The key ideas

From Strength to Strength

Arthur C. Brooks, 2022

A famous man, whom everyone on the plane recognises, quietly tells his wife he would be better off dead. Arthur Brooks overheard that conversation by chance and spent the next few years looking for an answer: why do successful people find getting older so hard? Brain science, the stories of Bach and Darwin and ancient Indian wisdom come together in his book into a clear path from the strength of youth to the strength of maturity.

Who it is for

For people who have achieved a lot and suddenly notice that work feels harder and success brings less joy. And for anyone who wants to understand in advance what a happy second half of life rests on.

To share your weakness without caring what others think is a kind of superpower.

A conversation on a night flight

A late flight from Los Angeles to Washington. Behind Arthur Brooks sat an elderly couple. The husband kept saying, quietly, that he would be better off dead. His wife answered wearily that it wasn't true that nobody needed him anymore. When the plane landed and the lights came on, Brooks recognised the man. He was over eighty, the whole country had once known him, and passengers came up to thank him. Yet he felt useless.

By then Brooks had achieved a lot himself. He had spent ten years running a well-known Washington research centre, the American Enterprise Institute, and he worked without a break. The conversation on the plane scared him: what if this was his future too?

He spent several years working out why successful people are so often unhappy in the second half of life. He studied brain science and the data on when people do their best work. He read philosophers and talked to spiritual teachers. The result is a book about how strength doesn't vanish with age but changes shape, and about how to notice that change in time.

Ahead of you are twelve stories: about Bach and Darwin, about two kinds of intelligence, about four false idols and about a grove of aspens that is really a single tree. By the end it will be clear what you can do right now, at any age.

Decline comes sooner than you think

First, the unpleasant news Brooks opens the book with. The psychologist Dean Keith Simonton studied the careers of scientists, inventors, writers and artists. He found that, on average, success and productivity rise for the first twenty years after a career begins. If you start working seriously at thirty, your best results will most likely come at around fifty, and then the decline sets in.

In some professions it happens even earlier. Brooks writes that many tech entrepreneurs who become famous in their early twenties have lost their creative spark by thirty. And the chance of making a major discovery at seventy is about the same as at twenty, which is to say close to zero.

His conclusion sounds harsh: if your work demands quick thinking and serious analysis, and most jobs held by university graduates do, a noticeable decline will probably arrive sooner than you'd like. Brooks learned this firsthand as a young man. His instrument was the French horn, and his playing got worse even though he practised more than ever.

But the book wasn't written to frighten you. Brooks first set out these findings in an article for The Atlantic, which later grew into the book. The question he cares about is a different one: what fades, and what takes its place? The answer is in the chapters that follow.

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About the author

Arthur C. Brooks is an American social scientist and economist, a professor at Harvard University and a columnist for The Atlantic. For ten years he led the American Enterprise Institute, a research centre in Washington.

All books by this author: Arthur C. Brooks

Terms from the book

  • Paul
  • Vaillant
  • Darwin
  • Michelangelo
  • Beagle
  • Ashram
  • Brahmacharya
  • American Enterprise Institute: An American research centre in Washington that studies the economy and public policy. Brooks was its president from 2009 to 2019.
  • French horn: A brass wind instrument with a long coiled tube and a wide bell. As a young man Brooks played the French horn professionally.
  • Simonton: Dean Keith Simonton, an American psychologist at the University of California, Davis. He studies how creative output changes over the course of a career.
  • Striver's curse: An image from the book, not a scientific term. It is Brooks's name for the pain very successful people feel when their abilities start to fade.
  • Self-objectification: Here: the habit of seeing yourself not as a person but as a set of achievements and job titles. Brooks uses the word to describe addiction to success.
  • Cattell: Raymond Cattell, a British-American psychologist of the twentieth century. He proposed telling fluid intelligence apart from crystallized intelligence.
  • Fluid intelligence: The ability to reason, analyse and solve new problems. According to the data Brooks draws on, it peaks in youth and starts to decline between thirty and forty.
  • Crystallized intelligence: The ability to use accumulated knowledge: to connect it, explain it and teach it to others. It usually grows into your forties and stays high for a long time.
  • Westminster Abbey: The famous church in London where monarchs are crowned and great figures of Britain are buried. Darwin is buried there too.
  • Bach: Johann Sebastian Bach, German composer and organist of the first half of the eighteenth century. In his lifetime his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was more famous than he was.
  • The Art of Fugue: A late cycle by Bach: many fugues on a single theme. A fugue is a piece in which one melody is taken up in turn by different voices.
  • Aquinas: Thomas Aquinas, Italian theologian and philosopher of the thirteenth century. He wrote that people try to replace the meaning of life with money, power, pleasure and fame.
  • Maranasati: A Buddhist practice: calm and regular reflection on your own death.
  • Pando: A grove of aspens in Utah. All its trunks grow from one root system, which is why it is considered one of the largest living organisms on Earth.
  • Harvard Study: The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest studies of human lives ever run. It began in 1938 and is still going.
  • Grihastha: The second stage of life in Hinduism: work, family and running a household.
  • Vanaprastha: The third stage of life in Hinduism, literally “retiring to the forest”. A time to step back from worldly affairs and deepen your spiritual life.
  • Sannyasa: The fourth stage of life in Hinduism: complete renunciation of the worldly for the sake of the spiritual.
  • Venkataraman: Sri Nochur Venkataraman, an Indian spiritual teacher. Brooks travelled to India to see him while working on the book.
  • Beethoven: Ludwig van Beethoven, German composer. He lost his hearing but kept composing, and wrote many of his greatest works when he was already deaf.

All terms

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