This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason.

“For your loves to turn into contribution, pay attention only to the specific activities you love, not the outcomes of those activities. Pay attention to what you are going to be doing, rather than why. “What,” in the end, always trumps the “why.”

Ask yourself: In this role, what precisely will I be paid to do?

Ask yourself: What will a regular week in this new role look like?

Ask yourself: What will I be doing at 9 a.m. on a normal Wednesday morning, or 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon?

Woodward later described this moment as like a shot of Adrenalin, showing her full support and resolve, but also making clear her standards: “Never” was unacceptable. “At that moment she achieved the perfect managerial pitch,” recalled Woodward. “She wasn’t going to meddle, try to edit or second guess, but she did, after all, want a better performance. Her skill was to raise the bar, gently but relentlessly.” Raising the bar, gently but relentlessly—now that is a powerful leadership encoding.

By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.

Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

11. Choosing Responsibilities

A turning point for me in this study came when I happened across a comment from Toni Morrison buried in a 1985 interview: “You see, the point is that freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilities; it’s choosing the ones you want.” Morrison’s comment cast a light back over the lives in this study to highlight a crucial ingredient in feeding the inner fire: Freedom does not mean the absence of responsibilities; freedom means that you get to choose your responsibilities.