#856: Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/b7177143c94891aa

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Welcome back to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. I'm Tim Ferris. My first interview with Jim Collins is one of the most popular episodes of the podcast of all time. It is episode three sixty one.
Titled
Jim Collins a rare interview with a reclusive polymath, and I believe it was his first ever
Podcast, first ever long form podcast for sure. I'm very excited to bring him back.
But first, who is Jim?
Jim is the author of multiple mega bestsellers, including Good to Great, with more than 11 million copies sold worldwide.
all exploring the big questions of leadership and life.
He also practices what he preach. His own personal protocols and routines and tracking are second to none. It's pretty remarkable. His brand new book is What to Make of a Life.
Subtitle Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. You can also catch Jim Live, which is incredibly, incredibly rare, on April 9th at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. So just hop on Google or somewhere else to find the details for that.
You can find the links to everything we discuss in the show notes for this episode at Tim.blog slash podcast.
Without further ado, please enjoy the one and only
Chim.
Comments.
Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So then I'll see you personally quite.
No, it is seen that.
A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
No
Tim.
So lovely to see you.
Yet again.
Absolutely. I
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 warning because I had done it.
Lots of research and reading.
Certainly on your latest work, which took quite a
Tour of duty to complete.
And I decided

Starting early 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 fifty different things, and it caused a bit of a crisis in terms of where to start and what to do.
But
I do have a lot of notes.
And
The latest work.
What to make of a life. And we will certainly get to that, but we're gonna meander all over the place.
And I wanted to start with
And I'm paraphrasing here, but
a line in this new work, which is effectively that you have more energy at sixty seven than thirty seven.
You are now sixty eight.
And I wanted to dig into that.
For a minute or maybe even a few minutes.
Because looking back at the last
Two conversations I wanted to spot.
Gaps in the terrain.
What had we not discussed?
And
I wanted to
look at some of maybe the the mundane things related to routine.
Food. Do you consume caffeine? Are you still rock climbing? Maybe we'll start with rock climbing because I just had elbow surgery and I'm looking to get back into it.
Are you still climbing?
Not so much I've been doing cycling with Joanne.
She uh got 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 are if your heart rate
above one sixty
for an hour or two hours.
And spiking into the one seventies. That's I think that has
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 I can't really explain entirely.
Fact the my team has heard me say multiple times.
Where's all this energy come from?'Cause it's only increased. I really do feel that I have more energy
I had a lot of energy yet.
Thirty seven.
I had a lot of energy at seventin.
I have more energy at
Sixty seven when I wrote that, sixty eight now.
I need less sleep.
My clarity, if anything, I think is higher. I really, really look forward to four AM.
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 four AM.
So that I can get up and get going.
And that is it's hard to explain, but it's 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 I was a few thousand people in the room and they had a nice couch backstage and I'm supposed to go on and I don't know, whatever it was, thirty minutes or something, and I laid down on the couch and I just went
Bang, right out to sleep. I'm like I'm dreaming and I'm having a sleep, et cetera. 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 I can go to sleep immediately, and then I can wake up immediately, and then I can walk out.
three thousand 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.
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 gonna go get ready for second morning.
Which basically is I'm gonna 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.
Is your first morning, Jim?
Is that four AM to seven AM? Something like that. I love I love the four AM to seven AM.
Joanne tends to sleep.
Later than me. So
Especially when I was like
really working on the book. But this is a general pattern as well. I love to be up at four
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
The only place I go where I don't take my own coffee is Italy.
And I start the day and that's that one 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
Yeah, the light changing and
Bang into it. I like
Within fifteen minutes.
I'm fully into it and just go.
When do you consume your first food typically and what does that meal look like if it's a meal?
So 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
Yeah, when I'm in town, which is most days. I don't like to travel that much. And
We once Joanne's up and going.
Yeah, the day is I 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
Yeah, the Wall Street Journal or from
Yeah, wherever.
And she reads them out loud.
And then we talk about them.
Is this after your first morning? Usually after first morning, exactly.
Sometimes we might get up at about the same time, but most times I'm up early.
And so then I have a pretty 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 a little running commentary?
So the first is that
I've noticed this
across a few different disciplines that
Uh
A comparison.
Marcelo Garcia, nine time world champion in
Brazilian jujitsu.
Considered by many to be the greatest of all time.
He
is incredibly good at going from effectively one to ten on an intensity scale. So even before his finals match in the world championships, my friend Josh Waitskin, who is the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher, also very good at this.
told the story of them trying to track down Marcello because he was about to be in the final match.
for his particular weight class, it might have been the unlimited division, and they couldn't find him because he was sleeping under the bleachers. And they had and they had to they had they had to wake him up
And then he walked to the mat.
kind of shook his head and went from one to ten and what Josh
H said.
And Marcello echoes this certainly in different languages, avoiding the simmering six. So basically not being in this simmering.
Six, but
Oscillating between rest.
Or
full activation, so to speak. The second thing I wanted to comment on.
is the gear shift to
Shared activities.
And biking with Joanne because I have seen in some of the most successful
relationships that I've observed and certainly that I'm modeling now for myself.
that at some point there's often an activity
shift to focus on what you can share together. Kelly Starrett, very famous performance coach, PT, and other things.
has done this with his wife, Juliet, who's amazing, where he's shifted from some of the things he used to do.
to actually mountain biking. This is in Northern California. So
Just wanted to make those observations to ask a very
Very specific question. You said you m travel with your own coffee.
I have to scratch the itch. What are you actually packing? So no it's it's um
I pack
Pee 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 gonna
Do something where
If I'm
Doing
some kind of session that really requires me to be
Absolutely at my best.
Which I expect of myself any time 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.
Like any of that kind of stuff. That opening kind of
Bubble the day.
Now, if it didn't work, I'd still be fine,'cause you always have to be able to like 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 uh four AM East Coast time, or it could be seven AM California time, or wherever. It replicates that morning bubble.
Yeah, it's like a boot up sequence that you're able to do. It is, it's a boot up sequence. That's exactly what it is. And I don't have to control any variables.
Or wonder like are they gonna have any good coffee?
Does room service run on time or the room service isn't open at four thirty or whatever. You don't think about any of that stuff. You just
Move.
So

Idiosyncrasies.
Eccentricities. I think that's what you say of successful people, right?
Yeah, their own idiosyncratic encoding. Yeah, there we go.
And we're gonna really double click on this word encodings.
Is endlessly fascinating to me. I have a few of my own and
Certainly in what to make of a life.
Which I found very inspiring because at least in your cohort and we'll talk about this
They did a lot of their best work.
After fifty, after sixty, in some cases after seventy, and I am forty eight at the moment, so I found it very reassuring.
That there were so many
Oh, you're still warming up.
I'm still warming up. Which is very
Exciting. On a lot of levels. I did note a few things, for instance
And I've got lots and lots and lots of notes that I took while reading the book. For instance, Alan Page
Former NFL player.
became very engrossed with running, woke up every morning at five nineteen AM. Yep. Exactly. Right at five nineteen. And you gave a list at one point
This is gonna be a pretty odd segue, but
You gave a list of some of the, let's call it, side passions or eccentricities of different people. And one of them a lot of them are like, Okay, okay, sure, I can see that. Some of my friends do that. And then one of them was studying the occult.

And I'm just wondering who was. Yeah. Well if I wanted to say who it was. Yeah, no, if I want to say who it was, I would have put it in the book.
Yeah, it's uh but that but that list, you know, I think that list was really interesting because so one of you know, one of the things that I was very curious about'cause our people became
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
Focused and
the level of intensity and energy over years or decades or multiple decades they put into it. 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 eighty some percent had some kind of uh an intense side passion. And what I was struck by.
Is the range of them. Oh my goodness. I mean
Disco dancing. Uh the 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 outside of the big thing.
That they focused on
And
I found that just an interesting data point that they didn't ha make a life where
They had nothing else except the primary arena of their work to focus on.

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Yeah.
So let's set the table a little bit and I apologize in advance. I know you like to shine the spotlight on
other people and research and data sets, but I'm probably gonna turn the spotlight back on Jim. The bug called Jim. Uh that's a call back for people who who listen to the first conversation. Yeah.
So when we spoke the second conversation we had
I asked you what was on deck.
coming up and you said I'm five years into research on self renewal. And I really like this term.
Self renewal.
And before we go back to Jim, I guess this is related to Jim, but I'm curious.
How you thought about framing
This book.
Self renewal.
Versus say the title.
What to make of a life.
As I'm looking at it.
How did you think about presenting this? And then if you wouldn't mind
Because
We were chatting before we pressed record. I think our first conversation was your first long form podcast.
I believe this will hopefully be the first conversation about the new book that comes out. Just giving a little bit of context or
Genesis on how you wrote it. So you can tackle it in any direction you like.
In my
Thirties.
I came across a
a remarkable man, a white one of the many sages I've had the joy to

John W. Gardner.
who was kind of a wise man in residence at Stamford Business School.
emeritus at that point.
Just down the hall from me when I was teaching there.
I need written a great book.
A little book.
Back.
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 dating and I thought someday I might return to that.
Then what happened is
I started thinking that question was always another like how would you actually study it?
And then
A seed got activated.
That had been planted.
A decade before that.
In my twenties.
Joanne, who you know is so central in my life. We've been married
Forty five years and
Joanne was a world class athlete.
Yeah, was world champion in the Iron Man.
She was
The first
female figure in the original Nike Just Do It campaigns back in the nineteen eighty with Bo Jackson and Howie
long and she was really constructed to compete
And that sense of
And we talk about when we'll talk later about the social being encoded for something, there's just some athletes to that
They need to win.
It's a need. They need to win. And that 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
when the Iron Man and then went in on that. It's like everything came together and
We go off to
Hawaii and she raced in eighty four, eighty five, eighty six, and in eighty five 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 ten minute lead.
With
ten miles to go and the marathon is you know it's two point four mile swim, hundred and twelve mile bike ride and
twenty six point two mile marathon and sort of ninety degree temperatures and eighty some percent humidity on the lava fields. I mean it's just
Horrendous out there.
And she d had a good swim and a great bike and she had this ten minute lead.
With just ten miles to go coming back into town.
And the hamstring caught up with her, partly'cause it did limited her training and
Yeah, 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, the truck right in front of her.
And you could see you're starting to lose time. Like just a you know, nine minutes, nine 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 gonna get there
Before somebody else does.
And then
There is this moment. I m never forget the moment where
She stops in the middle of the lava fields.
And
I mean
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 our 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.
There was this sort of stoic
Countenance that came over and she just
Started to move and then she started to run.

