687: Jim Collins - What To Make of a Life, The 3 Types of Luck, Inflection Points, Cliffs, Encodings, Navigating the Fog, the Art of Getting People To Want To Do What Must Be Done, and Reconnecting with an Old Friend

And in the meantime, I have sent it to some leaders, thinkers, and authors that I really

look up to. One of them is Brent B. Sure, and this is what Brent said about the price of becoming. "I've been on Ryan's podcast twice, and both times his preparation was exceptional. And stood out was that he'd actually thought deeply about the messy parts, and that's what the price of a becoming is about.

After interviewing so many elite performers, Ryan has identified the unglamorous compound practices that lead to sustained excellence. The best leaders know how messy they are. They acknowledge their imperfections. They do the work, no one sees.

“That's what this book shows you, exactly what that work looks like, and how you can do”

it too. Again, that's Brent B. Sure, founder CEO of Permanent Equity and Bestselling Author. I'd love it if you would pre-order the price of becoming. You can do it at learningleadard.com or go straight to Amazon and pre-order the price of becoming.

Thank you so much for your support. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global, I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleadard.com for show notes of this, and all podcasts, episodes, go to learningleadard.com. Now, onto the night speech or leader, Jim Collins is the author of some of the most influential

books ever written. It's good to great, built to last, and great by choice, just to name a few of his concepts, happy come part of all leaders of vocabulary like, level five leadership.

The flywheel, first two, then what?

The hedgehog concept. He spent more than a decade at Stanford as a professor and as advised, CEOs, four star generals and heads of state, his new book is called What to Make of a Life Cliffs, fog, fire, and the self-knowledge imperative during our conversation we discuss. How Jim's grandfather, Jimmy Collins, who was a test pilot and an author, shaped how Jim

thinks about courage and living fully. Then we discuss what Jim calls "encodies" and why it's so important that you discover yours. Then we get into what the three by three reflective practice is, and why Jim uses it to sustain excellence across decades.

Now, this is a very special one for me. We flew to Boulder to record with him in person, and I'm so glad that we did. As you'll hear, this one gets very personal and is quite emotional at the end. Jim's super kind words mean the world to me. He is one of my heroes.

“He is a great example of why you should meet your heroes.”

Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Jim Collins. I love reading about your name, sake. Jimmy Collins, your grandfather, and Dolores, your grandmother. There's a lot there. Can you tell me the story of Jimmy Collins?

Well, Jimmy Collins is my name, sake, and as you know, he comes at the end of the book.

Basically, he was one of the early test pilots, and he and my grandmother, Dolores, met

and got married four days after they first met. He was flying across country, landed at Wichita for fuel. My grandmother was from Oklahoma. She was working at the Wichita airport four days later. They were married, which of course leads to a series of sequences that I exist.

And my grandfather was, in fact, his original memoir, the bottom of it, says, to true stuff of an era man or something like that, and it was a kind of the first sort of right stuff kind of book that had been written. And he was writing in chapters, serialized by the Saturday evening post, who was testing

“a variety of planes, and then in 1935, my grandfather, I think, was 30.”

He died in a test crash. He was testing a Navy plane, a Navy fighter, I believe, and he was doing a series of dives over Long Island, and the plane failed, and he died. As he was writing the chapters of the book, they were coming out in different publications. I think mainly the Saturday evening post, until my grandmother, that if he died, which

was not an unlikely outcome given test piloting in that era, that he had already written a last chapter of the book, and it was in it, "Destor." And if he died, she was to go get the last chapter, pull it out, put it on the back of all

So my grandfather crashes, dies. My grandmother after the service goes to the "Destor," pulls out the last chapter, and reads the title of the last chapter, which is "I am dead." And the last chapter is in first person, about the death of the test pilot. He writes his own death story of the plane coming out of the sky, and the engines, and the

screaming of the wings, and he crashes, and his last words, and his own memoir by his own pen. Or "I am dead now." Those are the last words in the book.

“My grandmother, then, was a single mom in the middle of the depression, right?”

So I had never had her tell me the story of Jim and the crash, and all of that.

So when she was in her 90s, I traveled down to Oklahoma where she had been residing for quite some time. She'd grown up there, returned there. Now, it just has to go to tell me the story of Jim and meeting in her life, and my grandfather's out, and then she cried, and she said, "Thank you for that.

I've never done that before." And I said, "Well, never done what." So while I never told that story before, she said, "No, no, I've never cried before." And I think about this. It had been almost seven decades that my grandfather had died that she'd lost the love

of her life. I said, "You've never cried," and she said, "No, I was a single mom, middle of the depression. I had two kids, and I sat there in the service, and I just gripped the sides of the chair, and I just willed myself to hold it together. I had to.

“And finally, after all those decades, she was able to tell the story, and then to let”

loose and to cry about it. Of all the things kind of I feel good about in my life. I didn't plan for that to happen. I didn't know that that was the case. It was one of the ones I feel really, really good about.

Like, what if I hadn't gone down there? If I hadn't gone and asked her to tell me the story, her life might have come to an end, which it did just before 8, 100, without ever crying about losing Jim. And so some of those things were like, "Okay, I feel great about that." And I feel especially great about that because the dedication to the book has two dedications,

right? One is to Dolores, my grandmother, and it's who stood strong for me when I was most vulnerable.

And she was this one person in my life that she was just so strong, and she was always

there. Like, just always there, she was a very difficult person. She was difficult in part because of the shaping forces of her life. But she was this incredibly strong person, and the one person I knew that kind of no matter what, she could not break, and she wouldn't ever, ever let me be casted drift and alone.

And the second dedication is to Joanne, right? It's very simple. For Joanne, always. You write that your grandmother had a ferocious will to survive seven decades. But that also led to your dad, which this book you talked about, fogs and cliffs.

And you said, "My first big cliff came quite young when I'd lost my father while he was still alive." The Greyhound bus, can you take me inside that? That's how you open this book. Yeah, so the book is a research-based book, like all of my other books, but I decided in

this book to open with my own story, because part of the frame of the book are cliffs and periods of fog and how people answer questions of what to make of a life. And I was really struggling with where I was going to start the book, actually. I didn't want to just start with one of the people I'd studied.

And finally I decided I realized I had my own story as to kind of start with.

And what I meant by that opening line is that I had my first big cliff when I lost my father while he was still alive. So it was a go back to this story we had a moment ago. My grandmother goes over this. I mean, she went over a cliff of cliffs, so a cliff is an event that alters the trajectory

of your life in some significant way and forces you to reconsider or reconstruct everything that comes after. What comes next? Forces, big questions about that. So losing Jim, and having to recaster life, there was a major cliff event.

My father was just a little kid. I have a photo of him and my grandfather, my grandmother told me it was the day before my grandfather died in the plane that's in the picture. And so my grandmother went over the cliff and in a way kind of took my father with her. And it was kind of cast the landscape.

So my father then, one of the things we know from this research is that in the wake of cliffs, there's off these periods of fog being lost and confused and befuddled and you can be really lost in the fog.

“I think my father never got out of the fog.”

So what happened is when I had my father versus my father having his father, my father was

And he took me and my brother and my mom off to San Francisco in the 1960s. We lived a few houses down from Hay Street on Ashbury, 1964 to 1967, right down the street from the whole summer of love thing. But it was actually also a violent neighborhood.

And when a man was shot dead on our doorstep, my mom finally said, that's it.

We're leaving, brought me and my brother back to Boulder, Colorado, we moved into this really cold basement, cops, hot plate, you know, it was just really bleep. The Christmas rock. We had a Christmas rock. My brother and I could, didn't have a Christmas tree for the Christmas tree.

“So my brother and I rolled a boulder into the basement, called it our Christmas rock, right?”

But all throughout this entire time, I just kept hoping my dad would come back and would actually emerge as a father. I just had this desperate desire for a father. And in early high school, he had moved to New Mexico at this point. He was living in the Dobehut with a dirt floor.

I thought, well, I had this idea, this really romantic vision in my head. And so I got this prepackaged turkey at Thanksgiving and I got on this great home bus and I carried this turkey with me down to New Mexico and I was going to bring it to my father and had this image where we're going to cook the turkey and share Thanksgiving and we would bomb this father and son and there would be a father there and all we can, which

is a shattering experience because I realized Newers, I could tell he had no interest in me. And he mainly spent the weekend trying to convince me to convince his mother to give him money. And when I got back on the Greyhound bus, that was the cliff moment for me at that point

in life.

I mean, it was just crystal clear that will never, ever be a father there.

And so I remember being on the bus, kind of heading back more this kind of that time of year, right? Where it's, you know, the days are short, I'm looking out the window coming up from New Mexico and, but it's like just heading into this fog, the fog of youth, the fog of life. I had no idea, no male role models, no frameworks, no guidance, nobody giving me values,

none of that. This desperate need for father and realizing it didn't have one and as cast into, what do I do with this thing? I got this one life, like, what do I do with this and no clue how to answer that question? And so the reason I start the book there is because I think that's actually the real

seeds of where studying this came. It looks like I'm making a big departure from my prior work, perhaps, you know, it makes really companies ticks, but in many ways, it's returned to something much earlier. I think the question, kind of, ultimately, of what to make of a life was the question I have as a kid, lost, as I was heading back to Colorado and then lost for some time.

