PDF Summary:From Strength to Strength, by Arthur C. Brooks

In From Strength to Strength, management expert Arthur Brooks says that as we get older, our professional skills start to decline, and we can no longer succeed in our current jobs. Despite this, with the right mindset, the second half of your life can be even happier and more meaningful than the first. If you find a job that suits your changing skill set, and if you change your idea of “success” from career achievement and material wealth to happiness and fulfillment, you can continue to thrive.

In this guide, we’ll first explain how and why you lose your job skills as you get older. We’ll then discuss solutions: how you can find a job that suits your changing brain, and how to achieve a meaningful life instead of fruitlessly chasing success in your former field. In our commentary, we’ll discuss whether this professional decline really is inevitable and explore some methods to keep your mind sharp. We’ll also offer strategies for making the most of your life as you age.

(continued)...

Once you understand what you’re experiencing in that moment, the second aspect of radical acceptance is compassion: feeling love and care for yourself and what you’re experiencing. In other words, don’t criticize yourself for your declining skills or rage against the aging process. Again, you could imagine that you’re talking to a good friend and hold yourself with the same care and sympathy you’d extend to that other person. Only after you’ve achieved understanding and compassion can you start to truly accept your situation.

The secret of this technique is to not make an enemy where no enemy exists. The decline of your professional skills isn’t something to be fought: It’s simply your reality at that moment. By accepting and embracing your reality for what it is—rather than trying to force reality to be what you want it to be—you leave yourself free to do as Brooks suggests: look for ways to make the most of the abilities you do have.

Solution #2: Redefine “Success”

Finding a career where you can keep excelling as you get older is important, but it’s only one part of a successful later life. Brooks says that to feel truly happy and fulfilled at this time, you also need to rethink your goals. Chasing career achievements, wealth, and prestige won’t be satisfying forever. That’s why, instead of continuing to focus on professional success, you should dedicate yourself to life success—in other words, living a well-rounded life full of contentment and love.

Achieving life success is all about finding a healthy work-life balance. In other words, don’t give up on work, but don’t neglect other areas of your life either: Spending time with your family and friends and practicing your faith (if any) contributes to your life success. You’ll know you’ve found life success when your happiness doesn’t rely on the dopamine burst you get from a personal achievement; instead, contentment will be your normal state of being.

(Shortform note: In Eat That Frog!, Brian Tracy gives some specific advice on establishing a better work-life balance, which may help you to achieve life success. First, he says to determine the three most important things you do at work—you’ll probably find that a relatively small number of your duties produce the majority of your value to the company. Do those three things first each day, so instead of getting bogged down in countless smaller tasks, you’ll have time and energy after work to do what makes you happy. Also, set personal goals in three areas: financial/career, relationship/family, and health/fitness. Pursuing those goals, instead of devoting all your time to work, will help you build a balanced and satisfying life.)

Is Happiness a Choice?

Brooks discusses numerous choices you can make to become happier in your later years, such as choosing different life goals and career paths. However, some research shows contentment may simply come from choosing to pay attention to things that make you happy.

Some surveys and studies have shown that seniors tend to be happier than younger adults, which goes against the common assumption that people must become less happy as their abilities decline and the end of life draws closer. Further research into why seniors seem happier than their younger counterparts showed that they often focus on positive things and disregard negative things. For example, one study showed that older people tended to look away from unpleasant images, and they paid more attention to pleasant images than younger people who were shown those same images.

Researchers found the same trend among young people with terminal illnesses and, in some cases, among people who witnessed tragedies like the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. This suggests that people tend to focus on things that bring happiness when they come to understand that their lives could end at any time—a realization that’s often a result of aging but can also come from other sources. In other words, when people realize that their time is limited, they often shift their goals to maximizing their happiness in whatever time they have left.

In short, it’s possible that by making conscious decisions about where you direct your attention, you can make yourself happier.

Let’s discuss three specific ways Brooks says you can find life success: by prioritizing your eulogy values, nurturing your connections with other people, and finding (or practicing) a system of beliefs that’s meaningful to you.

Strategy #1: Find Life Success Through Your Eulogy Values

One way to pursue life success is to start prioritizing what Brooks calls eulogy virtues—so-called because they’re qualities that people might talk about at your funeral.

Eulogy values might include always helping people who need it, standing by your loved ones during difficult times, or lighting up a room with your unique sense of humor. Note that, rather than one-time achievements, these tend to be character traits and lifestyle choices; in other words, things that you do continuously throughout your life. These are things that will bring you lasting happiness and fulfillment.

(Shortform note: Robin Sharma’s book Who Will Cry When You Die? offers one possible method for prioritizing your eulogy virtues: View every single day as if it were a micro-version of your whole life. If the way you live today reflected the way you live your entire life, what would you do with your 24 hours? Would you mindlessly chase after success or devote time to cultivating your eulogy values—to improving the lives of those around you?)

In contrast, many people (especially young people) tend to focus on their résumé virtues. These are accomplishments that you might use to impress others—for example, holding a prestigious job title, winning a world-class competition, or earning a degree from a highly selective school.

Brooks says that these kinds of accomplishments only bring you fleeting, worldly rewards like money or fame. Furthermore, those rewards fade quickly unless you keep accomplishing more and more—which, remember, will become more difficult as you age. Anything that requires you to compete against or compare yourself to others probably falls into this category.

Why Are We Driven to Compete With Others?

