The Art of Manliness - A Map for Finding Direction and Purpose in Life (Again and Again)

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00:01:31.320 Now on to the show.

00:01:40.360 While we often think of life as linear, my guest's own life, along with a decade of research,

00:01:44.800 has taught him that it's anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life,

00:01:48.980 Jim Collins impacts the cyclical pattern life actually unfolds in and how to navigate it.

00:01:52.940 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.

00:02:03.960 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.

00:02:12.260 And Jim impacts the three elements that help you find and refine this frame over the course of your life.

00:02:17.040 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.

00:02:26.960 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Collins.

00:02:30.000 All right, Jim Collins, welcome to the show.

00:02:47.700 I'm really happy to be here with you, Brett.

00:02:50.080 So you've made a career for yourself researching about what makes good companies great. I'm sure

00:02:55.740 a lot of our listeners have read your books, Good to Great, other ones as well. In your latest book,

00:03:01.860 What to Make of a Life, you apply that same intellectual rigor you've used to analyze

00:03:08.000 companies to figure out what makes an individual's life feel meaningful. What kick-started this

00:03:14.680 project? Well, so first, even though it looks like a departure, and it is a wonderful extend

00:03:21.620 out from my prior work. One thing that is a thread that goes all the way back even to my earlier work

00:03:28.300 is the focus and real interest in what people do and how people navigate. When I look back at what

00:03:35.300 I have as themes in my What Makes Great Companies Tick work, such as in Good to Great, I've always

00:03:42.420 been fascinated with people and with leaders as people, entrepreneurs as people, and by the sheer

00:03:47.940 human drama of starting and building some of the most audacious and amazing companies in the world.

00:03:53.980 And that interest in people has always been there. Companies don't build themselves. People

00:03:58.540 build companies. So my interest in people has been a pretty consistent theme in looking through

00:04:04.460 that lens. But this project, of course, as you know, really takes a look at the lens of an entire

00:04:12.240 life rather than, say, the development of a company. And the seeds of this actually predate

00:04:18.600 good to great by a long time. Three basic seeds. The first, when I was young and I realized that

00:04:26.920 my father would never be a father. As you know, the opening line of the book is my first big

00:04:31.900 cliff in life came quite young when I lost my father while he was still alive. And what I meant

00:04:38.140 by that is that I was a kid who was trying to figure out my way in the world that I had this

00:04:42.980 shattering realization when I tried to establish a relationship with my father that he could never

00:04:48.800 really be a father. He could never really be there for me as a father. That when I went down to visit

00:04:54.320 him in New Mexico when I was in early high school and he was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor

00:04:59.980 and I went down on Thanksgiving and brought a turkey in hopes that we would cook this turkey

00:05:05.180 and some father-son relationship would ignite mysteriously in my mind.

00:05:10.120 By the end of the weekend, I realized that he was never really going to take an interest in me.

00:05:16.100 And so when I got back on that Greyhound bus that I'd ridden down to New Mexico

00:05:20.420 on the way back north to Colorado, where my mom had brought us after my parents had separated and divorced,

00:05:27.140 I realized I was heading out into the fog of life, really.

00:05:30.720 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? How do you, what do you do? How do you, what do you make of a life?

00:05:44.620 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.

00:06:04.740 and one day she said to me as she was beginning to accept the brutal fact that her athletic career

00:06:12.460 would be over that that phase of her life as an elite professional athlete would be taken from

00:06:17.900 her she said to me at the breakfast table one day just almost a gasp i i feel like i'm dying

00:06:23.920 and and this was a really deep seed for me because i had no answer it just sliced through me

00:06:30.000 and and it really planted the seed of like wow how do you come at life if life as you knew it

00:06:35.860 is all of a sudden radically changed or different than what it was before and you have to rethink

00:06:40.140 this whole question again and then a third seed came a little bit after that these each of these

00:06:46.920 seeds were about separated by about a decade what a wonderful wise man and mentor by the name of

00:06:51.740 john gardner who wrote a book called self-renewal he was a wise man at stanford when i was teaching

00:06:57.380 there, he got me really interested in the question of why do some people remain incredibly

00:07:04.000 well-renewed over the long arc of a life, right, so that they're able to continually

00:07:08.240 answer these questions of life as they go through midlife and then into the later decades

00:07:13.580 such that those are really vibrant and fire-filled, renewed phases of life as well.

00:07:19.180 And these three seeds sat inside me gestating until I reached this point about 13 years

00:07:26.680 ago when I realized I wanted to do a big research project on what became really the title of the

00:07:32.120 book, What to Make of a Life, but it is really a question, right? And we have to answer it three

00:07:36.360 times. One like that kid, that shattered kid, you know, what to make of a life when you're

00:07:41.000 emerging from the fog of youth and you're trying to find your way in the world. Second time when

00:07:45.940 you go through a cliff event, an event that changes your life and you have to reconsider

00:07:49.720 and now answer the question again, well now, now what to make of a life. And then at least a third

00:07:54.960 time later and when we're past we're heading into midpoint and after well well now when i'm looking

00:08:01.220 at whatever years and decades remain well now what to make of a life so that those decades are as

00:08:06.740 fire-filled as our younger years and that our younger selves need not tower over our older

00:08:11.920 selves and all that came together ultimately in doing this 10-year research project that

00:08:16.600 led to the book yeah this took 10 years to write and like you did with your other books you

00:08:21.340 amass a team. I think you had like 28 people working on this and you're looking for examples

00:08:27.040 of individuals who might have an insight about what makes life. What do they do to navigate the

00:08:31.700 fog or cliffs or how to transition from midlife into the second half of life? And like you did

00:08:38.920 in your other books, you find these individuals and then you start comparing and contrasting.

00:08:43.540 If we compare these lives, just like if we compare a company, what lessons can we extract?

00:08:48.900 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.

00:09:09.620 And the first one is they found work that they were deeply encoded for.

00:09:14.880 What do you mean by that?

00:09:16.620 Yes.

00:09:17.280 So, Brett, you're right in this.

00:09:18.900 framing of it. So the way I kind of look at it is that all of us have a set of encodings,

00:09:24.900 which were kind of these durable capacities of our intrinsic construction that are awaiting

00:09:30.060 discovery through the experiences of life. I like to think of it as they're like a constellation

00:09:37.160 of stars, but except as a constellation of encodings inside us. And that what happens is that

00:09:42.380 as life unfolds, if you think about it, when your life is what I like to describe as in frame,

00:09:47.900 is like looking through a window frame

00:09:49.760 and you can only see a portion of that constellation,

00:09:52.400 but you're capturing a portion of that constellation

00:09:54.560 where a big bright set of some of your marvelous encodings

00:09:59.220 are shining through the window,

00:10:00.420 which is different than a time when you're out of frame

00:10:02.840 and there's not really many shining through the window.

00:10:05.400 So one of my favorite examples of that in the book

00:10:08.940 is John Glenn and Gordon Cooper,

00:10:11.080 a pair of test pilots and fighter pilots and astronauts.

