4 Ways to Avoid Your Professional Decline

The Hinge in Careers

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0:30I want to talk about a phenomenon that I've heard about again and again and again from people all over the world, successful people, strivers, go-getters, about how life changes and they don't quite know why. Why in the middle of their careers they don't know what to do with themselves. Why things that used to feel satisfying no longer are. This is not just burnout. It feels like a kind of a hinge in what they're doing. The truth is that we really enjoy our careers, whatever we're going to do, not just because we enjoy the work day to day, but we like to see ourselves getting better. And it's just abject torture when we're not anymore. The world talks about going up. The world doesn't talk about coming back down again.

1:09But your decline is inevitable. Your misery is not. Because you can actually get better in a new thing if you choose the right thing. How do we do that? I want to tell you four things to do.

Welcome to Office Hours

1:23Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. This is the show about love and happiness using science and ideas. I do the show as a matter of public education. I hope you're finding it useful and maybe entertaining as well. And I especially hope that if it enriches you, that you'll use it to enrich other people. You'll take the ideas, make them your own, and share them with others. Or perhaps pass on this podcast so that we have more listeners.

1:55Please do like and subscribe so the algorithm understands that you like it and more people who are like you actually get it. And share this episode with other people. I would really, truly appreciate that. And that's one of the ways that we can reach the most possible people with the science of love and happiness and how we can share that to make a better world. I would very much love for you to be a happiness teacher alongside me. That's real leverage in this movement. As always, if you have any questions about what we're doing or you have suggestions about what we should cover in the show, you can do so by writing to us at officehours at arthurbrooks.com.

2:28That's on the website for the show. That's the email address. Don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple and subscribe on your platform of choice. If you want to go deeper on these ideas or you just like a little bit more over the course of the week, this podcast comes out on Mondays. Well, on Friday mornings at 8 o'clock Eastern Time, you will get, if you like, a copy of my newsletter. It's completely free. It'll come to your inbox. You can get that. You can subscribe to that at arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. It's not the same thing as in the podcast and starts with a bunch of my corny jokes. And who wouldn't want to miss that?

3:02Well, today I want to talk about a phenomenon that I've heard about again and again and again from people all over the world, successful people, strivers, go-getters, about how life changes and they don't quite know why. Why in the middle of their careers, they don't know what to do with themselves. Why things that used to feel satisfying no longer are. This is not just burnout. It feels like a kind of a hinge in what they're doing. People are kind of casting about when they didn't think they were going to. It's a sense of insecurity in a certain part of their lives. And it's very, very common.

The Airplane Epiphany

3:36In point of fact, I've experienced that myself when I was about 50 years old. I was the chief executive of a big nonprofit in Washington, D.C., a think tank, a public policy think tank dedicated to better policy and economics and national security. A famous place. It was the height of my career. It was the best thing I'd ever done. It was a dream come true for me professionally. And I'd done it for a while. I'd done it for six years at that point. And I recognized that that I didn't know what I was doing.

4:07Well, sort of emotionally, I didn't have the same drive. I didn't know if I wanted to keep doing it, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And that really put me at loose ends, I have to say, because I'd never felt anything like that. I'm an extremely ambitious and driven person, and I'd never had a lack of linearity before. I was asking, you know, my wife and anybody who would advise me, what's wrong with me? You know, I don't feel the drive. I don't feel the fire in my belly. I don't want to go forward. I don't want to go back.

4:37I don't know what I want anymore. She didn't know how to help me because, you know, who knows what the heck I'm talking about. And I had experience on a plane that actually led to a real epiphany for me. I want to talk to you about, which is how you can get your mojo back at any point in your career. And no matter where you are in your career, even if you feel like you're burning out or losing interest or just generally losing steam, there is a new act in front of you. And I'm going to tell you how to find it. Now, back to that airplane story, because that story is one that I start a book with that I wrote in 2020.

5:13It actually initially appeared in a big essay in The Atlantic that I wrote in 2019. Now, that wasn't all the way back to when I was 50. This was looking back on it. But that article where I talked about this subject, starting with the story that I'm going to tell you now, but the man on the plane wound up being one of the 50 most read articles from all periodicals in the world in 2019. What does that tell you? It's not just that I'm some sort of special writer. I'm not. It's that this is something that people are dealing with.

5:46I tapped a vein. And the book that came out, called From Strength to Strength in 2022, did as well. Back to the airplane. I was thinking about this kind of midlife ennui. And, you know, at the time I was traveling a lot. I still do. I travel about 48 weeks a year right now. And I was traveling maybe a little bit less than that, but plenty. And I was on a flight, an evening flight from L.A. to Washington, Dulles. I was living in around Washington, D.C. in those days, living in Maryland. And it was going to land around, I don't know, 11 o'clock at night.

6:20And so it was sort of dark, maybe an hour before we landed. I was tapping away on my laptop. And I overheard a conversation in the row behind me. Now, I wasn't trying to eavesdrop. That would be pretty indiscreet. But I have to tell you, I'm a behavioral scientist. So my laboratory is overheard conversations. You know, if you're confessing to somebody in a Starbucks line, your best friend, you're waiting for coffee, and you're just talking about having your heart broken. And I'm in front of you. Keep your voice down because, you know, that might be my next book.

