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What To Make of a Life— Jim Collins

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1. A Life Transformed

Gradually at first, then in cascading waves, I noticed that the research was not just changing my brain; it was changing me. The sign of good research is that you end up in places you never expected. If after years of research all you do is reconfirm your own preconceptions, then what is the point of doing research? The whole point is to discover, to be surprised, to come to see the world and how it works differently than you did before.

After this study, I will never look at life the same ever again, and I will never look at other people the way I used to.

But the more I discussed the study with a wide range of people, the more I came to realize that cliffs appear to be a universal part of the human condition. The long arc of a life is never perfectly smooth. Look closely enough, and life is fractured, diverted, kinked, disrupted, severed, and transformed along the way. Look closer still, and people can find themselves reeling from cliffs and wandering in the fog, only to emerge in places they’d never imagined. Which brings us right to the cusp of another prevalent element of our human experience, the subject to which we now turn: fog.

However, I did offer one key lesson from the research: When you’re lost in the fog, avoid big irreversible decisions.

As you’re wondering through the fog, you use the compass as you take a series of iterative steps toward having all three elements come together into One Big Thing.

And that is a key phrase: “iterative steps.”

The people in this study surprised me with the extent to which their lives were so often unplanned. Their lives were organic, unfolding, iterative, adaptive. They were like explorers adventuring into a vast unmapped territory, making discoveries and adapting a to whatever they hit along the way. Culling through tens of thousands of documents on the people in this study, I was continually struck by how their lives went down paths and ended up in places that they never expected. The path out of the fog lies in a series of small steps, a highly iterative, often unplanned approach that I think of as simplex stepping through life. And it is to this idea of simplex stepping that we now turn.

I don’t think of the people in this study as inspirational; I think of them as inspired. I don’t aim to inspire you to be exactly like any of the specific people in this study. I hope, rather, that you’re able to find yourself clicked into frame, inspired by what fits your encodings and ignites your inner fire, and that you commit to pursue it with excellence.