While we often think of life as linear, my guest’s own life, along with a decade of research, has taught him that it’s anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins unpacks the cyclical pattern life actually unfolds in, and how to navigate it. He explains how we all go through periods of “fog” — times of disorientation and uncertainty — at least three times: in youth, after a life-changing “cliff” event, and as we move through midlife into older age. We find our way out of these fogs by what Jim calls coming into “frame” — aligning what you’re built to do with what you actually do in a way that feels enlivening and meaningful. And Jim unpacks the three elements that help you find, and re-find, this frame over the course of your life.
Along the way, Jim shares case studies of these principles at work, and we explore the role of luck, the inevitability of drudgery (even in work you love), and how to keep your inner fire lit over the long haul.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Good to Great by Jim Collins
- All Rise: The Remarkable Journey of Alan Page by Bill McGrane
- Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society by John W. Gardner
- Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
- Sunday Firesides: Do the Right Thing, for Right Now
- AoM Article: The 5 Best AoM Podcast Episodes on Finding Meaning and Purpose
- AoM series on finding your life’s vocation
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. While we often think of life as linear, my guest’s own life, along with a decade of research, has taught him that it’s anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins unpacks how the cyclical pattern of life actually unfolds and how to navigate it. He explains how we all go through periods of fog, times of disorientation and uncertainty, at least three times in youth after a life-changing cliff event. And as we move through midlife into older age, we find our way out of these fogs by what Jim calls coming into frame, aligning what you’re built to do with what you actually do in a way that feels enlivening and meaningful. And Jim unpacks the three elements that help you find and refine this frame over the course of your life along the way. Jim shares case studies of these principles at work and we explore the role of luck, the inevitability of drudgery even in work you love, and how to keep your inner fire lit over the long haul. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/Collins. All right, Jim Collins, welcome to the show.
Jim Collins:
I am really happy to be here with you, Brett.
Brett McKay:
So you’ve made a career for yourself researching about what makes good companies great. I’m sure a lot of our listeners have read your book Good to Great, and other ones as well. In your latest book, What to Make of a Life, you apply that same intellectual rigor you’ve used to analyze companies to figure out what makes an individual’s life feel meaningful. What kickstarted this project?
Jim Collins:
Well, so first, even though it looks like a departure, it is a wonderful extension from my prior work — one thing that is a thread that goes all the way back even to my earlier work is the focus and real interest in what people do and how people navigate. When I look back at what I have as themes in my what makes great companies tick work such as in Good to Great, I’ve always been fascinated with people and with leaders as people, entrepreneurs, as people, and by the sheer human drama of starting and building some of the most audacious and amazing companies in the world. And that interest in people has always been there. Companies don’t build themselves, people build companies. So my interest in people has been a pretty consistent theme in looking through that lens. But this project, of course, as you know, really takes a look at the lens of an entire life rather than say the development of a company.
And the seeds of this actually predate Good to Great by a long time. Three basic seeds. The first when I was young and I realized that my father would never be a father, as you know, the opening line of the book is my first big cliff in life came quite young when I lost my father while he was still alive. And what I meant by that is that I was a kid who was trying to figure out my way in the world and I had this shattering realization when I tried to establish a relationship with my father that he could never really be a father. He could never really be there for me as a father. That when I went down to visit him in New Mexico when I was in early high school and he was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor, and I went down on Thanksgiving and brought a turkey in hopes that we would cook this turkey and some father-son relationship would ignite mysteriously in my mind.
By the end of the weekend, I realized that he was never really going to take an interest in me. And so when I got back on that Greyhound bus that I’d ridden down to New Mexico on the way back north through Colorado where my mom had brought us, after my parents had separated and divorced, I realized I was heading out into the fog of life really. I mean, I had no idea how to go about life, what to do with this one amazing gift of a single life to live. I had no male role models, no framework, no guidance. I just had no idea how to do this right. What do you do? What to make of a life? So that was the first seed. And then the second seed came a few years after that when my wife Joanne, who was a world champion athlete, she won the Hawaii Ironman in 1985 and she had the premature end of her athletic career due to an injury, a hamstring injury that simply would not heal.
And one day she said to me as she was beginning to accept the brutal fact that her athletic career would be over that phase of her life as an elite professional athlete would be taken from her. She said to me at the breakfast table one day, just almost a gasp, I feel like I’m dying. And this was a really deep seed for me. I had no answer. It just sliced through me. And it really planted a seed of like, wow, how do you come at life if life as you knew it is all of a sudden radically changed or different than what it was before? And you have to rethink this whole question again. And then a third seed came a little bit after that. Each of these seeds were separated by about a decade. What a wonderful wise man and mentor by the name of John Gardner who wrote a book called Self-Renewal.
He was a wise man at Stanford when I was teaching there. He got me really interested in the question of why do some people remain incredibly well renewed over the long arc of a life so that they’re able to continually answer these questions of life as they go through midlife and then into the later decades such that those are really vibrant and fire filled. And these three seeds sat inside me gestating until I reached this point about 13 years ago when I realized I wanted to do a big research project on what became really the title of the book, what to make of a life. But it is really a question and we have to answer it three times. One like that kid, that shattered kid, what to make of a life when you’re emerging from the fog of youth and you’re trying to find your way in the world.