Winning a ten hour plus race by about ninety seconds.
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
Well, the hamstring just
Didn't heal.
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.
It's gonna end.
At her peak.
And uh we're sitting there
In
In Little Towns in Pal Alto, and we're sitting at our kitchen table and Joanne just one day she gasps out to me.
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 a you can solve that or anything like that. It's just
I feel like I'm dying.
And in a sense she was.
Right,'cause that
Identity.
As a world champion athlete, this thing that she was so
encoded for that she's 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 fuse 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 fuse 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
It's so
changed at that time that you have to really reorient and reconsider. And sometimes you know 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 of other pieces'cause you have 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.
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 I selected my I had my match pairs, I had my 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 the you couldn't understand.
This cliff out thing if you didn't understand the whole life.
And so
I had to study
From
Their entire lives, right? And most of them are deceased, a few are in their eighties, but basically I 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 kinda 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
But 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 and built to last, which was about visionary companies and enduring great companies and all that. Jerry Pornes and I said out our original question was to study the concept of corporate vision, because it was sort of
What would that be was back before it was uh something that p anybody had ever studied.
And then our method of match pairs of these visionary companies over long periods of history
Лед то устіл.
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.
Yeah.
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 with.
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 you know, 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.
Part way 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 and I hope they will after reading this.
Is well now what to make of a life so that my fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, maybe my nineties turn out to be my biggest, most creative, most impactful, most interesting years.
Rather than
You know, sitting over here and
inferiority to my younger years.
And so I essentially is very similar to what happened with Bill Talas with Good to Great, whatever I started with a narrower question.
I came up with a method to answer it.
And then realize that that method
was actually answering
Uh
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
Yeah.
Trying to figure out life.
That is really kind of the creative journey.
And when you get the book it feels like
It's almost like
Clearly linear.
But yeah, right that way because you want it to hang together conceptually.
But the creative journey of how you get there
Is
Wonderfully dynamic.
Well a few things. So we are gonna get to
Childhood for sure, probably sooner rather than later.
And separately as I was reading this book
Particularly given the
End of our second conversation. I was really cheering for you because
I am in the middle of a fog with it.
draft that is eight hundred and fifty pages long. And I won't get into that, but I was like, oh, so there can be light at the end of the tunnel. Because honestly, I'm looking at this thing and I'm like
This rock just seems to get denser and denser. It gets harder and harder to chip away at it. So congratulations and
It was also very
Helpful is moral support. Yeah.
Me. So so are uh just uh uh so are you in the fog on the book itself or
In a general
Him wandering in the fog time.
I am, I would say
In
the inverse of where I've found myself typically before. And what I mean by that is before
I would say I have
Had
a lot of clarity around specific projects.
Here is the book in front of me. Here is the podcast I'm building. Here is the fill in the blank.
business project where I would have extreme clarity.
And
In contrast to that
I would say broadly for life direction, I would feel like I had
Less clarity.
Right now.
And I I am
Quite content with this for the time being. I have the flip side, which is
I'm with a wonderful partner.
We are very clear on where we're headed together.
And I feel like that is the Archimedes lever for everything else.
I don't feel like I have much to prove anymore from a professional perspective, but I do also want to
End up where you are in the sense.
of feeling like you have or in fact having more energy.
More
fire within you at sixty seven and thirty seven. I do want that.
But on a project level.
I have much less clarity.
In terms of what does Tim three point oh, four point oh

do love the podcast. I plan to continue doing it, but it's also become
One of the most
saturated noise filled.
Playing fields imaginable.
And
I think anyone who expects the same music to play forever
Probably.
does not anticipate the inevitable, which is probably a cliff of some type. Right. So I have
A fog as it stands currently around.
A few things, one of which would be writing.
So for instance, this eight hundred and fifty page behemoth, do I chip away at that, which I find a little bit
Draining, to be honest. So I've actually put it on the back burner or
Do I say focus on a newer
writing project that I'm very, very excited about.
And is that in fact leaning into
my encodings, which is a term we should probably define.
Or is it just the allure of the novelty of the new, and guess what? Surprise, surprise, as soon as I get into the mud.
I'm gonna still be paying.
The taxes. You need you need to be prepared to to pay. So that is a bit of a
crossroads at which I find myself.
Right now.
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 gonna put a
Quick context on that and then ask the question.
And so we just talked about the notion of cliffs and and the whole study structure was around cliffs and so forth.
And so I 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 in fog or 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, 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 twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, certainly in a fog in my twenties. There's kind of fog phases and these clarity phases.
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 fog will follow a cliff.
Based on what we're gonna do.
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 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? You know, 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.
I would hope so. I took a lot of notes. So either I'm a very bad note taker or there are things for me to focus on from the book. So I would say
A number of things come to mind and I could send you uh photographs of these if you're curious at some point, but
In terms of navigating fog, I think
The first is
Rule number one, don't freak out. And that was more of an interpretation than something you said literally, but in effect.
Like, hey, if you're in the fog, guess what? Everybody ends up in the fog. So
Don't panic, number one.
And then there were more than a few things, but certainly a few things that I found helpful and also a few things that gave me terminology for some explanatory power of things that have happened to me.
In the past, or things that I've
done in the past. We'll definitely talk about this, but the concept of return on luck and different types of luck I found very
Compelling.
And thinking of
Хаю
Take advantage of or
widen the aperture on luck.
'Cause I think broadly speaking
Luck is thrown around.
as something you either have or you don't.
And it lands on you and exerts its force, but it's not
quite that simple, and I think you put words to that that I found.
Very helpful. And then in terms of navigating the fog.
I would say you talked about simplex stepping, which we may spend some time on, but I have I think
Upstream kind of cascading.
questions that I wanna ask you about first, principally around encoding.
I would say that with the fog
There were questions that I began to ask myself that I've not yet answered. And this is part of the reason I was looking forward to chatting with you.
One of which is
How do I
Think about
Energy as a
core currency of life.
And the reason I say that, this is not
Taken verbatim from
The book, but it seems to be fundamental outside of accidents and so on, like there is a point when you die, and that is the cessation of energy. And
If you have all of the greatest intentions in the world, the best laid plans, if you do not have the energy to implement those things to execute.
I don't want to say all is for naught, but you're caught in a problematic situation. So
When I'm reading about these different case studies, these profiles in the books, and there were so many fantastic ones. I really have to say I love the Catherine Graham piece. Hard not to love. Hard not to love. Because you see people who are
put into say cliff situations and they are unprepared, and then there are counterexamples where people are effectively have prepped for 10 or 20 years for the
cliff they eventually face, and those are very, very different.
In a lot of ways.
And you also
Not to keep bearing 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 was sent to like
basketball prison camp and like lo and behold
What luck. You know, he happens to be incredibly good and and built for basketball. So my question for you that I I want to hit on before we dive into
Some of this is if I asked Joanne
Why does Jim have more energy now than he did at thirty seven?
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 I'm not big on a lot of profiles. I'd rather just have people read my books.
and take away the ideas. But anyway, it's the profile was gonna happen and so
I said if we're gonna do it, we'll do it right and I invited the

And he said, I'd really like to spend some time with Joanne.
And I'm like, ooh, uh, okay, here we go. And uh and so kind of proposal we're at breakfast and and he says, I have one one real question I really want to add.
I ask you is 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 I'm one
Yeah, 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 kinda looks at him completely serious, completely just straight.
Single answer.
Exhausting.
You know, that's hilarious, because I knew that word was coming. I like and that's me projecting. I'm thinking about my part. That's hilarious. I literally in my head have 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 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 sustained.
Until you run out of breath.
'Cause so many what happens is they they reach a certain point and
They go below the energy set point because of whatever sets of reasons.
And end up
With maybe twenty or thirty years of their life essentially off the table. That's an unfortunate loss.
To the world.
So
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.
the actual doing of it.
That sense of if you're doing it, you can't not
Do it, right?
I 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
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 added or 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 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.
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.
I love having a big project.
And this has been a huge project.
Right. So for
twelve years from the time I first started noodling on this to when I finally finished the writing
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 have no question what was in front of me at four AM. There's always the project.
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 of that this really interesting and it'll be very interesting to see for you as well as happens with this with the sense of
But
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.
Two things that they had
Built upon previously.
as almost a form of fuel.

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
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 trance musicians and all these kinds of really and learning to blend his voice with Allison Krauss. I mean utterly marvelous extensions.
But
With Allison Krauss or with some of his extensions, he'd come back.
And re bring 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.
Study said 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. That's consistent. That's a circle back.
The extend out 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.
I mean really.
Yeah, really in 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 fires changed.
The fire used to be like this molten hot
Burning.
Ferocity in the belly.


I think of it as green and yellow and it's like this sustained warming glow.
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.

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Tim.
I
So let me ask you about that.
Color shift. Right. Going from the red to the greenish yellow.
Is that a byproduct of age in the sense that you've amassed
A corpus of work that
At some point you cannot with a straight face to yourself.
Justify being red hot because you're like, look at this C V
I cannot with
any sincerity say that I have anything left to prove.
Is that what provoked the shift? Is there something else? What actually happened?
That led to that.
Shift in fuel, so to speak.
First of all
I would imagine that a number of people
And maybe you yourself relate to the
Raging, burning.
Lava coals. Oh yeah.
Oh boy.
Yes.
And
You kinda cling on to them because you feel you need'em.
And uh I guess I'm just a data point of one that I don't need'em 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.
It's nice that Joanna and I don't need to worry about like are we gonna hit the pavement and you would get having no safety net and all that kind of worry and fear that we used to live with of just genuine almost terror of aren't things gonna work.
So it's nice to not have that, but I I don't think that's the essence of it.
I think
It didn't happen in a like a flash.
I think what a lot of what really happened.
Happened as a result.

