When Is It Time to Step Aside?

DUCKWORTH: It’s not a reason that’s a good reason. It’s absolutely a reason.

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DUCKWORTH: I’m Angela Duckworth.

MAUGHAN: I’m Mike Maughan.

DUCKWORTH + MAUGHAN: And you’re listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show: Why do we struggle with relinquishing power?

MAUGHAN: “I’m going to hang onto power forever. I’m a king!”

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MAUGHAN: Angela, I have a question for you today that I have been thinking about for a long time. 

DUCKWORTH: All right, shoot.

MAUGHAN: Why is it so hard for people to let go? We see it everywhere, right? So you’ve got C.E.O.s who are hanging onto their companies for decades. We have U.S. senators serving into their 80s and 90s, Supreme Court justices dying in office. And if Trump wins the U.S. presidential election, he’ll be the oldest president ever elected at age 78. Biden dropped out of the race, but if he stayed in the race and won, he would have been 82 when he took office again. So, here’s my question. It seems that people nowadays — maybe always, but people connect so deeply to their work that they can’t seem to let go or move on to what’s next. So I’m curious why you think it is that people have such a hard time letting go of power or relevance and moving on, making way for the next generation.

DUCKWORTH: You know, the first thing that leaps to mind is my own dad, because his work was really his identity. And I think, you know, identity is a big part of this — a huge part of this. So, my dad worked for DuPont for almost the entirety of his professional career. And it was so much part of his identity that when he retired, he kind of, like, fell off a cliff. He just, like, sat on the couch in our home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And, you know, he would read the paper and then he would kind of, like, mosey on over to the television, plant himself on the couch, and then watch, like, hours of the Weather Channel and sometimes National Geographic specials. I mean, he didn’t even work out. He had zero hobbies, so I guess I’ve seen at least one person who was very close to me kind of fail to say goodbye to one chapter of life and say hello to the next one. 

MAUGHAN: See, and that is what I think is so common. People maybe don’t have an idea or vision for a next chapter and they hang so doggedly to an old one. Now what’s interesting is, again, if you look at the U.S. Congress, for example, it’s the oldest Congress we’ve ever had.

DUCKWORTH: Is that right?

MAUGHAN: The median age in the House is 59 years old. The median age of a Senator is 65. But then you have all these examples of, like, Chuck Grassley is a Senator who turned 90 recently and in his eighth term. You have Nancy Pelosi, 83, running again. You have Mitch McConnell, 82, who we’ve seen several times just freeze on stage. You have Dianne Feinstein, who is a, a senator from California who died in office at age 90, and was clearly not acting according to her office at the end.

DUCKWORTH: She wasn’t her 60-year-old self at the age of 90, I guess.

MAUGHAN: Right! But in all these other jobs, you have these mandatory retirement ages.

DUCKWORTH: Is that true? Okay, wait. I need to know this, because isn’t it a violation of civil liberties? Like, when you hire someone, you’re not allowed to ask how old they are.

MAUGHAN: Well, as a non-employment lawyer, I can’t answer that specifically. But I think in some areas, yeah. So, commercial airline pilots must retire by age 65. They can still fly, but not commercially. So, that’s at 65. Law enforcement, military, firefighters — those are all groups that have mandatory retirement ages. I’m sure there are exceptions in some geographies. But, like, judges — my dad was a judge much of my life, and in Utah, the retirement age for a judge is 75. And I looked it up, and in most states, the retirement age for a judge is between 70 and 75. I thought the most interesting was North Dakota. Now, North Dakota does not have a mandatory retirement age, but when it comes to incentives, if you don’t retire by age 73, you lose all of your earned retirement benefits. So, we can’t force you out but —.

DUCKWORTH: I want to know the 74-year-olds in North Dakota who are like, “I’m doing it anyway. I’m just going to keep going.” There’s got to be at least a few judges in North Dakota who want to hang on that badly.

MAUGHAN: Yeah, they were independently wealthy lawyers before they got appointed to the bench, I’m sure. But look, on the federal level in the U.S., you are appointed for life. 

DUCKWORTH: Okay so you can be on the Supreme Court for, like, ever.

MAUGHAN: Or any of the federal judicial benches. So, it’s interesting to me that we recognize in a lot of these places that there’s a mandatory retirement age. Even in Congress, by the way, there is a minimum age.

DUCKWORTH: Which is what? 35? 

