Time

Crystallised Fruits

A rather marvellous angle on life came by email a few weeks ago…

I’ve shared it with half a dozen people; and in passing nice to remember (even as the world seems to barrel towards hell in a handcart) at no other time in history could you have got this knowledge – via a friend of a friend, across an ocean and the English Channel, and then on to me – in but a handful of days….

There is still much to be thankful for in the modern world.

So what’s the story?

In 1999, Carole Holahan and Charles Holahan, psychologists at the University of Texas, published an influential paper that looked at hundreds of older adults who early in life had been identified as highly gifted.

The Holahans’ conclusion: “Learning at a younger age of intellectual giftedness was related to … less favorable psychological well-being at age eighty.”

But why?

The Holahans surmise that the children identified as gifted might have made intellectual ability more central to their self-appraisal, creating “unrealistic expectations for success” and causing them to fail to “take into account the many other life influences on success and recognition.”

And this is compounded by:

…abundant evidence [which] suggests that the waning of ability in people of high accomplishment is especially brutal psychologically.

Just think of professional sportspeople….

Consider professional athletes, many of whom struggle profoundly after their sports career ends.

Tragic examples abound, involving depression, addiction, or suicide; unhappiness in retired athletes may even be the norm, at least temporarily.

This is nicely summed up by Alex Dias Ribeiro, a former Formula 1 driver:

“Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy,”

This is sooo right…

“For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line.”

“His destiny is to die of bitterness or to search for more success in other careers and to go on living from success to success until he falls dead.”

“In this case, there will not be life after success.”

The author Arthur C Brooks calls this the ‘Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation’:

The idea that the agony of professional oblivion is directly related to the height of professional prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige.

I think I suffered a bit of this in my current job… From self-appointed ‘brain of Britain’ to hard pressed General Factotum in one simple apparently duff career move.

Still the great advantage of life is time.

There’s lots of time if you use it well. Time to think and time to learn. I’ve learnt a lot; and finally – having left my rather unhappy job last week – I’ve had some time to think on a happy family holiday.

And I return to this article again…

One thing I’ve learned working at a top university, is everyone is constantly competing to demonstrate what the article says British psychologist Raymond Cattell defined (in the early 1940s) as fluid intelligence:

The ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems—what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower.

It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s.

Cattell’s work suggests a smarter focus for the second half of one’s working (and actual) life is ‘crystallised intelligence’:

Crystallized intelligence 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’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.

And herein lies the answer to the later career – let go of being the sharpest, smartest and fastest; and develop wisdom instead.

Brooks continues:

The antidote to worldly temptations is Vanaprastha whose name comes from two Sanskrit words meaning “retiring” and “into the forest.”

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’t mean that you need to stop working when you turn 50—something few people can afford to do—only that your life goals should adjust.

And how?

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.

As we age, we should resist the conventional lures of success in order to focus on more transcendentally important things.

This suggests leaving behind:

Résumé virtues which are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others.

And making the benchmark ‘Eulogy virtues’ which…

…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“

And if this is the goal of the third phase of life – I’ve made some progress.

In my leaving dos from the end of the 1990s through the 2000s people might well have said: ‘He made Director at an astonishingly young age and had a lot of frequent-flier miles.’

But at my most recent leaving do last Thursday, I signed off by thanking a wonderfully diverse audience (which wholly represented the community I am proud to have been part of) for helping me to become: “a kinder, gentler and better person.”

And thanks to them; I have.

These are the crystallised fruits of the challenging but ultimately rewarding last three and a half years.

I’m now happy to turn the page.

Happiness, Life, Psychology, Work

Showtime

A night to remember last evening, at surely the greatest musical of our times – ‘Hamilton’.

We’ve been humming it and singing it all day (as we have for the last two years). But apart from the lesser known Founding Father’s tale of the (once) almost unlimited possibilities of America (as his final words bill it “that great unfinished symphony…”) Hamilton’s other message is the transcendent importance of time.

Alexander Hamilton lives like he’s running out of it; the other main protagonist, Aaron Burr ‘waits and he waits’.

As for me, absolutely shattered at the end of last week, I returned to “The Big Book of Happiness: 87 Practical Ideas” for solace and some new impetus.

Good old Chris Croft reminds us the external world is fickle (As George Washington cautions twice in Hamilton, no one decides ‘who lives, who dies, who tells our story), so the only resources we really have are money and time.

Separately, another excellent post from Eric Barker slam dunks the idea that anyone can multi-task well. I’d persuaded myself I can. But no… Multi-tasking Barker highlights, is just a rather ineffective and inefficient ‘dopamine rush’.

So, balancing the choice between work, money and time, my conclusion is: I’m working too hard and somewhat ineffectively; disproportionately meeting the needs of others, and not my own.

My Easter epiphany is to realise time is my most precious resource – and I’ve been being pretty careless with it. Looking on the bright side, it’s good to clock it.

The magic of Hamilton helped.

Art, Life, Psychology, Work

The Lost Jockey

This week, I have adopted Magritte’s ‘Lost Jockey‘; I found him a home on my iPhone ‘lock’ screen.

Painted in 1948, the ‘Le jockey perdu‘ has lost his racetrack and is charging through an other-wordly sepia forest.

“Racing nowhere fast”, is what the jockey says to me. And that’s why I put him on my home screen. Sometimes I do things faster that than I should. Sometimes I try to do tomorrow’s work today. Sometimes I do good things, but don’t take the moment to enjoy them.

