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.

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?

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.

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.

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.