Discussing “From Strength to Strength” by Arthur Brooks

Men’s Breakfast, December 17, 2022

When asked last week to speak at the Men’s Breakfast Group, it took me only a few minutes to accept. I had just finished Arthur Brooks’ new book From Strength to Strength and saw an opportunity to share my thoughts on this insightful read.

I first heard about this book at a diner in Charlotte, North Carolina while having breakfast with a friend. The three guys at the table next to us were talking excitedly about a new book titled From Strength to Strength.  So, I bought it.

I was happy to learn that the book was written by Arthur Brooks. As a professor at the Harvard Business School, his podcasts, which I listen to, are rigorous discussions on how to build a joyful and meaningful life. But he does so in straightforward language. His book does the same.

In putting some thoughts together for this talk, I revisited my talk to this group from five years ago. As I did so, themes from Arthur Brooks’ book kept appearing. So, I have taken the liberty of reexamining my Mount Kilimanjaro experience through the lens of this book.

From Strength to Strength opens with the author recounting a 2012 experience that occurred on a plane where he overheard a very famous man, then in his eighties, telling his wife that he may as well be dead because no one needs him anymore.  This spurred the author, a devoted social scientist, to delve into what causes people to feel this way in later life, especially people who have been successful. He calls this phenomenon “The Striver’s Curse.” It usually effects people who strive to be excellent at what they do, but who are terrified of inevitable decline. As a result, they become more and more dissatisfied with life and have few meaningful relationships. 

The author teaches us that this inevitable decline can be a blessing instead of a curse, showing us that as we age, we develop skills that allow us to jump to a new learning curve that focuses on service, wisdom, and counsel instead of power, pleasure, possessions, and prestige. And that this second curve could end up being more meaningful and purposeful than our first curve.

The first section of Brooks’ book, using scientific evidence, defines our inevitable decline, especially professional decline, and that we need to accept it. Indeed, my lack of preparation for my climb up Mount K was a classic example of not fully comprehending that concept.

It all started when my friend Pete called me in 2016 with the following question, “What would you think about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro instead of cycling in Europe? I responded with, “Well Pete, if you can do it, I can do it!” – a classic Striver remark.  That was how I decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania instead cycling through a beautiful part of Europe, where I could have enjoyed amazing food and wine.

A few facts about Mount Kilimanjaro. Dominating the high plains of East Africa, this beautiful mountain is the highest free-standing mountain in the world.  Located 205 miles south of the equator, Kilimanjaro contains almost every kind of ecological system: bushland from 2,500 to 6,000 feet, rain forest from 6,000 to 9,000 feet, heath and moorland from 9,000 to 13,000 feet, alpine desert from 13,000 to 16,000 feet, and finally, an arctic summit zone from 16,000 feet to the summit, which is over 19,000 feet.  Our hiking party of five with our 20-person support group would traverse through all of it.

Located in Tanzania just south the Kenyan border, Mount Kilimanjaro attracts 30,000 climbers a year, who either fly into Mt. Kilimanjaro airport or Nairobi, which is 100 miles north.  Of those climbers, about 65% are successful getting to the top.  The main reason that the other 35% are not successful is due to altitude sickness. To avoid this, it is important to acclimate.

Two of our party of five, Michael and Joseph, lived in Nairobi, located at an altitude of almost 6,000 feet. So, they were obviously acclimated.  My friend Pete had arrived in Kenya six days earlier for safari on the Serengeti high plains.  The Serengeti is at an altitude of 6,000 feet.  So, Pete had been acclimating for six days. I, on the other hand, went from sea level to 6,000 feet in one day, and I was also suffering from jet lag. And unlike Pete, I had done no training to build up my leg strength.  Our final climber, Francesca, Michael’s sister, had flown in from Florence to Africa the day before.  So, like me she had done no acclimation. However, she was twenty years younger and a triathlete.

After day one, as I lay on my cot at 9,000 feet suffering from a headache and a queasy stomach, I realized that I should have prepared better for the climb.  Part of reason I had not was my heavy workload at the office. As Brooks points out in his book, I was guilty of workaholism.

In addition, like many examples in his book, I was not accepting my inevitable decline and did not consider that I was 56 years old and may have needed more training.

