A job we love! (Part Two)

So when this ideal job filled with passion and an irresistible desire to go to work every morning isn’t quite in the cards, let’s see how people can grow to love (or at least deeply appreciate) an activity they initially loathe, but only under certain conditions. 

When raw passion isn’t part of the proposition can it be construed through meaning, mastery, autonomy, and identity? Sure, we cannot force ourselves to love something that violates our values or drains our energy, this would be insane! In fact, the real question I’m asking is not whether dream jobs exist, but in case I don’t love what I do, can I grow to appreciate it more and eventually, at least like it? Can affection for a job be cultivated?

This is a profound question, and psychology has a surprisingly clear answer. From what I’ve found, research in motivation psychology shows that passion tends to emerge from the three following ingredients: 

• Autonomy: If our bosses or superiors let us, when we gain a certain amount of control over the ways we can do the work, it suddenly becomes more tolerable, then evolving into an activity that begins being enjoyable. 
• Mastery: When we get good at something, we start liking it more as competence generates satisfaction and becomes fully part of who we are as a person. 
• Meaning or Purpose: When we connect the work to something larger than ourselves (helping others, supporting family, contributing to a team), it becomes emotionally sustainable and we can be proud of our contribution. 

These three elements can transform a disliked job into a more meaningful one, but they obviously cannot transform a job that violates our values or drains our identity. In the next part of that series, we’ll dig even deeper to see how we can grow to love an activity we think we loathe at first glance.

A job we love! (Part One)

We all would like to have a job we love and we tell the same to our children, grandkids or anyone we care enough for, because the perfect match between our passions and an occupation that falls right into what we love is, for most of us, so hard to come by. And it’s precisely that reality that forces many of us into accepting all sorts of compromises and often abandon that “Dream Career” we’ve hoped for.

So a fair question is what can we do if there’s no match between what we’d love to do and the reality of another occupation that seems unable to procure us much pleasure without even mentioning “Passion”? More specifically, can we “grow” in love with an activity we loathe. 

This is probably one of the most honest tensions in adult life: the gap between the work we dream of and the work we end up doing. And it’s naming something most people feel but rarely articulate, that is the quiet grief of realizing that passion and occupation don’t always align, and the deeper question of whether love for a job can be cultivated rather than found. 

Let’s not kid ourselves, a “dream job” is incredibly rare, as matching one’s passion to that person’s occupation is uncommon, not so much because people lack passion, but because our passions are often non‑marketable, they also change over time, while jobs are shaped by economic needs, not personal dreams. 

In my case, even though I embarked in what could be termed a “Dream Career” in the ski business, my job never felt super easy and was fraught with frustration from unreasonable owners, incompetent superiors or just lack of material resources, so the “dream” often turn into a recurrent little nightmare. Finally, there are also unforeseen aspects of a dream job that can turn into horrible experiences of their own...  

Most work available to us contains repetition, constraint, and compromise, so the idea that everyone should “follow their passion” is comforting but highly misleading, if not utopia, as most of us end up building a life around imperfect work and never discovering that ideal career and this perfect fit. Tomorrow, we’ll see what can be done about it…

Women’s most critical and important years (Part Two)

After going over the years to define a man’s life, it’s only fair to wonder if women undergo the same process. The answer seems similar but there are some major differences. 

While men and women navigate similar chronological milestones, the underlying biological mechanisms, cognitive timelines, and societal pressures create distinctly different, high-impact events for females. The most critical point is that the female brain matures earlier in life, with an accelerated maturation between 18–25 and transition into psychological adulthood faster than men.

Because of accelerated social and emotional wiring, young women experience higher anxiety and mood disorders during this window than young men, heavily influenced by social pressures and fluctuating estrogen and progesterone Because their prefrontal cortex finishes development a couple of years earlier than in males, young women generally develop long-term risk assessment, emotional regulation, and social processing sooner. 

