Make the Most of Your Life | Jim Collins

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Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. I had a surreal experience a couple weeks ago. I get this Instagram DM at a text over the weekend. It says, "Hey, I'm a producer for Harpo. That's Oprah's company. Would you have a minute? I want to ask you a question." Okay, this is a thing I'll do on the weekend. I reached out and it was a producer for Oprah Winfrey's show in podcast and they wanted to know she had just read my book

the obstacle's away if I would fly out to Maui to talk about it for this episode she was doing. Of course, I dragged the family along because any excuse to go to Hawaii is one I'm going to take. You take this long road up to her house there in Maui. They're nervous talking to the producer beforehand and I said, "You guys recording a bunch of these?" They said, "Yes, we patch these episodes."

“And actually, we just recorded a few minutes ago with Jim Collins. Do you know who that is?”

And I said, "Of course I know who Jim Collins is. I love his books. Good to great. Of course, how the mighty fall." And I actually, I said, "I have a copy of the galley of his new book on my desk," which I didn't bring on this trip because I didn't have room in my suitcase, but I need to read it because I'm about to interview him. So we had just missed each other the way

they staggered the guests as they'd never had us overlap, as like he was in the green room,

went to the deep episode and then as soon as he went to the episode, I went to the green room. Never got to see each other, but when I got home I reached behind my desk there and the office and pulled down the manuscript and it turned out there was a lovely note in it. This is from January 23rd, 2026, said, "Ryan, I'm so looking forward to engaging with you in spiritive conversation

“about what you read in these pages." His new book is called "What to Make of a Life Clif,”

fog, fire, and the self-knowledge imperative." He says, "A spirit of conversation about what you read in these pages." This is the best work of my life to date and it transformed me in the process of 12 years, 10 years of research, and two years of writing. I will be super curious how reading it might also change how you look at life in joy, Jim. And it did. It did change how I look at

life. It is a lovely book. I've always been a huge fan of his and it was very excited to get to sit

down to talk with him. So I am bringing you part one of my conversation now with the great Jim Collins, one of the best selling business writers of all time. He's worked with every CEO and company you can imagine. And most importantly, and this is where we start the episode. He is famous for coinning something known as the stock Dale Paradox. About the stoic blast for slash fighter pilot Admiral James Stockdale on page 83 in good to great. In a way, a little bit of a tangent in

eruption. It doesn't seem like it would be in this book about why some companies make the leap and others don't. But it's become this really famous thing in an introduced stock Dale to his huge audience. And it's fascinating look at sort of stoic philosophy and the handle of health. And so that's where we kick off this conversation. And then we get into a bunch of other stuff after that. But I'll just get into it here. It's me talking with the great Jim Collins. I was fascinated

with this book. And particularly the list of people at the beginning because a bunch of these people are heroes of mine. People I've read about people I've studied. People I've tried to

he's not a character in this book, but he is a character in this book. I wanted to ask you first

“and foremost, because it's where I work overlaps about your time with with Admiral Stockdale.”

Oh, yes. Yeah. What would you like to know? Well, take us back to that afternoon. You

spent together on the Stanford campus. Yeah. So it was actually really an amazing experience for me.

And one of those moments in life that you can just kind of see your whole lens on life shift in a matter of minutes. And what happened was kind of the real sort of background of the story, is that I was teaching my course on entrepreneurship and small business across the street from the Hoover Institute. I was at over at the Stanford Business School. And one of my students wrote his paper for my class on Admiral Stockdale and had gotten to know him through that. And then

that led to the opportunity to have a wonderful meeting in conversation and lunch and a walk with Admiral Stockdale. And a couple of interesting things that even before I had that afternoon,

I first of all sat down and read. And I read his book, which he wrote in alternating

chapters with his wife, a called in Love and War. And for those who don't fully know the story of Admiral Stockdale, he was shot down in, I believe 1967. He was the highest ranking naval officer in the Hanoi Hilton Prisoner of War Camp. He spent about seven years in the camp. And then one of the things that came out of it was this this book. And what I loved about the book was it was an alternating chapters of her experience and his experience going through those difficult

years because then both on the journey, both on the journey, right? And not knowing the end of the story.

