The Bee Gees and Discovering When Your True Prime Actually Is
The most iconic song of the Bee Gees was the 1977 disco anthem ‘Staying Alive.’ In fact, just saying the title probably made older listeners start humming the high pitch, fast-paced, wonder hit. ‘Staying Alive’ stayed number one in the Billboard Top 100 for a full month and similarly dominated the number-one position on music charts worldwide. It was also the feature song of ‘Saturday Night Fever, the most popular disco movie in the 70s, and it became a staple of disco fever as a fad. The curious part is ‘Staying Alive’ never actually had the words “disco” or “fever” in the lyrics, nor did the band members named Robin, Maurice, and Barry consider themselves disco until they were branded as such. They had always played rock and country. But in 1979, the brothers learned the hard way that they were stuck with disco, and disco was dying.
During their tour playing to sold-out arenas, one of the brothers held up a t-shirt he had found that said: “Shoot the Bee Gees.” Backstage in private, the brothers all had a great laugh. However, by the end of the tour, just six months later, the laughs died down, and the brothers found that their music had been thrown out of the biggest radio stations in America. They were no longer on the stations that had played their songs practically on repeat for two years, and those stations were publicly calling for the end of disco. During the infamous disco demolition night, fifty thousand people packed into a Chicago White Sox game at Comiskey Park, throwing their disco records into a massive crate slated to be blown up. When the 4 foot by 6 foot by 5-foot crate was utterly packed, disco haters took their remaining records to their seats so they could frisbee them at baseball players during the game or shatter them in the stands.
An overwhelming amount of records burned or exploded during disco demolition night, many from the most iconic band of the year, the Bee Gees, and their Mega hit album Saturday Night Fever featuring Staying Alive. The Bee Gees hit their prime, locked in their genre, and then aged out of it all in the span of about two years, and they never even knew it.
_________________________________________________________________________
Today on the Re-Engineered You, we have a strange question for you. Can you imagine a tired, balding, overweight Bruce Lee? Or take our example from above. Have you ever seen your favorite rock band perform live long after their prime when they're coasting off their old hits? We want to explore the idea that we as people might be able to identify when our prime is, and we want to know how to capitalize on that success while it's happening instead of blowing past our prime years in health and business without ever knowing it. To help us identify our primes, we're going to get into myths.
Myth 1: The prime of our health and attractiveness is somewhere around 25 when we're at our peak strength. Any athletic coach can tell you that.
Now we've done multiple episodes about what makes people attracted to one another and we know how much health pays into self-esteem. So, what's our health prime and what's our attraction Prime? Now, we can't talk about disco icons without that attractiveness factor because with those unbuttoned shirts and gold chains, it only makes sense. We discussed in our attraction episode the metrics of desirability based on online dating stats. So, this isn't what we physically find attractive. This is who gets the most messages sent to them when they're online dating by age. To reference that study, you can go back to our show notes from that episode, but they found that desirability peaks at about 50 for males. That is not to say they're not their most attractive earlier, but they are the most desirable and get the most messages. For women, and I am so sorry to report this yet again, but it's peaked at 18, and it stays steady throughout their 20s before it starts to slide off. Those are just the volume of messages based on desirability. According to these studies, men are like figures of stability by the time they reach their 40s and 50s. I get that because we crave comfort and stability.
Overall, we want to really get into covering where our prime might be in life. And so, we dug deep into a lot of different research points. One that I wanted to address right after desirability is health. In most studies, health is related to either prime or self-esteem. According to a Time article, about 24-25 is when our cognitive speed is at its best and our health is simultaneously at its best. Our rapid decision-making and multitasking basically peak around age 24. For me, a point I was researching was people that play video games. In a nutshell, shady things happening and it was a bunch of like 23-24-year-old gamers who are losing their edge, almost like a sport and they're starting to take performance-enhancing drugs to get faster and sharper mentally so they can keep up with these 18-19-year old’s.
So now we're going to get also into real-world situations and where our cognitive abilities are. First, a quick question for you; how good are you at multitasking day-to-day? There's no real such thing as multitasking that we're just very quick and very good at switching tasks. And according to a Simon Fraser University study from Canada, they found that cognitive speed declines with age. There is a solid number that they have found, which is for every 15 years after 24, cognitive speed drops by about 15%.
According to the same study, as cognitive speed slows down, your brain makes up for it in a variety of ways. You rely on your experiences because you've experienced life before and you're used to multitasking. You can more accurately predict upcoming tasks and your brain sort of uses shortcuts to eliminate information that's unnecessary. In the end, when you're 24, you might be able to take in everything that's happening simultaneously, but as a well-formed adult, you learn to boil down to the essentials. I think everybody, as they age, complains about how tired they are all the time and how much energy it takes to do things. I actually view that as a positive. I think tiredness reinforces the need to be efficient and only focus on the things that are necessary.
We have one more point to talk about here. According to the AARP, people's health starts to decline after about 50 for both men and women. In their 50s, they begin to slip in their ability to stand on one leg and rise from a chair, and that decline continues to slowly impact people over the next decades. In addition, more physical activity was associated with less decline, meaning the more active you are in those ages, the better off you are in avoiding declining realities. You can avoid adversities by just doing really easy free weight exercises, walking, etc.
Myth 2: Our financial prime is just before we have kids and then it's nothing but doctor bills and expensive Christmases, right?
