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

by Arthur C. Brooks

The Man on the Plane Who Changed My Life

“It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”

worked hard all his life in relative obscurity; someone disappointed at his dreams unfulfilled—perhaps the career he never pursued, the schools he never attended, the company he never started. Now, I imagined, he was forced to retire, tossed aside like yesterday’s news. As the lights switched on after touchdown, I finally got a look at the desolate man. I was shocked: I recognized him—he was well-known; famous, even. Then in his mid-eighties, he has been universally beloved as a hero for his courage, patriotism, and accomplishments of many decades ago. I have admired him since I was young.

he passed up the aisle of the plane behind me, passengers recognized him and murmured with veneration. Standing at the door of the cockpit, the pilot recognized him and said, echoing my own thoughts, “Sir, I have admired you since I was a little boy.” The older man—apparently wishing for death just a few minutes earlier—beamed at the recognition of his past glories. I wondered: Which more accurately describes the man—the one filled with joy and pride right now, or the one twenty minutes ago, telling his wife he might

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.

But that is a sure path to misery. In my field of economics, we have something called “Stein’s law,” named after the famous economist Herbert Stein from the 1970s: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”[1] Obvious, right? Well, when it comes to their own lives, people ignore it all the time. But you ignore this about your professional success at your peril. It will leave you falling further and further behind, shaking your fist at the heavens.

ever lived? This is the kind of question people like to debate in nerdy corners of the internet that you probably don’t visit, and I don’t intend to take you there. But no matter how much or little you know about science, your list is sure to contain Charles Darwin. He is remembered today as a man who changed our understanding of biology completely and permanently. So profound was his influence that his celebrity has never wavered since his death in 1882. And yet Darwin died considering his career to be a disappointment. Let’s back up. Darwin’s parents wanted him to be a clergyman, a career for which he had little enthusiasm or aptitude. As such, he was a lackluster student. His true love was science, which made him feel happy and alive. So it was the opportunity

2007, a team of academic researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Princeton University analyzed data on more than a thousand elderly people. Their findings, published in the Journal of Gerontology, showed that senior citizens who never or rarely “felt useful” were nearly three times as likely as those who frequently felt useful to develop a mild disability and more than three times as likely to have died during the course of the study.

By this standard, the man on the plane I wrote about in the introduction should have been the happiest guy in the world. He was rich, famous, and respected for what he had done long ago. He had won the race! The same goes for Darwin and Pauling. But they weren’t happy, because that model is all wrong. It is based on a completely misbegotten model of human striving. In fact, had the man on the plane had an “ordinary” life—had he never accomplished something extraordinary—he might not have felt so miserably irrelevant today.

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]

career as a professional historian and finish your PhD at thirty-two. The bad news is that in your fifties, you are still pretty wet behind the ears. But here’s the good news: at age seventy-two, you still have half your work to go! Better take care of your health so you can write your best books into your eighties. If you take these facts as being random, you get very little actionable strategy for life, beyond perhaps becoming a competitive Scrabble player

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

But then I took the opportunity to ask whether anyone in his youth-dominated business ever thought about age diversity. “Do you have enough old people working here?” I asked. His response was instructive: “You mean people over thirty?” Punk. 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. Where once they were venerated as the future of capitalism, today people often see their products as harmful and their leaders as selfish and childish. Older executives in other industries just shake their heads at the seemingly obvious mistakes the young tech entrepreneurs

baseline mood. 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. But it is strikingly common among some of history’s greatest strivers. Take Winston Churchill, perhaps the most impactful statesman of the twentieth century. He often referred to his “black dog,” a melancholy that he treated with whiskey, obsessive work, and an unquenchable thirst for greatness. Unable to leave his tortured mind unattended during his crushing schedule as a wartime prime minister, he simultaneously wrote forty-three books. Similarly, Abraham Lincoln was desperately sad off and on throughout his life, and at times suicidal, admitting once to a friend that he never dared to carry

In the 1980s, physician Robert Goldman famously found in his research that

Can’t Keep No) Satisfaction.”

In our hearts, we know this, of course. But, even with this knowledge, the problem seems unsolvable. One astonishing proof of this is that the inventor of the term “hedonic treadmill,” Philip Brickman—the celebrated psychologist also responsible for showing that winning the lottery brings no lasting satisfaction—died by suicide, throwing himself off a building across the street from his office at the University of Michigan.[16] Or consider the entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, founder of the online retailing pioneer Zappos and author of the mega bestseller Delivering Happiness. He died in 2020 at the age of forty-six after a long period of drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior resulting in at least one

decline was legendary. One day in 1909, the seven-year-old Disney was playing by himself in the backyard of his family’s Missouri farmhouse. He spied a big brown owl with its back to him. Like any red-blooded boy—certainly like my boys when they were seven—he snuck up on it with the intention of grabbing it, thinking little about the consequences of actually succeeding in his objective. Once he got hold of the panicked bird, it predictably began to scream and claw. Now in a panic himself, he threw it to the ground and stomped it to death. The ancients thought the owl was a bad omen. In the year AD 77, Pliny the Elder said, “When it appears, it foretells nothing but evil.” It was true for Walt Disney: that owl entered his dreams and haunted him for years. It created in him a morbid fear of death and colored even his many professional successes. Disney’s first big hit as a young animator came when he was twenty-six, in a cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie. It had not only images but synchronized sound, effectively ending silent cinema and ensuring Disney’s future as an entertainment pioneer. But he immediately followed it up with another short feature entitled “The Skeleton Dance,” which opens with a terrified owl perched in a tree, followed by skeletons rising from their graves. Disney’s distributor asked Roy, Walt’s brother, “What’s he trying to do, ruin us?” He went on, “You go back and tell that brother of yours the renters don’t want this gruesome crap. ...

it works with snakes, it can work with death and decline. In 2017, a team of researchers at several American universities recruited volunteers to imagine they were terminally ill or on death row and then write fictional blog posts about their imagined feelings. The researchers then compared those posts with writings by those who were actually dying or facing capital punishment. The results, published in Psychological Science, were stark: the writing of those temporarily imagining death was three times as negative as that of those actually facing it—suggesting that, counterintuitively, death becomes scarier when it is abstract and remote than when it is a concrete reality.[13]

Earlier in this book I mentioned a question I ask my students to get their attention: How many Thanksgivings do you have left? The truth is that it gets my attention as well. If I follow suit with my parents, it’s

When we think of our identities as fixed and unchanging—I am this kind of person; I am not that kind of person—we’re shutting ourselves off from many of life’s possibilities. Being open to reevaluating our ideas about ourselves can keep us from getting stuck in patterns that aren’t true to our changing selves.