Number of words: 5,050<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not true that no one needs you anymore.\u201d These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of \u201cI wish I was dead.\u201dAgain, the woman: \u201cOh, stop saying that.\u201dI didn\u2019t mean to eavesdrop, but couldn\u2019t help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams\u2014perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the end of the flight, as the lights switched on, I finally got a look at the desolate man. I was shocked. I recognized him\u2014he was, and still is, world-famous. Then in his mid 80s, he was beloved as a hero for his courage, patriotism, and accomplishments many decades ago.As he walked up the aisle of the plane behind me, other passengers greeted him with veneration. Standing at the door of the cockpit, the pilot stopped him and said, \u201cSir, I have admired you since I was a little boy.\u201d The older man\u2014apparently wishing for death just a few minutes earlier\u2014beamed with pride at the recognition of his past glories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For selfish reasons, I couldn\u2019t get the cognitive dissonance of that scene out of my mind. It was the summer of 2015, shortly after my 51st birthday. I was not world-famous like the man on the plane, but my professional life was going very well. I was the president of a flourishing Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. I had written some best-selling books. People came to my speeches. My columns were published in The New York Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the worst moment in my young but flailing career came at age 22, when I was performing at Carnegie Hall. While delivering a short speech about the music I was about to play, I stepped forward, lost my footing, and fell off the stage into the audience. On the way home from the concert, I mused darkly that the experience was surely a message from God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I sputtered along for nine more years. I took a position in the City Orchestra of Barcelona, where I increased my practicing but my playing gradually deteriorated. Eventually I found a job teaching at a small music conservatory in Florida, hoping for a magical turnaround that never materialized. Realizing that maybe I ought to hedge my bets, I went back to college via distance learning, and earned my bachelor\u2019s degree shortly before my 30th birthday. I secretly continued my studies at night, earning a master\u2019s degree in economics a year later. Finally I had to admit defeat: I was never going to turn around my faltering musical career. So at 31 I gave up, abandoning my musical aspirations entirely, to pursue a doctorate in public policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Life goes on, right? Sort of. After finishing my studies, I became a university professor, a job I enjoyed. But I still thought every day about my beloved first vocation. Even now, I regularly dream that I am onstage, and wake to remember that my childhood aspirations are now only phantasms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am lucky to have accepted my decline at a young enough age that I could redirect my life into a new line of work. Still, to this day, the sting of that early decline makes these words difficult to write. I vowed to myself that it wouldn\u2019t ever happen again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WILL IT HAPPEN AGAIN? In some professions, early decline is inescapable. No one expects an Olympic athlete to remain competitive until age 60. But in many physically nondemanding occupations, we implicitly reject the inevitability of decline before very old age. Sure, our quads and hamstrings may weaken a little as we age. But as long as we retain our marbles, our quality of work as a writer, lawyer, executive, or entrepreneur should remain high up to the very end, right? Many people think so. I recently met a man a bit older than I am who told me he planned to \u201cpush it until the wheels came off.\u201d In effect, he planned to stay at the very top of his game by any means necessary, and then keel over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the odds are he won\u2019t be able to. The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world\u2019s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The specific timing of peak and decline vary somewhat depending on the field. Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University\u2019s Kellogg School of Management, has spent years studying when people are most likely to make prizewinning scientific discoveries and develop key inventions. His findings can be summarized by this little ditty:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The author of those gloomy lines? Paul Dirac, a winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dirac overstates the point, but only a little. Looking at major inventors and Nobel winners going back more than a century, Jones has found that the most common age for producing a magnum opus is the late 30s. He has shown that the likelihood of a major discovery increases steadily through one\u2019s 20s and 30s and then declines through one\u2019s 40s, 50s, and 60s. Are there outliers? Of course. But the likelihood of producing a major innovation at age 70 is approximately what it was at age 20\u2014almost nonexistent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Much of literary achievement follows a similar pattern. Simonton has shown that poets peak in their early 40s. Novelists generally take a little longer. When Martin Hill Ortiz, a poet and novelist, collected data on New York Times fiction best sellers from 1960 to 2015, he found that authors were likeliest to reach the No. 1 spot in their 40s and 50s. Despite the famous productivity of a few novelists well into old age, Ortiz shows a steep drop-off in the chance of writing a best seller after the age of 70. (Some nonfiction writers\u2014especially historians\u2014peak later, as we shall see in a minute.