From Strength to Strength

From Strength to Strength Plot Summary

Introduction

I'll never forget the moment that changed my perspective on success and aging. It was a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, DC. The cabin was dark and quiet when I overheard an elderly woman behind me say to her husband, "I know that no one needs you anymore." Her words hung in the air, followed by his barely audible murmur. "Oh, stop saying it would be better if you were dead," she replied with exasperation. As we landed and the lights came on, I turned to glimpse this man who seemed so despondent. I was shocked to recognize him—he was famous, a celebrated hero for his courage and accomplishments decades ago. As he walked up the aisle, passengers recognized him, murmuring with veneration. The pilot even greeted him saying, "Sir, I have admired you since I was a little boy." The man—who minutes earlier had expressed a wish to be dead—beamed at this recognition of his past glory. The cognitive dissonance of that scene haunted me. Here was someone who had achieved extraordinary success by any worldly standard, yet he felt so irrelevant that he questioned whether life was worth living. I wondered: Was this the inevitable fate of successful people? Would I one day find myself in his position, clinging to memories of past accomplishments while feeling utterly useless in the present?

Chapter 1: Your Professional Decline Is Coming Sooner Than You Think

Charles Darwin is remembered today as one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. His theory of natural selection fundamentally changed our understanding of biology and our place in the natural world. Yet despite his monumental achievements and lasting fame, Darwin died feeling his career had been a disappointment. Born into a family that wanted him to become a clergyman, Darwin instead followed his passion for science. At twenty-two, he joined the voyage of The Beagle, a scientific expedition that took him around the world for five years. This journey provided the observations that would eventually lead to his revolutionary theory of evolution. At fifty, he published his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, which made him a household name and changed science forever. But after this crowning achievement, Darwin's work stagnated. He hit a wall in his research and could not make new breakthroughs. Unknown to him, a Czech monk named Gregor Mendel had discovered the theory of genetics that Darwin needed to continue his work, but Darwin never encountered it. Despite writing numerous books later in life, he broke little new ground. In his final years, though still famous, Darwin was increasingly unhappy, finding his work unsatisfying and unoriginal. "I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigations lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy," he confessed to a friend. "I have everything to make me happy and contented, but life has become very wearisome to me." Darwin's experience wasn't unusual. In fact, his decline was completely normal and right on schedule. Professional decline comes for virtually everyone, and it arrives much earlier than most people expect. Research shows that in almost every high-skill profession, decline begins sometime between one's late thirties and early fifties. Scientists, for example, tend to make their most important discoveries before forty. Financial professionals peak between thirty-six and forty. Writers typically produce their best work between forty and forty-five. What's particularly cruel about this pattern is that the more accomplished you are at your peak, the more pronounced your decline seems once it begins. Those who have enjoyed the greatest success often suffer the most when their abilities start to diminish. This creates a vicious cycle: terrified of decline, dissatisfied with victories that come less frequently, hooked on successes increasingly of the past, and isolated from others. No one feels sorry for a successful person, but the suffering is real. So what can you do? There are really only three doors: deny the facts and rage against decline (setting yourself up for frustration); give in to decline (experiencing aging as an unavoidable tragedy); or accept that what got you here won't get you to the future—that you need to build some new strengths. The third door is the only one that leads to happiness, but it requires learning a whole new way of thinking about success and fulfillment.

