Please enjoy this transcript of my third interview with Jim Collins (jimcollins.com). Jim has published multiple international bestsellers that have sold in total more than eleven million copies worldwide, including the perennial favorite Good to Great. His writings and teachings are based on extensive research projects designed to uncover timeless principles of human endeavor that have had a lasting impact across all sectors of society. His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. He will be live at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 9, 2026. Click here to buy your ticket.
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Tim Ferriss: So, Jim, so lovely to see you yet again.
Jim Collins: It is. Yeah, absolutely. I really, truly just revel in the idea of a conversation with you.
Tim Ferriss: We’ve had two previous dances.
Jim Collins: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: And I wanted to thank you/blame you for a very difficult morning because I had done lots of research and reading, certainly on your latest work, which took quite a tour of duty to complete. And I decided that this morning, I would go back, starting early with a lot of coffee to reread the transcripts of our prior two conversations.
Jim Collins: Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss: And typically, when I do something like that, I have a few highlights, a few marginalia to refer back to. And I ended up underlining about 50 different things, and it caused a bit of a crisis in terms of where to start and what to do. But, I do have a lot of notes, and the latest work, What to Make of a Life, and we will certainly get to that, but we’re going to meander all over the place.
Jim Collins: You got it.
Tim Ferriss: And I wanted to start with, and I’m paraphrasing here, but a line in this new work, which is effectively that you have more energy at 67 than 37, you are now 68. And I wanted to dig into that for a minute or maybe even a few minutes, because looking back at the last two conversations, I wanted to spot gaps in the terrain, what had you not discussed?
Jim Collins: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: And I wanted to look at some of maybe the mundane things related to routine, food. Do you consume caffeine? Are you still rock climbing? Maybe we’ll start with rock climbing because I just had elbow surgery and I’m looking to get back into it, are you still climbing?
Jim Collins: Not so much. I’ve been doing cycling with Joanne. She has gotten me into going off to Italy and the Dolomites and places like that to do these huge mountain passes, and it’s something we can share together, and with whatever years we have left. And I think that maybe the intense aerobic aspect of that, if you have your heart rate above 160 for an hour, two hours, I mean, and spiking into the 170s, I think that does something for you. I’m not sure what, but I actually think that’s part of it.
And then I just have other ways, I can’t really explain entirely. In fact, my team has heard me say multiple times, “Where’s all this energy come from?” Because it’s only increased. I really do feel that I have more energy. I had a lot of energy at 37. I had a lot of energy at 17. I have more energy at 67 when I wrote that, 68 now. I mean, I need less sleep. My clarity, if anything, I think is higher.
And I mean, I really, really look forward to 4:00 a.m. because that’s the point at which I give myself permission if I’m awake to leap into the day. And it really is true that I will wake up and I will think to myself, “Please, oh, please, oh, please let it be at least 4:00 a.m., so that I can get up and get going.” And that is, it’s hard to explain, but it’s that sense of almost childlike anticipation to get up and get rolling is palpable. It’s there almost every single day.
Well, I do get one, we might have spoken about this in our first conversation, but I’ve always been a morning person. I actually figured out how to get two mornings a day, and that, I’m just really fortunate that I have the ability to nap under any conditions, anywhere, at any time I can nap. And I was doing a talk once and a few thousand people in the room and they had a nice couch backstage. And I was supposed to go on and I don’t know, whatever it was, 30 minutes or something. And I laid down on the couch and I just went bang, right out to sleep. I’m dreaming and I’m having a sleep, et cetera.
And they come back and they look at me and they’re like, “He’s asleep. Oh my goodness, he’s supposed to be on in five minutes.”
And they shake me and I’m like, “Okay, good to go.”
I can go sleep immediately, and then I can wake up immediately, and then I can walk out, 3,000 people and I was asleep five minutes before. I don’t know where that comes from, that’s just a fortunate thing. But what that allows me is I get two mornings a day. I get first morning after a night’s sleep, but then I get second morning, which is after a nap. And in fact, my team knows that I’ll sometimes say to them, “I’m going to go get ready for second morning,” which basically is I’m going to go take a nap, and then I get second morning. And then I’ve learned really systematically what kinds of activities really fit with what times of day. What I do in second morning —
Tim Ferriss: Is your first morning, Jim, sorry to interrupt, is that 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., something like that? What does your first morning look like?
Jim Collins: That’s ideal. I love the 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Joanne tends to sleep later than me, so especially when I was really working on the book, but this is a general pattern as well. I love to be up at 4:00. I have one cup of coffee that I make in the day. I don’t have caffeine after that. I travel with my own coffee because you really need to — the only place I go where I don’t take my own coffee is Italy. I make my own coffee and I start the day and that’s that one cup that I make and I get right into, usually that’s when I do my most intense creative work. And I love that three to four hours if I can get it of just the light changing, and bang, into it. Within 15 minutes, I’m fully into it and just go.
Tim Ferriss: When do you consume your first food typically? And what does that meal look like if it’s a meal?
Jim Collins: I always have something with my morning cup of coffee so that I have enough calories to keep my brain going. And I just grab something that’s fairly easy to eat with a cup of coffee, a KIND bar or maybe a yogurt or something like that. And then I have breakfast with Joanne. We have a morning when I’m in town, which is most days. I don’t like to travel that much. And once Joanne’s up and going, the day is I make her a latte. We joke that I’m a coffee elf and I make her a latte. And then Joanne curates stories from The Wall Street Journal or from wherever and she reads them out loud and then we talk about them.
Tim Ferriss: Is this after your first morning that you’re doing this?
Jim Collins: Usually after first morning, exactly. Yeah. Sometimes we might get up at about the same time, but most times I’m up early. And so then I have a more robust breakfast and really listen to Joanne’s curation, and I’m always just really curious what she thinks.
Tim Ferriss: Could I just add a little running commentary if I could?
Jim Collins: Sure, please.
Tim Ferriss: The first is that I’ve noticed this across a few different disciplines that as a comparison, Marcelo Garcia, nine time world champion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, considered by many to be the greatest of all time, he is incredibly good at going from effectively one to 10 on an intensity scale. So even before his finals match in the world championships, my friend Josh Waitzkin, who is the basis for Searching for Bobby Fischer, also very good at this, told the story of them trying to track down Marcelo because he was about to be in the final match for his particular weight class, it might have been the unlimited division. They couldn’t find him because he was sleeping under the bleachers. They had to wake him up and then he walked to the mat, shook his head and went from one to 10. And what Josh has said, and Marcelo echoes this certainly in different language, is avoiding the simmering six. So basically not being in this simmering six, but oscillating between rest or full activation, so to speak.
The second thing I wanted to comment on is the gear shift to shared activities and biking with Joanne, because I have seen in some of the most successful relationships that I’ve observed, and certainly that I’m modeling now for myself, that at some point there’s often an activity shift to focus on what you can share together. Kelly Starrett, very famous performance coach, PT, and other things, has done this with his wife, Juliet, who’s amazing, where he’s shifted from some of the things he used to do to actually mountain biking. This is in Northern California. So just wanted to make those observations to ask a very, very specific question.
You said you travel with your own coffee. I have to scratch the itch, what are you actually packing?
Jim Collins: Okay, yeah. So I pack Peet’s ground coffee, Arabian mocha Java, a cone filter, the filters themselves, a water boiler so that you can make sure that you have hot water, and have the whole setup that way. And then when I start the day, I get the whole system going, and it doesn’t really matter where I am or what time of day it is. It’s actually an interesting thing because if I’m going to do something where if I’m doing some kind of session that really requires me to be absolutely at my best, which I expect of myself anytime that I’m out there. There is a ritualistic aspect of it, but it’s also this sense of it doesn’t matter if room service is open.
It doesn’t matter any of that kind of stuff, that opening bubble of the day. Now, if it didn’t work, I’d still be fine because you always have to be able to — if something just went awry, you just adapt. But for the most part, you’ve got that opening bubble of the day and to be able to basically replicate that no matter where I am, no matter what time of day. It could be 4:00 a.m. East Coast time, or it could be 7:00 a.m. California time or wherever. It replicates that morning bubble, right?
Tim Ferriss: It’s like a boot up sequence that you’re able to preserve.
Jim Collins: It is. It’s a boot up sequence, that’s exactly what it is. And I don’t have to control any variables or wonder, are they going to have any good coffee or does room service run on time or the room service isn’t open at 4:30 or whatever. You don’t think about any of that stuff, you just move.
Tim Ferriss: So the particular idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, I think that’s what you say of successful people, right? In these boot up sequences —
Jim Collins: Yeah, their own idiosyncratic encoding. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there we go, and we’re going to really double click on this word encodings, is endlessly fascinating to me. I have a few of my own and certainly in What to Make of a Life, which I found very inspiring because at least in your cohort, and we’ll talk about this, they did a lot of their best work after 50, after 60, in some cases after 70.
Jim Collins: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: And I am 48 at the moment, so I found it very reassuring that there were so many case studies.
Jim Collins: Oh, you’re still warming up.
Tim Ferriss: I’m still warming up, which is very exciting on a lot of levels. I did note a few things, for instance, and I’ve got lots and lots and lots of notes that I took while reading the book. For instance, Alan Page, former NFL player, became very engrossed with running, woke up every morning at 5:19 a.m. exactly, right? 5:19. And you gave a list at one point, this is going to be a pretty odd segue, but you gave a list of some of the, let’s call it side passions or eccentricities of different people. And one of them, a lot of them were like, “Okay, okay, sure, I can see that. Some of my friends do that,” and then one of them was studying the occult. And I’m just wondering who was, who’s the person.
Jim Collins: Well, if I wanted to say who it was, I would have put it in the book. But that list, I think that list was really interesting because, so one of the things that I was very curious about because our people became really, once they really locked onto a big thing for a given period of their life. As you know from the reading, I mean, they were really, really focused, and the level of intensity and energy over years or decades or multiple decades they put into it. I was just curious though, did they have any room for anything else in their lives, or were they just mono maniacally obsessed freaks? And then I just went through just a very simple, okay, on that particular dimension, did they have really intense side passions of some kind? Even if the big thing was over here.
I think I can remember there was something like 80 some percent had some kind of an intense side passion. What I was struck by is the range of them. Oh my goodness. I mean, disco dancing, studying the occult, but also teaching Sunday school, and running, and mountain climbing. Some people were really into just hosting interesting dinner parties, others wouldn’t have been interested in that at all, but they had things that absolutely, they were incredibly passionate outside of the big thing that they focused on. I found that just an interesting data point, that they didn’t make a life where they had nothing else except the primary arena of their work to focus on.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s set the table a little bit, and I apologize in advance, I know you like to shine the spotlight on other people and research and data sets, but I’m probably going to turn the spotlight back on Jim, the bug called Jim.
Jim Collins: By the way.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a call back for people who listened to the first conversation.
Jim Collins: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: When we spoke, the second conversation we had, I asked you what was on deck coming up, and you said, “I’m five years into research on self-renewal.” And I really like this term, self-renewal. And before we go back to Jim, I guess this is related to Jim, but I’m curious how you thought about framing this book, self-renewal versus, say, the title What to Make of a Life, as I’m looking at it, how did you think about presenting this? And then if you wouldn’t mind, because we were chatting before we pressed record, I think our first conversation was your first long form podcast, and I believe this will hopefully be the first conversation about the new book that comes out. Just giving a little bit of context or genesis on how you wrote it, so you can tackle it in any direction you like.
Jim Collins: In my 30s, I came across a remarkable man, one of the many sages I’ve had the joy to be affected by in my life of John W. Gardner, who was a wise man in residence at Stanford Business School, Emeritus at that point, just down the hall for me when I was teaching there. He’d written a great book, a little book back a number of years ago on self-renewal, and I was very interested in the question of, I don’t know why I was interested, but I was just interested in why would some entities or some people have a life of continuous self-renewal rather than a life of this followed by just a long degradation.
Tim Ferriss: Peak, and then a decline.
Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly. And John encouraged me to consider doing eventually some research on the question of self-renewal. And I was off working on Built to Last and Good to Great, and I was working on my company research, but I still have my notes from long conversations with John about how you might think about self-renewal. That seed had been in there and it was gestating, and I thought someday I might return to that. Then what happened is I started thinking that question was always like, how would you actually study it?
