To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timind, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

Think back for a moment on that someone you know who lived a full life. You get the sense, don’t you, that they were on to something. That they had somehow cut through all the noise, and tuned themselves into a signal only they could hear. And they didn’t do this in spite of their work. Rather, they seemed to be doing it through their work. Their loves and their work were inextricably linked.

In their telling, “work” does not simply mean “job.” It is not merely manual or knowledge labor. Instead, “work” is anything of value they created for someone else.

What I missed, and what got me so lost in my personal life, was the emotional power of being seen for who I truly am. Love, in any relationship, is not protection—it is not someone reaching in and saving you from yourself.

Love is not diversity—it is not someone complementing your personality with different strengths.

Love is not similarity—it is not someone sharing your interests, or values, or dreams.

Love is someone seeing the fullness of you and wanting you to be the best possible version of you. This is what a relationship is for—any relationship, whether friend, business partner, sibling, or lover. It is for each person to do all they can to help the other express their uniqueness as powerfully as possible. Love’s goal is to make the other person bigger.

To love someone is to see them, all of them, the best of them, to accept what you see, and then to do everything in your power to help them be the biggest version of themselves.

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.