How can you maintain productivity throughout life?

I’ve read somewhere (sorry, i forget where) that peak productivity occurs at about 40 to 45.

What can be done to have high output levels of productivity throughout life. I want to be making breakthroughs when I’m 80, the way Paul Erdos did.

Is it natural cognitive decline with aging? Is it reduced energy levels? Is it a reduction in ambition? Distractions from family? What can be done to combat these things? Are there any old people on this board that are highly productive who have some tips?

I’m a male in my mid-twenties.

Are you making breakthroughs now? Just keep it up! If you aren’t yet, you’d better learn how. :stuck_out_tongue:

Love what you do.

I work all day… and then think about what I’m working on when I’m at home, or on vacation, or in the shower. I simply love my career. I’m still making advancements, and I hope to keep doing so for another 15 years, at which point I’ll retire.

(And probably STILL keep thinking about my job. It’ll be a hobby, then.)

For mathematicians, they seem to make their breakthroughs by age 25. It’s a young man’s game. Albert Einstein was 26 when he published Special Relativity. He was 36 when he reworked it as General Relativity.

However for “judgment” type of thinking, people seem to hit their stride after turning 40. Seems to make sense if you consider that CEOs and presidents are typically older than 40 when they are promoted (or elected).

#1 tip I’ve heard repeatedly is cardio exercise every day. At least 30 minutes every day. Get the blood flowing through the brain.

Exactly right. Eat right, exercise vigorously, and there’s no reason (barring catastrophic illness) that you can’t be vital and energetic into your 80s and beyond. I have regular conversations with a distant cousin who is 89. She can remember every nuance of the genealogy research that she’s done, starting when she was 73.

I’ve also heard to keep the mind stimulated with puzzles or thought-provoking stuff. I work with three technical guys (one engineer, one surveyor and one hydrologist/technician) who are 70 +. These guys stay sharp, IMO, because they’re still doing a lot of mental exercise.

The brain wears out like everything else. While diet and exercise and such will help you do the best with what you have, mostly it’s a matter of the genetic lottery. If you come from a family with a bunch of still-clear-minded 80 and 90 year olds, your odds are good that you’ll be one. If your family tends to die younger, suffer from heart problems and so on, then you’ll probably end up the same.

The problem is that most people generally work in shit jobs they don’t particularly like. I hate my current job now at 36 and do basically jack shit all day (one of the reasons I hate it). Can you imagine if somehow I am doing it in 10-20 years?

The secret to “maintaining productivity” is to constantly pursue jobs you love.

And more importantly . . . do what you love.

It depends on what you do. In some fields, you just won’t have the cognitive power past a certain age (barring outliers like Erdos). I will always remember when William Alstoncame to give a talk to the philosophy department when I was in graduate school. He was hellasmart as a younger philosopher, but by this time he was in his 70s, and he frankly got owned. Even the grad students were kicking his ass. He just didn’t have the brainpower anymore. And presumably he did everything he was supposed to in order to stay sharp into old age–he remained active, teaching, writing, interacting with colleagues, etc. I will always remember this as an example of how I should hang up my spurs before I embarrass myself. Very very rare is the philosopher in his 70s (or even late 60s) who can make real, significant contributions.

How does one “kick ass” in what is essentially a made-up bullshit profession?

What the fuck is your problem? I guess I should follow your wise lead and do something I admittedly hate, so as to become a bitter person. Enjoy your life, sucker.

Take it to the Pit, people.

Oh, and post a link here for us rubberneckers.

Returning to your question, I remember a study showing that in males, productivity is theorized to be tied in part to testosterone levels, and marriage (which reduces said levels) reduces productivity, as does of course age.

Here is the study (which I may only be able to access b/c I’m surfing from a university), and here is a blog entry about it. From the abstract of the article:

I may be rambling a bit; it’s about 7 AM over here and I haven’t gone to bed yet. That’ll teach me to treat coffee with respect!

Huh…Erdos never married. (I know, I know, anecdotes aren’t evidence…). I don’t think I’d be willing to live a life of celibacy so I guess I’ll just have to accept that my peak will probably be in my thirties.

Anyway, couldn’t a married man get testosterone injections to keep the passion for science* flowing?

I read in “In Search of Memory” by Eric Kandel that the brain cells that do short-term memory don’t die as you get older, they just become less active. If only there was a way to stimulate them the right way; you’d have your youthful memory again.

You know how they say that speeding a dog’s brain up would just result in a dog that could decide in only 1/1000th the time whether to sniff your crotch? In general, I find that the human mind and body is incredibly limited. For starters, we can only think about one thing at a time. Could you imagine what could be done with a brain the size of a beach ball? (assuming structural and support issues were all worked out). I bet such a person could think thoughts and make discoveries that normal people like us would have as much hope of thinking as a dog would have of inventing calculus. Maybe such a mind wouldn’t need stupid patches like “attention” to properly allocate limited resources.

Oh, and cybernetics could give us awesome stuff like the ability to see infrared or ultraviolet and such.

Don’t forget about the increased productivity in people who lived longer. Imagine if the peak of someone’s career was measured in millenia instead of decades or years. You could have a millenium mirabilis.

Also, I can’t access that first article.

Well, I guess I’ll at least try to go to sleep now.

*and maybe some other things, heh, heh.

Apologies for not having read the whole thread, I was just getting started when I came across the above comment.

Is this from the same IT drone (I used the term sparingly, and as befits) who told us all in one of the financial meltdown threads that we couldn’t understand the complexities of financial products? And then later started a thread about how he hates his job because he’s got nothing to do all day? :eek:

Alright, maybe I should have phrased my question less contemptuously. I’m just curious how one measures productivity in a purely academic field like philosophy where you don’t actually produce anything (other than articles maybe)? How does one make a career in it outside of academia?

And, for that matter, how does one “kick ass” or “suck” at it?

I’m pretty sure I didn’t say the entire SDMB COULDN’T understand the complexities of the financial products. But I certainly discussed them.

Actually that’s an interesting point. I started my career as an IT consulting drone grinding out code but now I’m at a level where I’m mostly advising our company on IT strategy issues (mostly as they relate to legal or compliance issues). So in a real sense, I don’t really “produce” much of anything anymore. Could I go back to working 1 hour days writing code? Probably. But I really just don’t want to.

So maybe the whole point in rising to management is so you no longer have to compete with 22 year old college grads who are all eager and willing to do whatever it takes because they are naive and in their first real job?

Well, I don’t want to hijack the thread, so I won’t give this a proper response. I’ll just say there are better and worse responses to philosophical questions, and not everyone has what it takes to come up with a penetrating solution to a debate, or a novel way of framing the debate. Not everyone can be a Quine or a Rawls. You may not think it’s worth doing (which is fine; I freely admit I’m not curing cancer here), but there are degrees of success in doing it.

Interestingly enough, I consider software coding as more fun than management, having done both (mostly coding, but small tastes of management). On the other hand, you get more respect in management and you can accomplish bigger things than you ever could by yourself.

If you have nothing to do, you are at the wrong company. I always had more than enough work to do, back when I had a real job instead of being a grad student.

There is an entire thread dedicated to my job of doing nothing if you would like to continue that discussion there. I don’t want to hijack this thread.

But I will say this. I think that one tends to become less productive for emotional reasons long before there is any real physiological deterioration. It’s hard to maintain the same level of enthusiasm and energy you had when you were a couple of years into your career. Especially dealing with layoffs, long periods of inactivity, economic downturns, work politics, idiot bosses, burn out and so on.