Top highlights from From Strength to Strength
Get old sharing the things you believe are most important. Excellence is always its own reward, and this is how you can be most excellent as you age.
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Your satisfaction is what you have, divided by what you want.
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Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.
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This is just an example of the age-old debate over two kinds of happiness that scholars refer to as hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia is about feeling good; eudaimonia is about living a purpose-filled life. In truth, we need both. Hedonia without eudaimonia devolves into empty pleasure; eudaimonia without hedonia can become dry.
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It is well-known that a big percentage of all marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation (about 39 percent, according to the latest data).[30] But staying together is not what really counts. Analysis of the Harvard Study data shows that marriage per se accounts for only 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life.[31] The important thing for health and well-being is relationship satisfaction. Popular culture would have you believe the secret to this satisfaction is romantic passion, but that is wrong. On the contrary, a lot of unhappiness can attend the early stages of romance. For example, researchers find that it is often accompanied by rumination, jealousy, and surveillance behaviorsnot what we typically associate with happiness. Furthermore, destiny beliefs about soul mates or love being meant to be can predict low forgiveness when paired with attachment anxiety.[32] Romance often hijacks our brains in a way that can cause the highs of elation or the depths of despair.[33] You might accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happinessan exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us. The secret to happiness isnt falling in love; its staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call companionate lovelove based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.[34] You might think companionate love sounds a little, well, disappointing. I certainly did the first time I heard it, on the heels of great efforts to win my future wifes love. But over the past thirty years, it turns out that we dont just love each other; we like each other, too. Once and always my romantic love, she is also my best friend.
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Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
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Without being aware of it, Carlos was making a distinction in relationships that Aristotle had made more than two thousand years earlier in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle wrote that there is a kind of a friendship ladder, from lowest to highest. At the bottomwhere emotional bonds are weakest and the benefits are lowestare friendships based on utility: deal friends, to use Carloss coinage. You are friends in an instrumental way, one that helps each of you achieve something else you want, such as professional success. Higher up are friends based on pleasure. You are friends because of something you like and admire about the other person. They are entertaining, or funny, or beautiful, or smart, for example. In other words, you like an inherent quality, which makes it more elevated than a friendship of utility, but it is still basically instrumental. At the highest level is Aristotles perfect friendship, which is based on willing each others well-being and a shared love for something good and virtuous that is outside either of you. This might be a friendship forged around religious beliefs or passion for a social cause. What it isnt is utilitarian. The other person shares in your passion, which is intrinsic, not instrumental. Of
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The bad news is that in your fifties, you are still pretty wet behind the ears. But heres 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.
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There are two pillars of happiness.... One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.[8] And
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What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasnt just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers. I came to call this the strivers 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.
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Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important. Excellence is always its own reward, and this is how you can be most excellent as you age.
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satisfaction is possiblejust not with the old formulas. We need to toss out all that bad math and use this one equation instead, which incorporates the wisdom of Siddhartha and Thomas and the best modern social science: Satisfaction = What you have what you want Your satisfaction is what you have, divided by what you want.
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In his 1841 essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.[24]
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In the words of the Spanish Catholic saint Josemara Escriv, He has most who needs least. Dont create needs for yourself.
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You might accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happinessan exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us. The
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To see weakness as purely negative is a mistake. Weakness befalls us all, and in many ways. It has its discomforts to be sure and entails loss. But it is also an opportunityto connect more deeply with others; to see the sacredness in suffering; even to find new areas of growth and success. Stop hiding it, and dont resist it. Doing so has another benefit for striversmaybe the most important one of all: you can finally relax a little. When you are honest and humble about your weaknesses, you will be more comfortable in your own skin. When you use your weaknesses to connect with others, love in your life will grow. And finallyfinallyyou will be able to relax without worrying about being exposed as less than people think you are.
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As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his joyful essay Friendship, I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes minea possession for all time. An
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Psychologists have a special word for uncomfortable life transitions: liminality.[3] It means the time between work roles, organizations, career paths, and relationship stages. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a popular book in 2020 on liminality called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age.[4]
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Remember, a classic sign of addictive behavior is when something not human starts to supplant human relationships.
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Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom.
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Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things. Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh explains this in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness:
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Man was made for conflict, not for rest, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.[13] In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.
