The theme this week on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: 5 Lessons from the book: From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks

Today, I’m talking about the most important concept that can be applied to your life from the book “From Strength to Strength”. The author spends a lot of time in the early part of the book discussing the 2 types of intelligence: fluid and crystallized. 

Fluid intelligence is our ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems. Our fluid intelligence declines as we age, and it peaks very early in life - late teens to early 20s. Then it starts a slow decline that becomes more noticeable by middle age. According to the book our “prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness, and this has several implications. The first is that rapid analysis and creative innovation will suffer. The second is that some specific, once-easy skills become devilishly hard, like multitasking.”

“Another skill is the recall of names and facts. By the time you are fifty, your brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library. Meanwhile, your personal research librarian is creaky, slow, and easily distracted. When you send him to get some information you need—say, someone’s name—he takes a minute to stand up, stops for coffee, talks to an old friend in the periodicals, and then forgets where he was going in the first place. Meanwhile, you are kicking yourself for forgetting something you have known for years. When the librarian finally shows back up and says, “That guy’s name is Mike,” Mike is long gone and you are doing something else.”

That is the decline of your fluid intelligence. 

Thankfully the other type of intelligence, crystallized intelligence, actually increases with age, and if we can use more of our crystallized intelligence and rely less on our fluid intelligence as we age, we will be happier and much less frustrated.

Crystallized intelligence is defined as the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past.

What happens as your crystallized intelligence increases as you age is multifaceted. Studies show that “people maintain and grow their vocabulary—in their native languages and

foreign languages—all the way to the end of life. Similarly, you may notice that with age, people are better at combining and utilizing complex ideas. You get better at using the concepts you know and expressing them to others. 

“When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them.”

The key is using these changes in our intelligence to jump off the declining  fluid intelligence curve onto the growing crystallized intelligence curve. In other words - going from strength to strength.

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast. 

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