“And I think what really, I remember very vividly sitting there in, I had this wonderful little”

office. It was kind of up on the third floor of the business school. And I could actually see the kind of how Alto foothills and the fog coming in over them on a wonderful day. And I was reading this book. And as I was in this marvelous setting. And I found myself starting to get depressed as I read it. And I was trying to figure out like, why am I feeling depressed? Why is this feeling overwhelming to me? And I realized that what really struck me is the hardest thing is that I'm reading

it knowing that in a few days he and I are going to meet we're going to be on the beautiful Stanford campus. We're going to have lunch together. I know he gets out of the prison camp. I know the sort of the end of that portion of the story of his life. And as I was reading about him in the camp and enduring periodic torture and isolation and all the things that they went through, all of a sudden it was this thought of when he was there, he didn't know. He didn't know if this

would be the end of his life. I mean he didn't know for certain if he would get out. It's all like when you come into the Hanoi Health and they give you your release date as December 31, 1972 or something. You have no idea. How long this will last? What form it will take? And it was the unknown of the uncertainty of it. Though the not knowing the end of it that struck me is really hard.

“So I met up with Admiral Stockdale. And I remember actually there was a kind of a funny moment”

that happened early. He asked me, "So what do you teach over the business school?" And I sort of described my approach to building a class and wanting to challenge my students to think much more about kind of the role of building a company in their life and things like this. And he looks at me for a moment. It goes, "Well, you're not teaching business. You're teaching philosophy." It was a classic Jim Stockdale moment. Yes. So anyways, we're walking and I said, "Edward,

so I have to ask you, how did you not capitulate to despair?" I know the end of the story,

but you didn't know. And he said, "Well, I never capitulated to despair because I never

wavered in my faith that I would not only get out eventually, but I would turn it into a defining event of my life. Then in retrospect, I would not trade." And that there's a moment. I don't even know if I put this part in good to great. There's this, also this point where he said, "You realize, Jim, I'm kind of the lucky one in this between the two of us because I know how I would do and you probably never will." Right? And so I took that in and we walked for a long, long time. There's a

long silence. One of the things that really struck me about Admiral Stockdale that day was, his incredible comfort would really long silence. We walked for probably across a big chunk of

in silence. And then, as we got close to the faculty club where we were going to have lunch, I said, Admiral Stockdale, I'm curious, who didn't make it out as strong as you and he said, "Well, it's easy. It was the optimist." And I was like, "Well, I'm confused given what you said before and he said, "Well, let me help you understand what I mean by that." It's those who said, "We're going to be out by Christmas." And Christmas would come and it would go and then we're

going to be out by Easter. We're going to be out by Thanksgiving. We're going to be out by Christmas again and it would come and go and they died of a broken heart. And this was when this kind of fusing of these two views came together that later I ended up calling a Stockdale paradox in good to great. Now, reasons why it's in good to great, even though it's studying companies because of a lot of the leaders I studied embodied some version of what I call the Stockdale paradox,

which is this ability on the one hand to have kind of an unwavering faith in the end result. But at the same time having this really disciplined ability to confront the brutal facts of your current reality of your existence as they actually are. We're not at a hereby Christmas. We don't know how long this will be. And that just came together for me as a frame.

And interestingly, I have found the Stockdale paradox incredibly powerful in multiple times,

particularly, for example, if somebody is confronting a disease situation, that's touch my life, my wife's life, where you're wrestling with the uncertainties of what disease might mean, and kind of again embracing the Stockdale paradox of some sense of unwavering faith we can get to the other side. But the brutal facts are, we got a lot to go through. And this may and maybe a long time before I'm out of this. I'm not going to be out by April or December or

whatever. And other aspects of life when you're going through something that's just out of your control, that Stockdale paradox has for me been an enormously powerful frame. So it's like, you have one of those great teachers you meet for a moment. And in the course of

“a relatively short period of time, the way you come at life is like permanently altered.”

