Going from strength to strength later in life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since I am a boomer, I have been mostly enjoying reading a 2022 book by Professor Arthur C. Brooks titled From Strength to Strength (Finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life). He has the following nine headings for his chapters:

 

Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think [previously an Atlantic article]

The second curve

Kick your success addiction

Start chipping away

Ponder your death

Cultivate your aspen grove

Start your vanaprastha

Make your weakness your strength

Cast into the falling tide

 

And then his Conclusion is just Seven Words to Remember:

 

Use things. Love people. Worship the divine. 

 

In chapter 2, The Second Curve, he describes how you need to consider adding both fluid intelligence (peaking early in a career) and later rising crystallized intelligence (using a stock of knowledge). Raymond Cattell said fluid intelligence increased to the mid-thirties and declined through the forties and fifties. But meanwhile crystallized intelligence increased through middle and late adulthood. 

 

Chapter 9, titled Cast into the falling tide, includes four lessons:

 

Lesson 1: Identify your marshmallow

Lesson 2: The work you do has to be the reward

Lesson 3: Do the most interesting things you can

Lesson 4: A career change doesn’t have to be a straight line

 

In Lesson 4 he describes four categories for career changes starting on page 209:

Linear careers – which climb steadily upward (with everything building on everything else);

Steady-state careers – involving staying at one job and growing in expertise;

Transitory careers – involving jumping from job to job or even field to field;

Spiral careers – like a series of mini-careers, shifting fields building on previous ones;

 

Since Dr. Brooks is a Harvard Business School professor, he includes references to lots of notes at the back of his book. But sometimes the references diverge from reality. In Chapter 5 (Ponder Your Death), a section titled Understanding the fear of demise begins on page 97 with:

 

“ ‘The idea of death, the fear of it haunts the human animal like nothing else,’ anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in his classic 1973 book, The Denial of Death. A majority of people fear death to some extent, and most surveys find that about 20 percent have a high level of fear (Ref. 2). Some people have a fear that is so extremes as to rise to the level of a psychiatric condition known as ‘thanatophobia.’ “

 

However, in 1973 there was a well-known survey by R. H. Bruskin Associates which I blogged about on October 27, 2009 in a post titled The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists: where did this data really come from? Speaking before a group was the most common fear (40.6%) while death only ranked seventh (18.7%). What about Reference 2? It is to a blog post on October 11, 2016 about the Chapman University Survey of American Fears titled America’s Top Fears 2016. Fear of dying was much lower than in the 1973 survey - it only ranked #59! That was the second Chapman survey of seven including dying. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Detailed results for dying from those surveys are shown above in a table. In 2015 dying ranked #43, and in 2022 is ranked #61! The sum for Very Afraid plus Afraid was 18.8% in 2016, and had a mean of 25.4%.

 

Earlier, in Chapter 2 on page 57 Dr. Brooks says:

 

“Fear of failure has been studied quite a bit. For example, researchers have found the public speaking is college students’ most common fear; some scholars have famously asserted that people fear it even more than death (Ref. 24).”  

 

But the article on college students is incorrectly listed under reference 23. And it is about redoing the 1973 Bruskin survey. (I blogged about it on May 17, 2012 in a post titled More university students in the U. S. fear public speaking than fear death, but death is their top fear). Reference 24 is to an article by Glenn Croston in Psychology Today on November 29, 2012 titled That thing we fear more than death. I discussed Croston’s article in a post on April 25, 2015 titled Is public speaking by far the scariest thing that people face? Even more than death? No, it is not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do the Chapman surveys say about fear of public speaking? A table shown above summarizes the details from all eight of them. In all but the first the fear of public speaking ranks way down – from #26 in 2015 to #59 in 2018. And a > or a < shows whether more or less people fear speaking than dying. Note that more feared it for 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2022, but less feared it for 2018, 2019, and 2020-21. Also note that we can have very different percentages depending on the level of fear. For 2022 it is 14.0% for Very Afraid, 34.0% for Very Afraid plus Afraid (what is in the Chapman percentage list) and 69.2% for the grand sum of Very Afraid plus Afraid plus Slightly Afraid.  

 

The image was constructed from a walking man and a table mountain, both at Openclipart.