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What activities will you keep? What activities will you evolve and do differently? What activities will you let go of? What new activities will you learn? And to start . . . What will you commit to doing in the next week to evolve into the new you? What will you commit to doing in the next month? What will you commit to doing within six months? In a year, what will be the first fruits to appear as a result of your commitments?
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The drive to achieve worldly success for positional reasons can easily become an obsessive passion. The problem is that this kind of successlike all addictive thingsis ultimately Sisyphean and unsatisfying. No one is ever famous enough, rich enough, or powerful enough. Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become, and the same is true of famethats philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in 1851, more than a century and half before social media was invented and made the whole problem ten times worse.[28]
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Its better to be pleasantly surprised than disappointed,
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Notice the difference from the earlier equations? All of the evolutionary and biological formulas focus us on the numerator of our haves. If you are unsatisfied in life, thats what you most likely have been doing all these years. But that ignores the denominator of the equationthe wants. As you increase your haves without managing your wants, your wants will proliferate and sprawl. You can easily be less and less satisfied as you move up the success ladder, because your wants will always outstrip your haves. And when they do, your satisfaction will fall.
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believed three things about older age. First, that it should be dedicated to service, not goofing off. Second, our greatest gift later in life is wisdom, in which learning and thought create a worldview that can enrich others. Third, our natural ability at this point is counsel: mentoring, advising, and teaching others, in a way that does not amass worldly rewards of money, power, or prestige.
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bucket list, however: it makes us focus on the limits of time and thus on how to use time well. The idea of the bucket list is to make sure you dont get to the end and say, Im not ready to die! Ive never ridden in a hot-air balloon!
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Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become, and the same is true of famethats philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in 1851, more than a century and half before social media was invented and made the whole problem ten times worse.
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We may look solitary, but we form a vast root system of families, friends, communities, nations, and indeed the entire world. The inevitable changes in my lifeand yoursarent a tragedy to regret. They are just changes to one interconnected member of the human familyone shoot from the root system. The secret to bearing my declineno, enjoying itis to be more conscious of the roots linking me to others. If I am connected to others in love, my decrease will be more than offset by increases to otherswhich is to say, increases to other facets of my true self.
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Use things. Love people. Worship the divine.
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anything to regret.[11] In short, imagine its your last year of life, as well as of work. On the Sunday afternoon before the first day of each month, contemplate these questions: If I had one year left in my career and my life, how would I structure this coming month? What would be on my to-do list? What would I choose not to worry about? I am willing to guess that taking an extra work trip at the expense of seeing my spouse and staying late to impress the boss are not items that will be on your schedule. More likely, take a weekend away and call my friend will show up instead. This discipline helps us work on mindfulnessliving in the present as opposed to the past or futurewhich studies consistently find leads us to be happier people. But it also helps
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The decline problem is a double whammy, then: we need ever-greater success to avoid dissatisfaction, yet our abilities to stay even are declining. No, its actually a triple whammy, because as we try to stay even, we wind up in patterns of addictive behavior such as workaholism, which puts strivers into unhealthy relationship patterns at the cost of deep connection to spouses, children, and friends.
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The age-related decline among air-traffic controllers is so sharpand the consequences of decline-related errors so direthat the mandatory retirement age is fifty-six.
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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.
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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.
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Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side, Withstand the winters storm, And spite of wind and tide, Grow up the meadows pride, For both are strong Above they barely touch, but undermined Down to their deepest source . . . Admiring you shall find Their roots are intertwined Inseprably.[53]
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So what are you going to do about it? There are really only three doors you can go through here: 1.You can deny the facts and rage against declinesetting yourself up for frustration and disappointment. 2.You can shrug and give in to declineand experience your aging as an unavoidable tragedy. 3.You can accept that what got you to this point wont work to get you into the futurethat you need to build some new strengths and skills.
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Leaders are particularly prone to loneliness, in no small part because real friendships at work are difficult or impossible with people under ones authority and supervision. Work friendships are so important that 70 percent of people say friendship at work is the most important element to a happy work life, and 58 percent say they would turn down a higher-paying job if it meant not getting along with coworkers.[21] According to a data analysis conducted by Gallup in 2020, employees who say they have a best friend at work are almost twice as likely as others to enjoy their workday and almost 50 percent more likely to report high social well-being.
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At work, successful people are lonely in a crowd.
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