And that was my Animal Stockdale day. Well, I have goosebumps. And I want to tell you a little bit of a story. I'll tell you why I thought of him so much as I was reading your book. So Stockdale goes to the Naval Academy in 1943. And as his father drops him off there, his father says, I want you to be the best man in the hall. Like, I want you to be the best graduate out of the Naval Academy there as soon. So you might take that to me. Number one in your class,

the first to make Admiral, the first to do X, Y and Z. And it's really interesting because he struggles

for the next 20 years. And I don't mean struggle in terms of failure, but he's not number one in his class. He doesn't make the football team, you know, one of his classmates wins the Medal of Honor in Korea. And he doesn't get a chance to serve in Korea. He misses out on all these promise assignments. One of the characters in your book is John Glenn. You know, John Glenn and him and Stockdale are both at test fighter pilot school together. And John Glenn becomes the famous

one and Stockdale does it. I was just reading a newspaper article when Stockdale is promoted to commander in his hometown newspaper and it says, Stockdale is famously a classmate of John Glenn.

“So he's in the shadow of all these other famous people. He keeps missing his moment, right?”

And he thinks that it's not going to happen for him. And it's not until the Navy sends him to Stanford where he gets, he's getting his, his, his degree in international relations or economics or something like this, that he bumps into a teacher. Like you're talking about one of those teachers. It changes your life. And a professor there named Philip Rinelander takes him under his wing. I know, in your book, you talk about the, the mentor professor that you had at Stanford and how

these, these teachers can change your life. But on their last meeting, Rinelander famously introduces him to Epictetus, the stoic philosopher. And it's, it's Epictetus who he thinks about in, in the hand or a hilton. And, and Epictetus's main teaching is this idea that, you know, we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. Like we don't control

whether we get out, but we control who we are while we're in the prison. And ultimately, we control

“whether we make a good showing of ourselves. And so I think, you know, you wrote this”

lovely book about, you know, how do you create a meaningful purposeful life that matters? Not necessarily a life filled with plodits and success, although that can be part of it,

destiny actually does have this incredible opportunity and storeframe if you want to call it an

“opportunity. But this, this destiny tapping him on the shoulder moment. But for, for many years,”

decades even, he doesn't, he doesn't know that. And, and, and, and he's struggling and resenting and fighting and frustrating. And, and yet all the while he is being prepared for the moment that you, you ended up profiling in the book where where he is tested and he does, he is asked whether he's got the stuff or not and, and he manages to answer well. Yeah. And he comes out with that wonderful thing of us. I know how I would do, right? Yes. And he liked what he saw. I mean, yes, that he had no

question for the rest of his life because he did it. What's best? Like being the best man in the hall

when we're young, we so often think is the most money, the best job, the highest rank, you know,

the, we think of these sort of material or these objective performance metrics. But I think as you go and some of the, the most fascinating people in the book, particularly that that football player who goes on to become a judge, you realize, you realize that actually there's a whole other set of metrics that you're not even thinking about measuring yourself that, that end the end those are the

“important ones. Yeah. I think, you know, so it's actually worth noting just here as, as we get”

into the conversation, the people that are in this book are largely folks who we would, you know, look at as icons and and luminaries, John Glenn or Tony Morrison or Robert Plant and Jimmy Page or, you know, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, you know, these people, the Benjamin Franklin Roger Sherman and Barbara McClontock and Grace Hopper and these these these people who in their worlds had such a huge impact, but I only have people of that stature in the book because that's

where the data is and I really wanted to study really how they wrestle with the question of constructing and reconstructing a life and answering the question multiple times of what to make of a life. But if you're going to study people, you have to have people where you have lots of information including some contemporaneous information. I want to go back and I want to find articles on what Alice Paul was saying about what she was doing even before she was fully in the fight for suffrage

and so you can find these articles when she comes back from England and the, you know, early 19 tens and there's these, that you can see how she's talking about it when she actually disembarks and but you can only do that with people whose lives allow you to do that. So to me, this is about it's about life, it's not about their success, it's not about their fame and one of the most interesting things to me is how a number of the people in our study went from very visible walks of

life to at another time of life they chose a much more private side of their lives as well and that some of the most impressive parts of their lives were the things that they weren't necessarily the most the most known for and so just as we get into this I really want to set the the frame for our conversation for anybody who's listening which is you and I are interested in the questions

“of how people wrestle with the questions of living and of life and that's what I was looking at.”