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to becoming successful. There is no section marked \u201cmanaging your professional decline.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Entrepreneurs peak and decline earlier, on average. After earning fame and fortune in their 20s, many tech entrepreneurs are in creative decline by age 30. In 2014, the Harvard Business Review reported that founders of enterprises valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists tend to cluster in the 20-to-34 age range. Subsequent research has found that the clustering might be slightly later, but all studies in this area have found that the majority of successful start-ups have founders under age 50.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This research concerns people at the very top of professions that are atypical. But the basic finding appears to apply more broadly. Scholars at Boston College\u2019s Center for Retirement Research studied a wide variety of jobs and found considerable susceptibility to age-related decline in fields ranging from policing to nursing. Other research has found that the best-performing home-plate umpires in Major League Baseball have 18 years less experience and are 23 years younger than the worst-performing umpires (who are 56.1 years old, on average). Among air traffic controllers, the age-related decline is so sharp\u2014and the potential consequences of decline-related errors so dire\u2014that the mandatory retirement age is 56.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In sum, if your profession requires mental processing speed or significant analytic capabilities\u2014the kind of profession most college graduates occupy\u2014noticeable decline is probably going to set in earlier than you imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IF DECLINE NOT ONLY is inevitable but also happens earlier than most of us expect, what should we do when it comes for us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cManaging Your Professional Decline.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But some people have managed their declines well. Consider the case of Johann Sebastian Bach. Born in 1685 to a long line of prominent musicians in central Germany, Bach quickly distinguished himself as a musical genius. In his 65 years, he published more than 1,000 compositions for all the available instrumentations of his day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Early in his career, Bach was considered an astoundingly gifted organist and improviser. Commissions rolled in; royalty sought him out; young composers emulated his style. He enjoyed real prestige.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it didn\u2019t last\u2014in no small part because his career was overtaken by musical trends ushered in by, among others, his own son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, known as C.P.E. to the generations that followed. The fifth of Bach\u2019s 20 children, C.P.E. exhibited the musical gifts his father had. He mastered the baroque idiom, but he was more fascinated with a new \u201cclassical\u201d style of music, which was taking Europe by storm. As classical music displaced baroque, C.P.E.\u2019s prestige boomed while his father\u2019s music became pass\u00e9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bach easily could have become embittered, like Darwin. Instead, he chose to redesign his life, moving from innovator to instructor. He spent a good deal of his last 10 years writing The Art of Fugue, not a famous or popular work in his time, but one intended to teach the techniques of the baroque to his children and students\u2014and, as unlikely as it seemed at the time, to any future generations that might be interested. In his later years, he lived a quieter life as a teacher and a family man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s the difference between Bach and Darwin? Both were preternaturally gifted and widely known early in life. Both attained permanent fame posthumously. Where they differed was in their approach to the midlife fade. When Darwin fell behind as an innovator, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sad inactivity. When Bach fell behind, he reinvented himself as a master instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, and\u2014though less famous than he once had been\u2014respected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lesson for you and me, especially after 50: Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
HOW DOES ONE do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A potential answer lies in the work of the British psychologist Raymond Cattell, who in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems\u2014what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one\u2019s 30s and 40s. This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom. Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one\u2019s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later. For example, Dean Keith Simonton has found that poets\u2014highly fluid in their creativity\u2014tend to have produced half their lifetime creative output by age 40 or so. Historians\u2014who rely on a crystallized stock of knowledge\u2014don\u2019t reach this milestone until about 60.