00:10:15.300 They were two of the first to orbit the Earth, for example.

00:10:19.300 And so if you take John Glenn, you know, he's kind of emerging through life.

00:10:23.000 He's coming out of the fog of youth and he goes off to the local college and and he's

00:10:28.220 kind of out of frame.

00:10:29.040 Not a lot of encodings coming through the window.

00:10:31.640 His his parents hoped he might become a doctor or maybe come back to the family business

00:10:35.560 or something like that.

00:10:36.800 But nothing really clicked that much.

00:10:39.040 Sports didn't work that well for him.

00:10:40.800 He was very energetic and very hardworking, but hadn't really clicked yet.

00:10:45.300 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 and like this plane that they saw, you know, parked on the side of the road.

00:10:56.440 And his dad let him go up. And this feel of being in the airplane sort of stayed with John Glenn.

00:11:01.840 And then he happened across one of these luck events, a card that was put on the physics department bulletin board.

00:11:08.120 and it said that I think it was the Department of Commerce, but some government agency was

00:11:12.600 offering to pay for people to get their pilot's license. And so John Glenn got really excited

00:11:18.160 about this and convinced his parents to let him do it and goes off. And as soon as he starts

00:11:23.080 flying aircraft, the whole window frame shifts and he has these intrinsic capacities for flying.

00:11:30.020 He just has a feel for the aircraft. He can wear it like a glove. He's really good

00:11:33.900 at making decisions at times of great speed and great danger. I mean, he became a fighter pilot

00:11:39.640 and I'm fairly confident that if somebody is flying behind me in a jet, as I'm in a fighter

00:11:46.540 jet, and that person is trying to knock me out of the sky, I'm reasonably confident that my heart

00:11:51.300 rate will go up, right? With great sort of anxiety and fear. But he was able always to remain calm

00:11:56.960 and clear and to be able to make really good decisions at really high speeds in moments of

00:12:02.940 tremendous danger where the consequences of making a bad decision could be the end of everything

00:12:07.020 then the next instant. And all of a sudden, these encodings he had for being a fighter pilot and a

00:12:13.980 test pilot, and then later an astronaut just popped into frame. And now he is clicked in frame in a

00:12:20.820 way that's very different than when, say, he was trying to figure out how to do chemistry classes

00:12:25.280 and things like that. Gordon Cooper, who's the other test pilot in this, described it as that

00:12:30.320 flying was his truest element. That when he was in the cockpit, when he was even in the space

00:12:36.780 capsule, piloting it back to Earth after a total power failure, remaining calm and making brilliant

00:12:42.960 decisions as everything seems to be falling apart, just so perfectly suited them and captured these

00:12:48.380 encodings. Yes, they trained, but that intrinsic construction was there. And so at times of life,

00:12:54.840 what we'd find is that you could look across the arc of a life, and there are times when people

00:12:59.160 are sort of out of frame and there are times when they're in frame, in frame meaning they're hitting

00:13:05.820 a big bright set of their encodings and things click very much into place. Very natural.

00:13:12.660 All right. So encodings are innate talents, innate interest. It's the thing that

00:13:17.000 you would just do and you lose track of time and you just get so engrossed and you couldn't see

00:13:23.120 yourself doing anything else. And that could be a lot of things. For Glenn, it was flying planes,

00:13:27.760 But for an individual, it could be teaching or art.

00:13:31.520 I mean, even managing or analyzing data can be that for some people.

00:13:35.780 It's going to be different for every single person.

00:13:38.260 Yes, exactly.

00:13:38.820 And in fact, so one of the things that I really want to highlight about this is two things.

00:13:43.960 First of all, in the study, we have people from all different walks of life.

00:13:47.580 We have writers, we have scientists, we have actors, we have rock musicians, we have surgeons,

00:13:53.760 we have political leaders, we have football players, we have skaters, we have architects,

00:13:59.220 right? And all these people, the interesting thing is that the thing that worked for them was when

00:14:04.900 they clicked into frame with a set of encodings that fit really well with what they were doing,

00:14:09.200 but it was different things for different people. But then here's something I really want to

00:14:13.120 highlight for folks, is that it's never too late to discover a set of wonderful encodings.

00:14:20.120 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.

00:14:31.720 Interestingly, they didn't click into frame and really discover their encodings for being writers until they were essentially heading into midlife.

00:14:40.940 They were in their 40s.

00:14:42.500 And so John Glenn, sure, and Gordon Cooper found it early, but there are others who don't maybe find it until a bit later.

00:14:48.460 they're always there to discover, which is a very uplifting finding. The other piece

00:14:53.580 is that there's many possibilities. There isn't just one thing you could do in a life that would

00:15:00.000 be in frame. There could be many possibilities in a life of what you could do in frame.

00:15:05.440 A great example of that, someone who found their encoding and got in frame with that encoding

00:15:10.280 is Dwight Eisenhower. My wife wrote an article for our newsletter. It was called,

00:15:16.100 you never know how many chapters are still to come and it was inspired by this eisenhower

00:15:20.820 biography she was reading and you get to page 172 and eisenhower is already 52 years old he'd

00:15:28.020 missed out on combat in world war one he'd been a good staff officer but he just hadn't had a very

00:15:33.000 remarkable career and he feels like well you know this is pretty much as far as i'll go he feels

00:15:38.080 like his life has largely run its course but in this biography there's still 600 pages left

00:15:44.900 Because starting on page 172, that's when World War II starts. And then Eisenhower becomes Supreme

00:15:51.340 Allied Commander. And then after the war, he's President of Columbia, and then President of the

00:15:56.360 United States. So most of his highest moments in life happened in his 50s and 60s, because

00:16:02.800 that's the period in his life where his encodings for things like administrative work and strategic

00:16:09.640 planning, managing the social aspect of military campaigns and politics. That's when it came

00:16:16.020 into frame. You know, I love that you bringing in that article and congratulate your wife on

00:16:22.240 writing it. I think, by the way, it's also a wonderful title. And it really resonates with

00:16:27.100 the people that we studied because the interesting thing is that at any given point in time in their

00:16:31.900 lives, they couldn't have necessarily seen what was coming next. And one of my favorite little

00:16:37.000 data points that's analogous to this in the study is Benjamin Franklin. And if you ask a simple

00:16:42.780 question, if you take the major biographies of Benjamin Franklin and you ask, you know,

00:16:47.240 what percentage of the book remains when Franklin turns age 60? And the average across the major

00:16:54.760 biographies is 53%, which means that imagine coming at life with the idea that when you hit

00:17:01.660 age 60, more than half, more than half of what might be most interesting and creative and

00:17:08.660 impactful and meaningful has yet to be written, right? Although he didn't know that he was going

00:17:15.040 to be involved in writing the Declaration of Independence and helping to bring forth the

00:17:19.080 Constitution and end up as our greatest diplomat to France during the Revolutionary War. He didn't

00:17:23.920 know any of that when he was 60. And I think that's one of the things that has just been so

00:17:29.220 interesting about this study because I'm looking across the entire arc of these lives, up to cliffs,

00:17:33.500 through cliffs, after cliffs, and the incredible sense of what may still lay ahead. And it's not

00:17:41.200 done until it's done. Some of the things that some of the people in our study did way late

00:17:45.560 is one of the most uplifting aspects of the entire study. You really don't know. 52 is really,

00:17:52.860 really young. And some individuals, they find it early on. You highlight some individuals like that

00:17:57.740 where they had this knack for whatever

00:18:00.580 and this sort of intrinsic drive

00:18:02.740 and motivation to do that thing.