It's not the questions of how they became successful and famous and it is their life choices and what we learned from the patterns of those that really were of real interest to me and then I go back to Stockdale which is that not that many people knew about Stockdale I think more did after writing about them and good to great but I have had the great joy of in privilege of meeting a whole

lot of amazing people over the course of my journey so far. There are very few that stand in my mind

as when you talk about those that would be kind of in the category of the best right that there would be in a higher quadrant than Admiral Stockdale and it has nothing to do with the success or fame or stature of anybody it has to do with when you see the just intimidating level of character yeah that someone like Admiral Stockdale had that it just it just kind of puts all that other stuff often to a bucket of not irrelevant but it just like this is so pristine yes and I

and I use the word intimidating because it's such a rarefied standard and yet it's not easily seen yeah and it's hard to it's hard to measure as you're saying I thought that was one of the interesting things in the beginning of the book where you're talking about how you know on

you know whether it's shareholder value or the destruction of shareholder value or longevity or

“you know earnings how you're measuring a life is difficult right and and some of these sort of”

deeper values the the things that that we immediately recognize as being worse more than these other things are harder to track and and I think that is what's so fascinating about Stockdale is that towards the end he ends up achieving both a measure of fame and then and then unfortunately I think to our shame a level of infamy because of how that that not how he handled the present the vice presidential run and then how we as a society reacted to it but his was a quieter form of

greatness that is always a struggle as a writer because you know you you want or as you said you

you have to have the documentation but also as you're picking stories who you're going to write about and who you're not going to write about there's an extra level of resonance when the people have heard of those people right like the reader has a natural inclination to to want to read about

“famous men and women and so I guess it's always worth stipulating that that many of the greatest”

individuals the people have lived truly impressive lives we've just never heard of and just because when we're analyzing what that looks like there's a certain publication bias to it these are these are just representatives who are in some ways not representative of most people if you're running a business you know that deal with most CRMs they are packed with a bunch of

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on a similar trajectory and then they share a similar cliff event which is a place where your life is really hit within event that forces choices big choices often about what comes next and maybe

“your life as you knew it before is over and you have to reconstruct the life after that and I”

look at you know whether it be famous people like Robert Plant and Jimmy Page with the end of Led Zeppelin or Alice Paul and Lucy Burns with having achieved suffrage in facing the question of you know what's the rest of their lives but you know as I was as I was picking I could have picked any pair of people for any chapter so each concept in the book all the pairs all the people and the reflected the concept of that but I had to pick which pair I would highlight for any given

chapter and I made it I made a choice early which is that in the opening chapter my first pair of

and Grace Hopper and the reason I did that one of the reasons I did that there are multiple reasons including they were amazingly good illustrations of what the first chapter first key chapter after the info chapter lays out but also not a lot of people know Barbara McClentock and so when you meet her so if you met say Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in chapter one or you know somebody you know kind of much more sort of visible roles you'd have a preconception as to who and what they are

but because you've likely never really encountered Barbara McClentock and not that many people

even Grace Hopper in computer science before you can engage with them as people because you're meeting them as people for the first time you're not meeting their persona because Barbara McClentock doesn't really have a larger than life persona for most of us and Grace Hopper unfortunately

