39 pages • 1 hour read
Arthur C. BrooksFrom Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Start Chipping Away”
Drawing again on Eastern philosophy, Brooks opens Chapter 4 with an anecdote about visiting the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. The topic of what constitutes art just before its creation comes up with his guide. In Western thought, the blank canvas represents this moment of art before its creation. In Eastern thought, the moment before creation is a block of jade, uncarved and waiting for pieces to be removed. As Brooks posits, Western thought tends to think in terms of addition while Eastern thought tends to think in terms of subtraction. The same is true of success. The secret to contentment is stripping away nonessentials rather than mindlessly accumulating things, which people in the West tend to do.
The second barrier to moving to the second curve is attachment to worldly things. The fourth chapter looks at why people are attached and how they can alter this path or their behavior. Many people are like a successful entrepreneur Brooks once met who couldn’t get enough of people and material goods. The richer he got, the more he purchased. This takes to heart an adage from Malcolm Forbes, an American entrepreneur—“[h]e who dies with the most toys, wins” (69). The entrepreneur Brooks knew “collected” people in the same way, forming superficial relationships with famous people just to brag about whom he’d met. None of it was personally rewarding.
Brooks relates the stories of two spiritual men in history who dealt with the problem of worldly attachment: Thomas Aquinas and the Buddha. Both came from wealthy families who gave them everything they desired at an early age. However, both sought something more meaningful. Aquinas, from Italy, joined the Dominican order, whose monks devoted themselves to poverty. He identified four things—money, power, pleasure, and honor—that people use in an attempt to substitute for God. None are satisfactory, he argued, and people should seek real satisfaction in their spiritual lives.
Likewise, the Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, rejected his sheltered life of privilege and looked for something more meaningful. He lived life as an ascetic, abstaining from indulgence, and, as the story goes, sat under a fig tree until he found enlightenment. His conclusion was that worldly things by themselves are not bad; it’s one’s attachment to them that causes problems. To Brooks, following steps to letting go of this attachment brings peace and enlightenment.
More recently, research has shown how this attachment dynamic works in people. Getting what one wants brings a certain sense of satisfaction, but it’s fleeting and one loses that initial rush. Thus, one seeks something new to get that same feeling. This becomes a cycle—called the hedonic treadmill—that feeds upon itself.
In evolutionary terms, this makes sense: Historically, people competed for very limited resources, in part trying to attract mates. In a modern industrial society, resources are often abundant for many, but this atavistic or ancestral mindset still holds, and people feel a need to have more than others. Not doing so is seen as failure. Thus, people try to accumulate more and more.
Brooks sees a better approach. Instead of equating satisfaction with ever greater quantities of things, he devises this equation: “Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want” (86). In this way, each person can calculate what really makes them happy. Stripping away unnecessary things first involves asking oneself what truly motivates one. Brooks calls this asking what our “why” is—in other words, our purpose in life or calling—and abandoning the rest. Second, one should work on a reverse bucket list, in which one pares down one’s desires to only those things that will bring true happiness and personal satisfaction. Finally, one should focus on smaller things. The little things in life are what really matter, like watching a sunset with loved ones and soaking in that moment.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Ponder Your Death”
Brooks examines the fear of decline, the third reason people have trouble jumping over to the second curve. Strivers tend to equate work with their life and often figure they can just keep pushing themselves harder as they age to keep up professionally. Brooks argues that admitting decline is essential to reaching the second curve.
The fear of death is a normal phenomenon. All animals have a survival instinct, but only humans can contemplate not existing; this is often the source of true fear. If people think of their jobs as defining their life, then ceasing to work is akin to not existing. Some people continue working past their prime to try to secure their legacy. This is folly, Brooks suggests. No one can control the future, and even if one’s legacy is secure it’s no guarantee of happiness. Such was the case with the famous man Brooks overheard on the plane.
One is missing out on the present if one is always focused on the future. Brooks agrees with the advice of another writer who recommends working on “eulogy virtues” rather than “résumé virtues.” By this, he means cultivating those things people say about someone at their funeral, which have far more to do with personal qualities than professional accomplishments. Ambitious people may tend to dismiss this since it won’t make them stand out, but the inevitability of professional decline makes standing out less likely in old age.
Age doesn’t diminish personal virtues like integrity and kindness, Brooks says. Imagining one only has a year to live (and work) can help one focus on the important things. As Brooks writes: “Contemplating death can even make life more meaningful” (105).