MAUGHAN: It’s 25 to be in the U.S. House, 30 to be a U.S. Senator, and 35 to be the President.

DUCKWORTH: Well, we have exceeded the bar for the U.S. president then — by twofold.

MAUGHAN: Well it’s funny, we were so worried early on that people would try to jump into office too young. And yet it seems that the founders were worried about the wrong thing, à la 2024.

DUCKWORTH: But to state the obvious, like, I don’t know what the life expectancy was in, you know, 1776, but it’s got to have been much different than what it is today. I mean, I know people talk a lot about how we’re getting less healthy, and by many indices we are. But just compared to, like, a few centuries ago, wow, the average life expectancy has increased. And it wasn’t that there wasn’t anybody who lived into their 80s back then, but just, you know, something was going to get you. So, maybe the founding fathers didn’t think about dementia. You know? Like, maybe they didn’t think about just the general cognitive decline that starts around the senior prom.

MAUGHAN: Cognitive decline starts when I’m 18?

DUCKWORTH: So, when you think about our intellectual faculties, like how “smart” we are, quote-unquote, it turns out to be a little more complicated than just sort of, like, one thing, right? So, one element of our being smart is, in fact, processing speed: you know, how quickly we can take two things and associate them and, like, make a mental association in our head or there are other things that are really about tempo. And indeed, on many of those tasks, the peak performance is, like, around 18 or so. So, one element of your smartness, of your cognitive functioning, is in fact already in decline in your 20s. Others are kind of, like, still getting better, like you get better impulse control throughout your 20s. And then the big thing, I think, is knowledge and wisdom. And knowledge and wisdom can, for many people, steadily accrete over all of life. So, in that sense, you are usually wiser and more knowledgeable and in some ways, like, shrewder, as you march on, but it does occur to me when I think of some of the people you named and, like, wow, they are not their 18-year-old selves.

MAUGHAN: And thank goodness, right?

DUCKWORTH: Well, I want more knowledge and wisdom. I think that’s what the founding fathers were worried about. I don’t think they were — well, they didn’t have these terms like “working memory” and “processing speed,” etc., but maybe the founding fathers had a strong intuition that you want more knowledge and wisdom than you have in your teens and even 20s before you take that kind of responsibility. But I think they may not have anticipated just how long people would live. And yeah, knowledge and wisdom is increasing. But, you know, the brain is an organ. It’s showing some mileage.

MAUGHAN: Absolutely. And I do want to be clear on one thing. People can be discriminated against based on age. We’re not talking about ageism, per se.

DUCKWORTH: You mean, like, leaping to conclusions about somebody because of their age, right? Not, like, recognizing that there’s a population trend toward, you know, slower processing speed? But just like, “Oh, you’re 78. You must be—” whatever.

MAUGHAN: Yeah, or, “We would never hire someone who’s in their 60s. We’re a young company” I think that people who are older have a ton to contribute. The bigger question for me is why do people have such a hard time letting go of their power and their relevance. And I, I will say I spoke recently with a former U.S. senator, and he just said, “Look, so many of these people have been in office for so long,” his former colleagues. They go for three, four, five, six — I just said Chuck Grassley on his eighth term. And they have staff all around them who do everything that they need them to do. And the idea of giving that up and going out and becoming a quote-unquote “normal” person is so scary to them. That’s not a reason to continue to serve in office.

DUCKWORTH: It’s not a reason that’s a good reason. It’s absolutely a reason.

MAUGHAN: Sorry, that is very fair pushback.

DUCKWORTH: I think that was actually my dad. So, I don’t remember what age my dad retired, but he probably should have retired a little earlier, I mean, it was maybe after he retired where he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, but I think, and my mother thinks, that there was a decline before his diagnosis. And the grace, the humility to, like, recognize that you are not your former self, and also just the, um, like, “let me move over so somebody else can sit down at the table” — I don’t think he was thinking about that because of what you just said, Mike. Because it was his only identity. And also my dad was very successful, which was very important to him. I mean, it was everything. And so for him to have everything bound up in this work identity, and then to not have another identity — I mean, many psychologists think about personality in a different way than the big five. So, we’ve, you know, with our listeners talked about like, oh, your personality is how extroverted you are, or how open to experience you are. But there are many psychologists who think that the right way to think about your personality is as a story, and you are, of course, the protagonist in your story. And you change throughout your life story, which is one of the reasons why they like it so much, right? A Big Five personality inventory suggests a kind of static, like, “I’m high in this, and I’m low in that, and I’m medium in something else.” But a narrative identity is like, “Who is Mike Maughan in his teens, and who was he in his twenties, and what’s Mike Maughan doing now?” And I think if you take that lens, you could say that my dad did not have an idea of the next chapter. He had an identity for the chapter he was in and he really liked it. “Successful scientist.” Whenever he went to work, “Dr. Lee,” right? He would be addressed by the honorific. Actually, Jason, my husband, to my dad’s last day, would only address him as “Dr. Lee.” Because my dad liked it so much. Like, even in retirement, he needed to be called Dr. Lee, because that was a high-status salutation. So, I think that this idea of identity as being so central to so much of what we do and then what retirement or moving on and like moving over is — you’re exactly right, like, it’s so threatening.