And then a seed got activated that had been planted back a decade before that in my 20s. Joanne, who you know is so central in my life, we’ve been married 45 years, and Joanne was a world-class athlete. She was world champion in the IRONMAN. She was the first female figure in the original Nike Just Do It campaigns back in the 1980 with Bo Jackson and Howie Long and she was really constructed to compete.
And that sense of, when we talk later about [inaudible] being encoded for something, there’s just some athletes that they need to win. I mean, it’s a need, they need to win, and that was Joanne. When she came, when she gave up all these other opportunities she had in life to focus on ultimately trying to win the IRONMAN and went in on that. It’s like everything came together. We go off to Hawaii and she raced in ’84, ’85, ’86, and ’85 she won the World Championship in Hawaii.
There was a backstory to that race, which is that Joanne had a hamstring injury, and that hamstring injury just was chronic and it wouldn’t really go away. And in the race, it began to catch up with her. She had this 10 minute lead with 10 miles to go, and the marathon as you know is 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and 26.2 mile marathon in 90 degree temperatures and 80 some percent humidity on the lava fields. I mean, it’s just horrendous out there. She had a good swim and a great bike and she had this 10 minute lead with just 10 miles to go coming back into town. The hamstring caught up with her partly because it did limited her training and it was always there and she began to lose a minute a mile.
And I remember watching the ABC feed because the Wide World of Sports truck was in front of her and I could see the race unfolding. I could watch it in real time with the camera of the truck right in front of her. And you could see her starting to lose time, just nine minute lead, eight minute lead, seven minute lead, six minute lead. And you’re getting closer and closer to the end, but is she going to get there before somebody else does?
And then there is this moment, I mean, I’ll never forget the moment where she stops in the middle of the lava fields, and I mean, she has this, she’s just in extraordinary discomfort and pain. And she’s looking at her legs hoping they would move and she reaches down and she massages them and she pounds on her quadriceps and she looks up to the sky and it almost looked like she was pleading with somebody to help her somehow. And then she just fixed her gaze on the horizon and there was this stoic countenance that came over and she just started to move and then she started to run and she ended up winning a 10-hour plus race by about 90 seconds. And it’s like one of those things in life, you have very few experiences like that.
And then when we got back to Palo Alto, where we lived at the time, the hamstring just didn’t heal. She tried everything. Surgery, physical therapy, rest, stretching, you name it. And eventually, she just had to confront the brutal fact that her athletic career was going to end at her peak.
We were sitting there in a little townhouse in Palo Alto and we’re sitting at our kitchen table and Joanne just one day, she gasps out to me, and it was just one of those moments, it’s just etched in my emotional memory. She just gasps, “I feel like I’m dying.” And I mean, I had no answer. It’s not like you can solve that or anything like that. It’s just, “I feel like I’m dying.”
And in a sense, she was, right? Because that identity as a world champion athlete, this thing that she was so encoded for that she so loved doing was being taken away from her. And in a sense, it was dying, a certain kind of dying. And that seed somehow mixed with the John Gardner thing, because what happened is I somehow fused these together in my mind. I think that actually Joanne’s experience is what gave me the original interest in self-renewal, because I just didn’t have the language for it, I didn’t really see the connection so clearly. It was murky, but I think they fused together and I realized that one way to study self-renewal would be to look at people who go through what in the book we call cliff events, these times in life where life in some really significant way changes under your feet.
Either you choose it to change, or it happens to you, but there’s a before and an after, and your life is so changed at that time that you have to really reorient and reconsider. And sometimes those cliffs like Joanne’s are really monumental moments in life. They are real cliff events.
And I thought if I could find people, if I could study people at the cliff, and I could study their lives up to the cliff, through the cliff, and after the cliff and how they come out and how they constructed life after that, I would be able to have a method for understanding this thing that I used to think of as about self-renewal.
I just need to fill in a couple other pieces because yes, the creative journey of how I got here, but then as you know, I always like pairs. I like to have two entities in the same situation to sit next to each other. I did that in all my prior works. And so the idea was, wow, what if you could find pairs of people that were at the same cliff and their lives were really similar up to that cliff. And then you look at how their lives, how they come under the cliff, through the cliff, and out of the cliff. And then by looking at that, I would understand this process of renewal out here through this methodology. And so that’s when I started the whole journey.
Now, let’s just zoom way out. As I got into it and I really began, I selected my, I had my match pairs, I had my people who had gone through these cliffs, I was studying their whole lives. It was overwhelming in scale, this project. I honestly thought at times I might never be able to finish it because it was just so monstrously big. But it began to dawn on me the more I worked on it because I was looking at, you couldn’t understand this cliff out thing if you didn’t understand the whole life.
And so I had to study from their entire lives, right? And most of them are deceased, few are in their 80s, but basically I had the record of their lives pretty much intact. And all of a sudden, I began to realize two things. First of all, none of them thought about self-renewal as an objective. And rather what I really saw were people who achieved what I might call self-renewal, but that’s not what they were doing. They were leading their lives, and they were leading their lives through these cliff events and in between the cliff events, and somehow all the way through to the end for the ones that had passed away. I began to realize that what I had was a huge and rich data source for really the big question.
And just so that you grasp this, this has happened to me multiple times. Back in Built to Last, which was about visionary companies and enduring great companies and all that, Jerry Porras and I set out, our original question was to study the concept of corporate vision because it was, what would that be? It was back before it was something that anybody had ever studied. And then our method of match pairs of these visionary companies over long periods of history led to a much bigger question, which was, how do you build an enduring great visionary company. Which is very different than the smaller question of what is corporate vision and how does that work?
And so repeatedly in my journey, I’ve started out with what I think is the question, self-renewal, corporate vision, whatever, and I’ve ended up with the method leading me to a much bigger question that the method answers. And so in this case, all of a sudden, as I got deeper and deeper into it, I realized I’m not studying self-renewal. Self-renewal is a residual artifact of really the big question, and the big question is the title of the book, which is the question we all face with, which is What to Make of a Life? And we face that question when we’re young, you and I faced it coming out of the fog of youth.
And what I came to grasp is that cliffs are an amazing way to look at the question of wrestling with what to make of a life because when you have a big enough cliff, like Joanne’s cliff, like the cliffs in the study, you have to answer the question again. Part way through your life when you have one of a big enough cliff, you have to answer the question, “Well, now what to make of a life? Because all that’s done or all that’s changed.”
And then I realized there’s a third time, which is when you’re in the later decades of life, and many never get around to answering this question, and I hope they will after reading this, is, “Well, now what to make of a life so that my 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe my 90s turn out to be my biggest, most creative, most impactful, most interesting years, rather than sitting over here in inferiority to my younger years?”
And so essentially, it’s very similar to what happened with Built to Last, with Good to Great, whatever. I started with a narrower question, I came up with a method to answer it, and then realized that that method was actually answering a big question.
Tim Ferriss: Bigger question.
Jim Collins: And then I just gave myself over to that question, and that’s how I ended up really framing the whole book. And then as you know, and we’ll probably get into this, the seeds of that go all the way back to a shattered kid, trying to figure out life. That is really the creative journey. When you get the book, it feels like, God, it’s almost clearly linear, but you write that way because you want it to hang together conceptually, but the creative journey of how you get there is wonderfully dynamic.
Tim Ferriss: Well, a few things. So we are going to get to childhood, for sure, probably sooner rather than later. And separately, as I was reading this book, particularly given the end of our second conversation, I was really cheering for you because I am in the middle of a fog with a draft that is 850 pages long, and I won’t get into that, but I was like, “Oh, so there can be a light at the end of the tunnel.” Because honestly, I’m looking at this thing and I’m like, this rock just seems to get denser and denser. It gets harder and harder to chip away at it, so congratulations, and it was also very helpful as moral support to me.
Jim Collins: So are you in the fog on the book itself or in a general Tim wandering in the fog time?
Tim Ferriss: So I am, I would say, in the inverse of where I’ve found myself typically before, and what I mean by that is before, I would say I have had a lot of clarity around specific projects. Here is the book in front of me, here is the podcast I’m building. Here is the fill in the blank business project where I would have extreme clarity, and then in contrast to that, I would say broadly, for life direction, I would feel like I had less clarity.
Right now, and I am quite content with this for the time being, I have the flip side, which is I’m with a wonderful partner, we are very clear on where we’re headed together, and I feel like that is the Archimedes lever for everything else. I don’t feel like I have much to prove any more from a professional perspective, but I do also want to end up where you are in the sense of feeling like you have, or in fact having more energy, more fire within you at 67 than 37. I do want that, but on a project level, I have much less clarity in terms of what does Tim 3.0, 4.0 look like? Because I do love the podcast, I plan to continue doing it, but it’s also become one of the most saturated, noise-filled playing fields imaginable. And I think anyone who expects the same music to play forever probably does not anticipate the inevitable, which is probably a cliff of some type.
So I have a fog as it stands currently around a few things, one of which would be writing. So for instance, this 850 page behemoth, do I chip away at that, which I find a little bit draining, to be honest, so I’ve actually put it on the back burner, or do I say focus on a newer writing project that I’m very, very excited about? And is that in fact leaning into my encodings, which is a term we should probably define, or is it just the allure of the novelty of the new? And guess what? Surprise, surprise, as soon as I get into the mud, I’m going to still be paying the taxes that you need to be prepared to pay. So that is a bit of a crossroads at which I find myself right now.
Jim Collins: So my question for you is, so first of all, just for anyone who’s listening to this, we’re using the term fog, and I’m just going to put a quick context on that and then ask a question.
And so we just talked about the notion of cliffs and the whole study structure was around cliffs and so forth, and so I knew cliffs would play a critical role in how I look at things. I was really overwhelmed with the prevalence of fog in the lives that we studied. That was not something I expected to find, and fog are these periods of time where you’re either in some portion of your life or maybe overall in life at a given point where you’re lost, confused, befuddled, disoriented, uncertain. And there’s these clarity phases of life, like I’m in a clarity phase right now. I was in a fog phase about 2013, 2014, certainly in a fog in my 20s. There’s fog phases and these clarity phases, and every person in our study had these sometimes even extended episodes of fog, which I found very comforting in the end because the people we studied had remarkable lives when you summed up the entire thing, but they could lose a decade in the fog along the way.
And then in the wake of cliffs in particular, there seems to almost always be fog. So fog can come at any time for a variety of reasons, but the likelihood fog will follow a cliff, based on what we looked at in the study, is that if you have a big enough cliff, especially if it was unexpected, the fog is likely to roll in and can be very thick and very befuddling, so that’s why we’re talking about fog.
So my question for you is, I’m curious, as you are wandering around a little bit in the fog, and I think it’s a very interesting time as you describe it of, well, it’s this question of the things that you’d done up to this point, are you ready to be done with them? Are you ready to extend out in a different direction? All these sorts of questions that are swirling about. I’m curious if anything in the book, as you read it, illuminated for you or got you thinking about navigating through this fog?
Tim Ferriss: Well, I would hope so. I took a lot of notes, so either I’m a very bad note taker or there are things for me to focus on from the book. So I would say a number of things come to mind, and I could send you photographs of these if you’re curious at some point, but in terms of navigating fog, I think the first is rule number one, don’t freak out. And that was more of an interpretation than something you said literally, but in effect, hey, if you’re in the fog, guess what? Everybody ends up in the fog.
Jim Collins: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: So don’t panic, number one. And then there were more than a few things, but certainly a few things that I found helpful and also a few things that gave me terminology for some explanatory power of things that have happened to me in the past or things that I’ve done in the past. And we’ll definitely talk about this, but the concept of return on luck and different types of luck I found very compelling, and thinking of how you take advantage of or widen the aperture on luck. Because I think broadly speaking, luck is thrown around as something you either have or you don’t, and it lands on you and exerts its force, but it’s not quite that simple, and I think you put words to that that I found very helpful.
And then in terms of navigating the fog, I would say you talk about simplex stepping, which I think we may spend some time on, but I have, I think, upstream cascading questions that I want to ask you about first, principally around encoding. I would say that with the fog, there were questions that I began to ask myself that I’ve not yet answered, and this is part of the reason I was looking forward to chatting with you, one of which is how do I think about energy as a core currency of life? And the reason I say that, this is not taken verbatim from the book, but it seems to be fundamental.