6:50Anyway, so this conversation is clearly between a man and a woman. I can tell with their voices. And I can tell with their voices that they're elderly. You know how old people sound, the cadence of their voice, the tone of their voice. And I'm kind of figuring that they're married. You'll see why. Now, I can't make out his words. They're sort of muffled. But his wife's voice is really penetrating, coming right through the seat. So I can hear the answers. So he says, and she says, oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead.

7:21Knock, man. Now they have my full attention as a behavioral scientist. This is getting real. And then he goes, mumble, mumble, mumble. And she says, it's not true that nobody cares about you anymore or remembers you. So I'm kind of putting together a little portrait of who these people are. This is probably a guy who, well, he's not most of you who are watching the show, strivers, ambitious people, working to make your dreams come true, trying to get an edge in life. No, he's probably somebody who kind of let a lot of pitches go over the plate without

7:53a swing. And now it's near the end of his life and it's too late to do important things. Maybe he was a high school teacher and got retired and was unappreciated or something like that. I mean, it just sounded like somebody who was just disappointed with the way that his life went. It made sense. Anyway, so their conversation ended and I went back to work and 45 minutes or so later, we landed at Dulles Airport in Washington. The lights go on and we all stand up. And I turn around just to kind of get a look at the sad old guy, just to kind of put a face to the voice that I'd been hearing.

8:23And it turned out he was one of the most famous men in the world. Every single one of you watching the show, you would recognize who this person is. And you probably admire this person as well. This is not just a famous, you know, politician or something. Now, this is a real American hero who, with a relatively small group of people, changed the course of American life some decades ago. And, and I heard, I mean, this is somebody I've admired for years and, and I accidentally heard him telling his wife that he might as well be dead because everything good that happened to him is in the past.

8:54And I mean, it's unbelievable. As we were leaving the plane, they were like right behind me and people were recognizing him. And as we passed the cockpit, the pilot was standing outside, you know, saying, you know, thanks for flying United folks. Like they do, they all talk like Chuck Yeager for some reason. Um, he's, he recognized the hero, the man behind me on the plane. And he, and he said, sir, I want you to know that you've been my hero since I was a little boy and I turned around and he was beaming with pride.

9:25I thought, so which is it? Is it this one or is it the one an hour ago? But then I had a selfish thought. I don't want to be that when I'm old decades from now. I don't want to be on a plane next to long suffering. Mrs. B saying, honey, I might as well be dead. Everything good that happened happened in the past. And that's long since done. Nobody remembers me or loves me anymore. I don't want that. I don't want that. I don't want it. You know, I want something good and new. I don't know what it is.

9:57And she said, huh? She asked me who it was and I told her, she was amazing. And I said, yeah. And then she said, so why don't you study this? I mean, you're a behavioral scientist, right? And she says, why don't you use your PhD for something authentically helpful? You know, I took some offense at that, but that's a good point. And so I started looking into this. What can I do, this is a 50 years old, to move into something that authentically uses my talents that I'm deeply interested in, maybe for the first time in my life, that

10:30gives me a new breath of air, a tall drink of professional and personal water when I need it the most. How do I do that? Is it possible? Well, the answer to that is yes. I think I cracked the code. I'm going to tell you whether you're 30, whether you're feeling like your first career wasn't what you thought it was going to be and you don't want it, but you don't know what to do, whether you're 45 and actually feeling a little bit of burnout, whether you're in your fifties and, and, and, and what used to be easy is now hard and you don't know why

11:03and you don't like it, even though you did. And if you're at one of those hinge points in your life, this episode is for you.

The Happiness Curve by Age

11:10Now, let me start this whole research exercise where I always do as a social scientist. I want to know what I can do to get happier as I get older. That's fundamentally what I'm talking about. So let's start by, by taking a level set. How happy in general are people at different ages? In other words, as people get older, do they generally get happier by the normal progression of time or unhappier? I asked my students that my students are on average 28 years old. And I asked them that to vote.

11:41Do you think you're going to be happier or unhappier than now? Now, like 95% vote happier. They're optimists. They have to be given their level of student debt. And it kind of makes sense because, you know, my students are MBA students at Harvard. I mean, they're, they're, they got a great future waiting for them. I've seen the data. They're going to make a high salary and have great jobs. And most of them are going to like their jobs for that matter. At 38, they should be happier. They think, which is why they vote. Yes. I mean, those who vote no, I mean, I don't know what to tell them.

12:12And then I say, what about 48, 10 more years? And they say, most of them say, yeah, happier because more of same of all these good things are going to happen to me. And then I say, what do you think about 78? And almost everybody thinks they're going to be unhappier when it's 78. And I ask them why, and they, they can't answer because it just doesn't sound like fun to be 78 when you're 28. And then I show them the data. Now, what they think is that their happiness is going to go up and up and up and up, and it's going to flatten out. It's going to come back down and get out and down again, which is a pretty depressing story. So what actually happens?