“And then you have to answer the question many other times in life, but I start there”

because that's really where I think the book began all those years ago. Your mom tells you that you got to be the man of the house. What was that moment like? Well, I mean, I'm what? That was where my parents finally divorced, she was before the trip down to New Mexico.

I think it was like 12 or 13 years old. And I just had no idea what to make of that. I mean, what do you do when you're 12 or 13-year-old kid? And your mom says, "You're the man of the house now." And you're just like, "What's that mean?

I don't know what that means." I mean, stuff like that. You didn't have an example. I didn't have an example. I did not have an example.

Yeah. I did not have an example. So it was just one of those, "Huh, what do I do with that?" As a fan of your work, I have to say I love when you talk about yourself, your family,

Joanne, and Jimmy, I know the other stuff's amazing, and I got pages of pages of notes,

“but I think connect you with your readers because you write about great companies.”

You write about these amazing people and their stories. But when you write about yourself, I hope you do more of it, as long as I'm saying. Because I love it. And I think a lot of other people probably do too, as it feels like it brings us closer. Yeah, it's interesting.

We've known each other for quite some time. Yeah. We've got to be close to a decade, since we had our first conversation. And when we first had our early conversations, it was about what makes way companies take and all the years of research and all of that, and we didn't know any of this story.

And so it could look like my life really had to have it all figured out from early on, and it was a clean shot, and it was not like that at all. I mean, eventually once I clicked fully into frame, things were pretty clear, but there was a pretty foggy period. I just thought it was because my parents are still like my heroes to this day, and I still

look up to them and go to them for a lot of things. But I know others in my life who are friends or who have met through doing this podcast that are really fueled by an upbringing that wasn't like mine, or maybe they had a dad like yours, where they didn't have them. How much of that is fuel that's driven you to be these achievements or to Jimmy's story,

say I want to be a writer like Jimmy Collins, like the guy who wrote this great memoir that got published in his is really well written. How much of it, are you fueled by some of the history of Jimmy Collins versus fueled

I don't know if I'm saying that right, so positive, but it kind of seems like that. Yeah.

“I would say it was largely uninterested, is the way I would put it.”

So one of the things that became clear to me, as I was actually writing this and sort

of seeing how I was evolving, is that I've always had a ton of fire.

I mean, I have had an abundance of energy. I do have more energy at 68 than I did at 38. That's a very strange thing, but it's true. And it just kind of grows over time and love to get up early in the morning. I just, I mean, I was just never stopped.

But the sources of the fuel, the sources of the fire, those have changed over time. So when I was young and figuring out my way through the fog of youth and then finally kind of getting things working, where I was really doing the work that I became more known for, a lot of the early fuel really did feel like the burning hot coals in the stomach. I mean, there was kind of rage in fury and sense of just sort of terror with no safety net,

those sorts of things.

And it's really like this hot burning fire inside.

And just I'm going to sort of overcome by applying that fire in the world. And people who knew me could feel it, right? And I used to worry that if I ever lost that, I'd lose my drive. Right. I somehow needed that.

That that was somehow important to my, I don't know if it's a chip.

“It was so much as it was just, that's why I can describe it as just like channeled ferocity.”

And I was really good at channeling it. That's the one thing is that once I could get focus on something, I could really like take all of it and later be focused on something, but it was intense and hot. But what's happened, it's been really a marvelous evolution, as I don't really feel that anymore.

And yet, my level of fire and intensity and energy is as high as ever. And what happened is the color of the fire changed. And so what I began to realize, and it just sort of happened organically, it wasn't conscious, it just happened in a series of steps over time, is that I began to realize that just the sheer love of being curious, being lost in giant projects, engaging in marvelous

conversation with interesting people, figuring out how to make sense of something and put a framework around it. The joy of sharing what have learned from the research with other people, the absolute

“spectacular, energizing experience of having marvelous people on my team, all these sorts”

of things. They also fuel fire, but it's a very different fire, it doesn't burn, it doesn't hurt, it doesn't have that sense of channel ferocity, it's like, this is red and hot and burning and hot and this is kind of green and yellow and warming and perpetual. And so this is largely gone away.

And what remains is this very creative kind of fire that is very generative, out of can't ever really see it going out, I only see it growing over time. And for me, that's been a marvelous thing because I don't have to carry around that kind of ferocity, channel almost anger and rage that I felt, I don't need that at all, it can just go away and my drive is as high as ever and it feels a lot better and I know on the

outside it's often being a lot and that's a good thing, that's a good thing about hitting this stage of life at 68, which for me is still quite young, I still think of it as roughly mid-career. So there's a long way to go and perhaps sort of the edges soften, that's a good feeling. So going back to Jimmy Collins and how he met Dolores and how quickly the day-to-days

or days. So you are 22, you're at Stanford, you go on a date with a woman, it seemed like this happened pretty quick, can you tell me this story? Yes, well, so people, my grandmother's case was a grandma and grandfather, they were really fast because they got married after four days, but I wasn't too far behind because I got

engaged after four days. Four days, man. Four days. So what happened is, Joanna and I were both undergraduates, we're both in on scholarship,

we both came from difficult upbringing and I'd always admired Joanna from afar, but never

quite had the courage to ask her out and she was one year behind me. And finally in my senior year we had a conversation and I knew that she was a runner, I knew that she'd run cross-country and track for Stanford and so I said to her, I asked her if she was still running and she said, yes, and then I said, I'm thinking about being my mileage.

Now, that was actually a true statement because I had just thought of it and any number greater than zero, is an increase so she said, do you like to go for a run on Sunday?

a run.

“So I go and I kind of show up, I don't even really have what look like running shoes”

and running clothes on, but something I figured it would work. She takes me out on an eight mile run through the Stanford Industrial Park. We walked five of the eight, but that walking, which was because I just couldn't keep up and couldn't go that far, we got to know each other and that was on Sunday and by Thursday we were engaged and that was that.

So that was almost exactly 46 years ago because it was spring quarter of 1980. Wow, how much has Joanne played a role from this fire and fury guy to the more green and more generative stuff, how much do you think she's played a role in helping that happen? Well, I'm thinking of love in the power of that, but I don't want to answer for you. My life has had a lot of different kinds of luck in it.

Good luck in bad luck, but other than the bad luck of maybe not getting a father that I would have liked to have had, I've had a string of really good luck events, particularly who luck events and Joanne is number one, right? You know, just the sheer luck of we were in the same place at the same time and that we found each other and that then we're so well matched and here we are 46 years later, I mean,

and we talk about people ask us how did we know, you don't know, but you don't know. We thought we knew and then we just committed to make it work. But the way I've put it and I really, really believe this, I look back on different stages

“of my life so far, the inflection point in my life is Joanne because what happened is I began”

a process, and I was, I think reasonably conscious of it, I just didn't know how to do it, conscious process of it, I needed to become a person worthy of being married to her. I didn't really know exactly what that meant, I didn't really know exactly how to get there but what I did know was I needed to become a person that would be worthy of being married to her.

I mean, if I sort of think about like, what is the most significant inflection point in my life? It is Joanne and me together and then me trying to become somebody that deserves to be

married to her and that is the never ending journey and it's almost impossible to envision.

I can't envision what my life would have been otherwise. It's impossible, it's just so completely woven together as to how we've created our life together. What's it like today? Like, what are some of things you do to deserve?

I think it's a Charlie Munger, like how do you, how do you get a great wife and you deserve what? Did he say that? Yeah. That's great.

Yeah. That's something along the lines. That's a good idea. But as you mentioned, that's a daily thing. I'm curious about the Jim Collins specifics of what do you do to deserve a great wife every

day? In any given relationship and I don't know other people's relationships, it's more a matter of how the two of you weave together. Sure. So for Joanne and me as a couple, what works really well, part of what works really well,

is that Joanne is really good at seeing things clearly and she's really good at seeing what's need to tension and very, very good at articulating it. So that's part of her encodings and her capacity as a person. I'm encoded to hear it. Somebody once asked Joanne what she thought my greatest strength was.

And after thinking about it, she said, Jim takes critical feedback better than any person

I've ever met.

“And actually, I think that's, that I hope that's true, that not necessarily compared”

to others, but Joanne sees what's needs to tension, I hear it, then we adapt and adjust. And I think that that's sort of the inner flywheel. One of the others is life's difficult, right? You go through whether it be disease events or whether it be other clips you go through life or difficult times.

And one of the things that Joanne helped us see is that when life gets really difficult, when you circle the wagons together, you always make sure you're both on the inside of the wagons with the guns pointing out, never at each other, never at each other. You are always together. And I think that that has helped us through the inevitable challenges and difficulties

of life. You know, on a daily basis, it's a lot of really simple things. As much as possible, well, I tend to get up before Joanne and often have a big creative

bubble, but as soon as Joanne's up, I kind of first hour of the day is time together.

I make her a latte. It's a very good latte. I'm a coffee elf that turns out for Joanne's, I make her a latte and she has a latte.

what she thinks about them because her mind is so sharp that I love what she curates, what she chooses to share.

“And then we often talk about it, but more I really love to hear what she thinks.”

She often picks up, like, what might do an article on kind of the implications of current fed policy in the context of ten years of essentially close to zero interest rates and the way that that is affected, the way economics work and it's interesting. And then I love to hear what she thinks about it. Wow.

So it's funny that we're in the studio where you recorded your audiobook because I'm listening to you talk about this, then ten minutes, then nine, then eight, then seven.

