00:02:33.340I'm curious to know what you're curious about.0.99
00:02:35.780I'm just, this is, you've had too many touch points in my life where your damn work has had outsized influence.0.96
00:02:45.120Like next level, level five influence, in fact, in terms of just, you know, breaking my consciousness and all of my limiting beliefs.0.69
00:02:55.280And so it's a hell of a gift for me to be able to first thank you for your decades and decades of extraordinary contribution to, you know, so many of us that you, I can't even imagine, you know, not just business leaders, but people that are just trying to be better human beings, better.
00:03:15.120you know, better citizens, dare I say. So it's a great gift for me to have you on.
00:03:22.080Yeah, no, I, you know, and I could just tell that you're a very curious person, as am I. And I would
00:03:29.500imagine that whatever, you know, we would just have a marvelous conversation. So I kind of view
00:03:36.080this as a marvelous conversation. And by the way, congratulations on writing yourself.
00:03:41.420No. And as you now know, it's an arduous, an arduous journey. And I am curious what the process of writing was like for you. You've always loved taking in from books, but I'm curious what it was like for you to to create one.
00:03:58.740You know, it's interesting, Jim, just, you know, I thought I was really touched, you know, you begin and end your new book in the, it's not dissimilar to the way that I began my book, which is really a journey of discovery.
00:04:10.160It was a memoir of discovery, and it was really a love letter to my parents and to my grandparents.
00:04:15.820parents and you dedicated your book, not only to your wife, uh, but to your grandma, but it begins
00:04:22.140with just that powerful opening, uh, with your father and trying to connect with your father
00:04:27.560and realizing that you weren't going to be able to connect with your father. And it'd be a great,
00:04:31.440I'd love to just kick this off because you, you, you wrote a book called, you know, what to make
00:04:36.460of a life that's, you know, to me, it just, it touches on so many themes that are so resonant
00:04:43.220in terms of my time of life. But it also, I think, is resonant in the context of the lives of those
00:04:50.100we've lost and loved as well, and how they imprint on us and how we are an extension of them. And so
00:04:56.120in my own writing journey, you, of course, extended to this new piece of work that in
00:05:02.500contribution, your relationship to your father in a way you had in the past.
00:05:06.500Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm happy to pick up there. And as you know, from the beginning of what to make of a life, the seeds of this work really begin with the recognition that my father could never really be a father.
00:05:25.300And and as you know, there's a California connection to it, because when I was in about first grade, he took me and my brother and my mom off to San Francisco.
00:05:36.120And and we lived right kind of ground zero of everything that was happening in the Haight-Ashbury.
00:05:42.740We were a number of houses down from Haight Street on Ashbury.
00:05:47.040And my father was sort of into the whole beat scene.
00:05:49.640And I think he was really lost in the fog of life.
00:05:52.820I didn't have words for that at the time, but I think he was in a fog for most of his life and never really emerged.
00:05:59.600And finally, when my mom sort of just said, that's it, and they eventually separated and divorced, I always just – and maybe you can relate to this as well with just different people that you hope for things from them in life.
00:06:15.440And what I really hoped is that my father would somehow become a father, right?
00:06:20.860And I just kept hoping that he would step out of this fog and be a father and provide guidance.
00:06:27.320And I had no clue how to think about life.
00:06:29.660And then in early high school, there really was this moment that's really seared in my experience.
00:06:35.920We were back in Colorado at the time, my mom and my brother and myself.
00:06:39.840And I got this idea that I would take one of those prepackaged turkeys.
00:06:46.420And my father was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor in north of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
00:06:54.340I brought this turkey and was going to share it with him and had this image he would emerge as a father.
00:07:01.360And what happened that weekend was this shattering realization that he was mainly self-absorbed into the question of why his mother had made his life so difficult.
00:07:12.460and mainly tried to get me to convince her to give him money.
00:07:18.360And when I got back on the Greyhound bus heading north,
00:08:27.640Two years writing it, 10 years researching it, books that just knocked me on the floor
00:08:34.660and just knocked me in the core, talking about the core, core values, core ideology, you know,
00:08:39.720as a, as a young entrepreneur coming right out of college, uh, pen to paper. And I was writing
00:08:44.200business plans, opening a little wine store in a restaurant. And someone says, Hey, you got to
00:08:48.760read this book built to last. And I start, you know, this, this language begins to shift because
00:08:54.600of your work and research. And I think, what was that a six years or five or six? Yeah, that was
00:08:59.260a six year project. Which I thought was extraordinary in and of itself that you would
00:09:02.640take that much time to research a subject matter. And you're talking about this notion of being a
00:09:08.820clock builder versus a time teller. And you're talking about the genius of and versus the tyranny
00:09:13.840of or. And boy, did that open up my mind in so many ways. This notion of stimulating progress,
00:09:20.420but maintaining the core, core values, again, core ideology. I end up writing a core ideology
00:09:25.400book for my business. And I had a restaurant, a few little hotels and a winery, and I became my
00:09:33.260HR book, Plump Jack, Core Ideology and Ram Notes, but literally taken from you and then good to
00:09:39.200great. And I'm like, come on, can't get better than good to great meets built to last and
00:09:43.880learning about level five leadership and these larger concepts that you don't have to be a
00:09:49.600charismatic leader. It's about humility and, you know, just shifting all these mindsets. And I
00:09:54.400read. Well, that was another five years of research or something. And so here this book
00:09:58.580comes along. And to me, it's even more extraordinary, but it all connects, forgive me,
00:10:06.060because you write about leadership, management, visionary companies, what makes companies become
00:10:11.980good to great, and you pair things up. And here you start to pair up, not just stories and
00:10:18.460storytelling. We're going to get to dozens and dozens of those, but, you know, I think you pair
00:10:24.240up a larger meaning of life. It's not a, you know, you, you say this, it's not a self-help book,
00:10:29.500but it's about self-knowledge. And it's, it's about these things that we all share in common,
00:10:36.620these, these sort of moments in life, these, these, you know, as we navigate fog and we'll
00:10:42.680get to that as we navigate cliffs in our lives. But it's also about who we are and discovering
00:10:49.020this notion of, you know, you talk in terms of encoding. And so I just, forgive, I just wanted
00:10:55.200to, that was a long-winded preamble, just to explore my own bias towards you, but bias towards
00:11:01.280this work in particular and how it hit me like a ton of bricks. Perhaps it's, again, my time of life,
00:11:06.500my state of mind uh my state you know of being um as a termed out politician uh perhaps more
00:11:15.180specifically but also as a father and the journey of discovery that we're all on and figuring out
00:11:21.500who we are so let's talk about this book uh what to make of a life it's three and three fundamental
00:11:27.400books isn't it well go ahead i just i just want to um if it's all right with you and let's go right
00:11:33.600We'll go into what to make of life. I want to I just want to put a little comma from what you said before.