“hopefully she'll have more of one because I think in the world of computer science she's one of the”

figures that is the most seminal in all of history but you could then engage with them as human beings right not their persona as human beings and I you'll notice that a number of the more well-known people I sort of stacked towards the end of the book because I wanted people to meet them as people

yeah rather than personas yeah people wrestling with the same stuff that that people have always

had to wrestle with which is you know what do you do next what actually matters how do you bounce back from adversity how do you want to make this all totally I mean one of the one of the other characters I loved in the book and happened to be a classmate of stock deals at the Naval Academy was was Jimmy Carter and the idea that that his cliff was not being president is such a fascinating thing that that that that and he actually was a great a great president and did a lot of great

things and and held the office well but the idea that actually his greatness came after she was no longer president strikes me as a a pretty sort of powerful call to all of us that that you think you think your your best years are behind you or you think your your best

“shot is behind you but actually that's a that's a choice you get to make I think it's a a”

wonderful pair to bring up the drill forward and in Jimmy Carter General our our forward and and Carter of course is that they were they were matched the cliff I picked for them was they each got fired by the american i mean it's one thing to get fired it's another to get fired by millions of your fellow citizens yeah it's a big thumbs down yeah big thumbs down

at the end of your first term you're you know sorry your your here's your pink slip you've been

fired by the american people and of course a Carter had they had they had been political adversaries because in the 76 election they were it was for versus Carter and you know Carter he was stunned and shocked that he was not going to have a second term yeah thing he was 56 if I recall the the year correctly he he all of a sudden was in this flummits mode of well this is too early to retire but I have no idea what to do he didn't have a plan he didn't

really know what was going to come next that was a fascinating kind of the first thing that happened when they returned to plane just he's like uh uh let's go up and and they began like remodeling the upstairs attic of the house you know it's just like how to lose myself in doing this and

“I think he's even in debt right like I think this was in term like he he actually left the presidency”

and we're shaped and he entered it absolutely he had put his assets into a blind trust and some other people had kind of taken care of the family business and when he got you know and then he focused on being president and then all of a sudden they discover not only were they out of the white house uh they had a massive debt that they had to work through and so they had a financial cliff as well uh to work through coming out of it and he wasn't at all sure what he wanted to do and then

he had this that marvelous moment of kind of coming up with the idea that well as president so many ways the best ways he was most really encoded to really really operate was in brokering these things like bringing together uh people for uh Middle East negotiations and so forth camp David Accords and and he and what what he did was he said I want to continue doing that and but there isn't a place for that and is the idea of the Carter Center becoming a place

rather than just being a stayed library a place that could keep that activity alive which then so if you think about it he was 56 if if by memories right he lived to be a hundred yes and think about everything that that happened after that period of being 56 it could have just been

the long arc of of of Carter's role in the world one of my favorite though things in the

“book is I think the the acts of I don't know if I'd call them heroism but just acts of wonderful”

standards is actually something that was a kind of a a more personal and private act that he and Gerald Ford chair and uh one of the things I most loved writing was at the end of the chapter where I write about the two of them you probably remember the story one of the things I loved is how these two adversaries became friends yeah really close friends and they worked together on initiatives and issues and they did did joint at things at the Carter Center and so forth and

then they they really grew to love each other as friends and both of them had this incredible sense

of dedication to uh to the country to service to the the responsibilities that they held dear and late in life uh Gerald our Ford calls his friend Jimmy Carter and says I think we should render one small additional service to our nation essentially that we should agree to do and if whichever one of us passes first of the other one agrees to give the ulogy and and and Ford pass first and Carter gave this ulogy and what I what I love about that is that it was this kind of

very personal act of demonstrate of still accepting a responsibility choosing a responsibility not making a big deal out of it it was just an act and yet when I came across it in the research I was I was just so struck by the sheer beauty of what is actually a small act which is in

“many ways of very big yeah yeah I think it comes down to to decency my my favorite Carter story”

happens at the Naval Academy both Stockdale and Carter overlap with this young midshipman named

