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

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brooks, Arthur C., 1964– author.

Title: From strength to strength: finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life / Arthur C. Brooks.

Description: First Edition. | New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021040786 (print) | LCCN 2021040787 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593191484 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593191491 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Older people—Psychology. | Aging—Psychological aspects. | Spirituality. | Happiness.

Classification: LCC BF724.8 .B76 2022 (print) | LCC BF724.8 (ebook) | DDC 155.67—dc23/eng/20211015

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040786

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040787

Cover design: Jennifer Heuer

Cover image: Christiaan Hart / Alamy Stock Photo

Book design by Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media / adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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To my guru

Blessed are those whose strength is in you,

whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.

As they pass through the Valley of Baka,

they make it a place of springs;

the autumn rains also cover it with pools.

They go from strength to strength,

till each appears before God in Zion.

Psalm 84: 5–7

Contents

Introduction

The Man on the Plane Who Changed My Life

Chapter 1

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think

Chapter 2

The Second Curve

Chapter 3

Kick Your Success Addiction

Chapter 4

Start Chipping Away

Chapter 5

Ponder Your Death

Chapter 6

Cultivate Your Aspen Grove

Chapter 7

Start Your Vanaprastha

Chapter 8

Make Your Weakness Your Strength

Chapter 9

Cast into the Falling Tide

Conclusion

Seven Words to Remember

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

The Man on the Plane Who Changed My Life

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

These exasperated words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, DC. The plane was dark and quiet, and most people were either sleeping or watching a movie. I was working on my laptop, feverishly trying to finish something now completely lost to memory but that at the time seemed to be of crucial importance to my life, happiness, and future.

A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response.

Again, his wife: Oh, stop saying it would be better if you were dead.

Now they had my full attention. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but couldn’t help it. I listened half with human empathy and half with the professional fascination of a social scientist. I formed an image of the husband in my head. I imagined someone who had 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.

As 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 as well be dead?

•   •   •

I couldn’t get the cognitive dissonance of that scene out of my mind over the following weeks.

It was the summer of 2012, shortly after my forty-eighth birthday. I was not world-famous like the man on the plane, but my professional life was going pretty well. I was the president of a prominent Washington, DC, think tank that was prospering. I had written some bestselling books. People came to my speeches. My columns were published in The New York Times.

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.

And even if it did deliver satisfaction, could I really keep this going? If I stayed at it seven days a week, twelve hours a day—which I basically did, with my eighty-hour workweeks—at some point my progress would slow and stop. Many days I was thinking this slowing had already started. And what then? Would I wind up looking back on my life and telling my long-suffering wife, Ester, that I might as well be dead? Was there any way to get off the hamster wheel of success and accept inevitable professional decline with grace? Maybe even turn it into opportunity?

•   •   •

Though these questions were personal, I decided to approach them as the social scientist I am, treating them as a research project. It felt unnatural—like a surgeon taking out his own appendix. I plunged ahead, however, and for the last nine years I have been on a personal quest to turn my future from a matter of dread to an opportunity for progress.

I delved into divergent literatures, from my own field in social science to adjacent work in brain science, philosophy, theology, and history. I dug into the biographies of some of the most successful people in history. I immersed myself in the research on people who strive for excellence and interviewed hundreds of leaders, from heads of state to hardware-store owners.

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.

The good news is that I also discovered what I was looking for: a way to escape the curse. 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.

But I quickly realized that creating a private life plan wasn’t good enough. I had to share it. The secrets I found were available to anyone with a will to live a life of joy and purpose—and willing to do the work to achieve it. Unlike the world we have tried to conquer earlier in life, here there was no competition for the prizes. We can all succeed and all be happier. And that is why I have written this book for you, my fellow striver.

The fact that you picked up this book tells me you have most likely achieved success through hard work, huge sacrifice, and uncompromising excellence. (And let’s be honest—probably no small amount of good luck, too.) You deserve a lot of praise and admiration, and you’ve probably gotten it. But you know intellectually that you can’t keep this party going forever, and you might even already see the signs that it is coming to an end. Unfortunately, you never gave much thought to the party’s end, so you only really have one strategy: Try to keep it going. Deny change and work harder.

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.

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; and, in the process, true meaning in life—maybe for the first time. The process is what I lay out in this book. It has changed my life, and it can change yours, too.

A word of caution, though: This path means going against many of your striverly instincts. I’m going to ask you not to deny your weaknesses but rather to embrace them defenselessly. To let go of some things in your life that you worked hard for—but that are now holding you back. 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. To rebuild the relationships you neglected on the long road to worldly success. And to dive into the uncertainty of a transition you have worked so hard to evade.

None of this is easy—it’s hard to teach an old striver new tricks! It takes great effort to accept ideas that might have seemed crazy when you were doing everything under your power to be truly great at your worldly vocation. But I promise you the payoff will be worth it. I—and you—can get happier every year.

We can go from strength to strength.