00:11:40.240And then let's go right into the three parts of the new book.
00:11:44.300But first of all, I'm so tickled that you found Built to Last when you were starting as an entrepreneur.
00:11:51.460And the beauty of writing is you never know where it's going to go and to know that it was affecting you.
00:11:56.120And I just – I wanted to highlight one thing in that, which has a lot to do with my own journey, which is the marvelous people along the way that have had such an impact on me in such generous ways.
00:12:11.920And with Built to Last, I have one of these great strokes of huluck in my life.
00:12:17.400We write a lot about huluck in the new book, but it was my co-author on that book, Jerry Porras.
00:12:22.180And, you know, Jerry was the one who came up with the idea of not just studying, you know, success cases or just studying a set of companies, but this pairing process, the match-pair methodology really came from Jerry.
00:12:37.920He was my great research mentor, and we first used it and developed it and built to last.
00:12:43.420And just one little thing about Level 5, you mentioned this notion of people who lead with a great sense of humility.
00:12:49.060and it doesn't need to all revolve around them in some way.
00:12:53.540And there's just one beautiful data point.
00:15:28.520And I've always been interested in people, as you know, from from all the prior work built to last and good to great and so forth.
00:15:35.260There's so much in there that I mean, great companies don't build themselves.
00:15:39.620People build great companies. And I was always interested in the leaders and the people and their story and how what they are as people ended up being reflected in the kinds of companies and organizations and institutions that they built.
00:15:53.840And so I always had this interest in just the people side of things, really the center of things.
00:16:01.820And then when I had done about, oh, gosh, over three decades of work on what makes great companies tick, I had finished this two-year appointment as the class of 1951.
00:16:14.500I was sponsored by the class of 1951 chair for the study of leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
00:16:20.360And I sort of felt like a whole bunch of things had kind of come to towards a conclusion.
00:16:25.840And I was thinking, what am I going to really work on next?
00:16:29.660I didn't want to just do another book on unmatched pairs of companies and so forth after three decades of that.
00:16:35.680And so I kept thinking and I came back to this question and three seeds fused at once.
00:16:40.700One was the early journey, the Greyhound bus, the whole deal.
00:16:43.900uh the second uh seed uh was john gardner and his inspiration to me about self-renewal and that he
00:16:51.780felt that the question of how we make the most of the later decades of our life uh was really worth
00:16:57.940putting more research into and john had an impact on me with that and the third seed which kind of
00:17:03.680came in the middle was my wife joanne was a world champion athlete triathlete when we lived in palo
00:17:10.880alto in the 1980s and she won the hawaii ironman and but her athletic career uh as you know from
00:17:17.600the book came to an end and prematurely because of an injury you had an injury as an athlete right
00:17:23.640and there's it's very if you're an athlete and then it's taken away from you because you get
00:17:28.720injured uh that when and and and i remember we're sitting at a little table in our in our little
00:17:36.720townhouse in palo alto and the late 80s when she realized it was coming to an end and and and she
00:17:43.880would no longer be able to hold that identity and she just said to me one day you know i feel like
00:17:49.380i'm dying and i didn't have an answer and jim how old is she's she's young i mean she's yeah she's
00:17:56.300like uh in her late 20s at this point yeah mid to late 20s she won the iron man in 1985 so she was
00:18:01.88024. And just to put in perspective, people know, not only won the Ironman, but she was, I mean,
00:18:06.500Nike, you know, just do a campaign. I mean, she was, you were, you were out there hustling for
00:18:11.300her sponsorships, right? I mean, she was Bud Light and all these other. That's right. Exactly. In
00:18:16.520fact, I was very much Joanne's support team. And this is all before I got back to teaching or
00:18:24.420got the opportunity to teach at Stanford, connect with Jerry to build class, all that was in the
00:18:28.980future. And what, uh, I, uh, I, I quit all of my jobs and all of that and, and focused on just
00:18:36.620supporting Joanne's athletic career. She was the first female athlete in the famous, just do it0.98
00:18:41.460campaigns. And, and, uh, so she really, I mean, she was the world champion, Ironman champion with
00:18:48.600all of this stuff that surrounded it. And then her injury was going to take it away. And, and I
00:18:54.100think that all those seeds came together because I realized I didn't have the words for it at the
00:18:58.420time. But the question of what to make of a life, well, she had to answer the question again. I mean,
00:19:03.400what she's making of a life, she's an athlete. Now that's being taken away and you have to ask
00:19:11.280the question again. And I think what happened is all those seeds came together in this idea
00:19:18.760of we all face the question at multiple times in our life. We don't just answer the question
00:19:25.600of what to make of a life only once in all likelihood. We actually have to answer it and
00:19:31.980then re-answer it. And then maybe we get hit with what I'd describe as a cliff event, like Joanne's
00:19:38.380an event where it radically changes or alters your life and you have to sort of refigure it all out
00:19:45.200in some way. And there's all different kinds of cliffs, disease cliffs and career cliffs and
00:19:52.200personal cliffs and even success cliffs, right? What if you reach the very peak of something and
00:19:57.100that's over? And I came up with this idea of, well, you could really get an insight if you
00:20:04.940could look at how people go through the whole phase of life, but in particular, how they
00:20:11.880reprocess the question at multiple times when they're young, when they're going through a cliff
00:20:17.180and have to come out the other side. And when they're looking at the later decades and years
00:20:23.040of their lives, so that they don't squander those years and leave them on the table.
00:20:27.640And that ultimately led to, I got to do this project in some form. And then 12 years later,
00:20:33.780I emerged blinking in the sunlight. So it was a heck of a journey.