MAUGHAN: Think about any cocktail party you go to or anytime you’re meeting someone new who doesn’t have background on you. The very first questions we tend to ask someone are: where are you from and what do you do?

DUCKWORTH: Or if you’re my dad, just “What does your father do?” You know, on the rare occasions that my mom didn’t have to pick me up from some afterschool activity, get in the car, door slams, my dad would turn around — and he wouldn’t say, “What’s your name? How’s your day? What’d you girls do?” He would turn around and before he would start the engine, he would say, “What does your father do?” I was like, “Dad!” And then of course my friend would be like, “Uh, he’s a dentist.” But yeah, that’s because my dad only cared about, you know, your work identity.

MAUGHAN: Yes, and I think as society, though, the fact that we all recognize that that is one of the first questions asked in any social setting when meeting someone new —

DUCKWORTH: Do you think that’s just in the United States, though?

MAUGHAN: That’s a fair question. I don’t know. Here’s a question I have for you, because we’ve been talking a lot about politicians. I’ve got a million other examples of what you call a boomerang C.E.O. Howard Schultz has gone back as C.E.O. of Starbucks three different times now. But again, like, sort of maybe can’t let go. But you’re in academia, where people get tenure and I would assume that maybe some people hang on too long?

DUCKWORTH: You’re right. There are all kinds of incentives, by the way, in academia to get the tenured people — I don’t want to say “get rid” of people, but I’m going to say get rid of people.

MAUGHAN: Like what?

DUCKWORTH: The incentives are that you just get a really attractive retirement package. It’s not a penalty, like we’re going to take your retirement benefits away, like it sounds like in — was it Idaho or —?

MAUGHAN: North Dakota judges.

DUCKWORTH: North Dakota. But anyway, yeah, so there are some incentives. But yes, it is true that once you’re tenured, you have this right to, like, hang on forever. There is this thing called being an emeritus. As you know, “emeritus” just is the name they give you when you retire, and I think they’re doing it so you have an honorific. So you can still be “Dr. Lee,” you know, so you can still have this identity as somebody who’s important, somebody who matters.

MAUGHAN: That’s what I think is really interesting is I think a lot of people just want relevance. And I don’t blame anyone for that. I mean, we’ve seen and read lots of things about how quickly cognitive decline sets in after retirement if you’re not actively engaged in something else. I think the challenge though is, as you talked about, we have to have this second act. Now I, I want to bring up something that I read about that I will just acknowledge the incredible irony of this as I do. It’s called the Bridges Transition Model. It comes from a company called William Bridges Associates, which was of course founded by William Bridges, who was a professor emeritus of American literature at Mills College. And the reason I think it’s funny is because he named his company after himself, he named the model after himself — talk about, like, this idea of legacy and ensuring people remember who you are. I just think it’s, like, such a losing battle. But I, I thought it was funny that the guy named the company and the thing. It’s just like, that is the epitome of, “I want be remembered.”

DUCKWORTH: So, tell me more about what this is.

MAUGHAN: In this Bridges Transition Model — it’s a model identifying three different stages during change. And again, not psychology per se, but what he used in the business world a lot. And he looks at them as: “the ending of what currently is, the neutral zone, and the new beginning.” So “ending,” this first phase of transition, begins when people identify what they’re losing and learn how to manage the losses. The second part, the neutral zone, is this — as you can tell — this in between when the old is gone but new isn’t fully in place. And then, the new beginning — and I actually love this phrasing — it is a quote, “release of energy in a new direction; an expression of fresh identity.” Kind of common sense if you think about it, but unfortunately I think not applied very often. And it’s maybe because we’re afraid that there’s no future that we’re so afraid to let go of the past.

