What To Do When Life Doesn’t Go as Planned | Jim Collins

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday, welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm going to read you a quote here, "Whether you prevail or fail in dirt or die depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you." That is not a quote from ego is the enemy, although it is a book I read while I was

“writing ego is the enemy, because that was a weird book, right?”

I'm trying to look not at people who have succeeded, but where people have failed, where they've gotten into trouble, what causes those troubles. And as it happens, most of our wounds are self-inflicted, most collapses come from within, not from without. That quote is actually the back cover of a really good very well-known book called "How the Mighty

Fall" and why some companies never give in.

This is from Jim Collins who wrote "Good to Great" as well. I read "How the Mighty Fall" when I was researching ego is the enemy. As I said, in part one of this episode, I told you about Jim Collins and I, how we overlapped on Oprah, but we had a lovely conversation about his new book, "What to Make of a Life?" Cliff's fog fire and the self-knowledge imperative.

It is a great book. She says it's the best work that he's done in his life and it changed him, and I would agree with that. I think it is his best book. He said, "It's been ten years researching it, two years writing it, and you can tell

in the pages." It is a fantastic book. He has a little thing here at the beginning where he lists some of the people profile in the book. It's a whosu of people I've profiled in my book.

“People that I think I don't want to know from Lucy Burns, the Suffragette, Jimmy Carter,”

Gordon Cooper, the fighter pilot, Gerald Ford, accidental president, Michael J. Fox, Benjamin Franklin, John Glenn, Katherine Graham, who I wrote a lot about in ego is the enemy. Grace Hopper, Dolores Werta, George C. Marshall, Barbara McClintock, Toni Morrison, Sandra Dale, Connor, Jimmy Page, Alan Page, Alice Paul, IMPAY, Richard Sherman, Santana, Merrill Street, Barbara Tuckman, Vera Wang, Marys White, Deborah Winger.

This is just a great book, and not only is there a lot of research and distilled wisdom down in it, but I think it's a jumping off point for a bunch of people you're going to want to read and learn about. So I'll just get into part two of the conversation. This is me and the great Jim Collins. We have copies of Good To Great and what to make of a life at the Painted Board's Book

so are, and he assured me as we are wrapping up that he's going to come out and see us sometimes. So I'm excited about that as well. Thanks to Jim for coming on, enjoy. If you're running a business, you know that deal with most CRMs. They are packed with a bunch of features.

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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 and what's so powerful about looking across entire”

lives through these lenses is you can see times 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 and don't

you think part of the problem with being sort of highly competent at something that you don't truly love or you you aren't truly made for you know you can pull that off provided everything is going pretty well right and what I think can happen the real doom is when you are competent but not locked in and then you experience adversity or difficulty you you come to a cliff as you're talking about because the compensation or the recognition

of the social acceptance none of that is going to be sufficient to get you through that truly difficult period that's the danger of it I guess I think there's multiple day I think being comfortable in it for a really long time is also a danger right because you could end up just

having decade after decade after decade pass by and maybe never end up with the satisfaction

of being in frame the way a number of the people all the people in our study did at certain chunks of their of their lives and or you can have the description you have which is that

“you have a cliff that upsets everything and then you have to re-cast to begin with but what's”

interesting to me about that is that sometimes the cliffs are what throw you into frame they're not necessarily always what throw you out of frame so for some of our people the cliff can come along and and it for they were in frame then you have the end of your test piloting astronaut career you go into a phase of being out of frame and so the cliff is I'm no longer an astronaut, I'm no longer a test pilot, I'm no longer a fighter pilot that part of my life is largely over

and now I have to re-construct from there and that can be a foggy out of frame patch that then leads to another version of being frame in the case that case is a being a senator but you can also have cases where somebody marvelously discovers being in frame that they never knew they had before that came from the cliff so Catherine Graham who became one of the great corporate CEOs of all time imagine you have similar experience idea when you read her story

means so the first half of her life there's not a lot of evidence of huge chunks of being in frame the same way that the second half of her life was and she had this cliff horrendous awful cliff when she lost her husband to the disease of manic depression and he took us all life and not only that he'd run the family company which her father had bought which was the Washington Post and so she had kind of this second aspect of the cliff which was what should