Chapter 2: The Second Curve: Moving from Fluid to Crystallized Intelligence

Have you ever noticed that as people get older, they rarely become less articulate? In fact, they often have richer vocabularies than they did earlier in life. They're better Scrabble players and can do quite well with foreign languages—not in perfecting the accent, but in building vocabulary and understanding grammar. Studies confirm this: people maintain and grow their vocabulary all the way to the end of life. Similarly, with age, people become better at combining and utilizing complex ideas. They may not come up with shiny new inventions or solve problems as quickly as before, but they excel at using concepts they know and expressing them to others. This pattern isn't random. In the late 1960s, British psychologist Raymond Cattell discovered that humans possess two distinct types of intelligence that dominate at different points in life. The first is fluid intelligence—the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems. This is what we commonly think of as raw smarts, and it's highest relatively early in adulthood, diminishing rapidly starting in one's thirties and forties. If you've experienced professional success early in your career, especially in a field involving innovation or problem-solving, you have fluid intelligence to thank for it. But fluid intelligence isn't the only kind—there's also crystallized intelligence. This is the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past. Think of it as a vast library of experience and wisdom. Crystallized intelligence tends to increase through one's forties, fifties, and sixties—and does not diminish until quite late in life, if at all. As Cattell himself put it: "Fluid intelligence is conceptualized as the decontextualized ability to solve abstract problems, while crystallized intelligence represents a person's knowledge gained during life by acculturation and learning." This is tremendously good news. It means that if your career relies solely on fluid intelligence, yes, you'll peak and decline early. But if your career requires crystallized intelligence—or if you can repurpose your professional life to rely more on crystallized intelligence—your peak will come later and your decline will happen much later, if ever. The key is jumping from one curve to the other. Some careers naturally make this transition easier than others. Teaching, for example, requires verbal skill and a gift for explaining accumulated information—perfect for crystallized intelligence. A study in The Chronicle of Higher Education showed that the oldest college professors tended to have the best teaching evaluations, especially in the humanities, where professors improved through their sixties and seventies. This idea of moving from innovation to instruction in later life appears in wisdom traditions across cultures. As the elderly archery teacher says in Eugen Herrigel's famous book Zen in the Art of Archery, "Just as one uses a burning candle to light others with, so the teacher transfers the spirit of the right art from heart to heart, that it may be illumined." Similarly, the Roman statesman Cicero wrote that older people "should have their physical labors reduced; their mental activities should be actually increased. They should endeavor, too, by means of their counsel and practical wisdom to be of as much service as possible to their friends and to the young, and above all to the state." The existence of the second curve offers tremendous hope. It explains the typical drop-off in abilities in one's forties or fifties—it isn't just you. More importantly, it reveals a second wave of success that favors people who are older. The trick is having the courage to make the jump from fluid to crystallized intelligence, which means letting go of some things that defined your earlier success and embracing a new role as a teacher, mentor, and guide. Those who fight against time try to bend the old curve instead of getting onto the new one. But for those who make the leap, the reward is enormous—a second half of life that can be even more fulfilling than the first.

Chapter 3: Kick Your Success Addiction

One of the most revealing conversations I had while researching this topic was with a highly successful woman on Wall Street. She had made a fortune and earned tremendous respect in her field. Recently, however, she had begun to miss a step here and there. Her decisions weren't as crisp, her instincts less reliable. Where once she commanded the room, now she saw younger colleagues doubting her. She was terrified of decline. When I asked about her life beyond work, she admitted it wasn't very happy. Her marriage was unsatisfactory, she drank too much, and her relationship with her college-age kids was distant. She had few real friends and felt physically exhausted most of the time. Work was everything to her—she "lived to work"—and now even that was starting to slip. I suggested she might want to rebalance her life—to invest more in her marriage, spend time with her kids, address her drinking, and get more rest. She thought about this for a moment, then looked at me and said matter-of-factly: "Maybe I would prefer to be special rather than happy." Her words stopped me cold, because they reminded me of something a recovering addict once told me. When I asked why he kept using drugs despite being miserable, he said: "I cared more about being high than being happy." That's when it struck me: people who choose being special over happy are addicts. Their drug of choice isn't alcohol or cocaine—it's success. Success addiction operates like any other addiction. The brain releases dopamine—the neurotransmitter of pleasure—in response to achievements, winning money, acquiring power or notoriety. But like all addictive things, the high never lasts. The brain quickly neutralizes the dopamine hit, leaving a hangover feeling. Knowing you'll be looking for the next success hit very soon, your brain adjusts to a baseline feeling of "anti-success." After a while, you need constant success hits just not to feel like a failure. This creates what social scientists call the "hedonic treadmill." You run and run but make no real progress toward your goal—you simply avoid being thrown off the back from stopping. And it gets worse as you age, because your abilities are declining while your need for achievement remains constant or even increases. Meanwhile, fear haunts you as you start to fall behind. The root of this addiction is often pride—the excessive desire for one's own excellence that leads to misery. Pride hides inside good things. As Saint Augustine observed, "Every other kind of sin has to do with the commission of evil deeds, whereas pride lurks even in good works in order to destroy them." Work, which should be a source of meaning and purpose, becomes workaholism that hurts our relationships. Success, the fruit of excellence, becomes an addiction. Breaking free from success addiction requires first acknowledging the problem. If you define your self-worth by your job title, quantify your success in terms of money or prestige, fail to see clearly what comes after your professional successes, or dream about being remembered for your achievements—you're probably addicted to success. The good news is that recovery is possible, though not easy. It requires letting go of pride and becoming defenseless in your weakness. One practice that helps is to write a personal "litany of humility" that acknowledges your addictions and states your desire to be free: "From putting my career before the people in my life, deliver me. From distracting myself from life with work, deliver me. From my drive to be superior to others, deliver me..." This simple exercise can begin to loosen the chains that bind you to your fluid intelligence curve and prepare you for the jump to something new.