West Brown who was basically the Jackie Robinson of the US Naval Academy the first black graduate

of the of the Naval Academy and there've been other black men who'd been accepted but then they'd been driven out of the Academy by the racism and this sort of campaign to to to keep them out of the Navy and as you know there was an in sort of intense hazing at the Naval Academy or plebier and so as as this young man is going through the hazing process that is designed to drive him out you know Carter hears it from his room and the two of them had been running on the cross-country

team together and Carter from the deep south sort of walks out of his room and walks up to to West Brown and throws his arm over his shoulder and says you know hang in there don't let him get to you and and this act of sort of crossing this racial barrier and the decision to sort of root for someone else who you know he could have easily turned his his eyes away or closed his heart off to was his sort of moment of of of grace and decency that again when you when you think about what you

want to make of your life do you want to look back and go hey you know this person was a billionaire this person started this this person did this or do you want them to point to stories like that at your political rival could reach it across the aisle and ask you to deliver their ulogy or you know that you you supported someone who's being discriminated against or do you want them to you know sort of be bragging about your your net worth at the end and you know actually that brings me to a

question that I'd like to ask you if you don't mind through your your lens of having you really made yourself a student in in the great stoics and the way that they thought and how they're timeless ways of thinking and and living are very relevant in yep any era and certainly our own

“and congratulations on that I think it's marvelous marvelous fame to make a real contribution”

so one of the things that I that happened for me in in writing the the book is the ways in which I ended up sort of changing my views on things a lot I have a whole table in chapter 13 you may have you know there was like on one side as I used to believe and then after 12 years of research now I believe and and I could see my lens on the world changing that's about 15 layers deep of these ways in which I ended up looking at things very different and one of the ways that my thinking

changed my perspective changed was on this question of legacy because you know people think a lot about like what's my legacy how will I be remembered after I'm gone and so forth and what I was really struck by in as I studied the lives in this work over over yep and most of them have passed away

legacy was and the way they spoke and wrote and kind of went about their lives and it's not that

“they didn't create a legacy I mean there's a legacy in Toni Morrison's books there will be”

a legacy in the music of the great musicians that are in there there's the legacy of whatever impact a president might have had or of Franklin and Sherman and their legacy in founding of the nation or right there Alice Paul Lucy Burns were the legacy of of what happened with women's suffrage so I thought that they're what were like a cease but their focus on it was seem to be pretty absent and what they were focused on was that they had their encodings their gifts of what they

could do in the world to to be themselves and one day those would expire when they die yeah and and so job one was to keep choosing things that would express those if they in many of them kept choosing things they felt responsible for today right right in front of them and executing on that and then one day the clock ran out right and yeah they were done and so I found myself I used to to think about this question a little bit I remember people who started asking me

so Jim what do you want your legacy to be and I shared it with Joanne and Joanne was like well yeah that's that's a self-centered question number one and number two you won't be here to enjoy it anyway it's a number three why would you spend any time on that when you have so much left to do and and then as I studied the people in the research that's exactly how they went

“about things they really and I shift it and so I no longer think I think that this concern about”

legacy is like a danger almost because it takes you off of what's right in front of you that you have left to to do and whatever happens after you're here is like kind of not really relevant in terms of how people think about you and so forth and I'm curious to a stoic slice how you would think about it because I used to think it was important not I don't think it's very important at all what what do you think it's something with stoic stock a lot about one of the fundamental ironies

of Marcus Reless's Meditations is you're reading a book that is still a bestseller 2000 years after

it was written by one of the most famous people and and powerful and beloved and admired people

of all time and what he's talking about over and over again is how worthless legacy is you know he says he says that people who long for posh to misfame forget that they won't be around to enjoy it you know he says you know this Alexander the Great and his Mule driver you know the same thing happened to both of them in the end and and and and then one of my favorite passages is he lists all these famous people from the recent and not recent past in his time so you know he lists

vespasian who is an emperor like three or four emperors before him and a handful of others you know their their main advisors and their powerful generals and he goes like how unfamiliar these names

are already right and how quickly even the biggest most powerful people are are forgotten I think

that's you know I came I came to to good to great a little late it had probably already been out several years by the time I read it and so I thought I had an interesting experience going wait wait is is circuit city in here you know like you're I forget what which book which companies are in the book but when you read a classic business book you realize that even these classic companies don't stay classic that long that there's this sort of parade of irrelevance that we're all

a part of and so when you meditate on that does it make does it make your life's work empty and meaning list does it mean you shouldn't try should it mean you just you just have as much pleasure and fun and and experiences as you can know I think it goes actually to something you talk about

