A sixth lesson is that if you follow lives long enough, they change and so do factors that affect healthy adjustment. Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities. Nobody in the Study was doomed at the outset, but nobody had it made, either. Inheriting the genes for alcoholism can turn the most otherwise blessed golden boy into a trainwreck. Conversely, an encounter with a very dangerous disease liberated the pitiful young Dr. Camille from life of dependency and loneliness." (P.52)
"And we found that the fifty-nine men with the warmest childhoods made 50 percent more money than the sixty-three men with the bleakest childhoods." (113)
"Remember, Garrick was only the first of the men to reach ninety-five [...]. Can we learn anything from Daniel Garrick's life about the keys to graceful aging? [...] He certainly didn't follow most of the conventional "rules" for long life. His parents were not long-lived
. [..] He didn't really start to exercise until he was almost sixty. He smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for twenty years, and nine pipes a day for decades after that. During his sixties, he drank enough that he and his future wife worried about it. [... But] Remember, way back in college he had bicycled 5 miles back and forth to class after being up all night and had gotten top marks for being "well integrated" and "self-starting," both traits associated with longevity in the Study.
From the very beginning Garrick had a quality of indomitability, and maybe that was really what enabled him to live so long. Nobody in the Grant Study waited longer or worked harder than he did to get a college education. [...] He never gave up, and he never have up hope." (239-240)
"As I keep reminding myself, what people say doesn't mean much. It's what they do that predicts the future. It was the facts of people's long-term love relationships, not their belief systems, that showed us what we needed to know first about their capacity to love, and then about their mental health." (353)
"This extraordinary telescope has brought great joy and meaning into my life. [...] And I become more and more aware that the Study, and the work we've done with it, has encouraged other people to think about their own lives and the lives of others. Not statistically, perhaps, but with a little more curiosity and a little more interest and a little more kindness. And how can that hurt?" (370)
- My new all-time favorite book.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of The Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant
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