Chapter 4: Start Chipping Away Your Attachments

During a visit to Taiwan, I toured the National Palace Museum with a guide who offered a perspective that would change my life. Looking at a massive jade carving of Buddha, he remarked that Eastern and Western views of art fundamentally differ. When I asked how, he responded with a question: "What do you think of when I ask you to imagine a work of art yet to be started?" "An empty canvas, I guess," I replied. "Right. That's because you Westerners see art as being created from nothing. In the East, we believe the art already exists, and our job is simply to reveal it. It is not visible because we add something, but because we take away the parts that are not the art." While my image of unstarted art was an empty canvas, his was an uncarved block of jade. My work of art doesn't exist until I add images and paint. His already exists but is not visible until he takes away the stone that is not part of the sculpture within the block. This metaphor perfectly captures two different approaches to life. In the West, success and happiness come—or so we believe—by avoiding losses and accumulating more: more money, more accomplishments, more relationships, more experiences, more prestige. Meanwhile, Eastern philosophy warns that this acquisitiveness leads to materialism and vanity, which derails the search for happiness by obscuring one's essential nature. We need to chip away the jade boulder of our lives until we find ourselves. As we age in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to Eastern thinking, this is backward. As we age, we shouldn't accumulate more to represent ourselves but rather strip things away to find our true selves. In the words of Lao Tzu, "I shall overcome with the simplicity of original nature. With the simplicity of true nature, there shall be no desire. Without desire, one's original nature will be at peace." This approach directly contradicts the popular "bucket list" mentality. The bucket list—all the stuff you want to see, do, and acquire before you die—is precisely the same idea as adding brushstrokes to get a finished work of art. But this strategy becomes less and less effective over time as our fluid intelligence declines and the returns to our efforts diminish. To get off the first curve and onto the second, we need to understand why accumulation doesn't work and start taking things away. Consider the story of Thomas Aquinas, born to nobility in 1225. As the son of Count Landulf of Aquino, Thomas was expected to enter the church and succeed his uncle as abbot of the prestigious Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino. But Thomas had no interest in worldly glory. At nineteen, he announced his intention to join the recently created Dominican order, dedicated to poverty and itinerant preaching. This was his true identity. The life of wealth and privilege needed to be chipped away to find his true self. His family was outraged. An Aquino would not be an impoverished nobody! They kidnapped him from the Dominicans and imprisoned him in a castle for a year. Unmoved even while imprisoned, Thomas eventually prevailed and pursued the work of a cloistered scholar, producing dense works of philosophy that made him truly happy. He became an expert in distinguishing between what truly satisfies and what does not. In his view, people who opt for the worldly path choose "substitutes for God": money, power, pleasure, and honor. These idols leave us dissatisfied because they are not what we need as complete persons. The Buddha reached similar conclusions. Born a prince, Siddhartha Gautama left his kingdom at twenty-nine after encountering suffering in the world. He spent years seeking enlightenment, eventually realizing that release from suffering comes not from renunciation of the things of the world, but from release from attachment to those things. The Buddha's Four Noble Truths teach that suffering is caused by craving and attachment for worldly things, and can be defeated by eliminating this craving. Modern science confirms this ancient wisdom. Our brains are wired for dissatisfaction through a process called homeostasis. When you experience something pleasurable—whether a promotion, a new purchase, or public recognition—your brain quickly neutralizes the positive feeling, returning you to baseline. This explains why, when it comes to success, you can't ever get enough. The satisfaction equation is fundamentally broken: Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want As you increase your "haves" without managing your "wants," your wants will proliferate and sprawl. You can easily be less satisfied as you move up the success ladder because your wants will always outstrip your haves. The Mercedes brings less satisfaction at fifty than the Chevy did at thirty because now you want a Ferrari. The solution is to manage your wants—to chip away at your attachments. Start by asking "What is my why?" rather than focusing on "what" you do. Create a "reverse bucket list" of things you're willing to let go. And practice finding satisfaction in smaller things—what Voltaire called "cultivating your garden" in his novel Candide. By chipping away at your attachments rather than accumulating more, you'll find that satisfaction becomes possible. You'll be ready to jump to your second curve, where wisdom and meaning await.

