Whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to becoming successful. The shelves are packed with titles like The Science of Getting Rich and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There is no section marked “Managing Your Professional Decline.”
An article I’ve been thinking about a lot is a 2019 piece by Arthur C. Brooks, originally shared by Russell Davies. Your Work Peak is Earlier Than You Think looks at the inevitable, how we decline as we grow older. Up till now, I’ve been able to work with the assumption that I will remain capable at my current pace and workload until the day I retire. Brooks says this is not true:
The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.” Quoting an expert in the field of career trajectories, Brooks has bad news for me: “if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that
Brooks finds an interesting angle for his article – not just looking at how decline happens, but how one can manage this decline happily. The waning of ability can be tough on people.
Brooks writes about Raymond Cattell’s concept of ‘crystallised intelligence’. Fluid intelligence is “the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems”, and this is something that declines, whereas crystallised intelligence is the use of knowledge. Brooks suggests that, as we grow older, we should aim our careers toward “the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life”.
One example given is that of teaching – “No matter what our profession, as we age we can dedicate ourselves to sharing knowledge in some meaningful way”.
How to make the most of the future?
God, this feels like a book that I was almost born to write!
It’s funny, I’ve been ruminating a lot on the fact that, recently, a mutual friend narrativized my recent relationship, comparing it to the fact that in her late teens, she would seek out sexual relationships with men in their ’50s in order to attract their worship and feel better about herself. This hurt a lot, and I’m pretty certain that there is a little truth in it, but I responded that the person I have been seeing is not in their late teens, and in fact when I was 36, as well as having children aged 5 and 10, I’d had an extremely successful career that already felt washed up. In fact, I have been managing the decline of my career (not very well) since the age of 30. It wasn’t until I hit 50 years and 7 days old that the whole thing fell off a cliff