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

by Arthur C. Brooks

“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 bottom line, fellow striver: when it comes to the enviable skills that you worked so hard to attain and that made you successful in your field, you can expect significant decline to come as soon as your thirties, or as late as your early fifties. That’s the deal, and it’s not fun.

In 1971, Cattell published a book entitled Abilities: Their Structure, Growth, and Action. In it, he posited that there were two types of intelligence that people possess, but at greater abundance at different points in life. The first is fluid intelligence, which Cattell defined as the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems. It is what we commonly think of as raw smarts, and researchers find that it is associated with both reading and mathematical ability.[4] Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. Cattell, who specialized in intelligence testing, observed that it was highest relatively early in adulthood and diminished rapidly starting in one’s thirties and forties.

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.

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.

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.

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”

That’s why, when it comes to success, you can’t ever get enough. 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.

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.”

When we are talking about satisfaction from a success, there’s another element to consider: success is all relative. After all, social hierarchy is based on the people in your community, whatever that means—geographical, professional, or virtual. I know people with hundreds of millions of dollars who feel like failures because their friends are billionaires.

“What is my why?” The bestselling author and speaker Simon Sinek always gives people in search of true success in work and life the advice that they need to find their why.[20] That is, he tells them that to unlock their true potential and happiness, they need to articulate their deep purpose in life and shed the activities that are not in service of that purpose. Your why is the sculpture inside the block of jade.

staying together is not what really counts. Analysis of the Harvard Study data shows that marriage per se accounts for only 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life.[31] The important thing for health and well-being is relationship satisfaction.

The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.

Your romantic partnership is arguably your most important relationship. However, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent loneliness.

But having your spouse or partner as your one and only close friend is imprudent, like having a radically undiversified investment portfolio.

• You need strong human connections to help you get on the second curve and flourish. • No matter how introverted you are, you cannot expect to thrive into old age without healthy, intimate relationships. • For married people, a loving, companionate spousal relationship is key to thriving. • Marriage and family are not an adequate substitute for close friendships, which should not be left up to chance. • Friendship is a skill that requires practice, time, and commitment. • Work friendships are not a substitute for real friendships, although they can also be satisfying, if designed purposively.

The first ashrama is brahmacharya, the period of youth and young adulthood dedicated to learning. The second is grihastha, when a person builds a career, accumulates wealth, and maintains a family. This second stage seems fairly straightforward and uncontroversial, but in this stage the Hindu philosophers find one of life’s most common traps: People become attached to its earthly rewards—money, power, sex, prestige—and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime.

This is another description of being stuck on the fluid intelligence curve, chasing Aquinas’s four idols—money, power, pleasure, and honor—that lead to self-objectification, but that never satisfy.

To break the attachment to these idols requires movement to a new stage of life, with a new set of skills—spiritual skills. The change can be painful, Acharya said, like becoming an adult for a second time. And it means letting go of things that defined us in the eyes of the world. In other words, we have to move beyond the worldly rewards to experience transition and find wisdom in a new ashrama...

And that new stage? It is called vanaprastha, which comes from two Sanskrit words meaning “retiring” and “into the forest.”[1] This is the stage at which we purposively begin to pull back from our old personal and professional duties, becoming more and more devoted to spir...

one’s life goals must readjust. Vanaprastha is the metaphysical contex...

But vanaprastha isn’t the last stop, Acharya told me. That would be sannyasa, the last spiritual stage that comes in old age. This is the stage totally...

“The moment you realize the Self, you know that you are the Self, you are not the body. You know that you are the infinite Truth. That recognition, that realization is sannyasa.” Even if sitting in a cave at age seventy-five isn’t your cup of tea, the point should still be clear. The goal of the last phase of life is to drink from the chalice of life’s deepest secrets.

as we mature we should seek spiritual growth in anticipation of an old age filled with enlightenment.

But some resist these changes with all their might. In raging against decline and denying the realities of change, they also block out their need for the metaphysical. They live their last decades looking out the back window of the car, anxiously watching the glorious past recede and unwilling to look into the future, with its new promises and transcendent adventures.