Chapter 5: Ponder Your Death to Live More Fully

Recently I was having lunch with an old friend, a CEO about my age. I was telling him about the research in this book—the inevitability of the decline of his fluid intelligence and how hard it is for successful people to cope with. "That won't be my problem," he said. "Why not?" I asked. "I won't decline," he responded. "I'll just go harder and harder, until the wheels come off." In other words: work, work, work, croak. No second curve, because there's no need for one. I call this the "Rage Against the Dying of the Light" strategy, named for Dylan Thomas's famous poem that enjoins the reader, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." But this strategy fails, just as raging against death itself fails. If you live to work—if your work is your life, or at least the source of your identity—proof of being fully alive is your professional ability and achievement. So when it declines, you are in the process of dying. Only when you face the truth of your professional decline—a kind of death—can you get on with your progress to the second curve. "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else," anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in his classic book, The Denial of Death. This fear has many dimensions, but perhaps the most uniquely human is the fear of nonexistence—the fear of being completely erased or forgotten. Walt Disney's fear of death was legendary. At seven years old, he stomped an owl to death in his backyard, and the incident haunted him for years. His first big hit as a young animator, Steamboat Willie, was immediately followed by "The Skeleton Dance," featuring skeletons rising from their graves. His personal life was focused on decline and demise as well. According to his daughter, he thought about it so much that in his early thirties, he hired a fortune-teller to predict when he would die. She told him thirty-five—obviously the worst news he could receive. Workaholic and success addict that he was, to distract himself, he threw himself completely into his work. But is death really the inferior alternative? Jonathan Swift made this point in his 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels. In the nation of Luggnagg, the hero finds a small group of people called "struldbrugs" who are immortal. What luck! But Gulliver soon learns that while they do not die, they do age and suffer the typical ailments of old people—the only difference being that the ailments are not lethal. They live forever as unproductive wards of charity, horribly depressed and effectively invisible. This is fantasy in the case of physical death but a pretty accurate picture for many people in professional decline. Have you met people who refuse to accept they are past their prime—determined "to go until the wheels come off"? They consign themselves to frustration and miss out on opportunities to change and grow. So how should we think about our legacy? In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks distinguishes between "résumé virtues" and "eulogy virtues." Résumé 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 really would want people to talk about at your funeral. As in, "He was kind and deeply spiritual," and not, "He had a lot of frequent flier miles." The striver's life makes it hard to focus on eulogy virtues. We want to be good people, of course, but focusing on eulogy virtues feels just so... not special. But here's the thing: You lose your edge on those résumé skills as you age. Meanwhile, the eulogy virtues can get stronger and stronger, all the way up the crystallized intelligence curve and beyond. To cultivate these virtues, try this practice: On the Sunday afternoon before the first day of each month, ask yourself: "If I had one year left in my career and my life, how would I structure this coming month? What would be on my to-do list? What would I choose not to worry about?" This discipline helps us work on mindfulness—living in the present as opposed to the past or future—and helps us make decisions that truly express our best selves. But contemplating your eulogy is the easy part. The harder part is staring right at your death and decline itself. This is what will truly eradicate the fear. If you were morbidly afraid of snakes and went to a therapist, the most likely treatment would be... snakes. Exposure therapy has been firmly established as the best way to tackle fears and phobias. In Theravada Buddhist monasteries in Thailand and Sri Lanka, monks practice maranasati (mindfulness of death), in which they meditate on nine states of their own dead body: a swollen corpse, being eaten by scavengers, bones held together with tendons, and so on. While this may seem morbid, it's actually good psychology—it's exposure therapy that helps overcome the fear of death. Similarly, we can practice mindfulness of our professional decline: imagining our competence declining, others receiving the attention we once received, no longer being able to work, and eventually being forgotten for our accomplishments. By confronting these fears directly, we can free ourselves from their tyranny and open ourselves to new possibilities on the second curve.