Outside of accidents and so on, there is a point when you die, and that is the cessation of energy. And if you have all of the greatest intentions in the world, the best laid plans, if you do not have the energy to implement those things, to execute, I don’t want to say all is for naught, but you’re caught at a bit of a problematic situation. So when I’m reading about these different case studies, these profiles in the books, and there were so many fantastic ones. I really have to say, I love the Katharine Graham piece. It was just so compelling.
Jim Collins: Hard not to love Katharine Graham.
Tim Ferriss: Hard not to love, because you see people who are put into, say, cliff situations and they are unprepared, and then there are counter examples where people effectively have prepped for 10 or 20 years for the cliff they eventually face, and those are very, very different in a lot of ways. And you also, not to keep bearing the lead on this, have people who methodically find their encodings, and I want you to distinguish that from strengths.
Jim Collins: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: You have people who are forced into a situation, and thank God they just happen to have an overlap with the circumstances forced upon them and these inner workings that allow them to find their stride, as if Michael Jordan was sent to basketball prison camp, and lo and behold, what luck? He happens to be incredibly good and built for basketball.
So my question for you that I want to hit on before we dive into some of this is if I asked Joanne, “Why does Jim have more energy now than he did at 37?” How would she answer it? Because it seems to me like there might be a piece of [homing] in on encodings as a wellspring of energy, but you seem like you’ve always been pretty good at that, at least after some of your experiences at Stanford. What would her answer be, do you think?
Jim Collins: Years ago, there was a profile being done on me, and I’m not big on a lot of profiles. I’d rather just have people read my books and take away the ideas. But anyways, the profile was going to happen, and so I said, “If we’re going to do it, we’ll do it right.” And I invited the reporter out to Boulder, and he said, “I’d really like to spend some time with Joanne.” And I’m like, “Ooh, okay, here we go.”
Tim Ferriss: What profile is this going to be?
Jim Collins: So we go off to — so we’re at breakfast and he says, “I have one real question I really want to ask you. So if you could just pick one word to describe what it’s like to live with Jim, what one word would you use?” Okay, so you got a picture. I’m sitting there waiting for the answer, and always an adventure, inspired, energizing, creative. All these things are going through my mind as possible. She gets one word, and after a long pause, she just looks at him, completely serious, completely just straight, single answer — exhausting.
Tim Ferriss: It’s hilarious because I knew that word was coming, and that’s me projecting. I’m thinking about my partner. That’s hilarious. I literally in my head had exhausting.
Jim Collins: Exhausting, and so she would relate to the question. I think what she would say is that, yes, I’ve always had a high energy set point, and just as an aside, it’s not something I think I even put in the book, but the way I came to think of it is that we all have an energy set point, and maybe mine is just a reasonably high energy set point. And just to be clear though, I think that the thing I would want people to take away from what they read here is that whatever your energy set point, you can have variation around that set point, and the question is how do you lead your life in such a way that you’re on the positive side of that variation and the set point, and it sustains until you run out of breath?
Because so many, what happens is they reach a certain point and they go below the energy set point because of whatever sets of reasons and end up with maybe 20 or 30 years of their life essentially off the table, and that’s an unfortunate loss to the world. So I think Joanne would say, one, I’m one of those people who really set out in life somehow to end up expending my energy in things that I derive tremendous intrinsic pleasure from doing, the actual doing of it. That sense of if you’re doing it, you can’t not do it.
Like you, I don’t have to demonstrate that I can do well at what I do. I don’t have to worry about do I know how to, I don’t know, have a teaching moment or whatever, how to come up with the right questions to ask somebody running a big company. But if I sit down, I still get joy out of preparing for a moment or being at it, or just a sense of excitement that morning, because the actual doing is something that I so love.
I put in the book, and Joanne is the one that helped me see this, I’d always thought of myself as an incredibly disciplined person and everybody else saw me as really disciplined, and I finally came to the conclusion, I’m really not very disciplined. I am somewhat, but look, if you just can’t help, if you just can’t stop yourself from preparing, from getting ready to do the very best you can because you’re doing something that just so pulls it, like you can’t stop yourself, well, that’s not discipline. You’re just compelled. It’s almost a form of compulsion, which isn’t discipline. And if it’s sheer love of the actual doing itself, well, how’s that discipline? I just love doing it, so that’s one.
But I think she would also say that like you, I love having a big project, and this has been a huge project. So for 12 years from the time I first started noodling on this to when I finally finished the writing, when I wake up in the morning, I don’t have any question until the book’s done. Maybe I’ll go into a fog now. I had no question what was in front of me at 4:00 a.m. There’s always the project. Every single day, there’s the project, and that’s energizing, even if it’s huge and monstrous.
And then the third is this sense of extending out and circling back that I saw on all the people in the study that’s really interesting, and it’d be very interesting to see for you as well as happens with this, with this sense of this notion of radical reinvention isn’t really what we saw. There weren’t people who, quote, “radically reinvented” themselves. It was this organic process of extending and pushing themselves out into new modes or new things or new activities, et cetera, an extension outward, but then they would always find a way to circle back to things that they had built upon previously as almost a form of fuel to further extend out.
Robert Plant’s one of my favorite people in the study, and I love how what keeps him so full of fire for music and for singing all these decades later. And if you look at him, sure, he’s no longer in Zeppelin. He doesn’t need to be. He was extending out into bluegrass and he was extending out into going off to the desert and playing with trance musicians and all these kinds of really — and learning to blend his voice with Alison Krauss. I mean, utterly marvelous extensions, but with Allison Krauss or with some of his extensions, he’d come back and re-bring to life a Led Zeppelin song, and then they would do a bluegrass version of “Black Dog,” and just that sense of this extending and circling back.
Well, this study for me, you could look at it as I’m doing something radically new. Yes, it’s a new question, new study set, all that, but I’m also circling back, and to what I’ve always loved to do which is to take a big, giant, messy question, put a methodology around it and spend years figuring it out. So that’s consistent, that’s a circle back. The extend out is it’s a different question and different unit of analysis as both.
And then the last is this, and we talked about this I think a little bit in one of our previous ones, but I would really put it this way. When I was younger, I had a lot of fire, but it was really painful fire. It was burning hot, red molten lava in my stomach, almost like channeled rage, channeled ferocity.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know the feeling.
Jim Collins: Yeah. You know that feeling, right? And I used to worry that if I ever lost that, I’d lose my drive. And I think what’s happened, I know what’s happened, is the fire’s changed. The fire used to be like this molten hot, burning ferocity in the belly, and now it’s like this — it’s not red. I think of it as green and yellow and it’s like this sustained warming glow, and I do not have those kind of insecurity, prove myself kinds of things that are driving me, and as a result, my energy’s gone up. And I think that because the fire is different, because the fire is this sustained warming glow, it is just constantly generative, and I think that’s a really, really big part of it. That sense of like, you write a sentence and you look at it and you go, “Wow, that’s almost a good sentence.”
Tim Ferriss: So let me ask you about that color shift, going from the red to the greenish yellow. Is that a byproduct of age in the sense that you’ve amassed a corpus of work that at some point, you cannot with a straight face to yourself justify being red-hot because you’re like, “Look at this CV. I cannot with any sincerity say that I have anything left to prove”? Is that what provoked the shift? Is there something else? What actually happened that led to that shift in fuel, so to speak?
Jim Collins: First of all, I would imagine that a number of people, and maybe you yourself, relate to the raging, burning lava coals.
Tim Ferriss: Oh boy, yes.
Jim Collins: And you cling onto them because you feel you need them. And I guess I’m just a data point of one that I don’t need them to have even more energy, and so there is life without them that’s really wonderful and your best stuff, your best work coming from it. I don’t think it was, oh — I mean, it’s nice that Joanna and I don’t need to worry about are we going to hit the pavement and having no safety net and all that kind of worry and fear that we used to live with of just genuine almost terror of are things going to work? So it’s nice to not have that, but I don’t think that’s the essence of it.
I think it didn’t happen like a flash. I think a lot of what really happened happened as a result of studying the lives in this book. I really mean it. The last 12 now plus years since I started the first nibblings of this project in 2013, and the journey of doing this book so transformed me. And I think that I was probably prepped for that, but it was by somehow living alongside them in their lives, it was affecting me, and I think one of the ways it affected me is was I saw them — you just look at the sheer rapturous joy of Robert Plant blending his voice with Alison Krauss, or you look at this wonderful video I came across of Grace Hopper, the great computer scientist who invented software essentially. It’s an amazing story. Silicon Valley should know her story more, it’s really an incredible story. And she’s on Letterman at I think age 79, and she is like one of the most sparkle filled, fire filled — she just radiates out of that Letterman interview, and it’s just absolutely marvelous.
I could just go through case after case where what I saw was Barbara McClintock solving a genetics puzzle and her sense of she didn’t fear dying in a car crash, because there were all these car crashes that she was driving across the country so much that she feared dying in a car crash before she’d solved the puzzle that she had, because she just so needed to solve the puzzle. And every life was one of these ones where it’s like they got to this point where the thing that they were engaged in and doing was so reinforcing in itself, for itself, and I think somehow, just being so close to their lives while I walked through them had this effect on me, and it began to soften me.
It’s very hard to explain, but if you spent years alongside them at each step of the way through their lives, which is what I did, they rubbed off on me, and they all somehow got to this point, and I think that it just affected me. I can’t really explain it other than that it just affected me.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s look at another facet of this same prism, because looking at, for instance, whether it’s you, whether it’s a geneticist or any real figure in the book that you’ve profiled, finding your power zone with respect to encodings, and I want you to differentiate that from strengths, seems at the very top of the pyramid in some respects, or the base, depending on how you want to look at it. But if we’re trying to put dominoes in order, that seems like a very important domino to tip over first. It seems to be a prerequisite for a lot of the other things.
And I’m wondering, if somebody flew out, spent time with you for a day and they were like, “Jim, I know you’re good at asking questions. That’s what you do. How the hell do I find what my encodings are?” Because without that, it seems like having the conviction to know when you wake up, exactly what you’re going to do becomes a lot harder. And I’m not trying to speak for you, but it does seem to me that if you are always suffering from decision fatigue, paradox of choice, man, that’s a great way to use up all your chi and end up dead before you should be. I mean, creatively or physically or otherwise.
What are encodings? If they’re different from strengths, how are they different? And how do you find them if you’re not lucky enough to be like a Yo-Yo Ma who gets a cello handed to him when he’s four, or a Tiger Woods whose dad’s like, “Here you go, buddy,” at age God knows whatever.
Jim Collins: So we should go back and forth on this a little bit because there’s two strands that will come together, and I think for me, were really, really eye-opening and very uplifting in the end by looking at the study across these lives. Because there’s the luck piece of how the roulette wheel of your life spins as to which encodings you discover, and then there’s what the encodings are. So they’re actually, they’re joined, if you will, as an idea. There’s multiple examples in the book of where people, it was almost like by, well, chance in some ways that they discovered the set of encodings that they decided to dedicate themselves to. And so first of all, let’s just talk about encodings, and I’m going to describe what encodings are and how they work, but if you don’t mind, Tim, given that you’re in the fog, I want to ask you a question about encodings for yourself.
Tim Ferriss: I love questions.
Jim Collins: So encodings are these durable capacities that reside within, and they’re awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. And first huge thing about encodings is most of us, our lives will come to the end with probably vast swaths of our encodings never discovered. And the way I think about it, and you know this from the book, but I really like to help people who are listening hear this, is that I came to think of it as like a constellation of encodings. You have a constellation of encodings, I have a constellation of coatings, everybody on the planet has a constellation of encodings, and it’s like a vast galaxy of encodings. But in any given moment, your life is looking through a window frame at those encodings, and that what happens is that there’s points in life where the window frame captures a big, bright set of those encodings coming through the window, and you’re in frame with them.
And then if the window frame shifts again and doesn’t capture very many encodings, if you will, you’re out of frame, you’re not really capturing many encodings. The encodings are still there. They’re just there, but your life can shift around whether you’re capturing a set of encodings or whether you’re really not.