DUCKWORTH: There is a lot of research — I can’t say that it’s my favorite research, but on retirement and this is particularly research by business school professors and I have to say that when I read this, I’m like, ugh, you know, how useful is it to know that people do better if, toward the end of that chapter where they’re, like, about to retire — it just seems so obvious to me that they need to be thinking about the next chapter. They need to know that they’re in a transition, that there’s going to be a pause, and then a pivot, and then this new beginning, and right, this release of energy, and this new identity. But that is, by the way, what the research says — that when you interview, for example, people who are at different stages of their career, and if you study people using surveys, you do find that those who are more successful in this transition, meaning happier, less depressed, less anxious, more imbued with a sense of meaning, they have, first of all, a sense that there are stages.

MAUGHAN: Your identity is not fixed. 

DUCKWORTH: It’s not fixed, and it’s like, “Who am I going to be in the next chapter?” 

MAUGHAN: And look, Angela and I would both love to hear your thoughts on why people may have a hard time letting go. Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and email it to NSQ@freakonomics.com and maybe we’ll play it on a future episode of the show. And if you like the show and want to support it, the best thing you can do is tell a friend about it. You can also spread the word on social media or leave a review in your podcast app. 

Still to come on No Stupid Questions: Is it foolish to obsess over how you will be remembered?

DUCKWORTH: I don’t think about my legacy. I think all of us will be forgotten.

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Now, back to Mike and Angela’s conversation about letting go of power.

DUCKWORTH: Okay, I have to tell you this story about this gentleman who was maybe in his 80s. And I met him at my daughter’s graduation, Amanda’s graduation. And it turns out this guy had a very successful life. He was a lawyer. He was an Olympic athlete. And you could imagine that that would be very difficult to give up his identity of the “Olympic athlete,” of the, you know, “law partner.” But what happens is, he has a series of health challenges, they end up moving to Florida — he and his wife — they’re fully retired, and then, he tells me, he got really bored. He’s like, “Well, there are only so many walks you can take on a beach, right? Like, I just realized, like, getting up in the morning and, like, reading the newspaper and then planning what you were going to have for lunch was, like, you know, not the life I wanted to live.” So, I said, “What did you do?” And he said, “Well, you know, where we live in Miami there’s, like, a port and all the cruises come in and out. So, I walked down to the dock and I asked for a job.”

MAUGHAN: Really?

DUCKWORTH: Exactly. I was like, “Really?” I mean, this is a wealthy retired lawyer-slash-former-Olympian, and I say, “What job?” And I’m thinking, like, he wants to be in charge, right? He was like, “Oh, well, the job I got” — which he has to this day — is, like, he has a clipboard and he’s, like, that guy where, like, “Oh, you go over there, you know, see that white sign that says number eight,” right? He’s, like, checking people off by last name. He’s like, “You know, sometimes we’ve got to get people sandwiches.” And I said, “Why? Like, why do you do that?” He’s like, “I like to be busy. I like to be useful. I think it’s kind of keeping me young.” And I thought to myself, this is a remarkable human being who can write a next chapter with an identity of “helpful human.” Like, he was the opposite of my father. He didn’t need to be called “doctor.” His identity clearly was being useful and being maybe energetic, but not at all, like, being high-status.

MAUGHAN: I love that story. I think you’ve hit on one of the big points is that it is willingness to give up power and prestige. Mitt Romney, who is a U.S. Senator, former U.S. presidential candidate, he’s 77 years old and recently announced that he would not be running for re-election. And he said, “At the end of another term, I would be in my mid 80s.” And he said, “It’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones who need to make the decisions that will shape the world they’ll be living in.” And when Romney said that that’s why he wasn’t running, all of these memes came out on social media using King George from Hamilton, that talks about when George Washington is stepping down as the U.S. president after two terms. And King George — there’s this funny line, he’s like, “Oh, I was not aware that that’s something people could do.” A.K.A. like, “I’m going to hang onto power forever, I’m a king!”

DUCKWORTH: To the bitter end.

MAUGHAN: Yeah! And so it was like this funny use of the play Hamilton and it showed, you know, Donald Trump and Joe Biden and all of these senators being like, “Oh, you can step down at a reasonable age and make room for the next generation? I was not aware that that’s something people could do.”

