I strongly recommend to read this long article ‘Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it‘ because it contains much profound wisdom about professional career and happiness.
In this first post, let’s concentrate on the fact that our professional decline happens earlier than we believe. “According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world’s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that. The specific timing of peak and decline vary somewhat depending on the field.” It seems that creative fields see an earlier decline, while fields relying more on building up experience over time have a somewhat later decline.
In any case, “The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely, trying to make use of the kind of fluid intelligence that begins fading relatively early in life. This is impossible.”
It is essential that we recognize that we can’t sustain our performance indefinitely, and that there should be space for our younger successors to take over and put a new spin into our works. This is probably the number one happiness issue with high level professionals.