00:18:04.260 And it came into frame early on,

00:18:06.140 like the stars aligned for them to be able

00:18:07.980 to display those encodings and really get engrossed in it.

00:18:11.180 You might have these encodings

00:18:12.460 and it might take until your 50s

00:18:14.280 before you're able to really hit that frame

00:18:16.780 and be able to really express them.

00:18:18.580 So we have these encodings.

00:18:20.300 Is it possible to have more than one thing

00:18:22.540 that we're encoded for?

00:18:24.120 Yeah, I think this is really

00:18:25.560 one of the most uplifting findings from the study. And first, let me just put a little context for

00:18:32.120 people who are listening about how we did the study and then come into this and we'll maybe

00:18:36.180 talk about a couple people that really show how different the frames can be even in a single life.

00:18:42.540 And what we did in the study was to look at pairs of people who were on a similar trajectory and

00:18:48.340 then they each hit a cliff event. A cliff event is where you go through this event where your life

00:18:53.500 changes in some very significant way that forces you to make really big decisions about what comes

00:18:59.260 next, one way or another. And sometimes it's even the end of your life as you knew it before in some

00:19:05.420 really, really significant way. That end, it can either be by choice or it can be by imposition,

00:19:10.640 but it may not be entirely up to you whether you go through the cliff. John Glenn and Gordon Cooper,

00:19:14.980 for example, at age 42, each of them came to the conclusion that it was time to leave behind

00:19:22.640 their careers as right stuff astronauts and test pilots and so forth and move on to a next phase

00:19:28.840 of life, but they had half their life to go, right? So they faced this question of what would

00:19:32.840 come next. One of my favorite people in the study, well, they're all kind of favorite people,

00:19:37.520 but one really wonderful illustration of this is Alan Page. He was number 88 on the Minnesota

00:19:43.840 Vikings' Purple People Eaters defensive line. He and Carl Eller were the two football players

00:19:49.520 and at number 88 and 81, they played in the same four Super Bowls together. And they both had

00:19:53.720 amazing lives after their NFL careers and did really remarkable and creative and really beautiful

00:19:59.280 things with their lives. Alan Page, for instance, he made a shift from playing football to moving

00:20:07.140 into the study of law. And it's interesting how his interest in law actually predated his years

00:20:14.620 as a star football player. He was so encoded for football that he was the first defensive player

00:20:18.700 in NFL history to be named league MVP by the Associated Press as a defensive player. I mean,

00:20:24.980 that's pretty encoded for the sport of football. But you would think, well, how could anything

00:20:29.260 be as much in frame as that? And he discovers that he loves the law. He loves the questions.

00:20:35.520 He loves the cerebral thinking. And it's a really different world than football. And the seeds of

00:20:41.740 it go all the way back. He was a kid and he loved watching Perry Mason on TV. And he thought, well,

00:20:46.740 that looks like a pretty interesting way to spend time. And that seed stayed within him.

00:20:50.580 And as he got towards the end of his NFL career, he began taking law classes and so forth.

00:20:55.260 Anyways, after his NFL career, he ends up as a Supreme Court justice in the state of Minnesota.

00:21:02.480 And one of my favorite images is there's a biography of him called All Rise. And the

00:21:07.980 cover of that biography shows him prominently in his justice ropes. And there's a smaller photo

00:21:14.180 behind that photo of him in his football outfit. And it shows that as amazing as the football was,

00:21:22.460 he had found a second frame in law that was just as fire-filled, just as he was amazingly encoded

00:21:32.000 for. Now, here's the interesting thing. What does terrifying quarterbacks and writing cerebral

00:21:38.820 judicial opinions share in common in their encodings? Probably almost nothing. And so what

00:21:44.340 that shows is that within any given person, it's not that the legal encodings weren't there. It's

00:21:49.400 that when he's playing football, they're not called upon. Then the frame of his life shifts.

00:21:54.280 And now the frame is looking at a different set of encodings in the same person.

00:21:58.380 The beauty of this is, and it suggests this to anyone that's listening, we go through these

00:22:04.180 things in life, particularly in a disruptive world, the world of change, or maybe your entire

00:22:08.720 career gets wiped out by AI or whatever happens. Right. And you sort of think, well, that I was in

00:22:15.460 frame. Could I find another frame? And the answer from this study by looking at people going through

00:22:21.260 cliffs is the answer is, yes, you can find more than one frame in a life. I don't know how many

00:22:26.940 you can find, but it's multiples. And we will likely get to the end of our lives without having

00:22:32.240 discovered all of the possible frames that could be incredibly fulfilling for us.

00:22:38.260 That's a really cool story. I love that Alan Page story. It also reminded me of

00:22:41.380 Steve Young, the quarterback. He also, he studied law while he was still playing football. Because

00:22:46.860 I think, I think football players, athletes, they're very cognizant of the fact that they've

00:22:50.600 got a timeframe on their career. And so they had a built-in cliff. And so they had to make plans

00:22:55.960 for it. And so Steve Young studied law and he parlayed that after his career. He did, I guess,

00:23:00.200 VC funding, some legal stuff. So I mean, how do you manage that? So you might find this encoding

00:23:05.080 young in life, or maybe in your 20s and 30s, that's in frame, like you're able to express it.

00:23:10.480 But then you might have to think about, okay, well, do I have other encodings? And how do you

00:23:14.920 figure that out? And then sort of maybe kindle them a little bit. So when the time comes, when

00:23:19.940 it's time to do something else, you're able to tap into that. Well, so I think, first of all,

00:23:26.140 let me just sort of highlight from the research that there's kind of two ways that these cliffs

00:23:31.140 can happen. Well, multiple ways, but kind of two big buckets. What are the cliffs you can see

00:23:36.480 coming? And these are the ones where you can see a change in your world that's inevitable and it's

00:23:41.740 going to affect you. It could be something where you know, I mean, it's built-in cliff being in

00:23:47.100 athletics or built-in cliff being a test pilot or built-in cliff being in certain walks of life

00:23:52.620 where you know that that is going to come to an end.

00:23:56.780 So there are cases where you can see the cliff coming,

00:23:59.280 but there are other kinds of cliffs,

00:24:00.660 and these hit us in a very different way.

00:24:02.720 These are the ones that we can't see coming.

00:24:04.840 These are the ones that they come as a shocking event in our lives,

00:24:09.440 and we can't prepare for them because we can't predict them.

