Part 1: Fighting the 'midlife assassin'

Summoning crystallized intelligence and core attributes as superpowers.

Before we get going

Let’s start with what I hope is the obvious: the image above was NOT created by a human.

It was rendered via OpenAI’s DALL-E network. Since my own hands don’t glow, I wanted to see what technology could gin up.

I asked: “Please create an image in black and white of a middle-aged woman and man with superpowers.” It took about 5 seconds to generate this illustration.

Lots of thoughts are running through my mind right now: “Wild, creepy, sort of cool … what’s that nice cape material?”

Summary

• This is Part 1 of two posts about fighting the “midlife assassin.” Today we’ll talk about how to get a mental edge. Next week, we’ll plan our physical defense.

• As we age, we can get trapped in a mindset that we’re “fully baked” as humans. We stop pushing ourselves to try new hard things.

• We can fight back by harnessing our “attributes” and “crystallized intelligence” to tackle and master a new pastime.

• Think of these as our cognitive superpowers.

• There’s a lot more detail on this topic in my new book NOT TOO LATE: The Power of Pushing Limits at Any Age.

Post

Search online for “midlife synonyms” — which I did while writing NOT TOO LATE — and contemplate the hardly-inspiring results. “Crisis,” “breakdown,” “the wrong side of 40,” “stressful,” and my personal favorite, though I have no idea why it appeared, “tube sock.”

Read enough of these entries, and it begins to feel like there’s a stealth assassin waiting in the concert hall of our life.

The assassin bides its time through childhood, with all the bright notes of possibility.

It also holds back in early adulthood with its crescendoing high points: pick a profession, get good at it, make money, find a mate, create a home, take vacations, save for the future.

It’s when all this momentum slows into a pattern of rinse-and-repeat repetition (rise, eat, work, family, chores, bills, bed, do it all over again) that we become vulnerable to the assassin.

Our culture zeitgeist reinforces what that search engine suggested:

• After a certain age, there’s no point in pushing the envelope and pursuing hard new challenges because…

  • We’re fully baked as human beings (i.e., good at this thing, bad at that one).

  • We’re overwhelmed by responsibilities and don’t have time for anything new.

  • We need to reduce stress. New challenges are stressful!

  • We are wearing uncomfortable tube socks. (See above ^^ if you missed this reference).

“What’s the point?” the assassin whispers.

A dangerous cognitive trap is being set.

But trying new hard things at any age is central to the Not Too Late (N2L) philosophy.

Here’s how we can fight back.

Power up your attributes

We’ve actually got some pretty strong defenses at our fingertips. I wrote about this in MSNBC’s Know Your Value column and newsletter recently.

Among them are the key attributes we were born with: things such as discipline, resilience, humor and open-mindedness.

Attributes are different than skills. I learned a lot about them in former Navy SEAL Rich Diviney’s terrific book “The Attributes.”

Your attributes are hard-wired into your circuitry. They can give you a competitive advantage in learning something new regardless of age once you pinpoint them.

In fact, attributes can be an even better indicator than skills of whether we succeed or stumble in an endeavor.

In my book, you’ll discover I’m certainly not the fastest or strongest athlete. Younger people can run circles around me.

But I am able to grit it out when things get uncomfortable. (To learn about being super OK with discomfort, pick up Michael Easter’s bible on this topic: “The Comfort Crisis.”)

Here are two attributes I think are particularly useful as we age:

1. Patience - When you’re older, you can see the bigger picture more than when you were younger.

   “A word that pops into my mind is ‘patience,’” says Alex Hutchinson. He’s Outside magazine’s Sweat Science columnist and author of the bestselling book “Endure.”

   I talked to Alex for NOT TOO LATE and he went on to say: “It’s really easy to get excited about big goals, but to actually achieve them requires patience to take care of details, patience to stay on track when obstacles arise. Older people are more patient.”

2. Perspective - The older you are, the more you’ve tried, failed, succeeded and learned. That gives you perspective to weather the dips and plateaus that come with tackling something new and hard.

   In other words, you’re less likely to quit when the chips are down.

Summon ‘crystallized intelligence’

You have a vast bank of wisdom — your crystallized intelligence — to draw upon in pivotal moments.

It’s different than fluid intelligence, which is our ability to process information and solve problems regardless of past experience. That peaks when we are younger.

However, crystallized intelligence peaks and remains stable later in life, starting to decline gradually somewhere in our mid-60s.

Such wisdom can help you locate edges and equalizers to level the playing field. An example: I was stung badly by wasps during an obstacle course race but remembered from childhood that packing cool mud on the welts would alleviate the pain and swelling.

That edge helped me cross the finish line when others didn’t.

My best friend, who also is a journalist, became a volunteer firefighter in his mid-50s. He quickly ascended into the leadership ranks thanks to a high degree of organizational and team-building knowledge he'd amassed as a leader in his day job. 

He also exhibits the "patience" and "perspective" attributes I mentioned above. When younger guys attempt to run straight into a smoke-filled building, he'd tries to slow them down to do a "size-up" of the situation. Do you see cars in the driveway (signaling people inside)? Toys on the lawn?  Where is the smoke coming from? Are there bars on the windows?

What knowledge and attributes do you have that can make you smarter and more strategic as you pursue a new challenge?

Thanks for reading. Fight the midlife assassin. Find something you love. Harness your attributes and crystallized intelligence. Dig in. Stick with it when things get hard.

Next week, we’ll get into our physical defense.

Wendy

P.S. - I reserve the right to pen a future post in defense of the tube sock.