I really mean it. The last twelve now
Plus years since I started the first nibblings of this project in twenty thirteen.
And
The journey of doing this book
So transformed me.
And I think that I was probably prep for that, but it was by somehow living alongside them in their lives.
It was like
Afecting mi and I think one of the ways it affected me з was I saw them.
Yeah, you 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 an amazing story.
Silicon Valley should know her story more. It's really an incredible story.
She's on Letterman at I think age seventy nine.
And she is like one of the most
Sparkle filled, fire filled.
She just just radiates out of that Letterman interview and it's just absolutely marvelous. Or you you see
I could just go through case after case where what I saw was
Barbara McClintock solving the geneticists, 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 solve the puzzle that she had, right? Because 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.
А на тінь сам
Just
Бинг сорв'с Вол і вактюм.
Had this like effect on me.
And it began to soften me and it began to it was like this
It's very hard to explain, but if you spent
Years.
Олонсайдем
In 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 can't really explain it and other than that, is it just
Affected me.
Let's look at another facet of this same
Prism.
Because
Looking at for instance
Whether it's you.
Whether it's a geneticist or a
Any real
figure in the book that you've profiled.
Finding
Your
power zone with respect to encodings. And I want you to differentiate that from strengths seems
At the very top of the pyramid in some respects, or the base, depending on how you want to look at it. But
If we're trying to put dominoes in order, that seems like a very important domino to tip over first. It seems to be a prerequisite for a lot of the other things.
And
I'm wondering.
If somebody flew out to spend time with you for a day.
And they were like, Jim, I know you're good at asking questions. That's what you do.
How the hell do I find what my encodings are? Because without that
It seems like having the conviction to know when you wake up exactly what you're gonna do becomes a lot harder.
And
I'm not trying to speak for you, but it does seem to me that
If you are always suffering from decision fatigue, paradox of choice
Man, that's a great way to use up all your chi and end up dead before you should be. I mean, creatively or physically or otherwise.
Water encodings.
If they're different from strengths, how are they different?
And how do you find them if you're not lucky enough to be like a yo yo ma who gets a cello handed to him when he's four, or a Tiger Woods whose dad's like
Here you go, buddy, at age, God knows whatever, right?
We should go back and forth on this a little bit because there's kind of two strands that will come together and I think they're
For me we're really
Really, really eye opening and very uplifting in the end by looking, you know, the study across these lives because there's the luck piece.
Of kind of how the roulette wheel of your life spins as to which encodings you discover.
And then there's what the encodings are, right? So th they're actually
They're kind of joined, if you will, as an idea. I mean, you know, there's
We're multiple.
Examples in the book of where people it was almost like by
chance in some ways that they discovered the set of encodings that they
decided to dedicate themselves to.
So first of all, let's just talk about encodings and
I'm into describing what encodings are and how they kinda work.
But if you don't mind him.
Given that you're in the fog, I wanna ask you a question about encodings for yourself.
Love questions. So
Encodings are these kind of durable capacities.
That's
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 our 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 uh really like to help people who are listening hear this is that
I came to think of it as
Like a constellation of encodings. 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 in 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
Captures.
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.
you're sort of out of frame, you're not really capturing many encodings. The encodings are still there.
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 pilot John Glenn who you read about
And how he was not capturing codings when he was a young man. At first, I mean his parents thought, Well
maybe it'll come into the family business or
Yeah, maybe you should go try to be a doctor, but he just was
The encodings were not really in frame when he was like taking chemistry and physics and things like this. And then
True.
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
Signed up for this.
convinces his parents to let him do it.
And the moment he gets into an aircraft
It was like
What?
I mean
The way the aircraft felt, eventually being able to wear the aircraft like a glove, right? And 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
Yeah.
Everything slows down.
If somebody's flying behind me in a supersonic jet trying to knock me out of the sky
over Korea and the Korean War.
My heart rate's probably not gonna go down, but John Glenn's could go down, right?
And then of course he becomes an astronaut. Gordon Cooper is Match Pair very similar. And so it's like all of a sudden, bang.
And
Then after his career
That came to an end. Very interesting little story of how
He thought they we 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'
Be an astronaut anymore, really.
And that was his cliff.
And
Ten years and he went off to Royal Crown Cola.
And uh what I love is this little detail where
He's got
Of his memoir.
His time at Royal Crown Coal is like almost ten percent of his life.
And it's zero point two percent of his memoir.
I mean it's a wonderful set. Exactly. Exactly.
And so here he's still John Glenn, but what happened is the window frame shifted and it wasn't until he got back into the Senate where it shifted again.
Yeah, I'm sure he's 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.
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
Yeah, all those sorts of things.
But
John Glenn could have done ten MBAs and he would have never been as encoded for being a business executive.
The way he was encoded for being a senator.
And encoded for being.
A fighter pilot.
And an astronaut.
And so the key is that
Is discovering some set of them.
And 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
As 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 you've discovered into strengths. But
The things that were really have a basis of 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.
Yeah.
All right, I'll return serve. So I'll then have a ton of other questions. But
Well the answer to that
And uh
Maybe a bit of a roundabout way.
I have tried to ferret this out before for myself.
I think with different degrees of success. I think I have
In most cases because
I assume my self awareness is
Very imperfect at best.
benefited from asking other people questions.
Who are very close to me.
And those have been
Coaches, agents, friends.
Collaborators.
Almost like a three sixty.
Degree.
Kind of analysis.
And some of those questions have included
When have you seen me at my best?
And when have you seen me at my worst.
What do you think?
I find easier to do.
than other people, these types of questions. And
I suppose where I've landed.
But let me
Postpone the punchline.
First to say that
I've really found it fascinating to look at this is gonna be seem like a hard left to people, but
The sort of Soviet
And also Chinese approaches to sourcing athletes.
How on earth are they so successful?
How were they so dominant for so long?
And yes, you can explain some of it with kind of top down autocratic
Decision making and policy making and so on, but
In China, for instance.
They will scout by doing some very, very simple things. They'll go to
Every elementary school you can imagine.
And have kids do a broad jump.
And they'll make it fun. It's not some kind of back whipping exercise, but they'll have them do a handful of things.
Hold a broomstick overhead and get into a squat. Right. And that's how they start to source.
potential candidates for
Olympic weightlifting gold.
But unfortunately, as a single person as an N of one, you don't have the luxury of infinite time to try everything, right? This has been an ongoing
Open question for me.
And uh I haven't
Yet used any of them, but
looking at things like okay, well is is a strengths finder
test helpful for this. Like could you do five or six of these and look for the overlap to try to get some direction so that you're not penalized for trial and error by losing decade after decade.
Where I've landed for myself.
Is
Through my own experimentation, I think asking a lot of dumb questions. I'm very good at
Asking seemingly dumb questions which often are not.
Dumb. Sometimes they are just straight up dumb, let's be honest. But
Oftentimes there are questions that
could be or already are on the minds of a lot of people, and I think I'm good at putting on
Beginners classes.
And being very persistent like a dog with a bone if I don't get an answer to a supposedly dumb question. And those
Lead interesting
Places I think I am also good and this is a
Blessing and a curse.
Which will lead into some later questions about
Not getting trapped in various doom cycles and something we talked about before, which is sort of the fifty, thirty, twenty.
From respected faculty. I am a novelty seeker.
That's an intrinsic drive that I have.
In a lot of ways.
And
The upside of that is that I can do
Angel investing in in different industries. I can interview people from yet a different set of worlds.
And I can borrow practices and copy and paste different principles from one area into a disparate area, and sometimes those really, really work.
So I think I'm good at combining those worlds.
Separately.
And
Maybe people listening can give me feedback if they're interested in this.
A friend of mine, one of my closest friends, said to me, You know, you should really do some
Podcast episodes where you are recording conversations that you have with founders because I've invested in a hundred plus companies over
more than a decade, probably close to two decades. And
He said to me, he's like, there are things that you are really good at that I don't think you realize you're good at.
In terms of
really pinpointing terms positioning.
and various other things that I do routinely every week with startup founders anyway. I'm having those conversations anyway. And so I've been experimenting with recording those.
And I even go back and listen to it and I'm like, Yeah, I don't think there's anything special here. And he's like, That's the problem. He's like, You don't think it's anything special because it's so easy for you. He's like, It's actually not easy for most people. So those are a few scatter shot thoughts that come to mind, but
For myself and uh certainly also for
people listening, I am still wondering if there are ways that people can
Facilitate the process of finding the those encodings.
So I was listening very carefully to what you were saying and a couple of things really popped into my mind as as you were
Talking is that first of all, I think if we reround
Well, I did rewind.
the tape of their lives, right. And
It was
Yeah, I wouldn't describe that the process of
kinda coming into 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 isn't wasn't that there was some kind of
Yeah.
Deliberate.
test taking or anything like that. It was that life kinda spun them into a situation
Where they could feel
The encodings kinda light up, if you will. And I think what really stood out the more I think about this.
The question is less about

I wanna do it.
kind of sharpen the question a little bit for you.
One is is that it's not 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.
Mm-hmm. What I think really stands out to me about the people that I studied.
Is that
Regardless of whether they got support from others.
And John Glenn's parents didn't want him to be a pilot.
And they want 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.
Yeah.
When you think about that. I mean, with all that I mean, you know
You go through these 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 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 a hundred points.

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 gonna put seventy points on trust.
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.
Which is a very different question.
It's a very different question. It's like I could expend myself
Asking these supposedly dumb questions.
Or I could expend myself 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 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.

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 kinda 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 мі and softening me as 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 that part of my responsibility
As a leader of a small bus.
Is to really be attuned to me observing.
The encoding's 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.
And helping them, sort of 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'em in the wrong seat.
They're out of frame.
And the question is
You if you have a bus issue, you deal with it. It shouldn't be on the bus.
But the real question could be
You have them in a seat 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.
And helping you see what those encodings are.
Yeah, I've a 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. What's your point on the Enneagram?
Yeah.
So I which type am I, or what's my perspective on it? Well, so have you identified an anneogram point for yourself?
Well I'm a self preservation six, which
Honestly,
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
Uh doing a
Postmortem on things and people who have not worked.
in my organization. Organization is a very high fluent 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 NEARM I've found very helpful for that.
I think it should 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. Um

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 gonna hate this. Some people are gonna 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 Negram was not a it 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 force 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.
And I want to this is one of the seven thousand highlights I had from this morning over my several cups of coffee. So
This is a
I can't recall if this is from our first or second conversation, but let me just read for a second here. Here's the the recap. Jim was clear that he didn't want a half-life.
Of quality in his work.
I'll skip forward a little bit.
When he was invisible at Stanford, he could do deep work and long cycles of reflection for six years. He worried that if he became visible he might wake up years later and realize his subsequent books were only half as good because he hadn't returned to the wellspring of quiet solitude.
Separate node.
People should listen to these conversations. But one of the commonalities of your plus two days in your spreadsheet were either, I believe, intense solitude or highly socialized, but very little in between.
All right, coming back to what I was reading. He wanted quality to get better.
Here's the part that I underlined. He asked respected faculty, so that's Stanford, how they spent their time and got a consistent answer.
Fifty.
thirty.
twenty.
And to elaborate on that, it's pretty simple. Fifty percent equals new intellectual creative work, thirty percent equals teaching, twenty percent equals other stuff, committees, et cetera.
Okay.
And you organized your life and tallying things.
In a very methodical way. And you still do that. So people should listen to our prior conversations on that. But this fifty percent new intellectual creative work, thirty percent teaching, twenty percent other stuff, committees, et cetera. And this might feed into the um uh
going to screw up the exact terminology, but the sort of doom cycle of competence or or whatever it might be.
What I've found is one of the penalties of being a novelty seeker.
Is that sometimes
I will get pulled into things that I am quite good at.
They could be new, they could be older.
That do not align.
Super strongly with my encodings.
And so the days end up being very choppy. In other words, I'm doing a lot of management stuff. Maybe I've said yes to a speaking engagement. I regret.
Maybe I've
invested in a few too many startups and all of a sudden I'm on Zoom calls when I'm
quietly grinding my teeth because I feel like I should be working on a book project.
Et cetera, et cetera.
And my question is
A
Have you ever succumbed to this type of
gravitational pull to other things where you end up kind of managing more than making, perhaps.
And then separately.
If that's true, how have you corrected course?
There's
kind of two aspects of how I I have to really struggle to get
Getting pulled.
First of all, just way earlier in my life I was getting pulled into things though I was not gonna be encoded 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 might 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.
So the two areas that I've had to work with
And I eventually finally got my way to succeed at both of them. The second one was harder.
First one was
That you're right about the 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
Yeah, okay, I was prepared for the catastrophe on the other side.
I didn't expect this to be coming and now I gotta 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.
I was a 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
Yeah, 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? Basically just like
I gotta have above a thousand creative hours every three hundred and sixty five day cycle, every single day looking back for fifty years for that amiss. 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. That's something that I, you know, was very impressed by Warren Buffett's view of the world. 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 s we'll 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 Seventh? It's irrelevant whether I'm free to give a speech on Octob sevent.
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 sixty eight.
Life is the ultimate punch card.
I mean think about it, right? So you're forty eight.
If any given good size project is called a five year project.
You got a bunch of five year punches left.
I'm sixty eight.
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 five years
Or ten years.
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 how I manage that. But then the other goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
Could I pause for one second. Please don't lose your train of thought.
But for the punch cards, are those on a category by category basis?
In other words, or for example.
Speak engagements I'll only do.
five speaking engagements per year, they need to be within
X number of hours of my home is it on a uh
Category by category basis.
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
If I'm going to do an engagement that involves an airplane.
It costs more points.
If I'm gonna do a virtual presentation from here, it costs fewer points.
If I'm gonna do an intense
We have these lab sessions where people bring their executive team to Boulder for two days and be
essentially grilled by me for two days. If it's gonna be one of those, that actually, even though it's in boulder, it g actually takes a fair number of points because of the intensity of it is so high.
And so what we've done is we've kind of basically
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 gonna blow like the equivalent of three punches.
Like a reverse frequent flyer program. Oh yeah, exactly. Exactly. You just get points subtracted. 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 when you and your team are turning something down because you're lower on points.
Well we turn things down. Do they say we're very sorry, but Jim is out of points, or do they say sorry, Jim has reached his maximum allotment of commitments? Actually, it's a real question. Yeah, yeah. What is the language that you use for those polite declines?
First of all
Absolutely people totally in frame it, doing things that they're incredibly coded 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.
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.
It just statistically. We're
almost certainly likely gonna say no to almost everything that comes through.
And so
By s establishing a relationship and a 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
And 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, et cetera.
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
Yeah, we're unable to
For Jim to be able to join you punch card constraints. And that's just very real. But they've been prepared for that.
From the get go.'Cause 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 be
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.
I love that.
Fantastic. Very, very helpful.
By the way, the eight hundred and fifty page monster that I was describing.
shouldn't malign it by calling it a monster. Oh no, all books are monsters. Yeah. Okay, there we go. Right, right. My little pet monster. Maybe it's more like a monster from Monsters Inc. as opposed to like a cr a Kraken.
But
It's entirely about
How to say no?
And
That's a simple way of putting it, but turns out
Just like I think what you realized with what to make of a life.
Can't remember if it was Emerson who said this. Of course, I want to call it Emerson or Thoreau, but you know, whenever you try to isolate one thing, you find that it's hitched to everything else in the universe.
Turns out that saying no.
Is related to saying yes, which is related to decisions, which then you're like
Fuck. Now I have to talk about everything in life. So
Pardon my French, but
Thank you for that answer. I would love to come back to a few things you said, which
Can can I just post one quick thing out, which was you asked about this notion of dealing with the um
Staying on track.
Right.
And and not getting sex. We talked earlier about
right people in the key seats, are they encoded for it when they're in frame, you're grateful for what they are.
I used to s
A lot of
Getting knocked out of frame was trying to manage
My small system.
And I did a pretty bad job of it. Took a lot of my energy.
What changed is
Once I got really good at
People in seats for which they're encoded.
my time and energy that goes to that.
Has shrunk to almost nothing.
In terms of that.
Extraneous
Angst.
and replace with just the joy of working with my people. So I think that's the second answer is
All the way back to first two from good to great. It's always still first two.
And especially with people in key seats for which they're encoded. So
Enough on that. Let's double click on that actually before I hop to where I was going.
I'm imagining and maybe this is not the right way to think of it, but
Yes.
You have a small team, like I have a very small team, three or four people.
In terms of full time.
I suspect you have, at least if we're looking at broader
Corporate.
America, let's say you have a small team.
And you can run some trial and error.
Once you get up to a hundred people, a thousand people, ten thousand people, maybe the trial and error becomes a little harder to systematize.
But even on a small scale.
One could make the argument that
You have
Fewer players on the chess.
So you also don't want to chew up too much of their cycles with endless trial and error.
Are there ways that you have thought about
making that process as fruitful as possible. You're like, hey, there are five types of tasks. I'm gonna have everybody do trial and error with
five types of tasks and that'll help us hone in quickly.
Yeah, you know, okay, so first of all I just want to comment something about scale.
Two aspects of scale. The first is this.
Never confuse.
Scale of impact.
With scale of enterprise.
You and I
Or like
A special operations team.
А смал спел операційсь тем.
can have an immense impact.
With six people in the unit.
And I think people confuse scale and impact all the time. And so first of all, I don't think you have to be big to have big impact. So you and I have chosen that model. The second is I think one of the
Best reasons to grow a company.
Is
You have a lot of seats.
And it's an ever expanding range of types of seats, which means that there are more
Opportunities
For being able to shift people across seats.
Into seats for which they're really encoded because there's
A wider range and a larger number of seats.
In which you could do that.
And then I think what really good unit level leadership is
is that an individual unit leader is really good at kind of shifting people around on their unit across the seats by a process of
kind of sensing when they're in frame or out of frame.
My own process has has I I guess there's a little bit of systematic, but it's very
I'm not gonna package any of this'cause I don't know how to package any of it.
It's not my encoding to
Package and