Chapter 6: Cultivate Your Aspen Grove of Relationships

I was sitting under a stately aspen tree one summer day, thinking about this book. A tree seemed like the perfect metaphor for a successful person—strong, durable, reliable, and solid. Whether standing alone or among millions in a forest, a tree grows silently on its own, reaches its own heights, and ultimately dies alone. Right? Wrong. The aspen tree, it turns out, is not a solitary majesty. Each "individual" tree forms part of an enormous root system. In fact, the aspen is the largest living organism in the world; one stand of aspens in Utah called "Pando" spans 106 acres and weighs 6 million kilograms. That "lone" aspen I was looking at was simply one shoot up from a vast root system—one expression among many of the same plant. Similarly, the giant redwoods—the most massive individual trees on earth—have remarkably shallow roots, often only 5 or 6 feet deep. They stay upright because their roots are intertwined and, over time, fuse together. They start out as individuals and become one with others as they mature and grow. These trees are perfect metaphors for the Buddhist belief that the "self" is actually an illusion. We are all intertwined, and our "individual" lives are simply manifestations of a more holistic life force. Humans are naturally interconnected—biologically, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually. Creating an isolated self is dangerous and damaging because it is unnatural. The inevitable changes in my life—and yours—aren't a tragedy to regret. They are just changes to one interconnected member of the human family. The secret to bearing decline—no, enjoying it—is to be more conscious of the roots linking us to others. If I am connected to others in love, my decrease will be more than offset by increases to others—which is to say, increases to other facets of my true self. Research confirms this. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked hundreds of men for more than eighty years, providing a crystal ball of happiness. The longtime study director, George Vaillant, found that the single most important trait of Happy-Well elders is healthy relationships. As he puts it, "Happiness is love. Full stop." His successor, Robert Waldinger, adds: "The clearest message that we get from this study is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period." Unfortunately, many strivers have spent their adult lives under the illusion of their solitariness and now suffer the result. Their root systems are withered and unhealthy. Less metaphorically, they are simply lonely. Loneliness is not the same as being alone—it's the experience of emotional and social isolation. And it's deadly. Research has established that the stress it creates leads to lowered immunity to disease, insomnia, cognitive sluggishness, and higher blood pressure. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has written that "during my years caring for patients, the most common condition I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness." Leaders are particularly prone to loneliness, in no small part because real friendships at work are difficult or impossible with people under one's authority. According to one finding in the Harvard Business Review, half of CEOs experience loneliness on the job, and most feel it hinders their work performance. At work, successful people are lonely in a crowd. The relationships that best mitigate loneliness are romantic partnerships and close friendships. For married people, a loving, companionate spousal relationship is key to thriving. But marriage and family are not adequate substitutes for close friendships, which should not be left up to chance. In fact, researchers at the University of Michigan found that having at least two close friends—meaning at least one not being the spouse—was associated with higher levels of life satisfaction, self-esteem, and lower levels of depression. Do you have real friends—or just deal friends? My son Carlos once asked me this question after I took a business call during our fishing trip and referred to the caller as a "friend." Carlos looked at me skeptically and said, "A real friend, or a deal friend?" He was making a distinction that Aristotle had made more than two thousand years earlier in his Nicomachean Ethics. At the bottom of the friendship ladder are relationships based on utility—deal friends. Higher up are friends based on pleasure. At the highest level is Aristotle's "perfect friendship," based on willing each other's well-being and a shared love for something good and virtuous. If you struggle to name two or three real friends, or haven't talked to them in months, or wouldn't call them in a crisis, you likely have a problem. Building real friendships can be tricky for people who haven't done so for many years—maybe since childhood. It requires practice, time, and commitment. But the rewards are incalculable. To build your aspen grove of relationships, you must first acknowledge the barriers. Many strivers say they "just don't have time" for relationships. If that's the case, your priorities are unbalanced. Others lament that their relationships have withered so much they don't know where to start. The key is articulating your desire for deeper connections and then taking concrete actions—even if it feels awkward at first. Finally, some worry that people wouldn't forgive them after years of neglect. In this case, making amends is essential—not just with words, but with new behavior that demonstrates commitment to change. The payoff for cultivating relationships is immense. In 2009, researchers at the University of Rochester found that people who pursued intrinsic goals centered around fulfillment from deep, enduring relationships were significantly happier than those who pursued extrinsic goals like money, possessions, power, or fame. An intimate friendship, whether from the companionate love of your spouse or a perfect friend, is better than any professional success. It will salve the wounds of professional decline like nothing else.

