Old age has traditionally been perceived as a time of declines and losses. Yet, empirical findings from the recent 20 years have shown that many of age-related declines in social and cognitive performance can be offset by making the performance self-relevant and/or emotionally rewarding. In this talk, I am going to present finding from studies on social relationships, attention, memory, emotion and problem solving, across adult samples (aged 18 to 90+ years), from Hong Kong SAR, USA, Canada, and Germany, to show that aging is not just about declines. To the extent that older people perceive a stimulus or situation as important to them, they cognitively process that stimulus and perform in that situation as well as, and sometimes better than, younger people. The strategies that enable older people to do so, and cross-cultural differences in these strategies, will be highlighted. Practical implications of these strategies for personal aging at the individual and interpersonal levels, and population aging at the society level, will also be discussed.