12:42And the answer is the opposite. There's a ton of work by David Blanchflower at Dartmouth College, who's collected data on how happiness changes through the, through people's, you know, lifetimes. And for most people, not everybody, but most people, it's a very strong empirical regularity in the United States, Western Europe, South America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa. He's got data from countries all over the world. We vary in happiness in some ways, but not this way. It actually is the opposite of what my students think.

13:13Most people gradually decline in their happiness from their early twenties until their early fifties, just a gradual decline. And again, for those of you who are regular viewers of the show, you're probably figuring out that that's nothing to panic about. Remember, happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Enjoyment is an immediate happiness phenomenon. Meaning is a long-term happiness phenomenon. In your twenties and thirties and even forties, life is, it's sort of declining in enjoyment for lots of reasons. The house, you know, the mortgage, teenage kids, God forbid, you know, all that stuff is

13:47hard. But meaning is going up, meaning that's a long-term play. And in point of fact, that comes back around when people are in their early fifties. Most people from early fifties until like 70 get exceptionally happier. The only people who don't are people with unremediated mood disorders, depression, anxiety, and addiction issues. So if that's you, take care of that for no other reason, perhaps, than you need your happiness renaissance in your fifties and sixties, because if you do, you're probably going to get a lot

14:17happier because not coincidentally, your teenage kids moved out. Now, I mean, meaning really comes back into your life at that point, which is a beautiful thing. That's interesting enough. But then, then the plot thickens because around, you know, late sixties to early seventies, it looks like it's constant then for the rest of your life, your happiness. But that's an illusion. It turns out that the population breaks up into more or less two equal sized groups where half of the population gets happier all the way till death. And the other half of the population starts getting unhappier all the way till death.

14:49So here's what I really want to know, you know, pursuant to this question that was in my mind and heart, and it became really acute when I was on that plane. How can I be in the top branch and not in the lower branch when I'm older? What can I do now? So I'm not the old man on the plane. What are the questions that I can do now? So I can go on to something new in my fifties, my new thing. And I, when I'm in my eighties, um, I can be happy and not sad like he was now. It might seem like he should be happy because he had everything going.

15:20He was rich. He was famous. He was a hero. He's admired. Maybe he's just an aberration or maybe something's wrong with the way that he lived his life. That's the research question, isn't it? What can I do now when I'm feeling this discomfort so that I can be happier now and happier later? That's the big question. Now, to begin with, in the research, I had to ask who tends to be in the upper branch of happiness after 70 and who tends to be in the lower branch? And it's not who you think. It turns out that successful strivers tend to be in the lower branch, not the upper branch.

15:54That's not what the world tells you. The world tells you money, power, honor, prestige, admiration of other people, fame. You get that stuff. You're going to be happy for the rest of your life. And it turns out the more of those things that you have, the more likely you are to actually be on the lower branch when you get old.

The Burden of High Achievement

16:10Why?

The Burden of High Achievement

16:11Well, this is the burden of high achievement, as some psychologists have called it. Once again, I'll put stuff on this in the show notes, as I always do. The burden of high achievement is actually this. When you are identified as a super striver and successful when you're young, that is going to end at some point. And that's going to be noticeable to you, at which point you're going to be disappointed. What goes up must come down. I call that the principle of psychoprofessional gravitation. I made that up because it sounds fancy. The truth is, what that means is what goes up professionally must come down.

16:43And if you have a big party in your career, when you stop doing it because you burn out or you get worse at it or you have to retire, you're going to be bummed out. And that's exactly what we find from a lot of people in the lower branch of the curve. Look, if you never do anything with your life, you won't know when it's over. But you, office hours listener, I know you're doing it, trying to do a lot with your life. And so there's a danger on that, which means things are going to change either because they must, because of your health or well-being, or because you suddenly can't see your way forward anymore, which is this common, common, common thing that we're talking about in this episode.

17:20So, what I really want to know is this, and now here's where we're kind of nailing things down. This is how social science research goes. I'm going to take you into the Sherlock Holmes part of my business. I want to know, again, the biggest part is pretty surprising that the strivers tend to be on the lower branch. What about the strivers on the upper branch? Because there's always some outliers. The outliers who do a lot with their lives, what do they do so they can change as their life changes, continue to strive in ways that are especially applicable to their talents and gifts, and get happier and happier and happier all the way to the end?

17:58There are people like that. What do they do differently than the norm? I found it, and I'm going to tell you. I went through a lot of data sets, so you don't have to, my friends. And I have found the patterns of people who actually do this. To begin with, I want to point something out. You know, if you're feeling what we're talking about, to go back a minute ago to that feeling of insecurity that people have at different points in their lives, either early on because you think you've chose the wrong thing, or later on because you think you're burning out, or even later than that where things got weirdly hard or you just started hating something you used to like.

18:29Those are kind of the three big things that happen in people's lives where they have this kind of crisis. There's actually a lot of research out there that shows that even though nobody ever told you, you're going to have a decline in your abilities. And that natural decline in abilities is horrible for people because progress is the only thing that we like. We don't like being at a particular level. We like getting to a particular level. We like to see ourselves getting better. This is one of the reasons that almost any diet can be successful because it's such a huge reward to see the scale go down that you're willing to not eat what you like.