happen to the company now also I have to deal with this but also I've now got this question of the company I've never seen myself as the leader of the company when someone one of her friends said well you can always run and she's like oh no no no no me are you kidding and yet as she stepped into it and it was a series of steps eventually what happened is the window frame shifted and she discovered to her great joy and astonishment that she had within her an amazing set of

encodings for her corporate leadership and and once that clicked into frame she became the Catherine Graham that that was so beautifully well constructed for leading through some monumental courageous episode and so I think sometimes what happens with these cliffs because that's the constructor of the study is looking at into the cliff through the cliff and out of the cliff

“so it's a cliff ends a time being in frame and you have to reconstruct but also sometimes the cliff”

almost causes right the conditions for coming into frame for the first time so there may be somebody out there today who is in the curse of competence in loop and their career is going to

will actually be the starting point of through the fog through the through the cliff

of actually getting into frame for the first time and that may well happen for a lot of people

yeah you you think you want your life to go a certain way you think you want conditions to be a a certain way you think you have a preference or a preferred mode of operation and then life sort of reminds you that you don't get a choice then you have places how you respond but you don't have places as what life throws it you right yes exactly then you get your actual choice which is what are you going to what are you going to do about it and and you had this great line in the book

“the fruitless search for a cliffless life you know I think people think they want it to be”

comfortable they think they want it to be clean they think they want it to be simple they think they want to get x, y and z and you don't actually know if you have no idea that that's actually the best way for you and and almost certainly it isn't because when you look at the lives of the people you admire the most that have the most impact that have you know sort of become what they're capable of becoming you cannot not notice how adversity and difficulty and seemingly bad breaks

turn them into that yeah you know I think it's it's interesting because I had picked the the cliff construct because it I just thought there are lots of reasons I picked it but one of which is

I felt that it would be a really powerful way to sharpen the lens on the question of how people

answer the question of what to make a life because a cliff can you know become such a stark

“moment that you at part way along the way in your life you have to answer the question at least”

maybe a second time like gosh everything has changed around me my life is fractured on a right feed or I accomplished what I set out to do or whatever it is and now I've got to answer the question again and if I can look at two people facing a similar cliff and see how they each answer that question differently in one of the patterns I can I can learn a lot but in the process of that I with my research team we spent I think it was on the order of a couple of years of the of the

research where I said you know what we really need to do is we also need to find some lives that we can study they have enough information on them that or that didn't have a cliff didn't have a major cliff because I I'm really want to know is the pattern of those lives different those who have cliffs and those who don't have a major or make a cliff and this was one of those wonderful things that happened in the research which was in a certain sense we had a disappointment which was

we couldn't find anybody that met the test of a cliffless life which was actually not a disappointment because it was a great learning every time we found someone that we thought might be a cliffless life in terms of major cliffs you started studying their life and you would find oh actually

they had major cliffs or even make a cliff and I just finally concluded cliffs are us like

the odds you're going to get to the end of a reasonably long life without experiencing cliffs and certainly at least one or two major cliffs along the way I think are astronomically close to zero number of our people could see their cliffs coming but also sometimes you can't see them coming I mean they can just be you wake up and you've just you know your husband dies and playing crash and it upsets your entire life or you wake up and you discover you have a disease

diagnosis that you didn't see coming the day before even things where you just just kind of almost this shattering effect and those cliffs you can be sort of prepared for them in a way but you cannot plan for them and I guess I've come to the conclusion you're gonna have them that you just gonna have them yeah I think some of those events are external it's a war it's a shipwreck

“it's an economic disaster and I think the reason you can't find a truly clifless life is that”

we seem to do a good job of creating them for ourselves if they're not external right you wake up one day and you realize you don't like what you do anymore or you have a crisis of faith a religious crisis of faith or a political awakening there's gonna be those transition points there's moments of awakening or insight or truth whether they they originate from insider outside the question or as you said the place we have a choice is do we take them seriously and change in light of them

or and and maybe this is sadly more common than it needs to be some people just keep on trucking and and ignore it and don't take what they can out of it and that's that's the real shame of it I guess is is when you come to one of those cliff moments and you don't get that growth or

and and we do have cases in the study where people played a real role in what became a cliff we