So I think about the desk pilot, John Glenn, who you read about, and how he was not capturing encodings when he was a young man. At first, his parents thought, “Well, maybe he’ll come into the family business or maybe you should go try to be a doctor.” But he just was — the encodings were not really in frame when he was taking chemistry and physics and things like this, and then through a happenstance event, he was able to get a pilot’s license paid for by the government that was looking to train some pilots, and he goes and he signs up for this, convinces his parents to let him do it, and the moment he gets into an aircraft, it was like click. I mean, the way the aircraft felt, eventually being able to wear the aircraft like a glove. And his encoded ability that he only discovered, he didn’t add it was just there, that under extreme danger and immense speed, he could have a heart rate that everything slows down.
If somebody’s flying behind me in a supersonic jet trying to knock me out of the sky over Korea in the Korean War, my heart rate’s probably not going to go down, but John Glenn’s would go down. And then of course he becomes an astronaut. Gordon Cooper, his match pair, very similar. And so it’s all of a sudden, bang, and then after his career, and that came to an end, very interesting little story of how he finally concluded that John Kennedy had pulled him out of the rotation so that he wouldn’t be able to go to the moon, because Kennedy felt he was too valuable as a national hero. And so he couldn’t be an astronaut any more really, and that was his cliff. And 10 years, and he went off to Royal Crown Cola. And what I love is this little detail where he’s got, of his memoir, his time at Royal Crown Cola is like almost 10 percent of his life, and it’s 0.2 percent of his memoir. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing —
Tim Ferriss: Not much to report here. Yeah.
Jim Collins: Exactly. Exactly. And so here he’s still John Glenn, but what happened is the window frame shifted, and it wasn’t until he got back into the Senate where it shifted again. I’m sure he was an adequate executive, but it wasn’t like when he was flying fighter jets and going up and orbiting the earth. He was now out of frame. And so it’s not that — so the essence of it is encodings are there to be discovered by the experiences of life. And when they click into frame, it’s trusting them almost if you don’t know where they’re going to go. In many cases, the people didn’t know where they were going to go.
And yes, you turn encodings into more strengths by training and discipline and all those sorts of things. But John Glenn could have done 10 MBAs and he would have never been as encoded for being a business executive the way he was encoded for being a senator and encoded for being a fighter pilot and an astronaut. And so the key is that is discovering some set of them and letting them go. And that’s an empirical set of observations. So now I come back to the question for you.
You’ve written, you’ve done — I mean, you clearly have encodings for doing what we’re doing today. You have other kinds of encodings around just sheer curiosity and so forth. So if you thought about this, as you were making notes, as you were thinking about what are your encodings, as distinct from, sure, you’ve turned your encodings that you’ve discovered into strengths, but the things that were really have a basis of encoding coming into frame. I’m curious what occurred to you, and especially as you think about what’s going to be next.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. All right. I’ll definitely — I’ll return serve. So I’ll then have a ton of other questions, but I’ll answer that in maybe a bit of a roundabout way. I have tried to ferret this out before for myself, I think with different degrees of success. I think I have, in most cases, because I assume my self-awareness is very imperfect, at best, benefited from asking other people questions who are very close to me. And those have been coaches, agents, friends, collaborators, almost like a 360 degree analysis. And some of those questions have included, when have you seen me at my best and when have you seen me at my worst? What do you think I find easier to do than other people? These types of questions.
And I suppose where I’ve landed, but let me maybe postpone the punchline first, to say that I’ve really found it fascinating to look at, this is going to seem like a hard left to people, but the Soviet and also Chinese approaches to sourcing athletes. How on earth are they so successful? How were they so dominant for so long? And yes, you can explain some of it with top-down autocratic decision-making and policymaking and so on. But in China, for instance, they will scout by doing some very, very simple things.
They’ll go to every elementary school you can imagine and have kids do a broad jump. And they’ll make it fun. It’s not some back whipping exercise, but they’ll have them do a handful of things, hold a broomstick overhead and get into a squat. And that’s how they start to source potential candidates for Olympic weightlifting gold. But unfortunately, as a single person, as an N of one, you don’t have the luxury of infinite time to try everything. This has been an ongoing, open question for me, and I haven’t yet used any of them, but looking at things like, okay, well, is a strengths finder test helpful for this? Could you do five or six of these and look for the overlap to try to get some direction so that you’re not penalized for trial and error by losing decade after decade?
Where I’ve landed for myself is, through my own experimentation, I think asking a lot of dumb questions. I’m very good at asking seemingly dumb questions, which often are not dumb. Sometimes they are just straight up dumb, let’s be honest. But oftentimes they’re questions that could be or already are on the minds of a lot of people. And I think I’m good at putting on beginner’s glasses and being very persistent, like a dog with a bone, if I don’t get an answer to a supposedly dumb question. And those lead interesting places, I think I am also good, and this is a blessing and a curse which will lead into some later questions about not getting trapped in various doom cycles and something we talked about before, which is the 50/30/20 from respected faculty.
I am a novelty seeker. That’s an intrinsic drive that I have in a lot of ways. And the upside of that is that I can do angel investing in different industries. I can interview people from yet a different set of worlds, and I can borrow practices and copy and paste different principles from one area into a disparate area, and sometimes those really, really work. So I think I’m good at combining those worlds. Separately, and maybe people listening can give me feedback if they’re interested in this, a friend of mine, one of my closest friends, said to me, “You should really do some podcast episodes where you are recording conversations that you have with founders.” Because I’ve invested in 100 plus companies over more than a decade, probably close to two decades.
And he said to me, he’s like, “There are things that you are really good at that I don’t think you realize you’re good at.” In terms of really pinpointing terms, positioning and various other things that I do routinely, every week, with startup founders anyway. I’m having those conversations anyway. And so I’ve been experimenting with recording those and I even go back and listen to it and I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything special here.” And he’s like, “That’s the problem.” He’s like, “You don’t think it’s anything special because it’s so easy for you.” He’s like, “It’s actually not easy for most people.” So those are a few scattershot thoughts that come to mind. But for myself and certainly also for people listening, I am still wondering if there are ways that people can facilitate the process of finding those encodings.
Jim Collins: Yeah. So I was listening very carefully to what you were saying, and a couple things really popped into my mind as you were talking, is that first of all, I think if we rewound — well, I did rewind the tape of their lives, right? And I wouldn’t describe that the process of coming into a frame with a set of encodings was a systematic process. It was pretty organic and pretty messy, if you will. And I think the thing that really stood out is it wasn’t that there was some deliberate test taking or anything like that. It was that life spun them into a situation where they could feel the encodings light up, if you will. And I think what really stood out, the more I think about this, a question is less about — well, there are two ways in which I want to sharpen the question a little bit for you.
One is that it’s not even entirely about discovering encodings. I think people are getting clues to their encodings based on their experiences in life and input from others, which is a very interesting piece of this, all the time. What I think really stands out to me about the people that I studied is that, regardless of whether they got support from others, like John Glenn’s parents didn’t want them to be a pilot. They wanted them to be in the family business or be a doctor. Robert Plant’s parents didn’t want him to be a singer. They wanted him to be an accountant.
Think about that. I mean, with all that, I mean, you go through these different ones. What really stood out is that when they got a sense for them, they trusted them. It was their trust of them when they got a glimpse of them. That is what really stood out to me. Once they felt them, they didn’t really start questioning them or letting other people talk them out of them or listen to what other people think they should do. And so if you said, “Jim, 100 points, allocate between two buckets, how much of it is about discovering a set of encodings and how much of is it about trusting the encodings you’ve discovered?” I’m going to put 70 points on trust.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s cool.
Jim Collins: Because I think we’re getting clues all the time. The second is that — you said something about asking people what you think you do better than others. This study changed my view on that. I think it’s about doubling down on what you can do better than other ways you could expend yourself, which is a very different question.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s very different.
Jim Collins: It’s a very different question. It’s like I could expend myself asking these supposedly dumb questions or I could expend myself in some other way. And it’s not competitive comparative to others. It’s this is in frame and this is out of frame. And then I have learned something in my own experience, and this book is not about business, it’s not about leadership, it’s not about management. There’s a few ways, though, that it’s really affected me a lot when I think back to my prior, my classic work.
And one way that it has really affected me is we talk about the right people on the bus from Good to Great, still true. But what I’ve really come to see is it’s about the seats and whether people are in seats where they’re in frame in that seat. Whether they are in a seat for which they are encoded for that seat and in a seat that feeds their fire. And as I began to study the people, in my work, what I found is that they gravitated towards some walk of life, some arena of activity where they really hit a big, bright set of their encodings. It really fed their fire, and then they just went, once they clicked into frame.
And I think that I used to spend a lot of time trying to turn people into what they’re not and feeling very frustrated with what they’re not. And as I did this study, one of the things that just really went over me like water and just softening me and softening me and softening me is I began to realize that what I really had to learn how to do was to begin to find what the people around me, what their encodings are. Me, for people on my team, that part of my responsibility as a leader of a small bus is to really be attuned to me observing the encodings based upon what people do of the people around me, and then to begin to shift, in steps, their responsibilities so that in what they’re doing here is increasingly clicking into frame. So that then what happens is my emotional experience is not being frustrated with what they’re not and truly being almost at a level of almost awe, grateful for what they are.
And when that happened, their lives got better, my life got better, and I played a role in helping them, helping them discover their encodings, mainly by experiments, like testing them with something, see how something works, right? And then I could see the encoding flash and then I’d move the responsibility and I’d click them some into frame. And it’s been a marvelous, joyful journey to see that happen. And I have people who are in frame and they just, it’s astounding for me to see. And so I think that notion of other people, but I’d flip it around, which anybody who has teams, anyone who leads organizations or companies, if you spend emotional energy feeling frustrated with what people are not, you’ve got them in the wrong seat.
They’re out of frame. And the question is, if you have a bus issue, you deal with it. They shouldn’t be on the bus. But the real question could be, you have them in a seat for which it doesn’t line up with their encodings, that doesn’t feed their inner fire. And if you try to spend your life trying to turn them into what they’re not, they’ll be miserable and you’ll be miserable. And I think other people can really play a role in helping you see what those encodings are.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ve had a number of friends who run large companies who, and not to say this is the right tool for everyone, but who’ve used Enneagram actually as a sort of heuristic.
Jim Collins: What’s your point on the Enneagram?
Tim Ferriss: So which type am I or what’s my perspective on it? Both?
Jim Collins: So yeah, have you identified an Enneagram point for yourself?
Tim Ferriss: Well, so I’m a self-preservation six, which honestly is —
Jim Collins: I’m married to a six. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There you go. So it resonates for me. I have a bunch of caveats that I’m about to put out, but it resonates for me. I have found it to greatly inform doing a postmortem on things and people who have not worked in my organization. Organization is a very highfalutin term for a very, very small team, and people who have worked over time, there are, I would say — to my mind, irrefutable patterns.
It’s so clear the types that work and the types that don’t. And there’s no right or wrong. It’s just for me, as a strong-willed, hopefully decent leader, but at the same time, very demanding person with certain preferences and so on. There are certain people on the bus who work and certain people who don’t, and Enneagram, I found very helpful for that. I think Shopify and Dropbox, both I think still use Enneagram as two examples, but very good for conflict resolution as well.
The caveat is sometimes I think, at least, say, in Silicon Valley, that Enneagram is an acceptable horoscope for tech guys. I mean, it definitely rhymes in some ways, but when I read my particular, and it’s helpful to have a person who is experienced with typing do this. I’m sure there are online tools that can also help. Side note, also found this incredibly helpful, people are going to hate this. Some people are going to hate this, but for thinking about dating and ultimately ending up with a woman who is an incredibly, incredibly good match for me and vice versa. I’m a good match for her.
But the Enneagram was not a, it was dead on. I was like, “This is nonsense for the — I just don’t believe it can be that simple,” and it’s not that simple, but incredibly helpful. So I would say there are some people who go down the rabbit hole to an extent that I think ends up turning everything into an Enneagram exercise. I think that’s probably losing the forest for trees, but as one input of many, I’ve found it helpful.
And let me ask you a question for you, personally, and this could also be reflected in people in the book, but for you. And I want to, this is one of the 7,000 highlights I had from this morning over my several cups of coffee. So this is, I can’t recall if this is from our first or second conversation, but let me just read for a second here, all right.
