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

by Arthur C. Brooks

By his late forties, however, he was burned out and restless, despite the worldly success it had brought him. “I didn’t want to be doing it anymore,” he told me. “I felt like I was in a prison.” This was compounded by a number of personal traumas,

I got an email from someone I had never met, which summed up the striver’s curse as well as anything I’ve ever read. I now find myself on the wrong side of 50, with a deep, profound sense of regret, having spent the past 30 years of my life chasing one goal (work success). And while I’ve attained that goal, the personal cost has been extraordinarily high: the past 30 years can never be recovered, the relationships and other life events missed out on can never be experienced.

Most days I feel I should quit my fancy important finance job immediately and start over, focusing on more meaningful (and less time-sucking) work and relationships, volunteering, travel, giving my time to others, listening to the birds chirp, planting some flowers . . . but that also feels like a radical knee-jerk path,

In 1972, the Stanford University social psychologist Walter Mischel undertook a psychology experiment involving preschool kids and a bag of marshmallows.

He followed up on the children in the study and found that those who were able to delay their gratification found greater success as they grew up: they were healthier, happier, earned more, and scored higher on their SATs than the kids who had eaten the marshmallow.

The question, at this moment of reset, is, What exactly is the next marshmallow? Do you know what you want as you start making new sacrifices?

This is just one example of a broader truth, that waiting for a destination to be happy is an error. In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

Your reset won’t give you joy and fulfillment every day, of course. Some days it will feel pretty unsatisfying, like anything else in life. But with the right goals—earning your success and serving others—you can make the rest of your career itself your reward.

Hedonia is about feeling good; eudaimonia is about living a purpose-filled life. In truth, we need both.

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.

You’re letting go of what you have, what you’ve built, a professional life that answers the question “Who am I?” It is a professional death with a rebirth that is uncertain. You are looking out over a precipice, unsure whether what awaits will bring net pleasure or pain—or, most likely, both. But you know what you have to do. Don’t think, dude. Just jump.

sometimes, we must fight our natural instincts if we want to be happy. This is hard for some people to believe, I know. Our worldly urges for money, power, pleasure, and prestige come from our ancient limbic brains. We also instinctively want to be happy and satisfied. We then make an erroneous connection: “Since I have these urges, following them must make me happy.” But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy.

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.