The Unfair Advantage That Never Retires
The mind doesn’t retire. It de-trains.
Ten years ago, if you’d asked me what happens to your value as you age, I would have told you the story most of us repeat without thinking, which is that you gain experience, you become calmer, you stop reacting to every fire like it’s a five-alarm emergency, and then, somewhere later, your body slows down and your mind follows, and the world quietly suggests you “take it easy,” as if ease were the natural reward for effort, and not a trap disguised as a compliment.
Except that is not what I am living.
I feel sharper than I did a decade ago, and I don’t mean sharper in the nostalgic way people talk about their twenties; I mean sharper in the day-to-day way that shows up when the work is ambiguous, the stakes are real, and the answer isn’t sitting in anyone’s slide deck, including mine. What surprises me most is not the sharpness itself but the source of it, because by every conventional measure I should feel more “settled” by now, more certain, more practiced, more comfortable, and yet I feel younger in the exact way that matters, which is that I feel like a beginner again, and I can’t pretend that’s not the point.
Right now I’m building three businesses while moving through three leadership roles depending on the day, the partner, and the problem, which means I am sometimes the Chief AI and Strategy Officer, sometimes the Chief Strategy and Product Officer, and sometimes the transformation advisor boards and CEOs call when they want clarity without the performance, and at the same time I write a weekly publication for mid-career and senior leaders who are trying to stay useful and sane in a world that keeps changing the rules, and I am preparing to publish my first book, and if I’m honest, the funniest part is that this is the most “senior” my résumé has ever looked while this is also the most unsure and inexperienced I have felt in years.
This should be terrifying, but it isn’t, because I’ve started to recognize uncertainty as a sign that my life still contains friction, and friction, it turns out, is the fuel.
So some time back - I started digging started, not because I needed an academic label to justify what I was feeling, but because I wanted to understand why the conventional wisdom about aging and value felt incomplete, and why I kept seeing counterexamples in the real world, people who were not merely “still around” but still formidable, still learning, still contributing, still creating, still sharp, and not in a sentimental way but in a measurable one.
What I found was a distinction that clarified everything.
Psychologists often separate intelligence into two broad forms, one that helps you solve new problems when you don’t already know the answer, and one that reflects the knowledge and judgment you’ve accumulated over time, and the names don’t matter as much as the lived reality, but they’re useful:
Fluid intelligence is your ability to reason, adapt, and learn in the moment when you’re facing novelty, while,
Crystallized intelligence is your deep reservoir of experience, language, pattern recognition, and judgment, the part of you that can walk into a messy situation and sense what matters because you’ve seen enough to recognize the shape of things.
Most people accept, sometimes with a shrug, that fluid intelligence peaks earlier and crystallized intelligence grows later, and there’s truth in that, but the part we don’t say out loud, the part leaders learn the hard way, is that fluid intelligence is not just something you have, it is something you keep, and it decays fastest when you remove the need for it.
In other words, it’s not age that takes you out, it’s comfort.
Because comfort changes your calendar, and your calendar changes your demands, and your demands change your brain, and then one day you realize that what you call “experience” has quietly turned into an excuse to avoid being a beginner, which is how leaders become expensive and fragile at the same time.
Comfort Is Not Neutral
The real antagonist isn’t time, it’s the sentence we wrap around time, the one that sounds reasonable and even responsible, the one your friends will nod at because they want to believe it too.
“Let me take it easy now, I deserve it.”
Sometimes you do deserve it, and rest is not weakness, it’s maintenance, it’s health, it’s love, it’s choosing your family over your ego, and I’m not here to romanticize burnout, but if we’re being honest, a lot of “I deserve it” is not wisdom, it’s avoidance with a moral halo, and underneath it is something we hate admitting, which is that growing is getting harder, and we would rather negotiate with life than face the humiliation of starting again.
Because doing hard things forces you into conditions that high-achievers spend years trying to eliminate.
You have to be slow at something again, and if you’ve built an identity around being competent, that slowness feels like a threat.
You have to ask obvious questions again, and if you’ve trained people to believe you’re the person with answers, those questions feel like you’re giving something away.
You have to fail in a way that can’t be spun, because you are not “learning in public,” you are simply not good yet, and there is no shortcut through that part.
And that, right there, is where the mind either stays alive or starts to soften, because when your life has no meaningful friction, you stop needing to adapt, and when you stop needing to adapt, you stop learning quickly, and when you stop learning quickly, you start confusing seniority with capability.
It’s also where humility is either renewed or quietly abandoned, and humility matters far more than we like to admit, because humility is what keeps curiosity from dying, and curiosity is what keeps learning from becoming theater.
So when people tell me they want to “stay sharp,” I don’t ask what podcasts they listen to or what book is on their nightstand, because consumption is not the same as challenge, and reading can become a comfortable ritual too if it never forces you into action, and I ask a more uncomfortable question instead.
Where, exactly, are you still willing to be bad?