However the female body undergoes a much steeper, compressed biological transition in midlife. Women hormonal baseline gradually decline by 1% per year after age 30, followed by an abrupt cliff during menopause. If men experience a slower fading of hormones, women’s is a sudden, system-wide shift. For men, the 30s are about maintaining physical health and locking in a career, but between the ages of 35–50 women face strict biological timelines regarding fertility alongside their own career peaks. 

For women, this decade often becomes a high-stakes balancing act due to an inflexible biological timeline. If a woman wants children, she must juggle her career, relationship stability, and fertility timelines. Between the ages of 40-50, if a man's midlife transition is primarily driven by psychological reflection ("What have I accomplished?"), a woman's midlife transition is deeply rooted in profound neuro-hormonal restructuring. 

Unlike men’s gradual hormone decline, women face a sharp drop in estrogen during perimenopause and menopause (typically averaging around age 51). Estrogen is not just a reproductive hormone; it protects the female brain, bones, and heart. The loss of estrogen fundamentally changes how a woman's body stores fat, processes insulin, and regulates temperature (hot flashes and insomnia). 

Social scientists track a "U-shaped curve of happiness" where life satisfaction hits its absolute low for many women around ages 47–48. This drop is a perfect storm of peak career stress, aging parents, teenagers leaving home, and severe hormonal disruption. While the midlife transition is sharper for women, studies on the U-shaped curve of happiness show that women's life satisfaction bounces back powerfully after age 55, leading to a massive surge in creativity, confidence, and leadership. 

Women sure experience a more agitated life than men do!

A man’s critical and important years (Part One)

 

Based on my own lifetime experiences and as I advance in age, I sometimes wonder what years have the most impact on a man throughout his lifetime. When I look at my own observations I enjoyed the best moments, made the most satisfying and lasting just over a time span that lasted a little more than a decade until my mid-twenties. 

It’s been so intense and so lasting that still more than half a century later it immediately stands out in any of my life retrospective to make me wonder why exciting recent events still pale in comparison? After that relatively short period nothing has made a stronger impression on me in spite of a satisfying family life, a great career and, until now, an enjoyable retirement. In researching deeper, here is what I found. 

The time period from birth to 5 years old builds a male's foundational brain structure. During these first years, a child's brain grows faster than at any other time in life and any experience during this period wire the brain for how stress, emotions, and relationships will be handled later in life.

It’s when a child builds over one million new neural connections every second. It’s also a time when safe and loving care creates a baseline for trust and mental health. Likewise negative experiences or abuse in these years will affect physical brain development and lead to long-term health risks. 

Then, adolescence and young adulthood (ages 12 to 25) will have the greatest impact on men’s lifelong identity, behavior, and success. This period of time is when a young man figures out who he is and takes his place in society. The brain undergoes a massive remodeling process, starting with emotional centers and finishing with the prefrontal cortex (the area responsible for planning and impulse control) around age 25. 

During that period, friends and social groups heavily influence values, risk-taking, and confidence. At the same time, the drive for reward is high, making this a critical time for education, career habits, and avoiding dangerous behaviors, and I haven't even mentioned my musical tastes! It’s when finding positive mentors and good experiences during these years will be able to reverse or heal earlier childhood struggles. 

In fact, this information made me realize why my youth has such a determining impact on me and why I remain so much attached to this dozen years as it defined who I would be until now and where that development would take me. 

This emotional attachment is so strong that it’s been anchoring my entire persona, still overshadows my family life as well as my other accomplishments and still continues to remain the center of my life despite its inexorable drift away from my present reality. 

Tomorrow we’ll see if females undergo the same process as males do...

Old feet, new problems…

As we age and remain quite active (running, walking, etc) can we say that the soles of our feet have a harder time fully absorbing body weight and impacts, and that it may lead to a variety of foot problems? It’s a very reasonable assumption, and the short answer is yes. 

As we age, the feet absorb impact less effectively, and this can contribute to problems like metatarsalgia, plantar fat‑pad atrophy, and arthritis. Yet, the relationship is indirect, and staying active is still one of the best things we can do for foot health. It’s obvious that with age, the feet lose some of their natural shock‑absorbing ability — mainly because the fat pads thin, the ligaments stiffen, and the tendons lose elasticity. 

