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September 17 - October 3, 2022
I had found a list written on my fortieth birthday, eight years earlier, of my professional goals—those that, if accomplished, would (I was sure) bring me satisfaction. I had met or exceeded all of them. And yet . . . I wasn’t particularly satisfied or happy. I had gotten my heart’s desire, at least as I imagined it, but it didn’t bring the joy I envisioned.
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.
Methodically, I built a strategic plan for the rest of my life, giving me the chance to have a second half of adulthood that is not only not disappointing but happier and more meaningful than the first.
There is another path, though: Instead of denying change in your abilities, you can make the change itself a source of strength. Instead of trying to avoid decline, you can transcend it by finding a new kind of success, better than what the world promises and not a source of neurosis and addiction; a deeper form of happiness than what you had before;
the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain behind your forehead). This is the last part of the brain to develop in childhood and first to exhibit decline in adulthood. It is primarily responsible for working memory, executive function, and inhibitory mechanisms—that is, the ability to block out information extraneous to the task at hand, so we can focus and improve in our core skill. A big, strong prefrontal cortex makes it possible for you to get better and better at your specialty,
Great gifts and achievements early in life are simply not an insurance policy against suffering later on. On the contrary, studies show that people who have chased power and achievement in their professional lives tend to be unhappier after retirement than people who did not.[21]
there is also evidence that high accomplishment affects people negatively when it finishes. Consider the case of professional athletes, many of whom struggle greatly after leaving their sports careers. Tragic examples abound, involving addiction or suicide; unhappiness in retired athletes may even be the norm, at least temporarily.
The fact that we can’t store up our glories and enjoy them when they are long past gets to the problem of dissatisfaction—a problem we will confront later in this book. Humans simply aren’t wired to enjoy an achievement long past.
The decline problem is a double whammy, then: we need ever-greater success to avoid dissatisfaction, yet our abilities to stay even are declining. No, it’s actually a triple whammy, because as we try to stay even, we wind up in patterns of addictive behavior such as workaholism, which puts strivers into unhealthy relationship patterns at the cost of deep connection to spouses, children, and friends. By the time the wipeout occurs, there’s no one there to help us get up and dust off.
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.
In fact, there are some specific ways in which we naturally get smarter and more skillful. The trick to improving as we age is to understand, develop, and practice these new strengths.
Did you ever notice that as people get old, they almost never become less articulate? They tend to have a richer vocabulary than they did earlier in life. This leads to a number of abilities.
Similarly, you may notice that with age, people are better at combining and utilizing complex ideas.[2] In other words, they may not be able to come up with shiny new inventions or solve problems quickly like in the old days. But they get much better at using the concepts they know and expressing them to others.
Similarly, as a social scientist, I am better at telling a story from data than I was earlier in my career.
I can tell you how insights relate to one another and how to apply them in your life.
theoretical mathematicians tend to peak and decline early, just as Simonton’s data predict. But applied mathematicians (who use mathematics to, for example, solve actual problems in business) peak much later, because they specialize in combining and using ideas that already exist—a skill that favors older people.
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.
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.
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.
A recent study in The Chronicle of Higher Education showed that the oldest college professors tended to have the best teaching evaluations within departments.
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.
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. Over the last few years, the youth-dominated firms in the tech sector have been battered by scandals and plummeting public admiration.
So why do people try, over and over again? Two reasons: First, they are not aware that their first curve naturally bends down—they think something is wrong with them. And second, they don’t know that another curve exists that will take them to a new kind of success.
In interviewing people for this book, I found that invariably, the people who are happiest and most satisfied in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are those who made this leap.
In his lifetime he published more than a thousand compositions for all of the available instrumentations of his day.[13] The greatest cantatas for orchestra and chorus ever written seemed to fall off his pen by the dozens; his concerti are compositionally perfect; his piano works simple and elegant. Bach is my favorite composer.
Only ten of Bach’s children lived to adulthood, but these included four composers who went on to attain significant fame in their own right. The greatest of these was Carl Philipp Emanuel, known as “C. P. E.” to the generations that followed.
And just like that, C. P. E. displaced J. S. as the family’s musical celebrity. For the last decades of J. S.’s life (and a century afterward), C. P. E. was considered the greatest of the Bachs. Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven admired C. P. E. and collected his music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself said, “Bach is the father, we are the children,” referring to C. P. E., not J. S.
When Darwin hit his wall, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sadness. Like most people, he never looked for or found his second curve, so all he saw late in life was his decline. 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.
He demonstrates the way to build a fugue or canon so clearly that any student can do it—not like the master, but in at least rudimentary fashion.
Remember, every change of circumstances is a chance to learn, grow, and create value.
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.
It’s one thing to know that your next task is getting to that second curve. It’s another to—gulp—actually jump off your first curve. That’s hard, because it is precisely not what strivers do—they don’t quit; they work harder.
We are going to cover a lot of ground, but here’s the short version: your second curve exists, you can get on it, and you will be very happy you did.
I knew that her grueling work effort had made her successful in the first place, but when you figure out something has secondary consequences that are making you miserable, you find a way to fix it, right?
Finally, she looked at me and said, matter-of-factly, “Maybe I would prefer to be special rather than happy.”
My financier friend had objectified herself to be special, with a self-definition that revolved around work, achievement, worldly rewards, and pride. Even though that object was slowly eroding, she was too attached to her worldly success to make the changes that could now bring her happiness.
That’s when it struck me: people who choose being special over happy are addicts.
One of the nastiest and most virulent addictions I have seen is workaholism.
Consider the sheer number of hours spent at work: according to the Harvard Business Review, the average American CEO works 62.5 hours per week, versus 44 hours by the average worker.
Soon enough, the work crowds out relationships and outside activities. With little else, work is all that is left to the workaholic, reinforcing the cycle.
Working hard and enjoying it doesn’t make you a workaholic. However, I have met a lot of people who cross over into workaholism,
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?
workaholics have many of the same patterns of behavior and estrangement with their spouses as alcoholics do.
Workaholics convince themselves that that fourteenth hour of work is vital to their success, when, in reality, their productivity is likely severely diminished by that point. Economists consistently find that our marginal productivity tanks with work hours beyond eight or ten per day.
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.
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.
Something is clearly wrong when the idea of being “normal” induces enough panic to make someone neglect the people they love in favor of the possible admiration of strangers.
In the 1980s, physician Robert Goldman famously found in his research that half of aspiring athletes would be willing to accept certain death in five years in exchange for an Olympic gold medal today.