And I apologize. Well, here’s the recap. Jim was clear that he didn’t want a half life of quality in his work. I’ll skip forward a little bit. When he was invisible at Stanford, he could do deep work in long cycles of reflection for six years. He worried that if he became visible, he might wake up years later and realize his subsequent books were only half as good because he hadn’t returned to the wellspring of quiet solitude.
Separate note, people should listen to these conversations, but one of the commonalities of your plus two days in your spreadsheets were either, I believe, intense solitude or highly socialized, but very little in between. All right, coming back to what I was reading, he wanted quality to get better. Here’s the part that I underlined. He asked respected faculty, so that’s Stanford, how they spent their time and got a consistent answer. 50/30/20. And to elaborate on that, it’s pretty simple. 50 percent equals new intellectual creative work, 30 percent equals teaching, 20 percent equals other stuff, committees, et cetera. Okay. And you organize your life and tallying things in a very methodical way.
Jim Collins: And I still do that. To this day.
Tim Ferriss: And you still do that. So people should listen to our prior conversations on that, but this 50 percent new intellectual creative work, 30 percent teaching, 20 percent other stuff, committees, et cetera. And this might feed into the — I’m going to screw up the exact terminology, but the doom cycle of competence or whatever it might be. What I’ve found is one of the penalties of being a novelty seeker is that sometimes I will get pulled into things that I am quite good at, they could be new, they could be older, that do not align super strongly with my encodings. And so the days end up being very choppy. In other words, I’m doing a lot of management stuff.
Maybe I’ve said yes to a speaking engagement I regret. Maybe I’ve invested in a few too many startups and all of a sudden I’m on Zoom calls when I’m quietly grinding my teeth because I feel like I should be working on a book project, et cetera, et cetera. And my question is, A, have you ever succumbed to this type of gravitational pull to other things where you end up managing more than making perhaps? And then separately, if that’s true, how have you corrected course?
Jim Collins: So there’s two aspects of how I can get — I have really struggled getting pulled. First of all, just way earlier in my life, I was very close to — I was getting pulled into things that I was not going to be encoded for. And fortunately, by a series of really good events and choices, I ended up very much in frame. But if I’d stayed too long doing some of those things or taken some opportunities that were very glittering opportunities, that my life might have taken a very different path. I think I would have ended up successful and out of frame, and I think that that would have been an unfortunate outcome.
I think that — so the two areas that I’ve had to work with, and I eventually finally got my way to succeed at both of them. The second one was harder. First one was that you’re right about the thing about visibility. I was always prepared for failure. I was not prepared for success. And when success came, it surprised me, number one. I was like, okay, I was prepared for the catastrophe on the other side. I didn’t expect this to be coming, and now I got to deal with all this stuff coming at me. And all of a sudden, you have all these wonderful things, some of them may be not so wonderful, but they’re all coming at you, right? And you have all these voices and people and opportunities and glittering things that could pull you out of what you’re really encoded for because of all this wonderful opportunity and noise coming at you.
And early in that reeling from the, I was a fog of success phase. And I was really trying to sort through how I would allocate my time and I was reeling on my back feet and I would say yes to things that later, that today I would never in a million years say yes to, but I did. Whether it be involving too much travel or whatever sorts of things, but I began to realize, man, my whole life could be sucked away accepting opportunities. And so I had to really fight that and to eventually just clamp it all down, but to do it in a really systematic and disciplined way. And that’s when I started counting my hours. I basically just like, I’ve got to have above 1,000 creative hours every 365 day cycle, every single day looking back for 50 years without a miss. I just set that. I will not ever break it.
And then the other was to begin using very, very disciplined mechanisms for what I would say yes to. We have a punch card system. It was something that I was very impressed by Warren Buffett’s view of the world, which is any use of you is an investment, it’s a punch and you can’t get it back. And so when we’re laying out for the year what sorts of things I will say yes to, we literally have, every year we’ll be talking, “Well, what’s the punch card look like? How many punches are left?” And it’s not a question if somebody calls up and says, “Are you free to give a speech on October 17?” It’s irrelevant whether I’m free to give a speech on October 17. The relevant question is, do I have any punches left?
That’s the first question, or how many punches are left? And we limit them. We limit them tightly. And so that became another way of like, it’s punches, it’s punches and they go away. And one thing I’ve learned, I’ve come to see now at age 68, life is the ultimate punch card. I mean, think about it, right? So you’re 48. If any given good size project is, call it, a five-year project, you got a bunch of five-year punches left. I’m 68. I probably have really good health, but I know the number of punches that I have left is a lower number than yours. And so life is the ultimate punch card. And if you end up spending five years or 10 years pulled away from what you’re really encoded for in some way because of whatever sets of reasons, you can’t get that punch back. And so I began a punch card process and that’s how I managed that. But then the other goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
Tim Ferriss: Could I pause for one second?
Jim Collins: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Please don’t lose your train of thought.
Jim Collins: No, please.
Tim Ferriss: But for the punch cards, are those on a category by category basis? In other words, or for example, speaking engagements, I’ll only do five speaking engagements per year. They need to be within X number of hours of my home. Is it on a category by category basis? When it’s —
Jim Collins: So the way we’ve done it, it’s taken us a few years iterating on the exact process, but every week we calculate the punch card and the way it works is we have a point system. And the way the point system works is, if I’m going to do an engagement that involves an airplane, it costs more points. If I’m going to do a virtual presentation from here, it costs fewer points. If I’m going to do an intense — we have these lab sessions where people will bring their executive team to Boulder for two days and be essentially grilled by me for two days. If it’s going to be one of those, even though it’s in Boulder, it actually takes a fair number of points because of the intensity of it is so high. And so what we’ve done is we’ve basically used a numerical sense and then in any given period of time, there’s only so many points. So if I end up agreeing to do a commitment in London, I’m just going to blow like the equivalent of three punches. And then —
Tim Ferriss: Like a reverse frequent flyer program.
Jim Collins: Oh yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: You just get points subtracted and [inaudible].
Jim Collins: Exactly. And so that’s how we do it. And then we always have a running, what the total of the punch card is. And it doesn’t have to hit the exact number at a given time, but you can’t start going over. It’s okay if you get to the end of the year and you haven’t spent all your punches. What’s bad is if you get to the end of the year and you did twice as many as you should have. And so our conversations are always, everything is in the context of where’s the punch card? There’s only one and a half points left on the punch card.
Tim Ferriss: So when you and your team are turning something down because you’re lower on points —
Jim Collins: Well, we turn things down sort of all the time.
Tim Ferriss: Do they say, “We’re very sorry, but Jim is out of points?” Or do they say, “Sorry, Jim has reached his maximum allotment of commitments?” And actually, it’s a real question. What is the language that you use for those polite declines?
Jim Collins: So first of all, I have absolutely people totally in frame doing things that they’re incredibly encoded for. And one of the people on my team is a person who is incredibly encoded to build relationships and make friends and to learn a lot, and then to help me think. And this person who’s been with me now for quite a number of years, what she does that’s so marvelous is that everything begins with making a friend and building a relationship and everything we do. And as part of that, we’re always thinking ahead to the fact that we’re likely to say no. And just statistically, we’re almost certainly likely going to say no to almost everything that comes through.
And so by establishing a relationship and a friendship and setting expectations right out of the gate, the odds that Jim will be able to do this are very, very low. You should know that at the very beginning of this conversation. So we’re thinking ahead to preserving the sense of relationship when we say no from the very beginning of how the conversation begins. And then this person helps the person on the other end understand Jim has a punch card, so that he can focus on his research and his writing. It’s a limited punch card and I have to set expectations that there just aren’t very many spots on it. And then once we’ve established all that, then there’s a conversation about what the event is, what the invitation is, et cetera, and then we have our conversations and then the communication will come back as, in most cases, a no, a few cases a yes, where we will say, “We’re unable for Jim to be able to join you. Punch card constraints.” And that’s just very real.
But they’ve been prepared for that from the get-go. So that’s why, because we want people to walk away feeling better. No matter what answer they get, we want them to walk away feeling better about us than before they ever reached out to us, even though they’re likely to get a disappointing answer. And then in some cases, I will follow up, not all cases, because I couldn’t do it for all, but for some, I will personally record a voice memo for the person, expressing my appreciation for what they’re doing and for the invitation and try to close the whole thing out with a sense of, I want them to walk away and say, “That’s the most wonderful, disappointing answer I’ve ever received.”
Tim Ferriss: I love that. Fantastic. Very, very helpful. By the way, the 850-page monster that I was describing.
Jim Collins: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I shouldn’t malign it by calling it a monster.
Jim Collins: Oh no. All books are monsters.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. There we go. Right, right. My little pet monster. Maybe it’s more like a monster from Monsters, Inc. as opposed to a Kraken, but it’s entirely about how to say no. And that’s a simple way of putting it. But turns out, just like I think what you realized with What to Make of a Life, I can’t remember if it was Emerson who said this, of course I want to call it Emerson or Thoreau. But whenever you try to isolate one thing, you find that it’s hitched to everything else in the universe. It turns out that saying no is related to saying yes, which is really to decisions, which then you’re like, “Fuck, now I have to talk about everything in life.” So pardon my French, but thank you for that answer. I would love to come back to a few things you said, which I’m not sure I —
Jim Collins: Can I just close one quick thing out?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course.
Jim Collins: Which was you asked about this notion of dealing with the staying on track, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yes, right.
Jim Collins: And not getting sidetracked, just very briefly, we talked earlier about right people in the key seats. Are they encoded for it when they’re in frame? You’re grateful for what they are. A lot of getting knocked out of frame was trying to manage my small system. And I did a pretty bad job of it. Took a lot of my energy. What changed is once I got really good at people in seats for which they’re encoded, my time and energy that goes to that has shrunk to almost nothing in terms of that extraneous angst and replace with just the joy of working with my people. So I think that’s the second answer is — I mean, all the way back to first two from Good to Great, it’s always still first two, and especially with people in key seats for which they’re encoded. So enough on that.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s double click on that actually before I hopped to where I was going. I’m imagining, and maybe this is not the right way to think of it, but if you have a small team, like I have a very small team, three or four people in terms of full-time. I suspect you have, at least —
Jim Collins: Some more.
Tim Ferriss: — if we’re looking at broader corporate America, let’s say you have a small team.
Jim Collins: Yes, absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: And you can run some trial and error. Once you get up to 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people, maybe the trial and error becomes a little harder to systematize. But even on a small scale, one could make the argument that you have fewer players on the chessboard, so you also don’t want to chew up too much of their cycles with endless trial and error. Are there ways that you have thought about making that process as fruitful as possible? You’re like, “Hey, there are five types of tasks. I’m going to have everybody do trial and error with five types of tasks, and that’ll help us hone in quickly.” I’ll stop there.
Jim Collins: First of all, I just want to comment something about scale. Two aspects of scale. The first is this, never confuse scale of impact with scale of enterprise.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jim Collins: You and I are like a special operations team, right? A small special operations team can have an immense impact with six people in the unit. And I think people confuse scale and impact all the time. And so first of all, I don’t think you have to be big to have big impact. So you and I have chosen that model. The second is, I think one of the best reasons to grow a company is you have a lot of seats and it’s an ever expanding range of types of seats, which means that there are more opportunities for being able to shift people across seats into seats for which they’re really encoded. Because there’s a wider range and a larger number of seats in which you could do that.
And then I think what really good unit level leadership is, is that an individual unit leader is really good at kind of shifting people around on their unit across the seats by a process of kind of sensing when they’re in frame or out of frame. My own process has, I guess, there’s a little bit of systematic, but it’s very — I’m not going to package any of this because I don’t know how to package any of it. And it’s not my encoding to package and put out programs or anything. For me, it’s been just, I observe. So I have a member on my team that is absolutely marvelous at keeping a cool head in the face of unexpected crises. It’s not me because I have a little bit of the four Enneagram in me and I can go pretty overly dramatic. It’s not helpful.