“in this book which is that the best thing to do is focus on what you like doing and are good”

at doing and is meaningful to do for as long as you're able to do it and you detach from results and you detach from recognition and you detach from you detach from that idea of legacy and you just you get all the benefits you can from it now as a person who loves what they do and and believes what they do is having a positive impact to me that that's the legacy that you you get to enjoy and then any other legacy is is for the people who come after you you know it's

interesting I was really struck by how most of the people in the study and I I think there are some things that they did that were just brutally difficult that they that they did sure and it's hard to say well how did they you know how did they love some of the really hard things that they did but for the most part a lot of what was happening is the intrinsic satisfaction the intrinsic

the love of the daily process of writing or the romantic the idea of like I want to be a

“surgeon note the enjoyment of actually preparing for and executing a care for the patient”

surgery with great surgical conscience right it's not so much the idea of want to be a rock star is I love singing yes I just want to sing right and then Bruce Springsteen has talked about how it's it's called playing for a reason and he loves to play music you know that that's the joy of

it yeah and you never know that's the other thing of one of the things that was fascinating to me

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dope for an extra 10% off your order that's pesty.com slash dope for an extra 10% off I think about my two writers Tony Morrison and Barbara Tuckman and Barbara Tuckman was off study you know she was just fascinated with with whatever subject of history she picked up and decided to learn about right and and then she ends up writing this book The Guns of August and one of my favorite little stories in there is about how you know there's a series of sort of chances

president Kennedy reads the guns of August which is about the start of war war one and how

basically a bunch of forces when they finally got locked into place even the most powerful people in

the world couldn't untie the knot and we had the great calamity of war war one. He happens to be reading Tuckman's guns of August before the Cuban missile crisis and then ends up applying the lessons of those opening days of war war one through her book to say I don't want to ever this thing to be the the missiles of October we have to leave enough slack in the ropes so that kusha then I can find a way to a peaceful outcome here and eventually they work through the

Cuban missile crisis and I find myself thinking I find myself thinking of of Barbara Tuckman sitting in her writing space whatever that was with her bits and pieces of paper etc making sense of the thing she saw when she drove around France and putting together the whole kind of arc of the history of what happened in those opening days of war one. I'm 100% certain she wasn't thinking and then the president will read it and will have heard a nuclear war and will

all be alive. That's not our mind at all she's just writing her book and multiple times I could see where people were just they were in whatever they were doing sometimes there were these a wild outcomes that came from them but it wasn't they didn't even know that those outcomes

and the outcomes were often enormously unpredictable. Yeah you you don't influence a president and change the the the course of world events by sitting down to write a book to influence right the president you you influence the president because you love history so much that you put something down that that that is a value another great example of this is is the book the great influenza by John M. Barry he becomes fascinated with the the Spanish flu and he writes this book

about it that George W. Bush reads and creates a pandemic preparedness division inside the White House

“it because of this book like you you have to love the things so much and I think you maybe it's”

it's Tony Morrison you quote in the book like the only reason to write something is because you can't not write it and so you have to you have to find what that thing is and then that passion and that commitment and that fascination creates something that is infectious and compelling to others

sometimes not always but but but also it at the very least even if nobody had read guns of

August Barbara Tuckman succeeded because she enjoyed writing the guns of August right yeah and and it's interesting there's a wonderful line I think I put in there from Tony Morrison where she says if all the publishers disappeared overnight I'd still write my books yes which means the fact that it was published was extra on like like she did it because she enjoyed it and and then all

