Collins

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What To Make of a Life— Jim Collins

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1. A Life Transformed

Gradually at first, then in cascading waves, I noticed that the research was not just changing my brain; it was changing me. The sign of good research is that you end up in places you never expected. If after years of research all you do is reconfirm your own preconceptions, then what is the point of doing research? The whole point is to discover, to be surprised, to come to see the world and how it works differently than you did before.

After this study, I will never look at life the same ever again, and I will never look at other people the way I used to.

Part 1: Coming into Frame

2. One Big Thing

For McClintock, it wasn’t about being in love with the idea of being a prizewinning geneticist but about being in love with the actual doing of the daily tasks of being a geneticist.

Barbara McClintock discovered a set of natural encodings that she trusted and followed, even without knowing exactly where they would lead. She didn’t learn how to lose herself in thought; she was encoded to lose herself in thought. She didn’t learn how to make her brain into an organic decryption machine; she discovered that she came pre-packaged with that encoding and then used it. No one taught her to mentally transport herself into a cell and walk around inside that cell making friends with the chromosomes; that was just an idiosyncratic encoding specific to Barbara McClintock.

This very same sentiment could apply just as well to every single person in our study, not because of their “genius,” but because of how they played exquisitely to their unique constellation of encodings.

Each constellation of encodings is its own category-of-one distinctive blend. There was just one Barbara McClintock, one John Glenn, one Alice Paul, one Toni Morrison, one Benjamin Franklin. Just as there is only one of you, and only one of me. The thing that set them apart is their ability to play so consistently to their own individual (and sometimes quite peculiar) package of encodings.

The question is not whether a person has encodings. Everyone has encodings. The question is this: Which encodings will the journey of life lead you to discover, and will you trust them enough to align your life around them?

For McClintock, money and resources became the means to do her research, rather than her research being a means to make money. Every person in our study made this flip at some point in their lives, from seeing money principally as the output of their efforts (“I work to make money”) to seeing money as an input to fuel their efforts (“I need money to do what I am encoded for”).

She instinctively shifted from being a problem solver to being a tool builder— don’t just solve the problem, use the problem to build a tool!

McClintock did not confuse a position (“being at Harvard” or “being a professor”) with her life’s work, and she decided to recast herself on a different platform outside the strictures and constraints of traditional academia.

(To go deeper into Hopper’s story and how it merged with the early history of computers and software, see Kurt W. Beyer’s superb book, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age.)

A photo of Page donned in a purple justice’s robe with a pink bow tie dominates the cover of All Rise: The Remarkable Journey of Alan Page, Billy McGrane’s delightfully informative biography of Page.

Then, in an exquisite twist to a creative life, Eller began a late transition into using an entirely different set of encodings: He became a ceramic artist. He set up a studio in northeast Minneapolis, where he would lose himself for hours on end, spinning pottery and crafting beautiful ceramic bowls, utterly absorbed in what one article called his “contemplative passion.” When the Minnesota Vikings opened a new stadium in 2016, Eller (then 74) created a set of ceramic art pieces to be featured on its walls. In his youthful playing days, Eller had earned the nickname Moose. (Imagine being an offensive lineman trying to block a full-sized moose tearing across the line trying to get to the quarterback, and you get the idea.) but my favorite video of Eller comes not from his Moose days, not from his tossing aside offensive linemen and rampaging into the backfield, but a video of Eller in his mid-70s discussing the creation of his ceramic art installation for the Vikings’ stadium. Eller still carried those huge moose hands on his powerful six-foot, six-inch frame, but he used them in flowing gestures, lovingly showing the ceramic bowls that he’d crafted to evoke the feel of Minnesota lakes.

Either way, single or serial, the same three elements apply: discover and deploy encodings, flip the arrow of money, and focus the inner fire.

3. A Constellation of Encodings

I’d like you to fix an image in your mind. Picture a constellation of stars. Now imagine looking through a frame that limits how much of the constellation you can see (such as looking through the lens of a telescope or camera); stars outside of the frame remain hidden, while those inside the frame shine brightly brightly through the lens. This is how I came to think about discovering encodings. The encodings are fixed, just as the stars in the sky are largely fixed. What changes as people move through life is the positioning and size of the frame, and whether a big cluster of encodings sits brightly visible in frame.

Life worked best for the people in our study when they deployed themselves into activities that aligned with a big bright set of their encodings. I will sometimes shorthand this with the phrase “in frame.” Conversely, their lives didn’t work as well when they deployed themselves into activities poorly aligned with what they were encoded for. I will sometimes shorthand this to the phrase “out of frame.” Even the most exceptional people can get sidetracked by going out of frame. They can also be revitalized by coming back in frame.

Combat aviator in the Pacific, jet fighter pilot in Korea, test pilot in the supersonic age, Project Bullet— each iteration, each step, Glenn just kept volunteering himself into the future.

It’s not about finding what you can do better than others, but about finding what you can do exceptionally well relative to other ways you could expend yourself.

Of course, Glenn and Cooper trained and practiced and honed their capabilities for thousands upon thousands of hours. But it is not the thousands of hours per se that made them such exquisitely designed creatures for flying. It was thousands of hours expended directly in line with a preexisting set of encodings. John Glenn would have trained and practiced just as intently for thousands of hours in chemistry, in pursuit of medical school, or in football, in hopes of an athletic career, but all that energy would have been spent out of frame. John Glenn would maybe have worked just as hard, trained just as much, but he wouldn’t have become John Glenn.

Second, even highly accomplished people can languish when they operate contrary to their encodings, when they fall out of frame.

Here we have two of the most accomplished people of a generation, two of the greatest pilots of all time who became national heroes. Yet even these two remarkable individuals had episodes when they fell out of frame, such as Glenn’s ill-fated run for president and some of Cooper’s business ventures where he trusted the wrong people. The main point here is not that they “failed” or “made mistakes.” The point is that anyone can fall out of frame, and when they do, they’re likely to struggle relative to when they’re in frame.

Discovering what you are not encoded for can be just as important as discovering what you are encoded for.

I find it comforting that even the people in this study, with all of their accomplishments, had episodes when they made missteps that temporarily knocked them out of frame. I came to see that errant turns can be helpful for getting into frame. The process of discovery does not allow for a perfect record. You cannot plan or think your way into a life lived perfectly in line with your encodings.

Third, to be fully in frame requires a suitable hedgehog home.

Both Glenn and Cooper flourished in the culture of elite military pilots and NASA astronauts, wherein they could count on the people around them to be reliable, trustworthy, and highly capable. And while their work came with extreme danger, they operated within a system of competence, chock-full of checks and counterchecks, with scientists and specialist engineers and support crews all working together to accomplish a clear mission and decrease risk to the pilot or astronaut in the cockpit.