For me, it's been just
I observe.
So I I have a member on my team that
Is absolutely
Marvelous.
At keeping a cool head.
In the face of unexpected crisis.
It's not me.
I have a little bit of the four anneagram in me and I can go pretty overly dramatic.
not helpful and
But this person is really, really, really encoded for this calm.
For the unexpected crisis. We had an unexpected thing happened yesterday that was like whoa.
But how did I discover that? It was just observation and what really became clear to me was in the middle of Covid.
When everything is kinda chaos and
There's just this sense of just
Everything's spinning out of control and what I observed was this person was
Was like the calm balance through everything.
I could just see the behavior and it was more just kind of recognizing it.
And then once I recognize it and I just see little snippets, it could be just something I just notice.
Then I kick the frame to the side.
I just kinda kick it.
A little bit.
So that
What they're doing.
captures more of that.
It's a very iterative process. So I don't have any magic dust on this.
That's just kind of what I do.
So in that example, this is a great example.
for a follow-up question, which is if someone is good, you don't want to manufacture crises to Yeah. Let's see how y'all do in the crisis of the of the crisis manager. So
How do you harness that?
If it seems like intrinsically it's contending with
Destabilizing unexpected events.
How do you use that?
encoding.
So it's really interesting. Yeah, so yesterday
It was really simple. It's like
Boy, I'm really glad you're encoded for this. That's simple. Let me know how it goes. And uh
So remember I talked earlier about
I think if you talk to people on my team they would
Reinforce this.
We talked earlier about
For yourself.
It's not just recognizing your encoding probably
I put sort of seventy points on trusting them.
What I've learned with my small team.
Is
It's also true
With like
I think this really fits with that person's encodings.
I'm going to trust them.
And I think that's the real key is I sort of trust and get out of the way.
Because it's like
They're so well encoded for this.
That I don't need to worry.
I just need
To let them
do what's actually gonna be really quite natural for them.
And I think th that's not a particularly maybe satisfying answer, but I think the essence of it is I don't tend to
Just like you don't want to second guess your own encodings.
I don't second guess their encodings.
I just
Trust that
letting them go with their encodings is going to produce a great result.
And I just
Breathe calmly and stay out of the way.
So with that person again not
to belabor the point, but I I guess I specialize in belaboring the point to my earlier

In this particular employees case, team members case.
If we look at say Google.
Right. They have a lot of seats on the bus. So if they have some people are underutilized, but who are critical when they are needed.
Like firefighters, let's just say. Sure. They're playing cards.
All day long until you need them, but when you need them, you really want them.
Does that team member fit that description? In other words, they're underutilized most of the time.
Or how do you think about that?
No, I think
My people would tell you that I've got them overutilized almost all the time. So back to the exhausting thing.
This is I think actually leads to something really important for us, I think, to talk about.
People are not encoded for just one thing.
And so
For example, with this person, this person is also incredibly well encoded to coach people.
is a really phenomenal just instinctive coach.
And the coaching responsibility is something that
You know, that's there all the time.
We have young people who come in who are on my research team, young people who are here with us for a couple of years.
before they head off to do what they're gonna do in the world. Other people on our team who are handling
range of different types of things.
And they're in seats for which they're encoded, but then with that extra bit of coaching, they just kind of have a big inflection and this particular person is really, really good at coaching. So the crises come
Kind of unexpectedly.
they just kinda happen, but the notion of coaching other people is there all the time.
And so pretty fullized on that.
I mean sure, I mean if if you're in a special operations unit, you're not out on patrol every minute. But there's a whole lot of other activities that are taking place.
And you can be
activating different encodings in those kinds of activities.
But I wanna I wanna come to this this is I think
And I speak to the world of like founders on this, especially.
Let me just pause for a moment. Oh, I said there a moment ago, I'll let you kinda pick how you'd like to go with it.
It is okay.
One of the most uplifting aspects of this study.
That you're not encoded for just one thing.
And this idea that you have to find what you're made for.
Or even Abe Maslow's original definition of self actualization, which was
Discovering what you were made to do and then committing to pursue it with excellence. Which I think is actually a quite good definition.
of one more time please I think he defined it as discovering what you were made to do and then
Commit to pursue it with excellence.
I think that's
At some level that's what all of our people did at different phases of their life when they were in frame.

There's a little asterisk to it.
That this study has really changed my view, which is that
This idea of like
as if there's this one thing that you've got to discover that you're made to do.
And
what this study has done has blown that apart for me completely.
In the idea that
the range of things that you're encoded to potentially do.
is incredibly vast.
And all you have to do is find one of them.
And the way you find that
Can be
Really random.
It doesn't matter how it happens.
It just matters.
That it happens and it doesn't matter whether it's
This portion of the encodings or that portion of the encodings or that portion of the encodings, whether it's
Playing NFL football like Alan Page is the first defensive player ever to be League MVP.
And then becoming a Supreme Court Justice in the state of Minnesota, there's almost no overlap and codings in that at all.
But he's
Encoded for both.
And we see that
Notion of
It's not just one thing. You may find one and stay with it for your whole life. Some of the people in our study, once they found it, they never left it.
And there are other people who
Because of a cliff ending it.
Or because of some other
Driving interests.
They were in one frame.
And then they were way over here.
In another frame.
And then codings
that they were drawing upon could have been
radically different.
You look at Benjamin Franklin.
Built one of the first
Media empires in history.
Then becomes a scientist.
Then becomes our greatest diplomat and helps found a nation.
Three
Really
And
I'll get very excited here because
I think.
That there is an really, really important set of questions here for company builders and company founders because
Personally
I think
How you think about
The intersection of your life.
To the cycles of building a company.
can be radically affected.
Buy
how you think about this question of in frame or out of frame.
So I'm just gonna pause there and you can
B.
Curious, Tim, however you'd like to go.
I'm curious enough.
Maybe too many ways that can be problematic. And actually that relates to I do want to come back
To what you just said.
Since that's a nice cliffhanger pun intended.
What I do wanna ask you because this is uh
After all, in some ways a self indulgent therapy session for myself.
Let's take a sidebar. I want to talk about return on luck because it's been so present on my mind.
It came up in passing in one of our earlier conversations, but we never really did a deep dive.
And then it comes up again.
More substantially in
What to make of a life. And I want to talk about it because
It strikes me
And I want
you two poke holes in this if need be.
It strikes me that one of my encodings might actually be maximizing return on luck.
Because I do so many different
Things.
And very often
And we have to be careful about hindsight twenty twenty and survivorship bias and
Blah blah blah.
When I look at a lot of the home runs.
Whether that's
From personal reward.
External accolades or both.
A lot of the time
It is
Connecting these disparate worlds.
And
The way that comes about frequently
It's all have these
Dozens and dozens of conversations, which I do every week.
And they could be with scientists, they could be with
Startup founders, you name it.
And
Most things are a no in one form or another.
But I suppose the
picture I might paint is I feel like sometimes by the virtue of how I live my life
Standing on one side of a
Tennis net.
And there are six hundred
Tennis ball shooting machines on the other side.
And I seem to be very good at
picking out when there's six hundred balls in the air, which one I should actually take a swing at.
And
I may be giving myself too much credit, but I I think my closest friends would say that.
Also some version of that.
If we step back, could you just describe
the different types of luck that you've identified and what return on luck is.
And I might add something else that I picked up from someone in Silicon Valley that I think is also pretty helpful. But let's start there because I do think it's a mistake for folks to think.
I either have this thing called
Big luck or I don't, and that's the end of the story because you mentioned
Clues all the time. And I think this
Relates.
This has always been a real interesting
Question for me because
I think I've always been kind of attuned to
The role of luck.
in my good luck and bad luck.
And I was always really interested and curious about well
Yeah, in the end, what role does luck
Play.
Real brief.
Background.
The first time that I began to see this distinction between lock and return on lock.
goes all the way back to when Morton Hanson and I were doing our book Great by Choice, we're looking at really chaotic environments and some of them
most successful startups to great companies that came out of really turbulent worlds.
And because of the environment we were looking at, it allowed us to be able to say, Well, wait a minute, these are environments where luck events can happen.
Right. I mean you can think about
Two companies both having IBM walk in the door looking for an operating system.
And they both get the same luck event.
Right, but one got a return on that luck event.
And so what we did was we said, Well, we need to systematically understand this. And and Morton really gets a lot of credit for this because we figured out how to do it.
You have to first of all define what luck is.
But if you're gonna study luck, you have to understand what it is and realize that luck is not an aura or something, it's an event.
So luck of that.
And if we could put the parameters and what is a luck event.
with Morton's collaborating together, we defined a lock event. And I think this is a really good definition.
Is a you didn't cause it.
So if somebody says you make your own luck, it's not luck.
Yeah.
By definition.
'Cause there's bad luck too. If I get a cancer diagnosis
I mean make my own lock.
No.
You didn't cause it.
The second is it has a potentially significant consequence, good or bad.
And the third is
In some way it came as a surprise.
You didn't know that it would happen or when it would happen or what form it would take.
Right.
But
There it is. And any event.
That meets those three tests.
Here's a luck of it.
And once you have that lent.
You didn't cause a potential significant consequence, some element, some significant way as a surprise. You begin to see there are luck events happening all the time.
And so then what Morton and I did was we looked at these companies and we said
Well now let's
Actually run the numbers.
'Cause we always had comparatives in that.
Study.
And we were able to demonstrate that the big winners, the ones who had the huge outsize returns relative to their direct comparisons
Did not get more good luck.
They did not get less bad luck.
They did not get bigger spikes of luck and they didn't get better timing of luck.
So luck as a distributed variable was pretty even between those that were the huge 10x winners and their direct comparisons.
So clearly luck didn't separate.
And then that led to the observation that but it was
The return on luck. That when the luck came.
They had this
Amazing ability relative to the comparison to make more of the luck. And that led to the return on luck.
as the critical variable.
So now we come to this study.
And I I was looking through you know, just looking at the amount of luck.
It's in these people's lives. And it's
Yeah, there's a whole chapter on it. There's lots of permutations of luck, including
The relat we all
Which set of encodings you get thrown into at some
stage of life that just
put you there that you didn't expect to be there.
We were talking about Grace Hopper earlier.
How'd you end up in computer scientists?
Well, World War Two happened. She got pulled out of being a professor at Vassar. She was assigned to this project at Harvard. She didn't even know existed, and it was the first computer, the Mark One.
And that casts the die for the rest of her life. Well, without World War Two or without that assignment, without right
It would have been some other set of encodings that went off.
But then
I started looking at
What are the types of luck?
And I
Through this study came to see I think there are three. There's what luck.
Which is
A good event that goes your way or a bad event. You know, cancer event would be a bad luck.
What luck?
There's Hulak.
And I think this is the often
Underappreciated.
Gigantic kind of luck in life.
My life is a
continuous series of Huluk events. Starting with Joanne, but others as well.
And bad luck.
The bad luck of my father.
And then there's Zeitlock.
And Zeitlock.
Which I didn't really see until this study is when
What you're doing
Just
You know.
happens to fit with
A particular zeitgeist that's happening at the time you which you did not cause, but it is a huge reality. So
I mean, Benjamin Franklin, you and I would never talk about Benjamin Franklin if he had been born at a time that he wasn't there f you know, for the revolution and the founding of the country.
And Alice Paul, if she'd been born
twenty years later or twenty years earlier, she wouldn't have been there to
Bring
The nineteenth Amendment and suffrage to a successful close. She would have done something else.
Right, but but but not that.
And so Jimmy Page and had not been born in England, coming of age in the blues rock revolution.
Right there as all this great music was happening. Right. I'll just say briefly, people need to read it, but the whole the entire founding story of Led Zeppelin is kind of insane. When you look at the number of things that had to go right, it's just wild. And there's that great quote from Robert Plant saying, Well, is that the gods roared and lightning crackled and Blake wrote a
poem from under the ground and all England was reunited. In that basement that where they had that first song when they played Train Kept A Rolling. Um then the four of them came together.
Anyway, Zeitlock is a big one too. And then what we found in this study is and I think
It really is a it's a very true finding.
They were really good at getting a return on luck.
when we're talking luck came because they have these things we call Natalie moments.
Not all time in life is equal.
And you recognize this is a not all time in life is equal moment.
And it requires an unequal response.
to an unequal moment.
And so now I come back.
To you, Tim.
If you're
Good at this return on luck thing.
So the six hundred tennis balls are coming at you.
One of them is the one that you decide to to hit.
What about your ability to
kind of recognize
It's a not all time in life is equal moment.
And