Second time when you go through a cliff event, an event that changes your life and you have to reconsider and now answer the question again, well now what to make of a life. And then at least a third time later when we’re heading into midpoint and after, well now when I’m looking at whatever years and decades remain, well now what to make of a life so that those decades are as fire filled as our younger years and that our younger selves need not tower over our older selves. And all that came together ultimately in doing this 10 year research project that led to the book.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, this took 10 years to write and like you did with your other books, you amassed a team. I think you had like 28 people working on this. And you’re looking for examples of individuals who might have an insight about what makes life, what do they do to navigate the fog or cliffs or how to transition from midlife into the second half of life. And like you did in your other books, you find these individuals and then you start comparing and contrasting. If we compare these lives, just like if we compare companies, what lessons can we extract? And what you and your team found is that the people who seem to discover a calling or a project in a life that gave them significant meaning and were able to maybe maintain that for their entire life or maybe find new ones even after the first one sort of fizzled out. They often had three things in common. And the first one is they found work that they were deeply encoded for. What do you mean by that?
Jim Collins:
Yes. So Brett, you’re right in this framing of it. So the way I kind of look at it is that all of us have a set of encodings, which were kind of these durable capacities of our intrinsic construction that are awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. I like to think of it as they’re like a constellation of stars, but it’s except as a constellation of encodings inside us. And that what happens is that as life unfolds, if you think about it, when your life is what I like to describe as in frame, it’s like looking through a window frame and you can only see a portion of that constellation, but you’re capturing a portion of that constellation or a big bright set of some of your marvelous encodings or shining through the window, which is different than a time when you’re out of frame and there’s not really many shining through the window.
So one of my favorite examples of that in the book is John Glenn and Gordon Cooper, a pair of test pilots and fighter pilots and astronauts. They were two of the first to orbit the earth, for example. And so if you take John Glenn, he’s kind of emerging through life. He’s coming out of the fog of youth, he goes off to the local college and he’s kind of out a frame, not a lot of encodings coming through the window. His parents hoping he might become a doctor or maybe come back to the family business or something like that, but nothing really clicked that much. Sports didn’t work that well for him. He was very energetic and very hardworking, but hadn’t really clicked yet. And then there was this moment when he was younger, by the way, his father had put him on an airplane and let him have a flight that somebody was offering some flights in this plane that they saw parked on the side of the road and just dabbled let him go up in this feel of being in the airplane, sort of stayed with John Glenn.
And then he happened across one of these luck events, a card that was put on the physics department bulletin board, and it said that I think it was the Department of Commerce, but some government agency was offering to pay for people to get their pilot’s license. And so John Glenn got really excited about this and convinced his parents to let him do it and goes off and as soon as he starts flying aircraft, the whole window frame shifts and he has these intrinsic capacities for flying. He just has a feel for the aircraft. He can wear it like a glove. He’s really good at making decisions at times of great speed and great danger. I mean, he became a fighter pilot and I’m fairly confident that if somebody is flying behind me in a jet as I’m in a fighter jet and that person is trying to knock me out of the sky, I’m reasonably confident that my heart rate will go up with great sort of anxiety and fear.
But he was always able to remain calm and clear and to be able to make really good decisions at really high speeds in moments of tremendous danger where the consequences of making a bad decision could be the end of everything. Then the next instant and all of a sudden these encodings he had for being a fighter pilot and a test pilot and then later an astronaut just popped into frame and now he is clicked in frame in a way that’s very different than when say he was trying to figure out how to do chemistry classes and things like that. Gordon Cooper, who’s the other test pilot in this, described it as that flying was his truest element that when he was in the cockpit, when he was even in the space capsule, piloting it back to earth after a total power failure, remaining calm and making brilliant decisions as everything seems to be falling apart, just so perfectly suited them and captured these encodings. Yes, they trained, but that intrinsic construction was there. And so at times of life what we’d find is that you could look across the arc of a life and there are times when people are sort of out of frame and there are times when they’re in frame, in frame meaning they’re hitting a big bright set of their encodings and things click very much into place, very natural.
Brett McKay:
Alright, so encodings are innate talents, innate interests. It’s the thing that you would just do and you lose track of time and you just get so engrossed and you couldn’t see yourself doing anything else. And that could be a lot of things for Glen, it was flying planes, but for an individual could be teaching or art. I mean even managing or analyzing data can be that for some people it’s going to be different for every single person.
Jim Collins:
Yes, exactly. And in fact, one of the things that I really want to highlight about this is two things. First of all, in this study we have people from all different walks of life where we have writers, we have scientists, we have actors, we have rock musicians, we have surgeons, we have political leaders, we have football players, we have skaters, we have architects and all these people. The interesting thing is that the thing that worked for them was when they clicked into frame with a set of encodings that fit really well with what they were doing, but it was different things for different people. But then here’s something I really want to highlight for folks is that it’s never too late to discover a set of wonderful encodings. We have a pair of writers in this study, Barbara Tuchman and Toni Morrison, and both went on to have these really wonderful writing careers and one writing history and one writing novels. Interestingly, they didn’t click into frame and really discover their encodings for being writers until they were essentially heading into midlife. They were in their forties. And so John Glenn and Gordon Cooper found it early, but there are others who don’t maybe find it until a bit later. They’re always there to discover, which is a very uplifting finding. The other piece is that there’s many possibilities. There isn’t just one thing you could do in a life that would be in frame. There could be many possibilities in a life of what you could do in frame.