Multiple people in this study struggled, at least for a period of time, when their environment didn’t align well with their encodings. Barbara McClintock’s encodings for solving genetics puzzles remained in frame once she discovered them, but her time at the University of Missouri proved to be a terrible home for her. She simply did not fit with the culture of traditional academia, nor what that culture expected of her as a woman faculty member in her era. When she landed her spot at Cold Spring Harbor research institute, she found a much better home, and she stayed there for the rest of her life. Alan Page didn’t have the encodings for the client development and sales process of drawing in big lucrative clients. So, when he went to work at a traditional law firm that relied on its partners to excel at client development, he found himself partly out of frame. Then, when Page joined the Minnesota Supreme Court, he found a perfect home; his encodings came fully in frame with both the activity of legal thinking and the environment of the Supreme Court. Some people in our study, whom you will meet in future chapters, took a more entrepreneurial or loner approach, creating and/or shaping their own environment to fit with their encodings. Whatever the path, the people in this study flourished when both their activities and their environment fit with their encodings. A happy hedgehog needs a happy hedgehog home.

One of the advantages of having pairs to study is that we can see how two people engaged in similar activities can differ radically in how they operate. This shows that their successful practices are only partly a function of the type of work they do, and largely a reflection of how the individual is encoded. To illustrate, let's look at the other writer in our study, Barbara Tuchman.

It took her “six or seven years of very interrupted effort” to produce Bible and Sword. Like Morrison, Tuchman accumulated a stack of rejection slips before finding a publisher, a university press that mainly produced niche books. At age 44, Tuchman had finally become a published writer of history— a relatively unknown writer with a small readership, but a published writer nonetheless. And like Morrison, she’d become compulsive about her work, unable to stop herself, one question leading to another, project after project, book after book.

Like Morrison, she did some of her best work late, receiving a second Pulitzer Prize at age 60 (the first writer to ever receive a second Pulitzer Prize in the category of General Nonfiction) and a National Book Award at age 68. Both Morrison and Tuchman faced a “success cliff”; this is the type of cliff where a person achieves a level of success and recognitions that could impede further creative work.

Yet both sustained the cycle of creative work, Morrison pumping out five major books after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature (at age 62) and Tuchman producing four major books after the second Pulitzer Prize. Both writers produced more than 40% of their major books after the age of 60.

Like Toni Morrison, Barbara Tuchman talked and wrote extensively about her specific practices; she even wrote a whole book on her methods, Practicing History.

As a form, narrative has an inherent validity because it is the key to the problem of causation. Events do not happen in categories— economic, intellectual, military— they happen in sequence.”

(Barbara Tuchman)

As a prism of history, biography attracts and holds the reader’s interest in the larger subject. People are interested in other people, in the fortunes of the individual …. [Biography] encompasses the universal in the particular.”

(Barbara Tuchman)

She didn’t ask the more generic question, “What practices work best for writing history?” She discovered what practices worked specifically for her.

More generally, we see the following basic pattern:

Encoding —> Awareness of encoding (implicit or explicit) —> Translation into operating modes tailored specifically (and often uniquely) to the person —> Effect

After Tuchman published The Guns of August, a copy of the book ended up in the hands of President John F. Kennedy, who happened to read it shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As Tuchman herself wrote in the final paragraph of The Guns of August, “The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies would ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. . . . Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”

President Kennedy Kept Returning to the lessons of Tuchman’s book as he navigated the missile crisis. His brother Robert Kennedy later wrote in Thirteen Days, “Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August had made a great impression on the president. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October,’ he said to me that Saturday night, October 26. ‘If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move.’” Kennedy went for the naval blockade rather than an all-out invasion of Cuba.

So, here we have the story of a mom at home who decides to become a writer of history. She writes a book that the president reads. The president applies the lessons of the book to help avert a nuclear war. And we’re all alive today.

Barbara Tuchman didn’t set out to save the world when she wrote her books. She was just following her encodings. Once she discovered her encodings, she simply trusted them and focused the inner fire on writing books. She didn’t stop herself with questions like “Is this a worthy use of myself?” or “What will my parents think?” or “Does my husband approve?” or “Is this going to make me famous?” or “Will it generate huge social good in the eyes of my peers?” or any of that.

Recall how Toni Morrison began writing her first books not with a huge external audience in mind but so that she herself could read them. That her work eventually had a huge impact, both artistically and socially, flowed principally from keeping herself in frame, focused (alongside raising her children) on One Big Thing: books. When an interviewer asked her how she saw her public/social responsibility, how she knew she was “doing the write thing” with herself, Morrison responded, “You make it sound complicated, but it is really just about books. I edit books, I teach books, I write books.” Morrison believed that a great book can both be true to its historical/political context and be an imaginative creation, connected to what’s happening in the world while also being timeless, universal, and stunningly beautiful. In another interview, when asked whether she might take on a more political or public role if she didn’t write books, Morrison responded, “All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books. . . . There are people who can organize other people and I cannot. I’d just get bored.” Morrison felt a strong sense of responsibility to give back, but she did not let that knock her out of frame. Toni Morrison did give back, absolutely and in the most profoundly powerful way: She gave of her encodings.

One view of the world argues for a two-phase approach to life: success to significance. First achieve success, then do something significant and meaningful. This study leads me to a very different approach: First discover a set of encodings, then trust that full commitment to a hedgehog built around those encodings is in itself a meaning-filled answer to the question of what to make of a life. It might lead to curing cancer or protecting freedom or reducing human suffering or advancing social justice, or it might not.

4. Flipping the Arrow of Money

The people in our study flipped the arrow of money. Instead of work being a means to money, money became a means to work. And they made this shift because they embodied an unusual definition of work. For the people in this study, their true “work” could best be defined as pursuit of excellence in a hedgehog.

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were fortunate that Led Zeppelin generated a lot of economic fuel to do their music. Without question, most of the people in our study made a lot less money over their lives than the Zeppelin guys. Yet the basic pattern is essentially the same: Once people clicked into frame with something that they were encoded for, it lit a fire that burned so hot that they flipped the arrow of money in service of doing it. Even if they made more money than they knew what to do with, like Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, their fire for the work continued to burn within.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.

It turned out that only about half of the people in our study earned a traditional paycheck as the primary economic mechanism in doing a hedgehog.

We discovered a wide range of methods people in the study used to make their economics work, categorized into 12 economic streams. Over the course of their lives, the people in the study used some combination of between three and eight of these streams, with a median of four streams per person. This analysis showed that there are many ways to make the economics work, and you might need to draw from multiple methods simultaneously and/or across phases of your life.

5. Focus the Fire

Let’s pause the Albright story to extract a lesson about the inner fire: A big source of fire lay in the fact that when in full hedgehog mode the people in our study quite simply loved what they were doing.

The key word here is “doing.

There is a big difference between being in love with the idea of one’s work and being in love with doing the work itself. It means not just the love in the 0.001% highlight moments; it means love in the other 99.999%.

That said, there are three prevalent sources of fuel for the inner fire across the vastly different lives in the study. In addition to love of the doing, the two others are:

Extend Out/Circle Back: This is a continuous dynamic process of extending yourself— growing, learning, experimenting, expanding capabilities, discovering new encodings— while simultaneously drawing upon encodings discovered and capabilities developed earlier in life.

This dynamic of extending out and circling back proved to be a powerful source of sustainable fuel for the people in the study.