00:20:40.040Yeah. I mean, but, and, and, and when you start these journeys, five years, six years
00:20:44.380for build less and good to grade and 12 here, I mean, 10 plus too. Is that, you don't really have
00:20:52.260an end in mind, do you? You just have, you're just committed to the journey. You're working
00:20:57.080on a project and it runs its course. Yes, exactly. In fact, there's kind of a fun story
00:21:03.000with this one of how much I was just on the journey of doing it. I had a number of years
00:21:08.580where I was trying to figure out how to do it, right? And so often in the early stages of a
00:21:12.960research project, there's, well, I'm kind of getting the questions, but I really need to
00:21:17.680develop the methods. And then you got to find the study subjects and that can take years and finding
00:21:22.620pairs of people matched at the same cliffs. There was a whole lot. So before you could even get
00:21:27.320into studying individual lives, you had to find the pairs you were going to look at. So it's just
00:21:34.380this, and I'm oddly put together in such a way that I can get lost in something like that. And
00:21:41.720I don't need any external pressure of any kind. I just love getting up in the morning and having
00:21:48.640a project that's like a giant friend. I mean, it's just sort of like you look across the room
00:21:52.980and there's this giant friend and it says, good morning. And you're on your way. But my publisher,
00:22:00.160I was able to just pursue this on my own path. My publisher didn't even know it existed
00:22:05.780until it was done. And, uh, and, and so I'm, they did that. They didn't even have any ideas
00:22:13.040working on, on, on a book like this. They knew I was probably doing something because I'm always
00:22:18.040doing something. 10 years in advance. There's no, there's no advance. I think like I'm just
00:22:22.180marching. And then my, I have a wonderful, uh, partner that's been my literary agent for years.
00:22:27.920Uh, and, uh, Peter, uh, call, uh, I finished the book. We actually, it's actually written. It
00:22:33.980could maybe use a little polishing, but it's basically done. And an agent calls my publisher
00:22:39.800in New York that I've worked with for many years and said, on Monday morning, you will receive a
00:22:45.740box. In that box is Jim's new book. And my executive editor, my publisher, she's like,
00:22:55.820book? What book? What are you talking about? And she had no idea even what it would be about and
00:23:02.660open the box and there's the title, What to Make of a Life. And she's like, oh boy,
00:23:06.900we're not in Kansas anymore. And away we went. So I can't explain why I can just,
00:23:14.040if it takes 10 years or six years or whatever, I think the magnitude of it, I find,
00:23:21.820I just, once I start, if it's a really good project and it's something I've got to get to
00:23:26.900the end of satisfying my curiosity, I just can't stop. And I actually, I get to a certain point
00:23:34.740where when I, I, I start getting really conservative in my choices so that I don't
00:23:42.480have an unfortunate accident before it's done. Right. I, I, I, I so much want it to get done.
00:23:48.520So I drive slower, you know, I, I make sure that I look both ways because there's just this sense
00:23:56.180momentum that comes from the magnitude of the project. It's like, oh no, I can't get 80% of
00:24:00.700the way of this and then have an accident, right? I've got to get it done. Well, and that gets to
00:24:05.760fire and purpose, which we'll get to in a moment. But just to underscore so people have a better
00:24:10.320sense of who you are, I mean, you're a 4 a.m. guy, right? That's my favorite. When you wake up
00:24:15.520your mornings so people understand. We're not talking about 7.30 and you're looking out the
00:24:21.920window with a cup of coffee. You're 4 a.m. and you're sometimes up earlier wishing it was 4 so
00:24:27.480you can get moving on the day. Yes. So especially when I'm in the middle of a project. So when I
00:24:33.400had this giant friend in the room that would greet me every morning, my favorite time to get
00:24:39.880up is right around 4. And especially when I'm in the big project and the big writing mode and all
00:24:46.600that. And I'm at work by, I walked, you know, I stumbled downstairs. I have one really good cup
00:24:53.480of coffee during the day. I have it then, wake up, bang. And I am at work by like 4.11 or 4.12
00:24:59.980or 4.30, very quickly. And there's just something about, and I really will, I wrote this in the
00:25:08.680book kind of describing a little bit of the writing process, which is really true. I'd wake
00:25:11.700up sometimes to just think, oh, please, please, please let it be at least 4 a.m. so I can get up
00:25:15.820and get going. And, and then, you know, and do it and just, just sort of the day after day after
00:25:22.740day aspect of it. And it's not, it's not a form of regimen. It's not a form of, of like self-imposed
00:25:29.860grinding discipline. It's not like that at all. It's this sense of childlike enthusiasm is the
00:25:38.860best way I can describe it. And it's just, oh my goodness. I, you know, and, and, and there's
00:25:44.460tricks though. Like if you're writing something during the day, end partway through a paragraph
00:25:53.020because then when you get up at 4 a.m. in the morning, you already have the momentum of being
00:26:02.400partway through that paragraph. And so when you pick up, you can get this snap click when you hit
00:26:08.240the pages. Wow. I like that. It's an interesting hack. So the first look, the first and most
00:26:14.080difficult part of this, and it goes back to the work that Jerry and you did is the pairings. And
00:26:19.060I mean, and therein lies the decade. I mean, is how you explore the lives and really uncover
00:26:25.920thousands of years of lives in the aggregate and the lessons and distill sort of the essence of
00:26:31.220the lessons. And so I imagine, or perhaps you can illuminate, the process begins there,
00:26:37.780or does the process begin with the frame and the question? Is it, I mean, you really, you talk about
00:26:42.660the power of questions. And so how did, what was the, I mean, give us a way, give me a sense of
00:26:48.140how you architected this process at the beginning. Yeah. So, so I had these questions, right, that
00:26:54.660were in my mind. And probably initially, they were tilted a little bit towards the seed from
00:27:02.680Joanne and her cliff and John Gardner's question of self-renewal. And I'd always been inspired by
00:27:08.300those. And those two kind of went together because you had John really, I saw my notes from him
00:27:15.700sitting down with me many, many decades ago. And we talked through some possible ways that you
00:27:21.960might actually look at the question of how people remain renewed over the entire arc of life.
00:27:27.920But then I kept thinking, how on earth would you study that? And then what became clear to me is
00:27:33.240Joanne's experience came flooding back to me. And I realized that when you have one of these
00:27:40.360cliff events, these times in life when life as you knew it before in some significant way
00:27:47.400has ended. And you have to, it calls for new questions. You have to answer the question again
00:27:55.860of what to make of a life. And Joanne's Cliff is a very painful cliff. And that all of a sudden
00:28:03.440gave me the idea of like, wow, I could really learn a lot about how people renew themselves
00:28:07.540if I could find people going through cliffs and having to answer the question of how to renew
00:28:13.920themselves coming out of a cliff and then go through the rest of their lives. And so then
00:28:19.220came Jerry's thing about always learn from having, if you can have pairs that are facing similar
00:28:25.540circumstances and you can learn from how different entities handle those different circumstances.
