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

by Arthur C. Brooks

To adopt parts of life that will make you happy, even if they don’t make you special. To face decline—and even death—with courage and confidence.

Here is the reality: in practically every high-skill profession, decline sets in sometime between one’s late thirties and early fifties. Sorry, I know that stings. And it gets worse: the more accomplished one is at the peak of one’s career, the more pronounced decline seems once it has set

Other knowledge fields follow the same basic pattern. For writers, decline sets in between about forty and fifty-five.

The age-related decline among airtraffic controllers is so sharp—and the consequences of decline related errors so dire—that the mandatory retirement age is fifty-six.

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.

Pride is sneaky: it hides inside good things. Saint Augustine astutely observed that “every other kind of sin has to do with the commission of evil deeds, whereas pride lurks even in good works in order to destroy them.”23 So

Rafael Merry del Val y Zulueta, composed a beautiful prayer called the “Litany of Humility.” The prayer does not ask that we be spared humiliation, but that we be given the courage to deal with our fear of it.

From putting my career before the people in my life, deliver me. From distracting myself from life with work, deliver me. From my drive to be superior to others, deliver me. From the allure of the world’s empty promises, deliver me. From my feelings of professional superiority, deliver me. From allowing my pride to supplant my love, deliver me. From the pains of withdrawing from my addiction, deliver me. From the dread of falling into decline and being forgotten, deliver me.

In my fifties, my life is jammed with possessions, accomplishments, relationships, opinions, and commitments. I asked myself, “Can the right formula for a happy life really be to add more and more, until I die?” Obviously, the answer is no. Even worse than the inherent fruitlessness of this strategy, it gets less and less effective over time as our first success curve declines and the returns to our efforts diminish.

In his view, people who opt for the worldly path choose “substitutes for God”: idols that objectify the idolater and never satisfy the craving for happiness.5 Even if you are not a religious believer, his list rings true as the idols that attract us. They are money, power, pleasure, and honor.

Even more powerful than our urge for more is our resistance to less. We try even harder to avoid losses than we do to achieve gains. That’s the insight that earned the Nobel Prize in Economics for Princeton University’s Daniel Kahneman, for work he did with Amos Tversky on prospect theory.11 Prospect theory challenges the assumption that people are rational agents who assess gains and losses the same way; in fact, it asserts that people are much more affected emotionally by losing something than they are by gaining the same thing.

Satisfaction = Continually gettingwhat you wantSuccess = Continually having more than othersFailure = Having less

Researchers have consistently found that most survivors of illness and loss experience post-traumatic growth. Indeed, cancer survivors tend to report higher happiness levels than demographically matched people who did not have cancer.21 Talk to them, and they will tell you that they no longer bother with the stupid attachments that used to weigh them down,

Each year on my birthday, I list my worldly wants and attachments—the stuff that fits under Thomas’s categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor. I try to be completely honest.

Next, I go back to my bucket list. I consider how these things compete with the forces of my happiness for time, attention, and resources.

Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.

Whether paralyzing or mild, the fear of death has eight distinct dimensions: fear of being destroyed, fear of the dying process, fear of the dead, fear for significant others, fear of the unknown, fear of conscious death, fear for body after death, and fear of premature death.

To avoid this error, I take an hour one Sunday afternoon each month and start by imagining myself at the end of my life, surrounded by the people I love. I think about what they are saying about me. Then I come back to the present. I think about how I want to allocate my time in the coming weeks. What do I want to do with my time this week to cultivate the relationships that will result in that end scenario?

Intrinsic goals centered around fulfillment from deep, enduring relationships. Extrinsic goals centered on earning a lot of money, owning a lot of stuff, gaining power, or achieving reputation and fame—in other words, the wants that make up the denominator of the satisfaction equation.

Only a shift to intrinsic goals will give you what you really want, and prepare you to get on the second curve, which requires relationships and sharing wisdom in the spirit of love. But can you get new goals, especially later in life? Indeed you can, but you need to state your intrinsic values more openly.

The goal of the last phase of life is to drink from the chalice of life’s deepest secrets.

But it was his words of sadness and suffering at the end of his life that magnetized the Christian faith for the ages as one of authentic human experience—a faith that understands the pain in ordinary lives and the human reaction to it. This was not the norm in Paul’s time. His philosophical contemporaries admired and followed the Stoics, who sought to banish emotional expressions of suffering from their communication.5 A wise person, the Stoics taught, is strong and disciplined enough to see that anger and grief are senseless and destructive. Suffering should be borne, well, stoically. In contrast, Paul wrote to the Corinthian church “out of great dis- tress and anguish of heart and with many tears.”6 Paul was basically an anti-Stoic.