I'm not struggling about my legacy. . . I want my grandchildren to be proud of me. That's the main thing.
--George Schultz, former Treasury Secretary in the Nixon administration
Schultz' response was part of an interview by Deborah Solomon in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. The question that generated his response was this: You served as Treasury secretary in the Nixon administration, secretary of state for Ronald Reagan and, between those two posts, you were president for seven years of the Bechtel Group, the controversial engineering company based in San Francisco. Are you concerned about your legacy?
Reading the interview, I was musing over Schultz' storied life and the obvious happiness with which he views it. Schultz will be 90 in December and is a contributing member of the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Although many of us think that age used to be venerated, I doubt it. Indeed, even Will Shakespeare spoke disparagingly of age. Jaques in As You LIke It, spoke of age as "second childishness and mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." Most still think you can't teach an old dog new tricks. The old are not educable.
It's conventional wisdom, but neuroscience today shows it's all wrong. In the last ten years research has found that the brain is quite capable of creating new neurons all through life and making new connections. Yes, some mental processes, like working memory, clearly deteriorate. If the material is emotionally nuanced, we will retain it. We can integrate memories from both the left and the right hemisphere. And the brain compensates for our losses by reorganizing.
When it comes to memories, older people tend to be more positive than younger. Intriguingly, they bounce back from failure much faster than younger.
Conversing with a senior exec in one of America's well-known companies about the possibility of some coaching, his response to me was telling: You're old enough to have had a few failures and learned from them. I can work with you. (And he did!)
Or, as Daniel Coyle writes in The Talent Code: Why is wisdom most often found in older people? Because their circuits are fully insulated and instantly available to them; they can do very complicated processing on many levels, which is really what wisdom is.
I'm laughing as write this, waving my middle finger in the air, and enjoying the fact that I'll be 76 years old in a week. Neuroscience is now shredding the conventional wisdom on aging.
So what's in this for Gen-Y or X or Boomers? There's a lot to be said for the fun and wisdom of aging. Though George Schultz sounded serious in the interview, it was obvious that he fully enjoys life.