This is Gavin Newsom - And, This Is What To Make Of A Life With Author Jim Collins

00:00:00.900 Childlike enthusiasm is the best way I can describe it.

00:00:04.100 There's a constellation of encodings inside of it.

00:00:06.640 And then I opened my first business, and I never worked again.

00:00:10.760 This is Gavin Newsom.

00:00:13.520 And this is Jim Collins.

00:00:17.580 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:00:20.460 Guaranteed human.

00:00:22.120 What's up, fam? It's sports journalist Ari Chambers.

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00:00:52.420 I'm Jake Brennan,

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00:01:53.840 Hey everyone, it's the Jonas Brothers.

00:01:56.280 This week on the podcast, Hey Jonas, we're hanging out with Michael Bublé.

00:01:59.740 After Kevin's recent interesting confession about Michael.

00:02:02.700 We figured there's only one thing to do.

00:02:04.140 We must invite Michael Bublé on the podcast and we want to know what's on his sexy time playlist.

00:02:08.660 You know, I did an interview and they're like, have you heard about this Jonas Brothers thing?

00:02:11.940 And they're like, what did you think of it?

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00:02:14.820 We talk about Kevin's confession, Michael's reaction, and a whole lot more.

00:02:17.980 Our conversation with Michael Bublé is out now.

00:02:20.140 Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:02:25.140 Jim.

00:02:27.020 Kevin, I'm enormously curious about this whole conversation.

00:02:31.800 Are you kidding?

00:02:32.600 Are you kidding?

00:02:33.340 I'm curious to know what you're curious about. 0.99

00:02:35.780 I'm just, this is, you've had too many touch points in my life where your damn work has had outsized influence. 0.96

00:02:45.120 Like next level, level five influence, in fact, in terms of just, you know, breaking my consciousness and all of my limiting beliefs. 0.69

00:02:55.280 And 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.

00:03:15.120 you know, better citizens, dare I say. So it's a great gift for me to have you on.

00:03:22.080 Yeah, no, I, you know, and I could just tell that you're a very curious person, as am I. And I would

00:03:29.500 imagine that whatever, you know, we would just have a marvelous conversation. So I kind of view

00:03:36.080 this as a marvelous conversation. And by the way, congratulations on writing yourself.

00:03:41.420 No. 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.

00:03:58.740 You 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.

00:04:10.160 It was a memoir of discovery, and it was really a love letter to my parents and to my grandparents.

00:04:15.820 parents and you dedicated your book, not only to your wife, uh, but to your grandma, but it begins

00:04:22.140 with just that powerful opening, uh, with your father and trying to connect with your father

00:04:27.560 and realizing that you weren't going to be able to connect with your father. And it'd be a great,

00:04:31.440 I'd love to just kick this off because you, you, you wrote a book called, you know, what to make

00:04:36.460 of a life that's, you know, to me, it just, it touches on so many themes that are so resonant

00:04:43.220 in terms of my time of life. But it also, I think, is resonant in the context of the lives of those

00:04:50.100 we've lost and loved as well, and how they imprint on us and how we are an extension of them. And so

00:04:56.120 in my own writing journey, you, of course, extended to this new piece of work that in

00:05:02.500 contribution, your relationship to your father in a way you had in the past.

00:05:06.500 Yeah. 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.

00:05:25.300 And 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.

00:05:36.120 And and we lived right kind of ground zero of everything that was happening in the Haight-Ashbury.

00:05:42.740 We were a number of houses down from Haight Street on Ashbury.

00:05:47.040 And my father was sort of into the whole beat scene.

00:05:49.640 And I think he was really lost in the fog of life.

00:05:52.820 I 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.

00:05:59.600 And 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.

00:06:15.440 And what I really hoped is that my father would somehow become a father, right?

00:06:20.860 And I just kept hoping that he would step out of this fog and be a father and provide guidance.

00:06:27.320 And I had no clue how to think about life.

00:06:29.660 And then in early high school, there really was this moment that's really seared in my experience.

00:06:35.920 We were back in Colorado at the time, my mom and my brother and myself.

00:06:39.840 And I got this idea that I would take one of those prepackaged turkeys.

00:06:46.420 And my father was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor in north of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

00:06:52.260 And I rode a Greyhound bus down.

00:06:54.340 I brought this turkey and was going to share it with him and had this image he would emerge as a father.

00:07:01.360 And 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.

00:07:12.460 and mainly tried to get me to convince her to give him money.

00:07:18.360 And when I got back on the Greyhound bus heading north,

00:07:21.600 back to Colorado, I just had this.

00:07:23.980 I mean, I can still visually picture.

00:07:28.160 Looking at it, it was November.

00:07:30.140 There were these kind of New Mexico, Colorado,

00:07:33.840 swirling clouds that were sort of descending.

00:07:36.760 I had this whole sort of sense of darkness almost.

00:07:39.820 And I felt like I was just heading into the fog of life.

00:07:42.460 with no idea how to do it at all. And I certainly wasn't going to get it there. And so I think the

00:07:49.340 real seeds of wrestling with these questions, even though I went off and did all this stuff

00:07:53.200 on my great company's work and all that, that's where it really began. And then by the time you

00:08:00.860 get to the end of the book, as you know, though, I ended up, even though my father died when I was

00:08:05.220 only 23, ultimately reconciling psychologically and emotionally with my father.

00:08:13.120 So you've, over the course of decades of work in intense research, you spent, I think, what

00:08:22.140 is it, 10 years on this book, which is just extraordinary.

00:08:25.940 And we'll get to that in a moment.

00:08:27.640 Two years writing it, 10 years researching it, books that just knocked me on the floor

00:08:34.660 and just knocked me in the core, talking about the core, core values, core ideology, you know,

00:08:39.720 as a, as a young entrepreneur coming right out of college, uh, pen to paper. And I was writing

00:08:44.200 business plans, opening a little wine store in a restaurant. And someone says, Hey, you got to

00:08:48.760 read this book built to last. And I start, you know, this, this language begins to shift because

00:08:54.600 of your work and research. And I think, what was that a six years or five or six? Yeah, that was

00:08:59.260 a six year project. Which I thought was extraordinary in and of itself that you would

00:09:02.640 take that much time to research a subject matter. And you're talking about this notion of being a

00:09:08.820 clock builder versus a time teller. And you're talking about the genius of and versus the tyranny

00:09:13.840 of or. And boy, did that open up my mind in so many ways. This notion of stimulating progress,

00:09:20.420 but maintaining the core, core values, again, core ideology. I end up writing a core ideology

00:09:25.400 book for my business. And I had a restaurant, a few little hotels and a winery, and I became my

00:09:33.260 HR book, Plump Jack, Core Ideology and Ram Notes, but literally taken from you and then good to

00:09:39.200 great. And I'm like, come on, can't get better than good to great meets built to last and

00:09:43.880 learning about level five leadership and these larger concepts that you don't have to be a

00:09:49.600 charismatic leader. It's about humility and, you know, just shifting all these mindsets. And I

00:09:54.400 read. Well, that was another five years of research or something. And so here this book

00:09:58.580 comes along. And to me, it's even more extraordinary, but it all connects, forgive me,

00:10:06.060 because you write about leadership, management, visionary companies, what makes companies become

00:10:11.980 good to great, and you pair things up. And here you start to pair up, not just stories and

00:10:18.460 storytelling. We're going to get to dozens and dozens of those, but, you know, I think you pair

00:10:24.240 up a larger meaning of life. It's not a, you know, you, you say this, it's not a self-help book,

00:10:29.500 but it's about self-knowledge. And it's, it's about these things that we all share in common,

00:10:36.620 these, these sort of moments in life, these, these, you know, as we navigate fog and we'll

00:10:42.680 get to that as we navigate cliffs in our lives. But it's also about who we are and discovering

00:10:49.020 this notion of, you know, you talk in terms of encoding. And so I just, forgive, I just wanted

00:10:55.200 to, that was a long-winded preamble, just to explore my own bias towards you, but bias towards

00:11:01.280 this work in particular and how it hit me like a ton of bricks. Perhaps it's, again, my time of life,

00:11:06.500 my state of mind uh my state you know of being um as a termed out politician uh perhaps more

00:11:15.180 specifically but also as a father and the journey of discovery that we're all on and figuring out

00:11:21.500 who we are so let's talk about this book uh what to make of a life it's three and three fundamental

00:11:27.400 books 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

00:11:33.600 We'll go into what to make of life. I want to I just want to put a little comma from what you said before.

00:11:40.240 And then let's go right into the three parts of the new book.

00:11:44.300 But first of all, I'm so tickled that you found Built to Last when you were starting as an entrepreneur.

00:11:51.460 And the beauty of writing is you never know where it's going to go and to know that it was affecting you.

00:11:56.120 And 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.

00:12:11.920 And with Built to Last, I have one of these great strokes of huluck in my life.

00:12:17.400 We write a lot about huluck in the new book, but it was my co-author on that book, Jerry Porras.

00:12:22.180 And, 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.

00:12:37.920 He was my great research mentor, and we first used it and developed it and built to last.

00:12:43.420 And just one little thing about Level 5, you mentioned this notion of people who lead with a great sense of humility.

00:12:49.060 and it doesn't need to all revolve around them in some way.

00:12:53.540 And there's just one beautiful data point.

00:12:58.220 Jerry was a very senior professor.

00:13:00.920 He was a dean.

00:13:02.500 He was massively tenured.

00:13:04.480 I was just, you know, I mean, why he partnered with me is still just a marvel to me.

00:13:12.280 But then when it came time to publish the book,

00:13:15.500 he said we should put our names on it alphabetically and so it's my name you know

00:13:22.260 jim collins and jerry porus and he never was like well i'm the senior person here and when you think

00:13:30.000 about it how beautiful is that yeah he's 20 plus years older than you as you say tenured beyond

00:13:36.660 words he's the guy he's the man yeah exactly and then and just the beauty and the generosity

00:13:43.180 of that and how much he trusted that we could be great partners when we were so separated by

00:13:50.000 age and experience. And so I just wanted to share that with you because I think it's

00:13:54.620 a wonderful part of what you experienced. If it weren't for Jerry, you also wouldn't have

00:13:58.800 had Built to Last and its impact on you and all that it taught me to do. So we can go to the new

00:14:04.520 book. Hey, to be fair to you, but Jerry wouldn't have been inspired had you not been writing those

00:14:09.680 little articles in the San Jose Mercury. That's true. And then he says, Hey, this kid's got

00:14:14.300 something. Let's pull him in. He did. That's true. Yeah. So you, you, you, you, so you've been on

00:14:22.060 this, I mean, you know, getting back to, I mean, just, you know, a lot of business, but what would

00:14:26.100 be perceived as business books, I think they're much more impactful than that. I continue to

00:14:30.780 remind all of my friends that I've, you know, they bought dozens and you'll see good to great

00:14:35.100 all over my offices and built to last everywhere. And, and, uh, I make everyone in political

00:14:40.480 context, read them. Um, and notably, I think it's had a bigger impact in me in terms of my

00:14:45.180 political consciousness, um, than it has from a business perspective, but, but, but this notion

00:14:50.740 of, you know, just this journey again, that this notion of life, um, and you know, is it the time

00:14:56.180 is you got other mentors, not just Jerry, you talk about John Gardner who wrote, right. And

00:15:02.240 And it's inspired by this book.