DUCKWORTH: You know, if we think about identity in stages, something that we haven’t talked about is Erikson’s Stages of Life. Have you ever heard of this, psychoanalytic thinker named Erik Erikson?

MAUGHAN: I’ve heard of Erik Erikson, I’m not familiar — well, I’m familiar with stages of life generally, not the ones he’s probably defining.

DUCKWORTH: Okay, so Erik Erikson was a psychoanalyst. He’s no longer alive. I think he did the work that I’m going to talk about in, like, the ‘50s. So, he was two generations removed from Freud. He was a student of Anna Freud who was, of course, Freud’s chief disciple and his daughter. So, Erikson was still psychoanalytic — meaning, you know, there was all this thought about the ego and like, unconsciousness. So, Erikson said the first stage — and all these stages have a challenge, and you have to, like, successfully meet the challenge to progress to the next stage, right?

MAUGHAN: This is like a video game, but real life.

DUCKWORTH: It is, it’s like a level. So, the first stage is in infancy and this is the challenge of trust. And so, basically a baby progresses to the next stage if they have enough to eat and if they’re taken care of. The next stage is when you’re a toddler. This is the stage of autonomy. And you can do things and take risks and you have to have a sense of security. And then the next stage is, like, preschool, maybe through first grade or something. And that’s the stage of purpose, sometimes it’s called initiative, but you’re, like, getting a little bolder. Then there’s industry, and this is supposed to happen in, like, elementary school. This is the first time you get homework, you get chores, and so forth. Then comes adolescence, and this is often thought of as a stage where the challenge is to have a separate identity from that family that has been your secure base. And this is why, Erikson thought, like, teenagers did such stupid things. The next stage is early adulthood. This is, like, 20s and 30s, maybe even into the beginning of your 40s, and this is the challenge of intimacy. And that challenge is developing, not just romantic relationships, but friendships. And then, the stage that I always thought about a lot when I thought about what goes wrong with people in retirement and so forth is generativity. This is supposed to be your late 40s, your 50s, your early 60s. Keep in mind that Erikson was writing this in 1950. People live longer today. But anyway, generativity means that you have a beyond-the-self kind of purpose, that you’re not thinking just about your career and your achievement, but how you are serving something that is larger than yourself. And so, if you don’t pass this stage successfully or you’re struggling in the stage, it means that you now have a lot of competence, you’re industrious, you know how to do your job well, and you’re still selfishly only thinking about your own ambition, and you’re not mentoring, and you’re not thinking about how to help the next generation come forward. So, Erikson thought that what came after the generativity stage was — sometimes it’s called the wisdom stage, sometimes it’s called “integrity,” but that’s the stage where you reflect on your life as a whole and you ask the question, like, “Was it okay to have been me?” 

MAUGHAN: Woah.

DUCKWORTH: I know, right?

MAUGHAN: “Was it okay to have been me?” feels like a very heavy question to hold at the end of one’s life.

DUCKWORTH: But here’s what I love. Erikson had a wife named Joan. She outlived him. And she thought there was a ninth stage. And she wrote about this — I think maybe she was in her 90s. Anyway, she thought that at the very, very end of life, where you are often, if you live that long, in some form of mental decline. And then, of course, you’re almost always physically compromised — at least in some way or another. And she thought that at the ninth stage — if this is a board game, if you have leveled up to level nine, you struggle with everything. You struggle with the things that you struggled with as a child and a baby, like basic feeding. But it’s not just that you go all the way back to stage one. It’s that you have every challenge that you’ve had all at once. Like, you have the industry challenge and you have the challenge of intimacy. This would make a great video game. We should call it — I don’t know, like, “Eriksonville.”

MAUGHAN: “The Game of Life,” except for that name is already taken.

MAUGHAN: Here’s what I love about that, especially when you get to this generativity stage. I’m sure you’re familiar with Arthur Brooks’s book, From Strength to Strength.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, I read it. 

MAUGHAN: But he kind of goes through the same idea or principle that sometimes we hang too doggedly to one version of ourselves and don’t go on to the next chapter. So, I think this is most easily understood probably in terms of athletics, or at least for me. At some point, most athletes — professional athletes, depending on the sport — but somewhere in your 30s, it’s kind of game over. A few, like a LeBron James or Tom Brady, make it into their 40s on some of these more physically demanding sports, but they’re a young person’s game. And if Katie Ledecky, for example, were going to try to continue to swim into her 70s, she would not be able to compete with kids in their teens and 20s. Now, she is at the height of her — well, I don’t know. She’s always been at the height of her game.

