Act Your Age: An Outlier’s Rule

I’ve heard the phrase “act your age” for as long as I can remember. The first time I recall it, I was about ten years old, sitting at the dinner table, using my fingers to herd peas onto my spoon. My mother looked at me and said firmly, “Act your age,

Bill.” It wasn’t meant to be cruel. It was an instruction. Childhood came with rules, at least for me.

Over time, I noticed something curious. The phrase changed its meaning as I aged. When I was young, “act your age” meant grow up. Be more capable. Be less dependent. But somewhere along the way, it flipped. In later life, the same phrase began to mean the opposite. Slow down. Be careful. Don’t stand out. Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t surprise people.

This reversal tells us something important. “Act your age” is less about wisdom and more about conformity.

The phrase almost always shows up when someone is behaving like an outlier. It is rarely said to people moving comfortably down the middle of the road. It is said when someone steps outside the conformity lane. When a child asks too many questions. When a teenager challenges authority. When an entrepreneur refuses to settle. When an older person, and some would consider me elderly at eighty -seven, rides a bike hard and long enough to make his wife uneasy.

Think about our modern-day outliers. Steve Jobs was told, in countless indirect ways, to act his age. Drop out of college. Obsess over fonts. Barefoot meetings and impossible standards. The message was clear. Serious adults don’t behave this way. Jobs ignored it and changed how the world communicates. He did eventually wear shoes, often running shoes, but he never wore conventional expectations very well.

Elon Musk hears a contemporary version of the same warning. Responsible CEOs don’t sleep on factory floors. They don’t bet the company repeatedly. They don’t speak unfiltered in public. In other words, act your age. Musk’s refusal to comply is crazy even by my lowly standards, but he marches to a drumbeat nobody hears but Elon.

This pattern is not new. The Founders of our country were profound outliers, and many of them were warned by elders, colleagues, and friends to choose safer paths.

John Adams is a prime example. In his early thirties, Adams had a thriving legal practice and a growing reputation in Massachusetts. Older mentors urged caution. Britain was the most powerful empire on earth. Agitation threatened family security, professional standing, and even life itself. The sensible advice was to keep one’s head down, tend to one’s affairs, and let history take its course. Adams refused. He stepped into the storm, knowing full well the cost. He was not reckless. He was deliberate. He understood that acting one’s age sometimes means accepting responsibilities that comfort-seeking elders would rather avoid.

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” — John Adams

What is often overlooked is how Adams lived the long arc of that decision. He lived to age ninety, an extraordinary lifespan for his era, long enough to see the fragile experiment of the republic endure, fracture, and begin to heal.

Thomas Jefferson followed a similarly outlier path. Jefferson was endlessly warned to compromise, to soften, to wait. Instead, he drafted ideas that still unsettle power two and a half centuries later. He lived to age eighty-three, remaining intellectually engaged until the very end. In one of history’s most poetic coincidences, Adams and Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Two outliers, once rivals, exiting the stage together after a long life spent refusing to act their age when history demanded courage.

Which brings me back to my wife telling me to act my age after a long bike ride. I understand the concern. It comes from love. But I also understand something else. Age is a statistic. Purpose is not. Vitality is not.

Acting your age at five means learning how the world works. It means testing boundaries. At eighty-seven, it means stewarding perspective, staying engaged, and refusing to shrink just to make others comfortable.

The world advances because some people do not act their age when the age demands obedience. It stays humane because most people do. Wisdom lies in knowing which role is yours.

Perhaps the better instruction, at every stage of life, is this. Each of us accumulates experience and sees the world differently. Progress has always come from those who see opportunity where others see danger. That tension, between caution and courage, is what has made our country so unusual and so prosperous.

 We should listen more carefully to those who are not acting according to the norm. I still use my fingers to nudge peas into my spoon.