19:07The problem is that diets, almost none of them work at the end. In other words, you can't keep the weight off. You can take the weight off, but you can't keep the weight off because your reward when you hit your target weight is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. OK, so the truth is that we really enjoy our careers, whatever we're going to, not just because we enjoy the work day to day, but we like to see ourselves getting better. And it's just abject torture when we're not anymore. One of the big reasons that we have these painful inflections in our interests has to do with the fact that we sense a change in our abilities.

19:44Even if nobody else sees it, we do. And it's like clockwork, it turns out. Declined, generally speaking, for almost every skill, including intellectual skills, they come and they almost always come earlier than we think. And these are the big explanatory variables by why we have these crises. There's the work I want to alert you to of Dean Keith Simonton, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. Um, I'll put a, a, a, a magisterial article he wrote on this in 1997 called creative productivity, a predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks.

20:21Um, he wrote that in psychological review, a great journal where he showed that with the majority of intellectual professions, creative and intellectual professions that you peak 20 years after you start your professional life, you peak and then you start to decline. Now, on average, that's about age 39, 40 for most people, because people are like studying their careers and starting to do some work in it when they're college. Um, they peak 20 years later is what it comes about. Now, not all of them. I'll tell you about, uh, you know, differences between them. But what that means is that, you know, if you started a career in earnest because of a couple of fits and starts early on at 30 and you start like me burning out when you're 50 and you don't know why.

21:05Well, that's why that's an empirical regularity that Dean Keith Simon talks about. Now, he doesn't actually give the reason for this, but I'm going to give you the reason for this because we actually know the neuroscience of why that actually happens for most people.

Darwin and Professional Decline

21:16Now, two points here. Number one is that decline is, is pretty inevitable. What goes up must actually come down, including not just if you're, you know, Tom Brady, but if you're a librarian or if you're an accountant or you're a lawyer, a surgeon, you're a, you know, a professional French horn player that what goes up is going to come down again. It's probably going to happen earlier than you think, according to the data. Um, and that's the second point is that you think it's going to go on and on and on and on and on, and it isn't okay. The world doesn't tell you this.

21:47The world talks about going up. The world doesn't talk about coming back down again. There's no section in a bookstore in the self-improvement section called managing your professional decline. Is there no, and, and that's too bad actually, because if there were, we could save ourselves a lot of grief and go on to do great things. Actually, that's why I'm doing these podcasts and I've written about this particular topic. Okay. Now I'm going to tell you why that happens, why the decline.

22:17And then I'm going to tell you what to do about it. First, I want to tell you about famous, a couple of famous stories where that actually happened and of very, very famous people. So you're not alone if this is you, if you're like, I don't, I don't know what I'm doing. I retired early because all my dreams came true, but I have no clue what I want to do next. Or I got fired or my job went away. I don't know what else to do or I'm burning out. I can't focus on it anymore, whatever. I'm going to tell you that you're not alone in this. Um, not even close as a matter of fact, let me tell you the story of Charles Darwin.

22:51And everybody knows who Charles Darwin is. If you have a list of the five greatest naturalists who have lived over the past 500 years, Darwin's on your list. Darwin, um, is known for his incredible discoveries and his story is pretty amazing. When he was 22 years old, he was selected to be the naturalist aboard the Beagle, which is a sailing ship that was circumnavigating the globe, taking plant and animal, um, samples and sending them back to continental Europe where they'd be analyzed. Now, the purpose of this was to see if there was some evidence they could find linking current plants and animals alive today with the fossil record in which they were different.

23:29Why are they different? You know, why are they different now? Well, Darwin was formulating a theory of this as he was collecting these plants and animals. And you already know what it is. When he got back, there's a five-year voyage, 27 years old, gets off the boat and immediately drops this intellectual atomic bomb called the theory of natural selection, evolution. He hypothesized that evolution was explained why things changed over thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years from the fossils to today. And nobody had ever thought about this before.

24:00I mean, nobody had ever considered anything like this. And this changed science when he was 27 years old. I can talk about what it did to science, but I'm more interested in what it did to Darwin. He became the most famous scientist in the world at 27, almost overnight. He became rich. He was famous. He would give lecture tours all over Europe to packed halls. He wrote books by the standard of those days that were bestsellers because they'd sell 25 or 30,000 copies. Yeah, life's changed. And he was digging it, man. From his early, from his late 20s when he was doing this until about 50, he dined out on this.

24:35He wrote article after article and book after book and did experiment after experiment. But then something happened in his early 50s. All his progress stopped. He had, you know, the same kind of relationship to his work all of a sudden that he wasn't expecting that a lot of people, maybe you, have when you don't know what to do. It took a funny form, as a matter of fact. See, what had happened is that Darwin was a genius, but Darwin is actually pretty bad at math and statistics. And he couldn't read any languages but English.

These are a real liability for biologists, for scientists of any kind, as a matter of fact, because the result of it was that his work started a movement of science where young scientists were better trained in these disciplines, were working on the theory of natural selection and doing much more sophisticated models mathematically and statistically and not always writing in English, which meant that he couldn't keep abreast of the literature that he had started.