00:15:03.220 I went back and read that self-renewal speech he wrote.

00:15:05.880 Oh my gosh.

00:15:06.820 Classic.

00:15:07.460 Oh, come on.

00:15:08.220 How good is that?

00:15:09.220 Going to seed and all of that.

00:15:11.340 But what was the inspiration for this?

00:15:13.700 What got you into this mindset and this 10-year journey on this book?

00:15:19.160 So, yeah.

00:15:20.160 So there's the early seeds from trying to kind of figure out what to make of my own life when I was a kid.

00:15:26.680 And those were in there.

00:15:28.520 And 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.

00:15:35.260 There's so much in there that I mean, great companies don't build themselves.

00:15:39.620 People 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.

00:15:53.840 And so I always had this interest in just the people side of things, really the center of things.

00:16:01.820 And 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.

00:16:14.500 I was sponsored by the class of 1951 chair for the study of leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

00:16:20.360 And I sort of felt like a whole bunch of things had kind of come to towards a conclusion.

00:16:25.840 And I was thinking, what am I going to really work on next?

00:16:29.660 I didn't want to just do another book on unmatched pairs of companies and so forth after three decades of that.

00:16:35.680 And so I kept thinking and I came back to this question and three seeds fused at once.

00:16:40.700 One was the early journey, the Greyhound bus, the whole deal.

00:16:43.900 uh the second uh seed uh was john gardner and his inspiration to me about self-renewal and that he

00:16:51.780 felt that the question of how we make the most of the later decades of our life uh was really worth

00:16:57.940 putting more research into and john had an impact on me with that and the third seed which kind of

00:17:03.680 came in the middle was my wife joanne was a world champion athlete triathlete when we lived in palo

00:17:10.880 alto in the 1980s and she won the hawaii ironman and but her athletic career uh as you know from

00:17:17.600 the book came to an end and prematurely because of an injury you had an injury as an athlete right

00:17:23.640 and there's it's very if you're an athlete and then it's taken away from you because you get

00:17:28.720 injured uh that when and and and i remember we're sitting at a little table in our in our little

00:17:36.720 townhouse in palo alto and the late 80s when she realized it was coming to an end and and and she

00:17:43.880 would no longer be able to hold that identity and she just said to me one day you know i feel like

00:17:49.380 i'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

00:17:56.300 like uh in her late 20s at this point yeah mid to late 20s she won the iron man in 1985 so she was

00:18:01.880 24. And just to put in perspective, people know, not only won the Ironman, but she was, I mean,

00:18:06.500 Nike, you know, just do a campaign. I mean, she was, you were, you were out there hustling for

00:18:11.300 her sponsorships, right? I mean, she was Bud Light and all these other. That's right. Exactly. In

00:18:16.520 fact, I was very much Joanne's support team. And this is all before I got back to teaching or

00:18:24.420 got the opportunity to teach at Stanford, connect with Jerry to build class, all that was in the

00:18:28.980 future. And what, uh, I, uh, I, I quit all of my jobs and all of that and, and focused on just

00:18:36.620 supporting Joanne's athletic career. She was the first female athlete in the famous, just do it 0.98

00:18:41.460 campaigns. And, and, uh, so she really, I mean, she was the world champion, Ironman champion with

00:18:48.600 all of this stuff that surrounded it. And then her injury was going to take it away. And, and I

00:18:54.100 think that all those seeds came together because I realized I didn't have the words for it at the

00:18:58.420 time. But the question of what to make of a life, well, she had to answer the question again. I mean,

00:19:03.400 what she's making of a life, she's an athlete. Now that's being taken away and you have to ask

00:19:11.280 the question again. And I think what happened is all those seeds came together in this idea

00:19:18.760 of we all face the question at multiple times in our life. We don't just answer the question

00:19:25.600 of what to make of a life only once in all likelihood. We actually have to answer it and

00:19:31.980 then re-answer it. And then maybe we get hit with what I'd describe as a cliff event, like Joanne's

00:19:38.380 an event where it radically changes or alters your life and you have to sort of refigure it all out

00:19:45.200 in some way. And there's all different kinds of cliffs, disease cliffs and career cliffs and

00:19:52.200 personal cliffs and even success cliffs, right? What if you reach the very peak of something and

00:19:57.100 that's over? And I came up with this idea of, well, you could really get an insight if you

00:20:04.940 could look at how people go through the whole phase of life, but in particular, how they

00:20:11.880 reprocess the question at multiple times when they're young, when they're going through a cliff

00:20:17.180 and have to come out the other side. And when they're looking at the later decades and years

00:20:23.040 of their lives, so that they don't squander those years and leave them on the table.

00:20:27.640 And that ultimately led to, I got to do this project in some form. And then 12 years later,

00:20:33.780 I emerged blinking in the sunlight. So it was a heck of a journey.

00:20:40.040 Yeah. I mean, but, and, and, and when you start these journeys, five years, six years

00:20:44.380 for build less and good to grade and 12 here, I mean, 10 plus too. Is that, you don't really have

00:20:52.260 an end in mind, do you? You just have, you're just committed to the journey. You're working

00:20:57.080 on a project and it runs its course. Yes, exactly. In fact, there's kind of a fun story

00:21:03.000 with this one of how much I was just on the journey of doing it. I had a number of years

00:21:08.580 where I was trying to figure out how to do it, right? And so often in the early stages of a

00:21:12.960 research project, there's, well, I'm kind of getting the questions, but I really need to

00:21:17.680 develop the methods. And then you got to find the study subjects and that can take years and finding

00:21:22.620 pairs of people matched at the same cliffs. There was a whole lot. So before you could even get

00:21:27.320 into studying individual lives, you had to find the pairs you were going to look at. So it's just

00:21:34.380 this, and I'm oddly put together in such a way that I can get lost in something like that. And

00:21:41.720 I don't need any external pressure of any kind. I just love getting up in the morning and having

00:21:48.640 a project that's like a giant friend. I mean, it's just sort of like you look across the room

00:21:52.980 and there's this giant friend and it says, good morning. And you're on your way. But my publisher,

00:22:00.160 I was able to just pursue this on my own path. My publisher didn't even know it existed

00:22:05.780 until it was done. And, uh, and, and so I'm, they did that. They didn't even have any ideas

00:22:13.040 working on, on, on a book like this. They knew I was probably doing something because I'm always

00:22:18.040 doing something. 10 years in advance. There's no, there's no advance. I think like I'm just

00:22:22.180 marching. And then my, I have a wonderful, uh, partner that's been my literary agent for years.

00:22:27.920 Uh, and, uh, Peter, uh, call, uh, I finished the book. We actually, it's actually written. It

00:22:33.980 could maybe use a little polishing, but it's basically done. And an agent calls my publisher

00:22:39.800 in New York that I've worked with for many years and said, on Monday morning, you will receive a

00:22:45.740 box. In that box is Jim's new book. And my executive editor, my publisher, she's like,

00:22:55.820 book? What book? What are you talking about? And she had no idea even what it would be about and

00:23:02.660 open the box and there's the title, What to Make of a Life. And she's like, oh boy,

00:23:06.900 we're not in Kansas anymore. And away we went. So I can't explain why I can just,

00:23:14.040 if it takes 10 years or six years or whatever, I think the magnitude of it, I find,

00:23:21.820 I just, once I start, if it's a really good project and it's something I've got to get to

00:23:26.900 the end of satisfying my curiosity, I just can't stop. And I actually, I get to a certain point

00:23:34.740 where when I, I, I start getting really conservative in my choices so that I don't

00:23:42.480 have an unfortunate accident before it's done. Right. I, I, I, I so much want it to get done.

00:23:48.520 So I drive slower, you know, I, I make sure that I look both ways because there's just this sense

00:23:56.180 momentum that comes from the magnitude of the project. It's like, oh no, I can't get 80% of

00:24:00.700 the way of this and then have an accident, right? I've got to get it done. Well, and that gets to

00:24:05.760 fire and purpose, which we'll get to in a moment. But just to underscore so people have a better

00:24:10.320 sense of who you are, I mean, you're a 4 a.m. guy, right? That's my favorite. When you wake up

00:24:15.520 your mornings so people understand. We're not talking about 7.30 and you're looking out the

00:24:21.920 window with a cup of coffee. You're 4 a.m. and you're sometimes up earlier wishing it was 4 so

00:24:27.480 you can get moving on the day. Yes. So especially when I'm in the middle of a project. So when I

00:24:33.400 had this giant friend in the room that would greet me every morning, my favorite time to get

00:24:39.880 up is right around 4. And especially when I'm in the big project and the big writing mode and all

00:24:46.600 that. And I'm at work by, I walked, you know, I stumbled downstairs. I have one really good cup

00:24:53.480 of coffee during the day. I have it then, wake up, bang. And I am at work by like 4.11 or 4.12

00:24:59.980 or 4.30, very quickly. And there's just something about, and I really will, I wrote this in the

00:25:08.680 book kind of describing a little bit of the writing process, which is really true. I'd wake

00:25:11.700 up sometimes to just think, oh, please, please, please let it be at least 4 a.m. so I can get up

00:25:15.820 and get going. And, and then, you know, and do it and just, just sort of the day after day after

00:25:22.740 day aspect of it. And it's not, it's not a form of regimen. It's not a form of, of like self-imposed

00:25:29.860 grinding discipline. It's not like that at all. It's this sense of childlike enthusiasm is the

00:25:38.860 best way I can describe it. And it's just, oh my goodness. I, you know, and, and, and there's

00:25:44.460 tricks though. Like if you're writing something during the day, end partway through a paragraph

00:25:53.020 because then when you get up at 4 a.m. in the morning, you already have the momentum of being

00:26:02.400 partway through that paragraph. And so when you pick up, you can get this snap click when you hit

00:26:08.240 the pages. Wow. I like that. It's an interesting hack. So the first look, the first and most

00:26:14.080 difficult part of this, and it goes back to the work that Jerry and you did is the pairings. And

00:26:19.060 I mean, and therein lies the decade. I mean, is how you explore the lives and really uncover

00:26:25.920 thousands of years of lives in the aggregate and the lessons and distill sort of the essence of

00:26:31.220 the lessons. And so I imagine, or perhaps you can illuminate, the process begins there,

00:26:37.780 or does the process begin with the frame and the question? Is it, I mean, you really, you talk about

00:26:42.660 the power of questions. And so how did, what was the, I mean, give us a way, give me a sense of

00:26:48.140 how you architected this process at the beginning. Yeah. So, so I had these questions, right, that

00:26:54.660 were in my mind. And probably initially, they were tilted a little bit towards the seed from

00:27:02.680 Joanne and her cliff and John Gardner's question of self-renewal. And I'd always been inspired by

00:27:08.300 those. And those two kind of went together because you had John really, I saw my notes from him

00:27:15.700 sitting down with me many, many decades ago. And we talked through some possible ways that you

00:27:21.960 might actually look at the question of how people remain renewed over the entire arc of life.

