The View From Kalamazoo

Found on The Volokh Conspiracy, and here:

(there, it’s settled – no worries about dying early for me!)

Peaking too early can kill you:

“Here’s some reassuring news for those of us whose career plans are slightly behind schedule: It turns out that peaking too early may kill you. That’s the finding of Stewart J. H. McCann, a professor of psychology at the University College of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia.

McCann’s research, published in the February issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, concerns what he calls the ”precocity-longevity hypothesis.” McCann analyzed the lives of 1,672 U.S. governors who served between 1789 and 1978 and found that those who were elected at relatively tender ages generally died earlier than their less precocious counterparts. Even when he controlled for the year that the governors were born, how long they served and what state they governed, the pattern held. No matter how he sliced the data, ran the regressions or accounted for various statistical biases, the story remained the same: governors elected to office at younger ages tended to have shorter lives.

And what holds for state executives seems also to hold for other young achievers. McCann also analyzed smaller but more diverse sets of accomplished people — including American and French presidents, Canadian and British prime ministers, Nobel laureates, signers of the Declaration of Independence, Academy Award winners and seven centuries’ worth of pontiffs. Again, he found that ”those who climb to the loftiest peaks in the shortest time also die younger. For the eminent, and perhaps for all, an early rise may lead to an early fall.”