When she is trying to win that Iron Man race and all of a sudden, she basically dies at

the end and she's getting caught by everybody else. Can you go to that 1985 Iron Man and Hawaii? You write so beautifully about it. You speak it on the audio book. It was like a movie for me. I'm in the gym listening to you describe what happened

that race and then ultimately the ending of it, too. Yeah.

“Joanne is really an amazing athlete and she did indeed become World Champion, one the Hawaii”

Iron Man in 1985. She was the first featured female athlete in Nike's famous just do it campaign. In the 1980s, it's actually, there's a story in good degree, but it's a really true story. She had been working at Bane, a consulting firm.

She had admissions to Harvard and Stanford Business School and she had, she'd won the

honors thesis of prize for her honors thesis in economics and as an undergraduate and she was Phi-Bady Cap, she had all these things. All these things that she could have gone to do, kind of normally think a person would do. But she still had this athletic side of her and one day, we're sitting at breakfast and she says, "I think I could win the Iron Man."

She had some evidence of that, right? She didn't some races, done better than she expected, done a really heavy bike and some stuff like that. I looked at her and I said, "I bet you could." And so she quit everything, she turned down all the graduate schools, she quit her job and

as one of the ways in which we have been really good together is we make really big bets together. And she went all in on committing herself to this path and towards pointing towards winning the Iron Man. So we get all the way to the 1985 race. She'd already now been full-time racing, professional, all that, but she'd had this hamstring

injury, all that season that limited her running training to something like 16 or 17 miles a week.

“If you've run marathons, you know that you should probably be running at least 30, maybe”

50 plots for the marathon part of the course. She could only run limited to the, say, 16 miles a week. So she had a good swim, great bike. And she came off of the bike with a really solid lead and by the time she got to 10 miles left in the race, she had a really size of a lead to sort of picture what the Hawaiian

Iron Man is like. It is brutally hot, it's on the cone of side of Hawaii, so there's no real vegetation. I mean, it's just, it's a brutal course. So you racing not just other athletes, I mean, you're just also trying to survive the course. And so out there on those lava fields in the marathon course, there's this turnaround,

and she had 10 miles to go back into town. And that hamstring injury caught up and the limited training that, you know, the way to curtailed it caught up. And her 10 minute lead, which she'd built up by that point, started to shrink. And then there's a nine minute lead.

And then there's an eight minute lead. And then there's a seven minute lead. There's a six minute lead. And she's getting closer to the end, but the time is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. And there's this moment.

I was able to see parts of this on the feed from the ABC water, the sports truck that was kind of in front of her. There was this point, a few miles from the end, where she just stops in a little lava field.

I'll never lose the image of this.

She just stops. And I mean, I don't know how you see pain, but you can see the incredible discomfort. And she sort of looks down at her legs, and she's massaging your legs, like just desperately hoping they would move and kind of just doing anything, just like almost like pleading to run.

As this moment, she kind of looks up at the sky, almost like pleading. And then there's this shift. Her gaze fixes somewhere down the road. And you just see her go almost calm. And somehow she just starts to run.

And she ends up running and still the lead keeps shrinking, three minute lead, two minute lead. It ends up winning the race, ten hour plus race by something like 92 seconds or a random

And it was, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I admire Joanne's so much is that there was no guarantee she would win that day. And in any competitive elite competitive thing, there's no guarantee that you'll win, especially when you get to the highest levels. Lots of things can happen.

And in our case, dealing with the injury could happen. And so at some point, you're racing for something else. And Joanne described it to me as you're, in the end, you're really racing for self-respect. And do you know whether you've got first or third or tenth or whatever, do you know and only you'll know that when I was all said and done, you couldn't have run a step faster.

You could not have run a step faster. And if you know that you couldn't have run a step faster, then that's actually winning. And Joanne knew that he did win. That was life-changing for her. But she also carried away that winning the battle for self-respect, because it's one thing

to sit here and sort of talk about the importance of doing that and all of that.

It's another thing about there on this lava fields with your body falling apart, an incredible

discomfort. And you've already been going for nine hours, and you just want to stop. And you know, it's at that moment. And it's at that moment when it would be so easy to capitulate, to getting to the end of the race and having not expended every single little bit that you had to do, because

you can talk about it here, but to be there in that moment, in that searing heat, with that level of discomfort, with that level of exhaustion. And at that moment, you don't break. That's where I look at it. It's just like, yeah, I'm very dwell.

That's really, really cool. I also think it's an amazing metaphor for, you know, what to make of a life and how to live a great life of miles Monroe, this idea of dying on empty. There's gonna be nothing left, man. I'm gonna give everything I got.

You don't know what that day is coming. We don't know what that day is coming, but I got to do that every day.

“And I think that that story kind of like brings that to life for me, of this idea of just”

getting after it. Like, what's the point and not to? And it's interesting. So in the way that there's so many ways, it's impossible to envision the things I've done without Joanne's fingerprints all over them.

And one of the ways that she has fingerprints on things is their times when I'm writing that I'm on the lava fields. And so when I finish a book like with this one, what I want to know is I couldn't have written one sentence better, same idea, right? Now later, I could go back and I will learn things and I'll hopefully improve as a writer

et cetera. But what I'm done with it, I know that whatever flaws I might see later at that moment, I couldn't have made it any better. I didn't leave anything out, that anything I could see to make it better I did before it was done.

And there have been times and back on one of my earlier books, there was a chapter I was struggling with. And I was lost on the lava fields, I was cramping. I was suffering. But this chapter was really not working.

And so I remember sitting in my home office and Joanne had given it back to me with a lot of critical feedback.

And again, I take the critical feedback well because it'll make it better in the end.

And I go back to work on it and I'm working on it really hard and I like I put everything into making it right, finally it's like, okay, I got it and I give it to Joanne to read. And I don't remember whether it was the same day or another day, but I'm back on my desk

“to rank up into my home office and she just, she says, you have to do it again.”

It's still not there. And I looked at her and I said, but I can't. I can't, I don't have an in me to do it again. I don't have, I don't know how to make it better. She says, you have to.

It didn't matter that I didn't feel that I can't. So what I was getting from Joanne was essentially, she wasn't saying that's, but it was you're on the lava fields. This is the moment where like you just want to say, this is it. I'm done and she's like you're not.

And I remember the pain of rewriting that chapter again and then again until finally she's

like, okay, that's the very best you can do that truly as you can, now you can put it in. And so I don't know how I found it other than there's no way Joanne is going to let me let it be less than that. When you're stuck like that, do you go back to research? Do you try to just look at a blank page?

Do you call a mentor or a friend?

“Because I think there's a very normal feeling for writers and thinkers where you're sitting”

there saying, I'm reading this, I don't love it, it's okay, but it's not good enough.

For me, what it is is that if a chapter isn't working or something isn't working, you have to go back to a simple premise, which is that writing is thinking.

And the reason that you work so hard on writing is ultimately to discover what you think

in the most clear way possible and to sharpen your thinking is the ultimate testing ground of your thinking. So what I do is I go back and I say, okay, this isn't working because I'm clearly not thinking well. My thinking is not clear, I'm missing something logical, something rigorous, I'm fuzzy

in here somehow. And the reason the writing isn't working is because my thinking isn't working.

“And so I've got to go back and think, what is the clear conceptual line and point here?”

And how does it tie? Now once I reclarify that, then I can begin to put the text more around it and the narrative around it and the data around it and things like that. But I could have all that and if it's sort of think about it this way, imagine sort of think of the through line of the thinking is like your skeleton.

You could have all the muscle and blood and everything else. But if it doesn't have a good skeleton, it's just kind of a blob. And so if something's not working in the skeleton, if that's not clear and really sharp and good, it's going to be blobby and fuzzy. Even if my bicep is good, if it isn't hanging on a good framework, it doesn't matter.

And so I go back to where is my thinking flawed? And once I go back there, sometimes the way I do that is I go back to the data, right? And I go back and I say, what is the data really telling me here? What is the evidence from the research really telling me here? Where have I gotten maybe way laid by something that I thought was really interesting, but

really isn't what the data is most trying to tell me. And usually it resolves itself, but not necessarily easily.

“And that chapter was, I'll never forget.”

Which one was it? It was one of the chapters in great by choice. And it just, it was a really important chapter that my own writing was just struggling. And I had conversations with my co-author, Morton Hanson, and we also worked on it together. Of course, we need to think together.

Yeah, yeah. I had 20 mile marks. I'll never forget. Yep. We implemented that work.

One of the things I like about this book is I think, especially now, leaders are almost not allowed to change their mind, especially like politics, their flip floppers, where you have a whole section in the book that says, "I used to think this." Now I think this. And there's, I don't know, 20, 50 layers of that.

Yeah. I used to think this. Where this book, doing this work over the past 12 years, has transformed you, as you've said.

One, can we focus for a second on this idea of that excellent leaders are willing to change

their mind or willing to update their thinking because the evidence has presented itself and shown, actually, I was wrong, or at least a portion of my thinking, use to think two versions of luck. Now, there are three versions of luck, right? That's one example.

So, I would love to hear your ideas, if you're working with leaders saying, "No, no, you're supposed to change your mind."

“That's how this works, if you're actually thinking.”

