Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life

Joanne, just one day, she gasps out to me, and it was just one of those moments. It's just like etched in my emotional memory. She just gasps, 'I feel like I'm dying.' And in a sense, she was right, because that identity as a world champion athlete, this thing that she was so encoded for, that she so loved doing, was being taken away from her. And I realized that one way to study self-renewal would be to look at people who go through what in the book we call cliff events — these times in life where life, in some really significant way, changes under your feet.

Absolutely. I really, really, truly just revel in the idea of a conversation with you. We've had two previous dances, and I wanted to thank you — slash blame you — for a very difficult morning, because I had done lots of research and reading, certainly on your latest work, which took quite a tour of duty to complete. And I decided that this morning I would go back with a lot of coffee to reread the transcripts of our prior two conversations. And typically when I do something like that, I have a few highlights, a few marginalia to refer back to. And I ended up underlining about 50 different things, and it caused a bit of a crisis in terms of where to start and what to do.

You got it.

Not so much. I've been doing cycling with Joanne.

She has gotten me into going off to Italy and the Dolomites and places like that to do these huge mountain passes, and it's something we can share together with whatever years we have left. And I think that maybe the intense aerobic aspect of that — you know, if you have your heart rate above 160 for an hour, two hours, I mean, and spiking into the 170s — that's, I think, that does something for you. I'm not sure what. But I actually think that's part of it. And then I just have other ways. I can't really explain entirely. In fact, my team has heard me say multiple times, 'Where's all this energy come from?' Because it's only increased. I really do feel that I have more energy. I had a lot of energy at 37. I had a lot of energy at 17. I have more energy at 67 when I wrote that. 68 now. I need less sleep. My clarity, if anything, I think is higher. And I really, really look forward to 4:00 a.m., because that's the point at which I give myself permission, if I'm awake, to leap into the day. And it really is true that I will wake up and I will think to myself, 'Please, oh, please, oh, please let it be at least 4:00 a.m. so that I can get up and get going.' And that is — it's hard to explain — but that sense of almost childlike anticipation to get up and get rolling is palpable. It's there almost every single day. Well, I do get one — we might have spoken about this in our first conversation — but I've always been a morning person. So I actually figured out how to get two mornings a day, and I'm just really fortunate that I have the ability to nap under any conditions, anywhere, at any time. I can nap. And I was doing a talk once, and there were a few thousand people in the room, and they had a nice couch backstage, and I'm supposed to go on in, I don't know, whatever it was, 30 minutes or something. And I laid down on the couch and I just went bang right out to sleep. I'm dreaming and I'm having a sleep, etc. And they come back and they look at me and they're like, 'He's asleep. Oh my goodness, he's supposed to be on in like five minutes.' And they shake me and I'm like, 'Okay, good to go.' I can go asleep immediately, and then I can wake up immediately, and then I can walk out to 3,000 people and I was asleep five minutes before. I don't know where that comes from. That's just a fortunate thing. But what that allows me is I get two mornings a day. I get first morning, you know, that when after a night's sleep, but then I get second morning, which is after a nap. And in fact, my team knows that I'll sometimes say to them, 'I'm going to go get ready for second morning,' which basically is, 'I'm going to go take a nap.' And then I get second morning. And then I've learned really systematically what kinds of activities really fit with what times of day.

That's ideal. I love the 4:00 a.m. to 7 a.m. Joanne tends to sleep later than me. So, especially when I was really working on the book — but this is a general pattern as well — I love to be up at 4:00. I have one cup of coffee that I make in the day. I don't have caffeine after that. I travel with my own coffee, because you really need to. The only place I go where I don't take my own coffee is Italy. I make my own coffee and I start the day, and that's that one cup that I make, and I get right into — usually that's when I do my most intense creative work. And I love that sort of three to four hours, if I can get it, of just, you know, the light changing and bang into it. I like within 15 minutes I'm fully into it and just go.

I always have something with my morning cup of coffee so that I have enough calories to keep my brain going. And I just grab something that's fairly easy to eat with a cup of coffee — a Kind bar or maybe a yogurt or something like that. And then I have breakfast with Joanne. We have a morning when, you know, when I'm in town, which is most days. I don't like to travel that much. And once Joanne's up and going, I make her a latte. We joke that I'm a coffee elf, and I make her a latte. And then Joanne curates stories from, you know, the Wall Street Journal or from, you know, wherever, and she reads them out loud, and then we talk about them.

Usually after first morning. Exactly.

Yeah. Sometimes we might get up at about the same time, but most times I'm up early. And so then I have a more robust breakfast and really listen to Joanne's curation. And I'm always just really curious what she thinks. Could I just add a little running commentary, if I could?

Yeah.

