FLAME with Brad Hook
The Second Adulthood: Why Midlife Is an Awakening, Not a Crisis
What happens when the striving that built your career stops working? Fabrice Desmarescaux — McKinsey partner, leader of Aberkyn in Southeast Asia and author of The Art of Retreats — maps the second adulthood: the unnamed stage beginning around 45, when raw problem-solving gives way to wisdom, judgment and the ability to hold paradox.
The numbers reframe midlife on their own: fluid intelligence — raw processing speed, the engine of early-career success — peaks in your 30s. Crystallised intelligence, the pattern-recognition we call wisdom, keeps growing into your 70s and 80s. Fabrice's point is that most of us keep playing the first game long after the second has become our advantage, then mistake the resulting friction for a crisis.
Drawing on decades coaching CEOs and C-suite teams, Fabrice explains why the shift is really from control to influence. Senior leadership is an adaptive challenge: nudging, convening, holding space — control simply doesn't scale. He and Brad also dig into what older cultures handled better: rites of passage, and the elders who once guided people through life's biggest transitions. Without them, the second adulthood arrives unnamed, so we call it a crisis.
The practical heart of the conversation is the retreat — not as a luxury, but as a discipline of silence, solitude and stillness that Fabrice calls the most underrated leadership tool of all. You don't need a monastery: he shows how to build a retreat into an ordinary day by carving out disconnection on purpose. A warm, quietly radical case for presence, letting go, and finding your new game.
In this episode
- Fluid intelligence peaks in your 30s — crystallised intelligence keeps growing into your 70s and 80s
- Why control doesn't scale: senior leadership as influence, nudging and holding space
- The lost rites of passage — and why big transitions need elders
- Midlife as an awakening to name, not a crisis to survive
- How to build a retreat into a busy day through silence, solitude and disconnection
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