“have the two people who were in watergate and they were in some White House sure they're very”

clearly played a role in what ended up then going to prison and being disgraced and having to reconstruct their lives out of that they they really did play a significant role in the major turning clip for their life there are other cases where just the the role you've chosen in life is one that has a built-in cliff so if you're a professional athlete right we have professional athletes or people who were gold metal skaters or professional football players in the study where

you've essentially you are doing something that the cliff is inevitable you're not going to be playing all-pro-defence of alignment at age 60 it's just not going to happen and so you have these these other times where it's like I chosen a path that has a built-in cliff and you can either choose to prepare for that cliff ahead of time Alan Page from the Minnesota Vikings began putting himself

through law school while he was still playing in the NFL and then that led to his second frame

of being a Supreme Court justice he was kind of he was already laying the foundations for an inevitable cliff those clubs are easier to manage if you choose to because you can see them coming don't know the ones you just can't see coming one thing I've found with CEOs and I spent a lot of time in the world of business leadership and CEOs and people running large organizations for profit not for profit and so forth they are often very unprepared even though it's almost inevitable

that it's going to come for the end of their executive careers yeah and so it's not unlike being an athlete and you are defined by your executive role your executive leadership and just like Jimmy Carter being done with the presidency at age 56 he hit 60 or 65 what actually your best most creative capabilities are in many ways just beginning and that has ended and you often see a period where they're really not certain at all what to do next and it's a very common pattern of people

these very intense roles that very very much define to them coming to an end when there's a lot of life left to go and and even though they can see the cliff coming they don't really treat it as a cliff that's coming until it's on top of them yeah our ability to dilute ourselves

“about that is is pretty universal I think about that as an author it's this studio we have”

line with books and there's this company where you can just buy books by basically by the pound

or by the inch to decorate for you know like a movie set or whatever and one of the things they sometimes look at it I think I go you know some of these were huge books when they come out when they came out some of these authors were the biggest authors in the world and and it wasn't that long ago and now you know where are they at some point you do your last book at some point your your sales trajectory peaks and it's it's a downhill climb from there or it's a descent from

there and and so it's like we all know that there's an expiration date on what we do whether you're a musician or a professional athlete or just a human being and that we know we're all mortal and yet we just sort of continue as if we're gonna be the exception to the rule and gravity does not apply to us okay so can we spend a moment on this because yeah I I I come at this with a really different view a different lens after having done this this study I absolutely agree

with you there is one for certain expiration date yes and that is we don't know what it is we don't know what it is whatever your expiration date is and my expiration date is as a

“person on this planet we know that it will come we know that life is you know it's kind of the”

ultimate punch card right and the Warren Buffett idea you only have so many punches of investments will life like that we only got so many punches and you know you kind of have a statistical idea of how many there are but every five years you spend on a project that's a punch right and one day you're gonna be out of punches so we know that so there's an expiration date but one of the things that I really I get very animated about this so you'll have to forgive me if I

get animated about this this idea that our our our our best our most creative our our most impactful our most things we do in our life are going to be earlier and that later in life it's going to not compare well to that and that and it's going to be like this and sort of like this kind of

that is inverted for me I actually reject the idea now that that our younger selves have to tower over our older selves and I was so struck by the number of spectacular things that the people in our study did late in life there's that wonderful little statistic in the book because you take all the pages of the biography the major biographies of Benjamin Franklin and you ask what percentage of

the books are left one Franklin turns age 60 and the answer is 53% so he hits age 60 and over half

“over half of what is going to be most interesting creative spectacular of his life is yet to happen”