25:29By about the time he was 50 years old, for example, there was one key advance he needed to understand that today we now call genetics. He couldn't understand it. It was written in German by a monk named Gregor Mendel. And it was highly quantitative in a way that he wouldn't have understood the math. So the result was that he didn't get that. And his profession passed him by and he felt kicked to the curb. Now, he wasn't kicked to the curb. He was still a huge hero. He wrote 11 books after that, but he hated them.

26:00He considered them to be just straw, derivative. He felt like a charlatan. He lived for another 20 years, by the way. But he went to his deathbed miserable, often depressed. He wrote to his best friends, I don't have the heart to do any science, which is the only thing that I enjoy. In other words, he was super burned out in his own profession because he couldn't make any more progress for the reasons I talked about. But it's not just you, it's Darwin. He went to his grave feeling like a fake. He was buried in Westminster Abbey where they buried the Queen of England.

26:33And scientists venerate his grave, but he would have been the first to say, nah. If you're like me, you've got to be drinking when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's Element. L-M-N-T. You probably knew that already. It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks. No sugar, no junk, just electrolytes that actually work. Give it a try.

27:04I like it. It's science-backed and made for athletes, fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me. Anyone who sweats. So, how do I use it? I use it in the morning, 4.45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase at Drink Element. That's drink, just like it sounds, L-M-N-T.com slash Arthur.

27:36Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions asked, but you're going to like it. I talk a lot on this show about my morning protocol that starts with a 4.30 alarm. But what most people don't realize is that your morning protocols actually start the night before, when you go to sleep. Here's what the science actually shows. Poor sleep doesn't just make you tired. It can actually make you less happy. You can't build a meaningful life on frequent, chronic, broken sleep.

28:06So, I take my sleep seriously. One of the best investments I've made in this area is my Helix mattress. What I like about Helix is that they recognize something obvious but important. Different people sleep differently. Their website has a short quiz that asks about your sleep position, firmness preferences, and other sleep habits. Then they match you with one of more than 20 mattress models designed around your specific needs. Once that choice is made, the mattress ships directly to your door. It's a simple idea, but it's surprisingly rare.

28:39Start with the person, not the product. If you're serious about improving your sleep and your happiness, visit helixsleep.com slash brooks for 20% off site-wide and additional offers. Invest in your sleep. Everything else works better when you do. Okay, now, I can tell you story after story of really famous people who are suffering the same way that so many of us have and so many of you will. But I also remember my method here is looking for people who are the super strivers, the ambitious, successful people, whose curves keep going up.

29:17Let me tell you about one of those, too, before I keep going with the science of what's actually going on. Let me tell you about somebody whose career actually started going down and they went in decline, but they got happier. Okay, and that was Johann Sebastian Bach, the master of the high Baroque, perhaps the greatest composer who ever lived. By the way, he's my favorite composer as a former classical musician. Now, early on, Bach, like Darwin, was considered to be the genius of his generation.

29:48He was arguably the most famous composer in Central Europe. His life was full of commissions and royalty coming to him. And he had an astonishingly productive personal life as well. He had 20 kids, which is productive. And all was well until Bach was about 50 when something happened. And that thing that happened was that musical styles changed. Concert music changed. And believe it or not, the musical style and the way that it changed was ushered in by his own son, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach,

30:22who was one of the great pioneers of the classical style as opposed to the Baroque style. Now, Bach tried to write in his new style, but he couldn't. He couldn't adapt. It's like something was wrong with his brain. He was like Darwin with genetics. Johann Sebastian Bach couldn't adapt to the new style, couldn't write in it. Now, like Darwin, he could have sort of shook his fist at the heavens and been depressed. But it turned out he did something different. And this is going to provide a clue for us on how to have the normal course of change in your abilities not ruin your happiness.

30:56What happened to Bach was that he just changed his career. He went from being the greatest musical innovator of his age to being the greatest instructor of his age. He took a position at the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig, where he was the organist and he was the chorus master. And he wrote in the old style for the lectionary for the church. He wrote church music, which didn't have to be as daring or as innovative. And he became the most respected music professor and mentor of his time. He was a great teacher.

31:27He also continued to write text materials because he was such a great teacher. He was writing a textbook, effectively, on Baroque music called The Art of Fugue, Die Kunst der Fugue, when he died at 65 years old. As a matter of fact, his son, who had supplanted him, Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, he wrote in the margins of a piece that abruptly stopped, a manuscript that abruptly stopped. At this point, the composer put down his pencil and died, like strong finish. And it was a textbook. So here's the point.

31:58Here's the point, my friends. He actually changed what he did. He went from great to decline to great in something else that was, by the way, it was less remunerative. He didn't make as much money. It was less famous. But it was ultimately even more satisfying to him, which he did till the end of his life. He was surrounded as he was dying. I'm not sure he actually died literally with a pencil in his hand by his kids, many kids, many grandchildren, beloved students.

32:29And he died happy. So what's the difference? And what does it mean to you? That's where we're going.

