With each round of interviewing, June saw the links between old and new more clearly: “At first I wondered what I would do with my knowledge of literature. It seemed like such a waste. But then I realized that what I have always wanted is a job that keeps me constantly interested and always learning new things.” With each round, she also met more and more people who, like her, had “unconventional backgrounds,” or who impressed her as role models for whom she’d like to become: “I met an extraordinary woman—super smart and super nice—in fixed-income research, who graduated from my alma mater around the same time I did.

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.

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!