Aging and skills

You have to consider age when you think about skills. Physical and cognitive skills have different perspectives about age. Physical skills like playing basketball have different characteristics than cognitive skills like playing chess. All the statistics about ages are from Michael Mauboussin´s book The Success Equation. It is a good book about skills and luck.

Physical skills

Different physical skills like sports have different optimal ages for peak performance. They are not the exact figures but small ranges of ages. Men and women have small differences between their peak ages depending on the sports. There are no specific ways to determine which physical skills have higher or lower peak ages. A simple answer is that skills that need more fast-twitch muscle fibers have lower peaks and skills that need more slow-twitch muscle fibers to have higher peaks. For example, running fast requires fast fibers, and endurance running requires slow fibers. Peak performance for running fast happens when you are 22-24-year-old male and 21-23 old female. Peak performance for endurance running is 26-28 for both genders.

There are also some other physical characteristics like the visual system and the body-eye-coordination that need to be considered. Visual acuity weakens when you age. Therefore, baseball batters lose their edge after a certain age. Basketball players need both, fast-twitch fibers and great body-eye-coordination, therefore their peak age (24-26) is lower than peak age for baseball (27-29). Athletes that rely only on their body-eye-coordination like golfers (30-35) have higher peak ages than other athletes.

Cognitive skills

Cognitive skills usually mean the ability to make decisions. If you want to make good decisions, you have to be able to understand the stimuli you confront, how it relies on the understanding you already had about the similar or relevant stimuli about the situation, to understand what stimuli to discard and what to use to make a decision and overcoming your intuition if it is needed. Aging has a much slower effect on your ability to use your cognitive skills than using your physical skills. Aging helps in a stable environment and when you have lots of time. Peak age is much lower in an unstable environment with the necessity to make fast decisions.

Cognitive skills can be divided into two different groups. The ability to solve new problems and the ability to solve problems that are related to your experiences. The first group is called fluid intelligence. It peaks around 20 and is in constant decline about one percentage point a year until you die or your brain has big damage like Alzheimers-disease. Your ability to resist your intuition when it is wrong declines when you get older so does your ability to plan for the future. In other words, you cannot change your patterns of thought as well as you were younger. Therefore, the faster speed of change in the modern world becomes harder as you become older. You also have to be younger to create new things.

You can grow your ability to use things you learned before grows until you die, but in your early forties, the growth slows. Your peak when you are old is not much higher than you were in your twenties. It is only about 25 percent higher. Your vocabulary, ability to understand historical events, and geography, all grow until you die. If the current situation is just one of those previous events, you probably understand it better than later generations, especially if you have time to think about it. Your creativity in putting together old information and/or being an experimental creator peak later.

The overall cognitive performance declines after a certain age. The peak age is about 45 years. You cannot fool yourself in any way. You have to accept this. Some things that combine novel and old things like personal finance have later peak ages. The peak in the ability to make good decisions on personal finance is about 53 years of age.

You can read more about aging and skills from Mauboussin´s book. Until next time!

-TT