Ten X intensity.
In that moment. I'm curious how that plays out for you.
I think there's a lot of overlap. And certainly
I think my
Maximizing return on luck.
has an ROI distribution very similar to Angel Investing.
So eighty percent.
Of the times I hit the ball.
It's like Marco and there's no polo. Nobody hits it back, right?
But every once in a while I'm like, Holy cow, I just scored the winning point Wheelballton. That's crazy. Didn't see that coming.
So I'll come back and
And answer that. I think they're very closely related.
And
I identify with the what who.
And Zight Luck, for instance, when I started Angel Investing, 2008, roughly. Two thousand eight, two thousand nine, two thousand ten. I mean it was
Just a beautiful time.
to Angel Invest, yes, there's some skill involved.
I tend to
disbelieve people who attribute anything solely to luck or solely to skill. It's usually some combination.
But
There are definitely periods of time where I've felt that
Not all time and life is equal. And this is where you need to apply some pressure.
to the vessel.
And that could be the first book.
Which
you know, we don't need to get into right now. It could be uh early on the angel investing.
It could be, for instance, around two thousand fifteen deciding to ten X, twenty X, thirty X.
down my bet on supporting
science related to psychedelic assisted therapies.
And
Even back then starting also.
But now
Typically non invasive, but sometimes invasive.
Uh bioelectric medicine, brain stimulation. I think that's
I have very high conviction that that is
around the corner. So taking a peek at the future that's not evenly distributed, I feel
that way about bioelectric medicine right now. So I I think they're very
Tightly.
bound in a sense. And
Question for you.
There's this term that I came across. I wish I had the attribution, but uh believe it was from someone in Silicon Valley or at least someone in tech.
They talked about increasing the surface area of luck.
In other words,
If you need luck, if we're talking about good luck.
To stick to you.
How do you increase the surface area available to which that luck can stick? And when I think about my own who luck, for instance.
It was entirely dependent in the world of startups.
And even one could argue the f the success of the first book on me moving to
Silicon Valley.
being in the middle of that switch box. Without that, forget it. There was not enough surface area.

U luck could really stick.
I'm just wondering if that resonates.

Whatever the size of the surface
The idea of lock and return on lock.
Is always
operating, if you will, right? Because I mean you could be
Yeah, my family in rural northern Oklahoma on my father's side isn't Silicon Valley.
But my grandmother who grew up there
Yeah, she had lock and return unlock.
that her life was affected by
She was this beautiful Oklahoma farm girl.
And she was working at the Wichita Airport and this dashing test pilot who was
My grandfather, Jimmy Collins, landed for fuel.
on a Memorial Day weekend and they met.
And four days later they were married.
You know, and it was like, Okay, this is a hulak moment, but we're both gonna see that not all time in life is equal and boom, right?
Yeah, so that notion of the lock and return unlock can happen sort of anywhere. So one, I don't think it's contingent that it has to be the largest sphere. That said, I absolutely agree with you.
That one of the reasons to be in certain environments
If you're fortunate enough to be there.
is there's just a lot more tennis balls coming at you and there's a lot more around the who luck side of it. In my life
I've often said
No, there are lots of ways to be
Wealthy.
But the way in which I have been incredibly wealthy.
I
Done well in many dimensions, but
probably the way in which I have the greatest wealth is vast, vast.
Set of Hulak events.
And that happened it started because I started being in environments where
I would
come in contact with people who ended up being hoolak.
John Gardner down the hall for me at Stanford. But
Yeah, just a a couple to really illustrate, like that really affected my own life because I was in a place where the surface area was fairly large.
When I went off to
I was uh Stanford Business School second.
Yeah.
And the course sorting machine.
I wanted to get into an entrepreneurship small business course. It filled up. And so the course sorting machine just randomly put me into a section.
With a totally unproven
Guy named Bill Lazier, who we spoke about in one of our previous conversations. So it is absolutely like a coin flip.
And then Bill ended up it was the first time he taught. No one knew who he was.
Was the
First
person that it was ever like a father for me.
And Bill, despite all of my
you know, challenges to be somebody to deal with or whatever, and those hot coals and he had to manage those.
But Bill.
The return on luck was I recognize Bill's caring.
And I
I invested in our friendship and our relationship all the way along as well.
then that led to another luck event.
A what luck followed by a who lock.
So I was twenty nine years old, I think, twenty nine, maybe thirty, right around that age.
So how did I end up teaching at Stanford Business School?
Well, shortly before the start of the fall term in nineteen eighty eight.
Bill was teaching entrepreneurship and small business.
I was kind of still in the fog of my twenties and I've been managing Joanne's athletic career.
And
One of the sections of entrepreneurship and small business.
Because of a family tragedy.
all of a sudden lost the professor who was going to be teaching it.
I mean
It was all
Really bad luck event for that person.
But all of a sudden it hit me with a luck event is the in the sense that was the the luck event was all of a sudden that class had nobody to teach it.
And Bill taught the other section of it.
And Bill went to the dean and said
How about we let Jim teach it?
I wasn't teaching there at the time and and they were very skeptical of this. But Bill said, I'll take responsibility and so forth. And that's what opened up the door for me to teach at Stanford. It was a like had that
tragedy not happened, I wouldn't have had that opportunity. And if I had not had Bill from the previous luck event, I would not have had that opportunity.
And then Bill.
We said okay, you know, this is like
You unexpectedly got the
pitch in Yankee Stadium.
And you only get to pitch once if you don't throw a good game. But if you throw a no hitter
You might get to pitch again.
And so that's the Natalie time.
На алтайм лифі іquл із момент.
I get this yeah.
It's look, if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you wanted in one moment, would you capture it or let it slip? I mean, it's one of the great songs of all time because it gets right to this thing. That's the Natalie moment.