Yeah. So, let me just sort of step back right on this a little bit, because I sort of think of it as, so there's kind of maybe two or three different layers of that. One is that, and something that I want to be really clear on is that when I look back over my prior work, anything that made it to a major concept level, like level five, the

flywheel, first two, then what, preserve the course to emulate progress, all those key

I just 20 mile march, if we did our research right, we should never have to go back and

say 20 mile march is wrong, or level five is wrong. And I can say now looking back over decades of work, that the primary concepts that came from the research never had to go back and say, "One of those fundamentals is wrong." However, what does change is my understanding of the evolves. So, when a first row could great, right about the level five leaders, and I put a lot

of emphasis in the writing about that they were more reserved, they were often shy. You know, those are characteristics of the level five that were in that book, but what I later came to understand is that you can actually have very colorful and very flamboyant level five. So long as it says, you can have personal humility and indomitable will, but in a very

colorful and charismatic package, and that also came to see a used to believe, for example, then this is back on the prior work, and I'll talk about this because I have a question for you about it. But you all used to believe that are used to be more pessimistic about people being able to become level five.

It was such a high standard, and I thought, "Well, maybe there's

I knew what level five was, these humility and will kind of combined leaders who were able to funnel all their ambition and do a cause or a company that's bigger than they are and do it in a way that is inspired versus inspiring in a way. But over the years, I would have said maybe less than 20% of leaders could become level five.

“Today, I believe more than 80% of leaders can become level five.”

And so that's a place where even on my prior work, level five still level five. But my belief in my understanding as how many people can become level five has completely transformed, an incredibly optimistic about the capacity of people to rise to become level five leaders, all kinds of people to rise to become level five leaders.

And so I'm always evolving in my thinking that the foundational principles start to come

out. So in this book, we have the concept of encodings doing what you're encoded for. I'm convinced that when we have our next conversation, however many years down the road, my understanding of encodings, it'll still be encodings, but we'll have advanced considerably. Right?

That's the joy of learning. Now, in this work, though, because we all have our theories of life and our philosophies of life and our presumptions about how life works and so forth, over the course of 12 years of doing this study, there are ways in which all these ways I used to think life work to this best just got changed.

And as I'll because those original views I had were based on research, the original ones, what they were just my own kind of views on life. But having done a 12-year project in 10 years of research, I can kind of see that a lot of ways I used to think really got changed by the research, so my thinking changed and my emotion changed.

But I have a question for you as we sort of go into this. So I'm curious, so you think, look at that list of the 15 layers of ways in which I just

“changed in the way I think based on the evidence.”

As you read the book, and it's got a mountain of evidence behind it, it's not Jim's opinions, this is what the study showed me. What for you might be things that they get after having read the book, you would say, you know, I used to believe this, but actually having read what you found in the research, I would kind of now have the change ways in which it might have changed the way you think

life works at it's best. I just brought up luck with you. Yeah. So I wrestle with this, I wouldn't have it to ask you about it too, because I'm maybe changed, maybe not, that I like to think that luck plays a smaller role than maybe now

you think, but maybe I'm wrong. I get the idea of who luck and believe in it, and I think there's something very real there. I think the luckiest thing for me personally was when where and to whom I was born to and who they remain in my life.

And that by the way, congratulations on it from just luck event. Very much so. You didn't cause it, none. But when you look back, you'd like to think about your talent and work ethic and grit and resilience, but older me would say, I was like 5% lucky, and now I would probably say

it's 95% lucky, and that's some of the stuff that you talk about, because you have

you added a third version of luck now.

“But I think that also comes maybe with maturity and age and reading more and having conversations”

with guys like you to say, dude, you grow up thinking you're the man and you're special and you're awesome and then you realize like, well, a lot of it's not your fault. It's because of all the lucky things that have happened and then you've tried to capitalize and make the most and work really hard and be prepared and make the most of our opportunities. So let's just take this for us.

All right. So what's really interesting about this, there's a whole chapter in the book on the Relat Wheel of Life. Yep. And I think the, I mean, objective reality is you, we have to accept that there is a lot

of luck that happens in life. And my colleague Morton Hansen and I got very interested in the question of luck back when we were working in Great by choice, and Morton's a wonderful methodologist and a wonderful colleague and partner. And together we said, you know, nobody has ever really looked systematically, at least in

the world in which we'd studied, I won't roll this luck plan all this. I mean, it could be that everything we studied in Great companies is like a giant equation

where there's level five and first two and there's all these things.

And then there's just this giant residual variable at the end, called plus L, which is oh, yeah, and be really lucky and so, but it could be right. So we said we have, we have to study that. And so with Morton, we said, well, if we're going to study it, we have to define it.

I mean, really clearly rigorously, because people toss around luck, well, what is luck? Luxon event and it's an event that meets three tests. You didn't cause it. So when people say you make your own luck, by definition, you don't. If I get a cancer diagnosis tomorrow morning, that's a bad luck event. I did not make my own bad luck.

If you just happen to meet somebody, you have no expectation to ever meet and they become a mentor in your life, the becoming the mentor might be something you did, but the random chance of meeting them might mentor Bill is here who play a huge role in my life, closest

“thing to a father ever had, how did I end up with Bill in my life?”

I was trying to take somebody else's class at Stanford. That class was full. So literally the random course sorting mechanism threw me into this guy named Bill is

here's class, the first time he ever taught, never heard of him, didn't know who he was, random

chance I'm in this class, assigned by a computer. And there's the person who ends up being the closest thing to a father in my life. I did not cause that. You do not make your own luck. Luck is not something you caused.

You did get into Stanford though. Sure. That's a different question. You can set conditions, but Bill, that's a luck event, okay. So a lot of things you're doing in life, but luck event you got to be really clear.

You don't cause whether the coin comes up heads or tails, you just don't. So one, it's an event you didn't cause, two, it is a potential significant consequence, go door bad. And three, it has an element of surprise, it either comes as a complete surprise.

“Or you didn't see it coming, or you didn't know what form it was going to take, right?”

Or the timing of it was a surprise. All right, there's a lot of elements that any event that meets those retests, you didn't cause it, potential significant consequence, go door bad, and a surprise in some significant way. It's now a luck event.

Once you have that definition, you can then do a very simple analysis, which Morton and I worked very hard on. We were studying entrepreneurs at this point who started some of the greatest companies in

the second half of the 20th century in comparison to other companies that got started in

the same industry, same time. And then we could ask a very simple question, were the big winners luckier than the comparison. And this is where we get to and it eventually comes over to this idea we'll apply to people. But what the data showed is one, there was a ton of luck in the building of these companies. But the big winners weren't luckier.

And that was the first key punch line was there's a lot of luck, but the big winners weren't luckier. They didn't get more good luck, they didn't get less bad luck, they didn't get better timing of luck, they didn't get bigger spikes of luck. So on the one hand you have a lot of luck, on the other hand the winners weren't luckier.

But what they had was when the luck events came, they made more of the luck events that walked in the door. Good or bad. They mitigated the bad ones, they managed their lives to be able to absorb the shocks, managed their companies to be able to do that, but when the good luck events came or bad luck events

came, they had a way of making more of those luck events than others did. And it was the return on luck that was the change variable. You'll get luck events, all get luck events, a question is what will you do with the

“luck events when they come and that return on luck?”

Now, park that for a moment because that was clear in the data, get into lives. And you start looking, there's no way you can look at these lives and not see a ton of luck happening.

There's good luck, there's bad luck, ultimately what we came to see through this study

made clear to me is there are three types of luck. There's what luck I get a cancer diagnosis bad luck event or something just breaks my way and in a really good way and it could just be a good luck event, right? Or it could be a good luck event in the sense of like you're riding your bike and you just make a turn and you end up finding something really interesting down the road and whatever,

right? There's who luck and I think this is the one people often underestimate Joanna's who luck for me, Morton Hansen who luck for me, Jerry Poros, my research mentor who luck for me, Bill Lizier who luck for me, these people that intersect with your life and building the relationship is the return on who luck.

And then the third is this one that became clear in this which is the sight luck. And this is when what you're doing just happens to the luck of kind of the surrounding zeitgeist is this huge accelerant for what you're doing and so if you take Jimmy Page who is the guitarist, right? The luck event was that his family had moved across town in London and he was a kid.

And in that new house the former owners had left oddly one thing behind a guitar. There's just this guitar in the new house that you just sitting there, a house is empty except for a guitar and in walks this young kid Jimmy Page.

“Then you got to remember now, this is in Surrey, it's near London, it's going to be around”

the late 50s or early 60s and the whole blues rock explosion is about to happen. So he's in this place where all this is going to happen. He hears music coming over from America. He hears like Elvis Presley, Baby Let's Play House and wonders if he can replicate these cords.

There's the guitar, right? So the what luck of the guitar, he had wonderful parents who were supportive. So he had who luck with that, who luck just down the road and the fact that Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton were in the same neighborhood, right? And then just up the road, there were all kinds of wonderful things happening with music.

And he played sessions, he was background guitar on some of the great songs with some of the great bands of the early 1960s, which put a right in the middle of what then became the explosion of British rock, which he was in the middle of when he and Robert Plant and John Bonham and John Paul Jones all came together to create that great big sonic boom of Led Zeppelin and along the way, so he looked at Jimmy Page right and he kind of

say, well, he's got the luck of the guitar. He has the who luck of great parents and then like meeting these other four players. I mean the who luck of plant and page and bottom and John Paul Jones all coming together and to create the fifth element of the band, which was the four of them together with

the chemistry of all four of them creating the chemistry of the band that made this amazing

band go, this who luck and then they all happened to be in the middle of the blues rock explosion of British rock coming right, what luck, who luck, the zeit luck bang. And so you can see all of them, but on the other hand, think about this, there are a lot of other kids who probably socket cars, there are a lot of other kids who might not have once they recognize the talent of when you met Robert Plant and how they could sing together

and then bringing in bottom and to recognize the talent of the other players and the who luck of all that coming together, there might have been a lot of others who wouldn't have done multiple sessions a day like just up the road getting everything he could learn. Yes, he was in the right place at the right time, but he lived music.