So, as I continued laying on my cot in sleepless misery, I had a foreboding sense that I would be the weak link in this group. For me, who was very proud of striving to be near the top, that realization was a very scary thought.

But something even more serious began to gnaw at me. Several months earlier, we had traded emails discussing what route we would take and how many days we would take to do the climb.  Most people take seven days. But for various reasons, several members of the group wanted to do the hike in 5 days.  That 5-day requirement may not seem like a big deal, but it changed everything, including what trails we could take.

There is a reason that Marangu route, the trail we eventually took, was the only route that you could do in five days.  Almost no one does it in five days!  In fact, the longer you take to climb Mt. K, the greater your chances of reaching the summit, and more importantly, the less chance of getting altitude sickness. I found the following on Wikipedia:

“Twenty-five people died from January 1996 to October 2003 while climbing the mountain, ranging in age from 29 to 74. Fourteen died from advanced high-altitude illness, including one with high altitude cerebral edema (HACE), five with high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), and six with both.  The remaining eleven deaths resulted from heart attacks, pneumonia, or trauma.  The overall mortality rate was 13.6 per 100,000 climbers.”

That got my attention. So, in addition to the possibility of not making it to the top, there was a possibility, although remote, that I could die.  One of the first questions that popped into my mind was what would be my legacy?  And Brooks even tackles this issue in his book. Quoting Leo Tolstoy, he writes, “They say: live in such a way as to be always ready to die. I would say: live in such a way that anyone can die without you having anything to regret.” The following exchange illustrates his point.

First Man: “How’s it going?

Second Man: “Not very well. I lost my job, and my wife is leaving me.”

First Man: “I am so sorry. I am here for you. Tell me about it.”

There is a short pause.

First Man: “But you need to be quick because I only have a minute.”

If that second man dies, do you think the first man would have regrets?

Brooks also explains a term he calls “Success Addiction.” Like any other addiction, you need more of it to stay satisfied. However, at some point, both our physical and professional successes become fewer and fewer.  And if we are one of those people, like I was, who is defined by our work, we lose out on so much of life. And when you begin to decline or when that part of your life ends, we become depressed. Like the man on the plane, we think that we may as well be dead. Brooks calls this stage “the agony of irrelevance.”  And this is very real.

To avoid this pitfall, Brooks tells us that we need to avoid “self-objectification”, which can dehumanize us. We do so by creating a self-image of success. To feed that self-image, we spend an enormous amount of energy trying to maintain it, staying on a treadmill that spins faster and faster, crowding out the truly important things in life. This self-objectification ultimately lowers self-worth and life satisfaction, especially later in life during our inevitable decline. To eliminate this self-objectification, he states that one must eliminate the root causes, which include pride, fear, and social comparison.

When we began our climb, I had some fear of failure, was a little boastful regarding my lack of preparation, and compared myself to the others in our group. But by our third day on the mountain, pride, fear of failure, and comparison to the others was quickly fading from my thought process.  I was beginning to realize that there was a high probability that I would not make it to the top. The suffering that the climb was inflicting on me was chipping away at my self-objectification. And I began to see myself as a very human and vulnerable person. 

A friend of all of us, Tom Valiquette, gave a talk a few years ago to this same group.  He said something that I am going to paraphrase.  You grow spiritually by doing, you build healthy relationships by nurturing, and you build trust by being vulnerable. Tom’s advice was about building relationships and you do so by meeting people where they are and by being vulnerable. Now let’s face it, men are not good at being vulnerable.  I read a New York Times article that discussed why so many men are emotionally disconnected.  The article theorizes that we as men are trained to show no vulnerability and to solve our own problems. Quote – “Men deal with their nature alone, and apart.”

Back in 2016 when my friend Pete asked me to climb Mount Kilimanjaro he said, “if you ever climb Mount K, you should do it with someone you are close to because it will change your lives forever.” His words were prophetic.

On the 4^th day of our climb, we reached an altitude of just under 16,000 feet, our last stop before the final summit. I became even more fragile physically and emotionally. This hit home when I shuffled down the side of the mountain after tea to use the latrine, located 20 yards down the slope.  On the way back, it took tremendous effort to put one foot in front of the other.  After ten yards, I literally bent over to catch my breath. I felt like I had just sprinted two lengths of a basketball court.  And that 20 yards from the latrine back to the hut was not as steep as our final 3,000-foot ascent!