00:27:27.920 But then I kept thinking, how on earth would you study that? And then what became clear to me is

00:27:33.240 Joanne's experience came flooding back to me. And I realized that when you have one of these

00:27:40.360 cliff events, these times in life when life as you knew it before in some significant way

00:27:47.400 has ended. And you have to, it calls for new questions. You have to answer the question again

00:27:55.860 of what to make of a life. And Joanne's Cliff is a very painful cliff. And that all of a sudden

00:28:03.440 gave me the idea of like, wow, I could really learn a lot about how people renew themselves

00:28:07.540 if I could find people going through cliffs and having to answer the question of how to renew

00:28:13.920 themselves coming out of a cliff and then go through the rest of their lives. And so then

00:28:19.220 came Jerry's thing about always learn from having, if you can have pairs that are facing similar

00:28:25.540 circumstances and you can learn from how different entities handle those different circumstances.

00:28:30.000 So then the idea became very simple. Well, what if I could find pairs of people that are matched at

00:28:34.500 a very similar cliff and I could look at their lives up to the cliff, into the cliff, coming out

00:28:41.200 the cliff and then over the rest of their lives. And then became a really long journey of you had

00:28:45.700 to find these wonderful pairs. That became very hard. I had wonderful researchers and we searched

00:28:50.740 and we searched and we searched. And sometimes you'd have one side of the pair, but you'd really

00:28:56.220 have trouble finding the other side of the pair. And sometimes they were obvious once you found

00:29:00.080 them. So for example, I mean, you know, some of the pairs that are in there, I mean, a classic

00:29:05.160 like Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. And, you know, really, I mean,

00:29:10.760 they were so tightly together, playing on stage, lead guitarist, lead singer, and

00:29:15.160 John Bonham, the drummer, dies, and you have a cliff, the end of Led Zeppelin. And now what?

00:29:21.520 Our two suffragists, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, their cliff was, I mean, they had dedicated their

00:29:27.340 lives for quite a number of years where they were trying to get what became the 19th Amendment.

00:29:34.060 They 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.

00:29:49.560 it. And so you face the question of, well, now what? We won. And we have people who tragically

00:29:56.160 lost their spouse and had to then were cast into roles for which they had never prepared or

00:30:02.960 envisioned professional athletes. We have two Olympic gold medal winners. What do you do after

00:30:10.060 you've won a gold medal and you were the first and second women ever in the United States from

00:30:13.900 the United States to win gold and you need to figure out the rest of your life or your NFL 0.66

00:30:18.820 players like Alan Page and Carl Eller from the Purple People Leaders of the 1970s of the Vikings.

00:30:25.280 That's like Joanne's Cliff, end of an athletic career. What comes next? And so there were all

00:30:30.460 these pairs and these different walks of life. And it was years, like we'd find one side of the

00:30:35.220 pair sometimes, or I thought it'd be really interesting to have Benjamin Franklin, a great

00:30:41.160 example of renewal over the course of a life. And I thought, what a cliff, the ultimate cliff,

00:30:49.820 the time of revolution and your entire world being ripped apart, right? And I thought,

00:30:56.560 but how can I find a match to Benjamin Franklin? And we ended up doing this thing where a researcher,

00:31:05.980 member of my research team and I came with this idea, which is let's just take all the

00:31:11.020 members of the people who were at the Constitutional Convention and all of the people who signed

00:31:16.700 the Declaration of Independence, which Franklin had done, and then work back through exploring

00:31:22.220 all those lives to see if there was anyone whose life up to that point was parallel enough

00:31:30.780 to Franklin's that you could match him. And you find Roger Sherman from Connecticut and they are

00:31:36.840 the two oldest at the constitutional convention and their lives were defined by that time and

00:31:44.600 what they dedicated themselves to and so forth. And we had our match, but that was probably just

00:31:49.000 to find Roger Sherman was months. Amen. It took me six decades to find him and I found him in your

00:31:57.160 book. I didn't know anything about him. But now I know a lot about him. And of course,

00:32:01.760 the personality contrast between the two is next level. And you explore that in detail.

00:32:06.720 Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, 0.99

00:32:10.620 their elected leaders, and the world around them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce

00:32:14.400 the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast,

00:32:19.860 we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians,

00:32:25.100 and newsmakers all at different stages of their journey so if you're looking to connect then we

00:32:30.480 hope you'll join us listen to the honest talk podcast on iheart radio or wherever you listen

00:32:35.020 to your podcasts what's up fam i'm sports journalist ari chambers hey what's up y'all

00:32:41.760 it's your girl sam j and we're the hosts of everyone watches women's sports a new podcast

00:32:46.120 from together and i heart women's sports because let's be real women's sports is giving us way

00:32:51.060 too much to talk about these days the highlights the rivalries the breakout starts the moments

00:32:55.380 that take over your entire timeline and the conversations that start during the game and

00:33:00.020 somehow keep going all week every week we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's

00:33:04.500 sports we'll give you our takes our debates and probably a few disagreements we'll talk to

00:33:10.260 athletes celebrate big moments and get into what's happening on and off the field court track and

00:33:14.260 beyond because we're not just interested in what happened we're interested in why everyone's

00:33:18.740 talking about it because everyone watches women's sports so if you're already a fan or you're just

00:33:25.500 getting into the game there's a seat for you right here listen to everyone watches women's sports

00:33:30.820 on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast

00:33:34.880 hey I'm Hoda Kotb host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb okay if you know me you know this

00:33:43.020 I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy.

00:33:49.480 So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.

00:33:54.380 We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people,

00:33:59.840 like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.

00:34:06.380 I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.

00:34:11.000 There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression.

00:34:13.320 I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.

00:34:15.520 Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.

00:34:20.400 There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.

00:34:24.700 It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.

00:34:28.820 We just have to find it.

00:34:29.860 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app,

00:34:33.920 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:34:40.640 hanging out with the one the only the only and the one michael buble you guys i'm i'm genuinely

00:34:45.760 a huge fan like it's funny you know i made a whole thing about doing this tiktok where i got you guys

00:34:51.240 to sign the guitar and they but right it was real like we listened to in the car all the time like

00:34:56.440 it literally is hanging up with all your signatures wow i am so honored after kevin's recent uh let's

00:35:02.280 call it interesting confession about michael i had a feeling this wasn't going to be going away

00:35:06.140 we figured there's only one thing to do we must invite michael buble on the podcast and we want

00:35:10.020 to know what's on his sexy time playlist you know i did an interview and they're like have you heard

00:35:14.160 about this jonas brothers thing and they're like what did you think of it i was like well i mean

00:35:17.480 it's reciprocal like what a man gotta do we talk about kevin's confession michael's reaction and

00:35:25.900 a whole lot more do you have a hockey rink in your house i do i do our conversation with michael

00:35:31.440 is out now listen to hey jonas on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your

00:35:36.480 podcasts uh so much to unpack i'm thinking about a 20 year old skater uh the rest of her life you

00:35:42.500 mentioned obituary and the fact it barely even is registered in her obituary uh the most important

00:35:48.160 defining moment of her life yet she continued on so let's unpack all that this notion so cliffs

00:35:53.900 you know obviously joanne this notion of a cliff becomes sort of the central question

00:35:58.420 and as you're mining that you're figuring out these pairs then you start to explore the aspects

00:36:05.280 of cliffs. You get into these three frames or three words that I want to dive deeper in. This

00:36:09.920 notion of encoding, this notion of fog that often follows the cliff, and then this notion of fire.

00:36:17.580 Maybe you can unpack some of those and sort of orient them in the context of how you and the

00:36:22.580 journey of discovery, answering the simple question about your wife's own journey, the cliffs of these

00:36:28.700 matched pairs, how encoding plays an outside role, what fog represents, and then let's talk fire.

00:36:35.280 Yeah. Okay, great. So the book, as you know, breaks into three parts, right? And the first

00:36:43.840 part is called Coming Into Frame. And the second part is Navigating Cliffs and Fog. And the third

00:36:49.140 is Feeding the Inner Fire Long and Late. And there's integration across all of them simply

00:36:55.220 because life isn't a simple three-stage process. The thing that happened as I began to do the

00:37:03.660 research is that I began to realize the book shed light, not just on the cliff and past,

00:37:08.960 but also just even how they found their initial paths in life. I mean, how did Robert Plant end

00:37:13.580 up as a singer? Or how did Barbara McClintock end up as a geneticist? Or how did John Glenn end up

00:37:19.860 as a fighter pilot and an astronaut, right? It's really interesting. How do people come out of the

00:37:24.480 fog of youth and find their way? And so this notion of the encodings is that what we found

00:37:31.340 is that you can kind of think of times of life when they were, well, let me just back up for a

00:37:37.620 moment. Notion of encoding. So let's just quickly define encoding. So anybody listening knows what

00:37:42.820 we're talking about. Encodings, as we came to understand them, are these durable capacities

00:37:49.480 of our intrinsic construction that lie within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of

00:37:56.660 life. And they're there, but our life is like at any given time, like looking through a telescope

00:38:04.080 or a window. And it's like there's a constellation of encodings inside us, but at any given time,

00:38:10.480 you can only see a portion of that constellation based upon what you're doing. So if you're in

00:38:15.460 business, maybe a set of encodings are coming through the window really well that suit that

00:38:21.500 really well, and you're in frame as a business person. But if you shift the world and the frame

00:38:28.880 shifts to a different walk of life, as, for example, you've done, then it shifts and a

00:38:35.040 different set of encodings are coming through the window. And so the first is that there isn't just

00:38:41.340 kind of one thing that you're encoded for. It's not that you could only be encoded to be a singer

00:38:48.400 or only encoded to be in leadership roles, or only encoded to be a geneticist, any person has

00:38:56.360 a constellation of encodings that's pretty vast, and that you might be able to go through, and this

00:39:01.160 is what Looking Through Cliffs teaches us, is you can go through times in life where you might be

00:39:05.500 in frame over here with a set of encodings for, say, being a defensive lineman like Alan Page,

00:39:11.760 and that comes to an end, and then the frame shifts again. It captures a different set of

00:39:17.380 encodings that he has inside as a Supreme Court justice in the state of Minnesota.

