How Do We Stop Being Dejected by "Peaking Too Early"?

I often half-jokingly say that I am way past my peak at age 35. While it is a way to prevent others from setting too high of an expectation for how much further my career can go, it also reflects how I reflect how I see my career so far. As a mere 24-year-old, I was already a Vice President of Operations at Lazada, an e-commerce firm that became a major player in that industry in Southeast Asia. Overseeing more than 150 employees, some more than twice as old as I was at the time, made me realize that corporate management was frankly, not my cup of tea.

But as far as business hierarchy went, that stint more than a decade ago was really the peak. Yes, I took on additional management responsibilities, including more than 20 as part of an NGO's retail startup effort and in effect being the country manager for Japan and Korea in an international business research firm, these roles did not surpass the scale and depth of what I had experienced in Lazada even though I have become much older since then. Even though I was not particularly keen on business management, I often wonder if I had indeed "peaked too early" in this particular aspect.

It is a question that I often wonder about in conversations with the students that I mentor as part of my work as a college admissions consultant. Some students, at age 17, have already held leadership positions many adults several times their age can only imagine: founding and leading both social and for-profit enterprises with members from all corners of the globe, presenting their work at UN and other global conferences. Others have already conducted cutting-edge research, publishing the results in leading peer-reviewed journals that veteran professional researchers struggle to do.

There is no doubt that the enthusiasm, ambition, and accomplishment of these youngsters can help invigorate some jaded adults scratching their heads over where to take their careers next. But for others, myself included, seeing such achievements at such a young age is also a source of worry: when these youngsters, at a later stage of their lives, cannot seem to replicate the level of success that they witnessed today, how would they feel? Would they not only agree with my self-assessment of "peaking too early" but also, unlike me, feel dejected by that feeling that the best had already happened to them so long ago?

Of course, these are just hypothetical questions for these high school students living life to the fullest today. Busy with school studies, college applications, and these extracurricular activities that take up whatever remaining free time that they may have, they have no time, energy, or incentive to imagine what they will become years down the line beyond going further up and up on the trajectories that they have done so much already. And it is simply too inappropriately cynical for any adults, and especially their college admissions consultants, to remind them of the potential for a fall from grace in the future.

But it should be par for the course to remind them that the some life changes, if not outright potential for a fall, is possible, making what they achieve today unreachable in the future. The reasons may be entirely positive: they developed new interests or undertaken new responsibilities that make the devotion to past projects no longer possible. When such desirable changes do occur, it would be entirely unfortunate that these students look back upon their past glories and conclude that they are past their peak. Their narrow definition of success can bring anxiety to a situation that they ought to instead celebrate.

Indeed, conversations about whether some had or had not "passed their peak" must be done with a careful definition of what the "peak" is. Individuals have multiple identities, all of which have a set of different achievements not often congruous or mutually supportive of one another. This is true especially in those time-consuming passion projects that many high school students choose to define their college application profiles.With limited time and attention span, one can realistically only pursue some passions and reach peaks in them while giving up similar efforts in others.

In other words, talking about "past the peak" can only be not so saddening when we celebrate that goals are not singular but varied in nature. One peak may pass but others emerge. Just as my peak in business management was followed by peaks in academic achievement of getting a Ph.D. and travelling far more countries that I was possible at the time, new peaks can be gotten by jettisoning old ones. Rather than looking back to past glories as an absolute, constantly adjusting those peaks would be a source of personal growth and a brand-new mental "peak."