Choosing Responsibilities: This means making deep commitments to freely chosen responsibilities. These responsibilities might be visible and public, or they might be personal and private.

After a multi-decade career focused on doing surgery, Albright extended out and chose a big new responsibility. She founded the MIT Collaborative Initiatives, tapping her natural encodings for creative collaboration, reveling in bringing together people across disparate arenas to stimulate breakthroughs in thinking. She’d mix architects with military officers with business CEOs with leaders of national health systems to work together on problems like childhood obesity, stroke, and PTSD. She sparkled with enthusiasm when talking about her efforts.

Of course, not all of the 99.999% moments count as joyful bliss.

Welcome to the Stress and Drudgery Tax.

Even when right in the middle of the best hedgehog years of their lives, the people in this study paid what I came to call the Stress and Drudgery Tax. To be clear, the tax is not about stress and drudgery outside doing a hedgehog but about stress and drudgery in doing the actual hedgehog.

Recall Grace Hopper’s exquisite encodings for advancing computer software and the adoption of standard languages, and how she never lost the fire. Yet she found herself paying a tax: the frustration of getting people in bureaucracies to change and embrace new technologies. “I find in general that human beings are allergic to change. They’ve learned something, they’re perfectly satisfied doing it, and you come along and say, you’re going to do it this way. People push it away. . . . The job of changing people’s minds is one of the biggest challenges we have.

There is no level of success or reputation or money that fully buys you out of the tax; even at the zenith of a long and fruitful career, the tax remains.

Micheal Cannell related in his biography, I. M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism, that people even spit at his feet as he takes through Paris.

Throughout his career, Pei could never get rid of the tax. He accepted it as part of the price he had to pay to do the work he loved. Even in the core work itself, the creative process, Pei could never rid himself of the tax. “I get into a great inner turmoil when I have to find the right design for a building,” Pei lamented. “It absorbs me completely and I can't think of anything else. This may be a matter of hours or it may take as long as a month of sleeping badly, being irritable, sketching ideas and rejecting them. I am useless to everyone else. It is traumatic for my wife.

The crucial question is, Does the inner fire for what you’re doing far exceed the tax you have to pay to be able to do it? If not, can you change some aspect of it to lower the tax rate? Recall Barbara McClintock leaving the University of Missouri to find a more suitable home at Cold Spring Harbor, thereby lowering her tax rate to a more sustainable level. There might be a point when the tax rate becomes too large to pay, and you decide it is time to leave behind the activity that you love to do. Though the dominant pattern in our study is that so long as they were in frame with their encodings and full of fire for what they were doing, our subjects largely made changes and adjustments to be able to stay in hedgehog mode.

According to the professor of history Sidney R. Bland, Alice Paul told him that Burns was “never quite as committed as we’d like”— an astounding statement that says more about Paul than it does about Burns, given that Burns also endured hunger strikes and torturous force-feedings. According to Professor Bland, “Lucy Burns was the first of the ‘silent sentinels’ to be incarcerated; she spent more time in jail than any American suffragist.”

Lucy Burns never wanted to live a purely monomaniacal life like Alice Paul’s, but that does not mean she lacked fire or focus. Alice Paul didn’t appear to have much of anything else in her life than her work for women’s rights because, the evidence leads me to conclude, she didn’t feel the need for much of anything else in her life. Lucy Burns, in contrast, did feel the need for other aspects of her life. That Paul focused nearly 100% of her fire on the fight for suffrage and women’s rights doesn’t make her a more worthy template to follow. Lucy Burns also focused her fire during the fight for suffrage, just not in the purely monomaniacal manner of Alice Paul.

Again, one of the things I most want you to take from this book is a deep skepticism about any judgmental “worthiness hierarchy” that favors a singular measure of what to make of a life. There is absolutely no legitimate way to judge Alice Paul’s life as better than Lucy Burn’s life, or vice versa. They are different. Different people, different encodings, different priorities, different temperaments, different choices, but both lived out fire-filled lives.

In sum across the study, we found evidence that 30 out of 34 people (88%) engaged in invigorating side passions while in hedgehog mode. The side passions across the study covered quite a wide range, including gardening, knitting, painting, composing poetry, woodworking, running, bicycling, doing aerobics, skiing, golfing, playing tennis, mountain climbing, fly-fishing, reading, visiting art galleries, hosting dinner parties, playing poker, studying the occult, engaging in a deep meditation practice, teaching Sunday school, and disco dancing.

The point here is not about superhuman endurance, endless self-inflicted suffering, awe-inspiring work ethic, or even self-discipline. I’ve come to see that for individual lives it is more about feeling intrinsically compelled than about being fanatically disciplined. I used to think of myself as a disciplined person, but the more I studied these lives, the more I came to see that I never really needed discipline to keep going. If you so love what you’re doing, and you feel so well encoded for it that you simply cannot stop yourself from doing it, then how is that discipline? I love the time of bliss in the hours of transition from night to dawn, and there is nothing in the world I would rather be doing than creative work as the light changes. I still hit nearly every single day excited by the work at hand, checking my watch in the middle of the night hoping that it is far enough into the morning to justify getting up, thinking to myself, “Please, oh please, let it be at least 4 a.m., so I can get going!” That’s not discipline; that’s love.

Of all the sources of fire, I’ve concluded that perhaps the biggest is sheer unadulterated love of the doing. It’s like a personal flywheel within: If you discover something you’re encoded for and you love doing it, then you can't help but want to do more of it, which means you can't help but get better at it, which means you can't help but move toward the intrinsic satisfaction of excellence in what you do, which further reinforces doing what you are encoded for and love to do.

Part 2: Navigating Cliffs and Fog

6. Cliffs

My compassion for people going through a cliff has increased and deepened by doing this study. To harshly judge people for “not getting their act together” quickly in the shadow of a cliff reflects a profound ignorance of the often long and arduous process of getting to the other side of a significant cliff. If your life is knocked sideways or torn asunder by a cliff, and especially if that cliff come with mourning a loss and/or feeling the deep pain of grief, you can find yourself lost in the thick, murky fog for a very long time.

But the more I discussed the study with a wide range of people, the more I came to realize that cliffs appear to be a universal part of the human condition. The long arc of a life is never perfectly smooth. Look closely enough, and life is fractured, diverted, kinked, disrupted, severed, and transformed along the way. Look closer still, and people can find themselves reeling from cliffs and wandering in the fog, only to emerge in places they’d never imagined. Which brings us right to the cusp of another prevalent element of our human experience, the subject to which we now turn: fog.

7. Fog

Micheal J. Fox and Maurice White emerged on the other side of the fog in very different places because they were very different people with different encodings and different answers to the question of what fed the inner fire. White would have likely been both unhappy and ineffective if he’d tried to do what Fox did, just as Fox would have been unhappy and ineffective trying to do what White did. On the last day of his life, not long after his 74th birthday, White and the writer Herb Powell talked, as they did often while collaborating on White’s compelling and revealing memoir, My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire.