00:28:30.000So then the idea became very simple. Well, what if I could find pairs of people that are matched at
00:28:34.500a very similar cliff and I could look at their lives up to the cliff, into the cliff, coming out
00:28:41.200the cliff and then over the rest of their lives. And then became a really long journey of you had
00:28:45.700to find these wonderful pairs. That became very hard. I had wonderful researchers and we searched
00:28:50.740and we searched and we searched. And sometimes you'd have one side of the pair, but you'd really
00:28:56.220have trouble finding the other side of the pair. And sometimes they were obvious once you found
00:29:00.080them. So for example, I mean, you know, some of the pairs that are in there, I mean, a classic
00:29:05.160like Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. And, you know, really, I mean,
00:29:10.760they were so tightly together, playing on stage, lead guitarist, lead singer, and
00:29:15.160John Bonham, the drummer, dies, and you have a cliff, the end of Led Zeppelin. And now what?
00:29:21.520Our two suffragists, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, their cliff was, I mean, they had dedicated their
00:29:27.340lives for quite a number of years where they were trying to get what became the 19th Amendment.
00:29:34.060They were trying to get women's suffrage, and then they won. Alice Paul probably had already written the first word of her obituary in terms of how others would write her life, architect of the 19th Amendment.
00:29:49.560it. And so you face the question of, well, now what? We won. And we have people who tragically
00:29:56.160lost their spouse and had to then were cast into roles for which they had never prepared or
00:30:02.960envisioned professional athletes. We have two Olympic gold medal winners. What do you do after
00:30:10.060you've won a gold medal and you were the first and second women ever in the United States from
00:30:13.900the United States to win gold and you need to figure out the rest of your life or your NFL0.66
00:30:18.820players like Alan Page and Carl Eller from the Purple People Leaders of the 1970s of the Vikings.
00:30:25.280That's like Joanne's Cliff, end of an athletic career. What comes next? And so there were all
00:30:30.460these pairs and these different walks of life. And it was years, like we'd find one side of the
00:30:35.220pair sometimes, or I thought it'd be really interesting to have Benjamin Franklin, a great
00:30:41.160example of renewal over the course of a life. And I thought, what a cliff, the ultimate cliff,
00:30:49.820the time of revolution and your entire world being ripped apart, right? And I thought,
00:30:56.560but how can I find a match to Benjamin Franklin? And we ended up doing this thing where a researcher,
00:31:05.980member of my research team and I came with this idea, which is let's just take all the
00:31:11.020members of the people who were at the Constitutional Convention and all of the people who signed
00:31:16.700the Declaration of Independence, which Franklin had done, and then work back through exploring
00:31:22.220all those lives to see if there was anyone whose life up to that point was parallel enough
00:31:30.780to Franklin's that you could match him. And you find Roger Sherman from Connecticut and they are
00:31:36.840the two oldest at the constitutional convention and their lives were defined by that time and
00:31:44.600what they dedicated themselves to and so forth. And we had our match, but that was probably just
00:31:49.000to find Roger Sherman was months. Amen. It took me six decades to find him and I found him in your
00:31:57.160book. I didn't know anything about him. But now I know a lot about him. And of course,
00:32:01.760the personality contrast between the two is next level. And you explore that in detail.
00:32:06.720Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses,0.99
00:32:10.620their elected leaders, and the world around them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce
00:32:14.400the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast,
00:32:19.860we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians,
00:32:25.100and newsmakers all at different stages of their journey so if you're looking to connect then we
00:32:30.480hope you'll join us listen to the honest talk podcast on iheart radio or wherever you listen
00:32:35.020to your podcasts what's up fam i'm sports journalist ari chambers hey what's up y'all
00:32:41.760it's your girl sam j and we're the hosts of everyone watches women's sports a new podcast
00:32:46.120from together and i heart women's sports because let's be real women's sports is giving us way
00:32:51.060too much to talk about these days the highlights the rivalries the breakout starts the moments
00:32:55.380that take over your entire timeline and the conversations that start during the game and
00:33:00.020somehow keep going all week every week we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's
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00:33:34.880hey I'm Hoda Kotb host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb okay if you know me you know this
00:33:43.020I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy.
00:33:49.480So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.
00:33:54.380We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people,
00:33:59.840like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.
00:34:06.380I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.
00:34:11.000There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression.
00:34:13.320I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
00:34:15.520Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.
00:34:20.400There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.
00:34:24.700It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.
00:40:40.500And then there might be a time when we're out of frame, meaning what we're doing doesn't capture a lot of those encodings.
00:40:48.140And we're the same person, but somehow we're just kind of over here, we're a lightning bolt and over here, we're a lightning bug.
00:40:56.400And then the lens shifts again and a big, bright set of encodings comes through the window and I'm back to being a lightning bolt.
00:41:04.160And it's a it's a maybe a different frame.
00:41:06.080One of my favorite little details in the whole book, Gavin, is this little one about John Glenn, in frame as a test pilot, fighter pilot, astronaut.
00:41:21.380But he spends about 10% of his life as an executive at Royal Crown Cola.
00:41:27.860And even though it's about 10% of his life, he only puts about 0.2% of his memoir about it.
00:41:36.080And what that tells me is that in that time of his life, it's not that he was failing, it's that that was lightning bug. Astronaut, test pilot, fighter pilot, lightning bolt, executive, lightning bug, senator, lightning bolt.
00:41:53.600And much of the task of life is we're actually going to ebb and flow.
00:41:59.980We're going to have times when I sort of feel like I'm a lightning bug right now.
00:42:04.100And we're going to have times when it's like, wow, I'm in frame.
00:42:29.220How would you best describe when you're in that state, that bolt, that lightning bolt versus bug?
00:42:36.440So it's capturing a capacity that is very natural.
00:42:44.820That when you do it, if other people look at it, they might say, how do you do that?
00:42:52.760How do you have the instinct to do that? And you go, well, I don't really think that much about it. It's instinctive for me. And that's an encoding. And let me just maybe – the encodings, again, they don't have to be grandiose encodings. Like I'm encoded to win a Nobel Prize or something. It's not anything like that.
00:43:10.900But it's, go back to our friend, John Glenn.
00:43:15.720And Glenn, one of his encodings was checklists.