00:24:13.000 It could come in a form of a tragedy.

00:24:15.820 For example, two of the women in our study,

00:24:18.680 their husbands are going along with their lives,

00:24:20.660 and their husbands died unexpectedly.

00:24:22.620 one in a plane crash, one from a heart attack. And in both of those cases, there are a pair in

00:24:29.480 the study, their husbands had served in Congress. So not only did they have to face the unexpected

00:24:35.160 cliff of losing the love of their life and having the fog of grief and the pain of that and the

00:24:40.660 loneliness of that, but then on top of that, they were put into their husband's seats or they chose

00:24:46.800 to step into their husband's seats in Congress because there was this thing that makes that

00:24:52.000 possible if your spouse dies in Congress that you can go and serve in their seat. And they had never

00:24:57.860 planned to be in Congress. It was never part of their life plan at all. And all of a sudden,

00:25:03.240 bang, their life is completely different than it was shortly before that. And so first, I think

00:25:10.000 that if you have a clip that you can see coming, you can begin to kind of make steps for it ahead

00:25:15.760 of time. Alan Page started taking his law classes while he was still playing football. John Glenn

00:25:23.060 became a senator in his second frame, and he started getting interested in that relatively

00:25:28.960 early, and he would go sit in the Senate gallery in Congress, and he would watch legislative

00:25:33.860 proceedings while he is still serving in active duty and sort of feeding that. So he could,

00:25:38.780 eventually he knew that his active duty part of life and his astronaut part of life would come

00:25:44.180 to an end and he was sowing seeds, if you will. But then there are other cases like Curtis Collins

00:25:50.500 and Marion Pittman-Allen with this shocking change in their life. And we have other cases

00:25:55.180 in the study where it just came totally out of the blue. And there you can be really left reeling

00:25:59.300 and have to go through a very, very thick fog. And these can be personal. These can be disease.

00:26:04.120 These can be, you know, just shocking turns. And hopefully your life doesn't have one of those,

00:26:09.400 but you live long enough, the odds are some sort of shocking, unexpected cliff has got a good

00:26:14.680 probability of happening. So let me just pause there for a moment, because with that context,

00:26:19.720 maybe we can explore a little bit of what happens when people go through cliffs, how they go into

00:26:24.540 the fog, how they get out of it, how they find themselves to a new frame and so forth, wherever

00:26:29.220 you'd like to go, Brett. Yeah, let's talk about, let's say you hit this cliff. I think you did a

00:26:33.140 good job of describing these cliffs. You found everyone encountered a cliff at some point. You

00:26:38.720 can't go through life without encountering some sort of cliff. And so the ones that you know that

00:26:43.300 are coming, maybe you're an athlete or you're in a career where there's a timeframe or you see that,

00:26:48.180 okay, my industry is going to go in this direction. I got to start looking at other things.

00:26:52.340 Maybe you're a stay-at-home parent and your kids are going off to college. You can start doing

00:26:56.320 things, planting seeds, looking for those different encodings you might have that might be able to

00:27:00.140 come into frame afterwards. But what about the shocking ones? What do you do there? Because you

00:27:05.120 don't even know it's coming. How do you figure out what do I do with this thing that I'm in now?

00:27:12.540 So one thing I want to share with people, because it really is for me, one of the crucial findings

00:27:19.260 in the study that has given me a lot of compassion for people and maybe self-compassion for my own

00:27:26.180 times of whether it be post cliff or just navigating a foggy terrain of life. And fog is,

00:27:33.320 are these times when you go through a period of being lost, confused, disoriented, befuddled.

00:27:41.140 You feel like you might be wandering. You're uncertain. The fog descends and you can't see

00:27:46.260 clearly. So you can be in one phase of life where things are really clear. This is what I'm doing.

00:27:51.560 This is how my life is working. And then bang, life can change on you. Or even if you see the

00:27:59.240 cliff coming. It still might be disorienting when it's over because you've been so focused on what

00:28:04.800 you're doing prior to the cliff. So these periods of fog, the interesting thing to me is everyone

00:28:11.040 had them. There can be the fog of youth. I certainly had some fog of youth. Certainly my

00:28:16.360 20s were a fog of youth. Some people who had really amazing overall lives in this study had

00:28:22.580 a fog of youth. And there can be a fog of success, which is a very strange one, but where

00:28:28.480 success catches you off guard and it sends you into a befuddling fog, there's the fog of

00:28:34.060 disappointment. You thought life was going to go one direction or was going to work a certain way.

00:28:38.100 It doesn't. It doesn't meet your expectations, hopes, or desires. And there's the fog of

00:28:42.500 disappointment. There can be the fog of retirement. This is a really big one because retirement's

00:28:47.040 actually a cliff. And then finally, in the wake of cliffs, we found fog as a very prevalent

00:28:54.880 pattern. And what that says to me is that, first of all, fog is not a defect. If you go through a

00:29:02.080 period of fog, you're right in there with the people in our study who had, in the end, quite

00:29:08.640 remarkable arcs of lives, but they still had to go through periods of fog. And it might take you

00:29:14.580 a while to get to the other side of the fog. When you're in the fog, it can feel befuddling,

00:29:20.540 uncertain, lost, reeling, but it's not a character defect. It's not something that you look at and

00:29:27.060 say there's something wrong with you. It's to be expected. Yeah, I think everyone's experienced

00:29:33.160 that or will experience it sometime. I mean, it happens once, I think it happens a lot if you get

00:29:37.300 laid off from a job, like you suddenly, I don't have a job anymore. It's like, what do I do now?

00:29:41.800 What's my next move?

00:29:42.780 I can see this happening in retirement.

00:29:44.320 And then the solution is once you find yourself in the fog,

00:29:46.640 and again, this could last years for some individuals.

00:29:48.900 It could last years.

00:29:49.840 Decade even.

00:29:50.820 But what they do, the people who successfully navigate out of the fog,

00:29:54.700 they do something called simplex stepping.

00:29:56.820 What's that?

00:29:57.860 Yeah.

00:29:58.260 So this was very interesting to sort of look at

00:30:01.540 because when you're in the fog, there can be this real desire like,

00:30:04.960 I just got to get out of the fog.

00:30:06.040 So you just want to do something big and bold and leap

00:30:08.460 because you just want to be out of the fog.

00:30:09.880 But that can just throw you right off another cliff.

00:30:12.020 Because if you can't see clearly and you leap, how do you know you're not just leaping off a cliff?

00:30:16.600 And if you just sit still, well, the fog's just going to sit there with you.

00:30:20.580 So how do you get out of this?

00:30:22.220 And what we found is a thing that we call simplex stepping.

00:30:26.060 So imagine you're in the fog and you can't really see what's on the other side.

00:30:30.760 You don't know what it's going to look like weeks or months or years down the road.

00:30:36.220 You're just in the fog.

00:30:37.660 and you look around yourself and you say, I don't have a plan.

00:30:41.220 I don't know where it's going to go.

