Arthur Brooks

I mean, you got to think about the right things and set the right goals and you can create a lot of your circumstances, which is really wonderful.

But there's a lot of what's going on in your emotions in your life that actually has to do with the structure of your brain.

And this is a perfect case of that.

We find that almost everybody listening to us, not everybody, but a lot of people are in their twenties, early thirties who are listening to us.

The structure of your brain is that you're climbing a curve of intelligence called fluid intelligence.

Now that has a lot of working memory, a lot of innovative capacity and your ability to focus and get better at what you do, especially in kind of thinking and these kinds of skills, knowledge workers, idea people.

that you get better and better at it all the way through your 20s and 30s, your 10,000 hours, and you can just be killing it, especially by your late 30s.

And everybody listening notices this, that they're getting better and better and better and better and better.

Here's the problem.

That fluid intelligence of innovative capacity, working memory, ability to focus and concentrate, that suddenly starts to get worse after about age 40.

It's funny, I've looked at startup entrepreneurs and physicists and financial professionals and doctors and everything, and it's kind of 39, turns out to be this magic age, when you're at the peak of your powers, and then you start to decline.

Now, nobody's gonna notice it, folks.

Nobody should freak out.

Nobody will notice it except you.

You'll notice in your mid-40s that things aren't as fun as they used to be.

This is the reason that people burn out.

People burn out because they stop making progress.

Humans are wired for progress.

And when you stop making progress, you notice that you don't like what you were doing as much.

So this is, by the way, this is a common principle in everything.