Brett McKay:
A great example of that, someone who found their encoding and got in frame with that encoding is Dwight Eisenhower. My wife wrote an article for our newsletter. It was called, “You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come.” And it was inspired by this Eisenhower biography she was reading, and you get to page 172, and Eisenhower is already 52 years old. He’d missed out on combat in World War I. He’d been a good staff officer, but he just hadn’t had a very remarkable career. And he feels like, well, this is pretty much as far as I’ll go. He feels like his life has largely run its course. But in this biography there’s still 600 pages left because starting on page 172, that’s when World War II starts, and then Eisenhower becomes Supreme Allied Commander. And then after the war, he’s president of Columbia and then president of the United States. Most of his highest moments in life happened in his fifties and sixties because that’s the period in his life where his encodings for things like administrative work and strategic planning, managing the social aspect of military campaigns and politics, that’s when it came into frame.
Jim Collins:
I love you bringing in that article and I congratulate your wife on writing it. I think by the way, it’s also a wonderful title and it really resonates with the people that we studied because the interesting thing is that at any given point in time in their lives, they couldn’t have necessarily seen what was coming next. And one of my favorite little data points that’s analogous to this in the study is Benjamin Franklin. And if you ask a simple question, if you take the major biographies of Benjamin Franklin and you ask what percentage of the book remains when Franklin turns age 60 and the average across the major biographies is 53%, which means that imagine coming at life with the idea that when you hit age 60, more than half, more than half of what might be most interesting and creative and impactful and meaningful has yet to be written.
Although he didn’t know that he was going to be involved in writing the Declaration of Independence and helping to bring forth the Constitution and end up as our greatest diplomat to France during the Revolutionary War, he didn’t know any of that when he was 60. And I think that’s one of the things that has just been so interesting about this study because I’m looking across the entire arc of these lies up to cliffs, through cliffs after cliffs and the incredible sense of what may still lay ahead and it’s not done until it’s done. Some of the things that some of the people in our study did way late as one of the most uplifting aspects of the entire study, you really don’t know. 52 is really, really young.
Brett McKay:
And some individuals, they find it early on, you highlight some individuals like that where they had this knack for whatever and this sort of intrinsic drive and motivation to do that thing. And it came into frame early on, the stars aligned for them to be able to display those encodings and really get engrossed in it. You might have these encodings and it might take until your fifties before you’re able to really hit that frame and be able to really express them. So we have these encodings, is it possible to have more than one thing that we’re encoded for?
Jim Collins:
Yeah, I think this is really one of the most uplifting findings from the study. And first, let me just put a little context for people who are listening about how we did the study and then come into this and we’ll maybe talk about a couple people that really show how different the frames can be even in a single life. And what we did in this study was to look at pairs of people who were on a similar trajectory and then they each hit a cliff event. A cliff event is where you go through this event where your life changes in some very significant way that forces you to make really big decisions about what comes next one way or another. And sometimes it’s even the end of your life as you knew it before, and some really, really significant way that end. It can either be by choice or it can be by imposition, but it may not be entirely up to you whether you go through the cliff, John Glenn and Gordon Cooper, for example, at age 42, each of them came to the conclusion that it was time to leave behind their careers as right stuff astronauts and test pilots and so forth and move on to a next phase of life.
But they had half their life to go, right? So they faced this question of what would come next? One of my favorite people in this study, well, they’re all kind of favorite people, but one really wonderful illustration of this is Alan Page. He was number 88 on the Minnesota Vikings “purple people eaters” defensive line. He and Carl Eller were the two football players in that number 88 and 81. They played in the same four Super Bowls together, and they both had amazing lives after their NFL careers and did really remarkable and creative and really beautiful things with their lives. Alan Page for instance, he made a shift from playing football to moving into the study of law. And it’s interesting how his interest in law actually predated his years as a star football player. He was so encoded for football that he was the first defensive player in NFL history to be named league MVP by the Associated Press as a defensive player.
I mean that’s pretty encoded for the sport of football, but you would think, well, how could anything be as much in frame as that? And he discovers that he loves the law, he loves the questions, he loves the cerebral thinking, and it’s a really different world than football. And the seeds of it go all the way back. He was a kid and he loved watching Perry Mason on TV and he thought, well, that looks like a pretty interesting way to spend time. And that seed stayed within him, and as he got towards the end of his NFL career, he began taking law classes and so forth. Anyways, after his NFL career, he ends up as a Supreme Court justice in the state of Minnesota. And one of my favorite images is there’s a biography of him called All Rise, and the cover of that biography shows him prominently in his justice ropes.
And there’s a smaller photo behind that photo of him in his football outfit. And it shows that as amazing as the football was, he had found a second frame in law that was just as fire filled just as he was amazingly encoded for. Now, here’s the interesting thing. What does terrifying quarterbacks and writing cerebral judicial opinions share in common in their encodings? Probably almost nothing. And so what that shows is that within any given person, it’s not that the legal encodings weren’t there, it’s that when he is playing football, they’re not called upon. Then the frame of his life shifts and now the frame is looking at a different set of encodings in the same person. The beauty of this is suggests to anyone that’s listening. We go through these things in life, particularly in a disruptive world, the world of change or maybe your entire career gets wiped out by AI or whatever happens. And you sort of think, well, I was in frame, could I find another frame? And the answer from this study by looking at people going through cliffs is the answer is yes. You can find more than one frame in a life. I don’t know how many you can find, but it’s multiples and we will likely get to the end of our lives without having discovered all of the possible frames that could be incredibly fulfilling for us.