When White made the commitment to go all in on creating a life in music, he struggled just to eat. He later reflected in his memoir, “No money, many days hungry, I was dropping weight. . . . Every day I would go down to this Greek restaurant. . . . They had this great deal: pita bread, some veggies, and a piece of meat, all for $1. I ate that way for a few months, one meal a day, one dollar a day.” White worked his way out of scarcity within a couple of years (ages 21 to 22), getting ever more steady work as a drummer. Even so, it would take another six years before he would create the band Earth, Wind & Fire (at age 28) and another few years with three marginally successful albums to finally release a first hit album (at age 31). Yet throughout, he had unwavering dedication to a life in music. After he founded Earth, Wind & Fire—almost like creating a perfect instrument for himself— White enjoyed years of absolute clarity that leading the band would be the primary activity of his life.

Fog is not a defect. Fog is not a character flaw. Fog is not rare. Fog is normal, natural, common, and highly prevalent. Fog can descend in youth, in midlife, in later years. And in the wake of a cliff, the fog can envelop us in murk so thick that we can see only one or two steps ahead. Even the most successful, capable, energetic, ambitious, and otherwise clearheaded and self-directed people can find themselves in a major fog funk.

I’ve noted how this research profoundly changed me and what I think about how life works. And one of the most significant transformations is my appreciation for the inevitable fog of life. Fog, I came to understand, is a common human experience, even for people who otherwise seem to have great clarity about what to make of their lives. And if episodes of fog enveloped even people in this study, none of us should judge ourselves harshly when we wake up one day to find ourselves befuddled and confused in the fog.

Fog of Youth

While some of the people in our study found a clear path quite early, others had a somewhat foggy phase in their teens and 20s. Even someone as clear and resolute as Alice Paul (once she found herself committed to the fight for suffrage) had a somewhat fog-filled wandering phase in her youth. In college at Swarthmore, she majored in biological sciences, a field she never seriously pursued after graduation. After college, she went to New York to do social work related to labour issues and study at the New York School of Philanthropy. After living in New York for a year or so, she entered graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, thinking she might pursue and academic/teaching career. She then completed a master’s degree. There is some discrepancy in the sources as to whether her master’s was in sociology or political inquiry, but either way she embarked on a vector quite divergent from biology! She then travelled abroad, first in Germany, then on to England, where she studied at the London School of Economics. Biology, social work, economics . . . where was young Alice Paul going? What was all this wandering and exploration adding up to?

Paul took her first steps toward fighting for suffrage in England, when she joined protests organized by the militant suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, which led to her meeting Lucy Burns in jail, joining a hunger strike, and being force-fed. But even then, Alice Paul had not fully emerged from the fog of youth. Upon her return to the United States, she pinged back to an academic path, completing a PhD in economics. Was she going to become a professor of economics or a teacher or a practicing economist or a social worker or a writer, or . . . what exactly?

At age 28, she took a big step when she helped architect a suffrage parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential inauguration, a seminal moment that revealed her encodings for quiet, fearless leadership and a penchant for crafting spectacles of protest. She also began to show what would be one of her most distinctive leadership encodings: strategic insight. Paul had an impressive ability to see with piercing clarity the grand strategies that would lead to victory. In particular, she saw that the best strategy lay in pursuit of a constitutional amendment, rather than seeking suffrage state by state, and she co-founded with Lucy Burns the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage dedicated to that strategy.

He was searching for a way to meld them together. He emerged from the fog clear in his mind to define the core purpose of the company in terms of ideals he learned studying Plato and other philosophers. He rejected conventional business school dogma that the purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder wealth, replacing it with the purpose to provide a place for people to flourish and to enhance the community. To be clear, the company would also seek to grow profits and generate robust cash flow, but mainly as a necessary means to fuel the core purpose.

This can be particularly disorienting if you thought success would make you eternally happy or fill your life with meaning, only to discover that it does neither. Achieving success or accomplishing a huge goal (whether personal or public) does not answer the question of what to make of a life. In fact, it can have the exact opposite effect, forcing the question back to the center of your existence, to be addressed anew.

In my previous research into the question of what makes great companies tick, my colleagues and I observed a prevalent precursor to corporate decline: the post-BHAG stall. BHAG (pronounced “bee-hag”) stands for “Big Hairy Arduous Goal.” In Built to Last, Jerry Porras and I discovered the power of having a BHAG to galvanize an organization, acting as a powerful mechanism to stimulate progress. But we also discovered that companies can become adrift and on the verge of decline after achieving the BHAG. To avoid this trap, a company needs to have an enduring reason for being (its core purpose) that acts like a star on the horizon, forever chased but never reached no matter how many goals the company achieves.

Just because you’ve achieved success doesn’t mean your encodings have expired. If part of the answer to the question of what to make of a life is to continually discover and deploy encodings in a direction that feeds the inner fire, then success (in whatever form and level) is simply more of a by-product that happens along the way. When we forget that, success itself can be a catalyst for fog.

We found scant evidence that the people in our study had an explicit goal of working until a target retirement age to be followed by a life dominated by leisure. The vast majority of people in this study remained engaged in some permutation of a hedgehog well past the age of 60, in some cases into their 70s, 80s, even 90s. That said, nearly half the people in our study had a “retirement” from one hedgehog partway through their lives and faced the challenge of transitioning to the next one. Sometimes these were relatively smooth transitions, such as Tenley Albright’s shift from skating to surgery.

However, I did offer one key lesson from the research: When you’re lost in the fog, avoid big irreversible decisions.

I felt miscast inside a large company working on software for personal computers. I knew early that while I respected HP and felt grateful for the opportunity, I’d never flourish there. So, at the suggestion of Rochelle Myers, who’d co-created the creativity course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I decided to use working at HP as a personal laboratory to study myself, or more precisely, to study myself like a bug.

I carried my bug book with me all the time, making notes when I’d notice things about the bug named Jim. Then, one day, I had a turning point in discovering my encodings. I was asked to research, learn, and teach the team about networked personal computing and its strategic implications for HP. I became enthralled with researching and trying to understand something big and new. And even more, I found myself entranced with the challenge of how to convert my understanding into digestible concepts. I’d started to discover an encoding that would animate me for the rest of my life: the ability to take a mass of information and make sense of it, to go from “chaos to concept.” Then came the day of epiphany, when I got to share my learnings with our internal team. I discovered that I had a peculiar capability for packaging and teaching concepts to other people in ways that would stick.

To this day, I continue to use a permutation of a bug book, though it has evolved into a systematic spreadsheet that I update daily. Each evening, before I fall asleep, I open a spreadsheet and insert three sets of information. First, I detail the ingredients of the day, how I spent my time. Second, I note how many “creative hours” I got into the day, which I track to ensure that they’re kept above 1,000 per every 365–day cycle (to sustain my rhythm of creative work). Third, I note the quality of the day, a score of how the day felt, on a plus-two, plus-one, zero, minus-one, minus-two scale. I also make notes when I get a plus-two day or a minus-two day about why the day proved exceptionally positive or exceptionally negative. Over time, I’m able to do sorts and correlations. What makes for plus-two days (super-positive days)? What makes for minus-two days (super-negative days)? What is the pattern? What changes can I make to get more plus-two and plus-one days and fewer minus-one and minus-two days? Forty years after I started the bug book, I remain a “scientist of the self” and continue to make dispassionate observations about the bug named Jim.