00:43:21.920I mean, he would just, he was just intrinsically drawn to operating off of checklists.
00:43:46.560So there's this marvelous match between being check happy and, you know, you don't want to miss a check on your checklist when you're about to take off in a fighter jet into combat over Korea, right?
00:44:03.380But let's think about this for a moment.
00:44:05.360If you think about, that was an encoding that he then harnessed to being in his role as a test pilot and astronaut.
00:44:15.580But what if I'm not encoded for checklists?
00:44:20.120Well, I could learn the skill of checklists.
00:44:23.440And I could probably even make checklisting a strength by just practice and discipline.
00:44:29.560So here's the way I've come to understand the basic difference.
00:44:32.500If you have the encoding, and then you multiply that times training and discipline and focus, it becomes kind of a super strength.
00:44:44.840And if you're not encoded for it, through training and discipline and learning, you can turn it into a strength.
00:44:51.960and and so it doesn't mean that it might not become a strength or a skill
00:44:56.260but it's when it's layered when it when it stems from the encoding that's there the encoding to
00:45:03.660solve a puzzle i just can't not solve puzzles and when the when the lightning goes off i think what
00:45:11.600happens is it's very natural for people but there's also a sense of just when you do something
00:45:17.320that feels that natural, it's intrinsically compelling. It's not the adulation that would
00:45:25.320come from it or like our geneticist, Barbara McClintock, one of my favorite things about her0.56
00:45:31.160is she was just, she really was, she had to solve puzzles. It's just, she was just,
00:45:36.780just a puzzle solver. And when she was at the University of Missouri, she's trying to,
00:45:43.940She gets locked out of the lab on a Sunday, and she's so intrinsically compelled to solve puzzles that she can't waste the time to go back and get her keys.
00:45:52.700So she climbs up the outside of the building and in through a window so she can work on the puzzles.
00:45:58.520Okay, so I think when the lightning goes off, it's like that.
00:46:03.120And then later in life, when she wins a Nobel Prize, she says it's kind of unfair in a way.
00:46:10.560It's a great honor, but it's unfair to reward someone for simply having had so much pleasure over the years.
00:46:17.120And so when when sort of when it's a combination of like the fire and the real fire for doing it, just like it intrinsically feeds my fire.
00:46:27.580but also it's resting on this encoding that you turn into a super strength.
00:47:16.400And so this notion of uncoding, though, is hard for a lot of us, because a lot of us
00:47:20.700have a mythology that it's the one thing, that you have to find the one thing.
00:47:24.440yeah we would haven't we been nurtured to believe that and that's our real to find our purpose and
00:47:30.640our bliss and then passion and then we pursue that passion sort of the maslow version of life
00:47:35.940yeah so so you mentioned maslow and i uh have of course i've always loved maslow's basic
00:47:43.840definition of self-actualization the um discovering what you're made to do and committing to pursue it
00:47:51.040with excellence. Okay. And I still believe that, but with a giant asterisk, which is you can't
00:47:58.820take that sentence as there's this one thing you're made to do. Because first of all, imagine
00:48:05.180how dispiriting it would be to believe there's only one and you never found it.
00:48:09.960I mean, yeah. And then you can sort of feel like you're on this unicorn quest to find it.
00:48:15.760and and and then maybe you're a young person and something doesn't feel quite like it and so then
00:48:21.720you think i haven't yet found it and there's the it's almost like an existential doom loop right
00:48:27.000the search for it and so uh what this study showed because people had to often change the frame right
00:48:37.700A fighter pilot to senator, football player to Supreme Court justice.
00:48:48.780Sometimes it's one walk of life like Catherine Graham, who never envisioned herself as a business leader, went through a terrible cliff, lost her husband, ended up the CEO of the Washington Post.
00:49:01.480and then all of a sudden discovers that she has these encodings she never knew she had
00:49:06.120for leadership and then encoding for writing that she didn't know she had.
00:49:12.120And so what really changed for me is that within any one of us over the course of a life,
00:49:19.880and some of our people did two or three or even four things in a life that were really big,
00:49:25.320that the constellation is vast. And if you don't find this one,
00:49:31.480Well, you might find that one or this one here or that one over there.
00:49:37.420It's just you just need to find a thing that fits your encodings, that feeds your inner fire, where you can make the economics work to pursue it.
00:49:46.800And you went through your own process.
00:57:52.440Our conversation with Michael Buble is out now.
00:57:54.660Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:57:59.720But part of how I got out of the fog was a wonderful teacher named Rochelle Myers suggested to me.
00:58:06.340She co-taught the creativity course at Stanford Business School when I was there, and she suggested to me that I get a start what I ended up calling the bug book.
00:58:18.220And the idea behind the bug book was to take one of those lab notebooks, right, that we used to have in lab class, and write on the front of it the name Jim.
00:58:28.540The idea being that it's not that the book is owned by Jim, it's that the subject understudy is Jim.
00:58:35.300And, and so, and then you, and then take this lab notebook and carry it with me wherever I would go
00:58:42.500and study myself like a bug. And I'm the bug named Jim. And, and I would be, I would just
00:58:49.440make notes all the time that were simple observations with, without judgment. You don't
00:58:53.660say, gosh, you know, I think I'd be a better bug if I had eight legs rather than six. Well,
00:58:58.800you just make, observe, the bug has six legs. And so I would begin to make observations about,
00:59:06.300for example, being in meetings in a large corporation that I was working at in the 80s.
00:59:12.060I had made the mistake of following the advice of my professors and who thought I should get
00:59:17.080experience at a big, well-run company. It was a wonderful, big, well-run company,
00:59:22.040but I was really out of frame there. And there are a lot of notes in my bug book about
00:59:27.040sitting there in meetings and the meetings could have been much more productive. I didn't really
00:59:32.520see the point of them. And then I would say, I would say something that would not be helpful
00:59:37.320to the meeting because I would be critical of our particular perspective or whatever,
00:59:40.740but I would be making notes the entire time. The bug Jim is really doesn't fit in these kinds of
00:59:47.000meetings and conversations, but I would also make notes about when things would click.
00:59:51.780Yeah. And so there are, I bet if I went back and looked, that there are bug book entries about when I wrote those early articles before I ever met up with Jerry to do the research about the bug Jim enjoyed trying to make sense of something and share it in words.
01:00:10.440So, and then I got input as well from other people.