So I pack Pete's ground coffee, Arabian mocha java, a cone filter, the filters themselves, a water boiler so that you can, you know, make sure that you have hot water and have kind of the whole setup that way. And then when I start the day, you know, I get the whole sort of system going. And it doesn't really matter where I am or what time of day it is. It's actually an interesting thing, because if I'm doing some kind of session that really requires me to be absolutely at my best — which I expect of myself anytime that I'm out there — there is a ritualistic aspect of it, but it's also kind of this sense of it doesn't matter if room service is open. It doesn't matter any of that kind of stuff, that opening kind of bubble of the day. And now if it didn't work, I'd still be fine, because you always have to be able to adapt — you know, if something just went awry, you just adapt. But for the most part, you got that opening bubble of the day. And to be able to basically replicate that no matter where I am, no matter what time of day — it could be 4:00 a.m. East Coast time or it could be 7 a.m. California time or wherever — right, it replicates that morning bubble.

It is. It's a bootup sequence. That's exactly what it is. And I don't have to control any variables or wonder, like, are they going to have any good coffee, or does room service run on time, or the room service isn't open at 4:30 or whatever. You don't think about any of that stuff. You just move.

Yeah. Their own idiosyncratic encodings. Yes.

Oh, you're still warming up.

You know, if I wanted to say who it was, I would have put it in the book. But that list was really interesting, because one of the things that I was very curious about — because our people became really, once they really locked on to a big thing for a given period of their life, as you know from the reading — I mean, they were really, really, really focused, and the level of intensity and energy over years or decades or multiple decades they put into it. And I was really — I was just curious though, did they have any room for anything else in their lives, or were they just monomaniacally obsessed freaks? Right? And then I just kind of went through just a very simple, like, okay, on that particular dimension, did they have really intense side passions of some kind, even if the big thing was over here? And I think I can remember there was something like 80-some percent had some kind of an intense side passion. And what I was struck by is the range of them. Oh my goodness. I mean, disco dancing, studying the occult, but also like teaching Sunday school and running and mountain climbing. And some people were really into just hosting interesting dinner parties. Others wouldn't have been interested in that at all, but they had things that absolutely they were incredibly passionate about outside of the big thing that they focused on. And I found that just an interesting data point, that they didn't make a life where they had nothing else except the primary arena of their work to focus on.

Mhm.

Oh yeah. That's a callback for people that listen to the first conversation.

In my 30s, I came across a remarkable man, one of the many sages I've had the joy to be affected by in my life, John W. Gardner, who was kind of a wise man in residence at Stanford Business School, emeritus at that point, just down the hall from me when I was teaching there. And he'd written a great book, a little book, back a number of years ago on self-renewal. And I was very interested in the question of — I don't know why I was interested, but I was just interested in why would some entities or some people have a life of continuous self-renewal rather than a life of this followed by, you know, just kind of a long degradation.

Exactly. And John encouraged me to consider doing eventually some research on the question of self-renewal. And I was off working on Built to Last and Good to Great, and I was working on my company research, but I still have my notes from long conversations with John about how you might think about self-renewal. And so that seed had sort of been in there, and it was just sitting there, and I thought someday I might return to that. Then what happened is I started thinking that that question was always there — like, how would you actually study it — and then a seed got activated that had been planted back a decade before that, in my 20s. Joanne, who you know is so central in my life — we've been married 45 years — and Joanne was a world-class athlete. She was world champion in the Ironman. She was the first female figure in the original Nike 'Just Do It' campaigns back in the 1980s with Bo Jackson and Howie Long. And she was really constructed to compete. And that sense of — we talk about, when we'll talk later about this, being encoded for something — there's just some athletes that they need to win. It's a need. They need to win. And that was Joanne. When she came — when she gave up all these other opportunities she had in life to focus on ultimately trying to win the Ironman and went in on that, it's like everything came together. And we go off to Hawaii, and she raced in '84, '85, '86. And in '85 she won the world championship in Hawaii. And there was a backstory to that race, which is that Joanne had a hamstring injury, and that hamstring injury just was chronic and it wouldn't really go away. And in the race it began to catch up with her. So she had this 10-minute lead with 10 miles to go in the marathon. As you know, it's a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile marathon in sort of 90-degree temperatures and 80-some percent humidity on the lava fields. I mean, it's just horrendous out there. And she had a good swim and a great bike, and she had this 10-minute lead with just 10 miles to go coming back into town. And the hamstring caught up with her, partly because it did limit her training, and you know that was always there. And she began to lose a minute a mile. And I remember watching the ABC feed, because the sports truck was in front of her, and I could sort of see the race unfolding. I could watch it in real time with the camera of the truck right in front of her, and you could see her starting to lose time — like, she's a, you know, nine-minute lead, eight-minute lead, seven-minute lead, six-minute lead — like, and you're getting closer and closer to the end, but is she going to get there before somebody else does? And there is this moment — I mean, I'll never forget the moment — where she stops in the middle of the lava fields, and she has this extraordinary discomfort and pain, and she's looking at her legs, hoping they would move. And she reaches down and she sort of massages them, and she kind of like pounds on her quadriceps, and she looks up to the sky, and it almost looked like she was pleading with somebody to help her somehow. And then she just kind of fixed her gaze on the horizon, and there was this sort of stoic countenance that came over, and she just like started to move, and then she started to run, and she ended up winning a 10-hour-plus race by about 90 seconds. And it's like one of those things in life, like you have very few experiences like that. And then when we got back to Palo Alto, where we lived at the time, you know, the hamstring just didn't heal.