Tony Morrison didn't write beloved till 56 or publish it jazz at 61 over half of her books after the age of 60 Robert Plan did doing some of the greatest music of his life late in life right almost all of his Grammy nominations and all of his wins come weight including that amazing album where he comes together with Alice and Krauss and they do raising sand and you would think that well you know it was the zeppelin years well then was great music

but raising sand is stunningly exceptional piece of music and that comes he's already heading into

his seventh decade of life and you could you can take a look at the the I am pay does the Louvre pyramid in his 70s he does the museum as a of a Xomic art in Doha at age 91 Carter who we were talking about earlier which is the most like you could look at it is that well nothing's going to compare to being present except by the way the rest of his life which in many ways exceeds it yes and so I I come away uplifted by

sort of this this image of an arc which is that kind of these things happen and you kind of the sort of the peaks or the peak creativity or the peak impact or the peak this would have kind of happens here and then the rest of life you're sort of dealing with it that's towering in the past and I invert it now to where's like well those are sort of warm ups hmm those are just warm ups and out here out here is what is potentially really spectacular so hit 60 I'm 68 I'm more energy

than when I was 38 and part of that is because being really fueled by the examples of the people in this book and what they did late is like wow 68's just kind of I'm you know maybe just

“really getting going and the key is one of your key teachings you give people right one of the”

things I really love about what you contribute to people is to decouple the excellent the integrity of your work the excellence of your work the creativity of your work the intention of your work

from the result yeah and that if you separate those and you basically say I don't know

if raising sand is going to be a five grammy winner it did but he he didn't know that sure but the point was to blend his voice with a voice that sounds like an angel to learn how to sing as a duo rather than a single to reimagine even some old zeppelin songs in bluegrass and do new pieces in music and create this spectacular album that it ended up having a great result

“is phenomenal but even if it hadn't he still had a done it yes and and that sense of like what matters”

is the is is is the intention and the integrity and the excellence and the expression of your encodings over here and that can only grow and improve and kind of expand over a life and the results will be whatever they will be but if we define everything by the results we're in a trap yeah but if we divine it by how and what we're doing don't be a variation in the results but that's kind of separate from the sheer beauty and creative excellence of what I might be doing

and so I come away with there is no shelf life there's only in their life yeah it's spring here in Texas and that means new kinds of bugs we are dealing with with it because we have a house at the bookstore we have traces of the street a little grocery store and we don't

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“wouldn't i would maybe posit that there's a bit of a paradox here on the one hand you should”

believe that your best work is in front of you everything you're doing today is preparing you training you the seed cord of some future project that you can't even conceive of and in the same way that for stock though he doesn't know that that those dark days at the academy those middle years of the fifties where he feels like he's missing all his shots when he's far from the action when he's getting passed over for things he doesn't know that this is all preparing him for the handle i

holding but he just has to have faith that he's being prepared for the life he's meant to have and just like i would argue this book which i think is your best book wouldn't have been possible without the other projects leading up to it and that it's all building to it and that one of the joys of writing is that a lot of writers do do their best work towards the end of their life because

the expertise and the mastery is cumulative it might not always be the best selling but it but it

can be the best work i like to think the example i always bring up is like michael Lewis didn't know that his life and the great financial crisis were converging and that he was perfectly perfectly suited to write that book at that moment so there's that and yet if you're waking up day to day thinking that what you're doing right now doesn't matter because you're destined for some future bigger thing or if if you're miserable today and it's all contingent on

getting some big shot twenty thirty forty years in the future that is recognized and beloved well then you're really in trouble because that might not happen and so it's this it's this tension of like hey you love what you're doing right now and you're fully immersed in it you're in frame as you're saying you're giving everything to it you're absolute best and you're understanding that you might get this bonus of it's training you for some future thing that you can't

conceive of but that's at least how i try to think about it so a couple couple thoughts on that and one through the lens of being a writer and the other with this notion of kind of preparation for what you might be made for i think one of the things that i came away from this study really appreciating another sort of uplifting evolution for me by studying their lives is the wide range of things that were made for yeah and and so kind of there's one view of the

