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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.

Again, one of the things I most want you to take from this book is a deep skepticism about any judgmental “worthiness hierarchy” that favors a singular measure of what to make of a life. There is absolutely no legitimate way to judge Alice Paul’s life as better than Lucy Burn’s life, or vice versa. They are different. Different people, different encodings, different priorities, different temperaments, different choices, but both lived out fire-filled lives.

I’ve noted how this research profoundly changed me and what I think about how life works. And one of the most significant transformations is my appreciation for the inevitable fog of life. Fog, I came to understand, is a common human experience, even for people who otherwise seem to have great clarity about what to make of their lives. And if episodes of fog enveloped even people in this study, none of us should judge ourselves harshly when we wake up one day to find ourselves befuddled and confused in the fog.

One might expect that I’d wrap up a book like this with a set of recipes for living or a list of ten steps to a better life, or a bevy of helpful prescriptions. The findings of the research and the ethos of this book stand against the very idea of doing that. You might have come to greatly admire many of the people in this study (as did I), but that doesn’t mean you should try to become exactly like any of them. Don’t confuse admiration with prescription, role models with cookie-cutter templates.

I believe questions can be even more powerful than answers. As I indicated at the very beginning, this is a self-knowledge book, not a self-help book. It is a call to “Know Thyself”— and to bring that knowledge to life in the choices you make— not a prescription. Questions are the seeds of discovery, and the spirit of discovery is at the very core of this work. Not only about discovering shared patterns across the vastly different lives in this study, but also about making discoveries pertinent to our own lives.