And she tried everything — surgery, physical therapy, rest, stretching, you name it. And eventually she just had to confront the brutal fact that her athletic career was going to end at her peak. And we were sitting there in a little townhouse in Palo Alto. We're sitting at our kitchen table, and Joanne — just one day — she gasps out to me, and it was just one of those moments. It's just like etched in my emotional memory. She just gasps, 'I feel like I'm dying.' And I had no answer. It's not like you can solve that or anything like that. It's just, 'I feel like I'm dying.' And in a sense she was right, because that identity as a world champion athlete, this thing that she was so encoded for, that she so loved doing, was being taken away from her. And in a sense, it was dying — a certain kind of dying. And that seed somehow mixed with the John Gardner thing, because what happened is I somehow sort of fused these together in my mind. I think that actually Joanne's experience is what gave me the original interest in self-renewal, because I just didn't have the language for it. I didn't really see the connection so clearly. It was kind of murky. But I think they fused together. And I realized that one way to study self-renewal would be to look at people who go through what in the book we call cliff events — these times in life where life, in some really significant way, changes under your feet. Either you choose it to change or it happens to you. But there's kind of a before and an after, and your life is so changed at that time that you have to really reorient and reconsider. And sometimes those cliffs, like Joanne's, are really monumental moments in life. They are real cliff events. And I thought if I could find people, if I could study people at the cliff, and I could study their lives up to the cliff, through the cliff, and after the cliff, and how they come out and how they kind of constructed life after that, I would be able to have a method for understanding this thing that I used to sort of think of as about self-renewal. And so I just need to fill in a couple other pieces, because yeah, sort of the creative journey of how I got here. But then, as you know, I always like pairs. I like to have two entities in the same situation to kind of set next to each other. I did that in all my prior works. And so the idea was, wow, what if you could find pairs of people that were at the same cliff, and their lives were really similar up to that cliff? And then you look at how their lives — how they come under the cliff, through the cliff, and out of the cliff. And then by looking at that, I would understand this process of renewal out here through this methodology. And so that's when I started the whole journey. Now let's just zoom way out. As I got into it and I really began — I had my match pairs, I had my people who had gone through these cliffs, I was studying their whole lives. It was overwhelming in scale, this project. I honestly thought at times I might never be able to finish it, because it was just so monstrously big. But it began to dawn on me the more I worked on it, because I was looking at — you couldn't understand this cliff thing if you didn't understand the whole life. And so I had to study, you know, from their entire lives, right? And most of them are deceased. A few were in their 80s, you know, but basically I had the record of their lives pretty much intact. And all of a sudden, I began to realize two things. First of all, none of them thought about self-renewal as like an objective. And rather what I really saw were people who achieved what I might call self-renewal, but that's kind of not what they were doing. They were leading their lives. And they were leading their lives through these cliff events and in between the cliff events, and somehow all the way through to the end for the ones that had passed away. And I began to realize that what I had was a huge and rich data source for really the big question. And just so that you kind of grasp this — this has happened to me multiple times. Back in Built to Last, which was about visionary companies and enduring great companies and all that, Jerry Porras and I set out — our original question was to study the concept of corporate vision, because it was sort of what would that be — it was back before it was something that anybody had ever studied. And then our method of match pairs of these visionary companies over long periods of history led to a much bigger question, which was how do you build an enduring great visionary company, which is very different than the smaller question of what is corporate vision and how does that work. And so repeatedly in my journey I've started out with what I think is the question — self-renewal, corporate vision, whatever — and I've ended up with the method leading me to a much bigger question that the method answers. And so in this case, all of a sudden, as I got deeper and deeper into it, I realized I'm not studying self-renewal. Self-renewal is a residual artifact of really the big question. And the big question is the title of the book, which is the question we all face, which is what to make of a life. And we face that question when we're young. You and I faced it coming out of the fog of youth. And what I came to grasp is that cliffs are an amazing way to look at the question of wrestling with what to make of a life. Because when you have a big enough cliff, like Joanne's cliff, like the cliffs in the study, you have to answer the question again, right? Partway through your life, when you have one of a big enough cliff, you have to answer the question, well, now what to make of a life? Because all that's done or all that's changed. And then I realized there's a third time, which is when you're in the later decades of life, and many never get around to answering this question — and I hope they will after reading this — is, well, now what to make of a life so that my 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe my 90s turn out to be my biggest, most creative, most impactful, most interesting years, rather than sitting over here in inferiority to my younger years. And so I essentially — it's very similar to what happened with Built to Last, with Good to Great, whatever. I started with a narrower question, I came up with a method to answer it, and then realized that that method was actually answering a big question.

And then I just gave myself over to that question, and that's how I ended up really framing the whole book. And then, as you know, and we'll probably get into this, the seeds of that go all the way back to a shattered kid, right? Trying to figure out life. That is really kind of the creative journey. And when you get the book, it feels like, God, it's almost like clearly linear, but you write that way because you want it to hang together conceptually, but the creative journey of how you get there is wonderfully dynamic.