DUCKWORTH: Well, she’s at the Olympics, right?

MAUGHAN: Yeah, I’m just saying, she’s been at the peak for, it feels like, a, a long time. But at some point in the not too distant future, physically, she will not be able to continue to compete. And what Brooks is kind of encouraging in this process is: move from strength to strength. So, while you’re an incredible athlete for many, many years, there comes a point where if you hang so doggedly to that, you will just go into massive decline. Instead, an athlete moves on to, for example, potentially coaching. Or an entrepreneur, who has all the creativity and vibrancy of youth, moves on to becoming an investor who’s more focused on pattern recognition and dispensing said advice.

DUCKWORTH: I mean, many professional coaches tell me that athletes, after they finish their careers, no matter who they are and how successful they are, struggle with alcoholism, and debt, and depression. It’s almost that the high highs make it that much harder to move on to that next chapter and to let go. I just need to tell you about Danny Kahneman now, because as you know, he passed away earlier this year. But I just attended his memorial service. But there were people from all different chapters of Danny’s life who stood and gave remembrances. And one of those people was Craig Fox. So, Craig Fox is about my age, and back when he was just in college, Danny was a mentor to Craig. And so Craig goes and does his Ph.D. I think at Stanford, Craig gets tenure at U.C.L.A. And now Danny’s really famous, so I think this is around the time where Danny won the Nobel Prize in economics. And now Nobel Laureate Danny Kahneman comes to visit U.C.L.A., where his former protege, Craig, is a young professor. And they ask Craig to interview him on video. And he showed parts of it at the memorial service. Craig decided not to ask any of the questions that the university expected and wanted him ask. Like, “What is prospect theory? Can you explain cognitive biases for a lay person?” Instead, Craig asked Danny all the questions that he had always wanted to ask him, including: “What do you hope your legacy will be? When your life is over, how will you want to be remembered?” It was clear that Danny really thought about this in this interview. And he paused, and then he said, “You know, I don’t think about my legacy. I think all of us will be forgotten.” The way he lives his life is just he’s doing what he’s doing, he hopes he’s enjoying what he’s doing. He maybe thinks a couple years ahead. I remember that Danny would say that to me as well. I would always be talking about, like, 10-year plans and he was like, “I don’t know what you’re doing, Angela. I can’t do that. I can only see a couple of years, maybe, at best.” And towards the end of his life, I will say that Danny was not pretending to be the person he was in his youth. And talk about, like, moving over and making a seat. Almost every eulogy or celebration, if you want to call it that, said, like, “Here’s a person who mostly wanted to encourage me.” That’s what it was like to work with Danny.

MAUGHAN: I think there’s something enormously liberating about the concept that no one will remember us anyway, because then we stop doing things for some legacy that, no offense, won’t exist. Nowhere is that more obvious to me than when I walk through a park in New York and there is a statue, and another statue, and another statue of people that no one remembers and no one’s ever heard of. And I’m not saying we don’t honor the past —.

DUCKWORTH: Right, or that we shouldn’t have statues, but oh my gosh, so true! Jason and I have literally had this exact conversation where we’ll be like, “See that bronze statue? At some point, somebody thought that would be a kind of immortality.” But like, you know, they all look the same, by the way, right? Well, that’s because they’re all, like, dead white guys.

MAUGHAN: Angela, I would love to wrap up today by sharing with you one of my favorite examples of someone who moved from strength to strength, who was willing to let go, but who understood the power of a next chapter. And I am going back to politics. And it’s Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was President of the United States. He ran for re-election and lost, so it’s not like he was walking away, but term-limited regardless, even if he had won. The thing I respect so much about Jimmy Carter is he’s widely considered a pretty average U.S. President, not the most effective, et cetera, but I would say he is the most incredible former president we have ever had. 

DUCKWORTH: Hmm. Why?

MAUGHAN: Because I think he understood so much this idea of the next chapter and not hanging on so doggedly to what he once had.

DUCKWORTH: What did he do after he retired? Well, I don’t know if you can call it being retired.

