We found scant evidence that the people in our study had an explicit goal of working until a target retirement age to be followed by a life dominated by leisure. The vast majority of people in this study remained engaged in some permutation of a hedgehog well past the age of 60, in some cases into their 70s, 80s, even 90s. That said, nearly half the people in our study had a âretirementâ from one hedgehog partway through their lives and faced the challenge of transitioning to the next one. Sometimes these were relatively smooth transitions, such as Tenley Albrightâs shift from skating to surgery.
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Multiple people in this study struggled, at least for a period of time, when their environment didnât align well with their encodings. Barbara McClintockâs encodings for solving genetics puzzles remained in frame once she discovered them, but her time at the University of Missouri proved to be a terrible home for her. She simply did not fit with the culture of traditional academia, nor what that culture expected of her as a woman faculty member in her era. When she landed her spot at Cold Spring Harbor research institute, she found a much better home, and she stayed there for the rest of her life. Alan Page didnât have the encodings for the client development and sales process of drawing in big lucrative clients. So, when he went to work at a traditional law firm that relied on its partners to excel at client development, he found himself partly out of frame. Then, when Page joined the Minnesota Supreme Court, he found a perfect home; his encodings came fully in frame with both the activity of legal thinking and the environment of the Supreme Court. Some people in our study, whom you will meet in future chapters, took a more entrepreneurial or loner approach, creating and/or shaping their own environment to fit with their encodings. Whatever the path, the people in this study flourished when both their activities and their environment fit with their encodings. A happy hedgehog needs a happy hedgehog home.
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.
It turned out that only about half of the people in our study earned a traditional paycheck as the primary economic mechanism in doing a hedgehog.
We discovered a wide range of methods people in the study used to make their economics work, categorized into 12 economic streams. Over the course of their lives, the people in the study used some combination of between three and eight of these streams, with a median of four streams per person. This analysis showed that there are many ways to make the economics work, and you might need to draw from multiple methods simultaneously and/or across phases of your 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 Hopperâs 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. âI find in general that human beings are allergic to change. Theyâve learned something, theyâre perfectly satisfied doing it, and you come along and say, youâre going to do it this way. People push it away. . . . The job of changing peopleâs minds is one of the biggest challenges we have.
All of which brings us to one of the most important points of this entire book: the difference between finding âtheâ hedgehog and finding âaâ hedgehog. If we hold to the idea that each of us has only one hedgehog and much of life depends on whether we find it, then this would be a very depressing study. But if we embrace the view that each of us has many possibilities to potentially discoverâ that the constellation of encodings within each of us is vast and largely undiscoveredâ then the challenge changes dramatically from the low odds of finding that one elusive unicorn hedgehog to finding just one out of many possibilities.