00:39:22.900 He's the same person, but the frame has changed and it's activating different encodings. And it

00:39:29.540 might activate some overlapping encodings, or they might be just radically different parts

00:39:34.280 of the constellation, writing Supreme Court briefs and terrifying quarterbacks are really

00:39:39.600 different parts of the constellation. And what really became clear to me is that

00:39:47.120 these encodings. There are things we could all potentially relate to because it could be like

00:39:54.000 the encoding to, I'm just encoded to solve puzzles like Barbara McClintock, the geneticist, or I'm

00:40:01.080 just encoded to want to figure out how gadgets work. Like Grace Hopper, when she was a little

00:40:06.160 girl, couldn't stop herself from taking apart all the clocks in her house. She's about this tall

00:40:11.980 and running around, taking apart all the clocks. 1.00

00:40:14.680 Why?

00:40:15.460 Because she just has this encoding for, 1.00

00:40:17.440 I got to figure out how gadgets work

00:40:19.100 and make them work better.

00:40:19.940 And that eventually came fully in frame

00:40:23.020 when she worked on the first computers, right?

00:40:25.040 And brought software to us and all of that.

00:40:27.420 So the essential idea is that our lives move, right?

00:40:32.080 Through different frames.

00:40:33.880 And there are times when we're in frame,

00:40:36.320 which is a big, bright set of those encodings

00:40:39.040 are coming through the window.

00:40:40.500 And 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.

00:40:48.140 And 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.

00:40:56.400 And 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.

00:41:04.160 And it's a it's a maybe a different frame.

00:41:06.080 One 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.

00:41:16.640 Later in life, in frame as a senator.

00:41:21.380 But he spends about 10% of his life as an executive at Royal Crown Cola.

00:41:27.860 And even though it's about 10% of his life, he only puts about 0.2% of his memoir about it.

00:41:36.080 And 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.

00:41:53.600 And much of the task of life is we're actually going to ebb and flow.

00:41:59.980 We're going to have times when I sort of feel like I'm a lightning bug right now.

00:42:04.100 And we're going to have times when it's like, wow, I'm in frame.

00:42:07.400 It's a lightning bolt.

00:42:08.840 And that's when your encodings are in frame.

00:42:11.940 And Jim, when you think of encodings, it's not necessarily just what you're good at.

00:42:17.500 It's strengths, sure, but it's not necessarily just what your strengths are.

00:42:21.800 Is it bliss?

00:42:22.760 Is it just instinctual?

00:42:26.020 Is it flow?

00:42:27.660 Is it joy?

00:42:29.220 How would you best describe when you're in that state, that bolt, that lightning bolt versus bug?

00:42:36.440 So it's capturing a capacity that is very natural.

00:42:44.820 That when you do it, if other people look at it, they might say, how do you do that?

00:42:52.760 How 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.

00:43:10.900 But it's, go back to our friend, John Glenn.

00:43:15.720 And Glenn, one of his encodings was checklists.

00:43:21.920 I mean, he would just, he was just intrinsically drawn to operating off of checklists.

00:43:27.840 They were natural for him.

00:43:29.060 He would go about life with checklists.

00:43:30.660 He's packing his car for a trip across the country.

00:43:33.060 They're going to be checklists, right?

00:43:34.920 He just loves checklists.

00:43:36.260 He's working by checklists.

00:43:38.040 And it turns out that when he becomes a pilot, fighter pilot, and all of that, an astronaut.

00:43:43.100 I mean, think about the countdown sequence.

00:43:44.900 I mean, it's the ultimate checklist.

00:43:46.560 So 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?

00:44:01.160 Those go to well together.

00:44:03.380 But let's think about this for a moment.

00:44:05.360 If you think about, that was an encoding that he then harnessed to being in his role as a test pilot and astronaut.

00:44:15.580 But what if I'm not encoded for checklists?

00:44:20.120 Well, I could learn the skill of checklists.

00:44:23.440 And I could probably even make checklisting a strength by just practice and discipline.

00:44:29.560 So here's the way I've come to understand the basic difference.

00:44:32.500 If you have the encoding, and then you multiply that times training and discipline and focus, it becomes kind of a super strength.

00:44:44.840 And if you're not encoded for it, through training and discipline and learning, you can turn it into a strength.

00:44:51.960 and and so it doesn't mean that it might not become a strength or a skill

00:44:56.260 but it's when it's layered when it when it stems from the encoding that's there the encoding to

00:45:03.660 solve a puzzle i just can't not solve puzzles and when the when the lightning goes off i think what

00:45:11.600 happens is it's very natural for people but there's also a sense of just when you do something

00:45:17.320 that feels that natural, it's intrinsically compelling. It's not the adulation that would

00:45:25.320 come from it or like our geneticist, Barbara McClintock, one of my favorite things about her 0.56

00:45:31.160 is she was just, she really was, she had to solve puzzles. It's just, she was just,

00:45:36.780 just a puzzle solver. And when she was at the University of Missouri, she's trying to,

00:45:43.940 She 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.

00:45:52.700 So she climbs up the outside of the building and in through a window so she can work on the puzzles.

00:45:58.520 Okay, so I think when the lightning goes off, it's like that.

00:46:03.120 And then later in life, when she wins a Nobel Prize, she says it's kind of unfair in a way.

00:46:10.560 It's a great honor, but it's unfair to reward someone for simply having had so much pleasure over the years.

00:46:17.120 And 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.

00:46:27.580 but also it's resting on this encoding that you turn into a super strength.

00:46:33.060 That's when it's like, wow.

00:46:36.780 No, this isn't that hard for me.

00:46:39.160 It's so resonant with me.

00:46:40.520 I remember I was working for Walter Shorenstein downtown San Francisco

00:46:45.040 and doing property management right out of college.

00:46:47.500 It lasted about nine months and I went to work every day.

00:46:50.340 And I remember going to work every day.

00:46:52.360 And then I opened my first business and I never worked again.

00:46:56.040 I don't remember a day at work.

00:46:57.580 I don't remember if it was seven days a week, so it didn't matter.

00:47:00.420 And in this notion of just being it, it was back to just sort of finding that space, that

00:47:04.460 pleasure, where it just, it becomes almost transcendent.

00:47:08.580 And so it deeply resonates with me, this notion you're being recognized for something that

00:47:13.780 you would do in your sleep.

00:47:16.400 And so this notion of uncoding, though, is hard for a lot of us, because a lot of us

00:47:20.700 have a mythology that it's the one thing, that you have to find the one thing.

00:47:24.440 yeah we would haven't we been nurtured to believe that and that's our real to find our purpose and

00:47:30.640 our bliss and then passion and then we pursue that passion sort of the maslow version of life

00:47:35.940 yeah so so you mentioned maslow and i uh have of course i've always loved maslow's basic

00:47:43.840 definition of self-actualization the um discovering what you're made to do and committing to pursue it

00:47:51.040 with excellence. Okay. And I still believe that, but with a giant asterisk, which is you can't

00:47:58.820 take that sentence as there's this one thing you're made to do. Because first of all, imagine

00:48:05.180 how dispiriting it would be to believe there's only one and you never found it.

00:48:09.960 I mean, yeah. And then you can sort of feel like you're on this unicorn quest to find it.

00:48:15.760 and and and then maybe you're a young person and something doesn't feel quite like it and so then

00:48:21.720 you think i haven't yet found it and there's the it's almost like an existential doom loop right

00:48:27.000 the search for it and so uh what this study showed because people had to often change the frame right

00:48:37.700 A fighter pilot to senator, football player to Supreme Court justice.

00:48:48.780 Sometimes 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.

00:49:01.480 and then all of a sudden discovers that she has these encodings she never knew she had

00:49:06.120 for leadership and then encoding for writing that she didn't know she had.

00:49:12.120 And so what really changed for me is that within any one of us over the course of a life,

00:49:19.880 and some of our people did two or three or even four things in a life that were really big,

00:49:25.320 that the constellation is vast. And if you don't find this one,

00:49:31.480 Well, you might find that one or this one here or that one over there.

00:49:36.000 And it's not the thing.

00:49:37.420 It'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.

00:49:46.800 And you went through your own process.

00:49:48.980 You talk about Jim's bugs.

00:49:51.780 Yes.

00:49:52.720 So tell us about that.

00:49:54.220 I mean, so if someone's listening to this, what's the pragmatic advice?

00:49:57.240 Because it won't get to fog because a lot of us are in that fog.

00:49:59.980 after a cliff, something wonderful happens, something bad happens. You get what you want,

00:50:04.760 and then you don't feel like it matters. I finally made a million dollars, and my life's

00:50:09.820 the same. And so we have these cliffs. Then we get in these fogs of sort of despair and discomfort,

00:50:14.660 disappointment, and start questioning our lives. But you went through a similar process. You talk

00:50:21.660 about fog in your early days. You talk about the fog of youth. You referenced that a few times

00:50:26.000 already. Talk to us about your own journey on the encoding side and maybe introduce this notion of

00:50:31.940 fog. Fog. So let's first define fog a little bit up front because I knew cliffs would be important

00:50:38.560 in the study because it was the study construct. And then, of course, as we got into it, I discovered

00:50:43.860 when we tried to find lives to study that didn't have cliffs to see if the patterns were different,

00:50:48.260 we didn't find any lives without cliffs. So I concluded kind of cliffs are us. We'll all have

00:50:53.260 cliffs by the way that's important point because a lot of people don't think that it's just that's

00:50:57.860 oh my my lot in life i'm not as lucky as those folks that they never had those cliffs and you

00:51:02.500 just call bs on that that everybody's universal it's human it it was certainly i'll just put

00:51:08.980 i can't say for certain it's a hundred percent universal all i know is this we spent two years

00:51:15.280 of our research team trying to find really interesting lives that didn't have cliffs

00:51:19.980 along the way to study, we were unable to. So maybe we just missed them, but I don't think

00:51:26.460 they're out there. That's my conclusion. But what surprised me is some of these are really

00:51:33.640 remarkable lives. And we had remarkable lives because we needed lives well covered so I could

00:51:38.040 study them, quite visible lives. That's where the data is. These lives in net, in total,

00:51:46.720 when you go across all the decades are very impressive lives. And yet all of them had

00:51:54.300 episodes of what we call fog, a time in life when you are lost, confused, disoriented, reeling,

00:52:03.220 uncertain, unclear. And there was this huge sense of exhale I got from that because I all of a

00:52:16.720 is not a defect. There's nothing wrong with you when you're in the fog.