Brett McKay:
That’s really a cool story. I love that Alan Page story. It also reminded me of Steve Young, the quarterback. He also, he studied law while he was still playing football because I think football players, athletes, they’re very cognizant of the fact that they’ve got a timeframe on their career. A built-in cliff. So they had to make plans for it. And so Steve Young studied law and think he parlayed that after his career, he did I guess some VC funding and some legal stuff. So I mean, how do you manage that? So you might find this encoding young in life or maybe in your twenties and thirties that’s in frame, you’re able to express it, but then you might have to think about, okay, well do I have other encodings? And how do you figure that out and then maybe kindle them a little bit so when the time comes, when it’s time to do something else, you’re able to tap into that.
Jim Collins:
Well, I think first of all, let me just highlight from the research that there’s two ways that these cliffs can happen or multiple ways, but two big buckets. One are the cliffs you can see coming. These are the ones where you can see a change in your world that’s inevitable and it’s going to affect you. It could be something where, I mean it’s built in cliff being in athletics or built in cliff, being a test pilot or built in cliff, being in certain walks of life where you know that is going to come to an end. So there are cases where we can see the cliff coming, but there are other kinds of cliffs and these hit us in a very different way. These are the ones that we can’t see coming. These are the ones that they come as a shocking event in our lives and we can’t prepare for them because we can’t predict them.
It could come in a form of a tragedy. For example, two of the women in our study, their husbands, they were going along with their lives and their husbands died unexpectedly. One in a plane crash, one from a heart attack. And in both of those cases, their husbands had served in Congress. So not only did they have to face the unexpected cliff of losing the love of their life and having the fog of grief and the pain of that and the loneliness of that, but then on top of that they were put into their husband’s seats or they chose to step into their husband’s seats in Congress because there was this thing that makes that possible if your spouse dies in Congress, that you can go and serve in their seat. And they had never planned to be in Congress.
It was never part of their life plan at all. And all of a sudden, dang, their life is completely different than what was shortly before that. And so first, I think that if you have a cliff that you can see coming, you can begin to kind of make steps for it ahead of time. Alan Page started taking his law classes while he was still playing football. John Glenn became a senator in his second frame and he started getting interested in that relatively early. And he would go sit in the Senate gallery in Congress and he would watch legislative proceedings while he is still serving in active duty and sort of feeding that so he could eventually, he knew that his active duty part of life and his astronaut part of life would come to an end and he was sowing seeds, if you will. But then there are other cases like Curtis Collins and Marion Pittman Allen with this shocking change in their life.
And we have other cases in the study where just came totally out of the blue. And there you can be really left reeling and have to go through a very, very thick fog. And these can be personal, these can be diseased, these can be just shocking turns and hopefully your life doesn’t have one of those, but you live long enough. The odds are some sort of shocking, unexpected cliff is got a good probability of happening. So lemme just pause there for a moment because with that context, maybe we can explore a little bit of what happens when people go through cliffs, how they go into the fog, how they get out of it, how they find themselves to a new frame and so forth.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, let’s talk about, let’s say you hit this cliff. I think you did a good job of describing these cliffs. You found everyone encountered a cliff at some point. You can’t go through life without encountering some sort of cliff. And so the ones that you know are coming, maybe you’re an athlete or you’re in a career where there’s a timeframe or you see that, okay, my industry is going to go in this direction. I got to start looking at other things. Maybe you’re a stay at home parent and your kids are going off to college. You can start doing things, planting seeds, looking for those different you might have that might be able to come into frame afterwards. But what about the shocking ones? What do you do there? You don’t even know it’s coming. How do you figure out what do I do with this thing that I’m in now?
Jim Collins:
So one thing I want to share with people, because it really is for me, one of the crucial findings in the study that has given me a lot of compassion for people and maybe self-compassion for my own times of whether it be post cliff or just navigating a foggy terrain of life and fog is are these times when you go through a period of being lost, confused, disoriented, befuddled, you feel like you might be wandering, you’re uncertain, the fog diss descends and you can’t see clearly. So you can be in one phase of life where things are really clear, this is what I’m doing, this is how my life is working. And then bang, life can change on you. Or even if you see the cliff coming, it still might be disorienting when it’s over because you’ve been so focused on what you’re doing prior to the cliff.
So these periods of fog, the interesting thing to me is everyone had them. There can be the fog of youth. I certainly had some fog of youth, certainly my twenties were a fog of youth. Some people who had really amazing overall lives in this study had a fog of youth. And there can be a fog of success, which is a very strange one, but where success catches you off guard and it sends you into a befuddling fog. There’s the fog of disappointment, thought life was going to go one direction or was going to work a certain way. It doesn’t, doesn’t meet your expectations, hopes or desires. And there’s the fog of disappointment. There can be the fog of retirement. This is a really big one because retirement’s actually a cliff. And then finally in the wake of cliffs, we found fog as a very prevalent pattern. And what that says to me is that first of all, fog is not a defect if you go through a period of fog. You’re right in there with the people in our study who had in the end quite remarkable arcs of lives, but they still had to go through periods of fog. And it might take you a while to get to the other side of the fog. When you’re in the fog, it can feel befuddling, uncertain, lost, reeling. But it’s not a character defect. It’s not something that you look at and say there’s something wrong with you. It’s to be expected.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I think everyone’s experienced that or will experience it sometime. I mean it happens. I think it happens in life. You get laid off from a job suddenly I don’t have a job anymore. It’s like, what do I do now? What’s my next move? I can see this happening in retirement. And then the solution to this, once you find yourself in the fog, and again, this could last years for someone who the last years decade even, but what they do, the people who successfully navigate out of the fog, they do something called simplex stepping. What’s that?