I asked Acharya what is the one piece of advice he would give men and women my age who have been workaholics and success addicts—special, not happy—and who tremble at the thought of leaving grihastha. He paused for a long time. “Know yourself,” he finally said. “That is all. Nothing else. Nothing else can release.” “How?” I asked. “By going within,” he replied. “When your mind is quieter, you will find that treasure waiting for you within.”

It is indeed important to take risks and be willing to fail—to dare greatly, as Brown likes to say. But the true master then uses the inevitable failures—including the declines that inevitably follow a life of success—as a source of deep human connection.

there are two obvious lessons here. First, as I’ve been emphasizing over and over, it doesn’t matter who you are—if you live long enough, you will see the decline of your fluid intelligence. Second, you never really know what kind of impact your work will have had.

exposure to negative emotions makes us stronger for when there is a true crisis.

Beethoven’s later work became so original that he was, and is, regarded as the father of music’s Romantic period. “He opened up a new world in music,” said French Romantic master Hector Berlioz, who idolized the deaf composer. “Beethoven is not human.”

his Ninth Symphony closes triumphantly as the chorus sings lines from Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy”: Joy! A spark of fire from heaven . . . Drunk with fire we dare to enter, Holy One, inside your shrine.

To see weakness as purely negative is a mistake. Weakness befalls us all, and in many ways. It has its discomforts to be sure and entails loss. But it is also an opportunity—to connect more deeply with others; to see the sacredness in suffering; even to find new areas of growth and success. Stop hiding it, and don’t resist it.

When you are honest and humble about your weaknesses, you will be more comfortable in your own skin. When you use your weaknesses to connect with others, love in your life will grow. And finally—finally—you will be able to relax without worrying about being exposed as less than people think you are. To share your weakness without caring what others think is a kind of superpower.

interviews hundreds of people about their transitions, finding that a significant change in life occurs, on average, every eighteen months, and that lifequakes like his—or those that involve voluntary or involuntary career changes—happen very regularly. Most are involuntary—and thus unwelcome at the time—but nothing is more predictable than change.

In 458 BC, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was the dictator of Rome when the city was under siege. He led Rome to victory, remained in power long enough to see a return of stability, and then abruptly resigned. He retired to his small farm, where he worked and lived humbly with his family. Had he remained a dictator in Rome after his victory, he would probably today be a historical footnote—a man who governed as a dictator for a few years, gradually became ineffective and unpopular, held on as long as possible, and was assassinated. We certainly wouldn’t have named a city in Ohio after him. He is remembered as great because he wasn’t afraid to walk away.

For a week at a time, Conley brings groups of fourteen to eighteen to his small oceanside campus in Baja California.[19] With an average age of fifty-three, eight hundred participants to date have come from many walks of life—from steelworkers to doctors to retiring CEOs. What they have in common is a desire to reset their lives in a productive, joyful way in which they can serve others with their ideas and experience. There are four learning steps in becoming a “modern elder”: evolve from a fixed to a growth mindset, learn openness to new things, collaborate with teams, and counsel others.

In your next phase of life . . . What activities will you keep? What activities will you evolve and do differently? What activities will you let go of? What new activities will you learn? And to start . . . What will you commit to doing in the next week to evolve into the new you? What will you commit to doing in the next month? What will you commit to doing within six months? In a year, what will be the first fruits to appear as a result of your commitments?

To go from strength to strength requires learning a new set of life skills. We need to adopt a new formula, which I have laid out in detail in this book, chapter by chapter. But of course you are unlikely to memorize the last sixty thousand words. So let me summarize the whole book in seven—a formula that encapsulates all the lessons I have learned and now strive to live: Use things. Love people. Worship the divine.

The problem is not the noun things, but the verb to love. Things are to use, not to love. If you remember only one lesson from this book, it should be that love is at the epicenter of our happiness. Around the year 400, the great Saint Augustine summarized this lesson as the secret to a good life: “Love and do what you will.”[1] But love is reserved for people, not things; to misplace your love is to invite frustration and futility—to get on the hedonic treadmill and set it to ultra-fast.

Take love up one level and we have worship. The writer David Foster Wallace once said, astutely, “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”[2] If you love things, you will strive to objectify yourself in terms of money, power, pleasure, and prestige—idols all. You will worship yourself—or, at least, a two-dimensional cutout of yourself.