Not occasionally, not as a hobby you never take seriously, but as a disciplined part of your week, the way you’d protect a workout if you cared about your body, because you should care about your mind the same way, and the truth is that many leaders protect their reputation more carefully than they protect their cognition, and then they act surprised when they feel irrelevant.
What makes this personal for me is that I’m not writing this as a moral lecture from a mountaintop, I’m writing it because I can feel the difference between a week where I chose hard things and a week where I drifted, and the difference is not subtle, because one week leaves me awake and curious, and the other week leaves me dull, impatient, and weirdly tired, even if I didn’t “do” that much.
That mismatch is the tell.
If your days are full but your mind feels flat, you are busy, not challenged, and busy is not protective; busy is often the first layer of decay.
The People Who Stay Sharp Keep Training
When I went looking for living proof, I didn’t have to look hard, because history is full of people who kept their edge late into life, not because they were magical but because they kept their mind under load.
Warren Buffett, well into his nineties, is still formidable not because he refuses to retire as a brand strategy but because he kept the learning loop alive, day after day, for decades, and the point is not the exact routine; it’s the refusal to stop stretching the mind in ways that matter.
Benjamin Franklin, even late in life, was still tinkering, still improving, still designing practical solutions, still acting like contribution was not a phase you outgrow.
And Mr. Buffet’s lifelong partner, the late Mr. Charlie Munger, who had a way of making the truth feel blunt and oddly liberating, gave us the line that matters most here because it strips away all excuses and turns learning into a daily standard instead of an abstract virtue: “Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.”
That line sounds almost too simple, and that’s what makes it dangerous, because it forces the question most of us avoid, which is whether we are still getting smarter or merely getting older.
The reason I feel sharper now than I did ten years ago is not that I unlocked a secret supplement or discovered a productivity hack, it’s that my life currently forces me to keep learning at speed, and the work keeps putting me in rooms where I cannot fake it, and I have to build clarity from uncertainty, and I have to admit what I don’t know, and I have to keep my ego small enough to learn, and the truth is that this is the only recipe I trust, because it’s the only one I can feel working in real time.
It’s also why I believe the most underpriced advantage in leadership is not confidence, not charisma, not even experience, but the combination of crystallized judgment and still-trained fluid intelligence, which means you can recognize patterns and still adapt when the pattern breaks, you can bring history into the room without letting history trap you, and you can lead through novelty without pretending novelty doesn’t scare you.
That combination is rare precisely because most people stop training it, and when they stop training it, they tell themselves they have “earned” that right, which is like saying you have earned the right to stop caring for your health and expecting to feel strong anyway.
The Choice Is Weekly
Retiring at 55 or 65 or innovating at 80 is not just luck, and it’s not just genetics, and it’s not just circumstance.
It’s a choice, and not the dramatic kind you make once with a big speech and a new identity, but the quiet kind you make repeatedly, on ordinary weeks, when you decide whether you will protect comfort or protect growth.
If you are 25, your trap is that you will avoid looking incompetent, and you’ll optimize for being impressive instead of being expandable, and then you’ll wonder why your learning slows down even as your responsibilities grow.
If you are 35, your trap is that you will call stagnation “responsibility,” because you have real obligations and real people depending on you, and the danger is not that you will stop caring, it’s that you will start postponing growth until “later,” and later has a way of turning into a decade.
If you are 65, your trap is that you will confuse rest with disappearance, because the world has been whispering for years that contribution has an expiration date, and the most defiant thing you can do is refuse to shrink, not out of ego, but out of love for your own life and for the people who still learn from watching you.
So here is the single commitment, and it’s deliberately simple, because the point is not inspiration, the point is friction you can’t negotiate away.
Pick one hard thing that makes you a beginner again, and do it every week for the next 52 weeks, on the same day, and track the reps, because what gets tracked gets protected, and what gets protected compounds.
Then write one sentence and treat it like a contract with yourself, because the mind doesn’t change through vague intention; it changes through repeated demand.
Here’s the sentence, if you want to steal it:
For the next 12 months, I will do one hard thing every week that makes me a beginner again, and I will track it, because my edge is built, not granted.
If you keep that promise, you don’t just stay smart, you stay humble, curious, and valuable in the ways that matter most, at work, at home, and in the quiet moments when you realize you are still growing, and that growth is the real signal that you haven’t started disappearing yet.
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts - I love reading your opinions.
And as always - thank you! I am so grateful for your spending some of your day with me.
Adi
The distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence clarifies something many leaders feel but can't articulate - that competence without curiosity becomes fragile. Your point about "busy is not challenged" cuts deep. It's easy to fill calendars with meetings that feel important while avoiding the discomfort of being genuinely bad at something new. The weekly commitment structure is smart because it makes growth trackable rather than aspirational. When you ask "where are you still willing to be bad?" you're really asking where people are willing to prioritize learning velocity over protecting their reputation.