Jim Collins:
Yeah. So this was very interesting to look at because when you’re in the fog, there can be this real desire, I just got to get out of the fog. So you just want to do something big and bold and leap because you just want to be out of the fog. But that can just throw you right off another cliff. If you can’t see clearly and you leap, how do you know you’re not just leaping off a cliff and if you just sit still, well the fog’s just going to sit there with you. So how do you get out of this? And what we found is a thing that we call simplex stepping. So imagine you’re in the fog and you can’t really see what’s on the other side. You don’t know what it’s going to look like weeks or months or years down the road.
You’re just in the fog and you look around yourself and you say, I don’t have a plan. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I don’t know what the end result’s going to be. What do I do? Well, what the people in our study did was they just kind of looked around themselves and said, well, what’s the next best step? All I’m going to have is I can only see maybe three feet in front of me, but if the possible steps I could take, this one looks like the best, so I’m just going to take that one, then I’m going to reset. I’m going to look around again. And then, okay, I’ll take this step. And they iterate in these small steps. And once I take that step, I look again and take the next one.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I can see this. How does it apply to a listener who might be going through this? Let’s say they got laid off from a job or maybe their career is changing. They’re like, I’m in this fog. What do I do next? The simplex stepping is just do the next best thing. It might be making a lunch appointment with a colleague that’s in a field that you’re interested in. Tell me about the field. And then maybe you start applying for jobs in that field or doing a little bit of consulting work for that thing or maybe taking a class. It’s just little small things that are low stakes that don’t require a lot of investment. So even if it doesn’t work out, okay, I tried, but I can go do something else. And then little by little you’ll figure out what your next encoding is and how you can put that into frame.
Jim Collins:
That’s a really good description, Brett, because it is that very much little by little, and essentially what’s happening is you’re kind of kicking the frame to the side a little bit as you take those small steps and you begin to get clues or something clicks into place. And the really amazing thing to me is how unplanned the path was for many of the people as they got through the fog. It’s not that they were in the fog and they said, well, I know what the answer is on the other side. And they just have to figure out how to get there. They actually really didn’t know what was on the other side. And so that sense of just being able to say, I can take steps. I can take what looks like good next best steps, even though I don’t know where they’re going, is a tremendous relief. Because if you feel you can only take steps if you know where they’re going, at least to me, that would feel paralyzing when I don’t know where I’m going.
Brett McKay:
Okay, I think we did a good job of covering this idea of cliffs. We’re all going to hit. They can come in different ways. You might know the cliff’s coming, it could come to you as a surprise. And then when you hit a cliff, you’re going to experience fog. And if you feel befuddled and just confused and you can’t figure things out, that is completely normal. It could last a long time, but there’s things you can do, do the simplex stepping, just do the next best thing essentially. And you’ll figure it out. You’ll get through the fog. I want to circle back to this idea of frame and figuring out what your frame is. We talked about encodings, and so those encodings are those innate interest talents that we have that just light us up.
But there’s other elements to being in frame versus know your encodings, discover them, but to do the work that you feel like you’re meant to do, you got to pay the bills. So you have this. One thing you found is that these people who were able to find meaningful work or a meaningful project, they’re able to figure out how to do that in a way that allowed them to not make their focus so much on the money, but the money allowed them to do the thing that they were encoded to do. And you call this flipping the arrow of money. What does that look like?
Jim Collins:
So let’s just maybe put a little framework around this for everyone that’s listening, what it fully means to be in frame. So one, there’s being in frame with your encodings. The second is that you are willing to flip the arrow of money and are able to flip the marrow of money to do it. And then third is that it really feeds and focuses your inner fire. So when you have all three of those, you’re fully fully in frame. So this part about flipping the arrow of money, there’s a very practical part of this, which is how did they fund it? And I’m going to talk about the philosophical part very briefly. You already hit it. I don’t need to overstate it or over belabor it, but essentially it’s this look, is the purpose of work to make money or is the purpose of money to be able to fund your work where your work is defined as doing what I’m encoded for?
And that really feeds my fire with great excellence. And for the people in our study, it was the arrow flip — it’s that the purpose is for money to fuel doing what I’m encoded for and feeds the fire. That’s the direction of the arrow. But then the question is how did they do it? And so we had this research team meeting where I said, well, and then they figured out how they could get paid for it. My team just kind of had this wonderful irreverent revolt in the research team meeting, and they said, that’s just way too simplistic. We have to really better understand how they actually did it because not all of them were able to have a salary doing it. And nobody necessarily came in and just wrote them a check to do it. How do they make it happen? And so we were able to kind of strip away and ask the question, how did they fund their work?
And it turns out there were these 12 different ways that they could draw upon to do it. I don’t need to go through all 12 in our conversation, but they were in a range of things. Sometimes it was they had the help of a spouse for a period of time while they say they got a portion of their career going, or maybe they cross funded where they were doing like Robert Plant was laying tarmac while he was also getting his singing career going, which then eventually led of course to Led Zeppelin. Or you could have, for example, you could get education and training that would then lead to being able to do what you’re about. And that education and training can come in many ways, not just traditional education. The government paid for John Glenn to learn how to fly. There’s a lot of different ways that they drew upon resources to be able to pursue what it was that they were encoded for.
And they had some combination of these 12 streams. But one of them that’s really big is this is the idea of creating a flywheel of some kind. And a flywheel is the idea that you sort of have what you really feel the fire to do and you’re encoded for. And one part of the flywheel is doing that in the world, making the music, acting, writing your books, playing football, whatever it happens to be. One part of that. And then the other side of the flywheel is how you convert doing that into some kind of fuel that you can put back to the top of the flywheel to make the flywheel go around yet again, our albums start doing well or people will start reading the books, or I’m doing better as a football player, or I’m getting more opportunity to the test pilot, whatever. But because you’ve started with what you’re really encoded for and feel the fire four, the cycle is reinforcing.