After forcing some pasta down at dinner, I got into my sleeping bag, but sleep did not come.  For warmth, I lay in my sleeping bag with three layers of clothing on my legs and 5 layers on my torso. Still, I was cold.  It was a fruitless five hours trying to sleep, but the extra time to acclimate before the final ascent was priceless.

At 11:00 pm, we anxiously made final preparations, which included checking our head lamps and guzzling down hot tea. We then began our seven-hour ordeal up to Gilman’s Point, which is located at an altitude of 18,650 feet, and is one of the lower points of the crater rim.  I remember very little of that climb, but three things did stand out. 

First, even though it was zero degrees with a lot of wind, I could not believe how much I was sweating.  Although I was sweating, my hands and feet were cold. 

Second, the volcanic ash on the side of the mountain made it so much harder to climb. With each step, you had to dig your toe into the ash to keep from sliding back down.  This is where my lack of leg work before the trip really hurt me.  My quads were burning.  Each time I lifted my leg to jam my boot into the powdery ash, I would grit my teeth.  All the while, I was laboring to breath.

Third – the lights.  You would look up not to see the glorious night sky filled with millions of stars, but to gage how far you were from the top.  However, when you did look up, all you saw were tiny lights, which were headlamps that seemed far away up the mountain.  This only discouraged me.  So, I stopped looking up and only focused on the boots of the climber in front of me.  I was too weak to focus on anything else.  But this is where my weakness may have helped me.

In his book Brooks uses Saint Paul as an example of a person who admitted to being flawed, mortal, and weak. And in so doing, claimed that this weakness paradoxically was his source of strength. Brooks states that, “weakness creates an opportunity to connect more deeply with others, to see the sacredness in suffering, and even to find new areas of growth and success.” 

And for strivers, once they accept their weaknesses, they can relax and are free to jump off the treadmill of success addiction.

When Tom Valiquette gave that talk to our men’s breakfast group, he showed vulnerability, as he did when he announced to that same men’s breakfast group several years later that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  Through his vulnerability, Tom showed amazing courage and strength, an example of the paradox that those who demonstrate vulnerability are the ones with courage and strength.  I am reminded of a William James quote, “There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.” I believe that Brooks would say that faith in one’s true self is having the will and courage to focus on family, friends, and faith instead of power, pleasure, possessions, and prestige.

Another friend from that same men’s breakfast group, Steve Rogers, gave a talk about relationships, and how some of those relationships were instrumental to his own spiritual journey.  He went on to say that a huge benefit from true friendship is a belief in ourselves.  I also believe that it gives us permission and the ability to love ourselves.  Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Implicit in that statement is that we do love ourselves.  Unfortunately, I believe there are many who do not love themselves and not loving themselves is where the real problem begins.  In his wonderful book “The Road Less Travelled”, Scott Peck wisely states “As we proceed in our exploration of the nature of love, I believe it will become clear that not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but that ultimately they are indistinguishable.”

Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, and philosopher, sums it up nicely when he wrote the following: “Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”  Becoming a better person and being happier are excellent reasons to develop friendships and to nurture those friendships. Brooks calls this “Cultivating Your Aspen Grove.”

However, there is an even more practical reason.  A recent Boston Globe article mentions Dr. Richard S. Schwartz, a Cambridge psychiatrist, who wrote a book on the topic of social isolation titled “The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century.  Schwartz says, study after study has shown that those who were more socially isolated were much more likely to die during a given period than their socially connected neighbors, even after you corrected for age, gender, and lifestyle choices like exercising and eating right. Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking. So, making friends is a present you give yourself.

Brooks admits that going from strength to strength is not easy.  But the first step is being willing to take the jump. This is expressed beautifully in the last few lines of the animated Christmas movie “Polar Express”, which is about a boy who takes a magical train ride to the North Pole to meet Santa. At the end of the movie, the conductor, played by Tom Hanks, tells the boy, “You see. Here’s the point. It does not matter where the train is going.  What matters is deciding to get on the train.”   And that is what Arthur Brooks is trying to tell us. It does not matter where your second curve takes you.  What matters is taking the jump.  We all know that change is difficult. But to help with this he ends his book with the following advice.

Use things.

Love people.

Worship the divine.