From Strength to Strength: Arthur Brooks on the owner’s second curve

Somewhere over America, late at night, a social scientist working on his laptop overheard an elderly man telling his wife that he might as well be dead. When the lights came up on landing, he recognised the man — a national hero, admired for decades. The pilot shook his hand at the cockpit door and the old man beamed. Twenty minutes earlier he had felt useless.

That scene opens From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks, published in 2022 and in the UK by Bloomsbury. Brooks was 48 at the time, running a Washington think tank and working 80-hour weeks. He had hit every goal on a list written at 40, and he was not especially happy. The man on the plane frightened him. This book is his attempt to avoid becoming him.

It is aimed squarely at people Brooks calls “strivers” — those who have built something through hard work and a great deal of their own identity. In other words, a good many of the business owners and property investors who read this page. I have spent three decades sitting across the table from people at exactly the moment this book describes, and I think it is worth your time — with some reservations, which I will come to.

The idea at the heart of the book

Brooks’s first chapter is titled, bluntly, “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think”. He gathers evidence that in most demanding fields, peak performance arrives earlier than people expect — often somewhere between our thirties and early fifties — and that the drop can begin while we are still at the top of our game.

If the book stopped there, it would be a miserable read. It does not. The second chapter, “The Second Curve”, draws on the work of the psychologist Raymond Cattell, who distinguished between two kinds of intelligence.

• Fluid intelligence is raw problem-solving: speed, novelty, working out something no one has done before. It is strong early in adult life and then declines.
• Crystallised intelligence is the stock of knowledge and judgement built up over a lifetime: pattern recognition, knowing what the facts mean, and being able to explain them to others. It keeps growing well into later life.

As Brooks puts it, when you are young you have raw smarts; when you are older you have wisdom. The trick is to stop trying to win on the first curve and deliberately jump to the second — to become the teacher, the adviser, the person who sees the pattern, rather than the one doing everything at speed.

He illustrates this with two famous lives. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species at 50, then found his creative work stalling and died feeling, by Brooks’s account, that his later career was a disappointment. Johann Sebastian Bach, by contrast, saw his style fall out of fashion and moved into teaching and instructing others, finding a second act that suited his later strengths. One man clung to the first curve; the other changed curves.

Success as an addiction

The third chapter, “Kick Your Success Addiction”, is the one that will make some readers shift in their seats. Brooks argues that achievement works like any other habit that gives a short-lived lift: each win satisfies briefly, so we need a bigger one next time. Strivers tend to sacrifice relationships along the way and to confuse what they do with who they are.

His remedy, in the chapter “Start Chipping Away”, is subtraction rather than addition. Borrowing the image of a sculptor removing stone, he suggests we get clearer about what to let go of — possessions, status, the need to be indispensable — rather than piling more on top.

Later chapters cover facing mortality honestly, investing in the relationships that were neglected on the way up (he uses the image of an aspen grove, whose apparently separate trees share one root system), and turning weakness into a source of connection. Chapter seven borrows from the Hindu idea of life’s stages, or ashramas: student, householder, then vanaprastha — a stage of stepping back from worldly striving towards teaching, reflection and wisdom — and, finally, renunciation. Brooks’s chapter title is simply “Start Your Vanaprastha”.

Why this matters to a business owner

This is where the book earned its place on my shelf. Almost every business owner I meet in their late fifties or sixties is somewhere on the line between those two curves, whether they have named it or not.

The founder who still signs every cheque, answers every awkward customer call and cannot take a fortnight away is living on the first curve. It worked brilliantly for decades. But it has a hidden weakness: the business depends on one person’s energy, and energy is exactly the thing Brooks says will fade first.

The second curve looks different. It is the chair rather than the managing director. The person who mentors the next generation of managers, who spots the pattern in a contract negotiation because they have seen it twenty times, who sets the direction and then lets others run. That is not retirement. It is a change of role — and, if Brooks is right, often a more satisfying one.

Seen this way, succession is not an ending. It is the deliberate move onto the second curve. And like any deliberate move, it goes better when it is planned rather than forced on you by ill health or a buyer’s timetable.

A worked illustration

Take a Sussex couple — let us call them Richard and Helen, invented purely for illustration. Richard, 61, founded a precision engineering firm thirty years ago. Helen handles the finance side. Their daughter works in the business; their son does not.

Richard is still the person everyone calls. He has noticed he is slower to pick up new software and more tired after long days, and privately it bothers him. Reading Brooks, he recognises himself on the first curve.

So he and Helen decide to plan the jump. Over three years Richard moves from managing director to chair, a capable manager takes over day-to-day operations, and Richard spends his time training apprentices and handling the relationships with long-standing customers — work that draws on everything he knows. Helen steps back to a non-executive role.

That change of role raises practical questions. Who will own the shares, and when? How is fairness handled between a daughter in the business and a son outside it — bearing in mind that fair does not always mean equal? What happens if Richard dies before the handover is complete? The couple’s shares may qualify for Business Relief, and from April 2026 relief at the full rate is capped at £2.5 million combined for business and agricultural property, with 50% relief above that. For a family in Richard and Helen’s position, the timing and structure of any gifts, and what their Wills say, become part of the succession plan rather than a separate chore.

None of that is exotic. It is simply what happens when the second curve is taken seriously.

The traps Brooks helps you see

• Waiting until decline forces the decision. The best time to hand over is while you are still good enough that people wish you would stay. Brooks is emphatic on this.
• Treating the business as your identity. If you are the business, stepping back feels like losing yourself. Owners who have thought about who they are beyond the job tend to make clearer decisions about the future.
• Adding rather than subtracting. Many owners respond to midlife restlessness with a new venture or another acquisition. Sometimes that is right. Often it is the success habit asking for another hit.
• Neglecting the people. A succession plan that works on paper but leaves children feeling overlooked, or a spouse sidelined, is not a good plan.

Where the book falls short

In fairness, it is not perfect. Parts of it read like a stretched magazine column — Brooks writes a column on happiness, and some chapters carry more anecdote and encouragement than substance. A reader who grasps the two-curve idea in chapter two could reasonably skim a fair amount of what follows.

It is also very American. The examples, the career paths and the cultural reference points are mostly drawn from the United States, and a British reader will occasionally have to translate.

Finally, the later chapters turn openly spiritual. Brooks draws on his own Catholic faith as well as Hindu and Buddhist teaching. Some readers will find this the most rewarding part of the book; others will find it does not speak to them at all. I would say read it anyway, and take what is useful — the practical framework stands on its own.

What to do with it

• Name your curve. Be honest about which parts of your work rely on speed and stamina, and which rely on judgement and experience.
• Pick a date for the change of role. Not necessarily a sale or retirement — simply the point at which you move from doer to chair or mentor.
• Talk to the family early. Who wants to be involved, who does not, and how will you treat each of them fairly?
• Make sure the paperwork follows the plan. A change of role, a gift of shares or a new family structure is a natural moment to sit down and check that your arrangements still reflect what you want.

The verdict

From Strength to Strength is not the most rigorous book on ageing, nor the most elegantly edited. But its central idea — that the second half of a working life can be richer than the first, provided you stop trying to relive the first — is one of the most useful things a business owner in their fifties or sixties can read. It reframes stepping back not as defeat but as promotion to a different, wiser job.

If you are thinking about your own second curve and how your business and family fit into it, a Discovery Call is a good place to start. It is 30 minutes, the fee is £30, and that £30 is credited against your fees if you go on to instruct us.