01:00:13.720I had mentors who made observations about me and putting those things together, eventually
01:00:19.580I was able to see for myself, I didn't have the words for it.
01:00:37.580And through that process, eventually, that led through a series of steps to stumbling upon what I ended up spending so far the rest of my life on of research and writing and teaching.
01:00:50.380And you brought up Catherine Graham, and it's such a powerful story. I didn't fully appreciate it. I've gotten to know Catherine and her son, but I never really appreciated what happened with her husband.
01:01:04.540I mean, it was, that was, that was powerful. And this notion of simplex steps and her sort of
01:01:11.540reconciling, it's not a great leap that you necessarily have to take. It's this notion of
01:01:17.220sort of, as you suggest, stepping off a curb and realizing you're still standing up. And eventually
01:01:23.520over time and through iteration, you ultimately start to come out of that and you start to discover
01:01:31.320those encodings. Yeah, exactly. And that's very interesting. And isn't the story of
01:01:37.540Catherine Graham just marvelous? Oh, cool. I mean, you start to realize she's still with us
01:01:43.300and what a blessing, right? I mean, what an extraordinary life.
01:01:47.580An extraordinary life and an extraordinary leader. And I think what for me is so very
01:01:52.840powerful about Catherine Graham, she comes in the chapter that's after the fog chapter,
01:01:57.460which is about these small steps as you're moving through the fog where you can't see clearly so you
01:02:03.600just take a step off the curve you just take a step forward the best one you can and if you keep
01:02:09.280taking these steps step by step by step eventually the fog starts to clear but also what's happening
01:02:15.680at the same time is that what's happening is you're starting to move the frame that frame
01:02:21.900capturing encodings. And through that stepping process, you begin to see encodings that start
01:02:28.020to light up. And in the case of Catherine Graham, she didn't just step off the curb and all of a
01:02:33.400sudden, I'm a great CEO. She's one of the greatest CEOs of all time. Just period, full stop.
01:02:38.820And for you to say that, I hope people are paying attention. That's a hell of a statement
01:02:42.880of all human beings, you. That's what you do. Yes.
01:02:47.740Exactly. And it's on so many dimensions. But it took her years of stepping. And part of that stepping was learning things, right? She was always first learned, then lead. That was very much her approach.
01:03:05.700She learned from Warren Buffett and others in her circle that as he had invested in the company.
01:03:12.500But a lot of else what was happening is as she was taking those steps, it's like that frame was opening.
01:03:18.260And all of a sudden, those encodings for leadership that she had kind of came through the frame.
01:03:23.820There's this one wonderful moment I related in the book, but it really sticks with me.
01:03:28.840when in the middle of the Watergate story, she meets with one of her reporters, Bob Woodward,
01:03:35.380and says, do you think we'll ever get to the full publishable truth? And he said,
01:03:40.340I'm not so sure. And she goes, don't ever tell me never. And his response to it was,
01:03:46.920she had this perfect managerial pitch. Do better. She wasn't going to meddle. She wasn't going to0.82
01:03:53.780over-direct. She wasn't going to micromanage. She was just going to be, we can do better.
01:03:57.200and and he put this term on it of she was able to raise the bar gently but relentlessly
01:04:04.720and isn't that just wonderful but you see what's interesting about that is i think that was in her
01:04:10.560all the way along and and the process of kind of coming into frame brought it to the fore
01:04:17.280and then became part of her being such an exceptional uh leader and that's why i think
01:04:25.060this idea. I mean, her story is such a marvelous journey of discovery, every step along the way.
01:04:33.780I love it. And so then we get to this notion, once we've, you know, these frames and coding,
01:04:39.440we sort of work our way out of the fog after this sort of life event that alters things and cliffs.
01:04:46.600Defining this fire and fire, you know, purpose, passion, what, how do you define fire? And what
01:04:52.580is it what is it that you know in your process of discovery coming out of this was when did this
01:04:58.400start to appear and merge into your your research and you start to realize the connective tissue here
01:05:03.840so um so i i um okay there's a couple ways we could come at this and let's come at it from
01:05:13.520from the perspective of keeping the fire burning really bright over the entire long arc and and
01:05:22.560And let's talk about that there because I think that you and I, we're separated by about roughly a decade in age, I think.
01:05:41.080And, I mean, but also, you know, that's not particular to you.
01:05:47.460I think of that as, you know, that thing with Benjamin Franklin, when he hit age 60, and you look at the biographies of Franklin, on average, 53% of the pages were yet to be written in the books.
01:06:00.920So if you think of it as that when you hit 60, more than half of what a life might add up to has yet to be written.
01:06:08.160And it's just a, it reframes what these years are.
01:06:13.460And so I'm 68 and I think about this too, right? It's how do you keep the fire really bright and burning all the way along? Now, one of the things I'm very clear on is this notion of when you're in frame, it's not just that you're encoded for it. It's also something that really also ignites and feeds your fire.
01:06:34.640You don't have to justify it. You don't logically prove it. You just feel it, right? It's almost like I can't help myself from doing this.
01:06:43.960Now, what really became interesting to me, and I would love to just kind of bat back and forth with you on this, because I find that we live often with an assumption that energy, creativity, entrepreneurship, creative breakthrough is the province of the young.
01:07:12.120yeah and that are and and that and that somehow it has to be something else
01:07:19.420the province of the oldest something else and what i came away from this study
01:07:26.460really seeing in their lives is that your younger self doesn't have to tower over your older self
01:07:36.420In fact, your older self can be sometimes the most fire-filled part of life where you are full of ageless zeal, you are meaningfully engaged, you are growing and discovering new capabilities all the way along.
01:08:00.080And if we sort of reframe things that way, just all the details that are in the book, I.M. Pei, right? Giving us the Louvre Pyramid in his 70s. Toni Morrison, the great novelist, who didn't, she didn't even come fully into frame with all the pieces in place until her 40s.
