Think back for a moment on that someone you know who lived a full life. You get the sense, don’t you, that they were on to something. That they had somehow cut through all the noise, and tuned themselves into a signal only they could hear. And they didn’t do this in spite of their work. Rather, they seemed to be doing it through their work. Their loves and their work were inextricably linked.

In their telling, “work” does not simply mean “job.” It is not merely manual or knowledge labor. Instead, “work” is anything of value they created for someone else.

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”).

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.

That said, there are three prevalent sources of fuel for the inner fire across the vastly different lives in the study. In addition to love of the doing, the two others are:

Extend Out/Circle Back: This is a continuous dynamic process of extending yourself— growing, learning, experimenting, expanding capabilities, discovering new encodings— while simultaneously drawing upon encodings discovered and capabilities developed earlier in life.

Of all the sources of fire, I’ve concluded that perhaps the biggest is sheer unadulterated love of the doing. It’s like a personal flywheel within: If you discover something you’re encoded for and you love doing it, then you can't help but want to do more of it, which means you can't help but get better at it, which means you can't help but move toward the intrinsic satisfaction of excellence in what you do, which further reinforces doing what you are encoded for and love to do.