With the right people in place, you turn to Stage 2, disciplined thought. There are three key principles in Stage 2:

• Embrace the Genius of the AND.

• Confront the brutal facts (live the Stockdale Paradox).

• Clarify a Hedgehog Concept.

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.

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.

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.