I do more of that and then that leads to more fuel to do more of it, which leads to me doing it even better, which leads to even more fuel to do more of it further still, whether it’s a creative flywheel, a business flywheel could be a social cause flywheel. Once you have a flywheel effect going in some form, it starts to be a very powerful thing. I would imagine that when you started your podcast for example, there were early clicks on the flywheel, and then over a period of time it became exactly that. The more that you did it and did it really well, that created more opportunities for fuel to put back into this thing that you’re encoded for and feel the fire for to make the flywheel go further. That’s the flywheel effect. Yeah,
Brett McKay:
I can see that in my career. I mean, it started off as a blog and then it picked up steam, and then because it picked up steam, we were getting money. I was able to like, oh, I’m going to start a podcast. And the podcast started picking up steam and I was able to do other things as well. And the thing is, I wasn’t able to do this thing full time right away. I had to do a couple of years of legal work while doing the blog and the podcast on the side until I could do it full. So sometimes you have to do something that’s not connected to the thing you’re encoded for in order to move toward the thing you’re encoded for.
Jim Collins:
Yes, I think that really is true. And the critical thing is to be expending some of your very best energy, a big portion of your life on that which feeds the fire and that really you’re encoded for. And then the economic question, sometimes it might be a very direct kind of economics for it. Your albums sell or you get paid to do it or the government pays you to fly or whatever it happens to be. There can be a direct economics source, but there can be other cases where it’s like, no, I have other sources of funding including where I might be working or what I’m doing that will allow me to feed it. Toni Morrison, the writer, she worked full time as an editor, which wasn’t writing. It was editing, and her writing was ultimately her real thing. She did that for quite a number of years, even when she started writing to essentially allow her to put her energies into the writing. The writing was on one side, but it didn’t make any money at first at all. And her editing job is what kept her going while she got her writing flywheel going.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I think TS Eliot, he was a banker or a bank teller or something like that. And I know Philip Glass, the composer, he was a plumber in New York City.
Jim Collins:
Really? How about that?
Brett McKay:
So I mean, you could listen to a Philip Glass concert in New York on Saturday night, and then the next Monday morning, Philip Glass shows up at a monkey wrench to fix your sink.
Jim Collins:
Well, of course maybe he was also in frame with that too. I think that’s actually a really important thing I just want to share, is that being in frame doesn’t have to be something that’s grandiose at all and super visible to the world, or even in the classic sense of making albums or anything like that. I got an email from a former professor of mine who read an early version of the book, and he was one of my early professors in my life, had a big impact in a couple of key ways in my thinking. And he’d grown up on, I think Belgium. And he sent me this story about a person in his life that he knew when he was a kid who laid cobblestones. And this person was in our parlance here completely in frame with laying cobblestones. And he took such pride and created such beautiful sets of cobblestones that you could walk around the city streets and he could point out, and then you could begin to see which of the cobblestone sections were his, because they were laid down with a different level of beauty, if you will, in those cobblestones on the streets, and people are going by on their carriages and walking on them or whatever.
But he could point to those and he could feel those, and he felt that when he was making ’em. And so you would look at that and say, well, that’s just as much in frame, right? He is doing a beautiful job with the cobblestones and he’s totally in frame making them the best cobblestones they can be. And it’s not necessarily something you think of as like a Led Zeppelin album, but for him it’s absolutely in frame. And I think you can be in frame doing lots of things. You can be in frame as a high school coach. You can be in frame as a firefighter, you can be in frame in military service. There’s so many ways to be beautifully, beautifully in frame.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Alright, so we talked about finding your own framings. We talked about flipping the arrow of money. The third element of people who find that frame or what you call their hedgehog is they learn how to focus the fire. What does that look like?
Jim Collins:
Yeah, so this is really an important idea because what we found is that they would go through these phases in life where there would be a really big thing that they would focus as much of their energy on as they could. So we call it a hedgehog because the idea that the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing. And what it means to be in hedgehog mode is for a period of time, I’m not just dabbling in this. I’m really channeling the energy, the intensity, the fire that I have into this for a sustained period of time. And when you do that, the fire can show up. It doesn’t necessarily mean always. Part of it can be that you just really love doing it and that of course will feed the fire, but it also could just be something that you’re just going to stay with this, with the fire focused on it until something really important is done. And if it’s something that you really have true inner fire for, then a very interesting thing happens. You never really want to stop doing it unless you have to.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And then you also talk about when you have this fire and it’s focused, even when there is what you call the stress and drudgery tax, you’re willing to pay that tax.
Jim Collins:
Yeah. The truth is, even if you’re doing something that feeds the fire and they truly love, as was true for people in our study when they were really in frame, but no matter how much you’re into doing it, what we observed is there’s this thing called the stress and drudgery tax. Everybody pays it. You never get out of it. I don’t know how big of a tax you have to pay before it becomes too much, but there’s always some. So for example, I.M. Pei, the great architect, I mean, you would think by the time that he’s in his seventies and he’s won every architectural award imaginable and he has some of the most famous buildings in the world, and his career is fully established, that at some point somebody with that much stature and success and the flywheel going wouldn’t have to pay the tax.