00:52:23.160 There's fog throughout this study. There's fog in the wake of cliffs.

00:52:27.980 There can be the fog of youth, but fog especially in the wake of cliffs. There can be the fog of

00:52:32.800 retirement, the fog of success, and the fog of disappointment, and the fog of grief.

00:52:38.440 right and and so i just take this this uh exhale of okay we're all going to have fog i've had fog

00:52:53.440 i'm going to have fog and it's part of the human condition and i'm actually curious if you don't

00:52:58.580 mind me asking have you ever had a time that did the fog chapter resonate with you it was like there

00:53:04.960 was a time when you were like, I'm in the fog. Now I have a word for it, but that's where I was.

00:53:10.740 How many times? You might be living through it, Jim, full disclosure. You come to an end of a

00:53:18.860 long career in politics, but defined not just by politics, but by being an entrepreneur, but in a

00:53:26.680 business that I started that will be difficult to go back to. So those are two identities that

00:53:32.420 don't necessarily go with me. And then we get into larger, longer conversation. That's why

00:53:37.480 the Gardner piece really resonated with me on self-renewal, time of life, the anxiety around

00:53:43.200 time of life. And, and boy, was it calming reading your book about some of the, just, you know,

00:53:48.280 we'll get to Toni Morrison and go back to Franklin a moment and, and their lives and how they lived

00:53:53.560 them out loud beyond their sixties. So no, it was deeply resonant. And, and, and there's grace in

00:53:59.660 that i mean it was it was nice to see that shared so universally yes yes and so uh and and and i

00:54:08.220 i am um you know i was reflecting back on my own life and i have had episodes of fog and my 20s

00:54:15.580 were very much an episode of fog i uh i had a lot of energy i've always had a lot of energy but

00:54:23.920 It was energy in the fog and, uh, and listen, and you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts

00:54:35.500 and breathtaking triumph, 2026 FIFA World Cup, the knockout stage, every match, every moment.

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00:55:00.360 What's up, fam?

00:55:01.220 I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.

00:55:03.160 Hey, what's up, y'all?

00:55:04.020 It's your girl, Sam Jay.

00:55:05.360 And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports,

00:55:07.680 a new podcast from Together and iHeart Women's Sports.

00:55:10.520 Because let's be real, 1.00

00:55:11.920 women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. 1.00

00:55:14.840 The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, 1.00

00:55:17.160 the moments that take over your entire timeline.

00:55:19.660 and the conversations that start during the game

00:55:22.040 and somehow keep going all week.

00:55:24.420 Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories

00:55:26.060 across women's sports.

00:55:27.420 We'll give you our takes, our debates, 1.00

00:55:29.760 and probably a few disagreements.

00:55:31.840 We'll talk to athletes, celebrate big moments,

00:55:33.940 and get into what's happening on and off the field,

00:55:35.860 court, track, and beyond.

00:55:37.540 Because we're not just interested in what happened,

00:55:39.660 we're interested in why everyone's talking about it.

00:55:41.960 Because everyone watches women's sports.

00:55:45.520 So if you're already a fan,

00:55:47.260 or you're just getting into the game,

00:55:49.040 There's a seat for you right here. 1.00

00:55:51.520 Listen to everyone watches women's sports

00:55:53.000 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

00:55:55.820 or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:55:59.300 Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast

00:56:01.760 Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.

00:56:03.640 Okay, if you know me, you know this.

00:56:05.340 I'm always searching for inspiration, for support,

00:56:08.800 and useful tools to help maximize joy.

00:56:11.520 So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.

00:56:16.360 We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people.

00:56:22.180 Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.

00:56:28.660 I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer and that was more difficult.

00:56:33.200 There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.

00:56:37.720 Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.

00:56:42.460 There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.

00:56:46.900 It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.

00:56:51.020 We just have to find it.

00:56:52.360 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app,

00:56:56.120 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:56:59.600 Hey everyone, it's the Jonas Brothers.

00:57:01.080 This week on the podcast, hey Jonas, we're hanging out with the one, the only,

00:57:04.160 the only, and the one, Michael Bublé.

00:57:06.280 You guys, I'm genuinely a huge fan.

00:57:08.820 Like, it's funny, you know, I made a whole thing about doing this TikTok where I got you guys to sign the guitar.

00:57:14.680 But it was real.

00:57:16.120 Like, we listen to you in the car all the time.

00:57:18.520 Like, it literally is hanging up with all your signatures.

00:57:21.060 Wow.

00:57:21.580 I am so honored.

00:57:22.580 After Kevin's recent, let's call it interesting confession about Michael.

00:57:26.480 I had a feeling this wasn't going to be going away.

00:57:28.480 We figured there's only one thing to do.

00:57:29.860 We must invite Michael Buble on the podcast.

00:57:31.860 And we want to know what's on his Sexy Time playlist.

00:57:34.340 You know, I did an interview.

00:57:35.580 And they're like, have you heard about this Jonas Brothers thing?

00:57:37.560 And they're like, what did you think of it?

00:57:38.820 I was like, well, I mean, it's reciprocal.

00:57:40.700 Like, what a man got to do?

00:57:42.000 I don't know.

00:57:42.680 What a man got to do?

00:57:45.320 We talk about Kevin's confession, Michael's reaction, and a whole lot more.

00:57:48.820 Do you have a hockey rink in your house?

00:57:51.060 I do. I do.

00:57:52.440 Our conversation with Michael Buble is out now.

00:57:54.660 Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:57:59.720 But part of how I got out of the fog was a wonderful teacher named Rochelle Myers suggested to me.

00:58:06.340 She 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.

00:58:18.220 And 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.

00:58:28.540 The idea being that it's not that the book is owned by Jim, it's that the subject understudy is Jim.

00:58:34.540 I love it.

00:58:35.300 And, and so, and then you, and then take this lab notebook and carry it with me wherever I would go

00:58:42.500 and study myself like a bug. And I'm the bug named Jim. And, and I would be, I would just

00:58:49.440 make notes all the time that were simple observations with, without judgment. You don't

00:58:53.660 say, gosh, you know, I think I'd be a better bug if I had eight legs rather than six. Well,

00:58:58.800 you just make, observe, the bug has six legs. And so I would begin to make observations about,

00:59:06.300 for example, being in meetings in a large corporation that I was working at in the 80s.

00:59:12.060 I had made the mistake of following the advice of my professors and who thought I should get

00:59:17.080 experience at a big, well-run company. It was a wonderful, big, well-run company,

00:59:22.040 but I was really out of frame there. And there are a lot of notes in my bug book about

00:59:27.040 sitting there in meetings and the meetings could have been much more productive. I didn't really

00:59:32.520 see the point of them. And then I would say, I would say something that would not be helpful

00:59:37.320 to the meeting because I would be critical of our particular perspective or whatever,

00:59:40.740 but I would be making notes the entire time. The bug Jim is really doesn't fit in these kinds of

00:59:47.000 meetings and conversations, but I would also make notes about when things would click.

00:59:51.780 Yeah. 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.

01:00:10.440 So, and then I got input as well from other people.

01:00:13.720 I had mentors who made observations about me and putting those things together, eventually

01:00:19.580 I was able to see for myself, I didn't have the words for it.

01:00:23.580 I didn't have the word fog.

01:00:25.120 I didn't have the word that I was taking small simplex steps to get through the fog.

01:00:29.900 I didn't know that I was essentially searching to put my finger on my encodings, but that

01:00:36.720 is what I was doing.

01:00:37.580 And 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.

01:00:50.380 And 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.

01:01:04.540 I mean, it was, that was, that was powerful. And this notion of simplex steps and her sort of

01:01:11.540 reconciling, it's not a great leap that you necessarily have to take. It's this notion of

01:01:17.220 sort of, as you suggest, stepping off a curb and realizing you're still standing up. And eventually

01:01:23.520 over time and through iteration, you ultimately start to come out of that and you start to discover

01:01:31.320 those encodings. Yeah, exactly. And that's very interesting. And isn't the story of

01:01:37.540 Catherine Graham just marvelous? Oh, cool. I mean, you start to realize she's still with us

01:01:43.300 and what a blessing, right? I mean, what an extraordinary life.

01:01:47.580 An extraordinary life and an extraordinary leader. And I think what for me is so very

01:01:52.840 powerful about Catherine Graham, she comes in the chapter that's after the fog chapter,

01:01:57.460 which is about these small steps as you're moving through the fog where you can't see clearly so you

01:02:03.600 just take a step off the curve you just take a step forward the best one you can and if you keep

01:02:09.280 taking these steps step by step by step eventually the fog starts to clear but also what's happening

01:02:15.680 at the same time is that what's happening is you're starting to move the frame that frame

01:02:21.900 capturing encodings. And through that stepping process, you begin to see encodings that start

01:02:28.020 to light up. And in the case of Catherine Graham, she didn't just step off the curb and all of a

01:02:33.400 sudden, I'm a great CEO. She's one of the greatest CEOs of all time. Just period, full stop.

01:02:38.820 And for you to say that, I hope people are paying attention. That's a hell of a statement

01:02:42.880 of all human beings, you. That's what you do. Yes.

01:02:47.740 Exactly. 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.

01:03:05.700 She learned from Warren Buffett and others in her circle that as he had invested in the company.

01:03:12.500 But a lot of else what was happening is as she was taking those steps, it's like that frame was opening.

01:03:18.260 And all of a sudden, those encodings for leadership that she had kind of came through the frame.

01:03:23.820 There's this one wonderful moment I related in the book, but it really sticks with me.

01:03:28.840 when in the middle of the Watergate story, she meets with one of her reporters, Bob Woodward,

01:03:35.380 and says, do you think we'll ever get to the full publishable truth? And he said,

01:03:40.340 I'm not so sure. And she goes, don't ever tell me never. And his response to it was,

01:03:46.920 she had this perfect managerial pitch. Do better. She wasn't going to meddle. She wasn't going to 0.82

01:03:53.780 over-direct. She wasn't going to micromanage. She was just going to be, we can do better.