Chapter 7: Start Your Vanaprastha

It was a warm, humid morning in February 2018 when I set off deep into the south Indian countryside. My destination was a small town called Palakkad, where I hoped to meet the guru Sri Nochur Venkataraman. For years, I had been aware of an ancient Indian theory of the ashramas—about how to transition through middle age in happiness and enlightenment—but had found little detailed information. I was told that to find what I was seeking, I needed to find a teacher. After several hours of travel, I arrived at a small, unmarked home where I found the guru, known simply as "Acharya" ("Teacher") to his disciples, surrounded by silent devotees. "I've been waiting for you," he said. For the next two hours, Acharya explained the ancient Indian teaching that a proper life must be lived in four stages—the ashramas. The first ashrama 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 maintains a family. This second stage seems straightforward, but it contains one of life's most common traps: People become attached to its earthly rewards—money, power, sex, prestige—and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime. To break the attachment to these idols requires movement to a new stage of life, with a new set of skills—spiritual skills. That new stage is called vanaprastha, which comes from two Sanskrit words meaning "retiring" and "into the forest." This is the stage, beginning around age fifty, when we purposively begin to pull back from our old personal and professional duties, becoming more devoted to spirituality, deep wisdom, teaching, and faith. Vanaprastha is the metaphysical context of the second curve. But vanaprastha isn't the last stop. That would be sannyasa, the final spiritual stage that comes in old age. This is the stage totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment. In times past, some Hindu men would literally leave their families around age seventy-five to spend the rest of their lives in spiritual pursuits. This provides a road map for those suffering from the striver's curse. If you're a hard-charging professional whose foot has been on the gas from early adulthood to middle age, you must be prepared to walk away from these achievements and rewards before you feel ready. The decline in your fluid intelligence is a sign that it is time not to rage, but to scale up your crystallized intelligence, use your wisdom, and share it with others. Many people find that, in midlife, their interest in religion and spirituality unexpectedly increases. This is completely normal. The theologian James Fowler explained in his famous book, Stages of Faith, that as young adults, many people are put off by ideas that seem arbitrary or morally retrograde. As they get older, however, people begin to recognize that nothing is tidy in life. This is when they become tolerant of religion's ambiguities and inconsistencies and start to see the beauty and transcendence in faith. Mountains of research show that religious and spiritual adults are generally happier and suffer less depression than those who have no faith. Religion and spirituality are also linked to better physical health. After many years studying this field, I believe the best explanation for the happiness bump is simple: When you spend serious time and effort focused on transcendental things, it puts your little world into proper context and takes the focus off yourself. If you're in a transitional state and find your interest in the transcendental growing—even if you've marginalized this part of life in the past—you're right on schedule. Don't resist. One way to nurture this growth is through pilgrimage. In many traditions, walking is considered central to spiritual awakening. Since meeting Acharya, I have walked portions of the Camino de Santiago, the famous pilgrimage across northern Spain. The Camino is a form of extended walking meditation. "Each mindful breath, each mindful step, reminds us that we are alive on this beautiful planet," explains Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh. "We don't need anything else. It is wonderful enough just to be alive, to breathe in, and to make one step." The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama refers to walking speed as "the speed the love of God walks." The transcendent effects of pilgrimage appear after a few days, in waves of perception. I experienced rare relief from the hedonic treadmill. The Camino is all about walking, not arriving, which lays bare the satisfaction conundrum: Fulfillment cannot come when the present moment is merely a struggle to bear in order to attain the future. The focus must be on the walk that is life with its string of present moments. Whether through pilgrimage or other spiritual practices, developing your inner life helps you get onto the second curve. What often holds people back is that it feels like a kind of weakness to lean on spirituality after a lifetime of holding up oneself. But wanting spiritual depth is not a weakness—it is a new source of strength, the strength needed to jump to the crystallized intelligence curve.