This can increase stress on the forefoot and joints, making conditions like metatarsalgia more likely. But activity itself isn’t the problem, moving a lot like I do ends up protecting my joints. For sure, aging isn’t kind on our body and our feet as the thinning cushions under the heel and metatarsal heads reduce shock absorption and increase pressure on bones and nerves.

Our tendons and ligaments don’t fare any better as our collagen stiffens with age and makes our feet less adaptable to uneven surfaces and repetitive impact. The arch can also flatten slightly over time, shifting load toward the forefoot, finally years of walking and running contribute to mild degenerative changes that reflect normal aging but still not a disease. 

These changes don’t mean our feet “fail,” but they now handle load differently. All this new reality is why older runners and walkers often switch to softer shoes with generous cushioning, avoid long downhill itineraries and adopt a shorter stride length. It’s called adaptation, not deterioration! 

Our feet don’t “absorb less weight” because they’re weak but because their biological cushioning system changes. Our muscles may still be strong, our cardiovascular system excellent, but the fat pads and connective tissues don’t seem to care and keep on getting thinner as we age, no matter what we try to do to stop that process...

Year forty-one in Park City

We just quietly celebrated our 41st year living full time in Park City. 

Our experience has been great and continues to be to this day, even if we clearly are not as young anymore, we have witnessed an exponential growth all around us, even the planet population has almost doubled from 4.87 billion in 1985 to about 8.31 billion today!

But our little neighborhood has remained as calm and peaceful as it used to be, the access to town and skiing super easy, the weather continues to be terrific even if it now feels a little bit warmer (we have absolutely no doubt that climate change is real and is here, not just to stay, but will get much worse). 

We used to say: “We don’t need air-conditioning in Park City!” Today, this has become a debatable subject. On the plus side, we now have many more tall trees (our town has turned into an urban forest) with more wildlife keeping us company whether we’re enjoying it or not and, finally, the deepening feeling that we made the absolutely right choice the day we decided to move here.

Leveraging memories for growth (Part Two)

As we look back into our memories, a failed business venture, a badly chosen relationship, an opportunity we missed, a foolish argument, an impulsive decision, a misplaced trust and a career choice we later regretted, are so many “arrows” we can label: “Don't you repeat it again!” 

So, the ideal tool is the one that enables us a way to spot these bad situations earlier next time in order to turn regret into preparedness. Sure, as I mentioned yesterday, that exercise should not get us into a nostalgia trap. Maybe instead of “nostalgia” we should call it “rumination”. Nostalgia says, those were wonderful times. “I wish I could go back...” while rumination suggests “Why in the world did I do that? If only I had…”

Neither of the two necessarily make us learn from past experiences. What I’m proposing instead is a third relationship with the past by revisiting it, extracting the lesson, and leaving it there. In other words, our memory should be treated more as a laboratory than a museum. 

I’ve never thought about it this way, but I like it! I also see an intriguing asymmetry as we usually assume that experience makes us wiser because we lived through things, but perhaps wisdom can also be accumulated through deliberate retrospective learning. 

Imagine someone my age (78) looking back over his life and identifying 30 or 40 consequential mistakes. He might discover that five or six basic tendencies account for a surprisingly large proportion of them. Things like: 

• Acting too quickly 
• Being overly trusting 
• Avoiding difficult conversations 
• Caring too much about what others thought 
• Failing to recognize when circumstances had changed 
• Confusing confidence with competence 

The resulting insight could be far more valuable than remembering 40 individual incidents. At that point the summary shows us something like a personal history of errors and it raises a wonderful question. Could we deliberately become wiser by studying not only what happened to us, but how we repeatedly managed to get things wrong? 

As far as I am concerned, what I found were two recurring patterns. Acting too fast, indicating a need for enhanced patience, and lacking self-confidence or being shy. Call this excessive fear or timidity at times. The other, positive side of the coin is worth remembering too. In my case it was intuition and persistence that were my “best arrows…” 

Now I know and you can too if you go through the exercise!