00:30:42.560 I don't know what the end result is going to be.

00:30:44.060 What do I do?

00:30:45.160 Well, what the people in our study did was they just kind of looked around themselves

00:30:48.440 and said, well, what's the next best step?

00:30:51.660 All I have is I can only see maybe three feet in front of me,

00:30:54.780 but of the possible steps I could take, this one looks like the best.

00:30:58.020 So I'm just going to take that one and I'm going to reset.

00:31:00.320 I'm going to look around again and then, okay, I'll take this step.

00:31:03.320 And they iterate in these small steps and once I take that step,

00:31:06.300 I look again and take the next one. Yeah, I can see this. How does it apply to a listener who

00:31:10.700 might be going through this? Let's say they got laid off from a job or maybe their career is

00:31:14.780 changing. Like, well, I'm in this fog. What do I do next? The simplex stepping is just do the

00:31:18.900 next best thing. It might mean making a lunch appointment with a colleague that's in a field

00:31:24.560 that you're interested in. Tell me about the field. And then maybe you start applying for

00:31:28.500 jobs in that field or doing a little bit of consulting work for that thing, or maybe taking

00:31:32.560 a class. It's just little small things that are low stakes that don't require a lot of investment.

00:31:38.420 So even if it doesn't work out, you know, okay, I tried, but I can go do something else. And then

00:31:43.220 little by little, you'll figure out what your next encoding is and how you can put that into frame.

00:31:48.360 That's a really good description, Brett, because it is very much little by little. And essentially

00:31:52.840 what's happening is you're kind of kicking the frame to the side a little bit as you take those

00:31:58.300 small steps and you begin to get clues or something clicks into place. And the really

00:32:04.120 amazing thing to me is how unplanned the path was for many of the people as they got through the

00:32:10.780 fog. It's not that they were in the fog and they said, well, I know what the answer is on the other

00:32:14.700 side and they just have to figure out how to get there. They actually really didn't know what was

00:32:19.000 on the other side. And so that sense of just being able to say, I can take steps. I can take what

00:32:25.540 looks like good next best steps, even though I don't know where they're going, is a tremendous

00:32:32.180 relief because if you feel you can only take steps if you know where they're going, at least to me,

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00:35:16.620 And now back to the show. Okay, I think we did a good job of covering this idea of cliffs.

00:35:21.240 We're all going to hit them. They can come in different ways. You might know the cliff's

00:35:23.920 coming. It could come to you as a surprise. And then when you hit a cliff, you're going to

00:35:27.300 experience fog. And if you feel befuddled and just confused and like you can't figure things out,

00:35:32.320 that is completely normal. It could last a long time, but there's things you can do.

00:35:35.680 Do the simplex stepping. Just do the next best thing, essentially, and you'll figure it out.

00:35:40.240 you get through the fog. I want to circle back to this idea of frame and figure out what your frame

00:35:45.220 is. We talked about encodings. And so those encodings are those innate interest talents

00:35:49.940 that we have that just light us up. But there's other elements to being in frame versus know

00:35:57.020 your encodings, discover them. But to do the work that you feel like you're meant to do,

00:36:01.480 you got to pay the bills. So you have this one thing you found is that these people who were

00:36:05.780 able to find meaningful work or meaningful project, they're able to figure out how to do

00:36:09.840 that in a way that allowed them to not make their focus so much on the money, but the money allowed

00:36:15.200 them to do the thing that they were encoded to do. And you call this flipping the arrow of money.

00:36:20.300 What does that look like? So let's just maybe put a little framework around this for everyone

00:36:25.820 that's listening, what it fully means to be in frame. So one, there's being in frame with your

00:36:29.640 encodings. The second is that you are willing to flip the arrow of money and are able to flip the

00:36:35.620 arrow of money to do it. And then third is that it really feeds and focuses your inner fire. Okay.

00:36:42.640 So when you have all three of those, you're fully, fully in frame. So this part about flipping the

00:36:47.280 arrow of money, there's a very practical part of this, which is how did they fund it? And I'm going

00:36:56.480 to talk about the philosophical part very briefly. You already hit it. I don't need to overstate it

00:37:01.720 or over belabor it. But essentially it's this, look, is the purpose of work to make money or is

00:37:08.360 the purpose of money to be able to fund your work where your work is defined as doing what I'm

00:37:15.440 encoded for and that really feeds my fire with great excellence. And for the people in our study,

00:37:22.660 it was the arrow flip was it's that the purpose is for money to fuel doing what I'm encoded for

00:37:30.420 and feeds the fire. That's the direction of the arrow. But then the question is, how do they do

00:37:35.460 it? And so we had this research team meeting where I said, well, and then they figured out

00:37:41.020 how they could get paid for it. My team just kind of had this wonderful, irreverent revolt in the

00:37:46.260 research team meeting. And they said, that's just way too simplistic. We have to really better

00:37:50.280 understand how they actually did it because not all of them were able to have a salary doing it

00:37:54.540 and nobody necessarily came in and just wrote them a check to do it. How do they make it happen?

00:37:58.420 And so we were able to kind of strip away and ask the question, how did they fund their work?

00:38:05.780 And it turns out there are these 12 different ways that they could draw upon to do it.

00:38:12.220 I don't need to go through all 12 in our conversation, but they were in a range of things.

00:38:17.080 I mean, sometimes it was they had the help of a spouse for a period of time.

00:38:21.460 Well, 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.

00:38:36.420 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.

00:38:44.360 And that education and training can come in many ways, not just traditional education, but government paid for John Glenn to learn how to fly.

00:38:50.880 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.

00:38:57.800 And they had some combination of these 12 streams.

00:39:00.560 But one of them that's really big is this, is the idea of creating a flywheel of some kind.

00:39:06.840 And a flywheel is the idea that you sort of have what you really feel the fire to do and you're encoded for.

00:39:14.520 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, right?

00:39:23.580 One part of that.

00:39:24.260 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.

00:39:35.020 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 test pilot, whatever, right?

00:39:43.680 But because you've started with what you're really encoded for and feel the fire for, 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.

00:39:59.920 Whether it's a creative flywheel, a business flywheel, could be a social cause flywheel.

00:40:05.600 Once you have a flywheel effect going in some form, it starts to be a very powerful thing.

00:40:12.180 I would imagine that when you started your podcast, for example, there were early clicks on the flywheel.

00:40:18.140 And then over a period of time, it became exactly that.

00:40:20.620 the more that you did it and did it really well, that created more opportunities for fuel

00:40:26.420 to put back into this thing that you're encoded for and feel the fire for to make the flywheel

00:40:31.080 go further. That's the flywheel effect. Yeah, I can see that in my career. I mean,

00:40:35.200 it started off as a blog and then it picked up steam. And then because it picked up steam,

00:40:39.680 we were getting money as able to like, oh, I'm gonna start a podcast. And the podcast started

00:40:43.460 picking up steam. I was able to do other things as well. And the thing is, I couldn't, I wasn't

00:40:47.680 able to do this thing full time right away. I had to do a couple of years of legal work

00:40:52.120 while doing the blog and the podcast on the side until I could do it full time. So sometimes you

00:40:57.720 have to do something that's not connected to the thing you're encoded for in order to move toward

00:41:03.020 the thing you're encoded for. Yes, I think that really is true. And the critical thing is to be

00:41:10.240 expending some of your very best energy, a big portion of your life on that which feeds the fire

00:41:15.620 and that really you're encoded for.

