Creativity Can't Last Forever
Why You Should Leave Your Mark While You Still Can: Creatives, Athletes, Inventors, and Christians.
1.
Professor Arthur C. Brooks’ did a research project about the ages when people experience their apex of career success. An ‘apex’ is the point where someone achieves their biggest goals, creates their most enduring projects, or receives their highest critical acclaim. For director Francis Ford Coppola, this would’ve been The Godfather at age 32. For Joseph Heller, Catch-22 at 39. For Michael Phelps, the 2008 Beijing Olympics at 23.
But the hard-to-swallow pill is that there comes a point where our creative, athletic, and innovative potentials decline – usually somewhere between the 30’s and early 50’s.[
Here’s a summary of Brooks’ research:
· High-Intensity Athletes peak around 20-27.
· Endurance Athletes peak around 25-33.
· Nobel Prize winners are most likely to come up with their ideas in their late 30’s.
· Physicists peak at 50.
· Chemists, 46
· Medical scientists, 45.
· Writers, 40-55.
· Finance or economic professionals, 36-40.
· Doctors’ skills start dropping off somewhere in their 30’s.
· Entrepreneurs peak in their twenties and then steeply decline in their 30’s.
· Equipment and office workers’ skills level off around 35-45.
· Assembly-line workers and mail sorters peak anywhere from 45-54.
· Air traffic controllers’ skills level off so profoundly that they’re forced into early retirement at 56.
· Musicians hit a substantive decline somewhere in their 30’s.
· Other creatives (novelists, poets, film directors, painters, and so on) generally do their best work around 20 years into their craft – so 35-50 is typically the age range where the well starts running dry.
They all follow the same general pattern: anywhere in the first 10-30 years after starting your profession, you’ll peak. After the peak, your output, creativity, and inventiveness sharply decline.
Basically, it takes around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master your craft, and then another 10,000 hours to lose your innovative edge.
But the decline is very gradual – it’s not like a switch flips and leaves you suddenly incompetent. For example, if you’re an academic, you can still churn out some papers and books after your apex, but the likelihood of those ideas being superior to ones from your peak decrease year after year.
The decline isn’t just due to getting older; in fact, you can put off your apex by starting your vocation later in life. For example, Sigmund Freud didn’t even start talking “psychoanalysis” until after his 40th birthday. He then wrote his best and most influential works in his 50’s and 60’s. Which goes to show that the creativity faucet doesn’t shut off because you get old but because you rack up around 20 years of creative output.
Lastly, the higher the level of achievement you experience during your peak, the higher the level of dissatisfaction you’ll feel after your peak. Put another way, the more fulfillment you try to mine out of your own career success, accolades, or celebrity, the more frustrated you’ll tend to feel about the inescapable decline of your creative potential.
2.
After reading Brooks’ thesis, I got thinking: when do Christians hit their peak?
Which is a really broad question because there are really broad factors. So I broke it down into three pieces: When does a preacher do their best preaching? When do Christian scholars, philosophers, and writers churn out their best works? When do Christian activists make their most profound impact?
Truthfully, I had no idea. So, I did some research. However, since there’s not a lot of data to go off of – and most of the data that’s out there is highly subjective – don’t think of this as an exact science. It’s more a broad hypothesis than an empirical study.
For preachers, their peak is anywhere from 30 to 65.
Billy Graham first preached at 19, started his crusades at 30, and his most memorable sermons occurred within the 32-55 range. Rick Warren gained recognition for preaching in his 30’s and hit his most influential decade starting at 41. Harvest founder Greg Laurie hit his stride in his preaching somewhere in his late 20’s and continued the momentum for decades. Compared to scholars and activists, preachers have a longer career span – and we’ll get to why later.
For Christian scholars and authors, their average career apex is around 38-56.
N.T. Wright wrote his seminal Resurrection and the Son of God at the age of 55. Miroslav Volf wrote his most renowned book, Exclusion and Embrace, when he was 40. Oliver O’Donovan wrote his magnum opus at 41. Tim Keller started putting his ideas into bestselling books in his 50’s. They generally followed a pattern of storing up or drafting out material in their early careers before polishing them into books a few decades later.
Christian activists usually leave their greatest impact somewhere in the 28-45 range.
MLK Jr. accomplished everything he did by 39. The activist Florence Nightingale forever reformed wartime medical services at 34. Charles Dickens helped reform child welfare, public schools, and labor laws by the age of 32. John Wesley’s horseback travels, in which he planted hospitals, administered charities, opened orphanages, and preached 40,000 sermons, took place in in his 30’s.
All this to say, there’s a specific era in all our lives when our best work naturally flows out of us. To put it in New Testament language, there comes a point where our bodies and brains set us up to use our “talents” well.
In one of Jesus’ parables, a master distributes his wealth to three servants: one gets five, another gets two, and the last one gets one. In the end, the one who uses his five talents to gain five talents more is rewarded, while the one who’s overly cautious with his one talent is scolded for wasting his opportunity (Matt. 25:14-30).
Point is: while you’re able, use the gifts God’s given you to the best of your ability.
This research is fascinating – and a little haunting. I always figured creativity would sharpen as I racked up more experience. But there’s a deadline. For me, the well might start running dry, at least for writing, 13-27 years from now. Don’t check the math.
If anything, this is like a PSA to get you into gear: while you’re able, use your abilities to the maximum extent possible. Because, sadly, there comes a point where the ideas won’t flow as easily. So, let’s leave our mark and use our talents well.
3.
However (and this is a big however), just because your best creative heights inevitably plateau and fall, this doesn’t mean you should give up and retire. It’s actually a way of your brain inviting you to stop building your own achievement and start training others to follow in your footsteps.
Because, as further studies found, one profession that actually seems to sharpen with age is teaching. For example, myriad course evals have found that older professors consistently outperform younger professors – almost to an exact science. This is because, despite a drop in innovative ideas, people actually get better at articulating and explaining what they’ve learned as they get older.
This has huge implications. According to my PhD advisor, the reason this happens is because your body starts dampening the parts of your brain that want to achieve so it can make room for new pathways that are more open to loving, nurturing, and mentoring. In other words, your body is telling you to become a grandparent. A grandparent teaches, lives by example, and stores the family history so they can articulate and pass off wisdom to the next generation.
The people who refuse this grandparenting-impetus are the most miserable in their second half of life (see Darwin, Nietzsche, Oppenheimer, David Foster Wallace). To live our best lives, we should learn how transition from capitalizing upon our wisdom to passing it off joyfully. For example, one of the best and most enduring works of novelist Stephen King’s late career was his book On Writing – a straightforward guide for aspiring writers, penned with all the love of a master passing off the secrets of the trade.
There’s a phrase that says, “Those who can’t do, teach.” In reality it should be something more like “Those who have done, should teach…or else they’ll fall into perpetual existential dread and self-hatred” (not much ring to it but you get the idea).
This is why preachers have a longer career lifespan: they’re able to start connecting all of their ideas from their early career and articulate them better than they could in their 20’s.
To sum this up, your life follows this trajectory: you’re born, you slowly figure out what you might be skilled at, you find a profession in or around that skill, you reach your apex around 20 years into that profession, then you’re choiced with either trying to fan the flame of your former glory – which your body and brain will resist – or happily resigning to passing off your skills to those who are younger and would benefit from your counsel. Use your talents wisely while you can, then resign to training the next generation with whatever time’s left.
This is interesting particularly the part about teachers getting better at their skill. I wonder how having children or being a caregiver affects this? For years people may only be able to spend a little time on their work and then when caring responsibilities ease they have more time.