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s a practical lesson we can extract from all this: No matter what mix of intelligence your field requires, you can always endeavor to weight your career away from innovation and toward the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like what? As Bach demonstrated, teaching is an ability that decays very late in life, a principal exception to the general pattern of professional decline over time. A study in The Journal of Higher Education showed that the oldest college professors in disciplines requiring a large store of fixed knowledge, specifically the humanities, tended to get evaluated most positively by students. This probably explains the professional longevity of college professors, three-quarters of whom plan to retire after age 65\u2014more than half of them after 70, and some 15 percent of them after 80. (The average American retires at 61.) One day, during my first year as a professor, I asked a colleague in his late 60s whether he\u2019d ever considered retiring. He laughed, and told me he was more likely to leave his office horizontally than vertically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our dean might have chuckled ruefully at this\u2014college administrators complain that research productivity among tenured faculty drops off significantly in the last decades of their career. Older professors take up budget slots that could otherwise be used to hire young scholars hungry to do cutting-edge research. But perhaps therein lies an opportunity: If older faculty members can shift the balance of their work from research to teaching without loss of professional prestige, younger faculty members can take on more research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Patterns like this match what I\u2019ve seen as the head of a think tank full of scholars of all ages. There are many exceptions, but the most profound insights tend to come from those in their 30s and early 40s. The best synthesizers and explainers of complicated ideas\u2014that is, the best teachers\u2014tend to be in their mid-60s or older, some of them well into their 80s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That older people, with their stores of wisdom, should be the most successful teachers seems almost cosmically right. No matter what our profession, as we age we can dedicate ourselves to sharing knowledge in some meaningful way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A FEW YEARS AGO, I saw a cartoon of a man on his deathbed saying, \u201cI wish I\u2019d bought more crap.\u201d It has always amazed me that many wealthy people keep working to increase their wealth, amassing far more money than they could possibly spend or even usefully bequeath. One day I asked a wealthy friend why this is so. Many people who have gotten rich know how to measure their self-worth only in pecuniary terms, he explained, so they stay on the hamster wheel, year after year. They believe that at some point, they will finally accumulate enough to feel truly successful, happy, and therefore ready to die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a mistake, and not a benign one. Most Eastern philosophy warns that focusing on acquisition leads to attachment and vanity, which derail the search for happiness by obscuring one\u2019s essential nature. As we grow older, we shouldn\u2019t acquire more, but rather strip things away to find our true selves\u2014and thus, peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At some point, writing one more book will not add to my life satisfaction; it will merely stave off the end of my book-writing career. The canvas of my life will have another brushstroke that, if I am being forthright, others will barely notice, and will certainly not appreciate very much. The same will be true for most other markers of my success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that self is \u2026 who, exactly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last year, the search for an answer to this question took me deep into the South Indian countryside, to a town called Palakkad, near the border between the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. I was there to meet the guru Sri Nochur Venkataraman, known as Acharya (\u201cTeacher\u201d) to his disciples. Acharya is a quiet, humble man dedicated to helping people attain enlightenment; he has no interest in Western techies looking for fresh start-up ideas or burnouts trying to escape the religious traditions they were raised in. Satisfied that I was neither of those things, he agreed to talk with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I told him my conundrum: Many people of achievement suffer as they age, because they lose their abilities, gained over many years of hard work. Is this suffering inescapable, like a cosmic joke on the proud? Or is there a loophole somewhere\u2014a way around the suffering?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Acharya answered elliptically, explaining an ancient Hindu teaching about the stages of life, or ashramas. The first is Brahmacharya, the period of youth and young adulthood dedicated to learning. The second is Grihastha, when a person builds a career, accumulates wealth, and creates a family. In this second stage, the philosophers find one of life\u2019s most common traps: People become attached to earthly rewards\u2014money, power, sex, prestige\u2014and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The antidote to these worldly temptations is Vanaprastha, the third ashrama, whose name comes from two Sanskrit words meaning \u201cretiring\u201d and \u201cinto the forest.\u201d This is the stage, usually starting around age 50, in which we purposefully focus less on professional ambition, and become more and more devoted to spirituality, service, and wisdom. This doesn\u2019t mean that you need to stop working when you turn 50\u2014something few people can afford to do\u2014only that your life goals should adjust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vanaprastha is a time for study and training for the last stage of life, Sannyasa, which should be totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment. In times past, some Hindu men would leave their family in old age, take holy vows, and spend the rest of their life at the feet of masters, praying and studying. Even if sitting in a cave at age 75 isn\u2019t your ambition, the point should still be clear: As we age, we should resist the conventional lures of success in order to focus on more transcendentally important things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I told Acharya the story about the man on the plane. He listened carefully, and thought for a minute. \u201cHe failed to leave Grihastha,\u201d he told me. \u201cHe was addicted to the rewards of the world.