The Peak of Your Life

What do Harvard students and professional athletes have in common?

In their late 20s and early 30s, nobody is riding a cloud of adoration, pride, and importance as much as a superstar athlete. The cheers of 10,000 fans and the hopes of a city resting on his left arm are simply intoxicating. He is successful and he is loved. Then just as quickly, it is gone. The city has moved on to a new hero. His identity evaporates and the word “star” is preceded by “former.” He finds himself an antiquated nobody at the old age of 35. “Athletes die twice,” sports writer John Feinstein once said.

What Harvard students and professional athletes have in common is the burden of the early peak. Learning at one of the most prestigious universities in the world has a certain thrill. But Harvard students do not have nearly as glamorous a high point nor are they doomed to a mid-30s retirement like athletes. Indeed, we have the opportunity to make sure that Harvard is not the pinnacle of our lives. But this is precisely what makes an early peak like Harvard so dangerous for our psyche.

Todd May, professor of philosophy at Clemson University, wrote a piece in the New York Times about the burden of an early peak in life, using Edward Snowden and professional football players as his examples. He says, “For many people—not just activists like Snowden or professional athletes—life crests early. But it doesn’t end there. It goes on, burdened by a summit that can never be reached again, which one can gaze upon only by turning back.” While some may reach higher summits, “for many, however, those earlier moments will be a quiet haunting, a reminder of what has been and cannot be again.”

While there certainly is a fear that Harvard will not live up to our lofty expectations, the opposite fear is subtler but equally powerful—the fear that Harvard will live up to expectations too well. Harvard is the place where we feel we have reached the pinnacle of success for our age group. This is the place that cultivated Yo-Yo Ma ’76, Henry A. Kissinger ’50, and Bill Gates. The possibilities are breathlessly infinite.

And yet this is the greatest anxiety: this fear that one day we will have to look back at Mt. Harvard from the rolling valleys of post-graduation. Harvard’s superstar status in the academic world is wonderful for us now, but it also means that we have even harder to press ourselves if we do not want this to be the climax of our lives. There is a pressing feeling that if that becomes the case, then somehow we are intellectual frauds, who did not deserve to be here in the first place.

Our lives become a constant struggle to stay at this elevation, pursuing exclusive internships, lab publications, and Phi Beta Kappa so that we can indeed reach even greater levels of importance than the one we are granted here at Harvard. Afraid of the drop, the most ambitious of us spend our time ensuring that we can one day look down at Harvard from a loftier place.

There is a difference, however, between success and contentment. The problem with an early peak is that it often forces you to choose between these two. Continue feeding your ambition and the amount of success you achieve will never be enough. If you adopt the determination not to let Harvard be your personal high point, you may find higher peaks, but ambition will prevent you from ever accepting each one as your best. If you hate the idea of peaking at 22, then you will hate peaking at 32 and 45 as well. You will struggle to maintain a constant upward trajectory, one that cannot exist.

I admire most the people who can enjoy the view from a place like Harvard and then accept the inevitable drop in prestige afterward, the people who eschew the corporate ladder for a position as an English teacher at the local high school, if that is indeed what makes them happy. For the ambitious, it is hard to do. Even when I point out to my mother that teachers from my high school hold degrees and Ph.D.’s from places like Stanford and the University of Chicago, she brushes them off, saying, “They probably could not get a job anywhere else.”

The fear of someone saying this about me some day holds tremendous power. I hope that one day I will be able to accept that Harvard may be the crown of my life’s material success but that greater happiness and well-being may be yet to come. But for now, I have not outgrown my insecurities. I am more controlled than I would like to be by the praises of friends and teachers ringing in my bones from another age.

Ambition is not necessarily a bad thing. But when our ambitions become more about the height of the peaks rather the journey upward, will we have the strength not to attempt another ascent?

Andrew D. Kim ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is an applied math concentrator in Eliot House.