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.

5. Focus the Fire

Let’s pause the Albright story to extract a lesson about the inner fire: A big source of fire lay in the fact that when in full hedgehog mode the people in our study quite simply loved what they were doing.

The key word here is “doing.

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 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.

Throughout his career, Pei could never get rid of the tax. He accepted it as part of the price he had to pay to do the work he loved. Even in the core work itself, the creative process, Pei could never rid himself of the tax. “I get into a great inner turmoil when I have to find the right design for a building,” Pei lamented. “It absorbs me completely and I can't think of anything else. This may be a matter of hours or it may take as long as a month of sleeping badly, being irritable, sketching ideas and rejecting them. I am useless to everyone else. It is traumatic for my wife.