As you’re wondering through the fog, you use the compass as you take a series of iterative steps toward having all three elements come together into One Big Thing.

And that is a key phrase: “iterative steps.”

The people in this study surprised me with the extent to which their lives were so often unplanned. Their lives were organic, unfolding, iterative, adaptive. They were like explorers adventuring into a vast unmapped territory, making discoveries and adapting a to whatever they hit along the way. Culling through tens of thousands of documents on the people in this study, I was continually struck by how their lives went down paths and ended up in places that they never expected. The path out of the fog lies in a series of small steps, a highly iterative, often unplanned approach that I think of as simplex stepping through life. And it is to this idea of simplex stepping that we now turn.

8. Simplex Stepping

The term “simplex stepping” is inspired by a concept from a professor on my college campus named George Dantzig. It made a big impression on me when I first learned about it in a mathematical sciences course. It wasn’t the math mechanics that caught my attention, but the sheer elegant beauty of Dantzig’s seminal insight and what struck me as its philosophical implications.

Consider the following challenge: You want to find an optimal outcome to a huge complex problem that has many variables; furthermore, each variable has many possible values. One approach might be to calculate every possible permutation of the mix of values and then select its best result. But suppose there are too many possibilities for even the most powerful computer to process them all. How could you find an optimal result? Dantzig showed that it is possible to move in an iterative series of small steps that will lead you to an optimal outcome without ever needing to calculate the total set of possibilities. His approach proved reliable, and it revolutionized optimization. He called it the “simplex algorithm

It happened in steps. Many of her first steps were not about what but about who. Suppose you’re tossed into a leadership role for which you feel unprepared, and in which you find yourself lost in the fog without a clearly articulated vision for what to do or where to take the company. What steps should you take? Graham did what many great leaders do; she practiced the “First Who” principle: First get the right people on the bus, then figure out where to drive the bus. If you don’t know what’s coming down the road, your best bet is to have people with you who can adapt to and perform brilliantly no matter what challenges and opportunities come along the way. Step by step, person by person, hire by hire, seat by seat, Graham gradually assembled a busload of the right people around her.

Woodward later described this moment as like a shot of Adrenalin, showing her full support and resolve, but also making clear her standards: “Never” was unacceptable. “At that moment she achieved the perfect managerial pitch,” recalled Woodward. “She wasn’t going to meddle, try to edit or second guess, but she did, after all, want a better performance. Her skill was to raise the bar, gently but relentlessly.” Raising the bar, gently but relentlessly—now that is a powerful leadership encoding.

No matter how successful she became, she maintained a learning mindset: First learn, then lead. She continued stepping forward by getting great people around her, learning from them, and then applying what she learned to make better decisions.

She learned from Buffet in steps, cumulatively building a foundation of managerial and financial capability. Buffet would show up at board meetings with stacks of annual reports from a wide range of companies, giving Graham homework assignments to read them and build her business acumen. Graham dutifully did her homework, and then she and Buffet would sit down to discuss and glean insights about the ingredients of business performance. Then, at the next board meeting, Buffett would drop another stack of annual reports in Graham’s lap, and they’d repeat the process. Step by step, Graham built a foundation of financial competence and managerial excellence under the tutelage of her mentor. Keep in mind, she did this long before Buffett had become well known to the world as the Oracle of Omaha. She simply followed her encoded operating mode of getting the right people around her, learning from them, and then deploying that learning to great effect.

Courage, the saying goes, is not the absence of fear but the ability to act in the presence of fear. Katherine Graham lived and led with fear and anxiety that would never fully abate, no matter how successful, or powerful, or famous, or wealthy she might be or become. Warren Buffett described her as marching forward with knocking knees. Ben Bradlee related that she talked about worrying awake at night, “picking the wool off the blankets.” She paid a hefty Stress and Drudgery Tax, not just in leading through dramatic episodes, but also in shouldering the more routine duties of effective leadership such as giving speeches. Even the prospect of making remarks at the staff holiday party would loom for days or weeks ahead of time, filling her with dread. Graham herself copiously conveyed her inner turmoil; I quick count across her memoir yielded some permutation of words of fear or anxiety (for example, “dread,” “terrified,” “anxious,” “worried,” “fretted,” “frightened,” “nervous,” “anguish”) 289 times in reference to herself.

On June 15, 1971, The Washington Post Company went public at $6.50 per share (adjusted for a subsequent 4-for-1 split). When Kay stepped down as CEO on May 9, 1991, the price was $222, a gain of 3,315 percent. During the same period the Dow advanced from 907 to 2,971, an increase of 227 percent.” Now that I have studied Graham’s life and leadership, my own assessment is that she stands as one of the absolute best examples of a leader who took a company from good to great, with some of the gutsiest business leadership decisions of all time.

When Graham came across a particularly good one, she’d write “nugget” alongside the golden find. They did this for years, until they’d accumulated a great big pile of gleaming nuggets. Only then— after six years of culling documents, doing interviews, making transcriptions, and sifting for nuggets— did Graham make the definitive decision to write the book, which would take her another eight years to finish and publish. Graham would receive a Pulitzer Prize for her book at age 80.

Across the study, we can extract a more general pattern: When lost in the fog, simply take what looks like the next best step. Not a big step, but a small step. Then reassess, step again, reassess, step again, reassess, step again. Keep moving in steps. And one day, the fog will begin to lift and the cumulative effect of all those steps will become clear.

The lives in our study show the great utility of moving in small steps when otherwise befuddled and uncertain. You don’t need to have the answers for what to do with the rest of your life. You just need to begin simplex stepping. You might get a long way down the road before you even know where you are going.

Simplex stepping works in part because it allows you to take small steps, to get moving. And movement creates energy that fuels more movement, a feeling of momentum even if you don’t yet know where that momentum is taking you. If you just sit in the fog doing nothing and hoping the fog will clear on its own, you might never get to the other side. As Richard P. Carlton, former CEO of 3M, once put it: You so often get where you are going by stumbling, but you can only stumble if you’re moving.

The cliff can be like being jolted out of a deep slumber by a screeching fire alarm. Gaining clarity and coming into frame can be more like waking up without an alarm clock; at some point, you are aware that you’ve shifted from sleep to wake, but you only recognize that fact after the shift from sleep to wake already happened. Or think of it as being out on a long walk that starts in the fog. As you ramble, the fog gradually lifts. There comes a moment when you realize that you’re already standing in bright sunshine with a long clear view. You know it happened (“I’m standing in the sun!”) but might not be able to pinpoint the precise instant that it happened.

This study shows that there are fog phases of life and there are clarity phases of life. In the fog phases, we see simplex stepping as a highly functional method of navigation. In the clarity phases, we continue to see simplex stepping at work, but we also see more big decisions and life commitments. In both phases, we have action and movement, not just sitting in a room and contemplating.