He went and did all these session gigs, he met everybody, he learned how to produce. Right, so what you have there is what luck, who luck was at luck, but what made the difference was with each of those Jimmy Page got a really high return on luck and it was

the return on luck that ultimately creates the great accelerator because lots of other

kids had that same luck. But don't make the most of it. Right, part of it too when you, again, this maybe this comes from a true, when you realize some of the luck that you've gotten in your life, to me it's really inspiring.

“I use it as fuel to say, well, when you've been given a lot, you should give even more”

leave a positive debt in the world, leave it better than you found it and so like the more you realize the good luck that you've had, I think at least, the more of a responsibility you have to make a positive difference for other people, try to help them try to put something out that is useful, that is entertaining, that it's fun, that will change your life, how much of it do you think of the luck that you've gotten, both good and bad, and then

use that as fuel to be so impactful in the world and to leave such a positive debt.

So for me, it's really interesting because the way I've always looked at it is that I

this is incredible, instinctive, trust in my curiosity, and I just have this, it's almost like just an article of faith that if I get infected with a question, then I have to answer, what would happen if you look at all these people going through these different cliff events and how their lives unfold, what would you discover, why do some companies make a leap from a good degree, when others, the world in the same conditions didn't, whatever the question

happens to be, what really is luck and how does it really work and what role does it play,

“I mean it's a great example of like, I'm curious, I hope our work has an impact, right?”

But what really drives me in doing it is I'm too curious to stop until I've resolved my curiosity. And so if you think about what back back into the classic worth the notion of the fly will, right, my fly will, I have a fly will and it's very clear, it starts with at the top

help, but want to conduct research and to study and to learn and do these monster projects,

“five year projects, seven year projects, 10 year projects, and if I do that and have structured”

it well, well then I can't help but want to go from chaos to concept out of all that evidence. I can't help but want to find the ideas like level five and first two and things like that out of the research makes sense of it, and if I do that then I can't help but want to write it and to teach it once it's clear in my head, I can't help but want to do that. And if I do that then I can't help but I have impact.

If I write it well, if I teach it well, then you look around and this I can't help but have impact and if I have impact through the power of ideas that came from the curiosity, then that will generate resources and funding to be able to go back to the top of the fly will and follow my curiosity and do the next big question. So if you really look at what's driving the fly will, it's all these pieces together and

the impact on the world, the impact on others is over here and the fly will as I come up from writing and teaching it, but the animating force is the curiosity and the belief that if I follow that and do all of this impact will happen and that will ultimately lead me to be able to do more curious questions and around and around the fly will return. And so for me, that's really how it works.

I never really overfought the kind of impact the work would have.

I just believed that if I frosted the curiosity, followed the curiosity, did the work however many years it would take, not stop and then when writing a chapter when Joann says, you gotta do it again, you just keep going that the impact would happen and you never know what will be this is the beauty of being a writer, you never know who you're going to reach. I don't tend to read reviews of my work. I don't find a very healthy to do that because

I love what James Mishner said. Critics are perfectly fine for telling me how to spend my money. They're not qualified to tell me how to spend my talent and I've always thought about that relative to like critics and reviews and things like that so I don't tend to pay attention but you want to do pay attention too. As I want to get a letter like I did the other day from somebody who had read my very first book when she first immigrated to this country and made her way as an entrepreneur

and picked up beyond entrepreneurship which I wrote with Bill is your way back in the early 90s

and it became the framework for how she built her companies that gave her this incredible path

and then all the things she's doing touching all these other wonderful young people in the world. Now, that actually means a whole lot to me. I had no idea that would happen when Bill and I were working on that book but that has been a guide in her hand for years and years. I don't write to get those letters but I love seeing the impact. I don't think about impact on like this

“grand millions of people scale. We've reached millions of people but that's how I think about it.”

I think about it as like an individual person. I got a text just the other day from the sun of one of my longest time friends who sent me a text and said, I want to thank you for the new book because I've just come through a few cliffs. I've been wandering through the fog. My dad gave me the book. It's proving incredibly helpful as I navigate and just want a text and say thank you.

I didn't even recognize the number at first because I had never texted with him before and he's

in his 20 somewhere, you know, probably navigating the fog of youth. That's really meaningful to me. It's a single person. It's a son of one of my best friends in the world. I'm not trying to make that happen. It just happens. That's the juice called the juice team because there will be people who send follow up emails and notes and they're going to say that conversation you had with Jim Collins and Boulder, Colorado, was the dinner table conversation with my family

and it led to enriching deepening of our relationship. Man does that feel good. Like, I'm human, that feels amazing when people say, hey, we tried to, I tried to chase down my curiosity because of that it's changed and helped some families life in the middle of wherever. The curiosity parts

“really interesting to me because I think I'm curious of how much you're encoded that come from”

birth or did you develop it? And for others, because I think it could be potentially the most valuable skill in the world as to be a deeply curious person about others, about people, about things. Sounds like Joanna's with these searching for articles. So curiosity, how much of it are you encoded to be a very curious person? And then to have the skills, strengths, ability to chase that down really hard. So great question because one of the things that I was writing about

you because I'm most curious about you. Well, the book is the book is though just so good with the

other stories as well. The other story, I don't focusing because honestly, that's one of the most

“curious about. So that's why we're talking about it. It's a conversation. So anyways, one of the things”

in the book, and I just ties in to a question about am I encoding for curiosity versus it being a really important thing in any life? Yeah. So I'm doing 2,800 years of people lives in this method of putting pairs of people rising together, sharing a cliff event together, very similar cliff in life, and then I see how they go through the cliff and how the choices they make coming out of it over the remaining decades. And I've learned from all these different lives. We have

professional athletes with the end of their careers. We have astronauts that came to the end of that. We have suffragists who won the 19th Amendment, had to figure out what to do with their lives. We have people who lost a spouse and their lives were completely ripped apart. We have people who got disease diagnoses and had to figure out how to reorient their lives. There's a lot of different versions of this. In any case, one of the big things to come out of this is this idea that their

lives tended to work best, whether it be before the cliff or navigating out of the cliff or long arc of life for the end, when they were doing something that they were really encoded for. And encodings are these kind of durable capacities of your sort of intrinsic construction that are there, they're just in there, and they're awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. Life then kind of shows them that they're there. And this idea that you have, you have a

constellation of encodings. I have a constellation encodings or like a set of stars. And in our life is kind of going along, and in any given moment, you can only see a portion of the constellation and it's like a window frame. If you are doing something in life that captures a big bright

“set of those encodings, you're in frame with those encodings. And if your life is over here,”

it only capturing maybe a couple little encodings, you're sort of out of frame, because you're not capturing a lot of encodings. And what we found is that people's lives tend to work best when they're in frame with the sediment coatings or maybe other grading coatings, so just not in frame right now, versus out of frame. So that's one of the, one of the things we found in the book and the same

person can look amazing when they're in frame and look not very amazing when they're out of frame

and yet they're the same person, right? And we see that as these lives unfold. So I started thinking because I was writing about other people, but I started thinking about, huh, I wonder if I really tried to write it down like, what are my own encodings? Now that I've done this study. Part of what got me thinking about that a little bit is you had kind of indicated that in some of your pre-questions, I thought, well that's kind of interesting because I haven't really turned that on myself in a

rigorous way of like, let's just write down what my encodings are. And I have a few of them. So

“there are two answers back to your question. First of that, I think I really am encoded to be curious.”

I'm just giving an example of how this comes to life. I mean, obviously comes to life in these giant studies and all of that. I take these courses. I've been taking them for years. When I first started teaching at Stanford way back, when it's 30 years old, I did not have to teach. But there was this friend of mine who had started a company called the Great Course of Series, teaching company. And his idea was simple. Every university campus has one or two professors that whatever they teach,

everybody takes their course, not because of the material, but because of the professor. And his idea was to get those professors all over the country, maybe all over the world, to do a version of their course, brought him to Washington, D.C. at that point, is the course, and then you could buy these courses. So I bought all of his because he was, I don't know, maybe 40 of them at the time or something like that. And I made notes on how people

teach. I bought them to learn how to teach because I figured these are the great teachers. I'll study their teaching in the game field. So I did all their game field. But what happened was I also fell in love. I had been taking courses on game theory. I had been taking courses on theories of philosophy. I had been taking courses on the origins of evil. I would be taking courses on, I mean, you just, you know, their scientific courses and physics courses and, you know,

courses on world history and all these things. And I just couldn't stop. So finally, I got all the

notes on the teaching. By just kept going, I've done maybe, oh, it's got to be a well over 300 of those courses now. And they're in almost every imaginable subject area. I'm doing one right now on, I just did one on constitutional law before that. I had done one on the rise in fall of Napoleon and the French Revolution. And before that, I did one on the entire 14th century and the plague. Then you have one on the history of the United States in the second half of the 20th century.