But when he did the Louvre pyramid in his seventies, there’s these stories of people still spitting at his feet in the streets because a lot of people were upset in France with the Louvre pyramid at first before it was accepted, he was dealing with these cultural committees. It was very stressful. And he always described, well, even he kept architecting into his nineties, but he always had this phase at the beginning of a project that would be sort of stressful and not really sure what the design was. And he would even describe it as, it’s traumatic for my wife. I can’t sleep. He has to go through the stress and drudgery of figuring out what the design is. And every person in the study had some permutation of paying the stress and drudgery tax. I have yet to escape it. I imagine you have the stress and drudgery tax, and in a certain way I find it a bit of a relief because you would maybe have this idealistic view that, well, if I just get everything in place, I can live without the stress and drudgery tax, and I actually find it good news to know that nobody escapes it so I can more easily accept my own stress and drudgery tax.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, no, I think we can all see that. I mean, I’m thinking of it as you were talking, I was thinking of an example of say someone who’s really, their encoding is maybe leadership in church as an example. Well, there’s a stress and drudgery tax there. You have to deal with committees and people being upset over decisions you made. There’s a lot of stress there, and it can happen at work. You’re really passionate about your work that you do. But then, okay, I got to do these papers and forms and I got to deal with managers micromanaging. And if that’s what you’re encoded for, that’s the price you got to pay.
Jim Collins:
That’s right. And there’s one of my, I think I use it in the stress and drudgery section. It was Grace Hopper, one of my favorite examples of this. So she was the one who pioneered essentially software subroutines and so forth. She was there on the very first computer of the Mark one and dedicated her life to advancing the cause of standard languages. And she wrote the first compiler and so forth, and she worked a lot in organizations. She was in academics and then went into industry. And she also spent a big chunk of her life in the Navy and working in these big bureaucracies. And she said, for my entire life, I had to deal with the fact that people are allergic to change. So as much as she loved her computers and her software and getting all of that done, she had to deal with bureaucratic resistance. She had to deal with resistance to change to get new things adopted. And that tax never went away, never stopped her. She just kept right on going. But the tax was always there.
Brett McKay:
The tax was always there. Well, something you talk about, and I think this is really important, I’m glad you did talk about this in the book, is how much luck plays a role and whether we get into frame or not. So I’m thinking about John Glenn. I mean, the thing was he was born at the right time. He was born while aviation was just getting started. So he hit the prime of his life when jet test piloting was going on. And then the NASA program, the Apollo program went on. I imagine if he was born two decades later, he might’ve missed that frame.
Jim Collins:
Well he wouldn’t have been the first to orbit Earth.
Brett McKay:
Right.
Jim Collins:
So to me, it’s a really interesting area to explore, which is why we actually ended up spending quite a number of pages on it, which is this question of what is the role of these luck events and how people’s lives unfold? And there’s two parts of it is one is there’s the luck, and then there’s what they do with the luck, which is the return on luck. But the luck, man, it’s just amazing how many serendipitous type events happen. The story of how Jimmy Page got his first guitar is living in one end of London as a kid, he is like 10 years old or something, and his parents move across town and they move into a new house. And mysteriously, the only thing that was left behind by the previous owners in this entire house was a guitar just mysteriously, there’s just this guitar.
And then he hears Elvis coming over the radio and Baby Let’s Play House. And he’s wondering if I can replicate those chords. And there’s this guitar and there’s a lot of steps in there, but essentially, well, what would’ve happened if Jimmy Page had been born in Iowa rather than just down the street from people like Eric Clapton and the session musicians that were all gathering just up the road in London and right at the beginning of the whole blues rock thing and hadn’t had a guitar at his house that was mysteriously left. They’re like, would Jimmy Page have become Jimmy Page, the great guitarist and founding member of Led Zeppelin? And the answer is probably not if he’d been born in Iowa or Delhi or Helsinki or wherever. But here’s the beauty of this is that as we discussed earlier, if he hadn’t found that frame, he might’ve found a different frame. The beauty is that there’s other frames to discover, but the twists and turns of life are amazing. I still find myself thinking about those three types of luck in there. There’s the what luck. There’s the who, luck people that intersect with your life. And then there’s just the zeitgeist luck. You were talking earlier about when you started your podcast, the zeitgeist was on your side.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, for sure. I started it before podcasting was really a thing, and it was completely just random. I didn’t have any grand strategy. I was just like, I want to talk to authors that write books that I enjoy. I got an early start and then podcasting became this huge thing, and now everyone has a podcast. I imagine if I tried to start a podcast now, it wouldn’t have been as successful. The competition is just so much more fierce. But I got lucky and I did that whole return on it. I tried to take advantage of that lucky event that I had in my life and make the most of it.
Jim Collins:
Yeah, exactly. And you put exactly the point on it, which is that when we . . . well, let me just back up a little bit about this notion of return on luck, because that concept, I share a lot of credit. Well, really much of the credit goes to a co-author I had on a previous book called Great By Choice, and that was with my colleague Morton Hansen. And Morton and I we’re studying companies, but we were studying companies in really turbulent industries and we’re studying the entrepreneurs who built some of the most successful companies in really chaotic, turbulent, rapidly changing disruptive environments. And we were comparing them to other companies that didn’t do as well in those same environments and asking what was different. And Morton had this idea of like, well, we ought to really see if we can define and quantify the role of luck because these are environments that have a lot of luck in them and see if there’s any difference.