\u201d He explained that the man\u2019s self-worth was probably still anchored in the memories of professional successes many years earlier, his ongoing recognition purely derivative of long-lost skills. Any glory today was a mere shadow of past glories. Meanwhile, he\u2019d completely skipped the spiritual development of Vanaprastha, and was now missing out on the bliss of Sannyasa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a message in this for those of us suffering from the Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation. Say you are a hard-charging, type-A lawyer, executive, entrepreneur, or\u2014hypothetically, of course\u2014president of a think tank. From early adulthood to middle age, your foot is on the gas, professionally. Living by your wits\u2014by your fluid intelligence\u2014you seek the material rewards of success, you attain a lot of them, and you are deeply attached to them. But the wisdom of Hindu philosophy\u2014and indeed the wisdom of many philosophical traditions\u2014suggests that you should be prepared to walk away from these rewards before you feel ready. Even if you\u2019re at the height of your professional prestige, you probably need to scale back your career ambitions in order to scale up your metaphysical ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES columnist David Brooks talks about the difference between \u201cr\u00e9sum\u00e9 virtues\u201d and \u201ceulogy virtues,\u201d he\u2019s effectively putting the ashramas in a practical context. R\u00e9sum\u00e9 virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual, and require no comparison. Your eulogy virtues are what you would want people to talk about at your funeral. As in He was kind and deeply spiritual, not He made senior vice president at an astonishingly young age and had a lot of frequent-flier miles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You won\u2019t be around to hear the eulogy, but the point Brooks makes is that we live the most fulfilling life\u2014especially once we reach midlife\u2014by pursuing the virtues that are most meaningful to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I suspect that my own terror of professional decline is rooted in a fear of death\u2014a fear that, even if it is not conscious, motivates me to act as if death will never come by denying any degradation in my r\u00e9sum\u00e9 virtues. This denial is destructive, because it leads me to ignore the eulogy virtues that bring me the greatest joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How can I overcome this tendency? The Buddha recommends, of all things, corpse meditation: Many Theravada Buddhist monasteries in Thailand and Sri Lanka display photos of corpses in various states of decomposition for the monks to contemplate. \u201cThis body, too,\u201d students are taught to say about their own body, \u201csuch is its nature, such is its future, such is its unavoidable fate.\u201d At first this seems morbid. But its logic is grounded in psychological principles\u2014and it\u2019s not an exclusively Eastern idea. \u201cTo begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us,\u201d Michel de Montaigne wrote in the 16th century, \u201clet us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Psychologists call this desensitization, in which repeated exposure to something repellent or frightening makes it seem ordinary, prosaic, not scary. And for death, it works. In 2017, a team of researchers at several American universities recruited volunteers to imagine they were terminally ill or on death row, and then to write blog posts about either their imagined feelings or their would-be final words. The researchers then compared these expressions with the writings and last words of people who were actually dying or facing capital punishment. The results, published in Psychological Science, were stark: The words of the people merely imagining their imminent death were three times as negative as those of the people actually facing death\u2014suggesting that, counterintuitively, death is scarier when it is theoretical and remote than when it is a concrete reality closing in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For most people, actively contemplating our demise so that it is present and real (rather than avoiding the thought of it via the mindless pursuit of worldly success) can make death less frightening; embracing death reminds us that everything is temporary, and can make each day of life more meaningful. \u201cDeath destroys a man,\u201d E. M. Forster wrote, but \u201cthe idea of Death saves him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
DECLINE IS INEVITABLE, and it occurs earlier than almost any of us wants to believe. But misery is not inevitable. Accepting the natural cadence of our abilities sets up the possibility of transcendence, because it allows the shifting of attention to higher spiritual and life priorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But such a shift demands more than mere platitudes. I embarked on my research with the goal of producing a tangible road map to guide me during the remaining years of my life. This has yielded four specific commitments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely, trying to make use of the kind of fluid intelligence that begins fading relatively early in life. This is impossible. The key is to enjoy accomplishments for what they are in the moment, and to walk away perhaps before I am completely ready\u2014but on my own terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So: I\u2019ve resigned my job as president of the American Enterprise Institute, effective right about the time this essay is published. While I have not detected deterioration in my performance, it was only a matter of time. Like many executive positions, the job is heavily reliant on fluid intelligence. Also, I wanted freedom from the consuming responsibilities of that job, to have time for more spiritual pursuits. In truth, this decision wasn\u2019t entirely about me. I love my institution and have seen many others like it suffer when a chief executive lingered too long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leaving something you love can feel a bit like a part of you is dying. