.

We might call this the “principle of psychoprofessional gravitation”: the idea that the agony of decline is directly related to prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige.

You can accept that what got you to this point won’t work to get you into the future—that you need to build some new strengths and skills.

people maintain and grow their vocabulary—in their native languages and foreign languages—all the way to the end of life.

I invented ideas early on; I synthesize ideas—mine and others—now.

crystallized intelligence. This is defined as the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past.

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.

But if your career requires crystallized intelligence—or 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.

“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.