Some people peak in high school. Plan to be someone who’s still getting better at forty.

Peaking early tends to happen to people whose sense of themselves got attached to being good at something young, so they stopped learning in order to keep looking capable. Continued improvement means being a beginner repeatedly, which is uncomfortable for anybody who was once the best in the room. The long version of a life is not won by whoever was ahead at seventeen.

Start something now that you are plainly bad at, and stay with it past the embarrassing part. Keep one thing in your life that you are learning rather than performing. That habit, maintained, is what being good at forty is made of.