01:03:57.200 and and he put this term on it of she was able to raise the bar gently but relentlessly

01:04:04.720 and isn't that just wonderful but you see what's interesting about that is i think that was in her

01:04:10.560 all the way along and and the process of kind of coming into frame brought it to the fore

01:04:17.280 and then became part of her being such an exceptional uh leader and that's why i think

01:04:25.060 this idea. I mean, her story is such a marvelous journey of discovery, every step along the way.

01:04:33.780 I love it. And so then we get to this notion, once we've, you know, these frames and coding,

01:04:39.440 we sort of work our way out of the fog after this sort of life event that alters things and cliffs.

01:04:46.600 Defining this fire and fire, you know, purpose, passion, what, how do you define fire? And what

01:04:52.580 is it what is it that you know in your process of discovery coming out of this was when did this

01:04:58.400 start to appear and merge into your your research and you start to realize the connective tissue here

01:05:03.840 so um so i i um okay there's a couple ways we could come at this and let's come at it from

01:05:13.520 from the perspective of keeping the fire burning really bright over the entire long arc and and

01:05:22.560 And 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.

01:05:30.640 You're late 50s, is that right?

01:05:32.580 Yep, yep.

01:05:32.860 Yep.

01:05:33.320 And so you're two years away from having finished your warm-up.

01:05:37.460 That's kind of how I look at this.

01:05:38.480 That's a love, the warm-up thing.

01:05:40.160 Thank you.

01:05:41.080 And, I mean, but also, you know, that's not particular to you.

01:05:47.460 I 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.

01:06:00.920 So 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.

01:06:08.160 And it's just a, it reframes what these years are.

01:06:13.460 And 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.

01:06:34.640 You 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.

01:06:43.960 Now, 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.

01:07:12.120 yeah and that are and and that and that somehow it has to be something else

01:07:19.420 the province of the oldest something else and what i came away from this study

01:07:26.460 really seeing in their lives is that your younger self doesn't have to tower over your older self

01:07:36.420 In 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.

01:08:00.080 And 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.

01:08:20.700 right beloved published at 56 jazz stunning published at age 61 and a huge portion of her

01:08:28.420 work comes in the later phase of her life uh you look at uh robert plant continuing to be creative

01:08:34.980 in his music uh many decades after uh after led zeppelin and it just kind of basically says well

01:08:41.580 wait a minute uh if you're sitting here looking at years out there we ought to think about it the

01:08:49.400 way franklin's life unfolded or these other people i studied lives unfolded so maybe you

01:08:55.420 and i could kind of talk a little bit about because you're going to face this question too

01:08:59.080 one time or another right yeah uh what would you like to know about this and you've read the book

01:09:04.860 but what would you be really curious to know about this jim i mean did you come i mean and i

01:09:09.280 appreciate the frame you open up the question is sort of the the this notion of back to time of

01:09:14.500 life from an entrepreneurial and creative mindset and you know i mean we can get to you know a

01:09:18.540 number of, you know, the great breakthroughs of discovery in physics or something, and you feel

01:09:23.120 like, Jesus, I'm washed up, or the fact that even some of, as we're celebrating the best of Roman

01:09:28.440 Republic and Greek democracy, the declarations drafted by a 33-year-old, and you think, boy,

01:09:33.920 you know, what the hell have I done in my life? But did it come to you, and it's more of a Socratic

01:09:39.220 frame here, I'm curious, when you were doing, when you, when, was this in the process of doing this,

01:09:44.440 you started to discover this, or did you intuitively understand it, or were you even

01:09:49.400 more self-selective in terms of your pairing, that there was some intentionality around including or

01:09:56.680 incorporating people that you knew sort of had an extended narrative, that they had more chapters

01:10:02.340 in their life than some of these others, or just what the research presented it?

01:10:08.200 Yeah, no, it's a great question because of John Gardner's influence on me.

01:10:14.440 I 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.

01:10:43.680 and I just, I wanted to understand that.

01:10:48.220 And I don't know why that was so intrinsically interesting

01:10:52.020 to me when I was young

01:10:52.980 because I sought John Gardner out when I was in my 30s.

01:10:56.600 I was many decades away from where I am now,

01:10:58.980 but that just struck me as an interesting question.

01:11:01.420 And I think that part of the reason it struck me

01:11:03.020 as an interesting question is if you think about,

01:11:07.160 if you take the assumption that health permitting, right?

01:11:10.260 That's the great wild card of life

01:11:11.600 that we don't know what happens with health,

01:11:13.440 We 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.

01:11:34.400 And 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.

01:11:55.520 And then they made the most of those coming decades.

01:12:00.900 And 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.

01:12:20.100 So 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.

01:12:39.740 But then I wanted to understand, but for those who do that, how's it happen?

01:12:47.320 And 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.

01:13:07.500 And 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.

01:13:19.260 So 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.

01:13:35.160 they start sending you stuff and it feels like you're already checking out uh your kids are

01:13:39.980 saying oh it's okay dad you know they're patting you on the head and you know you become i mean so

01:13:45.740 so it's so you know so it's we're habitualized right to that that this is you know sort of the

01:13:52.040 you know youth and your middle age and then you know senior status um yeah and it's wisdom you

01:13:59.060 know we're supposed to impart our wisdom but not necessarily our energy but you you discovered

01:14:03.560 something different. What is the secret sauce? Obviously, it's mindset, right? Besides the

01:14:08.220 physical. It's belief system. I'll point to three things, one of which we've already covered,

01:14:13.960 which is that you can still be in frame in your later decades, right? And so we don't have to,

01:14:18.840 I mean, think about, we were talking about John Glenn earlier. He went back to space at 77.

01:14:24.280 and uh and and he served in the senate for 25 years starting at about midlife and they were

01:14:34.060 fire-filled years for him and so but you know there's this incredible sense of energy sure

01:14:39.000 he's got many more decades but is like double in frame and so part of it is you can be in frame

01:14:47.840 young and midstream and late being in frame is a big part of it right and then it becomes compelling

01:14:53.960 Will you keep writing Toni Morrison?

01:14:55.640 Oh, yeah.

01:14:57.120 Right?

01:14:57.380 I mean, why would I stop?

01:14:59.440 She had this wonderful line.

01:15:01.340 She'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.

01:15:08.140 And she said at one point, if all the publishers disappeared, I would still keep writing.

01:15:15.640 And 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.

01:15:28.740 You don't need the applause, you don't need the paycheck. You don't need the external validation.

01:15:34.600 Right. 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.

01:15:48.100 one is this thing called extend out circle back and and the idea being that you sort of would

01:15:56.260 tend to think that the way they would keep themselves renewed is always some sort of

01:16:00.100 radical self-reinvention they would sort of break with their past and like shatter themselves and

01:16:05.920 create something entirely new but but that but actually it was this very organic process

01:16:11.560 of they were always doing two things, right?

01:16:15.100 One is kind of extending out to push the edges,

01:16:18.220 to sort of find new things,

01:16:20.100 to discover and to learn and all of that.

01:16:22.600 And of course that makes sense for keeping the fire alive.

01:16:25.080 But what I also found interesting

01:16:26.400 was they also circled back

01:16:29.200 to things that encodings they discovered earlier,

01:16:32.600 strengths that they built earlier,

01:16:34.840 experiences they'd had earlier,

01:16:36.680 things they loved doing earlier

01:16:38.200 as kind of like a rocket ship going out

01:16:41.240 in ellipses, where extending out takes you out further, but then you kind of come back,

01:16:46.380 not as deceleration, but to use those earlier things as like a planet accelerating a rocket

01:16:52.320 ship out further. So you're like circling back, extending out, circling back, extending out.

01:16:57.540 One of my favorite ways to illustrate this is with Robert Plant. And he stays a singer,

01:17:05.960 of course, but throughout his entire musical adventure. And it is an adventure after adventure

01:17:11.580 for Robert Plant. He's always extending out. He's going off to the festival in the desert

01:17:16.040 and wandering out with all these camels to go play music out there at this festival in the

01:17:24.420 middle of the desert, way off in Africa with nothing around for miles. And he goes and explores

01:17:31.420 new genres of music like bluegrass, and he's pushing things, always stretching himself out

01:17:37.300 there. It's always an adventure. But along the way, if you notice, he'll come back and he'll

01:17:46.000 weave in Led Zeppelin songs. And one of my favorite little images in the whole study

01:17:51.400 is he does this marvelous extend out where he'd always been the front singer, right? You can

01:17:58.240 picture his voice and he's Robert Plant on stage with Led Zeppelin and he's the front person.

01:18:05.320 And then he hears Alison Krauss's voice. It sounds like an angel to him.

01:18:12.860 And he comes up with the idea of what if I could extend out to learn how to blend my voice

01:18:18.160 with a voice that sounds like an angel. And they connect up and they do this beautiful

01:18:24.520 bluegrass album, Raising Sand, which is not Zeppelin 4. It's a very different album. It's

01:18:31.380 a beautiful album. And it's in bluegrass and it's the two of them. And there's this, there's a

01:18:37.960 famous song, you probably know it, Black Dog from Led Zeppelin, Hey Hey Mama, right? Begins a bang,

01:18:43.320 full on classic blues rock, wham. And he and Alison Krauss do this thing at the,

01:18:54.040 The CMT Crossroads gathering is a country music gathering where they do Black Dog in bluegrass.

01:19:01.980 And it is this beautiful, melodic, slow and seductive and mature.

01:19:10.360 And it just it's it's the same song.

01:19:13.760 The circle back is Black Dog's a great song from the Zeppelin days.

01:19:19.300 And then he brings it into a new genre, blending his voice.

01:19:23.620 And the process of that feeds the fire because he's both extending, circling back and extending out.

01:19:34.840 And 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.

01:19:48.340 And that's the extend out, circle back.

01:19:51.260 I love that.

01:19:52.620 I love that.

01:19:53.620 Um, and, and I can't, I mean, and forgive me, I mean, she may not be the, the, the natural segue

01:20:00.540 to, to the plant, uh, frame, but, uh, I can't get out of my head. Just the description,

01:20:06.980 the 20 year old figure skater. Oh yes. Outside speaking of sort of melodic voices. Yes. The

01:20:14.460 voices of the crowd. Tell the story. It's too good. Oh, come on. If you don't mind me telling

01:20:19.240 the story. I get very excited about sharing this. I need to hear it. Oh, this story. So the person

01:20:27.440 you're referring to is just this really exquisitely beautiful life of Tenley Albright. And Tenley

01:20:39.020 Albright became the first American woman to win gold in figure skating. And she won it in Cortina,

01:20:47.740 italy in 1956 her match is carol heiss who won in 1960 but tenley uh had this amazing experience

01:20:58.260 and this this so stays with me so first of all if anybody if you've been to the dolomites you know

01:21:04.920 what this is but even if you haven't been to the dolomites so this is spectacular yosemite is

01:21:08.860 spectacular but the dolomites are like massively everywhere spectacular these jagged peaks

01:21:14.840 And it's wintertime.