And then the next luck event, which was a who luck thing happened, which is
I'd written a little article for the San Jose Mercury News.
A fellow by the name of Jerry Porus just happened to read it, who happened to be on the faculty with me, who sent me an email saying, I notice you're interested in this stuff on corporate vision.
Can we talk?
So I go have a conversation with Jerry Poras. He'd been a professor of mine before, but he didn't even probably remember that.
And then we ended up that became
Where we started the project that eventually led to built to last another hulak.
And then those years of like
Teaching and
basically having no time for anything except the research and the teaching and the whole bit. And then that leads to built to last, which then leads
to another luck event, which is
This thing that no one knew who we were.
And totally unexpected.
The day that Built to Last was published.
I wake up in a
A hotel room in a small hotel down in half moon bay, California.
I think Pub Date was October 17 or something like that, anyways. And I was down there to do a little thing for the Stanford Alumni Association, kind of a talk or something.
And I get up and I open the door to my
to pick up my morning US today and I pick it up.
And the top of the USA Today says built to last author something, see money section.
I'm like, well, that's kinda worse.
Okay, so then I flip to the money section.
And there's a picture this big of Jerry and me.
And we own the entire
Front.
Page of the money section.
And with a picture of the book and the two of us and it goes on for like three pages, we had zero idea any of this was gonna happen. And it's simply there's a series of things that led to that happening, which related to Hulak.
I thought it was a joke.
So I called Joanne and I said, You know, God, my friends are taking pity on me. They're playing a joke. They made this mock up copy of USA Today.
And they left it on my doorstep.
Well, actually I didn't call her at first because I went downstairs
And then I saw there were other USA today there.
And I went and I looked and they all had the same thing. I said, Man, this is a really elaborate
Hoax,'cause they changed all the newspapers. And then I called you Ann and she said, Oh my gosh, you know, now we're in trouble because that actually is real and we're fifty thousand copies back ordered overnight.
Oh wow.
You think about the the those series of and then of course there was
the year after that, which was a Natalie year, at the end of which I put so much into it, I ended up getting shingles because my immune system was so shot. So th each of those were
There was the luck event.
Often a hooluk event.
Sometimes a what luck event.
But
Every one of them what followed was
The return on luck aspect of it.
Of
Yes, I get the email from Jerry Poras, but then there's
The five years of doing the research.
And inventing the match pair method and
Yeah.
Like
One wonderful opportunity to do that.
And those are
My life is just hock after hock after hoo luck, and then the sphere
I was in a place where there was a a lot of the sphere.
I just have to say though there's one thing which is that sometimes you have hulak.
The key is
You can have opportunities come at you, and the hard part
Is
when not to make a return on lock.
event.
out of it because it wouldn't fit your encodings.
And so just because something's a once in a lifetime opportunity
Is merely a fact.
It's not a reason.
Yes.
Yes. I mean everything's kind of a once in a lifetime event if you sit down and think about it.
Each and every day.
I w think about
this line and I'm gonna paraphrase, although I think I'm very close.
By the late
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
who I had on the podcast a few years before he passed.
And I think he said something along the lines of
The great challenge in life is to separate an opportunity to be seized from a temptation to be resisted. Exactly. Oh, that's exactly that's those really good words.
I think about that a lot and
To follow up on the the luck question we're
So if we look at return on luck, it doesn't specify good or bad. I was thinking about this.
In the process of reading.
And I'm wondering if you look at
The people you have studied.
whether it's for what to make of a life or other books or outside of the context of books.
It seems like yes you can
Conclude distribution of luck.
for these matched pairs seems roughly equivalent, but the return on luck is not. And I'm wondering if that applies not only to good luck, and I'll I'll tell you what went through my head. I thought, hmm
If you were teaching, let's just say UGM, teaching a class at Stanford.
Called
Luck.
Or
Return on luck.
Is it possible there's actually a progression of skill?
related to return on luck.
Just as there might be with different types of investing.
And that
If there's big good luck.
That's sort of the white belt level.
Most people can recognize that.
some percentage of those people can capitalize on it. Then there's small good luck, which is is a little more challenging.
Then let's skip over neutral, just say there's like small bad luck.
Little bad things.
That people can sometimes make use of.
Along the lines of the apocryphal.
Chinese saying, never let a good crisis go to waste type of thing. And then there's
Big bad luck.
I'm just wondering we could think of these all as forms of chance.
Yeah.
You've noticed any patterns among the match pairs were able to make good use of
Big good luck.
Or small good luck, were they also able to reframe
bad events or make use of
quote unquote bad events. Yeah. Just a question. Yeah.
I've struggled with this myself'cause I
Feel like
I've done better at return on good luck.
than return on bad luck myself. I've had some return on bad luck too.
But I can more easily.
Zero win on the return on good luck.
So first of all I just wanna clarify one thing that's
Really
Worth mentioning.
In my prior work.
But great, belt to last, great by choice, how the mighty falls, so forth, where I was doing match pair studies and Jerry Porus really gets the credit for coming up with the idea of the historical match pair method that's been so central to me.
And you were always asking I got two companies.
You know, and then multiple pairs of companies and they're in similar circumstances and then one does one really well and the other doesn't, you're at you're looking at the contrast.
And asking what's different and that's how you see the ideas.
And so that was really good for
My corporate research.
The study is different in how I use pairs.
Joanne came into me one day and she just said, Jim
People are not stock returns. And what you meant by that is
Yeah, whereas if I'm studying companies, I have these objective output variables.
Right. I can look at cumulative returns relative to investors, for example. And I can definitively prove this company over time.
Did better than that company. I can unassailably demonstrate that.
But
There's no legitimate way for me to define what is a better life than another life.
And so what happened in doing this study
And this was a big change in how I just even look at the whole world is that
The way it actually turned out,'cause there were really interesting people all the way around, is
My other studies it was like
This, right? Yeah, there's always one that was better than the other.
And this study had two people and then they would hit a similar cliff
And they would come out and they would maybe go different directions.
But you couldn't necessarily say one direction is
Better.
And
Another direction. You could say maybe one person had more trouble getting in frame before they got to the other side or whatever. And so this study is very much about.
People going through similar cliffs.
and coming out making different choices, which is a very different thing than saying making
Better choices. So
I want to be really careful that though I use pair here. I learned a lot from having pairs. Pairs were essential to this. But the way I think about them when it comes to human beings is different than the way I think about it when it comes to companies.
Yeah, the the bad luck part.
I wanna speak from a company standpoint, I wanna speak from a personal standpoint.

Well Morton and I found him great by choice.
Is that
The only mistakes you can learn from and the only bad luck events you can learn from
Are the ones you survive.
And so it's true, right? And so what we found is that there's sort of a part of getting a return on bad luck.
For companies and speaking for any founders or people building companies
What we really found is that the way they manage the bad luck side of things is you think of like a rising curve
of a company or you know company moving through
And say it's you know, it's growth or its success or whatever's like this, but around the sort of like these events like you know, Covet, financial crisis.
Massive technological disruption, whatever it happens to be like. These are sort of
These things that are happening along the way.
And meanwhile, down here is this line that you'd think of as the death line.
And if you ever hit the death line.
It's over.
Right, you never get a chance to get a return on what comes next'cause it's done.
And so what we found is the kind of the secret to managing from a company standpoint
The bad luck
Side of it is
You gotta stay alive.
Part of getting a return on luck is if you manage yourself with such discipline.
And with such financial reserves, and with such buffers, and such relationships, and so forth, such that when
you get a triple hit of bad luck.
You're
Alive.
You don't hit the death line.
Part of the return on luck is you get to the other side and others got wiped out, but you didn't.
And that set you up for a return after the fact.
And so this notion of
kind of part of the secret to getting
A high return on bad luck as a company is to have constant productive paranoia.
So that you never hit the deathline. Because if you're one of the ones who never hits the death line.
then you get a return by almost definition
Because you survived.
And others didn't.
So that's
the company side of it. And then of course you make the most of the things you learned and all that sort of stuff.
From a personal standpoint.
I think about
One of the people in the study who you met.
In the study.
We have a pair of women whose
Husbands.
Died with tragic luck events.
One died in a plane crash.
And the other died of a heart attack.
So these
Two women got hit.
With a massive blow of
Bad luck.
I mean
J the ultimate, right? You didn't cause a c plane crash.
Huge negative consequence.
Total surprise out of the blue when you get that call.
That afternoon.
And you look at
Cardas Collins who
Husband.
Both of these women, their husbands serves in Congress.
Which meant that they had the opportunity to take their husband's seats'cause the way that works with this
Mandate that
Opens up the possibility if your spouse dies, you get
To take their seat.
And Cardas Collins, she felt that her husband would have wanted her to at least give it a try.
And
She goes off to Washington, D C. She was totally unprepared.
She'd never thought of being a congressperson.
whole frame of her life had shifted and her life had been shattered.
And
While she was there.
She began making these steps. Like she just started
You know, she would serve on a committee. She started right and she wasn't even sure she was gonna stay, but and then what happened is she began to discover.
A marvelous set like she had these amazing encodings, probably
I mean just really amazing encodings.
for being an incredible legislator.
became chair of the congressional black caucus at one point.
She was there for twenty five years. She really flourished in
The role of being a congressperson, seventh district of Chicago?
I I want to be really clear. I wouldn't look at it as that, oh, it turned out that it was a good thing she lost her husband. It wasn't, it was a terrible thing. So you don't look at it and kind of denigrate or
Or in any way dismiss the pain and the grief of losing her husband. That's just awful, tragic, terrible luck.
But what the story illustrates is that sometimes these bad luck events
Cliff events.
Number of the people in our study, these cliff events.
Have a way of knocking your life to the side.
And when that gets knocked to the side.
You're thrown off to Congress.
Or you have a disease.
Or
Your life has just been
Just
Bang!
And
What happens, I think the way I think of it through this study is it isn't just kind of like I will make good from bad. Look
It's just awful to lose your husband.
But in many ways
What it
Showed us this sense of that
Those cliff events.
Which are often form of
Bad luck.
in some cases, so sometimes good cliff events, but can be bad luck events.
Can refrain your life.
In incredibly unexpected ways.
And expose encodings.
You never knew you had.
Then the return on that
is right back to the very earlier part of the conversation.
Which is those encodings pop into frame.
You recognize them, you begin to trust them.
And your life takes a different vector.
And that's how I really kind of came to see it on these big ones.
Is that they're
Not polyanious about it at all. They can be terrible, terrible things. Catherine Graham, another one. She had no idea she had the encodings to be
One of the greatest corporate leaders of all time.
But when the frame shifted.
And she began to discover those leadership encodings.
doesn't take away the pain of what she lived through.
But when she
really committed to and trusted.
I am the leader of the Washington Post company.
That was the ultimate return.
For the company, for her, for journalism.
For the whole deal.
So that's kinda how I
Think about it. And think about it this way. This is gonna happen. There are gonna be founders. I know you have founders in your world.
One of the big luck events that happens to a lot of founders
Is
They lost control of their company.
Then they lost their company.
And sometimes it comes as a terrible ripping
Shock.
Almost like a death.
And
They are cast into the fog.
Yeah.
The other version of it is they sell their company.
And then they lose three decades of their life.
'Cause they don't get back in frame.
And
One of the groups uh there's multiple groups of people that I really, really, really hope engage with this book.
But one of them, my friends in the military, veterans coming out of places like special operations who have to reframe their life, et cetera.
For people who aren't gonna build a company till the day they die like Sam Walton.
Or Steve Jobs.
You're gonna face this cliff event.
And I think a lot of them are not well prepared for it.
And I think they just jump right off another cliff.
I I would love to see that not happen. And one of the big questions I would put to corporal I really believe this is you to ask yourself the question is
Ultimately in the end.
Are you gonna be a founder?
who actually the big thing you discovered in your life is building your company.
And you will do it until you're out of breath.
Yeah.
Are you gonna be somebody who that's one frame of your life?
And then there'll be a second very, very different frame that comes after that.
What worries me is how many people
Either they lose their company or they sell their company.
And they actually don't know how to get back in frame.
And then a year goes by
And five years goes by
And ten years goes by.
And fifteen years goes by.
And as you know from the book, your best years are starting to hit at about fifty five, sixty, sixty five seventy anyway.
And all of a sudden.
Those punches in life have just expired without being really used.
I would say very few founders have a plan.
They have
Scripts they can copy.
But it's not
reasoning from first principles or from seeking encodings. It's I guess this is what you do now and that
Typically.
ends up with a crisis of identity.
Much like you.
described after an athletic career, after special ops, after anything that has been
A
linchpin of your identity for such a long time. I had a a question that I think ties into a lot of what has come up.
That one has cumbed up. Do I speak English? I think very. You use English very well.
So
Love to ask you a question that may tie into a lot of what we've discussed already.
It came about in
Reviewing.
our earlier conversations.
And
I'd love for you.
to expand on it.
Here's the line.
His mentor Irv Grausbeck, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, told him
An option to come back in quotation marks has negative value on a creative path because it will change your behavior.
Could you expand on this? Because part of the reason why I
Have the
Confidence.
I'm not sure if that's
quite the right word.
to pursue all these different paths.
And
chase different laser pointers of novelty is that I know I don't have to stick with any given boondoggle.
If it turns out to be a boondoggle. So could you just expand on this? I want to make sure I'm understanding it correctly and where it applies, where it might not apply.
If this Irv Grouse Beck.
So Irv was another one of the
Yeah, wonderful.
People that hit my surface, if you will, a great Huluck event. This was
The story you're referring to essentially was I was at the point where I was gonna be
contemplating and confronting the
Leaving
Stanford to head out on my own and bet on my own work. And and of course the key is
Now we know the result.
It worked.
And
I'm really glad that I carved my own path. I wouldn't have been encoded to be
successful in a political environment anyway.
And then most universities are
political you had to be good at that. I'm I wasn't very good at it.
I'm
Singularly terrible at it.
But
Yeah, there was
A question in my mind about should I try to build some bridges and threads back such that
If I stepped away for six months or a year or whatever, that I could have the option to return.
If built to last didn't work or whatever, right?'Cause it was all right about that time.
And Irv said
It's not in your interest to have the option to come back.
And I said, Well I thought options always have positive value. He said, No.
Options sometimes can have negative value.
Because
If you know you have the option to come back.
It will change your behavior.
a level of commitment if you know there's no option to come back.
It's a Natalie time, right?
It's gonna be ultra Natalie time.
And
it will change your behavior.
If you don't have the option to come back.
I think you can have a lot of things in life that are sort of, you know, small test options and things like that.
What I really took from that is that there come these times
When
You just go all in, and this is the key.
In low odds.
Games.
Games where there's a very low odds of success.
Statistically.
If you don't go
Hundred percent all in.
The odds will be zero.
So you're either looking at a two percent chance
Or a zero percent chance. I'll take two over zero.
And zero is like anything from zero percent to eighty percent commitment is a zero. Yeah.
Exactly. And you can see it in the people in our study at certain points in their life.
Once they got clear.
Right, and they got out of a fog phase or they were sort of
clicked into frame for the first time.
I mean the extent to which they were in
I mean it was.
This is what I'm doing. I'm not looking back. Here we go. That moment.
When
Franklin.
gets dressed down by the Privy Council.
And he realizes that it is finally, you know, there has to be the separation from
Such a great story. Oh God, they're dressing him down and he's just like a walked in an Englishman and walked out an American. Yeah, as a as a as a history professor put it. I'm pretty sure I quoted him the history professor because perfectly walked in an Englishman, walked out an American.
But then think about
Than when they did the declaration of independent.
Because what I came to understand by studying Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin who are the pair in this is
Obviously historians know this.
Really well, but I had to learn a lot about the American Revolution, the founding of the country, the constitution, all this kind of stuff through the pair of these people.
And this difference between separating from like parliament
And separating from the king.
And the declaration of independent.
With separating from the king.
And that thing.
The understanding that when we sign this document
We lose, we die.
We all die.
This is a death warrant if we don't win.
In that moment of putting your signature
On the Declaration of Independent.
would result in your death if you don't win.
Has a
Way of focusing the mind to win.