Just because you can see the cliff coming doesn’t necessarily make the cliff itself less painful or difficult when it finally arrives. Nor does it mean that you will avoid fog. Yet simplex stepping in anticipation of a cliff might shorten the time from cliff to clarity. For a number of people in our study with foreseeable cliffs, they precleared some of the fog before the cliff. Sensing that Led Zeppelin would eventually come to an end, Robert Plant had already begun to think about life after the band a few years before John Bonham died. He even applied for a spot at a teacher-training college.

And Frontiere’s Rams would get to the Super Bowl for a second and third time, including the Ram’s first-ever Super Bowl Championship in 2000. Gliding along on a convertible in the celebratory parade after winning the Super Bowl, she heard fans all up and down the route cheering, “We love you, Georgia.” “I’ve never felt so much love,” said Frontiere, shining at age 72, “and I’ve never loved so much.

There is no evidence that there was anyone (other than perhaps Carroll Rosenbloom) who imagined that Frontiere— a former Las Vegas chorus girl and lounge singer who’d been married five times by her early 30s— would one day become known as Madame Ram, appear in an American Express commercial as a savvy business icon, oversee the “Greatest Show on Turf,” and win a Super Bowl ring. Neither Graham nor Frontiere fully clicked into frame as business leaders until after age 50, and they flourished in line with their encodings well into their 60s and 70s.

Beware the urge to judge people under the arrogant and ignorant assumption that you can see them and their lives in their entirety.

People can be in a phase of life where they are simply out of frame, with exquisite encodings hidden from view. Or they might be deploying their encodings into something private and personal, largely invisible to all but those who know them well. Or they might be in the fog, simplex stepping in small unseen steps toward something spectacularly unexpected. Life’s not done until it’s done, and there remains always the potential to discover encodings that had previously been unseen and to summon the full force of inner fire into a stunning result.

But as I got deeper into this research, observing the vast differences across the people in this study and how they flourished at their best when life lined up with their encodings and what fed their inner fire, I gradually began to change. Subtly at first, I began to shift away from trying to change people into what I wanted them to be. Simultaneously, I shifted toward finding or creating the best possible match between their encodings and their responsibilities. It didn’t happen overnight, it was more of a managerial form of simplex stepping. I’d sense something about a person’s encodings, and then I’d make a shift in their responsibilities to fir those encodings. Then I might observe something else about their encodings, discovering something wonderful about them when they thrived in a task, and I’d make another shift in responsibilities. Together, we essentially simplex stepped toward them coming into frame in a seat on the bus.

My attempts to mold him failed, and I felt increasingly frustrated. He thought I’d fire him. Fortunately, for him and me, I began to grasp that he had not failed me; rather, I had failed him by putting him in a role out of frame with his encodings. Furthermore, I felt somewhat responsible for his future; I did not want to see this wonderful young man start his professional life getting fired. So, I began making a series of iterative steps, testing him with different tasks that drew upon what I sensed to be his intellectual gifts, and he showed signs of flourishing.

By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.

Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

9. The Roulette Wheel of Life

In reading through the hundreds of source documents we collected on Jimmy Page, along with the voluminous books (such as Chris Salewicz’s Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography, Martin Power’s No Quarter: The Three Lives of Jimmy Page, and Page’s beautifully curated book Jimmy Page: The Anthology), I was continually struck by the confluence of circumstances. The discovery of the guitar. The same county as Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. The blues-influenced rock music tsunami sweeping across England in the 1960’s. The epicenter of the recording scene within 20 miles of Page’s teenage home.

All of which brings us to one of the most important points of this entire book: the difference between finding “the” hedgehog and finding “a” hedgehog. If we hold to the idea that each of us has only one hedgehog and much of life depends on whether we find it, then this would be a very depressing study. But if we embrace the view that each of us has many possibilities to potentially discover— that the constellation of encodings within each of us is vast and largely undiscovered— then the challenge changes dramatically from the low odds of finding that one elusive unicorn hedgehog to finding just one out of many possibilities.

One of the key ways that people get a high return on luck is in seizing what Morten Hansen and I described as NATILIE moments. NATILIE (pronounced like the name Natalie) stands for “Not All Time In Life Is Equal.” NATILIE moments are episodes of outsized opportunity or peril that call for summoning a level of energy and focus far beyond the person’s normal set point. Life serves up NATILIE moments, which often come as luck events, that count much more than other moments.

Consider the NATILIE moment of Micheal J. Fox and the lucky opportunity to play Marty McFly in Back to the Future.

Part 3: Feeding the Inner Fire Long and Late

10. Extend Out/Circle Back

Consider this simple statistic: Streep earned more Oscar nominations after age 40 than any other actor in history (male or female) had achieved across the entirety of their careers.

In fact, Streep earned just as many Oscar nominations in her 60s as she did during her hyperproductive 30s. As of 2024, she’d earned 21 nominations, 75% more than any other actor in history, and I would not be surprised to see her land another one in her late 70s or even her 80s.

How did she work through the “witch offer” phase of her 40s, regain full stride in her 50s, and then accelerate? How did she keep the fire fully fed long and late.

Meryl Streep exemplifies one of the key elements uncovered in the research: Extend Out/Circle Back. The basic idea of Extend Out/Circle Back is a looping process of, on the one hand, pushing out the edges and doing new things and, on the other hand, returning to the wellspring of encodings tapped before.

Extending out feeds the inner fire by animating the human yearning for growth, learning, discovery, and challenge; it activates the joy of self-development, capturing the youthful energy that comes from starting anew. Extending out can reveal previously hidden encodings; a continuous process of discovery that feeds the inner fire. (Wow, that’s exciting— I never knew I had that inside me!) Circle back also acts as a source of reinvigoration, but in a different way. Circling back reframes big bright encodings discovered long ago, which also feeds the inner fire. To circle back by tapping encodings discovered earlier in life is like refueling for the next phase if extending out.

Part of Streep’s encodings lay in an unquenchable curiosity about what it would be like to be a specific individual within a particular story and then internalizing that character. “Acting is my way of investigating human nature,” she explained. It’s an ethos she carried across the decades, as Streep succinctly put it, “I’ve always been curious to know what it’s like to be you.” As she continued to extend out into her 60s, Streep kept the curiosity motor running full bore, describing it as the key ingredient in the secret sauce that “most animates my work,” adding, “I’m really interested.

Winger had always followed her natural instincts about when to take a break, saying, “There’s just not a flight plan, when I run out of gas, I land for a while.” She exemplified an important distinction in life: Don’t confuse the need for a break with the need to quit.

I seem to have at least as much energy at 67 as I had at 37, perhaps even more. I need less sleep. I feel on the balls of my feet, tilted forward. I can't wait to get up before 5 a.m. and throw myself into each day. The inner fire burns brighter than ever. There are multiple elements that feed into this, including the sheer good luck of health to this point in my life. But now I see that one huge element has to do with this very project being an invigorating fusion of Extend Out/Circle Back. By taking on an entirely new subject at this stage of life, shifting from studying what makes great companies tick to studying people and what makes their lives tick, I’m clearly extending out. At the same time, I’m also circling back, returning to encoded operating modes I discovered years ago, particularly my penchant for doing big research projects, going from chaos to concept, and then writing and teaching what I learn. I’m incredibly energized by discovering entirely new elements of myself in doing this project and by how the study itself has changed me in such profound ways. I’m equally energized by circling back to activate and reactivate interests and encodings I’d discovered long ago.