So are you in the fog on the book itself, or in a general Tim-wandering-in-the-fog time?

My question for you is — so first of all, just for anyone who's listening to this, we're using the term fog, and I'm just going to put a quick context on that and then ask a question. And so we just talked about the notion of cliffs, and as you know, the whole study structure was around cliffs and so forth. And so I knew cliffs would play a critical role in how I look at things. I was really overwhelmed with the prevalence of fog in the lives that we studied. That was not something I expected to find. And fog are these periods of time where you're kind of either in some portion of your life or maybe overall in life at a given point where you're lost, confused, befuddled, disoriented, uncertain, right? And there's kind of these clarity phases of life. Like, I'm in a clarity phase right now. I was in a fog phase about 2013, 2014, certainly in a fog in my 20s. There's kind of fog phases and these clarity phases, and every person in our study had these, sometimes even extended episodes of fog, which I found very comforting in the end, because the people we studied had remarkable lives when you summed up the entire thing, but they could lose a decade in the fog along the way. And then in the wake of cliffs in particular, there seems to almost always be fog. So fog can come at any time for a variety of reasons, but the likelihood of fog will follow a cliff. Based on what we looked at in the study, is that if you have a big enough cliff, especially if it was unexpected, the fog is likely to roll in and can be very thick and very befuddling. So that's why we're talking about fog. So my question for you is, I'm curious as you are wandering around a little bit in the fog — and I think it's a very interesting time as you describe it, of kind of, well, this question of the things that you'd done up to this point. Are you ready to be done with them? Are you ready to extend out in a different direction? All these sorts of questions that are swirling about. I'm curious if anything in the book, as you read it, illuminated for you or got you thinking about navigating through this fog.

That's right.

Hard to love Katharine Graham.

Yes, in a lot of ways. And you also — not to keep burying the lead on this — have people who sort of methodically find their encodings. And I want you to distinguish that from strengths. You have people who are forced into a situation, and thank God they just happen to have an overlap with the circumstances forced upon them and these inner workings that allow them to find their stride. As if, you know, Michael Jordan was sent to like basketball prison camp, and like, lo and behold, what luck, you know, he happens to be incredibly good and built for basketball. So my question for you that I want to hit on before we dive in — if I asked Joanne, why does Jim have more energy now than he did at 37, how would she answer it? Because it seems to me like there might be a piece of honing in on encodings as a wellspring of energy, but you seem like you've always been pretty good at that, at least after some of your experiences at Stanford. What would her answer be, do you think?

Years ago, there was a profile being done on me, and I'm not big on a lot of profiles. I'd rather just have people read my books and take away the ideas. But anyways, the profile was going to happen. And so I said, 'If we're going to do it, we'll do it right.' And I invited the reporter out to Boulder, and he said, 'I'd really like to spend some time with Joanne.' And I'm like, 'Ooh, okay, here we go.' And what kind of profile is this going to be? So, we're at breakfast, and he says, 'I have one real question I really want to ask you. If you just pick one word to describe what it's like to live with Jim, what one word would you use?' Okay. So, you got a picture. I'm sitting there waiting for the answer, and I'm wondering — you know, always an adventure, inspired, energizing, creative, right? All these things are going through my mind as possible. She gets one word, and after a long pause, she just kind of looks at him completely, completely serious, completely just straight, you know, single answer: 'Exhausting.' You know, it's hilarious, because I knew that word was coming. I like — and that's me projecting. I'm thinking about my partner. That's hilarious. I literally in my head have 'exhausting.' Exhausting. So she would relate to the question. I think what she would say is that yes, I've always had a high energy set point. And just as an aside, it's not something I think I even put in the book, but the way I came to think of it is that we all have kind of an energy set point. And maybe mine is just a reasonably high energy set point. And just to be clear though, I think that the thing I would want people to take away from what they read here is that whatever your energy set point, you know, you can have variation around that set point, and the question is how do you lead your life in such a way that you're on the positive side of that variation in the set point, and it sustains until you run out of breath. Because so many — what happens is they reach a certain point and they go below the energy set point because of whatever sets of reasons, and end up with maybe 20 or 30 years of their life essentially off the table, and that's an unfortunate loss to the world. I think Joanne would say one — I'm one of those people who really set out in life somehow to end up expending my energy in things that I derive tremendous intrinsic pleasure from doing — the actual doing of it. That sense of if you're doing it, you can't not do it, right? Like you, I don't have to demonstrate that I can do well at what I do. I don't have to worry about do I know how to — I don't know, have a teaching moment or whatever, right? How to come up with the right questions to ask somebody running a big company. But if I sit down, I still get joy out of preparing for a moment or being at it, or just a sense of excitement that morning, because the actual doing is something that I so love. That I put in the book, and Joanne is the one that helped me sort of see this. I'd always thought of myself as an incredibly disciplined person, and everybody else saw me as really disciplined, and I finally came to the conclusion I'm really not very disciplined. I mean, I am somewhat. But look, if you just can't help — you just can't stop yourself from preparing, from getting ready to do the very best you can, because you're doing something that just so pulls it — like you can't stop yourself. Well, that's not discipline. You're just compelled. You're just — it's almost a form of compulsion, which isn't discipline, right? And if it's sheer love of the actual doing itself, well, how's that discipline? Just love doing it. So, that's one. But I think she would also say that like you love having a big project, and this has been a huge project, right? So, for 12 years...