01:08:20.700right beloved published at 56 jazz stunning published at age 61 and a huge portion of her
01:08:28.420work comes in the later phase of her life uh you look at uh robert plant continuing to be creative
01:08:34.980in his music uh many decades after uh after led zeppelin and it just kind of basically says well
01:08:41.580wait a minute uh if you're sitting here looking at years out there we ought to think about it the
01:08:49.400way franklin's life unfolded or these other people i studied lives unfolded so maybe you
01:08:55.420and i could kind of talk a little bit about because you're going to face this question too
01:08:59.080one time or another right yeah uh what would you like to know about this and you've read the book
01:09:04.860but what would you be really curious to know about this jim i mean did you come i mean and i
01:09:09.280appreciate the frame you open up the question is sort of the the this notion of back to time of
01:09:14.500life from an entrepreneurial and creative mindset and you know i mean we can get to you know a
01:09:18.540number of, you know, the great breakthroughs of discovery in physics or something, and you feel
01:09:23.120like, Jesus, I'm washed up, or the fact that even some of, as we're celebrating the best of Roman
01:09:28.440Republic and Greek democracy, the declarations drafted by a 33-year-old, and you think, boy,
01:09:33.920you know, what the hell have I done in my life? But did it come to you, and it's more of a Socratic
01:09:39.220frame here, I'm curious, when you were doing, when you, when, was this in the process of doing this,
01:09:44.440you started to discover this, or did you intuitively understand it, or were you even
01:09:49.400more self-selective in terms of your pairing, that there was some intentionality around including or
01:09:56.680incorporating people that you knew sort of had an extended narrative, that they had more chapters
01:10:02.340in their life than some of these others, or just what the research presented it?
01:10:08.200Yeah, no, it's a great question because of John Gardner's influence on me.
01:10:14.440I think I always had in the back of my mind that I was just intrinsically curious about why some people are able to keep themselves so renewed and so full of fire and so creative and so potentially impactful, whether it's on a private basis or on a more public basis, for year after year, decade after decade.
01:10:43.680and I just, I wanted to understand that.
01:10:48.220And I don't know why that was so intrinsically interesting
01:11:11.600that we don't know what happens with health,
01:11:13.440We might hopefully you get a good card. But if you take health permitting, the idea that 60 to 85, 90, whatever, can be just as creative and impactful and energetic and as 30 to 60.
01:11:34.400And if you take that idea and then you take and you ask yourself a simple question, what would happen if all the people who sort of thought of it as that they were sort of done at 60, changed it to, no, I'm beginning.
01:11:55.520And then they made the most of those coming decades.
01:12:00.900And if instead of those decades being sort of lost, they were captured as inflections and you multiplied that across thousands or millions of people who did that, the unleashing of human capacity would be immense.
01:12:20.100So I think that's why it appealed to me, right? I just was picturing all these late inflection points and lightning bolts going off and what would happen if there were millions of them. I think that's why I was interested in the question. I don't think at 30, I was worried I was going to run out of steam. Maybe as I got further along, I would question that.
01:12:39.740But then I wanted to understand, but for those who do that, how's it happen?
01:12:47.320And so I think my first side of the pairings and my first thought in all of this was I want to find people that after a cliff, after partway through their life, even if they stayed in one field, they were able to really have these accelerating decades.
01:13:07.500And so the study is tilted towards those that do that and then trying to understand why they were able to do that beyond just their energetic people.
01:13:19.260So why? Why, Jim? I mean, you know, at 65, you're quote unquote retired. You're supposed to enjoy your retirement. You're getting Social Security checks. You know, you're a member of AARP. Hell, I think I was at 50 or something.
01:13:35.160they start sending you stuff and it feels like you're already checking out uh your kids are
01:13:39.980saying oh it's okay dad you know they're patting you on the head and you know you become i mean so
01:13:45.740so it's so you know so it's we're habitualized right to that that this is you know sort of the
01:13:52.040you know youth and your middle age and then you know senior status um yeah and it's wisdom you
01:13:59.060know we're supposed to impart our wisdom but not necessarily our energy but you you discovered
01:14:03.560something different. What is the secret sauce? Obviously, it's mindset, right? Besides the
01:14:08.220physical. It's belief system. I'll point to three things, one of which we've already covered,
01:14:13.960which is that you can still be in frame in your later decades, right? And so we don't have to,
01:14:18.840I mean, think about, we were talking about John Glenn earlier. He went back to space at 77.
01:14:24.280and uh and and he served in the senate for 25 years starting at about midlife and they were
01:14:34.060fire-filled years for him and so but you know there's this incredible sense of energy sure
01:14:39.000he's got many more decades but is like double in frame and so part of it is you can be in frame
01:14:47.840young and midstream and late being in frame is a big part of it right and then it becomes compelling
01:15:01.340She's one of the people that I really enjoyed learning about because as a writer, I was fascinated in my pair of writers, her and Barbara Tuchman.
01:15:08.140And she said at one point, if all the publishers disappeared, I would still keep writing.
01:15:15.640And so no matter where you are in this sort of chronology of life, if you're in a frame like that, you're kind of going to almost not be able to stop yourself.
01:15:28.740You don't need the applause, you don't need the paycheck. You don't need the external validation.
01:15:34.600Right. Exactly. The two things, though, that I would point to that were, for me, the uncoverings of how they did it, what I learned from how they did it.
01:15:48.100one is this thing called extend out circle back and and the idea being that you sort of would
01:15:56.260tend to think that the way they would keep themselves renewed is always some sort of
01:16:00.100radical self-reinvention they would sort of break with their past and like shatter themselves and
01:16:05.920create something entirely new but but that but actually it was this very organic process
01:16:11.560of they were always doing two things, right?
01:16:15.100One is kind of extending out to push the edges,
01:19:13.760The circle back is Black Dog's a great song from the Zeppelin days.
01:19:19.300And then he brings it into a new genre, blending his voice.
01:19:23.620And the process of that feeds the fire because he's both extending, circling back and extending out.
01:19:34.840And so what's interesting is if you look across the lives, there's these chances to like, I don't have to break everything from my past, but I also can't just get stuck in the past.
01:19:48.340And that's the extend out, circle back.
01:28:26.180about asking the wrong question and you know you have the saddle and the horseback frame and it is
01:28:30.380that that frame of not looking necessarily back uh but this notion of chasing responsibility oh
01:28:37.400come on too good i read that knocked me off that horse yeah and what was it was it tony morrison
01:28:44.800that was it was that's where it came from yes it was so i had saved my pair of writers tony
01:28:52.100Morrison and Barbara Tuchman for my last pair set to personally digest, right? Because as a writer,
01:29:00.320it was like a treat for myself to learn about writers. And so I'm reading everything about,
01:29:07.520and there's a ton on both of them. But one of the things that Toni Morrison did over the course of
01:29:12.280her life was she gave a lot of interviews and talked a lot about her process of writing and
01:29:15.580how she thought about it, read all of her books in sequence. And that was a wonderful experience
01:29:19.200in and of itself same thing with barbara tuchman but in the 1985 interview there's this one little
01:29:25.160line uh that essentially is the idea that that um freedom is it doesn't mean having no
01:29:33.000responsibilities right freedom means you get to choose the responsibilities and when i hit that
01:29:40.280line all of a sudden all the other people in my study that i i'd studied all of them at this point
01:29:47.400They're like dominoes that fell because I saw all their lives through the lens of that sentence.