11. Choosing Responsibilities

A turning point for me in this study came when I happened across a comment from Toni Morrison buried in a 1985 interview: “You see, the point is that freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilities; it’s choosing the ones you want.” Morrison’s comment cast a light back over the lives in this study to highlight a crucial ingredient in feeding the inner fire: Freedom does not mean the absence of responsibilities; freedom means that you get to choose your responsibilities.

One of the most poignant moments for me in doing this research came while watching the Micheal J. Fox documentary Still, in a scene where Fox is working with his physical trainer. Fox, his shoulders visibly shaking, talks with his trainer about what he needs to do to feel better. But the reason he gives for sustaining his effort centers not on lessening his own pain but on what his example means to people in the Parkinson’s community. “People express to me that I make them feel better. I make them do things they might not otherwise do. And that’s, that’s the most powerful thing you could ever feel and that’s a huge responsibility and I don’t want to f— — it up.” In the film, you can see— and it’s difficult to watch— how much Parkinson’s had etched away the physical being of Micheal J. Fox. But you can also see the fire in his eyes, undimmed, burning bright, fueled by a responsibility that he freely chose.

As I worked on this book, I puzzled where core values fit into the research findings. To be clear, there is no single unified set of core values across all the people in this study. That said, each person developed a set of values somewhere along the way, some more explicitly than others. These values might have come from family, or mentors, or teachers, or military service, or the ethics of their field, or the social milieu in which they lived, or their faith traditions, or reading and reflection, or personal experience, or some combination. I came to see that living to a set of core values is a choice, a personal responsibility of the highest order.

The key idea here— whether public or private, whether in line with what other people think you should do or not— is the combination of two words: “choosing” and “responsibilities.” My enduring great friend Tom Tierney puts it this way, “What are you doing that meets the ‘but for’ test? What are you getting done that would not otherwise happen ‘but for you’ even if almost no one ever knows about it?”

Colson’s story shows that vibrant renewal is possible, even after scandal and disgrace, but not by trying to erase or correct the past.

Many of Colson’s obituaries followed a narrative of a man reviled in his earlier life, whose faith conversion had initially been viewed with suspicion and who largely redeemed himself through his nearly four decades of work on behalf of prisoners. I’ll share one excerpt, to illustrate, from The Wall Street Journal: “Still, for nearly four full post-Watergate decades, Colson, who died this past Saturday at age 80, steadfastly practiced what he preached about prisons, prisoners and penal reform. Where criminal justice was concerned, he was God’s good man, not Nixon’s bad man.

By its very nature, this study relies on people with highly visible accomplishments. I worry that some readers might misinterpret this as an implicit worthiness hierarchy that valorizes achieving fame over taking more unseen paths. I also worry that some of the people in the study can feel so unapproachable in what they made of their lives that readers might discount the relevance of learning from them, or be left wondering, “Well, their lives are interesting, but could I ever do what they did?” I share that feeling. Studying Charles Colson made me feel somewhat intimidated by the standard he lived to after prison.

You and I don’t need to try to be exactly like any of the people in this study. The relevant question, as it pertains to this chapter, is not whom do we want to emulate, but what responsibilities do we feel compelled to choose? All of us, no matter what we do in life, and no matter how the roulette wheel spins, can choose responsibilities beyond ourselves. It doesn’t matter how many people you touch with the responsibilities you choose; it might be many, or it might be only one or a few. What matters is the very act of honoring a self-chosen responsibility.

The Dangerous Lure of “Legacy”

A number of years ago, a few people began to ask me, “What do you want your legacy to be?” and “What do you want to be remembered for?” At first, this question struck me as reasonable, until I asked Joanne what she thought. “It’s a waste of time to think about your legacy or how you want to be remembered,” Joanne said. “It’s self-centric and distracts from doing what’s right in front of you. Besides, you won't be here to enjoy it anyway.”

This study reinforced Joanne’s wisdom. Charles Colson achieved a legacy, but not by trying to achieve or burnish his legacy. He had responsibilities to fulfill, too much work left right in front of him to get sidetracked into the irrelevancy of how he would be remembered. He cared far more about how God would assess the way he spent his life while alive than what people would think of him after he was dead. Colson spent his energy principally on responsibilities so far beyond Watergate and Nixon that it was almost as if he’d gone to another solar system. My own read of Colson’s story is that he did in fact build a “legacy” that outlived him, but only as a residual side artifact of living to the responsibilities he chose.

12. Feeding the Inner Fire (and Doing Great Work Late)

Toni Morrison didn’t write Beloved and Jazz, two of the books highlighted in her selection for the Nobel Prize, until well past the midpoint of her life; she published Beloved at age 56 and Jazz at age 61.

Robert plant garnered 86% of his 21 Grammy nominations, and all eight of his wins, after the age of 50. As I write this in 2025, Plant continues his creative work (in his mid-70s), and it is entirely possible that he will bring forth more award-winning music.

Or consider the following question: If you count the pages in three major biographies of Benjamin Franklin, how many pages remain on average after Franklin hits age 60? The answer: 53%. Imagine coming at life with the idea that turning 60 means that more than half of what might be the most interesting, energetic, and creative in a life has yet to be written.

Sherman influenced events with a rare instinct to wait until precisely the right moment to speak. Historian George Bancroft wrote of Sherman, “In the convention he never made long speeches, but would intuitively seize on the turning point of a question, and present it in terse language, which showed his own opinion and the strength on which it rested.” This ability to sense “the turning point of a question” proved to be one of Sherman’s most effective leadership encodings.

Yet he remains far less well known than Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Adam’s, Jefferson, and Madison. Sherman sought impact, not fame, responsibility, not credit. He chose the responsibility to protect the Constitution, deploying his leadership encodings into the work right in front of him. Sherman might not have gained the famous legacy of his fellow founders, but he is one of the primary reasons the Constitution itself endured.

In the source notes for chapter 12, I’ve included some of the most useful materials we found on Sherman, if you’re interested in learning more about this unsung hero of the Constitution.

As Carl Van Doren wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Franklin, “He had wanted wealth only that he might be free, and to be free only that he might be useful.

Across his life, Franklin displayed an encoded operating mode of active curiosity. Never content to just ponder, he felt compelled to observe directly, to experiment, to test and measure, to invent, to question, to figure out how the world around him worked— to chase the whirlwind. Franklin charted the Gulf Stream, identified the meteorological forces of storms, and became famous for his experiments with lightning and electricity. He established many of the terms we still use today in discussing aspects of electricity, such as “charge,” “conductor,” “electric shock,” and “battery.

In the end, Franklin drew upon his earned respect and facility with language to formally move for adoption of the Constitution in a final speech (read aloud for him by the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson) to secure enough support of the delegates to send it to the states for ratification. Franklin had come to see the wisdom in human affairs of embracing the best imperfect result.

