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.

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.

7. Fog

Micheal J. Fox and Maurice White emerged on the other side of the fog in very different places because they were very different people with different encodings and different answers to the question of what fed the inner fire. White would have likely been both unhappy and ineffective if he’d tried to do what Fox did, just as Fox would have been unhappy and ineffective trying to do what White did. On the last day of his life, not long after his 74th birthday, White and the writer Herb Powell talked, as they did often while collaborating on White’s compelling and revealing memoir, My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire.

Part of Streep’s encodings lay in an unquenchable curiosity about what it would be like to be a specific individual within a particular story and then internalizing that character. “Acting is my way of investigating human nature,” she explained. It’s an ethos she carried across the decades, as Streep succinctly put it, “I’ve always been curious to know what it’s like to be you.” As she continued to extend out into her 60s, Streep kept the curiosity motor running full bore, describing it as the key ingredient in the secret sauce that “most animates my work,” adding, “I’m really interested.

12. Feeding the Inner Fire (and Doing Great Work Late)

Toni Morrison didn’t write Beloved and Jazz, two of the books highlighted in her selection for the Nobel Prize, until well past the midpoint of her life; she published Beloved at age 56 and Jazz at age 61.

Robert plant garnered 86% of his 21 Grammy nominations, and all eight of his wins, after the age of 50. As I write this in 2025, Plant continues his creative work (in his mid-70s), and it is entirely possible that he will bring forth more award-winning music.