CHAPTER 1

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think

Who are the five greatest scientists who have 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 of a lifetime to him—by far the most important event in my life, he later called it—when, in 1831 at age twenty-two, he was invited to join the voyage of The Beagle, a scientific sailing investigation around the world. For the next five years aboard the ship, he collected exotic plant and animal samples, sending them back to England to the fascination of scientists and the general public.

This was impressive enough to make him pretty well-known. When he returned home at age twenty-seven, however, he started an intellectual fire with his theory of natural selection, the idea that over generations, species change and adapt, giving us the multiplicity of plants and animals we see after hundreds of millions of years. Over the next thirty years, he developed his theory and published it in books and essays, his reputation growing steadily. In 1859, at age fifty, he published his magnum opus and crowning achievement, On the Origin of Species, a bestseller explaining his theory of evolution that made him into a household name and changed science forever.

At this point, however, Darwin’s work stagnated creatively: he hit a wall in his research and could not make new breakthroughs. Around that same time, a Czech monk by the name of Gregor Mendel discovered what Darwin needed to continue his work: the theory of genetics. Unfortunately, Mendel’s work was published in an obscure German academic journal and Darwin never saw it—and in any case, Darwin (who, remember, had been an unmotivated student) did not have the mathematical or language skills to understand it. Despite his writing numerous books later in life, his work after that broke little ground.

In his last years, Darwin was still very famous—indeed, after his death he was buried as a national hero in Westminster Abbey—but he was increasingly unhappy about his life, seeing his work as unsatisfying, unsatisfactory, and unoriginal. I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigations lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy, he confessed to a friend. I have everything to make me happy and contented, but life has become very wearisome to me.[1]

Darwin was successful by the world’s standards, washed up by his own. He knew that by all worldly rights, he had everything to make him happy and contented but confessed that his fame and fortune were now like eating straw. Only progress and new successes such as he enjoyed in his past work could cheer him up—and this was now beyond his abilities. So he was consigned to unhappiness in his decline. Darwin’s melancholy did not abate, by all accounts, before he died at seventy-three.

I’d like to be able to tell you that Darwin’s decline and unhappiness in old age were as rare as his achievements, but that’s not true. In fact, Darwin’s decline was completely normal, and right on schedule. And if you, like Darwin, have worked hard to be exceptional at what you do, you will almost certainly face a similar pattern of decline and disappointment—and it will come much, much sooner than you think.

The surprising earliness of decline

Unless you follow the James Dean formula—Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse—you know that your professional, physical, and mental decline is inevitable. You probably just think it’s a long, long way off.

You’re not alone in thinking this. For most people, the implicit belief is that aging and its effect on professional performance are something that happen far in the future. This attitude explains all kinds of funny survey results. For example, when asked in 2009 what being old means, the most popular response among Americans was turning eighty-five.[2] In other words, the average American (who lives to seventy-nine) dies six years before entering old age.

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 in.

Obviously, you aren’t just going to take my word for this, so let’s take a look at the evidence.

We’ll start with the most obvious, and earliest, decline: athletes. Those playing sports requiring explosive power or sprinting see peak performance from twenty to twenty-seven years of age, while those playing endurance sports peak a bit later—but still as young adults.[3] No surprise there—no one expects a serious athlete to remain competitive until age sixty, and most of the athletes I talked to for this book (there aren’t any surveys asking when people expect to experience their physical decline, so I started doing so informally) figured they would have to find a new line of work by the time they were thirty. They don’t love this reality, but they generally face it.

It’s a much different story for what we now call knowledge workers—most people reading this book, I would guess. Among people in professions requiring ideas and intellect rather than athletic skill and significant physical strength, almost no one admits expecting decline before their seventies; some later than that. Unlike athletes, however, they are not facing reality.

Take scientists. Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, has spent years studying when people are most likely to make prizewinning scientific discoveries and key inventions. Looking at major inventors and Nobel winners going back more than a century, Jones finds that the most common age for great discovery is one’s late thirties. He shows that the likelihood of a major discovery increases steadily through one’s twenties and thirties and then declines dramatically through one’s forties, fifties, and sixties. There are outliers, of course. But the probability of producing a major innovation at age seventy is approximately equal to what it was at age twenty—about zero.[4]

That fact no doubt inspired Paul Dirac, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, to pen a little melancholy verse about how age is every physicist’s curse. It ends with these two lines:

He is better dead than living still

when once he is past his thirtieth year.

Dirac won the prize when he was thirty-one years old, for work he had done in his midtwenties. By his thirtieth birthday, he had developed a general theory of the quantum field, the area in which he had earned his PhD at Cambridge (at age twenty-four). At twenty-eight he wrote The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, a textbook still in use today. At thirty he was a chaired professor at Cambridge. And after that? He was an active scholar and made a few breakthroughs. But it was nothing like the early years. Hence his poem.

Of course, Nobel winners might be different than ordinary scientists. Jones, with a coauthor, dug deeper into the data on researchers