The jockey – whom I have to swipe with my thumb, to open up the brightly lit iPhone world of action, reaction, email, work, stimulation, art, literature, music, aggro and time commitments – has reminded me several times this week not to ‘swipe’ – just do the thing I’m doing; not start something else.

Aristotle, Death, Life, Work

Today

I heard Simon Armitage read his poem ‘Knowing what we know now’ on the Today Programme on Radio 4 on Wednesday. It features an Elf who makes the offer of turning the clock back to a man who is 44 – exactly half-way to the end of his life. It has a twist in its tale which I didn’t welcome but it certainly set me thinking.

As I’ve written before it’s increasingly likely that I’m at, or close to, what Armitage’s elf calls the ‘tipping point’ – the half way mark. On Saturday morning in an unconnected thought I put it to myself, what am I going to do that will be memorable today? Cue 3 year old. I spent 3 hours doing 3 miles and 3 parks on a scooter with my son. We had great fun on what could otherwise have been a grey day. I love that boy.

Pondering it this evening, I thought to myself; what would be different if I counted life more often in days, not halves or years? Tapping 365 into a calculator, I realised that in the last year or so I’ve passed the milestone of living over 15,000 days. It’s a bit like when all the 9s turn over on another 10,000 on your car milage. That’s a lot of days. And since I reckon I have a reasonable hope of living another 15,000 that’s a lot of great days if I make them so.

And this reminded me of Seneca’s: ‘On the shortness of life‘. At the start he gently criticises Aristotle for bemoaning that nature has given man such a short span of life, for our many and great achievements, when animals have so long for so little. Seneca disagrees:

‘It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste so much of it.’

I listened to a very experienced and senior person describe his career on Friday. He had many thought-provoking things to say. But the one that stuck the most for me was a comparatively obvious one; you’ll spend more time working than doing anything else so make sure you do something you enjoy. He used the word ‘fun’ all the time to describe his work – great, enormous, tremendous… fun. Not a word I use anywhere near enough describe my working life.

And that is the thing I’ve been thinking about this weekend: enjoyment, fun and spontaneity. Thinking I’m half way to death makes me sombre and cerebral. Thinking I’ve got another 40 years, and probably another 20 odd of work, makes me think about my career and mortgage and school fees. Thinking I’ve got another 15,000 days makes me think about today – what’s going to be today’s highlight, what’s going to be today’s memory, what’s going to be today’s fun.

As Seneca has it, the philosopher makes his life long by recollecting the past, using the present and anticipating the future. The most important of these for me though is remembering to have fun – today.

Death, Life, Work

In this age of austerity, a lot of people are leaving my organisation through voluntary redundancy. Voluntary redundancy can be quite a good way to part company, but inevitably for some when the moment of farewell comes it is hard. Different people deal with it in different ways. Some have a knees up, some have and make speeches. Some slip away quietly, others have a go at the ‘leadership’ which includes me.

I’ve noticed though that some people – especially those who are nearly or over 60 and who have worked for 25 to 30 years for us – get quite frantic. This manifests itself as an incredible drive to get things ‘fixed’ before they leave. This can be their overall legacy, a last piece of work or sometimes just a detail they feel they can’t rest until they’ve sorted. It reminds me of the ‘nesting’ stuff we did before our first child was born – objectively you need to focus on the big change coming in your life, but instead you fuss about cot sheets, wallpaper and in our case finishing building the kitchen.

I was talking to a thoughtful and clever person at work about this today and I advanced my emergent theory of the ‘sands of time double whammy’. I believe our brains are Bayesian probability engines. Everything we do, see and think in some way gets incorporated into our brain so that we act and react based on a quasi-instinctive, but highly tuned estimation of the ‘thing to do’ in any situation based on the vast experience dataset we carry in our heads. So why the ‘double whammy’?

My theory (constructed in a thoroughly Bayesian fashion through a blend of unremembered facts, data, experience and sources) is that our perception of time over duration is relative – and related to how long we’ve been alive. My thesis is that the reason summer holidays seemed endless when I was little is bacause 6 weeks when you’ve only lived a few hundred weeks is a significant proportion of your total life. 6 weeks when you’ve lived several thousand weeks is much less – hence it feels like it passes faster.

Of course we could argue about the stimuli, as an adult you’re busier as a child you have days and days doing the same things. But it seems to me – and I’ve observed in others – as you age the passage of time accelerates. A Bayesian brain which logs everything is hardly going to ignore hard earned experience so new experiences and today must compete for salience with old and the many yesterdays.

That’s half the ‘whammy’. The other half is the ‘sands of time problem’. At 40 something I can still reassure myself I have a good chance of living as long again as I have lived so far. A good chance. But I know that’s becoming increasingly untenable. Within the next 5 years the odds of doubling my life so far will diminish rapidly.

So how will I feel when I am nearly 60, potentially leaving a life’s work, time running faster and faster and the end looming closer and closer? As I said to two different people today, come find me with a gun and shoot me if I’m still working flat out in an Executive job when I’m in my middle fifties.

Not that I’d be too old, just that my days will be racing away and the sands of my time pouring through my hourglass. If I’m still trying to please my boss, make my end of year targets and conjure up another organisation change I need to move on and get a life before the end of life gets me.