“the success was was extra which I think ties back to stoicism like this is the idea of like hey the”

part you controlled you did well and then you you got lucky right you got lucky in the in the sense that it it lined up this idea of loving what you do and and doing it for that reason you have the the converse in the book too you talk about the curse of competence doom loop what we walked

me through to that yeah so so first of all kind of zooming way out kind of to put that in in

in perspective as you know one one of the kind of ways I came to understand the way life works and it's at its best is this idea that there are times when people are kind of in frame and out of frame and what what for those who might be listening what that means is the idea that you know we all have kind of a set of encodings right and you have different encodings than I have and and there are a constellation it's just that these capacities we have within and then they're waiting to

discovery uh through the experiences of life so we were talking earlier about Admiral Stockdale who I yeah I think is you know when he ended up in the in the Hanoi Hilton it was like the frame of his life he was incredibly well encoded for that for leadership in that situation he'd been training for it without knowing it his entire life exactly and then boom he's in frame and he was the perfect leader for that setting and and what I you know saw is that as the frame of

life would shift at different points in your life the the the frame of your life would only maybe capture a small set of your encodings and then another shift in your life a big bright set of those encodings would come through the window so we were talking earlier about John Glenn and there are times of his life where he was kind of out of frame right he he was studying chemistry and thinking he might try to become a doctor that wasn't working very well sports didn't

work very well as parents hoped he might come into the family business that didn't really and then he through a series of kind of almost accidental steps ended up being able to get his pile of sights and and learn to fly and all the sudden these encodings came flooding through the window he's in frame that comes to an end and then there's a time when he's out of frame uh goes to work at Royal Crown Cola one of my favorite little details is that it Royal Crown

Cola worries and executives almost 10% of his life but it's 0.2% of his memoir and and so it's gonna show that it's just kind of like a time that it was it was sure it was fine but it wasn't like what he was when he was it's the dog that didn't bark it's it's revealing he's really is exactly and then back in frame as a senator and so forth and and being in frame means three things one

big set year encodings were coming through the window not all of them because you never find them all

“to what matters to you is not the money you make from it but you flip the arrow of money so that”

the purpose of money is to be able to do what you're encoded for yes rather than the purpose of doing what you're encoded for is to make money right the the arrow flips and the third is that

big bright ignition of fire and when you have all three of those you're willing to flip the

“arrow of money you're encoded for it and it really feeds the inner fire you are really in frame okay”

so now let's go to the curse of confidence doom loop so the curse of confidence doom loop is when you start down a path where through hard work and discipline and where you happen to be working or doing whatever you're doing something at which you're kind of out of frame you're you're good enough at it right you're not necessarily it's like being at Royal Crown Colour for John Glenn right or taking chemistry classes like John Glenn you may be able to become a doctor you know and

“and through hard work and discipline and you know good personal habits and so forth you can”

become competent and maybe even successful at it and what happens then is because you're doing that you you get better at it you get more opportunities to do more of what you don't really love to do and what you're not really encoded for because you're reasonably confident at it and then you get better paid doing it and what happens is that you're spend more time becoming better paid at doing something at which you are not really in frame the years go by

and then one day you wake up your 10 20 years down the road and you realize that you're in an activity at which you're reasonably well compensated but you're not really in frame it doesn't really

capture some of the best of your encoding so it doesn't really feed the fire and the reality is

you never really flip the arrow of money because of the reason you're doing it is because it makes you the money and then boom you are in the curse of competence doom loop and anybody can end up in it I have great compassion for people who have this because there can be very noble reasons for why you ended up going down that path you're caring for your family you're supporting your parents you're you know whatever the reasons might be but the more time you spend

there can be harder and harder to escape it to eventually end up really in frame the way the people in our study did for phases of their life and there were times that they were out of frame

I think that's one of the really big things about all this is that the die is never fully cast until

“the entire life is written right and what's so powerful about looking across entire lives through”

these lenses is you can see times when when they're even lost and they're really out of frame and they're really confused and they're absolutely in the fog and then they can end up in a time when they really are in frame and everything clicks and in the same life you can have multiple cycles of that phase of that phasing in and out and and that is actually something that when you go into a time when you feel like I'm out of frame is this is just isn't you know it's okay or

it's terrible or it's whatever it's not the end of the story it's never the end of the story until it's

really the end