“Aging’s all right,” the late President George H.W. Bush once said. “Better than the alternative.”
But what’s even better than “better than the alternative?” Realizing that as you get older you actually do get better — at least in some ways — and that there’s scientific research to back up that notion.
The latest example comes from the journal Intelligence, in which psychologists Gilles E. Gignac, of the University of Western Australia, and Marcin Zajenkowski of the University of Warsaw in Poland, say they’ve determined that “for many of us, overall psychological functioning actually peaks between ages 55 and 60.” ‘Peak performance’
Gignac and Zajenkowski compiled results from 10 existing studies — including data a total of 321,661 people — and quantified and standardized them.
Their goal was to identify 16 “well-established psychological traits” that they could measure and assign scores to — things that “represent enduring characteristics rather than temporary states, have well-documented age trajectories, and are known to predict real-world performance,” as Gignac explained in an accompanying article.
Among them were core cognitive abilities, along with “the so-called ‘big five’ personality traits – extraversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and agreeableness.”
Reviewing all the other studies, they concluded that people reach their peak in many of these key traits later in life than some might suspect.
Overall, they suggest that “peak performance” and “overall mental functioning” generally occurs for most people somewhere between ages 55 and 60, when you combine measures of both cognitive and personality traits. ‘High levels of functioning’
The researchers found that different abilities peak at different ages:
Early to mid-20s: peak for fluid intelligence (reasoning, memory, and processing speed).
Age 60: moral reasoning
Mid-60s: crystallized intelligence (vocabulary, knowledge).
Age 65: conscientiousness
Age 65: financial literacy
Age 75: emotional stability
Into the 80s: “capacity to resist cognitive biases.”
Of course, physical peak occurs much earlier.
I’ve finally admitted to myself that I’ll probably never beat some of my PRs from the early 2000s — although in practice many people who make healthier choices later life do wind up in better physical shape than they were personally at earlier ages.
“It should be emphasized that not all individuals experience cognitive or personality change at the same rate or magnitude,” Gignac and Zajenkowski wrote in the study. “Longitudinal research shows substantial variability in aging trajectories, with some people maintaining high levels of functioning well into late life.” George H.W. Bush was right
Still, Charles Darwin was 50 before he published “On the Origin of Species,” Beethoven was 53 — and deaf — when he premiered his Ninth Symphony.
Ray Kroc was 52 when he met the McDonald brothers and began building the fast-food empire. Sam Walton opened the first Walmart at 44. Vera Wang became a fashion designer at 40.
Come to think of it, I was in my 40s before I started writing for Inc.com—a milestone that changed my career trajectory in retrospect.
Gignac’s conclusion?
“History is full of people who reached their greatest breakthroughs well past what society often labels as ‘peak age,'” he wrote. “Perhaps it’s time we stopped treating midlife as a countdown and started recognising it as a peak.”
Better than the alternative.