01:21:16.820 And the stadium for the skating is an outdoor stadium at that time.

01:21:21.400 And she's skating for the gold medal.

01:21:23.440 She's doing a free skate for the gold medal.

01:21:26.200 And as she's skating, she all of a sudden realizes she's hearing a sound and she doesn't know what it is.

01:21:34.040 You have the Olympic cauldron and you have the dolomites.

01:21:37.480 and there's somewhere out there is the, you know, kind of the sense of just the grandeur of the

01:21:43.860 entire Olympic village and everything. And she's skating the skate, focused just on the divots in

01:21:50.940 the ice and everything being perfect, but then the sound again. Every time she'd get by the boards

01:21:57.300 and all of a sudden she realized something. She'd selected the Baccarol from the opera Tales of

01:22:05.260 Hoffman and the audience knew the music, and she realized the stadium was surrounding

01:22:13.200 them, surrounding her, as they hummed her music while she skated her gold medal performance.

01:22:23.740 and just imagine i mean so then the thing that i come away with

01:22:32.780 is how on earth could the rest of life compare to that of course

01:22:38.780 i mean it's not only just winning the gold medal

01:22:42.620 but those moments in cortina with the humming

01:22:48.920 and you would think that it would be this is the peak of life and everything from here is going to

01:22:56.420 be inferior to that moment and then as i began to study her life she went on and became a surgeon

01:23:04.760 had a marvelous medical career and then founded this thing called the mit collaborative initiatives

01:23:11.600 where they're solving big problems by collaboration and i downloaded her bio off of the

01:23:17.920 the collaborative initiatives website when i first began studying her life

01:23:22.040 and i started reading the bio in the first paragraph there's no mention of the gold medal

01:23:26.700 and you read on further you get to the second paragraph and there's no mention of the gold

01:23:31.300 medal and then you get to the third paragraph there's still no mention of the gold medal

01:23:35.840 and finally you get all the way down and almost it feels almost like an afterthought it's

01:23:42.040 is this sentence at the very end earlier she was olympic gold medal skater something i i got it

01:23:50.800 basically right but it's about two percent of her bio and it's not because she doesn't view it as

01:23:55.480 me as a really significant part of her life but it's this part back here and her instead of her

01:24:01.560 life being this it was this and her life was this yeah and that sense of her life rising from that

01:24:10.980 point. For me, that's the image that I carry of how so many of the people we studied went about

01:24:18.460 their lives. Whatever peaks came before, they just became smaller relative to what came later.

01:24:28.740 Listen, and you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts and breathtaking triumph.

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01:25:00.380 What's up, fam?

01:25:01.320 I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.

01:25:03.260 Hey, what's up, y'all?

01:25:04.120 It's your girl, Sam Jay.

01:25:05.480 And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports,

01:25:07.700 a new podcast from Together and iHeart Women's Sports.

01:25:10.360 Because let's be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days.

01:25:15.120 The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout starts, the moments that take over your entire timeline. 1.00

01:25:20.320 And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week.

01:25:24.520 Every week we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports.

01:25:27.560 We'll give you our takes, our debates, and probably a few disagreements.

01:25:31.920 We'll talk to athletes, celebrate big moments, and get into what's happening on and off the field, court, track, and beyond.

01:25:37.000 because we're not just interested in what happened.

01:25:39.720 We're interested in why everyone's talking about it

01:25:41.780 because everyone watches women's sports.

01:25:45.600 So if you're already a fan

01:25:47.120 or you're just getting into the game,

01:25:49.120 there's a seat for you right here. 1.00

01:25:51.600 Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports

01:25:53.100 on the iHeartRadio app,

01:25:54.920 Apple Podcasts,

01:25:55.920 or wherever you get your podcasts.

01:25:59.440 Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast

01:26:01.860 Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.

01:26:03.740 Okay, if you know me, you know this.

01:26:05.320 I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy.

01:26:11.780 So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.

01:26:16.640 We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people,

01:26:22.140 like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she

01:26:27.420 never saw coming.

01:26:28.680 I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that

01:26:32.180 was more difficult.

01:26:33.300 There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression.

01:26:35.620 I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.

01:26:37.820 Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.

01:26:42.700 There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.

01:26:47.000 It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.

01:26:51.100 We just have to find it.

01:26:52.180 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app,

01:26:56.220 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

01:27:02.940 hanging out with the one the only the only and the one michael buble you guys i'm i'm genuinely

01:27:08.060 a huge fan like it's funny you know i made a whole thing about doing this tiktok where i got you guys

01:27:13.520 to sign the guitar and they but right it was real like we listened to in the car all the time like

01:27:18.740 it literally is hanging up with all your signatures wow i am so honored after kevin's recent uh let's

01:27:24.580 call it interesting confession about michael i had a feeling this wasn't going to be going away

01:27:28.440 we figured there's only one thing to do we must invite michael buble on the podcast and we want

01:27:32.320 to know what's on his sexy time playlist you know i did an interview and they're like have you heard

01:27:36.460 about this jonas brothers thing and they're like what did you think of it i was like well i mean

01:27:39.780 it's reciprocal like what a man gotta do what a man gotta do we talk about kevin's confession

01:27:46.980 michael's reaction and a whole lot more do you have a hockey rink in your house i do i do our

01:27:52.720 conversation with michael buble is out now listen to hey jonas on the iheart radio app apple podcast

01:27:57.460 or wherever you get your podcasts.

01:28:00.600 There is one last piece, I think,

01:28:02.400 that I would really love to chat about,

01:28:04.780 and I'd be very curious how you reacted to it.

01:28:07.660 Is this a big revelation for me

01:28:10.560 was the importance of choosing responsibilities?

01:28:13.600 I was just going to go there, Jim.

01:28:16.120 I was going to go there

01:28:17.280 because that's something else they had in common.

01:28:19.480 I mean, you talk about, you know,

01:28:20.620 you had this impact with a professor

01:28:23.600 who sort of read you the riot act

01:28:26.180 about asking the wrong question and you know you have the saddle and the horseback frame and it is

01:28:30.380 that that frame of not looking necessarily back uh but this notion of chasing responsibility oh

01:28:37.400 come on too good i read that knocked me off that horse yeah and what was it was it tony morrison

01:28:44.800 that was it was that's where it came from yes it was so i had saved my pair of writers tony

01:28:52.100 Morrison and Barbara Tuchman for my last pair set to personally digest, right? Because as a writer,

01:29:00.320 it was like a treat for myself to learn about writers. And so I'm reading everything about,

01:29:07.520 and there's a ton on both of them. But one of the things that Toni Morrison did over the course of

01:29:12.280 her life was she gave a lot of interviews and talked a lot about her process of writing and

01:29:15.580 how she thought about it, read all of her books in sequence. And that was a wonderful experience

01:29:19.200 in and of itself same thing with barbara tuchman but in the 1985 interview there's this one little

01:29:25.160 line uh that essentially is the idea that that um freedom is it doesn't mean having no

01:29:33.000 responsibilities right freedom means you get to choose the responsibilities and when i hit that

01:29:40.280 line all of a sudden all the other people in my study that i i'd studied all of them at this point

01:29:47.400 They're like dominoes that fell because I saw all their lives through the lens of that sentence.

01:29:52.820 And I realized that powerful idea that freedom does not mean the absence of responsibilities.

01:30:01.720 It means we get to choose responsibilities.

01:30:05.620 And when I looked at all the people in our study, that's what they were doing.

01:30:09.660 Now, the responsibilities were very different from person to person.

01:30:13.100 But 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.

01:30:33.040 Four, it doesn't matter to you if you get credit.

01:30:36.240 Yeah. And that if you choose responsibility, it might be simply the responsibility to

01:30:42.600 honor the musicians that came before you. It might be choosing the responsibility to,

01:30:51.020 as Tenley Albright we were talking about, she would practice with surgical conscience. It's

01:30:55.860 something she'd learned about as an idea as a practicing surgeon, but for her was a sacred

01:31:00.760 responsibility that every patient under her care, she had to operate with the highest level of

01:31:07.520 surgical conscience and care. And it went back, she was a young girl with polio. And there was

01:31:14.280 a moment in her life where they were going to put this big needle in her spine, and she was terrified.

01:31:21.280 And she asked for somebody to hold her hand. And after a lot of hesitation in the room,

01:31:26.480 a medical professional came and held her hand while they put this painful needle.

01:31:33.680 And that notion of health care has to have care in it. And that was part of her. And when she

01:31:43.300 became a surgeon, she made sure somebody was holding the patient's hand during surgeries,

01:31:49.440 not because there's a prescription manual that says you have to do it that way,

01:31:54.660 but because she saw operating with surgical conscience as a responsibility that she just

01:32:01.980 held at the highest, most sacred level. And when I looked at the people in the study

01:32:07.880 who then were able to keep themselves, Franklin didn't need to do what he did in his 60s and

01:32:15.940 70s. He didn't have to, he could have just said, I'm done. Like, I'm tired. It's over.

01:32:20.400 but he felt the responsibility as did roger sherman at the founding of the country you have

01:32:28.900 responsibilities and all these different places where people would say i choose this

01:32:33.360 and i believe after doing this study that one of the ways the fire goes out

01:32:38.580 is when we stop choosing responsibilities and the question not what do i want to do next

01:32:45.880 is a very different question. Or how do I want to retire? That's a very different question than,

01:32:53.360 well, now that my life has changed, what responsibilities do I now

01:32:58.820 want to choose that I will hold myself to account for?

01:33:06.920 You can't stop. Well, you know, I'm going to end on that because it is the right damn question. I 0.98

01:33:12.420 I mean, you know, Masterclass, Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life.

01:33:19.000 This is just, you know, if I were a professor, signed reading, and anyone who hasn't already

01:33:26.520 picked it up and picked up these other books, they, you know, with all due respect, they're

01:33:31.180 not chasing their responsibilities, dare I say.

01:33:34.740 And by the way, I can't help but, you know, I'm thinking when you talk about chasing

01:33:39.380 responsibilities and i i kept going back and forgive me i i just i kept thinking of you

01:33:43.640 slowing down and driving a little slower because you i guess i imagine that reflected you right

01:33:51.180 just the sense of responsibility you had to birth this book that's right you you have an obligation

01:33:55.780 you're you know right yeah that you know it really that's uh i don't mean it in any morbid

01:34:04.600 sense or anything like that but there just there comes a point and i i remember this this this also

01:34:09.920 happened with uh with my with like i remember with good to great it happened it's like there's

01:34:15.560 a certain point where i just reach a point where i feel responsible for two things multiple things

01:34:23.720 but in in bringing it out one is i just want to fulfill the responsibility of bringing it out the

01:34:33.660 best it can be for those who will read it. Once a book's in the world, it's not yours anymore.