00:41:18.020 And then the economic question,

00:41:19.620 sometimes it might be a very direct kind of economics for it.

00:41:23.600 You know, your albums sell or you get paid to do it

00:41:26.280 or the government pays you to fly

00:41:27.800 or whatever it happens to be.

00:41:29.040 There can be a direct economic source.

00:41:31.060 But there can be other cases where it's like,

00:41:33.340 no, I have other sources of funding,

00:41:35.820 including where I might be working or what I'm doing,

00:41:39.180 that will allow me to feed it.

00:41:40.400 Toni Morrison, the writer, she worked full-time as an editor, 0.91

00:41:45.280 which wasn't writing. It was editing. And her writing was ultimately her real thing.

00:41:50.080 She did that for quite a number of years, even when she started writing, to essentially allow

00:41:55.540 her to put her energies into the writing. The writing was on one side, but it didn't make

00:42:00.620 any money at first at all. And her editing job is what kept her going while she got her writing

00:42:07.600 flywheel going. Yeah. I think T.S. Eliot, he was a banker, like a bank teller, something like that. 0.99

00:42:13.320 And I know Philip Glass, the composer, he was a plumber in New York City.

00:42:18.960 Really?

00:42:19.480 How about that?

00:42:20.300 Yeah.

00:42:20.640 I mean, you could listen to a Philip Glass concert in New York on Saturday night.

00:42:25.060 Then the next Monday morning, Philip Glass shows up with a monkey wrench to fix your sink.

00:42:30.220 Well, of course, maybe he was also in frame with that, too.

00:42:32.840 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.

00:42:43.320 or even in the classic sense of making albums or anything like that.

00:42:47.560 I got an email from a former professor of mine who read an early version of the book.

00:42:52.200 And he was one of my early professors in my life,

00:42:54.640 had a big impact in a couple of key ways on my thinking.

00:42:57.560 And he'd grown up in, I think, Belgium.

00:42:59.020 And he sent me this story about a person in his life that he knew when he was a kid

00:43:05.600 who laid cobblestones.

00:43:07.920 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 sort of a different level of beauty, if you will, in those cobblestones on the streets.

00:43:37.160 and people are going by in their carriages

00:43:39.840 and walking on them or whatever,

00:43:41.500 but he could point to those and he could feel those

00:43:44.200 and he felt that when he was making them.

00:43:45.920 And so you would look at that and say,

00:43:47.540 well, that's just as much in frame, right?

00:43:49.800 He is doing a beautiful job with the cobblestones

00:43:52.740 and he's totally in frame,

00:43:54.220 making them the best cobblestones they can be.

00:43:56.980 And it's not necessarily something you think of

00:43:59.440 as like a Led Zeppelin album,

00:44:01.260 but for him, it's absolutely in frame.

00:44:04.380 And I think you can be in frame doing lots of things.

00:44:06.500 You can be in frame as a high school coach.

00:44:08.740 You can be in frame as a firefighter.

00:44:11.120 You can be in frame in military service.

00:44:14.060 There's so many ways to be beautifully, beautifully in frame.

00:44:18.820 All right.

00:44:19.180 So we talked about finding your encodings.

00:44:21.060 We talked about flipping the arrow of money.

00:44:22.980 The third element of people who find that frame or what you call their hedgehog is they

00:44:28.480 learn how to focus the fire.

00:44:30.500 What does that look like?

00:44:31.880 Yeah.

00:44:32.060 So this is really an important idea because what we found is that people 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.

00:44:46.980 So we call it the hedgehog because the idea that the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing.

00:44:53.260 And what it means to be in hedgehog mode is for a period of time, I'm not just dabbling in this.

00:44:58.960 I'm really channeling the energy, the intensity, the fire that I have into this for a sustained

00:45:08.420 period of time. And when you, when you do that, the fire can show up. It doesn't necessarily mean

00:45:14.680 always, or a part of it can be that you just really love doing it. And that of course will

00:45:19.100 feed the fire, but it also could just be something that you're just going to stay with this with the

00:45:23.680 fire focused on it until something really important is done. And if it's something that you really

00:45:30.180 have true inner fire for, then a very interesting thing happens. You never really want to stop doing

00:45:37.580 it unless you have to. Yeah. And then you also talk about when you have this fire and it's

00:45:42.860 focused, even when there is what you call the stress and drudgery tax, like you still, you're

00:45:49.600 Are you willing to pay that tax?

00:45:50.720 Yeah.

00:45:51.140 The truth is, even if you're doing something that feeds the fire and they truly love, as

00:45:56.720 was true for people in our study when they were really in frame, but no matter how much

00:46:01.880 you're into doing it, what we observed is there's this thing called the stress and drudgery

00:46:05.840 tax.

00:46:06.760 Everybody pays it.

00:46:08.080 You never get out of it.

00:46:09.080 I don't know how big of a tax you have to pay before it becomes too much, but there's

00:46:13.620 always some.

00:46:14.460 So, for example, I am pay the great architect.

00:46:18.820 I mean, you would think by the time that he's in his 70s

00:46:21.860 and he's won every architectural award imaginable

00:46:24.740 and he has some of the most famous buildings in the world

00:46:27.840 and his career is fully established,

00:46:30.100 that at some point somebody with that much stature and success

00:46:34.100 and the flywheel going wouldn't have to pay the tax.

00:46:37.360 But when he did the Louvre Pyramid in his 70s,

00:46:40.820 there's these stories of people still spitting at his feet in the streets

00:46:45.340 because a lot of people were upset in France with the Louvre Pyramid at first before it was accepted.

00:46:50.840 He was dealing with these cultural committees.

00:46:52.820 It was very stressful.

00:46:54.560 And he always described, well, even, you know, he kept architecting into his 90s,

00:46:59.120 but he always had this phase at the beginning of a project that would be sort of stressful

00:47:03.600 and not really sure what the design was.

00:47:05.460 And he would even describe it as, it's traumatic for my wife.

00:47:08.620 I can't sleep. I care.

00:47:10.600 He has to go through the stress and drudgery of figuring out what the design is.

00:47:14.860 and every person in the study had some permutation of paying the stress and drudgery tax.

00:47:21.560 I have yet to escape it. I imagine you have the stress and drudgery tax. And in a certain way,

00:47:27.160 I find it a bit of a relief because you would maybe have this idealistic view that, well,

00:47:32.740 if I just get everything in place, I can live without the stress and drudgery tax.