Fluid versus Crystallized Intelligence

32:36Now, to begin with, what happened to Bach and Darwin? What happened to the man on the plane? What happened to me? What happens to a lot of you sometime at these hinge points where we lose interest and maybe even lose ability when, as Keith Simonton pointed out, we peak and we go into decline. That's a cognitive phenomenon. That's not a technical phenomenon. That's a cognitive and that's our brains. We don't think that there's something wrong with our brains at 39, but across every profession that I look at, I find somewhere between 36 and 45, with some exceptions that I can mention in a minute, where your brain is just fine.

33:14But what you used to be good at gets harder for some reason. Here's what's going on. In the 60s and 70s, the great British psychologist Raymond Cattell, he was the man studying intelligence. Now, human intelligence, there's a lot of ways that we know it's like there's always a lot of news when we talk about IQ and intelligence testing or aptitude testing or SATs. And we talk about that a lot. But really interesting is how human intelligence, no matter how you measure it, actually changes over the lifespan.

33:47That's what Raymond Cattell talked about an awful lot. And he had a theory of two intelligences. The one that you have when you're young, which is called fluid intelligence. Now, that's the ability to reason, analyze and solve novel problems. It relies on working memory, quickness of thinking. It allows you to be really great at what you do. That's increasing, that fluid intelligence, through your 20s and 30s. That's super high. That tends to peak around age 39. In other words, what Bach was really great at when he was young, what Darwin was really good at when he was 39, what I was really good at when I was 39, that peaks then because that's based largely on fluid intelligence.

34:28When you're super good at what you do and you're a young striver, you're always maxing out on what requires a lot of this fluid intelligence. This reason, analysis, solving novel problems, working memory, facility and quickness of thought. That's what makes you a great litigator when you're in a junior associative firm. It makes you so good at what you do and distinguish yourself from the others. Or a stock picker or a composer, a video game maker, a coder, whatever it happens to be. Not coder anymore because that's AI. But a software engineer using AI, that's what's going to make you a star is what it comes down to.

35:03But Cattell recognized and showed in his research that fluid intelligence is just a first intelligence curve. Goes up, hits its max around 39, 40, then starts back down again. That would be really bad news if that were your only intelligence curve. That would mean that everybody would be just wiping out and have nothing to do by about 50 or 55. Turns out there's a second intelligence curve that comes in behind it. But it's a different kind of intelligence. Cattell called it crystallized intelligence, which is the ability to use knowledge that you gained in the past.

35:36This is your pattern recognition. This is your ability to use a vast library. See, when you're a kid, you don't have very much in your library, but you can find stuff out really, really quickly. You're good at solving problems with your feral intelligence. When you're older, that ability is less. You're slower. Your working memory is not as good. I mean, mine isn't. You know, I miss names. I miss all kinds of stuff at 62. But I know a ton. I mean, I can do the show and I'm looking at notes and all that. But, you know, I've learned a lot. I've written a lot of columns and books and academic articles.

36:06And I got recalled because my library is full. Furthermore, crystallized intelligence favors teaching, mentoring, managing other people. So what this shows is that if you want to be happy, and let's just say you're an innovative high baroque composer in your 20s and 30s and 40s, declining in your 40s. What do you want to be in your 50s and 60s and 70s? And the answer to that is that you want to be a teacher. You want to be the best possible teacher, the best manager, the best mentor.

36:37You want to be the kind of person who can say, you see this problem? I've never seen it before, but I have an intuition about it because I've seen so many other similar problems. You want to be able to explain long-haired ideas that would have been too complex for other people to understand when you were 30. When you're 60, you want to be able to explain them in a way that people can understand you. Huh. You know, the truth of the matter is, when I was in my 30s, I was doing research that was so mathematically sophisticated. I don't understand my own papers today.

37:07What do I do today? I write, speak, and teach about science for bigger audiences than I ever had in the past of people who are not scientists. And my guess is that you're following this. I mean, you might have to slow it down to 0.75 or something because I talk too fast, but that's beside the point. I'm actually a much better teacher than I've ever been. Now, here's one exception to this 20-year peak rule for intellectual professions. Historians. It turns out that historians, this weird outlying thing, historians tend to do the best half of their research after 65.

37:47I mean, in other words, they do half of their work after 65 and the better half of their work. Why? The answer is because history, writing history, is a crystallized intelligence profession. I mean, you got to be kind of inventive, right? You know, I'm going to write a new kind of book, but basically you need to know everything about that. That's why Doris Kearns Goodwin is so great today. And when you think of a historian in your mind, you don't think of a 30-year-old. You might think of an 80-year-old. As a matter of fact, they're in the zone for that particular profession, but that's the outlier.

38:21More to the point, people who are successful in the second half of their lives, when they go from the thing that they did so well, and then they maybe burn out or realize that they're changing, and they go on to something new and they're successful. It's something that's crystallized and not fluid. They do a crystallized version of themselves. That's what Bach demonstrated. A lot of people that find, weirdly, that, you know, they'll step down from their post as some fluid intelligence thing, and that they, you know, they're a hedge fund manager, you know, and working in really innovative space.