01:34:40.140 It's your readers. It's not yours. You don't make a bestseller.

01:34:45.680 Your readers make a book ultimately what it is because a book is what happens in the relationship

01:34:52.160 between the reader and the book. And eventually the author goes away anyways. And so when you

01:34:58.800 know you have something that it's your responsibility to finish it, to get it out there and then

01:35:06.360 let it be its thing. And so I really, there's a beginning of good to great. I really did. I wrote

01:35:14.520 this in the preface, but I really did do this. I went running up one of the mountains here,

01:35:20.840 one of my favorite winter trails that I, when I used to run, I mainly ride a bike now because

01:35:25.380 to be hard to run as much but running up uh and i had this favorite sitting place where i could sit

01:35:31.940 and look over the mountains and it's winter right it's uh probably like maybe january and i'm

01:35:39.240 finishing up writing good to great and i'm looking out on the snow covered rockies from this perch

01:35:45.200 where i could sit in that late beautiful like you're like four o'clock afternoon where you start

01:35:49.140 to get that glowing sun in the winter hitting those snow peaks. And a weird question popped

01:35:56.300 into my mind. How much would somebody have to pay me to not publish Good to Great?

01:36:05.720 So I'm about three months from done with the writing. And so I started playing the thought

01:36:10.160 experiment in my mind. I'm sitting there on this rock, looking at the mountains, right? And this

01:36:14.020 is, you know, Joanne and I, as you know, we didn't, our lives had turned out really well now,

01:36:18.420 But we didn't come from having a lot of resources.

01:36:21.520 And so I just started playing around with the numbers.

01:36:23.660 So I go to like $10 million.

01:36:25.160 I'm like, there's no way.

01:36:26.440 I mean, well, $10 million to change your life, doesn't matter.

01:36:29.440 I got to get this done.

01:36:30.220 And finally, it's starting to get cold in the afternoon.

01:36:32.720 By the time I'd crossed over $100 million, I thought, I'm just not going to – yeah.

01:36:39.520 No, I still wouldn't not publish it.

01:36:41.260 If somebody right then had said, I'll give you $100 million to not publish this, I'm 100% confident I would have turned it down.

01:36:50.640 And that's because at some point, it just almost has like a life of its own.

01:36:56.280 And your responsibility is to bring it out.

01:36:58.700 The second thing is to be very true to what you found.

01:37:02.140 In this one, also just really feeling responsible to the lives of the people that I studied.

01:37:11.260 uh, what I, uh, most of them have passed away, but I envisioned in my mind them reading what

01:37:19.500 I wrote about them. And, um, what I would want is for them to feel that I handled their lives

01:37:26.420 very responsibly. And, and, you know, forgive me, chapter 13 is your life. I mean,

01:37:34.660 your own assumptions, you know, you, the things that you, you know, you evolved, you, your

01:37:42.940 positions, your feelings, your things that, uh, that changed in the process of writing this book

01:37:49.780 as well. I really did. And, and so it's not just about the reader. It was about you, this, you,

01:37:56.240 you came out a different person. I mean, if book ends, I mean, come on, how about that last chapter?

01:38:01.560 Well, the last chapter gives questions to the reader, which I believe are more powerful than just giving them answers in the end.

01:38:12.040 But really what happened for me, and maybe you had some of this with your own writing, you discover, right?

01:38:18.660 Part of the purpose of writing is to discover what you think.

01:38:22.160 What I didn't expect was to discover and then change how I feel.

01:38:27.820 so in the process of writing this there are so many things that i used to believe that i no longer

01:38:33.960 believe about the way life works at its best i used to really believe uh about um you know you

01:38:40.500 have to have a super clear purpose at all times and you follow that and and actually uh i i now

01:38:47.680 believe you need to have ever deepening and expanding understanding of your encodings and

01:38:52.420 then trust that they will lead to something that almost in retrospect looks purposeful. It's a very

01:38:57.600 different way to understand things. So there are lots of things like that that changed, but emotionally

01:39:02.860 I changed. And I came away with much greater compassion for people going through the inevitable

01:39:12.100 cliffs and fog of life. I came away with feeling, seeing in other people

01:39:20.740 the marvelous, wonderful ways that they're put together and feeling ever grateful for what people

01:39:30.960 are in my life rather than feeling frustrated with what they're not. And that happened because

01:39:35.840 of doing this book. And then, as you know, the book ends with a massive transformation because

01:39:44.020 it was only by doing this book that I finally understood why my father, where we began this

01:39:50.720 conversation, could never, never got out of the fog of his life. And his life ended without him

01:39:58.560 ever getting out of the fog. And, um, it was, uh, the last paragraph of the book where I finally

01:40:07.740 realized all of this in writing. When I wrote it, I sat there at my home office desk and I cried for

01:40:13.600 an hour after I wrote it. And I literally sat there for an hour and just cried because it was

01:40:21.080 like this, uh, I can't, I don't even know what word to put on it. It was, it wasn't just like

01:40:32.240 relief. It was tremendous sense of sadness that my father never was able to understand or have

01:40:45.120 the framework that this book could have given him, but he didn't have it. And as a result,

01:40:54.080 his life was fog-filled to the very end. And you didn't know, but did you, when you put down that

01:41:00.540 pen and that paragraph and hell of a description of the next hour, did you know that was the end

01:41:08.560 of the book. So what happened is, and as somebody now is you've begun to experience this process of

01:41:19.080 writing, you realize that you're always sort of, you don't write purely linear. You don't start

01:41:25.120 with sentence one and write to the end. There's looping backs and there's editings and all kinds

01:41:30.360 of things. And so sometimes you don't really know the ending or even necessarily the beginning

01:41:36.640 when you're starting or when you're ending. And what happened was I decided to write the story

01:41:44.120 at the end of the book of my grandmother, who I dedicated the book to, her husband,

01:41:50.500 Jimmy Collins, who I named after my grandfather, a test pilot who died at age 30. And to write

01:41:58.380 that story as the casting the shadow over my father's life and the shocking realization that

01:42:05.460 I had that my grandmother had. I mean, you know the story, it's in the book, but they were really

01:42:19.120 tightly bound together, married after four days of meeting. He was the dashing test pilot. She

01:42:26.140 was a beautiful Oklahoma farm girl, but he dies tragically in this test accident. And my grandmother

01:42:33.660 uh after the service he well during the service uh she told me years later she sat there and she

01:42:44.080 just gripped the arms of the chair and just held it uh and held her with just willed herself to

01:42:52.700 not cry and willed herself to hold it together as a single mom in the depression with two kids

01:42:57.940 having just lost her husband in this test crash. And I asked her to tell me all about the story.

01:43:05.200 And, you know, my grandmother cried at that point. And she said, thank you for that. And I said,

01:43:11.520 thank you for what? You'd never told the story of Jim and the aftermath and his death and him

01:43:17.340 writing his own chapter about his own death, which he did in his own book, Test Pilot,

01:43:22.080 because he thought he might die. So he wrote his last chapter before he died so I could complete

01:43:26.740 the book. And she said, no, I've never cried. And this, I asked, this was, she was 94 at this point,

01:43:32.600 I think. And she'd held her tears in for seven decades. And that was, and I want, and I just

01:43:41.380 was writing this story about that. And that's all of a sudden it just realized, my goodness,

01:43:46.860 my grandmother had this horrendous cliff. She carried my father and his sister over the cliff

01:43:52.980 with her. My father went into the fog as a toddler when it happened. And he never, ever got out of

01:44:00.120 the fog. And I'm just writing this story. And then I write this last paragraph. And when I wrote the

01:44:05.600 last words of the last paragraph, I all of a sudden just realized I wasn't planning that this

01:44:10.600 is the last paragraph. It's just all of a sudden it was there. And I knew that's it. That'll be

01:44:16.400 the last sentence in the book and that's when i broke down and cried yeah well it's uh as i say

01:44:23.480 it's it's not good dare i say it's great and um and it's um you know you continue to

01:44:30.620 for guys like me it's it's just a marvel the work you're doing and and how different and unique and

01:44:37.080 insightful it is and and how impactful it is and snowsha and jim of chasing responsibilities it's

01:44:42.380 just, you know, come on. If that doesn't hit you, talk about it. I mean, come on. If nothing else.

01:44:52.720 Well, you know, I have to say, I was enormously curious for our conversation and to know that you

01:44:59.760 have followed our work and that it's influenced you at all these different phases of your life.

01:45:06.100 I mean, seriously. So come on. I didn't know. Every face. I knew that you like built to last

01:45:12.560 because I saw a reference to that, but it really, um, it's, it's just, Jim, you don't know. I mean,

01:45:19.540 come on, just the BHAG frame. I mean, this notion of big, hairy, audacious goals, like, come on,

01:45:23.820 every, every corner of my every, it explains everything. Every, you know, you may love or

01:45:29.740 hate me. Uh, it's, uh, it explains more things and more ways and more days about my motivations,

01:45:35.020 my my why and this notion of of just you know of having a core but also sort of the notion of

01:45:43.060 stimulating progress changing my notion of leadership that it's not just about you know

01:45:48.080 the guy a guy on the white horse to save the day um and and and the notion of of just institutional

01:45:54.120 change come on these are these are these you know i've read a hundred business books those

01:46:00.100 And I've never read a political book that expresses those fundamental values in a more profound and important way.

01:46:06.900 And there may not be a more important political book. 0.97

01:46:09.920 It should be a requirement for every damn executive. 0.97

01:46:12.640 Those books should be. 0.99

01:46:14.380 Because I don't think we live by them.

01:46:16.880 So forgive me.

01:46:18.100 I don't want to belabor it, but I'm not going to undersell you.

01:46:22.280 You're not going to get away with getting undersold here.

01:46:25.980 Jesus, come on, man.

01:46:27.380 Well, 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.

01:46:46.200 And 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.

01:47:03.600 I 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.

01:47:25.260 For 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.

01:47:39.560 Jim, thanks for joining us.

01:47:41.200 Thank you so much. Have a great rest of the day.

01:47:48.180 This is an iHeart Podcast.

01:47:51.080 Guaranteed human.

This is Gavin Newsom - July 09, 2026

And, This Is What To Make Of A Life With Author Jim Collins

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