The Question We Need to Keep Asking Ourselves as We Age

Eight years ago, then in my mid-40s, I attended a dinner party and overheard an older man, well into his gin, ask a young girl: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

She gleefully rattled off an impressive list: veterinarian, painter, computer coder. I listened with an awe that soon morphed into something approaching panic. She still had time to be all those things. But no one was asking me anymore in middle-age what I wanted to be. More importantly, I wasn’t asking myself.

There are many reasons midlife gets pegged as a period of “crisis” sitting at the bottom of a U-shaped curve of life happiness. But one key catalyst is a tendency to fall into a cycle of sameness, one that puts us in a mindset of bending mostly toward our competencies. We believe we know what we’re good at, and what we’re not, and we allocate our time accordingly.

There can be health risks to this kind of inertia if it leads to chronic boredom. By contrast, as I discovered, there can be powerful benefits from continuing to ask “What do I want to be?” if it helps lead to positive perceptions about aging and a “will to live.”

That chance encounter at a dinner party set me off on an unlikely six-year journey to become a competitive athlete, something I'd never been. As a skinny, gangly kid born one year before Title IX was passed, I always craved something I instinctively believed sports could give me. But I was mostly picked last for teams and warmed the bench. So I responded instead to what people had praised me for—stringing together words—and followed that praise to a career in journalism. I became tethered to my keyboard, living a life of sitting and staring at screens. Athletics, in the meantime, took a backseat. After all, no one had cheered when I fumbled my way around the 7th-grade basketball court.

I once heard that if you take something you were made fun of as a kid and get good at it, then it will become your superpower.

Maybe. But whether or not that’s true, I will happily take 7.5 years of added lifespan.

That number comes from Becca Levy, a Yale professor of epidemiology who led groundbreaking research when she took one of the country’s most detailed examinations into aging and overlaid it with mortality data. Her key finding: people with more positive perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer on average. Central to such positive perceptions was maintaining a “will to live,” which can be inclusive of pastimes that excite and push us.

Read More: Medieval Advice for Living Forever

I corresponded with Levy and examined other research from dozens of experts in the health, cognition and longevity fields for my book Not Too Late: The Power of Pushing Limits at Any Age. One takeaway is the importance of escaping our competency trap as we age in order to maintain mental sharpness and flexibility. 

Chronic boredom—like the kind that can set in as we fall into ruts—has been correlated with anxiety, depression, and the risk of making mistakes. By avoiding doing things that are new or uncomfortable, we stop forcing our brains to work and make hard choices. For instance: always walking the same route, eating at the same restaurants, talking to the same people, or performing the same job in the same way. Routines have their place, but not when they put your life on autopilot.

The Seattle Longitudinal Study is a comprehensive research project that examines how we develop and change cognitively throughout adulthood. It ran from 1956 to 2012 as participants completed a series of exercises testing their cognitive abilities. In total more than 6,000 adults ages 22 to 100-plus were part of the study. The lead author, K. Warner Schaie, wrote in a report: “As you begin to stop making decisions, it won’t be long before you have difficulty actually making decisions. The notion that you can no longer do anything becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

After overhearing that dinner party exchange, I awoke still disconcerted the next morning. A haphazard Google search of “what are the hardest things you can do” led me to something called obstacle course racing (OCR), a demanding sport combining endurance running with obstacles such as carrying heavy sandbags and traversing ropes and monkey bars. The Olympics will feature a version of OCR in 2028 as part of the modern pentathlon.

OCR was my answer to the older man’s question. While I was most certainly grown-up, “athlete” was still something I wanted to be. So for the last six years, I’ve trained almost every day amid all my other life and work obligations to become something I always wanted to be as a little girl but never thought possible. As a competitive athlete, I’ve raced more than 50 times, I medal often in my age group, and have competed in two Spartan Race world championships. 

When I was younger, there wasn’t much about me suggesting I’d ever be able to cultivate these abilities. But by leveraging the attributes, experience, and wisdom I possess now as an adult, I was able to finally make it happen. Your ambition will be different from mine, but you can make it a reality too. Either way, the path forward requires a reallocation of time and priorities. 

Here are three tactics to consider as you embark on your own quest escape the competency trap.

Don't put up barriers to entry

It can be tempting to think we need all the information, gear, tools, and tactics to try something new. But just fumbling around can pay big dividends because it prevents procrastination. Eventually the fumbling will give way to process. Early on, I simply signed up for free daily Spartan Race email workouts and set my alarm 45 minutes earlier. Then I watched YouTube videos to decipher how to complete foreign moves (like a “bear crawl”) and fumbled around in my yard. It wasn’t exactly strategic, but the point was, I was doing something. And that kept me motivated until the point where I advanced enough to seek coaching.

Try something you really like, regardless of whether you think you'll be good at it

What makes you want to get off social media, turn off Netflix, and become a student again? “When people ask me for advice about protecting their brains, I usually recommend that they do the things they enjoy,” wrote Schaie of the Seattle Longitudinal Study. “If you don’t enjoy whatever it is you’re doing, you’ll soon stop doing it.”

Sticking with something you’re not particularly good at is disconcerting. The word “yet” can help. Well-known Stanford psychologist and author Carol Dweck often talks about one Chicago school’s unorthodox grading protocol. Instead of a failing grade, students would receive a “Not Yet.” In my case I just kept thinking: “I’m not an athlete—yet.”

Be OK with looking foolish

Letting go of the notion that you’re supposed to always show up seasoned or competent means getting comfortable with looking foolish. This can feel counterintuitive in a world where social media rewards us looking our best with the dopamine hit of likes. It turns out, however, that a reduced level of “perfectionism” actually can help build resilience in response to failure. Gutting it out through such dips, as George Leonard writes in his book Mastery, is critical to any transformation.

My new athletic pursuit required a lot of humbling failure as I learned to climb a 17-foot rope and build the strength to pull my bodyweight over a seven-foot wall.

I am not sure about a superpower, but I can now throw a spear. And I’m never bored.