From the time I first started noodling on this till when I finally finished the writing, when I wake up in the morning, I don't have any question until the book's done. Maybe I'll go into a fog now. I had no question what was in front of me at 4:00 a.m. There's always the project, right? Every single day there's the project and that's energizing even if it's huge and monstrous. And then the third is this sense of extending out and circling back that I saw in all the people in the study. That this really interesting, it'll be very interesting to see for you as well, what happens with this sense of this notion of kind of radical reinvention isn't really what we saw. There weren't people who quote radically reinvented themselves. It was this organic process of kind of extending and pushing themselves out into new modes or new things or new activities, etc. Kind of an extension outward. But then they would always find a way to circle back to things that they had built upon previously as almost a form of fuel to further extend out. Robert Plant's one of my favorite people in the study and I love how over the, you know, what keeps him so full of fire for music and for singing all these decades later. And if you look at him, he's like, you know, he sure he's no longer in Zeppelin. He doesn't need to be. He was extending out into bluegrass and he was extending out into, you know, going off to the desert and playing with trans musicians and all these kinds of really and learning to blend his voice with Allison Krauss. I mean, utterly marvelous extensions with Allison Krauss or with some of his extensions. He'd come back and rebring to life a Led Zeppelin song.

And then they would do a bluegrass version of Black Dog and just that sense of this extending and circling back. Well, this study for me, you could look at it as I'm doing something radically new. Yes, it's a new question, new study set, all that. But I'm also circling back and to what I've always loved to do, which is to take a big giant messy question, put a methodology around it, and spend years figuring it out. Right? That's consistent. That's a circle back. The extendout is it's a different question and different unit of analysis. So, as both. And then the last is this, and we talked about this, I think, a little bit in one of our previous ones, but I would really put it this way. When I was younger, I had a lot of fire, but it was really painful fire. It was burning hot red molten lava in my stomach. Almost like channeled rage, channeled ferocity.

Yeah, you know that feeling, right? And I used to worry that if I ever lost that, I'd lose my drive. And I think what's happened, I know what's happened is the fire's changed. The fire used to be like this molten hot burning ferocity in the belly. And now it's like this. It's not red. It's I think of it as green and yellow and it's like this sustained warming glow. And I don't have that. I do not have those kind of insecurity, prove myself kinds of things that are driving me. And as a result my energy's gone up and I think that because the fire is different, because the fire is this sustained warming glow, it is just like constantly generative and I think that's a really really big part of it. That sense of like you write a sentence and you look at it and you go wow, that's almost a good sentence.

First of all, I would imagine that a number of people and maybe you yourself relate to the raging burning lava coals.

And you kind of cling on to them because you feel you need them. And I guess I'm just a data point of one that I don't need them to have even more energy. And so there is life without them that's really wonderful. And your best stuff, your best work coming from it. I don't think it was, oh, I mean, it's nice that Joan and I don't need to worry about like are we going to hit the pavement like having no safety net and all that kind of worry and fear that we used to live with of just genuine almost terror of are things going to work. So, it's nice to not have that, but I don't think that's the essence of it. I think it didn't happen like a flash. I think what a lot of what really happened happened as a result of studying the lives in this book. I really mean it. The last 12 now plus years since I started the first nibblings of this project in 2013 and the journey of doing this book so transformed me and I think that I was probably prepped for that but it was by somehow living alongside them in their lives it was like affecting me and I think one of the ways it affected me is was I saw them you just look at the sheer rapturous joy of Robert Plant blending his voice with Allison Krauss. Or you look at that this wonderful video I came across of Grace Hopper, the great computer scientist who invented software essentially. It's amazing story. Silicon Valley should know her story more. It's really an incredible story. And she's on Letterman at I think age 79. And she is like one of the most sparklefilled, firefilled. She just radiates out of that Letterman interview. And it's just absolutely marvelous. I could just go through case after case where what I saw was, you know, Barbara McClintock solving the geneticist solving a genetics puzzle and her sense of she didn't fear dying in a car crash because there were all these car crashes that she was driving across the country so much as she feared dying in a car crash before she'd solved the puzzle that she had, right? Cuz she just so needed to solve the puzzle. And every life was one of these ones where it's like they got to this point where the thing that they were engaged in in doing was so reinforcing in itself for itself. And I think somehow just being so close to their lives while I walked through them had this effect on me and it began to soften me. It's very hard to explain, but if you spent years alongside them at each step of the way through their lives, which is what I did, they like rubbed off on me.

