Time to Jump the Curve?
“Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important. Excellence is always its own reward, and this is how you can be most excellent as you age.”
This weekend we had the gift of spending a couple days with my wife’s immediate family, including her mother who has dementia, to reflect on their life as a family on the third anniversary of her father’s death.
In the Wall Street Journal this weekend, Lance Morrow, a senior statesman at the Ethics and Public Policy center penned a note to President Biden:
“It is good to be old. It is good to be young. It is right to be a child and right, when the time comes, to be a mother or father, and right, further down the road, to be a grandfather and, by and by, a corpse. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. Let’s leave it at that.”
President Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office at the White House. (Chris Kelponis / Getty Images)
If President Biden runs and is elected for a second term, he will be 86 before he leaves office. As much as many would wish otherwise, it is already clear that he will not be excellent at his craft. Although watching someone get old is not easy, watching someone not embracing it with excellence is painful.
Arthur Brooks, in his new book From Strength to Strength, suggests that there are two forms of intelligence: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. In an interview about the book, he said that fluid intelligence is what makes you good at what you’re good at in the knowledge business and the ideas business.
“And that gets easier, and better, through your 20s and into your 30s. And then in your late 30s, according to the research, fluid intelligence starts to decline, and is really in free fall in your 40s and that people who are in perfectly good health and have high levels of skill, find their job getting harder and just more challenging than it used to be.”
Arthur Brooks speaking in 2017 (Gage Skidmore)
Brooks points out that’s why certain things for people who are in perfectly good health and have high levels of skill, find their job getting harder and just more challenging than it used to be. “That’s why lawyers find that in their 40s they’re not as sharp as they were in their 30s and surgeons find the same thing,” he said, “whether they’re willing to admit it or not.”
When I was in the Senate leadership as the head of the Senate Republican Conference, I had the opportunity to be in the middle of a number of Senate floor skirmishes. One of my most memorable moments on the floor involved then Senator Joe Biden, who saved an amendment regarding third world debt that I had helped negotiate into President Bush’s initiative on global AIDS. It was amazing to watch him work his colleagues off the cliff real time. This is what he was excellent at. But I fear those days are past whether the President is willing to acknowledge it or not.
I am reminded of the character that Anthony Hopkins played in The Father, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar last year. In the film, Anthony is either unable or unwilling to embrace his decline. Eventually, however, he acknowledges that he is "losing his leaves, the branches, the wind and the rain".
Anthony Hopkins stars in The Father (Alamy)
But the good news is that crystallized intelligence, which we call “wisdom” is on the increase as fluid intelligence is on the decrease. "You get much better at taking the information that’s out there and assembling it into a coherent storyline and solving problems that way now," Brooks says. "You’re basically going from innovator to instructor, from visionary inventor to master teacher."
Crystallized intelligence goes up through your 40s, it goes up through your 50s and it stays high in your 60s and 70s, and even in your 80s, so as long as you’ve got your health and your marbles. Brooks says you could be a sage. You can be a master teacher. You can be the Dalai Lama. But you “got to jump from that first curve to the second curve.”
Ronald Reagan was the oldest president to serve in the White House before President Biden, and he left office at 78, younger than President Biden is now. I remember how his opponents questioned his competency then, and even those of us who cheered him on privately worried that they may be right.
When I visit my mother-in-law in her memory care unit, I encounter the harsh reality of the limits of the human body and mind due to aging. My father, who is a former professor of Systematic Theology and student of the theologian Karl Barth, has thankfully been spared from dementia, and has even written several books including a memoir during Covid. But he acknowledges his limits, and does not try to keep up with everything physically and mentally that the rest of us have to. My father just turned 92.
Writing a book is a good way to exercise crystallized intelligence. President Biden, your friends need to encourage you to jump the curve and write your memoirs before it’s too late to remember them. You will enjoy making the jump, and so will the rest of us.
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1