From Strength to Strength
Finding success, happiness and deep purpose in the second half of your life by Arthur C Brooks
I’m a student of happiness. Probably less for myself, than for being able to understand it better, so that I can empower other people to find their joy. This quest led me to Arthur Brooks’ book, which not only opened my eyes to new ideas but also reinforced a lot of my own thinking. That welcome validation gave me a lot more confidence in striding down my current path and today I’d like to share my key takeaways from Arthur’s wonderful book with you:
Decline is inevitable
Work productivity inevitably declines and the agony of decline is directly related to prestige previously achieved, and to one's emotional attachment to that prestige. What helps here is to accept that what got you to this point won't work to get you into the future, and that you need to build some new strengths and skills.
Your fluid intelligence, which is the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems, is what declines over time. It is what we commonly think of as raw smarts, and researchers find that it is associated with both reading and mathematical ability. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. This diminishes rapidly in one’s thirties and forties.
There is hope
What improves with age is your vocabulary and your crystallised intelligence, which is defined as the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past.
Think of it this way. 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.
As you age, if you can repurpose your professional life to rely more on crystallised intelligence than fluid intelligence, it will serve you well. If you can depend less on innovation and more on instruction, you will be able to play to your strengths with age.
You need to kick a habit first
The only way to get on the second curve is to kick your addiction to ‘success’ and get off the hedonic treadmill. To lose your attachment to money, power, pleasure and prestige.
Westerners often see unstarted art as an empty canvas, and art doesn’t exist until images and paint are added. It’s about adding more and more. In the East the art already exists, like an uncarved block of jade. And it reveals itself when everything that is not the statue is chipped away from it, implying that we need to chip away the jade boulder of our lives, all the extra stuff that isn’t art, until we find ourselves.
Ponder your death
Too many of us try and cling on to our fluid intelligence curves and our inability to accept a decline in our abilities prevents us from getting on the next curve. We try and engineer a professional legacy to avoid the agony of being forgotten. However obsessing about the future squanders the present. If you love your work so much you might as well enjoy it while you are doing it.
Instead of focusing on resume virtues, focus on eulogy virtues. Resume virtues are the things that you put on your CV, which include the kind of things the marketplace values - skills, accomplishments and the like. Eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral - whether you were kind, brave and compassionate. Keeping and building your eulogy virtues in inherently rewarding and allows you to live a fulfilling life by pursuing the virtues that are most personally valuable to you.
This discipline helps us work on mindfulness – living in the present as opposed to the past or future – which leads us to be happier people. It also helps us make the decisions that truly expose our best selves.
Cultivate your Aspen Grove
The single most important finding of what leads to happiness is healthy relationships, whether it be a romantic partner or other close, fulfilling family links and friendships. Real friends, not deal friends. You need strong human connections to help you get on the second curve and flourish.
Other big predictors that we can control directly include:
Smoking – Don’t do it or quit early.
Drinking alcohol – Quit drinking.
Maintain a healthy body weight.
Exercise.
Have an adaptive coping style – confront problems directly, appraising them honestly, and dealing with them directly without excessive rumination, unhealthy emotional reactions or avoidance behaviour.
Pursue lifelong, purposeful learning and lots of reading.
Start your Vanaprastha
If you find your interest in the transcendental growing, even if you have marginalized this part of life in the past, don’t resist. Become more devoted to spirituality and deep wisdom, crystiallised intelligence, teaching and faith. Put your spiritual development front and centre and schedule time for mediation, prayer, reading and practice. And practice gratitude.
Make your weakness your strength
Vulnerability is a source of deep human connection. Weaknesses offer us an opportunity to connect more deeply with others, to see the sacredness in suffering, and even to find new areas of growth and success. Stop hiding your weaknesses and don’t resist them. Sharing your weaknesses without caring what others think, also helps you relax and stop pushing to try and show how good you are.
Cast into the falling tide
Gracefully move into the next chapter of your life. Think about what activities you will keep, what you will do differently, what you will let go off and what new activities you will learn. The work you do has to be the reward, and not a means to an end. Seek work that is a balance of enjoyable and meaningful. A career doesn’t have to be a straight line. Think about what you really want now, as opposed to things you may have wanted in the past, like prestige and monetary compensation.
Seven words to remember
Use things.
Love people.
Worship the divine.
In the words of David Foster Wallace, “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
I hope you enjoyed my summary. These words and thoughts are all Arthur's and you can buy his book here. Links to all my writing and work are here.