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a concept called bardo, which is a state of existence between death and rebirth\u2014\u201clike a moment when you step toward the edge of a precipice,\u201d as a famous Buddhist teacher puts it. I am letting go of a professional life that answers the question Who am I?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am extremely fortunate to have the means and opportunity to be able to walk away from a job. Many people cannot afford to do that. But you don\u2019t necessarily have to quit your job; what\u2019s important is striving to detach progressively from the most obvious earthly rewards\u2014power, fame and status, money\u2014even if you continue to work or advance a career. The real trick is walking into the next stage of life, Vanaprastha, to conduct the study and training that prepare us for fulfillment in life\u2019s final stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Time is limited, and professional ambition crowds out things that ultimately matter more. To move from r\u00e9sum\u00e9 virtues to eulogy virtues is to move from activities focused on the self to activities focused on others. This is not easy for me; I am a naturally egotistical person. But I have to face the fact that the costs of catering to selfishness are ruinous\u2014and I now work every day to fight this tendency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fortunately, an effort to serve others can play to our strengths as we age. Remember, people whose work focuses on teaching or mentorship, broadly defined, peak later in life. I am thus moving to a phase in my career in which I can dedicate myself fully to sharing ideas in service of others, primarily by teaching at a university. My hope is that my most fruitful years lie ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because I\u2019ve talked a lot about various religious and spiritual traditions\u2014and emphasized the pitfalls of overinvestment in career success\u2014readers might naturally conclude that I am making a Manichaean separation between the worlds of worship and work, and suggesting that the emphasis be on worship. That is not my intention. I do strongly recommend that each person explore his or her spiritual self\u2014I plan to dedicate a good part of the rest of my life to the practice of my own faith, Roman Catholicism. But this is not incompatible with work; on the contrary, if we can detach ourselves from worldly attachments and redirect our efforts toward the enrichment and teaching of others, work itself can become a transcendental pursuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe aim and final end of all music,\u201d Bach once said, \u201cshould be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.\u201d Whatever your metaphysical convictions, refreshment of the soul can be the aim of your work, like Bach\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bach finished each of his manuscripts with the words Soli Deo gloria\u2014\u201cGlory to God alone.\u201d He failed, however, to write these words on his last manuscript, \u201cContrapunctus 14,\u201d from The Art of Fugue, which abruptly stops mid-measure. His son C.P.E. added these words to the score: \u201c\u00dcber dieser Fuge \u2026 ist der Verfasser gestorben\u201d (\u201cAt this point in the fugue \u2026 the composer died\u201d). Bach\u2019s life and work merged with his prayers as he breathed his last breath. This is my aspiration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout this essay, I have focused on the effect that the waning of my work prowess will have on my happiness. But an abundance of research strongly suggests that happiness\u2014not just in later years but across the life span\u2014is tied directly to the health and plentifulness of one\u2019s relationships. Pushing work out of its position of preeminence\u2014sooner rather than later\u2014to make space for deeper relationships can provide a bulwark against the angst of professional decline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dedicating more time to relationships, and less to work, is not inconsistent with continued achievement. \u201cHe is like a tree planted by streams of water,\u201d the Book of Psalms says of the righteous person, \u201cyielding its fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither, and who prospers in all he does.\u201d Think of an aspen tree. To live a life of extraordinary accomplishment is\u2014like the tree\u2014to grow alone, reach majestic heights alone, and die alone. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wrong. The aspen tree is an excellent metaphor for a successful person\u2014but not, it turns out, for its solitary majesty. Above the ground, it may appear solitary. Yet each individual tree is part of an enormous root system, which is together one plant. In fact, an aspen is one of the largest living organisms in the world; a single grove in Utah, called Pando, spans 106 acres and weighs an estimated 13 million pounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The secret to bearing my decline\u2014to enjoying it\u2014is to become more conscious of the roots linking me to others. If I have properly developed the bonds of love among my family and friends, my own withering will be more than offset by blooming in others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WHEN I TALK ABOUT this personal research project I\u2019ve been pursuing, people usually ask: Whatever happened to the hero on the plane?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think about him a lot. He\u2019s still famous, popping up in the news from time to time. Early on, when I saw a story about him, I would feel a flash of something like pity\u2014which I now realize was really only a refracted sense of terror about my own future. Poor guy really meant I\u2019m screwed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But as my grasp of the principles laid out in this essay has deepened, my fear has declined proportionately. My feeling toward the man on the plane is now one of gratitude for what he taught me. I hope that he can find the peace and joy he is inadvertently helping me attain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n