And they all somehow got to this point and I think that it just affected me. I mean, I can't really explain it and other than that is it just affected me.

So first of all, let's just talk about encodings. I'm going to describe what encodings are and how they kind of work. But if you don't mind, Tim, given that you're in the fog, I want to ask you a question about encodings for yourself.

Encodings are these kind of durable capacities that reside within and they're awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. And first huge thing about encodings is most of us our lives will come to the end with probably vast swaths of our encodings never discovered. And the way I think about it and you know this from the book but I really like to help people who are listening hear this is that I came to think of it as like a constellation of encodings. They're just you have a constellation of encodings. I have a constellation of encodings. Everybody on the planet has a constellation of encodings. And it's like a vast galaxy of encodings. But at any given moment, your life is looking through like a window frame at those encodings. And that what happens is that there's points in life where the window frame, right, captures a set of a big bright set of those encodings coming through the window and you're kind of in frame with them. And then if the window frame shifts again and doesn't capture very many encodings, you're kind of, if you will, out of frame, you're not really capturing many encodings. The encodings are still there, right? They're just there, but the kind of your life can shift around whether you're capturing a set of encodings or whether you're really not. So, I think about the test pilot John Glenn, who you read about, and how he was not capturing encodings when he was a young man. At first, I mean, his parents thought, well, maybe he'll come into the family business or, you know, maybe you should go try to be a doctor. But he just wasn't I mean, the encodings were not really in frame when he was like taking chemistry and physics and things like this. And then through a happenstance event, he was able to get a pilot's license paid for by the government that was looking to train some pilots. And he goes and he signs up for this, convinces his parents to let him do it. And the moment he gets into an aircraft, it was like click. I mean, the way the aircraft felt, eventually being able to wear the aircraft like a glove, his encoded ability that he only discovered, he didn't add it. It was just there, that under extreme danger and immense speed, he could have a heart rate that is, you know, everything slows down. If somebody's flying behind me in a supersonic jet trying to knock me out of the sky over Korea in the Korean War, my heart rate's probably not going to go down. But John Glenn's would go down, right? And then of course he becomes an astronaut. Gordon Cooper is match pair very similar. And so it's all of a sudden bang. And then after his career that came to an end. Very interesting little story of how he thought they finally concluded that John Kennedy had pulled him out of the rotation so that he wouldn't be able to go to the moon because Kennedy felt he was too valuable as a national hero. And so he couldn't be an astronaut anymore really. And that was his cliff. And 10 years and he went off to Royal Crown Cola. And what I love is this little detail where he's got of his memoir, his time at Royal Crown Cola is like almost 10% of his life and it's 0.2% of his memoir.

Exactly. Exactly. And so he's still John Glenn, but what happened is the window frame shift shifted and it wasn't until he got back into the Senate where it shifted again. You know, he I'm sure he was an adequate executive, but it wasn't like when he was flying fighter jets and going up and orbiting the Earth, right? He was now kind of out of frame.

And so the essence of it is encodings are there to be discovered by the experiences of life. And when they click into frame, it's trusting them almost if you don't know where they're going to go. In many cases, the people didn't know where they were going to go. And yes, you turn encodings into more strengths by training and discipline and you know, all those sorts of things. But John Glenn could have done 10 MBAs and he would have never been as encoded for being a business executive, right, the way he was encoded for being a senator and encoded for being a fighter pilot and an astronaut. And so the key is discovering some set of them and letting them letting them go. And that's an empirical set of observations. So now I come back to the question for you. You've written. I mean, you clearly have encodings for doing what we're doing today. You have other kinds of encodings around just sheer curiosity and so forth. So have you thought about this as you were making notes as you were thinking about what are your encodings as distinct from sure you've turned your encodings that you've discovered into strengths but the things that were really have a basis of encoding coming into frame I'm curious what occurred to you and especially as you think about like what's going to be next.

So I was listening very carefully to what you're saying and a couple things really popped into my mind as you were talking is that first of all I think if we rewind the tape of their lives right and you know I wouldn't describe that the process of kind of coming into a frame with a set of encodings was a systematic process it was pretty organic and pretty messy if you will and I think the thing that really stood out is it wasn't that there was some kind of you know deliberate test taking or anything like that it was that life kind of spun them into a situation where they could feel the encodings kind of light up if you will. And I think what really stood out the more I think about this the question is less about well there are two ways in which I want to kind of sharpen the question a little bit for you. One is that it's not even entirely about discovering encodings. I think people are getting clues to their encodings based on their experiences in life and input from others, which is a very interesting piece of this all the time. What I think really stands out to me about the people that I studied is that regardless of whether they got support from others, like John Glenn's parents didn't want him to be a pilot and they wanted him to be in the family business or be a doctor, Robert Plant's parents didn't want him to be a singer, they wanted him to be an accountant. Think about that. I mean with all that I mean you know you go through these different ones. What really stood out is that when they got a sense for them they trusted them. It was their trust of them when they got a glimpse of them. That is what really stood out to me. Once they felt them they didn't really start questioning them or let other people talk them out of them or listen to what other people think they should do. And so if you said Jim 100 points allocate between two buckets. How much of it is about discovering a set of encodings and how much of it is about trusting the encodings you've discovered? I'm going to put 70 points on trust because I think we're getting clues all the time. The second is that you said something about asking people what you think you do better than others. This study changed my view on that. I think it's about doubling down on what you can do better than other ways you could expend yourself.