“world which is you need to just you know the abazlo idea of self-axialization discover what you're”

made to do and commit to pursue it with excellence and doesn't speak to how successful it is is to commit to pursue with excellence but there's this asterisk which is well but what if I don't find it yeah right what if I don't find it and what this study showed me is because people often have these cliffs that through them into frames that they they couldn't have envisioned before and often even in a single life had multiple frames right printing empire to scientists to

nation founder for example yeah but i really realize is that the the consolation inside us is vast

one of the many possibilities at any given time of what i'm really encoded for and so long as it's

one of them there will be others i'll never discover that's okay yeah so long as at any given time

there's a good chance i find one of them uh you and i ended up writers but maybe we would have ended up in frame in a very different way if the contingent paths of our life had gone a different path that Jimmy page hadn't discovered a guitar almost by sheer serendipity because somebody left it behind in a house that his parents moved into when he was ten years old maybe his life would have come into frame in a very different way graphic designer or you know curator of our ancient

artifacts i always thought that Jimmy page would be great at that but his life ended up in music and and i find it very uplifting the idea that there are multiple shots on goal

“multiple possibilities and life is enormously contingent and enormously full of random events”

and which permutation we end up in that's in frame is partly up to us but it's also largely up to a lot of factors that are outside of our control and i was struck by how unplanned many of the lives were when the roulette wheel spun they ended up in frame with something there was often a great big surprise they didn't know that that's where they're going to end up just like Jim Stockfield didn't know he's going to end up in the and the hand-oil thing i actually find that very uplifting

because it removes this pressure yeah this idea that i got to find the one thing yes but it's just a thing of many possible things one thing on the writing i i've been really lucky with my writing

i never expected it to be as successful as it's been and but you know if somebody sometimes

people have asked well how do you make a best seller my answer is you can't all you can do is write the best piece of work you're capable of at the moment that you're writing it good to great which will forever be something that you know completely changed my life and some ways it was hard to manage because i was prepared for failure but i wasn't prepared for success and i wasn't prepared for the level of what would come at me from that but you know it came out

right as nine eleven half and so i thought it was probably just going to get buried anyway and yet somehow it it it caught the world and what i realized is that the zeitgeist makes the best seller you don't yeah you write the book but you don't get to decide your readers get to decide

zeitgeist at the time gets to decide ultimately how successful that book is right and and so you

can't make a best seller i mean yeah i suppose with just your you know there's certain things where you have a platform and you know that guarantees a certain number of readers and so forth but

“but the real the real take of a book the only thing you control is ultimately what's on the”

pages of the book yeah and after that zeitgeist is with you or zeitgeist is not your readers are with you or your readers are not and you don't determine that yeah and and what i mean about sort of the future is like if you're one of those people we're like all of this is leading up to when i become president or when i am in charge of this or when i that's a really vulnerable place to be because all these things have to go a certain way but but it strikes me that what you're

seeing and all those other people is a kind of strategic flexibility and an adaptability that allows them to face different situations and go okay i can work with this i can work with that i can turn this into that and so their life it can go in a variety it ends up going in one direction or a couple directions but the point is it could have gone in any number of directions based on whatever material or opportunities fate fortune circumstance happened to do it out to them you know one of my

favorite chapters in the book is the the relatt way of life and it looks yeah lock and contingencies and so forth really through the lens of their lives and and i love the story of Gerald R. Ford

“because his life is full of these and you would think that you know becoming president would be”

this great pinnacle this great success but he didn't want to be president right he he wanted to be speaker of the house and he was he was most in frame operating uh in the house of representatives where he was uh the man with no enemies many many adversaries who had different views but no enemies and he made friends really well and he could really get things done but because of the zeitgeist of the time his party didn't control the house and and then a whole bunch of things

administration you know eventually led to him becoming vice president and then he was going to be

“president and he had nothing to do with it again wanted to be president never never expected it and”

all of a sudden the thing he really wanted to be got taken away from him to the house

and instead he got what probably was like second or third or fifth price for him which was he

got to be president and uh and then there's this wonderful I love this little vignette after Carter's inauguration which was a beautiful thing the way he's showing delight on Ford yes inauguration and let Ford have a moment in the light it was just beautiful Ford gets on the helicopter to leave uh the mall and instead of circling over the white house he told the pilot don't circle over the white house circle over the Capitol wow that's my real home

yeah and and to me it was just like you know even even if you become president it might not be what you planned and it might not even be what you want that's yeah that's beautiful