I've had the most confidence and the most security when I've had the best job or the most money in the bank. With that being said, when is our financial prime?
That's an excellent question because we usually assume that our financial prime is going to be at our most creative prime or our most skilled prime. We assume that when we have the most marketable ability, that's when we will be the most financially secure. However, that's not always the case. Oftentimes, we get pigeonholed into a job or we end up doing something where a skilled boss or company is our prime time, but we actually don't see a return on that.
We’re going to go through a couple of research centers and a couple of poles to figure out exactly when our financial prime is and when it isn't because this part surprised me. First off, we'll start with the Pew Research Center, which states that most Americans think that 22 is when you should be independent. Not in your prime, just not needing to be supported. They also found that less than a quarter of people at that age actually are. This means that while we all think 22 is the time for you to leave the nest, 75% are not ready. In fact, the Census Bureau found that 24% of young adults could even be considered independent by 22 compared to 32% in 1980. We just had an episode where we were looking at how many people in their lifetime will make more than their parents. It was not even 50%. Not only are we not going to make more money than our parents statistically, we will also not be financially independent by 22, which is what everyone thinks should be the case. Lastly, they also found that 45% of adults between 18-29 receive financial help from their parents.
Based on this, our financial prime is obviously not in our 20s. I'm going to switch over to a Forbes article. It states that Boomers and Gen-X parents are the most worried. Also, 58% of people up to millennials couldn't afford their lifestyle without their parents helping them with things like cell phone plans, food, school costs, and car expenses. Those are the most common types of financial support adults give. Overall, most people are not financially independent until after age 35. This is going to be seen as normal because nothing's affordable anymore. And then more bills are going to be on them because most jobs don't pay enough.
Now, we may not be getting paid as much as we're worth. But when are we really worth it? When are we at our most valuable as people? According to The Washington Post, it’s your 20’s for sprinting and sporting prime, before your efficiency starts to decline. So basically, while your cardiovascular system is best processing oxygen. So, we're looking at the 20s-30s, and that kind of aligns with our earlier study. We are faster and younger then, but we're more efficient later. In the mid-30s, you're not as fast, but your peak is when skill and speed basically meet. Endurance sports like Ironman championships or the Kona Ironman in Hawaii, when do you think the peak is for those people? It's closer to mid to early 30s, but the Kona Ironman winners averaged 42-43. I guess in sports, you can peek late by training yourself into an endurance sport if you don't have the speed skills anymore. If you get into archery shooting or sailing, all those you can literally peek in your 70s and 80s. Those are almost entirely skill-based.
So now we get into the creative prime's here's the part where I was getting excited because according to this Washington Post study, you can, as a writer, creatively peak early or late, but the average is 45. For painters, age 42 is when they do their peak work. And again, this is an average; you can totally be an outlier.
Myth 3: Our relationship and self-esteem prime must be right before we get married. That's where we are at the top of our game, and we have the in-laws to impress.
Do relationships have a prime, and will you have a prime as far as your ability to make connections? Oftentimes, people think they are at their best career-wise, but that's usually reliant on our prime with our connections, not necessarily with our skills.
This comes from Oxford University, and they were looking at the mobile phone records of 3.2 million users in Europe for one year. They found out that young people have more contacts. When do you think the max number of connections were and who do you think had more, men or women? According to the study, the max number of connections for men and women peaked at 25. The number of friends and connections you had at 25 is the most you will ever have and it declines from there. For your adult years, your number of connections plateau at age 25, and then they started declining again after 55. This is because you are more likely to invest in fewer, but more meaningful relationships. They also found that the average number of contacts of people focus on each month is about 15. If you've got 200 people on your phone, I guarantee that the number of people you have regular connections with is about 15 or less.
In the last episode, we've mentioned that the highest self-esteem peak is when you're about 60, so I just want to remind everybody about that. We're talking about primes and recognizing what our prime is. Your creative prime is around 40. Your sports prime is about 25 to 30, but your self-esteem prime is going to be about 60. I believe that is what is most important. I mean, you can have all the connections and money, but the most important thing is really how you feel about yourself.
Final Thoughts
We might think of songs like ‘Staying Alive,' 'How Deep Is Your Love,’ and ‘Night Fever’ as prime Bee Gees and prime disco. But I assure you, it's neither. In fact, the peak of the Bee Gees stardom was really just the final flash of the disco bomb before it fizzled out. As a trio of musical Brothers with so much talent ability, the Bee Gees could have redefined music if only we hadn’t chased them out of the country ten years before their creative prime.
Speaking of primes, I hope you can all take comfort knowing that our health, cognitive speed, and strength reaches best around 25. But if we're talking about life and finances, our prime is well past 30. Our creative prime is closer to 40 or 45. If we’re talking about our prime for having meaningful social connections, we're looking at around 50. Lastly, the prime of our self-esteem, the high-water mark for anyone's life, is closer to 60.
We hold young geniuses up on pedestals. We share cute facts on social media about how Mozart was playing for empresses and kings by age 7, how Michael Jackson released his first number one soul hit by 14, and how Alexander the Great conquered much of the Known World by 25. Usually, these are accompanied by motivational quotes like, “what have you accomplished today?” But maybe we should all be asking a different question.
According to noble data about when our creative intellectual prime really is, maybe we should all be asking the question, “Are you doing everything you can to prepare when the prime of your life happens?”