Learning came naturally for Sherry Lansing, seventy-three, the most powerful female movie mogul of all time and the first to head a major studio. But first, she was a schoolteacher, actress, and film executive, before becoming chairman of Paramount Pictures for twelve years. While the overall movie biz may have been more gender diverse, the corridors of power were exclusively male until Sherry came along; perhaps it was a result of her unique perspective that her whole career, as she tells it, was often mentoring or being mentored without even knowing it. Like me, she loved what she was doing until her calling turned into a job and it was then she knew it was time to get curious.

Marie Forleo, founder of Marie Forleo International, runs an eight-figure business training company with her distinct personality front and center. In the beginning, she worried about being her quirky self in videos and writing because at the time that wasn’t seen as the norm in the business world, or even in the world of other leaders she aspired to connect with, like Oprah. Funnily enough, though, it was specifically her quirky self that her audience related to so strongly, and when her platform grew to reach more than 250,000 subscribers in 193 countries, not only did she appear on Oprah, but Oprah named her a leader for the next generation.

At age 28, she took a big step when she helped architect a suffrage parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential inauguration, a seminal moment that revealed her encodings for quiet, fearless leadership and a penchant for crafting spectacles of protest. She also began to show what would be one of her most distinctive leadership encodings: strategic insight. Paul had an impressive ability to see with piercing clarity the grand strategies that would lead to victory. In particular, she saw that the best strategy lay in pursuit of a constitutional amendment, rather than seeking suffrage state by state, and she co-founded with Lucy Burns the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage dedicated to that strategy.

She learned from Buffet in steps, cumulatively building a foundation of managerial and financial capability. Buffet would show up at board meetings with stacks of annual reports from a wide range of companies, giving Graham homework assignments to read them and build her business acumen. Graham dutifully did her homework, and then she and Buffet would sit down to discuss and glean insights about the ingredients of business performance. Then, at the next board meeting, Buffett would drop another stack of annual reports in Graham’s lap, and they’d repeat the process. Step by step, Graham built a foundation of financial competence and managerial excellence under the tutelage of her mentor. Keep in mind, she did this long before Buffett had become well known to the world as the Oracle of Omaha. She simply followed her encoded operating mode of getting the right people around her, learning from them, and then deploying that learning to great effect.

And Frontiere’s Rams would get to the Super Bowl for a second and third time, including the Ram’s first-ever Super Bowl Championship in 2000. Gliding along on a convertible in the celebratory parade after winning the Super Bowl, she heard fans all up and down the route cheering, “We love you, Georgia.” “I’ve never felt so much love,” said Frontiere, shining at age 72, “and I’ve never loved so much.