Howard Friedman - The Longevity Project

We gathered together our collaborators and research assistants, filling our computer programs with a whole host of relevant information, including the personality indexes we had constructed and validated earlier. We recorded how much alcohol the men drank, the participants’ reports of their ambition, and even their parents’ reports of how driven they thought their sons to be. Most important, we used the death certificates to see how long they lived.

The results were very clear: those with the most career success were the least likely to die young. In fact, on average the most successful men lived five years longer than the least successful! 67 67 Peggy Kern, Chandra Reynolds, and Gloria Luong worked with us on this research. Gloria had the rare distinction of coauthoring our major scientific paper while still an undergraduate. For one of our papers on the longevity of the successful men, see M. L. Kern, H. S. Friedman, L. R. Martin, C. A. Reynolds, and G. Luong, “Conscientiousness, Career Success, and Longevity: A Lifespan Analysis,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 37 (2009): 154-63.

The Terman subjects who were moderately successful lived longer than the less successful, but not as long as the more successful. Epidemiologists call this a dose-response relationship—the greater the dose of success, the longer the life.

Especially convincing about this finding is that the men who were independently rated by Terman as most successful more than a half century ago were the ones least likely to die at any given age in the decades that followed. Some studies in this field of research might be inadvertently biased by the classifications or judgments used by the epidemiologists, but in this case, we did not have to do any job classifications or make any judgments—we simply relied on those careful categorizations Terman and his associates had made decades ago.

Everyone knows that the rich tend to live longer than the poor, and we often think that we know why. People think that access to the best doctors, the fanciest gyms, and the safest homes make the difference. In some cases this is certainly very true. Those mired in poverty face a whole host of significant health threats. But much more is going on below the surface.

One matter that continues to stump researchers, for example, is why those in the upper middle class tend to live longer than those in the middle class, when both have enough food, housing, and medical care. Our study of the Terman participants examined this question in a very different way from the standard rich-versus-poor or favored-versus-deprived approach. In our study, we had a mostly advantaged, middle-class, educated sample of people, and yet the highly successful long outlived their very bright peers who were less successful. If their surroundings were alike, then, we wondered, could it perhaps be their individual personalities that accounted for the difference?

Conscientiousness, as we have established, is a strong predictor of longevity, and it turns out that the professionally successful Terman subjects were indeed more conscientious than their peers. But conscientiousness didn’t explain everything: those with a successful career lived much longer even after taking their conscientiousness into account.

Conscientiousness did, however, make a big difference for those who were least successful in their careers. Those men who were very unsuccessful in their careers and who were also very unconscientious (on their childhood assessments) had a whopping increase in their mortality risk. If you were both unconscientious and unsuccessful, you were especially likely to die before reaching even age sixty.

Not surprisingly, ambition predicted career success. More to the point, ambition, coupled with perseverance, impulse control, and high motivation, was not only good for achievement but was part of the package of a resilient work life. It is not a coincidence that Edward Dmytryk was a prominent director and lived a long life or that Norris Bradbury headed a powerful agency and lived a long life. Symphony conductors, company presidents, and bosses of all sorts tend to live longer than their subordinates.

Complementing our own analyses, the sociologist Glen Elder and his colleagues looked at career changes between 1940 and 1960 and found evidence that the Terman men who moved among various jobs without a clear progression were less likely to live long lives than those with steadily increasing responsibilities in their field. 68 68 The study of career progression is E. K. Pavalko, G. H. Elder, and E. C. Clipp, Journal of Health and Social Behavior 34 (1993): 363-80 . In other words, a stable and successful career is often part and parcel of a successful pathway to long life. Usually this increasing responsibility brings more challenges and a heavier workload, but paradoxically this is helpful to long-term health.

Converging evidence from a number of studies suggest that the damaging sort of workplace stress arises from conflicts with other people rather than from the challenges and demands of the work itself. Having a poor relationship with your overbearing boss can lead to health problems, and not getting along with your coworkers can be quite harmful. This is especially true if you have lots of responsibilities that depend on the cooperation of others but you do not have the resources or the leadership qualities to make things happen. On the other hand, if you have resources and a good deal of influence over outcomes, demanding tasks will be less stressful for you. It makes sense that those agency heads, symphony conductors, and company presidents who have both power and leadership skills will tend to remain healthy despite very demanding careers.

Individuals who tend to react with hostility to interpersonal slights are particularly likely to suffer lingering physiological damage. Those Terman subjects who were less critical of others, tried to avoid arguments, and didn’t always try to get things their own way tended to be healthier and live longer. John, Norris, and others did not shy away from controversy but did seek out the good in other people. In fact, Edward Dmytryk blamed his good intentions and his desire for solidarity with the others of the Hollywood 10 for his early affiliation with the Communist Party, which he was later quick to abandon.

To some extent unhealthy behaviors and circumstances—more smoking and drinking, and less stable marriages—played a role in the unsuccessful Terman subjects’ earlier deaths, but the core problem of being unconscientious and unsuccessful remained even for those who never chose partying over work. It was something deeper about how they lived their lives that led them to die sooner. Unsuccessful Terman subjects who had been characterized as having comparatively low motivation even in childhood were at greater mortality risk than successful individuals.

In the early 1970s—a half century into the study—the Terman men who were still alive were in their sixties, and their working lives, including occupational achievement and work satisfaction, were again assessed in some detail. 69 69 Robert Sears, himself a Terman participant, had taken over certain responsibilities for the study and made major contributions to the database, including looking into this aspect of career satisfaction. See R. R. Sears, “Sources of Life Satisfactions of the Terman Gifted Men,” American Psychologist 32 (1977): 119-28. The first thing that was clear was that work and family were the most important aspects of life for the Terman men, more so than friends or the pursuit of culture or happiness. Work was not seen as stress to be shunned but was highly valued.