38:55And then they go and they teach a class at the local business school, and they find it just glorious, and they're really, really good at it. Why? Because they were in the downslope of their fluid intelligence curve and frustrated, and they jumped onto the upslope of their crystallized intelligence curve, where they were actually getting better. And once again, they were making progress, and they got happy. The truth of the matter is this. This is what the research shows. Your decline is inevitable. Your misery is not, because you can actually get better in a new thing if you choose the right thing, which is to say something on your crystallized intelligence curve.

Four Steps to a New Curve

39:32How do we do that? I want to tell you four things to do. Okay? Now, four things to think about. Then again, I'm going to put the, you know, the book and the article written on this in the show notes, so you can get, you know, the comprehensive plan. This is an abbreviated version of it. Number one, you got to make a jump onto that new curve, and a lot of people are really afraid to do that. A lot of people will try to ride that fluid intelligence curve or force it, try to reinflect it and force it back up. Oh, if I work hard enough, that working memory, that problem-solving capacity, that, you know, that edge, that'll come back.

40:08That'll come back. Yeah, no, probably not. The happiest people, they jump onto the new curve by finding the crystallized intelligence version of themselves. And so people who are great litigators and law firms in their 30s, they make good managing partners in their 50s and 60s. Better managers, as a matter of fact. If you're a startup entrepreneur at 30, maybe you should be a venture capitalist at 60, because that's the teaching talent scout version of that. Find the next great ideas.

40:39That takes a lot of humility, doesn't it? To dedicate yourself to the greatness of younger people in the fluid intelligence space. Yeah, that's a good thing, too. So you don't have to quit your job, necessarily. What's important is striving to detach progressively from the most obvious earthly rewards that come from fluid intelligence, even as you continue to work or advance in a career that has changed towards something that is more magisterial, something that is more crystallized.

41:10Now, the essence of the crystallized intelligence curve is not me, me, me, me, me. It's us. It's you. And that's the second point. If you're looking for something and you're casting about it, you don't know what it is, think about how you can serve others, right? I mean, crystallized intelligence is all about, generally speaking, teaching and bringing out goodness in other people. And that's a service, as a matter of fact. What can you do to find the strengths of other people as opposed to looking internally for the strengths of something that you used to be good at?

41:43And that's hard for a lot of people. That's hard when you've been a star, to be sure. But it's hugely motivating when you actually do that. Unbelievably satisfying for so many people. I talk to people who say, I had no idea that mentoring others was going to be such a great thing. You know what? A lot of people who retire will come to be strivers. And they'll say, I don't have a retirement plan. You know, let's just say that they're financially independent. Good. And they're 60 years old. They have lots and lots of health and life ahead of them. Great. I usually recommend a portfolio approach of crystallized intelligence activities.

42:17Mentor two people. Sit on two boards. Teach one class. You know, put together a portfolio of things that actually do that. And then really develop the thing that you love the most. And you just don't know that yet. And why are you going to love it? Quite frankly, because you're super good at it. But you didn't know it. Because you didn't understand your own brain. Serve others. Look for opportunities. Now, meanwhile, one of the things that I recommend that actually goes really well, especially for older people, is that crystallized intelligence, for some reason,

42:50and I've got hypotheses as to why, lends itself especially good toward transcendence, to worship, to an understanding of philosophy, toward deeper thinking. You know, that's really where Bach went. I mean, Bach was always a pretty religious guy. He was a pretty serious Lutheran. But near the end of his life, he was asked, why do you write music? And he said, the aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul. At the end of all of his, at least later manuscripts, he would write, to the glory of God, at the end.

43:27Last bar, finished, to the glory of God. He spent hours every day with his Bible. He was the organist and the choir master at the Lutheran Church in Leipzig, at the Tomaskirche in Leipzig. He got more religious as he got older and found that that motivated him and fortified his crystallized intelligence. It was part and parcel with that. You can probably come up with some hypotheses yourself as to why that would be the case. But it is truly, you see again and again and again and again, that worship and teaching,

44:03serving other people through crystallized intelligence and offering up your soul as you see it, they go hand in glove. That's number three. And number four is to connect more deeply with other people. But connect more deeply. Because once again, crystallized intelligence is about us, not me. And the connections per se, therefore, need to be cultivated and are more satisfyingly cultivated as we get older. The truth is that this is completely consistent with all of the research on the matter.

44:33I've talked in the past about the Harvard Study of Adult Development. I did a whole show on it, as a matter of fact. I'll make sure that's in the show notes, that link. And it talked about the 90-year longitudinal study that's still going, starting in the late 40s. Or the late 30s, following men at Harvard, and then their spouses, and then a sample of guys who didn't go to college, and their spouses, and then their kids. And now it's hugely representative. And looked at what they did over the course of their lives as they got older, that predicted being really happy and being healthy when they were truly old, like 80s and 90s.

45:06And there's seven things. And some of it's obvious. They didn't smoke, or they quit early. They didn't drink to excess, or they didn't drink at all. They didn't eat like 11-year-olds, and they got a moderate amount of exercise. But then it got a little bit more interesting. That's the first four. The fifth thing that they did that predicted happiness or wellness was that they had a way to deal with their problems. For some, it was therapy. For some, it was worship. For some, it was journaling. They had a way to do it. They got good at it. Number six was that they were lifelong learners.

