Young Success Means Early Death
This study does not bode well for early over-achievers:
McCann’s research, published in the February issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, concerns what he calls the ”precocity-longevity hypothesis.” McCann analyzed the lives of 1,672 U.S. governors who served between 1789 and 1978 and found that those who were elected at relatively tender ages generally died earlier than their less precocious counterparts. Even when he controlled for the year that the governors were born, how long they served and what state they governed, the pattern held. No matter how he sliced the data, ran the regressions or accounted for various statistical biases, the story remained the same: governors elected to office at younger ages tended to have shorter lives.
Tell me the average life span of a US citzen in 1776, when they started, or even 1789, when they started this survey, and then tell me the average life span of a man born in 1930, or 1950 for that matter, and I imagine there are some differences between youth and success.