01:29:52.820And I realized that powerful idea that freedom does not mean the absence of responsibilities.
01:30:01.720It means we get to choose responsibilities.
01:30:05.620And when I looked at all the people in our study, that's what they were doing.
01:30:09.660Now, the responsibilities were very different from person to person.
01:30:13.100But it's the idea of choosing a responsibility that, one, fits with your encodings, two, it feeds your fire, three, it might not happen but for you.
01:30:33.040Four, it doesn't matter to you if you get credit.
01:30:36.240Yeah. And that if you choose responsibility, it might be simply the responsibility to
01:30:42.600honor the musicians that came before you. It might be choosing the responsibility to,
01:30:51.020as Tenley Albright we were talking about, she would practice with surgical conscience. It's
01:30:55.860something she'd learned about as an idea as a practicing surgeon, but for her was a sacred
01:31:00.760responsibility that every patient under her care, she had to operate with the highest level of
01:31:07.520surgical conscience and care. And it went back, she was a young girl with polio. And there was
01:31:14.280a moment in her life where they were going to put this big needle in her spine, and she was terrified.
01:31:21.280And she asked for somebody to hold her hand. And after a lot of hesitation in the room,
01:31:26.480a medical professional came and held her hand while they put this painful needle.
01:31:33.680And that notion of health care has to have care in it. And that was part of her. And when she
01:31:43.300became a surgeon, she made sure somebody was holding the patient's hand during surgeries,
01:31:49.440not because there's a prescription manual that says you have to do it that way,
01:31:54.660but because she saw operating with surgical conscience as a responsibility that she just
01:32:01.980held at the highest, most sacred level. And when I looked at the people in the study
01:32:07.880who then were able to keep themselves, Franklin didn't need to do what he did in his 60s and
01:32:15.94070s. He didn't have to, he could have just said, I'm done. Like, I'm tired. It's over.
01:32:20.400but he felt the responsibility as did roger sherman at the founding of the country you have
01:32:28.900responsibilities and all these different places where people would say i choose this
01:32:33.360and i believe after doing this study that one of the ways the fire goes out
01:32:38.580is when we stop choosing responsibilities and the question not what do i want to do next
01:32:45.880is a very different question. Or how do I want to retire? That's a very different question than,
01:32:53.360well, now that my life has changed, what responsibilities do I now
01:32:58.820want to choose that I will hold myself to account for?
01:33:06.920You can't stop. Well, you know, I'm going to end on that because it is the right damn question. I0.98
01:33:12.420I mean, you know, Masterclass, Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life.
01:33:19.000This is just, you know, if I were a professor, signed reading, and anyone who hasn't already
01:33:26.520picked it up and picked up these other books, they, you know, with all due respect, they're
01:33:31.180not chasing their responsibilities, dare I say.
01:33:34.740And by the way, I can't help but, you know, I'm thinking when you talk about chasing
01:33:39.380responsibilities and i i kept going back and forgive me i i just i kept thinking of you
01:33:43.640slowing down and driving a little slower because you i guess i imagine that reflected you right
01:33:51.180just the sense of responsibility you had to birth this book that's right you you have an obligation
01:33:55.780you're you know right yeah that you know it really that's uh i don't mean it in any morbid
01:34:04.600sense or anything like that but there just there comes a point and i i remember this this this also
01:34:09.920happened with uh with my with like i remember with good to great it happened it's like there's
01:34:15.560a certain point where i just reach a point where i feel responsible for two things multiple things
01:34:23.720but in in bringing it out one is i just want to fulfill the responsibility of bringing it out the
01:34:33.660best it can be for those who will read it. Once a book's in the world, it's not yours anymore.
01:34:40.140It's your readers. It's not yours. You don't make a bestseller.
01:34:45.680Your readers make a book ultimately what it is because a book is what happens in the relationship
01:34:52.160between the reader and the book. And eventually the author goes away anyways. And so when you
01:34:58.800know you have something that it's your responsibility to finish it, to get it out there and then
01:35:06.360let it be its thing. And so I really, there's a beginning of good to great. I really did. I wrote
01:35:14.520this in the preface, but I really did do this. I went running up one of the mountains here,
01:35:20.840one of my favorite winter trails that I, when I used to run, I mainly ride a bike now because
01:35:25.380to be hard to run as much but running up uh and i had this favorite sitting place where i could sit
01:35:31.940and look over the mountains and it's winter right it's uh probably like maybe january and i'm
01:35:39.240finishing up writing good to great and i'm looking out on the snow covered rockies from this perch
01:35:45.200where i could sit in that late beautiful like you're like four o'clock afternoon where you start
01:35:49.140to get that glowing sun in the winter hitting those snow peaks. And a weird question popped
01:35:56.300into my mind. How much would somebody have to pay me to not publish Good to Great?
01:36:05.720So I'm about three months from done with the writing. And so I started playing the thought
01:36:10.160experiment in my mind. I'm sitting there on this rock, looking at the mountains, right? And this
01:36:14.020is, you know, Joanne and I, as you know, we didn't, our lives had turned out really well now,
01:36:18.420But we didn't come from having a lot of resources.
01:36:21.520And so I just started playing around with the numbers.
01:46:27.380Well, I'm honored that you have been such a wonderful reader. And in the ultimate end, I mean, I've always said I'm much less interested in bestsellership than I am in best readership.
01:46:46.200And so it's a great joy to engage in this conversation with you and about so many ideas, right? So we'll be forward in the saddle and choosing responsibilities. I, of that, I am certain.
01:47:03.600I love it. No, honor, truly. And I know you don't do a ton of these things. And you sure as hell don't want to do them with politicians. So I'm even more grateful in that respect. And so it's been a hell of a gift. And I'm grateful. And I'm grateful, especially with a lot of the folks in this podcast that go all over the damn map.
01:47:25.260For those that haven't discovered Jim Collins, I hope you understand why I've been such a raving fan, dare I say, and you will be as well after you pick up what to make of a life.