45:37Their brains were interested. They were curious people. But by far, more than anything else, was number seven, which is that they had a lot of love relationships. They, generally speaking, had good marriages or at least very close friendships and usually relationships with their adult children. That was the big predictor. That was the big swinger in happiness. And this is what Bach found, certainly, by surrounding himself with his family and students. And that's what everybody in the research shows. Those who actually get happier as they get older. They get on the right curve where they serve others.

46:09And they surround themselves with family and friends and people that they actually love. That is the important thing to be thinking about. So, if you're struggling with this, if you're wondering about the future and you're at loose ends, you don't know what to do, and you don't want to wind up like the man on the plane. Because, of course, you don't. Jump to the new curve. What is the new curve? What is it? Two, serve other people. Find a way to serve other people. That's probably on your crystallized intelligence curve.

46:40Worship. Develop your life philosophy. Go deeper into the biggest questions and connect with other people in the spirit of love. And you don't have to worry about finding the new meaning of your life. That's how the meaning of your life, at any stage of your life, will find you.

Answering Listener Questions

46:58Let's do some questions before we finish. Let's start with Frank T. Frank T, thank you for writing in to officehours.arthurbrooks.com. I don't want to sound too desperate. That was great when things start like this. But what advice would you give us to navigate the rest of our lives without being too needy toward these amazing people we made from scratch? Isn't that a charming way of talking about your children? Actually, Frank, you're talking about your biological children. I have two biological children and one by adoption. And it doesn't matter if your kids are the make or buy decision.

47:29See, I'm a business school professor. You'll love them exactly the same. And it's the same question. And I appreciate your question as well. Here's the thing, particularly with adult children, as your life is changing. The desperate question is, how can I get them to love me more? It's always the desperate question. That seems needy. It's needy in a marriage. Can I get her to love me more? The right question is, how can I love her more? The right question about your adult children is, how can I love them more? What can I do to love them more?

47:59Which, by the way, is not necessarily showering them with cash. What can I actually do to love them more? The secret, the paradox of happiness is that we as humans, this is not the paradox. This is an axiom of happiness. We are built to love and be loved. Here's the paradox. To be loved, you love. You give the thing that you actually want. And that is most true with the people who are closest to you. Laura M, writing into the website as well. I'm concerned about what I will do when I retire. These are all on theme for today.

48:31I worry it will just be cooking and cleaning all day long. I don't think I know what I want to do with my free time. And our finances won't allow for much travel. That's fine. Because it turns out that cooking and cleaning and traveling, fine. But ultimately, there are two things to do as you retire that will be most satisfying. Number one is service. Because that's on the crystallized intelligence curve, whether it's compensated or not. It's just a natural crystallized thing to do. And I talked about that. Refer to the episode before. But second is something I've talked about occasionally on the show as well, which is leisure.

49:03But leisure is not chilling on the beach or traveling to see the Acropolis. Real leisure, according to Josef Pieper, the great German philosopher, is really one of three things. Deepening your spiritual awareness, making more profound your relationships, and learning new things. Those are the three parts of actual generative leisure. And that's the promise of what we can all do that doesn't require that we have unbelievable finances and financial security. And that works in the literature as well. I'm not just making that up, obviously. Anonymous writes in,

49:34What is your advice on fair weather friends? Friends who may have started out as friends of pleasure or utility. That's good. Aristotelian language, Anonymous. Thank you very much. But later on, only show up when they can get something from you. A favor. A good time. So those are deal friends. Those are deal friends. We all have a lot of deal friends. Nothing wrong with deal friends. But they don't satisfy. What satisfy are real friends. And so what do we do as time goes on about fair weather friends? You don't worry too much about them. You can turn some deal friends into real friends.

50:05But your real friends are your real friends. They just love you. They don't want you for anything else except you. And you know who they are. So with fair weather friends, especially as you're moving on in your life, as you move on with your life. And if they're around, that's great because they're pleasant. But you don't pursue it. You put your work into the real friends. You don't put the work into the deal friends. And you will get back what you invest in. That's true in anything else in life. So make sure you're investing in the real and not in the deal. And you'll actually start to sort your relationships.

50:35And you'll have a portfolio that's paying higher dividends in love. We're done. I hope this will be useful to you. We're going to sign off now. Please let me know your thoughts by writing in as our friends have here today. OfficeHours.ArthurBrooks.com. Leave comments wherever you are watching or listening to this. We will see them. I promise. And please do like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on the other platforms. Please do recommend this show to one or two million of your closest personal friends. And while you're at it, order for these, this couple million people, The Meaning of Your Life, my newest book.

51:10We want people to have more love and more happiness in their life. And we want to be responsible for it if we possibly can. Okay, not millions of them, but at least pass on some thoughts and prayers to them. And maybe a suggestion that this podcast might be right for them too. Thank you for listening or watching. And I'll see you next week. We'll see you next week. We'll see you next week.

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