The following out-of-work period was difficult but gave him [DeVore] some real exercise in a new kind of resonance:

The unsuccessful job-hunting became very frustrating, and I became very depressed. So much so that I made myself susceptible to a virus that resulted in spinal meningitis. And I was laid down flat in bed for three months with no income coming in. Nothing coming in at all and a wife who was pregnant, mortgage payments that were overdue, and every time I started to stand up my head just throbbed and I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was read. And so I had my wife go to the library.

I said, “Get me every book you can on every great person, every person who has been successful.” In these three months I devoured about twenty-five autobiographies and biographies of great people. And every time I read these biographies or autobiographies I identified with these people. These people became models.

You can’t wear your disdain for people on your sleeve, though. You end up either cowing them into submission or frustrating them into complacency. Either way, you sap them of the pride they take in their work. Over time, nearly everyone abdicated responsibility to Peter and Strat Planning, and Michael was comforted by the analytical rigor they represented.

Of course, not all of the 99.999% moments count as joyful bliss.

Welcome to the Stress and Drudgery Tax.

Even when right in the middle of the best hedgehog years of their lives, the people in this study paid what I came to call the Stress and Drudgery Tax. To be clear, the tax is not about stress and drudgery outside doing a hedgehog but about stress and drudgery in doing the actual hedgehog.

Recall Grace Hopper’s exquisite encodings for advancing computer software and the adoption of standard languages, and how she never lost the fire. Yet she found herself paying a tax: the frustration of getting people in bureaucracies to change and embrace new technologies. “I find in general that human beings are allergic to change. They’ve learned something, they’re perfectly satisfied doing it, and you come along and say, you’re going to do it this way. People push it away. . . . The job of changing people’s minds is one of the biggest challenges we have.

There is no level of success or reputation or money that fully buys you out of the tax; even at the zenith of a long and fruitful career, the tax remains.

The crucial question is, Does the inner fire for what you’re doing far exceed the tax you have to pay to be able to do it? If not, can you change some aspect of it to lower the tax rate? Recall Barbara McClintock leaving the University of Missouri to find a more suitable home at Cold Spring Harbor, thereby lowering her tax rate to a more sustainable level. There might be a point when the tax rate becomes too large to pay, and you decide it is time to leave behind the activity that you love to do. Though the dominant pattern in our study is that so long as they were in frame with their encodings and full of fire for what they were doing, our subjects largely made changes and adjustments to be able to stay in hedgehog mode.