And with this person, it’s really, really, really encoded for this calm for the unexpected crisis. We had an unexpected thing happened yesterday that was like, “Whoa.” But how did I discover that? It was observation. And what really became clear to me was in the middle of COVID, when everything is kind of chaos and there’s just this sense of just everything spinning out of control. And what I observed was this person was like the calm ballast through everything. I could just see the behavior and it was more just kind of recognizing it. And then once I recognize it and I just see little snippets, it could be just something I just notice. Then I kick the frame to the side. I just kind of kick it a little bit so that what they’re doing captures more of that. And it’s a very iterative process. So I don’t have any magic dust on this. That’s just kind of what I do.
Tim Ferriss: So in that example, this is a great example for a follow-up question, which is if someone is good, you don’t want to manufacture crises to —
Jim Collins: Yeah, let’s see how we all do in crises —
Tim Ferriss: — it’s like the thirst of the crisis manager. So how do you harness that if it seems like, intrinsically, it’s contending with destabilizing unexpected events? How do you use that encoding?
Jim Collins: So it was really interesting. So yesterday, it was really simple. It’s like, “Boy, I’m really glad you’re encoded for this.” It’s that simple. “Let me know how it goes.” So remember I talked earlier about, I think if you talk to people on my team, they would reinforce this. We talked earlier about for yourself, it’s not just recognizing your encodings, probably I put sort of 70 points on trusting them. What I’ve learned with my small team is it’s also true with like, I think this really fits with that person’s encodings. I’m going to trust them. And I think that’s the real key is I sort of trust and get out of the way because it’s like, they’re so well encoded for this that I don’t need to worry. I just need to let them do what’s actually going to be really quite natural for them.
And I think that’s not a particularly maybe satisfying answer, but I think the essence of it is I don’t tend to, just like you don’t want to second guess your own encodings, I don’t second guess their encodings. I just trust that letting them go with their encodings is going to produce a great result and I just breathe calmly and stay out of the way.
Tim Ferriss: So with that person, again, not to belabor the point, but I guess I specialize in belaboring the point to my earlier point of dumb questions. In this particular employee’s case, team member’s case.
Jim Collins: Team member, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If we look at say Google, they have a lot of seats on the bus.
Jim Collins: A lot of seats.
Tim Ferriss: If they have some people are underutilized, but who are critical when they are needed, like firefighters, let’s just say. They’re playing cards all day long until you need them.
Jim Collins: And then, bang.
Tim Ferriss: But when you need them, you really want them.
Jim Collins: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Does that team member fit that description? In other words, they’re underutilized most of the time or how do you think about that?
Jim Collins: No, I think my people would tell you that I’ve got them overutilized almost all the time. So back to the exhausting thing. No, this I think actually leads to something really important for us, I think, to talk about. People are not encoded for just one thing. And so for example, with this person, this person is also incredibly well encoded to coach people, he’s a really phenomenal, just instinctive coach. And the coaching responsibility is something that never — that’s there all the time. We have young people who come in who are on my research team, young people who are here with us for a couple of years before they head off to do what they’re going to do in the world, other people on our team who are handling range of different types of things. And they’re in seats for which they’re encoded, but then with that extra bit of coaching, they just kind of have a big inflection. And this particular person is really, really good at coaching.
So the crises come kind of unexpectedly. They just kind of happen, but the notion of coaching other people is there all the time. And so pretty fully utilized on that. I mean, sure, if you’re in a special operations unit, you’re not out on patrol every minute. But there’s a whole lot of other activities that are taking place. And you can be activating different encodings in those kinds of activities. But I want to come to this, this is, I think, and I speak to the world of founders on this especially. But look, here’s one of the things that — let me just pause for a moment. What I said there a moment ago, I’ll let you kind of pick how you’d like to go with it. It is one of the most uplifting aspects of this study, that you’re not encoded for just one thing.
And this idea that you have to find what you’re made for, or even Abe Maslow’s original definition of self-actualization, which was discovering what you were made to do and then committing to pursue it with excellence, which I think is actually a quite good definition of self-actualization.
Tim Ferriss: Can you say that one more time, please?
Jim Collins: Yeah. I think he defined it as discovering what you were made to do and then commit to pursue it with excellence. And I think at some level, that’s what all of our people did at different phases of their life when they were in frame. But there’s a little asterisk to it that this study has really changed my view, which is that this idea of like, as if there’s this one thing that you’ve got to discover that you’re made to do. And what this study has done has blown that apart for me completely. And in the idea that the range of things that you’re encoded to potentially do is incredibly vast and all you have to do is find one of them. And the way you find that can be really random. It doesn’t matter how it happens. It just matters that it happens.
And it doesn’t matter whether it’s this portion of the encodings, or that portion of the encodings, or that portion of the encodings. Whether it’s playing NFL football like Alan Page is the first offensive player ever to be League MVP and then becoming a Supreme Court Justice in the state of Minnesota, there’s almost no overlap encodings in that at all, but he’s encoded for both. And we see that notion of the — it’s not just one thing, you may find one and stay with it for your whole life. Some of the people in our study, once they found it, they never left it. And there are other people who, because of a cliff, ending it, or because of some other driving interests, they were in one frame, and then they were way over here in another frame. And the encodings that they were drawing upon could have been radically different.
You look at Benjamin Franklin, right? Built one of the first media empires in history, then becomes a scientist, then becomes our greatest diplomat and helps found a nation. Three really different frames. And I’ll get very excited here because I think that there is a really, really important set of questions here for company builders and company founders. Because personally, I think how you think about the intersection of your life to the cycles of building a company can be radically affected by how you think about this question of in-frame or out-of-frame. So I’m just going to pause there and you can be curious, Tim, however you’d like to go.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’m curious. I’m curious in maybe too many ways, that can be problematic. And actually, that relates to — I do want to come back to what you just said, since that’s a nice cliffhanger, pun intended.
Jim Collins: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: What I do want to ask you, because this is after all, in some ways, a self-indulgent therapy session for myself, let’s take a sidebar. I want to talk about return on luck because it’s been so present on my mind. It came up in passing in one of our earlier conversations, but we never really did a deep dive. And then it comes up again more substantially in What to Make of a Life. And I want to talk about it —
Jim Collins: Wrote a chapter on it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I want to talk about it because it strikes me, and I want you to poke holes in this if need be. It strikes me that one of my encodings might actually be maximizing return on luck.
Jim Collins: Oh interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Because I do so many different things and very often if — and we have to be careful about hindsight 20/20 and survivorship bias, and blah, blah, blah. But when I look at a lot of the home runs, whether that’s from personal reward, external accolades or both, a lot of the time it is connecting these disparate worlds. And the way that comes about frequently is I’ll have these dozens and dozens of conversations, which I do every week, and they could be with scientists, they could be with startup founders, you name it. And most things are a no in one form or another, but I suppose the picture I might paint is I feel like sometimes by the virtue of how I live my life, I’m standing on one side of a tennis net and there are 600 tennis ball shooting machines on the other side, and I seem to be very good at picking out when there’s 600 balls in the air, which one I should actually take a swing at.
And I may be giving myself too much credit, but I think my closest friends would say that also, some version of that. If we step back, could you just describe the different types of luck that you’ve identified and what return on luck is? And I might add something else that I picked up from someone in Silicon Valley that I think is also pretty helpful. But let’s start there because I do think it’s a mistake for folks who think I either have this thing called big luck or I don’t, and that’s the end of the story. Because you mentioned clues all the time, and I think this relates.
Jim Collins: So this has always been a real interesting question for me because I think I’ve always been kind of attuned to the role of luck in life, good luck and bad luck. And I was always really interested and curious about, well, in the end, what role does luck play? Now, real brief background, the first time that I began to see this distinction between luck and return on luck goes all the way back to when Morten Hansen and I were doing our book Great By Choice. We’re looking at really chaotic environments and some of the most successful startups to great companies that came out of really turbulent worlds. And because of the environment we’re looking at, it allowed us to be able to say, “Well, wait a minute, these are environments where luck events can happen.” You can think about two companies, both having IBM walk in the door looking for an operating system, and they both get the same luck event, but one got a return on that luck event.
And so what we did was we said, “Well, we need to systematically understand this.” And Morten really gets a lot of credit for this because we figured out how to do it. You have to first of all define what luck is. If you’re going to study luck, you have to understand what it is and realize that luck is not an aura or something. It’s an event. It’s a luck event. And if we could put the parameters of what is a luck event and with Morton’s collaborating together, we defined a luck event, and I think this is a really good definition, is A, you didn’t cause it. So if somebody says you make your own luck, it’s not luck by definition.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Jim Collins: Right? Because there’s bad luck too. If I get a cancer diagnosis, you mean to say I make my own luck? Right? No, you didn’t cause it. The second is it has a potentially significant consequence, good or bad. And the third is in some way it came as a surprise. You didn’t know that it would happen or when it would happen or what form it would take, right? But there it is. And any event that meets those three tests is a luck event. And once you have that lens, you didn’t cause it, potential significant consequence, some element, some significant way as a surprise, you begin to see their luck events happening all the time.
And so then what Morton and I did was we looked at these companies and we said, “Well, now let’s actually run the numbers and see,” because we always had comparatives in that study. And we were able to demonstrate that the big winners, the ones who had the huge outsized returns relative to their direct comparisons, did not get more good luck. They did not get less bad luck. They did not get bigger spikes of luck and they didn’t get better timing of luck. So luck as a distributed variable was pretty even between those that were the huge 10X winners and their direct comparisons. So clearly luck didn’t separate.
And then that led to the observation that, but it was the return on luck, that when the luck came, they had this amazing ability relative to the comparison to make more of the luck. And that led to the return on luck as the critical variable. So now we come to this study and I was looking through, just looking at the amount of luck that’s in these people’s lives. And there’s a whole chapter on it. There’s lots of permutations of luck, including the roulette wheel, which set of encoding she get thrown into at some stage of life that just puts you there that you didn’t expect to be there. We’re talking about Grace Hopper earlier. How’d she end up in computer sciences? Well, World War II happened. She got pulled out of being a professor at Vassar. She was assigned to this project at Harvard she didn’t even know existed, and it was the first computer, the Mark I. And that cast the dye for the rest of her life.
Well, without World War II or without that assignment, without, it would’ve been some other set of encodings that went off. But then I started looking at what are the types of luck. And I, through this study, came to see, I think there are three. There’s what luck, which is a good event that goes your way or a bad event. A cancer event would be a bad luck, what luck. There’s who luck, and I think this is the often underappreciated, gigantic kind of luck in life. My life is a continuous series of who luck events, starting with Joanne, but others as well. And bad luck, the bad luck of my father.
And then there’s zeit luck. And zeit luck, which I didn’t really see until this study, is when what you’re doing just happens to fit with a particular zeitgeist that’s happening at the time, which you did not cause, but it is a huge reality. So Benjamin Franklin, you and I would never talk about Benjamin Franklin if he had been born at a time that he wasn’t there for the revolution and the founding of the country. And Alice Paul, if she’d been born 20 years later or 20 years earlier, she wouldn’t have been there to bring the 19th Amendment and suffrage to a successful close. She would’ve done something else, but not that. And so Jimmy Page had not been born in England, coming of age in the Blues Rock Revolution right there as all this great music was happening.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll just say briefly, people need to read it, but the entire founding story of Led Zeppelin is kind of insane.
Jim Collins: Right?
Tim Ferriss: When you look at the number of things that had to go right, it’s just wild. Yeah.
Jim Collins: And there’s that great quote from Robert Plant saying, what was it? “The gods roared, and lightning crackled, and Blake wrote a poem from under the ground and all England was reunited.” It’s this great moment in that basement where they had that first song when they played “Train Kept A-Rollin’” and the four of them came together.
Anyway, zeit luck is a big one too. And then what we found in this study is, and I think it really is, it’s a very true finding, they were really good at getting a return on luck when luck came because they have these things we called “NATALIE” moments: Not All Time In Life Is Equal. And you recognize this is a not all time in life is equal moment, and it requires an unequal response to an unequal moment.
And so now I come back to you, Tim. If you’re good at this return on luck thing, okay?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jim Collins: So the 600 tennis balls are coming at you. One of them is the one that you decide to hit. What about your ability to kind of recognize it’s a not all time in life is equal moment and to go to kind of a 10X intensity in that moment. I’m curious how that plays out for you.