I also take solace from Franklin’s life, in learning that he endured an extended trough in his 50s and 60s (relative to the rest of his life). If Benjamin Franklin can make mistakes and misjudgments, then I don’t feel so bad about my own mistakes and misjudgments. If Benjamin Franklin can spend years on efforts that ultimately ended in failure, then I don’t feel so bad about my own efforts on projects that ended up being dead ends or cul-de-sacs. If Benjamin Franklin can feel dispirited and in a fog funk, then I don’t feel so bad about my own existential fog funks. If Benjamin Franklin can enter his 60s with half of the most significant pages of his life yet to be written, then I feel quite good about the possibilities for the late decades of life.

In writing about Benjamin Franklin and casting back through all the remarkable people in this investigation, I’m struck by the imperfections in their lives. The stories led me to a gigantic, calming exhale about my own life imperfections, letting go the anchoring weight of past mistakes and missed opportunities. I take from studying them a reminder that I wrote for myself and that I return to whenever I find myself being pulled around backward in the saddle by past regrets: You cannot straighten out the road behind you.

Why Capabilities Increase with Age

SUB-CAPABILITY NO. 1: RAW ENCODINGS

We’ve covered encodings extensively in this book, so I’m not going to dwell on them here, other than to make two observations. First, with the exception of purely physical encodings (like athletic speed or the ability to hit high musical notes), I see little evidence that encodings dim dramatically over time. Second, people can discover previously hidden encodings as the frame of their lives shifts, which serves only to increase one’s capabilities.

SUB-CAPABILITY NO.2: CUMULATIVE EXPERIENCE

The people in our study simply got better at doing what they were encoded for, layering experience upon experience over a long period of time. They learned how to recognize patterns, they learned from mistakes, they honed existing skills and added new skills.

SUB-CAPABILITY NO.3: CREDIBILITY EQUITY

Sherman and Franklin made a huge impact late in life partly by drawing upon storehouses of credibility they’d built over decades. It wasn’t just Franklin’s words at the end of the Constitutional Convention that held sway, but also that these words came from Franklin. It wasn’t just that Sherman articulated a strong argument to preserve the actual text of the Constitution and use the amendment mechanism to include the Bill of Rights, but also that the argument came from Sherman.

A New Lens on Leadership*

There is a great irony for me as I finish this project: I learned more about effective leadership in doing this study than in all my decades of studying what makes great organizations tick. That’s an irony because many people who know my prior work would categorize me as a “leadership expert” based on five books wherein I’d studied and written about some of the greatest corporate leaders of all time. Yet it took this project to finally see perhaps the most important ingredient in effective leadership: leading from your encodings.

That definition is simply this: Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. Leadership is not a personality. Leadership is not charisma. Leadership is not power. Leadership is not giving orders. Leadership has nothing to do with position or rank or title or any of that. True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow.

I want you to notice three elements of this definition. First, as a leader, it’s your responsibility to see what must be done. You might do this by your own insight or in collaboration with others, but however you do it, you need to get clear. Second, it’s not about getting people to do what must be done but about getting them to want to do it. Third, it’s not a science; it’s an art. And it is this third element— the artistry— where leadership intersects with this study. Each of us is a different “leadership artist” because each of us has different encodings.

Leadership effectiveness flows not from following the leadership recipes of others, or in having something we might call a “leadership personality.” There cannot possibly be a universal recipe for leadership, for the simple reason that we are all encoded differently. The key is to trust your own leadership encodings, not to follow someone else’s. If someone offers you a leadership recipe based on what worked for them, remember that it worked for them because it reflected their encodings, which likely differ substantially from your encodings. It’s okay to have a recipe for leadership, so long as it is your recipe that flows from your encodings and your inner fire.

I don’t think of the people in this study as inspirational; I think of them as inspired. I don’t aim to inspire you to be exactly like any of the specific people in this study. I hope, rather, that you’re able to find yourself clicked into frame, inspired by what fits your encodings and ignites your inner fire, and that you commit to pursue it with excellence.

13. Questions Are Better Than Answers

In the beginning of this book, I noted that multiple seeds ultimately led to this study. The first came with the loss of my father, leaving me with unanswered questions about how to navigate life. The second seed came when Joanne prematurely lost her identity as a professional athlete, which planted the question of how people reconstitute themselves when they hit a life-altering cliff. The third seed came in being inspired by the work and wisdom of the late John W. Gardner and his book Self-Renewal.

How do you know when it might be time to make a life change?” I asked. “As soon as you start asking the question,” he replied.

One might expect that I’d wrap up a book like this with a set of recipes for living or a list of ten steps to a better life, or a bevy of helpful prescriptions. The findings of the research and the ethos of this book stand against the very idea of doing that. You might have come to greatly admire many of the people in this study (as did I), but that doesn’t mean you should try to become exactly like any of them. Don’t confuse admiration with prescription, role models with cookie-cutter templates.

I believe questions can be even more powerful than answers. As I indicated at the very beginning, this is a self-knowledge book, not a self-help book. It is a call to “Know Thyself”— and to bring that knowledge to life in the choices you make— not a prescription. Questions are the seeds of discovery, and the spirit of discovery is at the very core of this work. Not only about discovering shared patterns across the vastly different lives in this study, but also about making discoveries pertinent to our own lives.

A friend once said of my earlier work that I wrote with a signature of “well-founded hope.” The mountains of systematic research, combined with my dedication to drawing insights from the evidence, provided the “well-founded” part. “But the message is always hopeful,” he said. “You demonstrate with evidence that good can become great, that people can build organizations worthy of lasting, that strong values can win in a hypercompetitive world.” Well-founded hope. This study only added to that signature for me. It made me feel even more hopeful and optimistic, not directly about the world at large, but about people. And people, after all, make the world.

Writing these words 50 years after I got back on that Greyhound bus in New Mexico, shot through the heart with the knowledge that there would never be a father there, I no longer feel the furious condemnation that drove me so hard. I now see that he simply didn’t know the right questions for fully seizing the amazing gift of his one life to live. I wish I could go back in time and give him those questions before it was too late. But alas, I cannot. So instead, I offer them here to you. And I take them for my own.

Acknowledgments

Hollis Heimbouch, my long-time working partner at Harper-Collins Publishers, has always encouraged me to take whatever time I need to create a new book, showing full confidence that the best work requires years to bake.

Nigel Wilcockson, my longtime publishing partner in the U.K., proved himself yet again to be a writer’s editor with whom I can engage intellectually and philosophically. Early in our working friendship, Nigel grasped that my work was never fundamentally about business and leadership, but about the study of people and exceptional human endeavor, and he encouraged me to boldly break out of the limiting circle of being defined as a business and leadership author.

Bill Meehan, intellectual provocateur and caring friend, encouraged and challenged me to widen and deepen the scope of what this book is all about. “Don’t waste your time— or your words— on the little questions,” he’d hammer at me. “Go for the big questions, the questions of truth and wisdom and meaning. You need to be more of a poet and less of an analyst, more of a philosopher and less of a strategist” I’ve always built my books on a foundation of rigorous research and empirical evidence, and What to Make of a Life is no exception.