And then there's a whole thing, one on the entire history of World War I. And then there's what science knows about literature. And then, I mean, you just pick almost any subject area, an entire course on the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. I mean, just fascinating stuff. Okay, you look at and say, Jim, what's the theme here? The only theme is, I'm curious.

But it's really interesting. How does 5,000 years of Chinese history come to life today?

So you started these because you want to be, you want to learn, you don't have to teach. Yeah. And then your curiosity at the best of you when you're, oh, I just got someone, it's like kind of what reading does to you read good to great. And all of a sudden, I want to read all these,

“honestly, we have me, like I read good to great. It's like, I didn't really as books had the power to do this to you.”

Yeah, I think I'll read a bunch of books because it could literally change your life. So you're saying, I want to be a good teacher and studying that actual teacher, but then they pulled you in and now you can't start. I just can't stop. And I've been doing this for, I mean, you could, so you're encoded. I'm coded. And so this comes to the big point, though. We all tend to look through a lens of our own encodings and tend to think that that's the way life works. What I've learned through this research,

starting all these lives is the way life works is not my encodings. My life works because I'm in frame with my encodings. But it would be wrong for me to say, therefore, other people should lead their life the way I do. And the reason it would be wrong is they have different encodings than I do. So I do actually don't think that curiosity is a universal need to follow and really, no, it's my encoding, but there are feelings of skill. I think for some people to skill,

“but I think it's an encoding for me. What I mean by that is, I would not take the fact that it's”

a central encoding for me. And then pronounce that everybody should be more curious. Got you. See, that's where the key findings from this book is that you actually shouldn't follow the advice of anyone else. Because their advice will be well-meaning, their advice will maybe be coming from a wonderful place. Their advice may well have worked very well for them, but why did it work well for them? Yeah. Because it was something that flowed from their encodings and

they're not your encodings. So you take the two women in science in the beginning of chapter two, they start with Barbara McClentock and Grace Hopper. They were encoded very different, both monumental figures, one in computer science, Grace Hopper, one in genetics, Barbara McClentock. But if you look at how these two women are encoded, McClentock had encodings for just being lost in solving puzzles and going so deep that she

“could even forget her own name as she did on the exam once. She was once, she was so engrossed”

in solving puzzles that when somebody said, you know, you're driving across country to Caltech. You know, the dangerous is way back in the 1930s. And she was like, well, I didn't worry so much about dying in a car crash so much as I worried about dying in a car crash before I had solved the puzzle. But that was the thing. It's like, once she got her hands on a puzzle, she couldn't stop and she would just go deeper and deeper in studying the control of dreams and she worked

as a solitary scientist. She didn't get a telephone. When she won the Nobel Prize, she heard about it on the radio because they couldn't reach her because she just was the solitary, solo scientist off doing her and she loved that. That was so perfectly encoded for Barbara McClentock. You want to grace Hopper encoded to figure out gadgets, right? She's a little girl. She says, all these clocks in their summer house, she takes them all apart. She can't stop herself.

Where's that come from? It's encoded. I have to figure out how gadgets work. She gets on the first

computer the Mark 1 and World War II calls that the most beautiful gadget she'd ever seen. And that cast her life for working on computers for the rest of her life. But she had a difference ahead of encoding. She worked well through people. She worked well by being a pirate to advance the cosmic computers within side, bureaucratic institutions that tried to resist change. She even kept a pirate flag in her office and she would get people swept up at one point

she's in the Pentagon. She's leading all of this stuff in the Navy. She gets all of her teams, swept up in the idea we need better furniture for our little computer renegades. They go out in the middle of the night. They steal a bunch of furniture from other people's offices for their own. And then when called on it, she goes, well, it wasn't bolted down. I mean, just marble and of course, everybody would just love to be on her pirate ship

of changing things despite all the bureaucratic resistance through computers. Okay, now you look at these two women. One is encoded to work through other people and to get things done in institutions and create pirate teams. The other is, I don't even have a phone. I just love to get so lost in a puzzle I can forget my own name.

And you would never say that Barbara McClintock should try to do what Grace Hopper did,

or Grace Hopper should try to do. No, what they shared in common was not the specifics. Pirate teams or solitary work not having a phone. What they shared in common was their lives were in alignment with their encodings. So if somebody doesn't have the curiosity encoding, I would never advise them. You should be more curious. I would say you should discover your encodings.

And one of my big ones just happens to be, I'm incapable of being anything but curious.

With that said, one of the ways to find that out is you got to be curious enough to want to, I mean, go through some of the questions that you've brought in this book to be helpful to say, what am I encoded to do? Yeah, yeah. And that takes work, right? Because it's not just well, what am I passionate about, right? You read about this. Yeah. So what am I encoded to do? That takes some reflection, some thought, probably some help from people who know you really, really well.

“Internally, you have to be willing to question yourself and really think about that. So when someone's”

like, Jim, that sounds great. But how do I figure out what I'm encoded to do? What would you say? So I think you're getting clues to your encodings all the time. So remember the definition of an encoding. It's a durable capacity of your intrinsic construction that resides within a waiting discovery through the experiences of life. And so my own experience with those courses, I was discovering how curious I was because once I got into, take it as I began to notice,

and I was interested in learning everything that these folks are teaching as opposed to just learning how to teach. And then I can't stop myself. And then I could observe, I'm so curious,

that I could do a five-year project without getting any feedback basically to go five years into a

cave to finally get my curiosity satisfied. The fact that I could do that without deadlines, without pressure, without other people forcing me to do it, that I could just march every single day because I'm curious. Well, that's an observation of something that's very natural for me to do, to lose myself for five years or seven years or twelve years in a project. Until I'm done,

“so I'm getting clues. I'm acting. And I think what happens is life happens.”

So we talked about that thing with Jimmy Page, finding the guitar. But when he starts experimenting with the guitar, and he starts seeing if he can replicate chords, it's not just that the guitar was just in his hands, it's that the guitar felt really good in his hands. Right? And kind of noticing, I have an instinct for this. He could have picked up the guitar and maybe it wouldn't have activated music in coatings. Maybe those in coatings wouldn't have been there and what if that

was kind of curious or is this guitar there, but just leaving in the corner. But it was the experience intersecting with an encoding that's already there that the encoding kind of pops into frame. And so I think what really happens is you're sort of going along through life and then you have these things that when you hit them, they kind of click. And the key is to recognize when they click, that's natural instinct of it. Talk about your friend John Glenn from Ohio. He became one of

the great aviators, first American door but the earth. And he had, he was interested in flying from a

young age because his father bought him a flight on a biplane and he just felt interesting to him. And then through a lock event, he was able to get a pilot's license. A lock event was the,

“I think it was the department of commerce was offering to pay for people to get the pilot's licenses.”

And he just happened to see the card on the bulletin fort and then convinces parents against their fears of the dangers of flying to let him go do this. But once he got into flying, there were things that just suit him really well in the world where two came and exposed more encodings. So he's really good in combat. Well, there are lots of training that goes into being a good combat aviator. But also there's this thing of he's able to keep his heart rate

quite steady and calm in the face of speed and danger. Calm in the chaos man. Calm in the chaos, right? He's on top of a rocket ship that's about to be blasted into space back when, I mean, it was scary to do this stuff. And his heart rates like the same as when he's watching TV on a couch. So you discover that through the experiences, a could have been that maybe he would have gotten into combat situations and he's not calm in the chaos, even with all of his training.

But he was. And his ability to think clearly when things are falling apart, yes, they train that. But also there's just like how many people really do have the encoding that this is so dangerous, the getting nervous is just going to increase my chance of getting killed. So therefore I have for a main calm. Okay, that's all logical. But to be actually able to do that, breathe, focus, go to my training, focus on task, stay alive. Now, you discover those encodings to the experiences

of life and then you discovered more pedestrian encodings like John Glenn was, I think if them is like captain checklist. John Glenn was just encoded checklist. I mean, you know, there are some people who they just love checklist. Like they're almost even add things that they've

to life. What's on the checklist and check check check check check. He described himself as check

happy. He loved doing checklist. But actually think about how then when you learn how to fly and you learn how to fly into your situations, what keeps you alive is in part checklist. You stay on the checklist. You check cross check everything before you get into the chaotic situations. Think about all the checklist before the watch of a of a Mercury 7 rocket checklist checklist and you're going through all of your checklist. But the interesting thing is sure he learned about checklist,

but it was actually he was encoded for checklist because when he went to the Senate, he ran his office off checklist for he was just encoded for using checklist. So life happens and they expose encodings and then you trust those encodings and you follow him. Tony Morrison, the writer was encoded to get up and form the morning every day and right. Not what he taught

“or that. She just is that. And that's what encodings are all about. So the the question when it”

comes to leadership a lot. I've heard it a million times you've prioritized a billion times our

leaders born or are they made or a certain percentage of the population encoded to be leaders, to be the ones who take on those roles or can you grow into that? Can you develop those skills? When it comes to leadership as that thing, the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. My favorite definition of it. 2016 I learned to find you. Right. Is that it encoding that you're born with? Okay. So we have to spend a moment on this for your listeners because I

know many of them. This is for me. This is, I didn't set out to write a leadership book. It's not really a leadership book unless you think it was like leading your life. But in the last chapter

I write about people. Yeah. I write about leadership. Wasn't planning on it. But I don't,

so it's ironic because I'm going to even held a chair at West Point in the study of leadership for two years. There's a among a number of marvelous people. It's a two year rotating chair tremendous honor to serve my country in that role. Right. I wasn't, it wasn't formally in the military but I could contribute back to my country by spending time with the cadets and being one of the world's great leadership development institutions and is the class of 1951 chair for the

study of leadership at West Point. You would think that maybe I know something about leadership. But the interesting thing is I don't think I really understood leadership until I did this study. I mean, I understood it at some level, but this study really nailed it for me. And here's

“where it's really important. First of all, I kind of reject the overall question of leaders”

born or made because they just sort of see it differently now. It's not a bad question. I just think it's a early question, a primitive question. So let's take a look. You gave the definition of what I discovered at West Point by researching, learning, engaging and being influenced by generalizing how it's writings. Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. The more I live with that definition of what leadership is, the more I love that definition.