Tim Ferriss: I think there’s a lot of overlap. And certainly, I think my maximizing return on luck has an ROI distribution very similar to angel investing. So 80 percent of the times I hit the ball, it’s like Marco and there’s no Polo. Nobody hits it back. But every once in a while, I’m like, “Holy cow, I just scored the winning point in Wimbledon. That’s crazy. I didn’t see that coming.” So I’ll come back and answer that. I think they’re very closely related and I identify with the what, who, and zeit luck. For instance, when I started angel investing, 2008 roughly, 2008, 2009, 2010. It was just a beautiful time to angel invest. Yes, there’s some skill involved. I tend to disbelieve people who attribute anything solely to luck or solely to skill. It’s usually some combination, but there are definitely periods of time where I felt that not all time in life is equal and this is where you need to apply some pressure to the vessel.
And that could be the first book, which we don’t need to get into right now. It could be early on the angel investing. It could be, for instance, around 2015 deciding to 10X, 20X, 30X down my bet on supporting science related to psychedelic-assisted therapies, and even back then starting also. But now typically non-invasive, but sometimes invasive bioelectric medicine, brain stimulation, I think that’s — I have very high conviction that that is around the corner. So taking a peek at the future that’s not evenly distributed, I feel that way about bioelectric medicine right now. So I think they’re very tightly bound in a sense. And question for you, there’s this term that I came across, I wish I had the attribution, but I believe it was from someone in Silicon Valley or at least someone in tech. They talked about increasing the surface area of luck. In other words, if you need luck, if we’re talking about good luck to stick to you, how do you increase the surface area available to which that luck can stick?
And when I think about my own who luck, for instance, it was entirely dependent in the world of startups and even one could argue the success of the first book on me moving to Silicon Valley, being in the middle of that switchbox. Without that, forget it. There was not enough surface area to which who luck could really stick. And I’m just wondering if that resonates with you.
Jim Collins: So first of all, I think whatever the size of the surface, the idea of luck and return on luck is always operating, if you will, right? Because I mean, you could be — my family in rural Northern Oklahoma on my father’s side isn’t Silicon Valley, but my grandmother who grew up there, she had luck and return on luck that her life was affected by. She was this beautiful Oklahoma farm girl and she was working at the Wichita Airport. And this dashing test pilot who was my grandfather, Jimmy Collins, landed for fuel on a Memorial Day weekend, and they met, and four days later they were married. And it was like, “Okay, this is a who luck moment, but we’re both going to seize the not all time in life is equal and boom.” So that notion of the luck and return on luck can happen sort of anywhere.
So one, I don’t think it’s contingent that it has to be the largest sphere. That said, I absolutely agree with you that one of the reasons to be in certain environments, if you’re fortunate enough to be there, is there’s just a lot more tennis balls coming at you and there’s a lot more around the who luck side of it. And my life, I’ve often said there are lots of ways to be wealthy, but the way in which I have been incredibly wealthy, I’ve done well in many dimensions. But probably the way in which I have the greatest wealth is in a vast, vast set of who luck events. And that happened, it started because I started being in environments where I would come in contact with people who ended up being who luck, John Gardner down the hall for me at Stanford.
But just a couple to really illustrate, that really affected my own life because I was in a place where the surface area was fairly large. When I went off to — I was at Stanford Business School second year. And the course sorting machine, I wanted to get into an entrepreneurship small business course, it filled up. And so the course sorting machine just randomly put me into a section with a totally unproven guy named Bill Lazier, who we spoke about in one of our previous conversations. It was truly just the random course sorting. So it is absolutely like a coin flip.
And then Bill ended up, it was the first time he taught, no one knew who he was, was the first person that was ever like a father for me. And Bill, despite all of my challenges to be somebody to deal with or whatever in those hot coals and he had to manage those. But Bill like — now the return on luck was I recognized Bill’s caring and I invested in our friendship and our relationship all the way along as well. And then that led to another luck event, a what luck followed by a who luck. So I was 28, 29 years old, I think 29, maybe 30, right around that age. And so how did I end up teaching at Stanford Business School? Well, shortly before the start of the fall term in 1988, Bill was teaching entrepreneurship and small business. I was kind of still in the fog of my 20s, and I’d been managing Joanne’s athletic career.
And one of the sections of entrepreneurship and small business, because of a family tragedy, all of a sudden lost the professor who was going to be teaching it. I mean, it was a really bad luck event for that person, but all of a sudden it hit me with a luck event in the sense that the luck event was all of a sudden that class had nobody to teach it. And Bill taught the other section of it.
And Bill went to the deans and said, “How about we let Jim teach it?” I wasn’t teaching there at the time, and they were very skeptical of this. But Bill said, “I’ll take responsibility and so forth.” And that’s what opened up the door for me to teach at Stanford. It was like had that tragedy not happen, I wouldn’t have had that opportunity. And if I had not had Bill from the previous luck event, I would not have had that opportunity.
And then Bill said, “Okay, this is like you unexpectedly got to pitch in Yankee Stadium. And you only get to pitch once if you don’t throw a good game. But if you throw a no hitter, you might get to pitch again.” And so that’s the Natalie time, right? Not all time in life is equal, is that moment I get this — it’s, look, if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you wanted in one moment, would you capture it or let it slip? I mean, it’s one of the great songs of all time because it gets right to this thing, right? That’s the Natalie moment.
And then the next luck event, which was a who luck thing happened, which is I’d written a little article for the San Jose Mercury News. A fellow by the name of Jerry Porras just happened to read it, who happened to be on the faculty with me, who sent me an email saying, “I noticed you’re interested in this stuff on corporate vision. Can we talk?” So I go have a conversation with Jerry Porras. He’d been a professor of mine before, but he didn’t even probably remember that.
And then we ended up, that became where we started the project that eventually led to Built to Last, right? So another who luck. And then those years of teaching and basically having no time for anything except the research and the teaching and the whole bit, and then that leads to Built to Last, which then leads to another luck event, which is this thing that no one knew who we were and totally unexpected, I mean, totally unexpected.
The day that Built to Last was published, I wake up in a hotel room in a small hotel down in Half Moon Bay, California. And I think pub date was October 17 or something like that anyways. And I was down there to do a little thing for the Stanford Alumni Association, kind of a talk or something. And I get up and I open the door, look out, to pick up my morning USA Today. And I pick it up and the top of the USA Today says, “Built to Last author,” something, “see money section.” Okay.
So then I flipped to the money section, and there’s a picture this big of Jerry and me, and we own the entire front page of the money section, and with a picture of the book and the two of us, and it goes on for like three pages. We had zero idea any of this was going to happen. And it simply, there’s a series of things that led to that happening, which related to who luck. I thought it was a joke. So I called Joanna, and I said, “God, my friends are taking pity on me. They’re playing a joke. They made this mock up copy of USA Today and they left it on my doorstep.”
And well, actually I didn’t call her at first because I went downstairs, and then I saw there were other USAs Todays there. And I went and I looked, and they all had the same thing. I said, “Man, this is a really elaborate hoax because they changed all the newspapers.” And then I called Joanne, and she said, “Oh my gosh, now we’re in trouble because that actually is real, and we’re 50,000 copies back ordered overnight.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow. Quality problem. Yeah.
Jim Collins: You think about those series of — and then of course there was the year after that, which was a Natalie year at the end of which I put so much into it, I ended up getting shingles because my immune system was so shot. So each of those were, there was the luck event, often a who luck event, sometimes a what luck event. But every one of them, what followed was the return on luck aspect of it. Of yes, I get the email from Jerry Porras, but then there’s the five years of doing the research and inventing the matched pair method and what a wonderful opportunity to do that.
And my life is just who luck after who luck after who luck. And then this fear, I was in a place where there was a lot of this fear. I just have to say though, there’s one thing which is that sometimes you have who luck, though, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that — the key is you can have opportunities come at you. And the hard part is when not to make a return on luck event out of it because it wouldn’t fit your encodings. And so just because something’s a once in a lifetime opportunity is merely a fact, it’s not a reason.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, yes. And everything’s kind of a once in a lifetime event if you sit down and really think of it, right?
Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly. Each and every day.
Tim Ferriss: I think about this line, and I’m going to paraphrase, although I think I’m very close, by the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who I had on the podcast a few years before he passed. And I think he said something along the lines of, “The great challenge in life is to separate an opportunity to be seized from a temptation to be resisted.”
Jim Collins: Exactly. Oh, exactly. Those are really good words.
Tim Ferriss: I think about that a lot. And to follow up on the luck question, so if we look at return on luck, it doesn’t specify good or bad. I was thinking about this in the process of reading. And I’m wondering if you look at the people you have studied, whether it’s for What to Make of a Life, or other books or outside of the context of books, it seems like, yes, you can conclude distribution of luck for these matched pairs seems roughly equivalent, but the return on luck is not. And I’m wondering if that applies, not only to good luck, and I’ll tell you what went through my head. I thought, if you were teaching, let’s just say you, Jim, teaching a class at Stanford called luck or —
Jim Collins: Return on luck.
Tim Ferriss: Return on luck. Is it possible there’s actually a progression of skill related to return on luck just as there might be with different types of investing. And that if there’s big good luck, that’s sort of the white belt level. Most people can recognize that. Some percentage of those people can capitalize on it. Then there’s small good luck, which is a little more challenging. Then let’s skip over neutral. Just say there’s small, bad luck, little bad things that people can sometimes make use of, along the lines of the apocryphal Chinese saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” type of thing. And then there’s big bad luck. And I’m just wondering, we could think of these all as forms of chance, if you’ve noticed any patterns among the matched pairs who were able to make good use of big good luck or small good luck, were they also able to reframe bad events or make use of, quote, unquote, “bad events.” It’s just a question.
Jim Collins: I’ve struggled with this myself because I feel like I’ve done better at return on good luck than return on bad luck myself. I’ve had some return on bad luck too, but I can more easily zero in on the return on good luck. So first of all, I just want to clarify one thing that’s really, worth mentioning.
In my prior work, Good to Great, Built to Last, Great By Choice, How the Mighty Fall, so forth, where I was doing matched pair studies and Jerry Porras really gets the credit for coming up with the idea of the historical matched pair method that’s been so central to me. And you were always asking, I got two companies, and then multiple pairs of companies, and they’re in similar circumstances, and then one does really well and the other doesn’t. And you’re looking at the contrast and asking what’s different and that’s how you see the ideas. And so that was really good for my corporate research.
This study is different in how I use pairs. And Joanne came into me one day, and she just said, “Jim, people are not stock returns.” And what she meant by that is, whereas if I’m studying companies, I have these objective output variables. I can look at cumulative returns relative to investors, for example, and I can definitively prove this company over time did better than that company. I can unassailably demonstrate that. But there’s no legitimate way for me to define what is a better life than another life.
And so what happened in doing this study, and this was a big change in how I just even look at the whole world, is that the way it actually turned out, because there were really interesting people all the way around, is my other studies, it was like this, right? There was always one that was better than the other. In this study, I had two people, and then they would hit a similar cliff, and they would come out and they would maybe go different directions, but you couldn’t necessarily say one direction is better than another direction. You could say maybe one person had more trouble getting in frame before they got to the other side or whatever.
And so this study is very much about people going through similar cliffs and coming out and making different choices, which is a very different thing than saying making better choices. So I want to be really careful that I use pairs here. I learned a lot from having pairs. Pairs were essential to this. But the way I think about them when it comes to human beings is different than the way I think about it when it comes to companies.
The bad luck part, I want to speak from a company standpoint, I want to speak from a personal standpoint. Company standpoint. What Morten and I found in Great By Choice is that the only mistakes you can learn from and the only bad luck events you can learn from are the ones you survive. And so it’s true, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jim Collins: And so what we found is that there’s sort of a part of getting a return on bad luck for companies, and speaking for any founders or people who are building companies, what we really found is that the way they manage the bad luck side of things is you think of like a curve, a rising curve of a company or a company moving through, and to say it’s growth or it’s success or whatever’s like this, but around this are like these events like COVID, financial crisis, massive technological disruption, whatever it happens to be. These are sort of these things that are happening along the way.