If competing with others only brings fleeting rewards, why are we so driven to do it? One possible explanation is that it’s an evolutionary holdover—in other words, competitiveness may be coded into our genes because our ancestors had to compete with each other for food, shelter, and mates.

However, as biologist Richard Dawkins says in The Selfish Gene, humans aren’t slaves to their genetic programming; we’re unusual (possibly unique) in our ability to consciously choose to go against our biological drives. For example, our genes should compel us to have as many children as possible, but many people choose not to have children at all. Therefore, we can still follow Brooks’s advice and choose to pursue eulogy values over competition-based rewards.

Strategy #2: Find Life Success Through Your Connections

Another key theme in Brooks’s suggestions for pursuing life success is that competing against others brings professional success while connecting with others brings life success.

Brooks believes that nobody can live purely as an individual. People naturally support one another emotionally, intellectually, and even materially. The more you embrace that interconnectedness—the more you decide to love and support the people around you and accept their love in return—the happier you’ll be.

Conversely, trying to go against that natural order by isolating yourself or selfishly chasing professional success your whole life will leave you stressed, lonely, and unhappy.

(Shortform note: Scientific data backs up Brooks’s argument here: Loneliness is extremely harmful to both mental and physical health, especially for older people. Loneliness and isolation are linked to an increased risk of health conditions ranging from anxiety and depression to heart disease and strokes. In fact, some experts say that loneliness is almost as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.)

According to Brooks, some research suggests healthy relationships are the single most important factor in maintaining your physical, mental, and emotional health as you age. While other factors, like body weight and alcohol consumption, did affect people’s overall well-being, the healthiest and happiest people—almost without fail—were the ones who were most satisfied with their relationships.

How to Cultivate Your Connections

Brooks stresses the importance of interpersonal connections, but he doesn’t offer much advice on how to cultivate them. Furthermore, it’s notoriously hard for adults to make friends. So, here are a few tips to help.

One of the easiest ways to make new friends is to join a group that interests you, where you’ll naturally meet other people who share that interest. It also helps to be bold—to make friends you wouldn’t make otherwise, you may have to accept invitations you’d normally turn down or try making the first move to start a new friendship.

Also, don’t overlook the importance of casual acquaintances: people whom you see frequently but don’t consider close friends, such as your coworkers or the bartender at your favorite bar. Some studies have shown the positive impact that such relationships have on people’s happiness: The more acquaintances you have, and the more frequently you interact with them, the more likely you are to be happy. Therefore, it’s arguably worthwhile to say hi and make small talk with your acquaintances whenever you get the chance.

Strategy #3: Find Life Success Through Your Beliefs

Finally, Brooks says faith is crucial to happiness later in life, citing numerous studies suggesting that religious and spiritual people tend to be happier and healthier than their atheist counterparts. He thinks this is because faith and spirituality help to put your life into perspective. They take your focus off yourself and your problems; instead, you start thinking about the nature of the universe, the purpose of life, and your part in making the world a better place for everyone.

(Shortform note: While there may be a connection between religion and happiness, correlation doesn’t always mean causation. For instance, one group of researchers found that religion only boosts people’s health and happiness in cultures where religion is highly valued—in more secular cultures, such as those found in Scandinavian countries or Japan, those benefits disappear almost entirely. Those researchers concluded that the benefits religious people were finding weren’t from religion itself, but rather from the social connections people experienced while practicing their religion.)

Brooks adds that religious leaders have known about the path to life success for millennia. As an example, he relates an ancient Hindu teaching that says there are four stages of life, each with a particular goal. At around 50 years old, you enter the third stage of life, called vanaprastha. The literal translation of this stage is “retiring into the forest,” but vanaprastha really means that you begin to leave behind your pursuit of wealth and professional success in favor of developing your spirituality. This is meant to be preparation for the last stage of life called sannyasa, when you fully renounce worldly concerns like wealth and spend the final years of your life pursuing enlightenment.

(Shortform note: While Brooks says that “retiring into the forest” doesn’t have to be taken literally, the yogi Sadhguru says that leaving your home (at least temporarily) is a crucial part of vanaprastha. Sadhguru explains that the purpose of vanaprastha is to truly, deeply understand that you’re mortal and your time is limited; this understanding, in turn, mentally prepares you to leave behind worldly concerns and embrace spirituality. However, your home gives you an illusion of safety and immortality. Therefore, leaving your home to live in nature for a while helps you to understand that death can come at any time and in any form—for example, in the form of a lightning bolt or a wild animal.)

However, belief in the divine isn’t the only way to achieve life success. Brooks says that people who reject religion and spirituality can often find meaning in philosophy—it has many of the same benefits, such as pulling your attention away from selfish pursuits, instead encouraging you to seek happiness by living well and making the world better.

Finding Purpose Through Philosophy

Philosophers from many different schools of thought agree with Brooks that connecting with and helping other people is the best way to live a happy and fulfilling life. In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma offers one possible explanation for why that is: You’re part of the world, not just an isolated individual living in it. Therefore, by improving the world around you, you’re also improving yourself and your own circumstances.

As another example, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations—one of the definitive texts on Stoic philosophy—says that working for the common good is the only way to live a happy and fulfilling life. Aurelius’s reasoning is that to feel fulfilled, you must have a consistent goal (what Sharma would call your purpose) and spend your life working toward that goal. However, people are naturally inconsistent; your personal desires and goals will change frequently. Therefore, any fulfilling goal must be selfless rather than oriented around your ever-changing personal preferences.