 you've gone from innovator to instructor. Now most people don't know this and so most people just struggle and struggle and struggle and they feel really bad about the great things that happened in their past and they feel really regretful about the fact that they don't have the edge that they used to have and they try to hide it and they get really angry and they rage against the dying of the light as Dylan Thomas the poet once said instead of jumping onto this new curve with both feet and and having a second wave of success that is inherently designed to serve and share with other people. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. We have to strive to go beyond what nature dictates for us and and where one of the few animals on this planet that even have that capacity so why not maximize it. Totally totally that's to be fully alive. Saint Irenaeus this fourth century mystical saint he said the glory of god is a man fully alive and by that he meant being awake right now I mean it's like don't sleepwalk through your life by trying to make money that you can't spend by you know getting pleasures that don't satisfy that's drinking seawater Arthur Schopenhauer the great 19th century philosopher said seawater that money like fame is like seawater the more the man drinks the more he wants and the same is true of money. And we've certainly had those characters on this show over the years and also thinking going into those episodes that they must be the happiest people on the planet they've achieved a level of success fame wealth that's unbelievable and yet they struggle with these exact same issues when I think back to my experience growing up Catholic I think exactly that I think about how it forced me to go beyond myself and the me thinking and the homilies around we and us and the community and even those outside of the Catholic faith treating them as neighbors and I feel in secular life a lot of that collapses on itself due to capitalism consumerism and this need to achieve and constantly strive searching out for success and your latest book from strength to strength starts out I think in a place that will be a stunning realization for many in our audience. Yeah it's it was a big realization for me for sure you know we think and you've had a lot of famous successful people on your show because you talk about empowerment human performance on your show and some of the people who have achieved the most you find that they're really not satisfied with their lives and say what the heck is going on well okay that's where my book starts you know on a plane at night where eight or nine years ago I was doing what I did I mean I was a CEO and and things were going really great for me and I was working myself to death and I was on a plane at night as like always I was doing 175 speeches a year and and it was I mean it was it was a hamster wheel and on this plane at night I was coming to DC from LA and there was a guy behind me talking to his wife I assumed it was his wife I mean there was a couple they were in I could tell by their voices they were elderly in their 80s and this guy I can hear him kind of mumbling to her and then she answers oh don't say it would be better if you were dead I'm like whoa and so I'm kind I don't mean to eavesdrop but I mean they've got my attention and then she's he's mumble mumble mumble and she says what you mean that nobody loves you or cares about you and pays attention to you anymore it's not true anyway she's consoling him like this guy's unconsolable obviously that lights go on after we land and I'm kind of curious because I'm a social scientist I'm a behavioralist right so I whip around and I'm thinking it's going to be some you know some disconsolate sad sack of a guy turns out as one of the most famous men in the world who is I mean he's completely uncontroversial he's a hero for things that he's done over the years now long past you know we all think that somebody who is unbelievably successful by worldly standards would be dining out on that for the rest of their life and he was telling his wife it would be better if he was dead so I'm thinking what's up with that and it turns out that's ubiquitous that's every place that's around us we're all trying to be good we're trying to be better and the people who are going to turn on the art of charm is because they want to be their strivers I mean there's nobody who's like a slacker it's like I'm going to listen I'm going to take an hour and listen to the art of charm you know it's a you know it's a commitment it's like an education in yourself it's a commitment and an investment yourself so the people who do that that's great and they can do a lot but that is not going to guarantee their happiness that's not going to guarantee their satisfaction that's a different problem and and and I said to myself look I'm going to wind up like this guy I just am I'm on that path you know I am hustling to do as much as I possibly can with my life I am not satisfied with that life and I'm not going to find satisfaction and I'm going to be 85 years old on a plane with my wife Esther telling her I wished I were dead because the world will pass me by at that point and all of the great things that I think of them will turn to straw that's a fact so I better get my act together right now and so I spent the last nine years writing a book on how to crack that problem and that's that's the book we're talking about right now and that problem starts a lot earlier than probably many of us in the audience realize so this idea that on average the peak in your career occurs around 20 years after your career inception we've done studies on our audience many in our audience are sitting exactly in that bucket of 35 to 50 years old why is that so difficult for us to one realize and then to really understand and make do with it because I'm sitting here just turned 40 and I'm thinking oh wait what I'm I'm striving I'm like trying to reach even higher up the mountain so it was a tough realization for myself in reading that chapter we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends yeah so there's a this is based on the the work of a guy named Dean Keith Simonton who's a social psychologist at the University of California at Davis and he's done the the best work ever done on the trajectory of people's careers who are in creative industries or knowledge workers or information basically everybody listening to us right now or most people there I mean there's some people who who are working with their hands but most of your audience are going to be people who have office jobs for example and most of them you know have a significant amount of education for example because they