“the idea that that all you control is what's on the page I I I think that might be an interesting”

place to close one of the things that I was struck by in in the note that you set me and and and some of the things you've said is it seems like you were really changed by writing this book and it is a departure it's different than the other books like you clearly made the decision to go in not just in a less business direction but in a more personal direction yourself as as the

writer it opens with a story about about your father I've always believed that the first thing you

should think about when you're sitting down to write a book I think this could be expanded any creative project is will you get better for doing it will you get better because of the subject matter you chose you learned a lot and and it changed you or or will you get better because you chose something technically difficult that in having to to figure out how to do you add some element to your skill base but it strikes me that on this book you chose in a couple ways to tackle

something that again it could sell zero copies I'm sure it will sell quite a few but you will consider the project that success because of who Jim Collins is at the end compared to who he was when he started it that's a really nice way to kind of have a circle in our conversation because we go back to your opening story about stockdale yeah and the idea of be the best but what does that mean yeah and and so I I do believe this is the best I've done so far in terms of the quality of the

work and the writing and all of that but but what does best mean and and I think in that it's really the ways in which I changed and what I'm really grateful for and having gone through the twelve years of doing this project is the way I changed through it not just what I think there's

“lots of ways in what I think that changed dramatically because that's what good research does it”

changes what you think but my emotional landscape is what really changed and in ways that I'm really happy with one of them I used to and I was struck by some of the way you bring in the stoics on this I mean I really did use to spend a lot of emotional energy feeling really frustrated with what people are not yeah people who work with me people in my life and I would be frustrated with what they're not I'd be frustrated they're not more like me I'd be frustrated and I would try to change them

and by watching the people's lives in this study unfold as I lived alongside them in researching I began to see the beauty of when they were in frame and when they were not in frame and I instead

began to see it is like well no the real question is what amazing in coatings to those people

have and when they're in frame it's beautiful and and now my emotions are to look for the ways in which I'm truly grateful for what people are rather than frustrated with what they're not and and to really allow myself to help them be in positions where they're very much in frame and that shift I'm I'm out of the try to change and mold people yeah mode at all I just I just want to see them in frame and then feel grateful for what they are this whole notion of a worthiness hierarchy you know I

think I carried around in my head a lot of kind of this idea that there's the big visible impacts and you know the things that you know if you if you did something like the 19th Amendment it's somehow more worthy than you know something else that might be less visible in the world maybe making those beautiful zen garden in your backyard that's changed for me I don't want to look at people through a worthiness hierarchy are you more worthy than this person but rather

don't want to judge other people's lives because we're all encoded differently

and and also this idea and this I think really ties into your work Ryan about how people looked at the folks that you studied looked at their lives which is you know the story of

“the life is not done till it's done and the impulse to kind of judge a life part way in progress”

or to be frustrated because somebody's been in the fog for a long time or whatever right to

realize that there's still a lot of this story yet to be written yeah and if maybe I had met Admiral Stockdale when he was a young lieutenant or something and or I guess just before becoming commander whatever is it kind of say well you know maybe I would seem differently when I knew the whole story but actually to kind of look at it and say inside this person I don't know the whole story of their life yeah and what's yet to come could yet be some of the most wonderful glorious things

“you have to see do not judge yeah and those are ways in which I really evolved because of”

studying these lives and in many ways if you think about what makes better it's what happened to me that is how I see the best part of the book you can't see it exactly because you're not inside me yeah so however many people read it I hope people do read it because I think it will create great conversations in their lives I want them to share it and discuss it but the worst case scenario is

“I think I'm a better person for having gone through the journey of doing it. It was a good use of”

the time you put in it already everything else is extra which is the the best place to be on the on the eve of a book launch just to be clear I think will be and is certainly deserves to be a best seller I love the book I think it's it's right there alongside the others and it's been an honor to chat it has been an honor check keep up the great work right and I love how you you know how much I value principles that last right real durable ultimately human ways of looking at

things and I love the way that you've gone back to people like Marcus Aurelius like Seneca people who it doesn't matter that they lived all you know centuries ago what they saw and understood is

deeply true and powerful everybody thinks that everything profound has to be new and so it does not

that's that's very well said well thank you very much