And just, again, think about this. You're walking down the street. You're just a person. You don't have a budget. You don't have a title. You don't have stars on your lapel. You don't have a team. You're just walking down the street. And you notice someone's in trouble. Could be their under threat. Could be their having a health issue. Could be a car crash.

“Whatever it is. Somebody's in trouble. And do you notice what must be done?”

And then suppose it's something like maybe you had to pull someone out of a car. Whatever it happens to be, right? And you realize you need other people to be engaged with you, to deal with the situation with what must be done. And somehow you then get other people who are on the street to join you and doing what must be done for this person who's in trouble. And you get it done. Okay, now let's stand back. Notice, there's none of the accutraments of leadership.

There's no budget, no title, no stripes, nothing. You're just walking down the street. But what did you do? You exercise the art of getting people to want to do what must be done right here. At that moment, no matter what else you're doing in your life, you are leading. So if you sort of change the word from leader to leading, you are leading in that moment, exercising the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. And in that sense,

what I have come to the conclusion is I say this is CEOs all the time now. That means every single person in your company is by definition a potential leader because every single person in your company,

is sitting somewhere in a seat as somewhere in a role where they offer the opportunity to see what

“must be done. And they have the opportunity in that moment to figure out how to use their”

artistry to get people to want to do what must be done. And it has nothing to do, they could be the person who stocks the refrigerator. And they see that we have a door that's too narrow for the cart to get in and what must be done is I got to get people to agree to change the door. But if you do that, you're leading. So by that definition, the conclusion I've come to, is there is no line between those who are leaders who those want. There's a line between those

who choose to lead. And those who don't choose to lead. And so that's cleared me every single person in your organization without exception. If they have that definition alive for them, can lead. Now, the thing that's really happened for me now, though, to see is notice that word artistry. Everyone's a different leadership artist because everybody has different encodings.

“And so the way you would get people to want to do what must be done. You're encoded. I know”

you now for a number of years. You have incredible encodings for what I would describe as

attractive persistence. You don't have a pushy tone. You're not aggressive in some sense, but you are persistent. And once you see what must be done in your view, you are relentless in your persistence. That's part of your encoding. You just kind of like, I'm just not going to let go. It's true, isn't it? For sure. It's very true. But that persistence, there are some people could be that way, and it's off putting. Yours is welcoming. I've just also part of your style,

right? The way you're put together. It's a relentless persistence of invitation. That's the way I experience your encoding. The invitation's not going away. So that persistence of invitation is a Ryan Hawk encoding of leadership that works really well for you. But it's your encoding. It's very you. Now, my encodings for leadership are different. My encodings for leadership

have to do with, I'm really good at creating a framework and then giving people incredible

freedom in that framework. And then I just trust they'll do incredibly great work. And because I trust them, which I do, they absolutely do not want to fail the trust they've been given. Now, I don't do that as like, well, this is how people will work. It's very natural for me. Yeah. I get great people build a great framework, trust them deeply, and they don't want to fail

“that trust. But it's not me like, well, that's how I'll get them. It's just I just do it. And so”

what we found in the same way, you look at how John Glenn led or Roger Sherman led or Katherine Graham led or Georgia Frontierry led, and we could go through pairs in the study of how they led in life. But they led all differently from each other because they all did the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. But they all did it differently because they were all had different leadership and coatings. And so one of the big things for those for you and for

the leadership audience that you reach so much, it's not a question of how other people lead. It's a question of what are your leadership and coatings that allow you to be peculiarly effective with those encodings at getting people to want to do what must be done. And if you do that, you are leading and you are leading brilliantly because it's reflecting your encodings. That for me is one of the big takeaways from this work. And what it means is it's wonderful to

read what other leaders do, but always keep in mind. They're effective because they're

following their encodings and they're not yours. So that's going to be, I hope people get that. Well, it just, this whole idea of like, it was out in the world. You may not have even seen it like that, great leaders or builders of companies aren't reflective. They just charge forward. And I just, it was so rigid. Did you see that marking? No, I haven't seen that. I'm seeing that. It was out on Mark Andrews and other people saying they don't reflect. They just go forward and they're just too busy

working and building and working and building. They don't reflect. And that's just the opposite of my experience in life. Yeah. Is there any part of that that could be true? I don't think it would be true for somebody who's are encoded that like yet. Yeah. But, but not true for somebody who's not encoded that. I just don't know anyone who's encoded that way. Okay. So let's, that's a sustained excellence over an extended period of time. Maybe it happened. I don't know. There has to be examples. But most

percentages of the leaders I've met with. Very reflective, very thoughtful, very curious,

humble, aggressive, relentless. These are some of the things that I see. Yeah. But they also know themselves well. And I don't think you can know yourself that well. If you're not willing to do that reflective work and actually think, right, those types of things. Well, I'm totally open to the possibility that there are some leaders. I'm thinking about some leaders for their encoding is a very unreflective charge that I just see clearer. And I go. But when my response to that would be

that's great because that's their encoding. Yeah. Yeah. That's their encoding. I wouldn't try to tell someone else to stop reflecting exactly. But that's their encoding. Right. And so after having done this research, I am extraordinarily clear that it's marvelous to listen to what other successful

“people did. You should just largely ignore it. I mean, it's marvelous. It might give you ideas.”

But everything that worked for them reflects their encodings. Yeah. Yeah. They are not your encodings. And so it will be interesting. And there may even be some fascinating things that help you maybe even see some interesting ideas, though. You can give you some ideas, casters, reading books, could give you some ideas to try to, like, experiment or figure out in my encodings. Or you might just resonate with some kind of kind of go. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. That rings true with my encodings.

And so therefore, if that rings true with my encodings, and this could work for me. So somebody might be really encoded for curiosity. And they might actually start taking these courses. Right? Because it expands their thinking. Not because I think they should do a bit because it activates they already recognize their own encoding for curiosity. But I think this notion of that there's, well, we've covered it well. And by the way, on their reflective piece, there are some

enormous reflective leaders. And that's the way that they're constructed. And they're really, really, really good at it. I mean, it's interesting because I'm thinking about the people in the study, there's a range on this question of them being reflective. I mean, one of my favorite people in the study is this guy Roger Sherman, who's the match to Benjamin Franklin. I have a lot of favorites. I had to probably bad phrase to you, one of my favorites, as if I have favorites. I love all the

people I study. But Sherman had a big impact on me. Because he's one of the most important

founders of the country. He saved the U.S. Constitution, not once, but twice. The first was he was the one that came up with the compromise that created a bicameral legislature. We should have two per seid in the Senate, and we could have proportional for the house. And that allowed the Constitution to actually get done. Otherwise, the large-state small states would have been unreconcilable. We would not have had, maybe getting at a Philadelphia with a Constitution.

Second came on the Bill of Rights. When he argued successfully against James Madison's proposal to introduce the Bill of Rights by rewriting parts of the Constitution itself, and Sherman was alarmed

“by that and said we should use the amendment mechanism. And that's why the Bill of Rights are the first”

set of amendments to the Constitution, is because of Roger Sherman's insight. But if you look at Roger Sherman, the way he led. So saving the Constitution not once but twice, there's only one person I know of who did that. That was Roger Sherman, tremendously significant figure in American history. But notice something. You don't know much about him. I'm sure his story ends too. But I didn't know as much about him as I did say about Benjamin Franklin, or Alexander Hamilton, or George Washington,

or Tom Jefferson, James Madison, right? And it's because actually Sherman was very much that quiet

reflective one. He, first of all, almost never spoke. It was very quiet. He was described by a later

biographer, said he was the personification of awkwardness. And he would sit in committees behind the scenes, and he would listen, and listen, and listen, and listen, and then wait for the precise moment

“to get clarinet's own mind about what was really essential. And at the exact precise moment,”

behind the scenes, often in committee when no one could see it, he would introduce just the right reflective point to turn the vector of American history. Roger Sherman was constantly reflecting constantly evolving his thinking. He initially was skeptical of the idea of the Bill of Rights, but evolved to see its essential point in then really pushing for the amendments as the way to do it. And then wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, and then the precise right instant. And so when I look at that,

It's very behind the scenes. It's very uncharismatic. It's very unglamorous, but enormously effective because it reflected his encodings, very different than Benjamin Franklin. So for anyone, for you, for anyone that's listening to this, there's so much others, as you all

“leader does this. You should do that as a leader. This is how the best leaders lead.”

