I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

There's a thing called fluid intelligence that makes you good at what you do when you're

young. Whether you're an actor or a politician or an electrician or a college professor, you

get better and better in your 20s and 30s. And then it starts to get harder and a lot of

people don't realize that that's not the end. The real end of the story or the continuation

of the story is what they get good at next. That's kind of your happiness 401K plan. What

you should invest in so that you can get better and happier and actually more successful

for the rest of your life.

That's Arthur Brooks. He's had an unusual career path from French horn player to think tank

president to Harvard professor of social science. And then a conversation he overheard on a

plane made him begin exploring what might make him happy later in life. He realized that

the skills that made him a success when he was young weren't working so well as he approached

his 60s birthday. But they've been replaced, he says, by different skills, life enriching

skills. He's laid out the ways for how to develop those skills in his new book from

strength to strength. This is going to be great fun for me because you pose such an interesting

first thought when I encounter your work, which is that we're all going to start to decline

sooner than we think. What gives you that impression that it's more than an impression

I know?

Yeah, it's something that I've noticed again and again about strivers. I work a lot

with people who are trying hard to make something of their lives and I'm not talking about

going to go have a lot of money or fame necessarily. I work with electricians and military members

and all kinds of people that just want to do a lot with their lives. And one of the things

...