Yeah.
No options.
I'd love to
Here you
Discuss for a bit.
What you learned from simply choosing who to include.
In the book because
You've applied.
Much like sometimes people think of options as always good things, not true.
People may think of constraints as bad things, but very often
Necessary.
Positive constraints are a real thing.
So having matched pairs.
It's a forcing function for filtering.
And even with matched pairs, you have many
You can.
ostensibly choose from and you had to winnow that down to something that could be contained in a coherent way in this book.
And I'm wondering if
As an entire group.
You learned from
Who you chose to omit.
as opposed to who do it include and if anything distinguished
One group from another. Meaning.
Who made it and who didn't make it.
outside of the matched pair forcing function.
There was a
A journey
Uh
Of really looking for
A range of people.
who would shine a light on the questions that I was interested in.
But
There's lots of folks that for whatever reason, in the end
I ended up not including.
You put it right on it, number one.
If I was gonna have matched pairs
I've gotta find the opposite side of the pair.
So I'll give a really good example.
We're just talking about Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin.
I thought that this was back when they originally flamed it as renewal, but then began to look at an entire life. But
I always thought Franklin would be fascinating to study. He is the
kind of first poster child of great stuff late.
I mean the things that he did seventy and beyond. And of course, most of the people in our study
Did great stuff late too. That's one of the most uplifting findings of the study is how much great stuff happens late. But I was just fascinated by Franklin that way.
But then
How do you find a match pair for Benjamin Franklin? And I was like, well, we may not be able to have Franklin because I don't think there's going to be a match. How do you find a match for Franklin? And so member of my team.
And I kinda puzzled on this and we came up with this idea, which was just so well let's just take all the names.
of all the people who signed the declaration of independence and who were also at the Constitutional Convention.
That'll be a starting set.
Now what we'll do
Is we'll go
Pull apart all those live.
Looking to see if there's anybody.
That meets the following tests. One
Came from what they call the leather apron class.
Two, through self education, became a successful business person.
And hard work. Three
Then went on to sort of a second life after that in some form, some sort of interesting way.
Four played a significant role in
In the founding documents of the United States.
And
Five would have been kind of a comparable age cohort to Benjamin Franklin, right? The whole thing, like just go through and you start taking all these people on this long list, and you start ticking it off and ticking off, and then all of a sudden we discovered
Roger Sherman.
who met all of those tests, it turns out to be one of the great finds for me in the study. Almost no one knows about Roger Well that's not true.
I didn't know much about Roger Sherman. I didn't either. And he saved the Constitution twice.
Yeah, the way you penned the introduction to that.
Oh yeah, section was really, really fun. Who is this guy?
And he turns out to be amazing and they were the two oldest people at the Constitutional Convention.
They play a
Seminal role.
in the founding of the country.
But if I wouldn't have found Sherman.
I wouldn't have been able to have Franklin.
Because I wouldn't have had the match.
And so throughout the entire study there was this constant process of
God, that'd be really interesting, but is there a match I thought it'd be fabulous to have
Lennon and McCartney.
But you have an asymmetry.
Tragically, sadly, we lost John Lennon.
At a point where all of a sudden
His life's truncated.
And so
Just wouldn't have been as good of a match to look all the way out, right?
So ended up with Plant and Page.
from Zeppelin, which I think was a phenomenal.
match. And so just time and again. And then the other part was I wanted different walks of life. I wanted scientists. I wanted writers. I wanted, very different kinds of roles and things that people did and different eras, right? I've got the suffrage era, I've got the founding of the country, I've got
Yeah, the nineteen twenties or forties or sixties or
Whatever.
But
The other is they all had to be people where
Their life
Even if it's not over, and most of'em it is over.
is largely in the record books.
They couldn't be
At an age where you
Don't know what's really gonna h
Happen. There's too much more yet to live.
And I'm really glad I stuck to that.
Because that's what really showed the
Hey.
Look at what happens after fifty, sixty, seventy.
And beyond.
So let me ask a sort of holistic question about all the folks that were included also, and that is
It's dangerous to assume, but
Presumably you could have chosen a cohort.
And I've looked at the U.S.
Just given my involvement in
science and studies and so on.
These meta analyses of
key contributions to science and perhaps they're awarded with the Nobel Prize or something much, much later, but
A lot of scientists
It seems produce
their most compelling work, let's just say sort of been their startup.

Right in quintessential startup.
Silicon Valley terms like eighteen to twenty five or eighteen to thirty, something like that.
If that if we take that just as a placeholder to be true.
For some.
Many.
Scientists.
And maybe even more broadly speaking, in other disciplines.
What separates
The people
In the book.
Cool.
in the book are so consistently incredibly
productive in their later years.
from the people who don't do that.
First of all, before we even just get into this a little bit, I want to ask you a question, which is
Where do you think this mythology comes from?
That
Creativity.
Innovation.
Breakthroughs, best work.
Et cetera, et cetera, is the province of the young.
Where do I think it comes from? My thoughts may not be.
Appetizing. But let's
Give it a shot.
So I I think about this
Part of uh
How I'll answer echoes.
I think
Some of how you approach your work in the sense that
Why do you study publicly traded companies? Because you can compare them.
across metrics and criteria that are publicly available. You have the data.
And I don't want to make everything about startups, but I do find
startups a really strange, fascinating.
laboratory within which you can look at
different types of phenomena.
And
I'm currently right now, I have a whole group of people.
And we're also using clog code and all sorts of stuff to do the most
intense, fine detailed analysis of my last twenty years of investing in startups that you could possibly imagine. It's pretty incredible what you can do with enriching data and
So on the
But
One of the
questions is Asia Founder.
What do you see?
when you're sorting by
H is a founder.
as one variable which is not independent. And I would say that
I think the belief, whether it's a myth or not.
And I think it's situationally dependent.
Part of it is and hence my
Incessant annoying questions about energy.
Is that
for certain disciplines, the intensity required to sustain like a Natalie.
Over years of intensity.
Is constrained by energy. And sometimes it's also constrained by responsibilities. So if you are early twenties, you're living on a futon.
in a cockroach infested apartment eating ramen to survive, and that's good enough for you at the time.
There is a certain competitive advantage to that. I think there's also possibly just a mitochondrial
physical advantage. So you see a lot of
home runs are created in I mean it seems like to me, I haven't done a
Fine.

People produce a lot of their best work when they're in those kind of professional sports peak years.
It's not that they're limited to that. I think that's an a piece of it.
Is just
Energetic.
Intensity.
endurance advantage, which may be physiologically bound.
First of all, I think it's really interesting and I would I would process this in a different
Through a different lens, actually, at this point, which is that Yeah, the way I would process this is having done this study.
I think it's not a question of
Energy. I think it's a question of
Being in frame with your encodings.
And
that if you are I don't think the energy is I mean, there's physical things. Like you can have a
Something that catches up with you physically, of course, right? Or you might have a
Autoimmune disease or something like that. Okay, but put setting aside you know
Things.
physically, health wise, they begin to to come at you.
I just see
repeated levels of evidence.
From the lives I studied here and people I've known over the course of my
More classic work, people building companies and so on and so forth.
That there's no evidence to me that
the energy goes down, it goes up.
That the creativity goes down, it goes up.
And what I would say is that a founder that kind of burns out
Made a
not even really been in frame being a founder.
And the ones who really are in frame building a company.
So if you take a Sam Walton
Or Walt Disney.
Or Steve Jobs.
There's no evidence to me.
That their creativity, that their intensity
Waned.
Until they were basically
Expiring.
I mean Sam was
He had bone cancer.
And he lived a very simple life.
I mean I don't think that
Some of the people I studied that their lives changed very much. Their circumstances changed in terms of the amount of wealth they had, but the way they lived didn't really change.
And still get up every day and they go to work and they do the thing that
They're there to do. And
Walt is still thinking about like what the next thing at Epcot might be and
Sam is still thinking about the expansion of stores and what could happen with the culture and Steve Jobs is thinking about, you know, what will be the next iteration of sorts of things and how can he set up Apple to be outstanding beyond him? And then the clock stops at some point, but until then they don't stop.
Think don't stop!
They just don't.
So this I
Dear
That somehow it goes like this.
Peak and fall. Peak and fall.
I see it as a peak when you're young, isn't this
It's a peak.
And then there's this.
And it just goes up and up and up and up and up and up and up.
I mean you found a media empire.
Peak.
You found a nation.
And so
I mean
Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty pretty hard to to match. Exactly. And so and and even in the science or creative areas, you know what it's like to write a book.
And how exhausting it is, how draining it is.
And you look at Tony Morrison.
doesn't even become a writer.
Until her forties she comes into frame as a writer.
She doesn't publish Beloved till she's fifty six.
She doesn't publish jazz until sixty one.
Which is an astounding
thing. And then she just goes on and she does about half of her contributions after the age of sixty.
And
There's no evidence. Anybody wanna say that well, Toni Morrison was slowing down when she did Beloved'cause she's after fifty.
No.
And Barbara McClintock.
Grace Hopper.

