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.

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.

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.

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.