The best way for people to get over the fear of death is greater exposure. Psychologists suggest meeting fearful things head-on, as repeated familiarity removes fear. Certain Buddhist monks do this with death, Brooks says, by displaying photographs of decomposing bodies. They have a meditation that keeps them mindful of death, called maranasati, in which they envision the various stages of physical decomposition, from bloated corpse to dust. Brooks says that he does the same thing, only as a meditation on his professional life, from being initially aware of his decline to dying with no one remembering his accomplishments.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Cultivate Your Aspen Grove”
In this chapter, the focus is on forging the relationships that give our lives meaning and which we rely on in our declining years. The trouble most strivers have is they put work first to the exclusion of all else—including family and friends. Brooks discusses how not to let that happen and how to cultivate relationships late in life if it has.
A groundbreaking study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development provides some insight into what people find meaningful. Begun in 1938, the study examined a cohort of almost 300 male Harvard students across their lives. The study was designed to outlive the original researchers, as new ones took their place. For each decade of life, the participants revealed what made them happy and satisfied, which were categorized according to physical and mental health as well as life satisfaction. The top category, “Happy-Well,” provided life lessons for factors that could be controlled. These included exercise and not smoking or abusing alcohol, but the single most important factor was love. In short, love equals happiness.
Many high achievers are quite lonely despite all their outward signs of success, Brooks says. They may be connected to many people on a daily basis but still feel deep pangs of isolation. People at the top in workplaces often do not have a chance to make work friendships because of their position of authority and leadership. The closest relationships, which are essential to reducing loneliness, are romantic loved ones and friends.
Love is strongest between spouses when it becomes “companionate love,” in which the partners are each other’s best friend as well as lover. Research shows that happiness is greatest with love that is monogamous. Also important for happiness is to have close friends outside of marriage. By this, Brooks doesn’t mean work friends—what he refers to as “deal friends”—but real friends with whom one can discuss serious topics and turn to when in need.
Brooks uses a metaphor of an aspen grove. To look at just one aspen tree above the ground, it appears to exude strength, resilience, and individualism—each one growing solidly on its own. However, the truth is their roots are connected below ground in one large system, making the aspen “the largest living organism in the world” when seen in terms of its interconnected groves (112). In much the same way, humans are strong and powerful only when supported through their interconnected relationships.
Strivers often resist forming friendships because of three things, the first being not enough time. Brooks points to his earlier discussion of workaholism to note that resisting friendships is a sign of work addiction. The other two reasons for lacking friendships are being out of practice from letting relationships wither and fearing that others would not forgive them for this.
Borrowing from the work of Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, Brooks suggests three exercises for avoiding workaholism: Plan out your time well in advance, do your core job (what you can uniquely provide in relationships), and invest intelligently in what you want for the people you love. Research has shown that intrinsic goals from strong relationships provide the most satisfaction, and even late in life they can be cultivated. These are necessary, Brooks says, for getting onto the second curve, and help more than anything else to mitigate the loss from professional decline. Love is transcendent and multifaceted. The ancient Greeks had a whole vocabulary to describe different kinds of love, including agape, or spiritual love, which is the topic of the next chapter.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These three chapters explore the theme, Managing the Mental Decline That Comes With Aging, and provide the reader with tools for making the jump to the second curve. Brooks tries to get readers to dwell on their decline to weaken its power over them. If work success represents the pinnacle for people—even their identity—professional decline is as frightening as actual death.
However, just as people who face death often experience peace in their last years, those who contemplate professional decline can also experience peace. Brooks marshals a wide range of sources—from Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy to literature to biography to Buddhism—to get high achievers to understand how freeing it can be to face decline without fear. When strivers no longer rely on professional success to define themselves, they are free to get off the hedonic treadmill and move confidently to the second curve.
Chapter 6 is the longest chapter in the book, reflecting its importance. It explores the theme of Love as the Key to Happiness. Brooks reinforces the metaphor of the aspen tree with the Buddhist idea that all life is interconnected, and that the self is wholly manufactured by the human mind. Just as pondering one’s professional decline and subsequent death is useful, pondering one’s insignificance in the grand scheme of things helps one put everything in perspective. We are all supported by a vast network of other people. Brooks employs empirical research to make this point, drawing from the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
The love from healthy relationships is the greatest determinant in whether one feels happy. However, it’s not enough to identify this. Brooks wants to equip readers with the know-how to maintain, rekindle, and/or build relationships. The spectrum of challenges is wide. Brooks aims to meet readers wherever they are on that spectrum, providing advice and encouragement with the underlying message that it is never too late for either repairing or forming relationships. The stakes are too high to be afraid, he suggests, since love and support are necessary for moving to the second curve.