00:47:36.680 And I actually find it good news to know that nobody escapes it. So I can more easily accept

00:47:42.600 my own stress and drudgery tax. Yeah, no, I think we can all see that. I mean, if I'm thinking of

00:47:47.660 it as you're talking, I was thinking of examples, say someone who's really they're encoding is maybe

00:47:52.300 leadership and church as an example. Well, there's a stress and drudgery tax there. You have to deal

00:47:57.480 with committees and people being upset over decisions you made. There's a lot of stress

00:48:02.600 there and it can happen at work. You're really passionate about your work that you do, but then

00:48:05.980 okay, I got to do these papers and forms and I got to deal with managers, micromanaging. And if

00:48:11.940 that's what you're encoded for that's the price you got to pay that's right and you know there's

00:48:15.480 a one of my i think i use it in the stress and drudgery section as grace hopper one of my favorite 0.84

00:48:21.140 examples of this so she was the one who pioneered essentially software subroutines and so forth she 0.57

00:48:27.000 was there on the very first computer the mark one and dedicated her life to advancing the cause of

00:48:32.920 standard languages and she wrote the first compiler and so forth and she worked a lot in

00:48:37.140 organizations. She was in academics and then went into industry. And she also spent a big chunk of

00:48:42.440 her life in the Navy and working in these big bureaucracies. And she said, for my entire life,

00:48:47.620 I had to deal with the fact that people are allergic to change. So as much as she loved her

00:48:52.160 computers and her software and getting all of that done, she had to deal with bureaucratic

00:48:56.220 resistance. She had to deal with resistance to change, to get new things adopted. And that tax

00:49:02.280 never went away, never stopped her. She just kept right on going, but the tax was always there.

00:49:08.820 The tax was always there. Something you talk about, and I think this is really important,

00:49:12.540 I'm glad you did talk about this in the book, is how much luck plays a role in whether we get

00:49:17.680 into frame or not. So I'm thinking about John Glenn as a good example. With the card on the

00:49:22.660 bulletin board, yeah. Right. But also too, I mean, the thing was he was born at the right time. He

00:49:27.640 He was born while aviation was just getting started.

00:49:29.820 And so he hit the prime of his life when, you know, jet test piloting was going on.

00:49:34.380 And then the NASA program, the Apollo program went on.

00:49:37.660 I imagine if he was born two decades later, he might have missed that frame.

00:49:42.780 Well, he wouldn't have been the first to orbit Earth.

00:49:44.500 Right.

00:49:45.000 Right?

00:49:45.360 Yeah.

00:49:45.580 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,

00:49:52.820 which is this question of what is the role of kind of these luck events

00:49:57.820 and how people's lives unfold.

00:50:01.060 And there's two parts of it is, you know, one is there's the luck

00:50:04.100 and then there's what they do with the luck, which is the return of luck.

00:50:06.560 But the luck, man, it's just amazing how many serendipitous type events happen.

00:50:12.740 The story of how Jimmy Page got his first guitar, right,

00:50:17.080 is living in one end of London as a kid.

00:50:19.700 I mean, he's like 10 years old or something.

00:50:21.040 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.

00:50:43.800 And there's this guitar and, you know, there's a lot of steps in there. But essentially, well, what would have 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 and hadn't had a guitar in his house that was mysteriously left there?

00:51:06.500 like, would Jimmy Page have become Jimmy Page, the great guitarist and founding member of

00:51:11.360 Led Zeppelin? And the answer is probably not. If he'd been born in Iowa or Delhi or Helsinki or

00:51:18.180 wherever. But here's the beauty of this is that, as we discussed earlier, if he hadn't found that

00:51:24.460 frame, he might have found a different frame. That's the beauty is that there's other frames

00:51:28.700 to discover and but the twists and turns of life are are amazing i still find myself thinking about

00:51:40.260 those three types of luck in there right there's the what luck there's the who luck right people

00:51:45.420 that intersect with your life and then there's just the zeit luck you were talking earlier about

00:51:51.120 when you started your podcast the zeitgeist was on your side yeah for sure because i started it

00:51:57.560 before podcasting was really a thing. And it was completely just random. I didn't have any

00:52:02.280 grand strategy. I was just like, I want to talk to authors that write books that I enjoy.

00:52:07.240 And I got an early start. And then podcasting became this huge thing. And now everyone has a

00:52:13.340 podcast. I imagine if I tried to start a podcast now, it wouldn't have been as successful because

00:52:18.440 the competition is just so much more fierce. But I got lucky and I did that whole return on it.

00:52:24.080 Like I try to take advantage of that lucky event that I had in my life and make the most

00:52:28.660 of it.

00:52:29.560 Yeah, exactly.

00:52:30.320 And you put exactly the point on it, which is that when we, well, let me just back up

00:52:35.300 a little bit about this notion of return on luck, because that concept, I share a lot

00:52:40.280 of credit.

00:52:40.780 Well, really much of the credit goes to a co-author I had on a previous book called

00:52:45.520 Great by Choice.

00:52:46.940 And that was with my colleague Morton Hanson.

00:52:50.380 And Morton and I, we're studying companies, but we're studying companies in really turbulent

00:52:54.800 industries.

00:52:55.360 And we're studying the entrepreneurs who built some of the most successful companies

00:52:58.780 in really chaotic, turbulent, rapidly changing, disruptive environments.

00:53:03.840 And we were comparing them to other companies that didn't do as well in those same environments

00:53:08.640 and asking what was different.

00:53:10.200 And Morton had this idea of like, well, we ought to really see if we can define and quantify

00:53:16.400 the role of luck because these are environments that have a lot of luck in them and see if there's

00:53:21.220 any difference. Were the successful companies luckier? Successful entrepreneurs, were they

00:53:25.780 luckier? And we were able to define a luck event as something you didn't cause. It's something you

00:53:32.400 didn't make happen. It just happened. The second is it has potentially significant consequence,

00:53:36.880 good or bad. And the third is it came in some significant way as a surprise. Anything the

00:53:41.860 Miso Street test is a luck event. And what Morton and I were able to do is to then be able to

00:53:48.800 analyze enough luck events across the histories of these companies to ask a simple question.

00:53:53.920 Were the more successful entrepreneurs and companies that they built luckier than the

00:54:00.080 others? And the answer was no, they didn't get more good luck and they didn't get less bad luck.

00:54:06.760 They didn't get bigger spikes of luck.

00:54:08.940 They didn't get better timing of luck.

00:54:11.360 What they got is exactly what you described, Brett, which is that when the luck events came, they made more of those luck events.

00:54:18.700 And it was the return on luck that was the real differentiating variable.

00:54:24.560 It wasn't they were lucky because everybody is at some level.

00:54:27.620 You have a good luck, bad luck, all of that.

00:54:29.740 It's what they did with the luck that they got.