Yeah, it's very different. It's a very different question. It's like I could expend myself asking these supposedly dumb questions or I could expend myself, you know, in some other way. And it's not competitive comparative to others. It's this is in frame and this is out of frame. And then I have learned something in my own experience. This book is not about business. It's not about leadership. It's not about management. There's a few ways though that it's really affected me a lot when I think back to my prior my classic work and one way that it has really affected me is we talk about the right people on the bus from good to great still true but what I've really come to see is it's about the seats and whether people are in seats where they're in frame in that seat whether they are in a seat for which they are encoded for that seat and in a seat that feeds their fire. And as I began to study the people in my work, what I found is that they gravitated towards some walk of life, some arena of activity where they really hit a big bright set of their encodings. It really fed their fire and then they just kind of went once they kind of clicked into frame. And I think that I used to spend a lot of time trying to turn people into what they're not and feeling very frustrated with what they're not. And as I did this study, one of the things that just really went over me like water and like just softening me and softening me and softening me is I began to realize that what I really had to learn how to do was to begin to find what the people around me what their encodings are. For people on my team. Part of my responsibility as a leader of a small bus is to really be attuned to me observing the encodings based upon what people do of the people around me and then to begin to shift in steps their responsibility so that in what they're doing here is increasingly clicking into frame so that then what happens is my emotional experience is not being frustrated with what they're not and truly being almost at a level of almost awe grateful for what they are. And when that happened, their lives got better, my life got better, and I played a role in helping them discover their encodings, mainly by experiments, like testing them with something, see how something works, right? And then I could see the encoding flash, and then I'd move the responsibility, and I'd click them some into frame. And it's been a marvelous joyful journey to see that happen. And I have people who are in frame and they just it's astounding for me to see. And so I think that notion of other people, but I'd flip it around which anybody who has teams, anyone who leads organizations or companies, if you spend emotional energy feeling frustrated with what people are not, you've got them in the wrong seat. They're out of frame. And the question is, if you have a bus issue, you deal with it. They shouldn't be on the bus. But the real question could be you have them in a seat for which they that doesn't line up with their encodings that doesn't feed their inner fire. And if you try to spend your life trying to turn them into what they're not, they'll be miserable and you'll be miserable. And I think you other people can really play a role in helping you see what those encodings are. I've had number of friends who run large companies who and not to say this is the right tool for everyone but who've used Enneagram actually as a sort of heuristic.

Which type am I or what's my perspective on it?

Have you identified an Enneagram point for yourself?

There you go. It resonates for me. I have a bunch of caveats that I'm about to put out, but it resonates for me. I have found it to greatly inform doing a post-mortem on things and people who have not worked in my organization. Organization is a very high flutin term for a very very small team and people who have worked over time. There are, I would say, to my mind, irrefutable patterns. Like, it's so clear the types that work and the types that don't. And there's no right or wrong. It's just for me as a strong willed, hopefully decent leader, but at the same time very demanding person with certain preferences and so on. There are certain people on the bus who work and certain people who don't, and Enneagram I found very helpful for that. I think Shopify and Dropbox both I think still use Enneagram as two examples but very good for conflict resolution as well. The caveat is sometimes I think at least say in Silicon Valley that Enneagram is an acceptable horoscope for tech guys. I mean it definitely rhymes in some ways, but when I read my particular and it's helpful to have a person who is experienced with typing do this. I'm sure there are online tools that can also help. Side note, also found this incredibly helpful. People are going to hate this. Some people are going to hate this, but for thinking about dating and ultimately ending up with a woman who is an incredibly incredibly good match for me and vice versa, I'm a good match for her, but the Enneagram was dead on. I was like, this is nonsense for the like I just don't believe it can be that simple. And it's not that simple, but incredibly helpful. So I would say there are some people who go down the rabbit hole to an extent that I think ends up turning everything into an Enneagram exercise. I think that's probably losing the forest for trees. But as one input of many, I've found it helpful. And let me ask you a question for you personally, and this could also be reflected in people in the book, but for you, this is one of the 7,000 highlights I had from this morning over my several cups of coffee.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

There's kind of two aspects of how I have really struggled getting pulled. First of all just way earlier in my life I was very close to you know I was getting pulled into things that I was not going to be coded for. And fortunately, by a series of really good events and choices, I ended up very much in frame. But if I'd stayed too long doing some of those things or taken some opportunities that were very glittering opportunities that my life may have taken a very different path, I think I would have ended up successful and out of frame and I think that that would have been an unfortunate outcome. I think that so the two areas that I've had to work with and I eventually finally got my way to both to succeed at both of them. The second one was harder. First one was that you're right about that thing about visibility. I was always prepared for failure. I was not prepared for success.