huge contributions to computer science.
Those happened as her second career.
Barbara McClintock's breakthrough.
on transpositional genetic elements when it all came together happened after the midpoint of her life, which was in her late forties.
So this idea that it happens early, and then I can and I go back to my classic work and the people who built companies.
The ones who really built companies.
The reason why I think they didn't like have this peak early and then they're just sort of exhausted and burnout is because they were in frame.
Sam Walton was encoded to build Walmart.
Steve Jobs was encoded to build Apple.
Walt Disney was encoded to build Disney.
And if you're encoded to build your company the way they were encoded to build their companies.
A start up is just kind of the first step. And you would still eat ramen to offer an alternate. I love it.
I want the chafing, a sentence you don't hear very often. No, I'm into it.
The alternate explanation I wanted to offer.
Maybe it's complimentary, but let's just say we rule out
my theory of professional sports physiological advantage. I mean I think there's a piece of that sometimes.
Sure, for like singing and stuff, sure.
I won't drag th that particular piece out, but let's say I take it off the table.
The reason I was asking
About the fifty, thirty, twenty.
Right. How do you actually
maintain the fifty percent of your time allocated to new intellectual creative work.
is because the alternate ex explanation I would
Probably vote for.
As to why some people seem to get lost.
Or certainly don't focus on their encodings.
after some initial success and therefore you do see a peak and maybe a decline or plateau.
Is that
In the beginning, sounds like you've sustained this very well. They wake up, they know exactly what they're doing. They are doing one or two things, but there's a primary, and let's just say it's a startup, it's making this metric go up five percent per week or per month.
compounding over time. That's it. That is the focus period.
End of story.
And
When you have a modicum of success or a lightning bowl of success, and you see this in Nobel Prize winners, right? I can't remember the term for it. It's like Noble term or something. Yeah.
Yeah, where their productivity just plummets afterwards. Why? Because they're now getting all of these invitations over the transom.
And similarly it's like when fill in the blank founder.
Putting Steve Jobs aside, although he had his periods in the fog for sure. Well, for sure, after he got fired, which was a cliff.
Yeah, right.
So
Taking someone who's maybe uh
You could take your pick of hundreds of founders who've had an exit of some type.
Or done well enough that now they don't necessarily feel like they have a demon whipping them at their back. Again, that
Is not necessarily
entirely compatible with the encodings. But
The point being.
Now they're thinking about
The
charity whose board they just joined. They're thinking about
Any number of other things.
That
Slow

Eat up the pie chart of time.
Such that
They are well below their fifty percent.
in terms of new intellectual creative work or applying it to their encodings.
How have you seen people most reliably preserve that?
outside of some mutants who are maybe like I certainly see this in Silicon Valley on the spectrum, who are seem unable to do anything but focus on their encodings.
What have you observed?
in all of your studies to people who are
How they are good at preserving
the majority of the pie chart for their encodings because I find it very, very, very challenging.
I do. I do. I'm not gonna lie. It is. It is so
Just for myself, I have one great advantage was just part of my encodings.
Going all the way back to what you even wrote about described our first conversation, I'm I'm belligerently reclusive.
And it's a temperament.
Right. It's a temperament.
People have often said, Well, Jim, it must be really you must be feel really lucky that you're you know, you're you're in a such an enviable position because
It's easy for you to be selective and to say no to stuff'cause you have so much to select from then what they
Don't
See is that I was always selective.
Even when I didn't have anything to select from.
Right. It's an encoded mode that I've always had. So for me it's been
I think easier than for some people.
Because they maybe don't have that encoded mode of n belligerently reclusive and naturally selective as a way of being, independent of circumstance. But then that brings me to
I think
What I would really see with the people in our study is that
There's phases of life
I don't think they're common stages, by the way. They're just phases. You're kind of in a phase or out of a phase.
And there's what I would describe as kind of clarity phases and fog phases, and we talked about the fog phases.
But there are also these times of great clarity when they click into frame with a really big thing.
And sometimes they click into frame with a really big thing and it is the big thing till the day they die.
Right. It just
They just all the way to the end.
They it may have cliffs, but it doesn't knock them into doing something else.
They're just, you know, Tony Morrison just kept writing and Barbara McClintock just kept doing her genetics and Robert Plant is still doing music, right? They found the big thing and
And it's just like that's just what I'm gonna do. And then there are others who
Life would hit them.
Or they would make a change and they kinda go through a fog phase.
And then there can be a lot of these different sort of noisy things around them, but then they click in again with a big thing.
And what happened with the people in our lives is there are these times when
They're doing something they're encoded for, that really feeds their fire, that they're willing to flip the arrow of money to do. And this is the other part we need to talk about about this.
So what happens is once they do that
It's a
Big
Thing.
And they go into what described in the book as hedgehog mode. There are times in life when you're in hedgehog mode.
This is the big thing I'm doing. Now I may have some other things around here.
But I'm really clear on the big thing.
And sometimes they get out of that, but then they'll come back to a version of being in the big thing.
Science.
Building my company.
Founding a nation. Right, you know.
Big, big, big, right? Tuesdays. Got to focus on founding a nation. Exactly. And so I think that
Once you click in with the really big thing, you give yourself over to it and it sort of dominates. It's kind of like sure, you may have tributaries in your life of water.
But there's a big river which is the Mississippi.
Of how you allocate yourself.
Now there can be a lot of pieces within it, it can have a lot of sub points to it.
Right, it might not be as simple as just I solve genetics puzzles.
But it's got a big organizing theme around it.
If that's simple, man, I don't know what my life is.
Pickup sticks.
But this thing about flipping the arrow of money.
So now thinking about it is with the startup community and so forth.
One of the things that is very clear about
how people really got in frame.
In our study.
And I really r resonate with this as a reflect on my own life too, but
question is what's the arrow of money?
Are you doing what you do to make money?
Or do you need money?
to do your work.
Is money fuel?
Back to the flywheel. Is it simply fuel?
To make the flywheel go further.
Is money fuel to write your next book?
Is money fueled to do the next Zeppelin album?
Is money fuel?
To be able to do your science.
Is money fuel to be able to be
A provocative questionnaire in the world is money fuel money is
Of fuel.
And that's the direction of Arrow this way.
The other is the direction the flipping of the arrow of money of actually the truth is if I strip it away.
The truth is
In the end.
A big part of this is I'm doing this to make money.
And what I found with our people is if they'd flip the arrow of money, the the only purpose of money
is to be able to do what I'm encoded for that feels fees the fire. That that's the point of it.
So I never have to stop.
Then
You have a very different relationship to success when it comes.
If it was about the money.
And then you get the money.
And you were never really in frame in the first place, maybe, or maybe you were, but
I think that notion of what is the direction of the arrow plays a big role in what happens when you get
Say to the other side of
Having built something succeeded or whatever.
And I go back all the way to my classic work.
I think the
great company builders that I studied. It was never about the money.
It was what they were building.
And that's why they never ran out of steam.
No matter how much money they made.
They never ran out of steam.
And I think that's a really critical part of
How this cycle gets managed.
It's a huge piece from what I can tell. And I'll just throw a few things out there and then I wanna also make sure I
Don't forget to ask you about this live event that I believe you're doing. Oh yeah.
Not too far from now. So if you thank you for reminding me about that. Yeah.
Absolutely. So
I'll sprinkle some thoughts. So the first is the older I get, the more I think about
I guess finite and infinite games, cars.
And just along the lines of what you were saying.
fuel. Being very clear to distinguish between
fuel for the journey and the journey itself. And it makes me think of this quote.
people should look up. I think I may have had him on the podcast, in fact, Tim O'Reilly.
Fascinating figure in Silicon Valley.
Publisher, but much more than that. And I'll paraphrase this quote, which is
Imagine life.
As a road trip.
Across the country.
You need
Fuel for the trip.
But it's not a tour of gas stations. And also
If you're selecting
Perhaps using a reframed question from Seth Goten. So the question people often hear is what would you do if you knew you could not fail?
It's like okay.
And I have a mug with that on it.
And it's helpful to think about that.
But Seth's reframe is where would you six, you're always gonna be worried about failing.
Yeah.
Well the the way the way Seth puts it.
As he said, What would you do if you knew you would fail?
Right.
forces you to think about.
The actual day to day.
process of traveling on whatever that journey.
Happens to be.
Those are just a a few things that came to mind. And also it's like
The more I do certain things in the my life, the more I realise yes, there might be. It's a big might.
a monetary reward and I've maybe been rewarded in the past.
But now
I just want those additional chips if they come so I can keep putting them back into play.
Which may not be the most financially responsible all the time, but I'm also not anywhere.
I'm
Much like
Richard Branson or a lot of these other folks people think of as risk takers, they're actually really expert risk mitigators. If you really dig into their stories, they're very rarely at risk of ever touching that death line that you were talking about. But if you want to hop into it, since I know we're gotta be coming up on three hours now.
Do you want to mention this live event?
There are very few times when I'm just out there in a public event that people can sign up for, but related to this on April ninth.
At the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
Great spot.
Yeah, we're gonna be doing a conversation on uh the evening.
around uh the ideas in this book. I don't know what direction the conversation exactly will go, but I know sometimes people are like, is Jim ever gonna be live at something? And
Usually there are things people can't sign up for, but this is one they can. So I would hope to see some friendly faces there and maybe even people were provoked a little bit by our conversation in some way.
And I
Would look forward to that very much.
If people search Jim Collins Commonwealth Club.
I think they should be able to. I would hope so, yeah. Uh yeah, and uh so yeah, there's the Commonwealth Club, April ninth, San Francisco.
What to make of a life, Jim Collins. Uh they can find it there.
In our second conversation, we're gonna start to land the plane shortly, but I was
Looking at
A reference to the good to great acknowledgments. This was also something that I think you may have brought up.
And I'll just read the line because there may be something that was eligible here.
But success dot dot dot is that my spouse likes and respects me evermore as the years go by.
And I'm wondering if
You would keep it to that.
If you would
Revise that, add to it.
Simplify it.
How do you think about success?
These days.
I think that's one of the best paragraphs I ever wrote.
The
Final acknowledgement paragraph and good to great.
And I really
Still see that as
For me, the ultimate definition of success in life.
Joanne and I
The ultimate who lock, right? We got engaged four days after our first date. Seems to run in the family, I guess. It does. And uh and the Natalie moment was
She's saying yes now. I should say yes.
Let's get married.
Uh I was very much. And
But then the thing is that
And then forty five years is the return on lock.
They were gonna do forty six this year.
Your spouse knows you like no one.
And
Kinda to me.
The depth of my not just my love for Joanne.
But the depth of my respect.
For her for her intellect.
For her integrity.
For her
amazing ability to


to me about what needs attention.
Our marriage works because we have this
Multiple way reasons it works, but one of it is
Joanne is incredibly good at seeing what needs attention.
And I'm encoded to hear it.
And the combination
Is what
Is a
Great.
combination for us.
And
She's strategic guidance mechanism. I'm creative propulsion.
And
I over the years somehow
Just began to realize that
Joanne can see me for
really who and what I am, what my real motivations are, why I'm doing things, my weaknesses, my flaws, my fracture points, my
Unlikeable.
Tendencies, whatever they might be.
And
I just
When I wrote that sentence, and it's as true today as ever.
The measure for me is that Joanne will love me.
Unless I did something really stupid.
Juan will love me, regardless.
But will she like me more?
As the years go by.
Will she respect me more?
As the years go by.
For me
This like the truest, most searing test is if Joanne
Likes.
And respects what she sees.
I'm not too far off the mark.
And
Other kinds of success have come and I w want my work to be read and all those sorts of things.
But that really is.
If I had all kinds of external success, but I lost Joanne's respect.
Or Joanne woke up one day and is like, Well, actually I don't really like you.
Anymore.
Yeah.
That would be the worst.
possible kind of failure.
Yeah.
That's deeply inspiring. I find your find your life and your examination of your life and the lives of others.
Deeply inspiring. People can find you at Jimcollins.com, the new book.
Encourage people to check it out.
Read every page of it.
What to make of a life subtitled Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self Knowledge Imperative.

That's
The book that people will be able to find everywhere. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we
Wine to a close?
I would just add that it is
Truly a great joy.
To
Connect with you in conversation.
Again.
The range of things that we get to talk about, the quality of your questions.
It is
As you know.
I track my days.
Minus two, minus one, zero, plus one, plus two.
Our conversation.
Makes today
Absolutely for me.
A plus two day.
I would converse with you any time.
Thanks, Jim. Makes my day. And
Always a pleasure.
to connect. Hopefully we'll have a chance to break bread.
In person in the not too distant future. That would be nice.
Like it like getting to the mountains.
And
For everybody listening, we will link to everything.

The new book, What to Make of a Life and the Commonwealth Club and so on. In the show notes.
Tim.blog slash podcast, just search Jim Collins and
Go to the
Most recent episode.
And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but also to yourself.
Yeah. Thank you, Jim.
You're welcome.
Thanks to everybody for tuning in. Until next time. Take care. All right. Bye-bye.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
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