Disposition Is Destiny

Another startling revelation, Vaillant says, was that genetics does not play a significant role in reaching a ripe old age. "I thought that the ones who petered out young would have short-lived ancestors," he says. "That didn't seem to bear out at all."

It's not genes but disposition that help bring about a happy old age, and as a side benefit, Vaillant says, he found that happy people tend to be financially more successful in life. "The people who are happy are the people who give to others and are willing to do others' heavy lifting," and such people, he explains, tend to advance upwards to positions with greater responsibilities and rewards. "As a student, one thinks of the principal as someone who likes power, who is ambitious, who neglects his or her children. But my aunt, who was a school principal, confided in me that you can tell who the headmistress is by who moves the most furniture. That statistically is much more powerful than parental social class in differences in social mobility."

Conversely, Vaillant adds, being born into a wealthy family does not indicate that a person will be financially successful themselves. To quote the old adage, he says, if you look at families over time, "you go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations."

The biggest question the Harvard Study has yet to answer, Vaillant says, is what gives one individual the mechanisms to love well and to deal well with conflict-the two major factors for aging well. "What makes Saddam Hussein different from Nelson Mandela in terms of how he deals with conflict?" he asks. "Do you find a way of being forgiving yet diffusing the opposition? Where does that come from? Mandela didn't learn what he learned by having an ideal childhood and going to the Academy. What allows people to take others inside? Why did some students manage to find the best teachers and get inspired by them and graduate from Exeter feeling terribly grateful, and some people who had the same teachers graduate from Exeter feeling screwed? I have no idea where that comes from."

Another question Vaillant is still pondering is the nature of the maturational process. "Forgive me for using the Exeter metaphor, but it's handy and we've got it in common," he begins. "But think of the lowers who are stars, and the lowers who are not. At their 25th reunion, some of them have shifted places, and the stars in school may not have succeeded in life. It's like Kennedy and Churchill, who were high school disasters. Kennedy was kicked out of Princeton and Churchill everyone hated. Clearly they continued to grow. Then there's Shakespeare, for example, who keeps turning out Tony winners his whole life. Why are some people's first novels their best and after 25 they just futz along, trying to write the same first novel? Some people lose whatever it was that made them shine."

Of course, the problem with Vaillant's findings is that they reveal that attitude is the key ingredient to aging well-and it's certainly easier to change your diet than it is to change your disposition. Vaillant readily admits this, but then quotes Pasteur: " 'Chance favors a prepared mind,' " he says. "If you learn what some of the parameters are, it's a lot easier. Until someone figured out the two-handed backhand, you could practice hard, but your backhand wasn't very good. Of course, you can't always make yourself a Davis Cup player. But the things you can work on are a sense of humor, a sense of tolerance, of being willing to think about the other side."

For those of us who are still decades away from old age, Vaillant says that one thing we can do to try to change the outcome of our lives-particularly us curmudgeons-is to read biographies. "If you want a single take-home bullet from the book, the simplest how-to-do-it rule is to stop reading books about how to age well by people who are under the age of 80 and start looking at people who have done it," he says, adding that Malcolm Cowley's The View from 80 is his favorite book on aging. "It's tremendously instructive to read biographies that are written prospectively, where you're studying 20-year-olds at 20 rather than reconstructing a life that happened in the past. Pay attention to the Disney time-lapse photo of adults unfolding. And that's not entirely self-evident, but it does allow one to change attitudes."

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