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.

Like Toni Morrison, Barbara Tuchman talked and wrote extensively about her specific practices; she even wrote a whole book on her methods, Practicing History.

She didn’t ask the more generic question, “What practices work best for writing history?” She discovered what practices worked specifically for her.

More generally, we see the following basic pattern:

Encoding —> Awareness of encoding (implicit or explicit) —> Translation into operating modes tailored specifically (and often uniquely) to the person —> Effect

Recall how Toni Morrison began writing her first books not with a huge external audience in mind but so that she herself could read them. That her work eventually had a huge impact, both artistically and socially, flowed principally from keeping herself in frame, focused (alongside raising her children) on One Big Thing: books. When an interviewer asked her how she saw her public/social responsibility, how she knew she was “doing the write thing” with herself, Morrison responded, “You make it sound complicated, but it is really just about books. I edit books, I teach books, I write books.” Morrison believed that a great book can both be true to its historical/political context and be an imaginative creation, connected to what’s happening in the world while also being timeless, universal, and stunningly beautiful. In another interview, when asked whether she might take on a more political or public role if she didn’t write books, Morrison responded, “All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books. . . . There are people who can organize other people and I cannot. I’d just get bored.” Morrison felt a strong sense of responsibility to give back, but she did not let that knock her out of frame. Toni Morrison did give back, absolutely and in the most profoundly powerful way: She gave of her encodings.

I carried my bug book with me all the time, making notes when I’d notice things about the bug named Jim. Then, one day, I had a turning point in discovering my encodings. I was asked to research, learn, and teach the team about networked personal computing and its strategic implications for HP. I became enthralled with researching and trying to understand something big and new. And even more, I found myself entranced with the challenge of how to convert my understanding into digestible concepts. I’d started to discover an encoding that would animate me for the rest of my life: the ability to take a mass of information and make sense of it, to go from “chaos to concept.” Then came the day of epiphany, when I got to share my learnings with our internal team. I discovered that I had a peculiar capability for packaging and teaching concepts to other people in ways that would stick.