Running out of Creative Puff.

A windsock is a very clever piece of engineering.

My father took early retirement in his mid-50s from his position as Chief Engineer and Manager of the Works Department at the Brisbane City Council. He had spent his whole career as a public servant, initially as a young engineer working on the Tinaroo irrigation project near Mareeba in North Queensland, and then as Townsville City Engineer before moving to Brisbane.

After leaving the BCC, he tried his hand at a private practice. He worked as a construction engineer on various civil projects in the west, a role usually filled by much younger practitioners. His last position was General Manager for a truck manufacturing company in Pittsworth after it had gone into liquidation. I had never fully understood what drove him to leave a high profile, well-paid, secure position to take on hands-on, lower-paid positions.

In Fairweather Observations V5, I wrote about the different thinking styles that change as we age. Conceptual or Fluid in the first half of our careers, and Experimental or Crystalline in our later years.

In his book From Strength to Strength, Arthur C Brooks makes a more profound distinction between these two very different thinking styles. It is not just when these different styles are more and less dominant; they grow and diminish in a semi-circular arc…