Level five, I still believe. The art of getting people to want to do what must be done. I believe,

100 percent. The way you do it should be different than the way everyone else does it for a

very simple reason. You are encoded differently in composite than everyone else. Man, I could go all day. I'm going to wrap this up though with a with a final question, Jim, before our next time we talk, which I already can't wait for. And there will almost certainly be next time because we have had multiple marvellous conversations. And I have to tell you, it makes me so pleased to hear that that definition that we talked about all those years ago

has stuck so clearly in your brain. I think about all the time, bringing up all these meetings and sessions. And I'm doing keynotes and Q&As and they ask and I'll say it's art of getting people to want to do what must be done. All the time, all the time, Jim Collins and they're like, oh yeah, I was like, did you read good to grade or don't you read this stuff like that? It's pretty

“because sometimes they get complex and they're this long. I don't remember all that. I just remember”

that it's the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. So this is a, we started personal and personal. It's a fun one. I have no idea. It doesn't matter if you drink champagne or not, but this is called the champagne question. It's a year from now. One year from now. And we are, you and Joanne are poppin' bottles and whoever else you love are poppin' bottles. You're celebrating like crazy. What are we celebrating? What are you celebrating? I should say.

Well, I'm not sure I'm very encoded for celebrations. So it's a hard question for me to answer. Also, another commonality among people who have sustained excellence over time, they don't celebrate that well or maybe frequently enough. When this book came out, did you celebrate? When you turned it in, did you celebrate? No. When you hit list, any of this stuff?

No, I am. When, when do you guys celebrate birthdays? Like, so first of all, let's just

how I think we celebrate. Okay. I could, this is clearly a skill I could develop. I don't think it's part of my natural encodings, but you can learn new skills, right? Even if you're not encoded for it, and you could add it as something that, you know, just like, I might not be encoded to right legively, but I could probably learn the skill of righting legively, right? I think the

“way it really works in our life is celebrating in little ways all the way along. So for example,”

if we go for a wonderful hike or a walk and we catch up on the day, and we just are reflecting on maybe and it's often, it's not the big visible things. I mentioned earlier, but I really mean this, like, getting the text from the son of one of my best friends. Thanking me for the book. You know, I celebrate that. In fact, I went right down stairs. I said, "Joying, you gotta see this." I haven't told her any of the media coverage of this.

I said, "You gotta see this." Yeah. You know, it's that personal connection. That's what I celebrate is the personal connection, the personal impact on individual people. And my team celebrates,

well, I always like to watch the game film and figure out what plays I could have run better.

And, in fact, it's interesting. I'm doing that all the time. I mean, I do these, I just started a recent practice I call three by three, which is a real simple thing, which is that after almost any conversation, intense one, or teaching moment, or some interaction, or sometimes it'll even be the way I was in the lab at a given day. I just simply write down and write down three things that, one well, or I did well, or I could build upon. And three things that I could,

like, plays I could have run better or missed opportunities. And I just write them down and remind myself, and, and I do that. I've been doing that in some version for years. I'm now doing it systematically. I don't really post a celebrate. I just sort of post two, learn quickly and move on. And I spend a lot more time on, you know, so maybe you won the game 34-7, but what you really remember is there was somebody standing wide open in the end zone on the fourth drive and I missed them.

Right? What you won 34-7? Yeah, but they were wide open in the end zone and I missed them. And that's just how I kind of come at things. Doesn't mean I'm unhappy, or glum, or grimmer,

Wild energy. It does. He has him for everything from the second. You won't do this building. Yeah. Well, seeing you is a big part of it. I mean, I mean, so, you know, look, I mean, what I write down in my-- Yeah, I thought there was the idea to do this before.

Oh, no, I always, I always do this. I mean, it's sort of like, it's a, it's the other crazy thing,

because you obviously haven't even looked at it for a second, and yet you have these beautiful stories that are really in depth. In a way, though, sometimes you, a football coach, a good one, creates, they create the big play chart and all of the prep this stuff. It's all in here, but then the game happens. Right. And so you can just let it rip. That's right. That's right. That's the game. It's nice to have it, but like you don't really need it. That's right. It's the doing of it.

“But you need to, you need to have it. But what did I write here? The biggest reminder for today”

reconnecting with an old friend. Oh, man, you're the best. And that's like the top of the list today, walking in here, is reconnecting with an old friend. And so we just sort of start with that. But see, that's a celebration. Right. What could be a better celebration than reconnecting with somebody we've had marvelous conversations? I appreciate that. Yeah. I don't really know where to go, but I appreciate that. It means a lot to me. I'm sorry. Sorry. Yeah. I don't know. I think we're good.

Man, this is this is amazing. I really appreciate you. And the impact you've made in my life and so many others, it's just, it's awesome. There's hands that come here and do this in person with you. We definitely need to do it again. Yeah. We're going to go hike after this. Oh, good. We already won the hike yesterday. We're going to hike some more. So you're going to have a great day for it, too. It looks awesome. It looks awesome. And it's beautiful out here. I get why you want it. You and

Joanne would want to live here. It's awesome. Yeah. And so have a wonderful mini celebration with Branda and enjoy the hike. It really has absolutely marvelous to reconnect with an old friend. Awesome. Thank you. Well, again. Thanks, man. This is great. Sorry about that. Oh, no. I'm sorry. And it's all right. You did do that. Yeah. This is just awesome, man. You're best. I'm really, really

honored that you would come here and and do this in person and marvelous questions as always.

I make sure I got to give Miranda her book. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And thanks for all that work. That was crazy. You know, what goes into this can't help that. But but also, you know, I do the game film

“thing really is. That's how I think of it as like, well, I think there's a lot. It's almost like”

with this stuff to sitting there and typing and writing and handwriting and thinking of it so that when it comes. That's right. To it. You might peek everyone's smile, but for the most part, it's okay. This is how I remember all this. Yeah. Well, and I would imagine it's for you, the way it is like, so you think of the answer to the NFL coach thing. You probably have your first three or four players. You're going to run. Yeah. Yeah. But then the game happens. Right. Right.

You're going to lean in and it's like, you know, we're going to run against lead, but that's what the good coaches, the best ones are really, really good. That's when all of a sudden they come out after half time in the beta. It's like, yeah, wait. These guys could adjust them the fly. Yeah. That's so well. That's when you know you got to go to coach and you do a confident as a player right now. First of the ones, certainly. Well, we have to play on let's go run it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just a little bit. Yeah. It's just a little bit saying. There you have it's very good stuff. But they keep this thing. I know.

“I know. It's great, band. Hey. By the way, any recommendations of where we should be going?”

What an experience that was to be with Jim for a few hours in studio in Boulder, Colorado. I am so glad that Miranda and I decided to fly out west to be with him in person, listening to that back, watching it back is still a really emotional experience. For me, Jim is one of my heroes. And it can be risky to meet one of your heroes. There's a great chance to be let down and yet he surpassed all my expectations. So focused. So present. So kind. So curious. So thoughtful.

I'll treasure that day for the rest of my life. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm grateful that you're a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are send me an email, [email protected]. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Jim Collins. A few takeaways from my notes. There is no way to capture all of this and just three bullet points. But I'll get a few of them. Classify your luck. Jim breaks luck into three types. What luck? Who luck and

zite luck? The question is never whether you got lucky. The question is what you chose to do with it.

He said the critical factor is your return on luck. How you manage and make the most of the luck events that occur? How are you making the most of these opportunities? The three by three,

to improve three and three? A simple reflection that could lead to continued improvement for you.

Reflection is critical. And then leadership to choice. Leadership is the art of getting people to want to

“do what must be done. That is my favorite. And I think best definition of leadership. The art”

of getting people to want to do what must be done. Leadership is not a trait. Leadership is a choice. Anyone and any organization can lead depending on their desire to make a difference to take away. Nobody needs to wait for a title. Leadership is available to all of us right now. Once again,

I want to say thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do amazingly cool things like

fly to Boulder, Colorado and hang out with one of my heroes for a few hours, talk about leadership and life. Because you continue to do that and you also go to Spotify and Apple podcast and you write reviews, write the show, hopefully five stars, subscribe to do all those things you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love in a daily basis. And for that,

“I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much, talk to you too. Can we?”

So, Ryan, I'm trying to remember where you grew up. Oh, I. So, that's right. You mentioned in

your notes. Yeah, fellow Ohio and with John Glenn. Yep, yep, I love. We're in Ohio. I'm dating. Yeah, she's, uh, that was cool. Big there and then we'd love coming out to anywhere where you can hike though. Where's your favorite plan? Well, you're like rock climbing though with all the harnesses and stuff. Right? Do you ever

“do much of just like hiking up normal? I love hiking with you, Anne. Do you? Yeah. Where do you”

guys like to go? Oh, I thought we'd just go from our house because we have where are you guys close to my Boulder? Yeah, about 10 minutes from here. Oh, so you just get out and go. Yeah, just wherever. Yeah, just love to be moving in a nice, I don't know. It's just, just a walk as a great way to catch up on the day. Yeah. Yeah, but most of what I've been doing is going cycling with Joanne and the Dolomites and things like that because as we have had more years together, it's looking

for things that we can really enjoy doing together. Yeah. And now that doesn't mean we really cycle together because she's so much better of us. I was going to say, is she kill you? Oh my god. Yeah, probably. Well, she doesn't call us running about how good she is. I'm like, she probably crushes you as a cyclist like I just we start together. Okay. Really, that she's like gym your two slow. Sorry. She just is so strong. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, that's fine. It works out really

great. She got, she got really good at taking photos while waiting for me. I love it. I love it. I love [BLANK_AUDIO]