00:54:31.920 and that is then carried over into this study where we can see that over and over again there's

00:54:39.080 a lot of luck that happens good and bad but what they do with the luck is what really become these

00:54:45.560 kind of separating moments what you know we call the not all time in life is equal moments the

00:54:50.560 moments where there are real inflection points so i think we've done a really good job capturing

00:54:55.580 this idea of frame you're doing the thing that you just feel like you're meant to do and you

00:54:59.580 couldn't imagine yourself doing anything else. Or at least one of many possibilities. One of many.

00:55:02.660 Yeah, there could be many. So you got to find your encodings, those sort of innate talents and

00:55:06.500 interests, find out how you're going to fund that, that encoding, and then really focus that fire.

00:55:11.800 You're going to hit cliffs. You know, they might be coming. They could be surprised.

00:55:15.320 There's going to be fog after that. Simplex step out of the fog.

00:55:18.560 Yeah, simplex step out of the fog. But let's talk about sort of the elder, you know, sort of the

00:55:23.240 second half of life. I think there's this idea that as we get older into retirement that, you

00:55:29.000 know, you're naturally going to start losing your fire to take on ambitious or meaningful projects.

00:55:34.420 And like, all you're going to do is just go on cruises and read mystery novels and that's it.

00:55:39.880 Like I'm done. But you found that there's a lot of people who did some of their best work

00:55:45.140 and it might not be like great creative work or business work, but even just like something that's

00:55:49.500 really impactful in the world or in their community when they're in their seventies,

00:55:53.340 their eighties and their nineties, any examples of those individuals that stand out and what were

00:55:58.540 they doing differently from the people who might not have done that? Well, I think one of the truly

00:56:04.180 most uplifting findings in all of this is what people in this study did well past the midpoint

00:56:10.560 of their lives, in their 50s, 60s, sometimes even their 70s, 80s, even 90s. We mentioned earlier in

00:56:17.280 the conversation about Benjamin Franklin, right, that 53% of the pages in a biography were after

00:56:23.840 the age of 60, but we could go through others. You have, for example, some of Robert Plant's

00:56:29.080 greatest music coming late in life. Most of his Grammy nominations and awards come

00:56:33.880 in his 50s and 60s when he does this amazing bluegrass album with Alison Krauss. And that

00:56:40.580 doesn't happen when he's young. It happens when he's down the road. I.M. Pei doing Louvre Pyramid

00:56:45.140 in his 70s. Toni Morrison didn't publish Beloved until 56 and didn't get to jazz one of her most

00:56:52.020 spectacular creations, in my view, until her early 60s, and then just continued right on doing

00:56:57.960 spectacular work. And we can go through sort of case after case where remarkable things happened

00:57:03.900 late. And what I kind of stand back with is they would have rejected the idea that their younger

00:57:10.640 self has to tower over their older self. And that as I looked at these lives, it was maybe the other

00:57:17.520 way around in a number of cases, but certainly it wasn't the tyranny of youth over our older

00:57:24.380 selves. The evidence from this project convinces me that much of our great creative steps in life

00:57:34.180 can easily happen well, well past the midpoint and maybe the most spectacular parts of our life

00:57:43.220 to come well past the midpoint yeah and you talk about reasons why that might be is like one is

00:57:49.640 you're just more familiar with yourself right you know what your encodings are probably by the time

00:57:54.720 you're 70 or 80 the different ones you might have you have all this experience that you can draw upon

00:58:00.940 that you didn't have when you're in your 20s and you also just have more like skill like you might

00:58:06.540 not have that what is that fluid knowledge where you can think fast on your feet but you got that

00:58:11.440 crystallized knowledge, this reservoir of wisdom that you can call upon that can help you make

00:58:16.320 better decisions and figure out like, what is the thing I need to do with the time I got left?

00:58:21.620 Yes. I also think that you can do spectacular, creative things that you'd never done before.

00:58:28.960 And this is where you can begin to discover when, you know, when the frame shifts and you do things

00:58:34.720 that are almost like drawing upon things that had always been there, but now you're amplifying them

00:58:39.780 in ways that are almost like a whole new arena. And so I love this idea that it's not necessarily

00:58:47.940 going to be derivative things you do. They could be entirely new things that you do.

00:58:54.180 Yeah. So be open to that. Don't think, okay, I did this when I was younger. That's how I'm

00:58:58.900 going to stick to this. There could be new things that I can discover. Or you might go back to

00:59:03.580 things you did earlier, but do them in a reimagined way. For those who know Led Zeppelin,

00:59:09.100 I love how Robert Plant will go back and he isn't repeating like Black Dog or Ramblin' On, right, in just a classic Zeppelin way.

00:59:19.080 He will bring forth in bluegrass or with a different orchestra from a different part of the world or Arabian music or whatever,

00:59:28.540 bring it all together and create a whole new reimagined version of Black Dog.

00:59:34.340 Black Dog in Bluegrass as a duet with Alison Krauss. It's still Black Dog, but it's not still Black Dog. And that ability to kind of circle back to something that might have 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.

01:00:00.880 Yeah, I love that. That section is really inspiring for me because I'm in my 40s.

01:00:04.580 I'm seeing the second half of life and it's good to know that I can still have projects that light me up.

01:00:10.660 Well, let me just put it this way.

01:00:12.960 Brett, when you hit 60, you'll have finished your warmup.

01:00:17.240 Okay. That's good to know. Yeah.

01:00:19.960 You never know how many more chapters are still to come.

01:00:22.140 That's right.

01:00:22.660 That's right. Well, Jim, this has been a great conversation.

01:00:26.000 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

01:00:28.660 Probably the best place is our website, just simply jimcollins.com.

01:00:33.480 And there they can learn about the classic work and they can learn about the new work.

01:00:39.360 Fantastic.

01:00:39.680 Well, Jim Collins, thanks for your time.

01:00:40.700 It's been a pleasure.

01:00:41.600 It has been a real pleasure, Brett.

01:00:44.560 My guest here was Jim Collins.

01:00:45.840 He's the author of the book, What to Make of a Life.

01:00:47.760 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

01:00:50.080 You can find more information about his work at his website, jimcollins.com.

01:00:53.300 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Collins, where you can find links to resources

01:00:56.880 where you delve deeper into this topic.

01:00:58.180 well that wraps up another edition of the a1 podcast if you haven't done sorry i'd appreciate

01:01:10.300 it if you take one minute to give us a review on the podcast player that you used to listen to the

01:01:13.980 show and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with a friend

01:01:17.780 or family member you think you get something out of it as always thank you for the continued

01:01:21.400 support until next time it's brett mckay reminding you to listen to the a1 podcast but put what you've

01:01:25.620 into action. Before you go, here's another episode worth adding to the queue. In episode

01:01:47.040 number 821, we explore why routines, especially over rigid ones, can actually make life harder,

01:01:52.020 not easier. We talk discipline without obsession, structure without rigidity and where real growth

01:01:57.080 comes from. You can find it at aom.is slash routines. That's aom.is slash routines. Go

01:02:02.980 check it out. Episode number 821.

The Art of Manliness - April 28, 2026

A Map for Finding Direction and Purpose in Life (Again and Again)

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