work with their brains and that's right the trouble is that he has found that for the most part your career peaks about 20 years after the inception of your career because early on your career is based on what's called fluid intelligence now fluid intelligence is something that that is a term that goes to a great psychologist British psychologist from the 60s named Raymond Cantel and he found that there's not one kind of intelligence there's two the first is fluid intelligence which you've got early on in your life in incredible abundance that's your ability to focus solve problems innovate work hard and that's what everybody uses to be a star I mean that's what you know AJ is doing to become the best AJ possible in his 20s and 30s right the trouble is it peaks after 20 years and starts to decline then what most people don't know and the reason they panic could actually find there between 35 and 50 and they find that you know they don't they're not sharp as they used to be and almost everybody finds this doctors find this lawyers find this data scientists find this and they hate it they hate it there's good news the good news is there's another intelligence curve behind the fluid intelligence curve called the crystallized intelligence curve in which you're not coming up with all the original ideas solving the problems as quickly as you once were but you actually have a lot of wisdom to take all the facts around you and assemble them into an explanation of what's going on in other words you can become an incredible teacher but you know you're not going to be a great teacher in your 20s and 30s most people aren't you it's much easier to be a great teacher in your 50s and 60s and 70s than it is in your 20s and 30s and even in your 40s because your crystallized intelligence has overtaken your fluid intelligence you've gone from innovator to instructor now most people don't know this and so most people just struggle and struggle and struggle and they feel really bad about the the the great things that happened in their past and they feel really regretful about the fact that they don't have the edge that they used to have and they try to hide it and they get really angry and they rage against the dying of the light as dylan thomas the poet once said instead of jumping onto this new curve with both feet and and having a second wave of success that is inherently designed to serve and share with other people and by the way jay what you're doing right now you're a teacher which means that you are actually exploiting your second curve even early in your second curve so 20 years from now you'll be better at this than you are right now congratulations which is the exciting part because it's what i love doing the most and as we talk about happiness being in service of others is one of those pathways that lights up our ability to feel connected and happy yeah yeah yeah for sure absolutely no that's right and and as people who are listening to us in the in the from their you know mid 30s to to early 50s for example start thinking about how you can migrate your work toward mentoring toward managing others toward building good teams towards serving other people and teaching other people that doesn't mean you have to be a college professor like me it just means that you have to be in some way sharing more less of a sole proprietor less of a cowboy and more of a team player well this idea of sharpening skills learning new skills and constantly looking to maximize our strengths is a big part of what johnny and i teach in our programs and i love this this quote that what got you this far now won't get you there into the future and that realization for many of our students even our our military clients this past week of we have to especially in a world that's the pace of innovation information is is rapidly growing we have to realize that those skills that we rest our laurels on that we found success with are not going to be what we can find future success with we need to keep honing that skill set can you talk a little bit about where we start now if we've painted this this picture of these two intelligences many in our audience are realizing they want to maximize their crystallized intelligence yeah so to begin with you have to know yourself and recognize that these patterns are normal most people that i talk to who are really insecure about what's going on in their lives they think they're the only one and this is the key thing to keep in mind that this is i mean i i in the book i go through you know medicine law the arts broadcasting entertainment everything i mean i go through all of these sports is obvious because people are in the client of their 20s but that's easy that's just because of motor skill ability or strength for example but everybody is going to deal with this some people a little bit later some people a little bit earlier and if you're lucky enough to have the kind of career that blends fluid and crystallized intelligence that's great so if you're a professor you'd be really involved in your research early on and then really involved in your teaching later and you can have a really good career but you can't hold on to the wrong part is the bottom line so number one it's not you number two is you got to have a lot of courage to say it's okay for me to reinvent myself i got to reinvent myself and it's a really cool and fun adventure to reinvent myself and that's been just tectonically important for me i mean i i because of this research i walked away from my ceo job you know nobody walks away from these ceo jobs i was running a think tank in washington dc and these these great positions and super fun and at the epicenter of a lot of activity but i knew that going forward i needed to do something where i could more easily more clearly more in a more defined way share ideas and so i went to a college teaching job where i teach i write i speak i talk to big audiences of in the public and also my audiences of my mba students at harvard and and it's just better placed what i'm going to be able to do for the next 10 to 20 years so the book goes through the impediments to this the fear the the paranoia the insecurity that we have and then it talks about the things you need to establish to make it possible to you know the relationships in your life and your spiritual path for example you have to be comfortable with the fact that there are certain kinds of decline that it's a sexier world to work in fluid intelligence everybody wants to star i mean you you reward elon musk more than you reward your math teacher but but but you have to play to your own strengths because if you don't you're going to wind up frustrated and like the guy in the plane