And when success came, it surprised me. Number one, I was like, you know, okay, I was prepared for the catastrophe on the other side. I didn't expect this to be coming and now I got to deal with all this stuff coming at me. And all of a sudden you have all these wonderful things. Some of them maybe not so wonderful, but they're all coming at you, right? And you have all these voices and people and opportunities and glittering things that could pull you out of what you're really encoded for because of all this wonderful opportunity and noise coming at you. And early in that sort of reeling from the I was in sort of a fog of success phase and I was really trying to sort through like how I would allocate my time and I was kind of reeling on my back feet and I would say yes to things that later that today I would never in a million years say yes to but I did whether it be involving too much travel or whatever sorts of things but I began to realize man my whole life could be sucked away accepting opportunities and so I had to really fight that and to eventually just kind of clamp it all down, but to do it in a really systematic and disciplined way. And that's when I started counting my hours, right? I basically just like I got to have above a thousand creative hours every 365 day cycle every single day looking back for 50 years without a miss, right? I just set that I will not ever break it. And then the other was to begin using very very disciplined mechanisms for what I would say yes to. We have a punch card system as something that I, you know, was very impressed by Warren Buffett's view of the world, which is, you know, any use of you is an investment. It's a punch and you can't get it back. And so when we're laying out for the year what sorts of things I will say yes to, we literally have every year we will be talking, well, what's the punch card look like? How many punches are left? And it's not a question if somebody calls up and says, are you free to give a speech on October 17? It's irrelevant whether I'm free to give a speech on October 17. The relevant question is do I have any punches left? That's the first question. Or how many punches are left? And we limit them. We limit them tightly. And so that became another way of like it's punches. It's punches and they go away. And one thing I've learned I've come to see now at age 68, life is the ultimate punch card. I mean, think about it, right? So you're 48. If any given good-sized project is call it a five-year project, you got a bunch of five-year punches left. I'm 68. I probably have really good health, but I know the number of punches that I have left is a lower number than yours. And so life is the ultimate punch card, right? And if you end up spending 5 years or 10 years, you know, pulled away from what you're really encoded for in some way because of whatever sets of reasons, you can't get that punch back. And so I began a punch card process and that's how I managed that. But then the other goes back to what we were talking about earlier.

The way we've done it, it's taken us a few years iterating on the exact process, but every week we calculate the punch card. And the way it works is we have a point system. And the way the point system works is, you know, if I'm going to do an engagement that involves an airplane, it costs more points. If I'm going to do a virtual presentation from here, it costs fewer points. If I'm going to do an intense, we have these lab sessions where people bring their executive team to Boulder for 2 days and be essentially grilled by me for two days. If it's going to be one of those, that actually, even though it's in Boulder, it actually takes a fair number of points because the intensity of it is so high. And so what we've done is we've kind of basically kind of use a numerical sense and then in any given period of time there's only so many points. So if I end up agreeing to do a commitment in London, I'm just going to blow like the equivalent of three punches.

Oh yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. And so that's how we do it. And then we always have a running kind of what the total of the punch card is. And there's, you know, it doesn't have to hit the exact number at a given time, but you can't start going over. It's okay if you get to the end of the year and you haven't spent all your punches. What's bad is if you get to the end of the year and you did twice as many as you should have. And so our conversations are always everything is in the context of where's the punch card? Like there's only one and a half points left on the punch card.

So first of all I have absolutely people totally in frame doing things that they're incredibly encoded for. And one of the people on my team is a person who is incredibly encoded to build relationships and make friends and to learn a lot and then to help me think. And this person who's been with me now for quite a number of years. What she does that's so marvelous is that everything begins with making a friend and building a relationship in everything we do. And as part of that, we're always thinking ahead to the fact that we're likely to say no. And all just statistically, we're almost certainly likely going to say no to almost everything that comes through. And so by establishing a relationship and friendship and setting expectations right out of the gate, the odds that Jim will be able to do this are very, very low. You should know that at the very beginning of this conversation. So, we're thinking ahead to preserving the sense of relationship when we say no from the very beginning of how the conversation begins. And then this person helps the person on the other end understand Jim has a punch card and so that he can focus on his research and his writing. It's a limited punch card and I have to set expectations that there just aren't very many spots on it. And then once we've sort of established all that then there's a conversation about what the event is, what the invitation is, etc. And then we have our conversations and then the communication will come back as in most cases a no, a few cases a yes where we will say, you know, we're unable for Jim to be able to join you. Punch card constraints. And that's just very real. But they've been prepared for that right from the get-go. Because we want people to walk away feeling better, no matter what answer they get, we want them to walk away feeling better about us than before they ever reached out to us, even though they're likely to get a disappointing answer. And then in some cases I will follow up. Not all cases because I couldn't do it for all but for some I will personally record a voice memo for the person expressing my appreciation for what they're doing and for the invitation and sort of try to close the whole thing out with a sense of I want them to walk away and say that is the most wonderful disappointing answer I've ever received.