Chapter 8: Make Your Weakness Your Strength

Who is the most successful entrepreneur in human history? Henry Ford? Steve Jobs? For my money, that distinction goes to Saul of Tarsus—later Saint Paul. He was the first-century convert to the teachings of Christ who organized the work of a messianic itinerant preacher into a body of coherent theology and spread it around the ancient world. Today Christianity has more than two billion followers. The iPhone's one billion current users isn't too shabby, but let's wait and see how well it's doing in the year 4000. So what was Paul's entrepreneurial secret? Here it is, in his own words from a letter to the early Christian church in Corinth: "I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." Scholars have long speculated on what exactly Paul meant by his "thorn." Some think it was temporary blindness, others believe it was epilepsy, and still others suggest it referred to persecution he suffered. Whatever it was, Paul's purpose in mentioning it wasn't to stimulate pity. His clear intent was to show that he—the great Paul, visionary and apostle of Christ—was flawed, mortal, and weak. But Paul goes further: he says this weakness was his source of strength! At first consideration, this seems impossible. For most of us, it sounds insane to advertise our decline to those we need to impress. "Hey everyone—I am sick, suffering, and getting worse! Want to join my religion?" That's pretty bad marketing. And advertising our own weakness always seems bad for us, which is why people spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to cover up the ravages of time. But Paul was right. The secret to going from strength to strength is to recognize that your weakness—your loss, your decline—can be a gift to you and others. I learned this quite by accident. I had a nontraditional college education, earning my degree by distance learning at about age thirty. I never talked about this as an academic because all my colleagues had gone to fancy universities. Years later, when there was a debate about creating an affordable bachelor's degree, I finally wrote about my experience in The New York Times—about how my education was perfectly good and gave me the opportunity to build my life and career. I braced myself for derision but instead received hundreds of notes from people who had also gone to school nontraditionally. They told me it was empowering to see someone like me share a story not of being the golden boy with elite opportunities, but of being someone not welcome at traditional schools. I became an advocate for nontraditional education and connected with people I never would have met otherwise. The lesson? If you want to make a deep human connection with someone, your

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Arthur C. Brooks

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