Were the successful companies luckier, successful entrepreneurs? Were they luckier? And we were able to define a lock event as something you didn’t cause it’s something you didn’t make happen, it just happened. The second is, it has potentially significant consequence, good or bad. And the third is it came in some significant weight as a surprise. . . and what Morton and I were able to do is to then be able to analyze enough luck events across the histories of these companies to ask a simple question. Were the more successful entrepreneurs and companies that they built luckier than the others? And the answer was no. They didn’t get more good luck, and they didn’t get less bad luck. They didn’t get bigger spikes of luck. They didn’t get better timing of luck. What they got is exactly what you described, Brett, which is that when the luck events came, they made more of those luck events and it was the return on luck. That was the real differentiating variable. If they were lucky. Everybody is, at some level you have good luck, bad luck, all of that. It’s what they did with the luck that they got.
And that is then carried over into this study where we can see that over and over again. There’s a lot of luck that happens, good and bad. But what they do with the luck is what really become these kind of separating moments. What we call the not all time in life is equal moments. The moments where there are real inflection points.
Brett McKay:
So I think we’ve done a really good job capturing this idea of frame. You’re doing the thing that you just feel like you’re meant to do and you couldn’t imagine yourself doing anything else, or at least one of many possibilities. So you got to find your encodings, those sort of innate talents and interests. Find out how you’re going to fund that encoding and then really focus that fire. You’re going to hit cliffs. They might be coming. They could be surprised. There’s going to be fog after that.
Jim Collins:
Step out of the fog.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Simplex step out of the fog. But let’s talk about the elder, the second half of life. I think there’s this idea that as we get older into retirement, that you’re naturally going to start losing your fire to take on ambitious or meaningful projects, and all you’re going to do is just go on cruises and read mystery novels and that’s it. I’m done. But you found that there’s a lot of people who did some of their best work, and it might not be great creative work or business work, but even just something that’s really impactful in the world or in their community when they’re in their seventies, their eighties and their nineties. Any examples of those individuals that stand out and what were they doing differently from the people who might not have done that?
Jim Collins:
Well, I think one of the truly most uplifting findings in all of this is what people in this study did well past the midpoint of their lives in their fifties, sixties, sometimes even their seventies, eighties, even nineties. We mentioned earlier in the conversation about Benjamin Franklin, right? 53% of the pages in a biography were after the age of 60, but we could go through others. You have, for example, some of Robert Plant’s greatest music coming late in life. Most of his Grammy nominations and awards come in his fifties and sixties when he does these amazing bluegrass album with Alice Kraus. And that doesn’t happen when he’s young. It happens when he’s down the road. I.M. Pei doing the Louvre pyramid in his seventies. Toni Morrison didn’t publish Beloved until 56 and didn’t get to Jazz, one of her most spectacular creations in my view, until her early sixties, and then just continued right on doing spectacular work.
And we can go through sort of case after case where remarkable things happened late. And what I kind of stand back with is they would’ve rejected the idea that their younger self has to tower over their older self. And that as I looked at these lives, it was maybe the other way around in a number of cases, but certainly it wasn’t the tyranny of youth over our older selves. The evidence from this project convinces me that much of our great creative steps in life can easily happen well past the midpoint and maybe the most spectacular parts of our life to come well past the midpoint.
Brett McKay:
And you talk about reasons why that might be is one is you’re just more familiar with yourself. You know what your encodings are probably, and by the time you’re 70 or 80, the different ones you might have, you have all this experience that you can draw upon that you didn’t have when you were in your twenties, and you also just have more skill. You might not have that, what is that fluid knowledge where you can think fast on your feet, but you got that crystallized knowledge, this reservoir of wisdom that you can call upon that can help you make better decisions and figure out what is the thing I need to do with the time I got left?
Jim Collins:
Yes. I also think that you can do spectacular creative things that you’d never done before, and this is where you can begin to discover when the frame shifts and you do things that are almost like drawing upon things that had always been there, but now you’re amplifying them in ways that are almost like a whole new arena. And so I love this idea that it’s not necessarily going to be derivative things you do. They could be entirely new things that you do.
Brett McKay:
So be open to that. Don’t think, okay, I did this when I was younger, so I’m going to stick to this. There could be new things that I can discover.
Jim Collins:
Or you might go back to things you did earlier, but do them in a reimagined way for those who know Led Zeppelin. I love how Robert Plant will go back and he isn’t repeating like Black dog or rambling on in just a classic Zeppelin way. He will bring forth in bluegrass or with a different orchestra from a different part of the world or Arabian music or whatever and bring it all together and create a whole new reimagined version of Black dog, black dog in Bluegrass as a duet with Alison Kraus. It’s still black dog, but it’s not still black dog. And that ability to kind of circle back to something that might’ve been earlier, but then to do it in a new and completely reimagined way, that process is part of how we saw the creative efforts happening for many of our people over the course of their lives.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I love that section was really inspiring for me. In my forties. I’m seeing the second half of life, and it’s good to know that I can still have projects that light me up.
Jim Collins:
Well, let me just put it this way, Brett, when you hit 60, you’ll have finished your warmup.
Brett McKay:
Okay. That’s good to know. Yeah. You never know how many more chapters are still to come.
Jim Collins:
That’s right.
Brett McKay:
Well, Jim, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Jim Collins:
Probably the best place is our website, just simply jimcollins.com and there they can learn about the classic work and they can learn about the new work.
Brett McKay:
Fantastic. Well, Jim Collins, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Jim Collins:
It has been a real pleasure. Brett.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Jim Collins. He’s the author of the book, What to Make of A Life. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jimcollins.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
