A study from Harvard Business School shows that we learn more when we couple our experiences with periodic reflections. Even though people prefer to learn by doing, “participants who chose to reflect outperformed those who chose additional experience.

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.

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.

But as I got deeper into this research, observing the vast differences across the people in this study and how they flourished at their best when life lined up with their encodings and what fed their inner fire, I gradually began to change. Subtly at first, I began to shift away from trying to change people into what I wanted them to be. Simultaneously, I shifted toward finding or creating the best possible match between their encodings and their responsibilities. It didn’t happen overnight, it was more of a managerial form of simplex stepping. I’d sense something about a person’s encodings, and then I’d make a shift in their responsibilities to fir those encodings. Then I might observe something else about their encodings, discovering something wonderful about them when they thrived in a task, and I’d make another shift in responsibilities. Together, we essentially simplex stepped toward them coming into frame in a seat on the bus.

By its very nature, this study relies on people with highly visible accomplishments. I worry that some readers might misinterpret this as an implicit worthiness hierarchy that valorizes achieving fame over taking more unseen paths. I also worry that some of the people in the study can feel so unapproachable in what they made of their lives that readers might discount the relevance of learning from them, or be left wondering, “Well, their lives are interesting, but could I ever do what they did?” I share that feeling. Studying Charles Colson made me feel somewhat intimidated by the standard he lived to after prison.