MAUGHAN: Well, so many things. So, he started the Carter Center, which is an organization that’s helped advance human rights and alleviate human suffering. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was a massive advocate for affordable housing and did so much work with Habitat for Humanity. And on a most personal level, he worked on something called guinea worm. And I spent a summer in northern Ghana on the border of Burkina Faso working on guinea worm. And back in 1986 it was estimated there were three and a half million cases a year. And in 2022, largely due to the work of the Carter Foundation, it went down to 13 reported cases worldwide. But I, I just want to share one silly thing. Jimmy Carter used to teach Sunday school every other week for decades at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. If you’ve ever been to Plains, Georgia, there are maybe five stores on Main Street.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, wow. This is like the mental image of the small town from fill-in-the blank century.

MAUGHAN: Yes. So, my friend Mike and I fly down to Plains, Georgia in December of 2018 because we want to go see Jimmy Carter teach Sunday school.

DUCKWORTH: Are you allowed to? Is that, like, a thing?

MAUGHAN: Yeah. The church has very few parishioners every other Sunday and then is packed on the Sunday that Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school. But this, I think, just makes the point again: this is not ageism. This doesn’t say you don’t have much to contribute later in life. You do. There’s so much benefit to the wisdom that you talked about, to knowledge, to experience. But I just want to share this from the Sunday school lesson. It was recorded. And he said this, and this is one of my favorite things ever: “If everyone would help just one person, that will help America. In the next two or three weeks, identify someone in your circle of influence who is lonely, or hungry, or poverty stricken, or without friends, or aged, and do something nice for them. Make them know they have one friend in the world.” 

DUCKWORTH: That is so beautiful.

MAUGHAN: I love the philosophy because, again, if you’re not hanging on to being Dr. So-and-so, or Judge So-and-so, or Senator So-and-so, but instead are focused on maybe having your clipboard where the cruises come in and helping people get their sandwiches, or, like Jimmy Carter is saying, make people know they have one friend in the world — that’s what really adds value, because you’re focused on others instead of on self.

DUCKWORTH: Maybe as the chapters progress — I mean, this is aspirational, right, but I hope that my story becomes less about me. Maybe that’s one of the things that, as you turn the pages of your life, you know, at first you’re all about yourself, but really, the game of life is about recognizing that you’re not the only character.

Coming up after the break: a fact-check of today’s conversation.

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And now, here’s a fact-check of today’s conversation:

At the time of this recording, Representative Nancy Pelosi is 84 years old — not 83.

The average life expectancy in the United States in 1776 was reportedly 38 years old, but this number may be misleading given the high infant mortality rate at the time. Many of the founding fathers lived into their eighties. Thomas Jefferson died at 83, James Madison at 85, and John Adams at 90. However, all three of them stepped down from the presidency when they were in their 60s.

Later, Mike says that few athletes — with exceptions like N.B.A. player LeBron James and former NFL player Tom Brady — continue to play professionally into their 40s. James is 39 years old, though he recently agreed to return to the Los Angeles Lakers on a two-year contract, where he will play alongside his 19-year-old son.

Finally, Angela references the U.C.L.A. psychologist Craig Fox’s 2004 interview with the late Daniel Kahneman. She says that Fox didn’t ask the expected questions like, “What is prospect theory?” Fox did, in fact, ask Kahneman this exact question.

That’s it for the fact-check.

Before we wrap today’s show, let’s hear some thoughts about our previous episode on values.

Katie JOHNSON: Hi, Mike and Angela. This is Katie Johnson. I loved this episode about values. I’ve given this a lot of thought over my lifetime. I thought I was right all the time as a young woman. And what I learned over time is what I call “compassionate curiosity” — wondering why someone is the way they are, wondering what they have been through that day. Maybe they had a bad day if they’re being unkind. It doesn’t mean that I do not have boundaries, but coming at it from that viewpoint has given me the ability to have a little bit of a distance so that I can figure out what the issue is, what the root is. And so that is my family’s value: compassionate curiosity. 

That was listener Katie Johnson. Thanks to her and to everyone who shared their stories with us. And remember, we’d love to hear your thoughts about why it’s so hard for people to let go of power. Send a voice memo to NSQ@Freakonomics.com, and you might hear your voice on the show!

Coming up on No Stupid Questions: How is the way that other people view you different from how you view yourself?

DUCKWORTH: You ask people, like, “Are you an average driver? Are you better than average? Right? Worse than average?”

MAUGHAN: Everyone’s a great driver.

That’s coming up soon on No Stupid Questions.

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No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lyric Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Rippin. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter @NSQ_Show. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ@Freakonomics.com. To learn more, or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com/NSQ. Thanks for listening!

MAUGHAN: I thought I was being humorous.