And meanwhile, down here is this line that you’d think of as the death line. And if you ever hit the death line, it’s over. You never get a chance to get a return on what comes next because it’s done. And so what we found is the kind of the secret to managing, from a company standpoint, the bad luck side of it is you got to stay alive. And the part of getting a return on luck is if you manage yourself with such discipline and with such financial reserves and with such buffers and such relationships and so forth, such that when you get a triple hit of bad luck, you’re alive. You don’t hit the death line. Part of the return on luck is you get to the other side and others got wiped out, but you didn’t. And that sets you up for a return after the fact.
And so this notion of kind of part of the secret to getting a high return on bad luck as a company is to have constant productive paranoia so that you never hit the death line. Because if you’re one of the ones who never hits the death line, then you get a return by almost definition because you survived and others didn’t. So that’s the company side of it. And then of course, you make the most of the things you learned and all that sort of stuff.
From a personal standpoint, I think about — one of the people in the study who you met in the study is we have a pair of women whose husbands died with tragic luck events. One died in a plane crash and the other died of a heart attack. So these two women got hit with a massive blow of bad luck. I mean, it’s the ultimate. You didn’t cause a plane crash, huge negative consequence, total surprise out of the blue when you get that call that afternoon.
And you look at Cardiss Collins, whose husband, both of these women, their husbands served in Congress, which meant that they had the opportunity to take their husbands’ seats because the way that works with this mandate that opens up the possibility. If your spouse dies, you get to take their seat. And Cardiss Collins, she felt that her husband would have wanted her to at least give it a try. And she goes off to Washington DC. She was totally unprepared for being — she’d never thought of being a Congressperson. The whole frame of her life has shifted and her life had been shattered.
And while she was there, she began making these steps. She just started, she would serve on a committee. And she wasn’t even sure she was going to stay. But then what happened is she began to discover a marvelous sense, like she had these amazing encodings, probably, I mean, just really amazing encodings for being an incredible legislator. She became chair of the Congressional Black Caucus at one point. She was there for 25 years. She really flourished in the role of being a congressperson, Seventh District of Chicago.
Now, I want to be really clear. I wouldn’t look at it as that, oh, it turned out that it was a good thing she lost her husband. It wasn’t. It was a terrible thing. So you don’t look at it and kind of denigrate or in any way dismiss the pain and the grief of losing her husband. That’s just awful, tragic, terrible luck. But what the story illustrates is that sometimes the bad luck events, cliff events, a number of the people in our study, these cliff events, have a way of knocking your life to the side. And when that gets knocked to the side, you’re thrown off to Congress, or you have a disease. I mean, your life has just been just bang.
And what happens, I think the way I think of it through this study is it isn’t just kind of like I will make good from bad luck. It’s just awful to lose your husband. But in many ways, what it showed is this sense of that those cliff events, which are often a form of bad luck in some cases, so sometimes good cliff events, but can be bad luck events, can reframe your life in incredibly unexpected ways and exposing codings you never knew you had. And then the return on that is right back to the very earlier part of the conversation, which is those encodings pop into frame, you recognize them, you begin to trust them, and your life takes a different vector.
And that’s how I really kind of came to see it on these big ones, is that you’re not Pollyannish about it at all. They can be terrible, terrible things. Katharine Graham, another one. She had no idea she had the encodings to be one of the greatest corporate leaders of all time. But when the frame shifted and she began to discover those leadership encodings, it doesn’t take away the pain of what she lived through. But when she really committed to and trusted, “I am the leader of the Washington Post Company,” that was the ultimate return for the company, for her, for journalism, for the whole deal. So that’s kind of how I think about it.
And think about it this way, this is going to happen. There are going to be founders. I know you have founders in your world. One of the big luck events that happens to a lot of founders is they lost control of their company, then they lost their company. And sometimes it comes as a terrible ripping shock, almost like a death. And they’re cast into the fog. Or the other version of it is they sell their company, and then they lose three decades of their life because they don’t get back in frame.
And one of the groups, there’s multiple groups of people that I really, really, really hope engage with this book, but one of them, my friends in the military, veterans coming out of places like special operations who have to reframe their life, et cetera. But I think for people who aren’t going to build a company till the day they die like Sam Walton or Steve Jobs, you’re going to face this cliff event. And I think a lot of them are not well prepared for it, and I think they just jump right off another cliff. I would love to see that not happen.
And one of the big questions I would put to [inaudible], I really believe this, is to ask yourself the question is, ultimately in the end, are you going to be a founder who actually the big thing you discovered in your life is building your company, and you will do it until you’re out of breath, or are you going to be somebody who that’s one frame of your life and then there’ll be a second very, very different frame that comes after that?
What worries me is how many people, either they lose their company or they sell their company, and they actually don’t know how to get back in frame. And then a year goes by, and five years goes by, and 10 years goes by, and 15 years goes by. And as you know from the book, your best years are starting to hit it about 55, 60, 65, 70 anyway. And all of a sudden, those punches in life have just expired without being really used.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would say very few founders have a plan. They have scripts they can copy, but it’s not reasoning from first principles or from seeking encodings. It’s, I guess this is what you do now. And that typically ends up with a crisis of identity, much like you described after an athletic career, after flops, after anything that has been a linchpin of your identity for such a long time. I had a question that I think ties into a lot of what has comed up. What has comed up. Do I speak English? I think I’ve tried —
Jim Collins: Yes, you do.
Tim Ferriss: — very hard.
Jim Collins: You do. Yes. You use English very well.
Tim Ferriss: Let me try that again. So I’d love to ask you a question that may tie into a lot of what we’ve discussed already. It came about in reviewing our earlier conversations, and I’d love for you to expand on it. So here’s the line. His mentor, Irv Grousbeck, hopefully I’m pronouncing that correctly, told him —
Jim Collins: Yep. Grousbeck, yep.
Tim Ferriss: — “An option to come back,” in quotation marks, has negative value on a creative path because it will change your behavior.
Jim Collins: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Could you expand on this? Because part of the reason why I have the confidence, I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word, to pursue all these different paths and chase different laser pointers of novelty is that I know I don’t have to stick with any given boondoggle if it turns out to be a boondoggle. So could you just expand on this? I want to make sure I’m understanding it correctly, and where it applies, where it might not apply if this Irv Grousbeck —
Jim Collins: So Irv was another one of the wonderful people that hit my surface, if you will. A great who luck event. So the story you’re referring to essentially was I was at the point where I was going to be really contemplating and confronting the leaving Stanford to head out on my own, bet on my own work. And of course the key is now we know the result. It worked. And I’m really glad that I carved my own path. I wouldn’t have been encoded to be successful in a political environment anyway. And most universities are political. You had to be good at that. I wasn’t very good at it. I was singularly terrible at it.
But there was a question in my mind about, should I try to build some bridges and threads back such that if I stepped away for six months or a year or whatever, that I could have the option to return, if Built to Last didn’t work or whatever. Because it was all right about that time. And Irv said, “It’s not in your interest to have the option to come back.” And I said, “Well, I thought options always have positive value.” He said, “No. Options sometimes can have negative value. Because if you know you have the option to come back, it will change your behavior, the level of commitment. If you know there’s no option to come back, you’re going to have to do…” It’s ultimately it’s a Natalie time, right? It’s going to be ultra Natalie time. And it will change your behavior if you don’t have the option to come back.
And so that idea of — I think you can have a lot of things in life that are sort of small test options and things like that, but I also, what I really took from that is that there come these times when you just go all in it. This is the key. In low odds games, games where there’s a very low odds of success statistically, if you don’t go 100 percent all in, the odds will be zero. So you’re either looking at a two percent chance or a zero percent chance. I’ll take two over zero.
Tim Ferriss: And zero is like anything from zero percent to 80 percent commitment is a zero.
Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Something like that.
Jim Collins: And you can see it in the people in our study at certain points in their life, when they went, once they got clear, they got out of a fog phase or they were sort of clicked into frame for the first time, I mean, the extent to which they were in, I mean, it was, this is what I’m doing. I’m not looking back. Here we go. That moment when Franklin gets dressed down by the Privy Council, and he realizes that it is finally, there has to be the separation from —
Tim Ferriss: Such a great story. It’s so good.
Jim Collins: Oh God. They’re dressing him down and he’s just like —
Tim Ferriss: Walked in an Englishman and walked out an American, I think is —
Jim Collins: Yeah, as a history professor put it, and I’m pretty sure I quoted him, that history professor, he goes, “Perfect, he walked in an Englishman, walked out an American.” But then think about then when they did the Declaration of Independence. Because what I came to understand by studying Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin, who are the pair in this is, obviously historians know this really well, but I had to learn a lot about the American Revolution, the founding of the country, the Constitution, all this kind of stuff through this pair of these people.
And this difference between separating from parliament and separating from the King. And the Declaration of Independence was separating from the King as I came to — and that thing, of the understanding that when we signed this document, we lose, we die. We all die. This is a death warrant if we don’t win. And if that moment of putting your signature on the Declaration of Independence would result in your death if you don’t win, has a way of focusing the mind to win. No options.
Tim Ferriss: I’d love to hear you discuss for a bit what you learned from simply choosing who to include in the book. Because you’ve applied, much like sometimes people think of options as always good things, not true, people may think of constraints as bad things, but very often necessary. Positive constraints are a real thing. So having matched pairs requires, it’s a forcing function for filtering. And even with matched pairs, you have many you could ostensibly choose from, and you had to winnow that down to something that could be contained in a coherent way in this book. And I’m wondering if, as an entire group, you learned from who you chose to omit as opposed to who to include, and if anything distinguished one group from another, meaning who made it and who didn’t make it, outside of the matched pair forcing function.
Jim Collins: There was a journey of really looking for a range of people who would shine a light on the questions that I was interested in. But there’s lots of folks that for, whatever reason in the end, I ended up not including. And partly the first, you put it right on number one, if I was going to have matched pairs, I’ve got to find the opposite side of the pair. So if I found somebody — so I’ll give a really good example.
We were just talking about Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin. I thought that this was back when I originally framed it as renewal, but then began to look at an entire life. But I always thought Franklin would be fascinating to study. I mean, this guy, he’s the kind of first poster child of great stuff late. I mean, the things that he did 70 and beyond. And of course, most of the people in our study did great stuff late too. That’s one of the most uplifting findings of the study is how much great stuff happens late. But I was just fascinated by Franklin that way.
But then how do you find a matched pair for Benjamin Franklin? And I was like, well, we may not be able to have Franklin because I don’t think there’s going to be a match. How do you find a match for Franklin? And so a member of my team and I kind of puzzled on this, and we came up with this idea, which was we said, well, let’s just take all the names of all the people who signed the Declaration of Independence and who were also at the Constitutional Convention. That’ll be a starting set.
Now what we’ll do is we’ll go pull apart all those lives looking to see if there’s anybody that meets the following tests. One came from what they call the leather apron class. Two, through self-education, became a successful business person and hard work. Three, then went on to sort of a second life after that in some form, some sort of interesting way. Four, played a significant role in the founding documents of the United States. And five would have been kind of a comparable age cohort to Benjamin Franklin. The whole thing, just go through. And you start taking all these people in this long list and you start ticking it off and ticking it off. And then all of a sudden we discovered Roger Sherman, who met all of those tests. It turns out to be one of the great finds for me in the study. Almost no one knows about Roger — well, that’s not true. I didn’t know much about Roger Sherman.
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t either. I was shocked. And the way —
Jim Collins: And he saved the Constitution twice.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The way you penned the introduction to that section —
Jim Collins: Oh yeah. Who is this —
Tim Ferriss: — was really fun also.
Jim Collins: Yeah. Who is this guy? And it turns out to be amazing. And they were the two oldest people at the Constitutional Convention. They played a seminal role in the founding of the country. But if I wouldn’t have found Sherman, I wouldn’t have been able to have Franklin, because I wouldn’t have had the match. And so throughout the entire study, there was this constant process of, “God, that’d be really interesting, but is there a match?” I thought it’d be fabulous to have Lennon and McCartney, but you have an asymmetry. Tragically, sadly, we lost John Lennon at a point where all of a sudden his life’s truncated. And so it just wouldn’t have been as good of a match to look all the way out, right? So ended up with Plant and Page from Zeppelin, which I think was a phenomenal match. And so just time and again, and then the other part was I wanted different walks of life. I wanted scientists, I wanted writers. I wanted very different kinds of roles and things that people did and different eras.
I’ve got the Suffrage era, I’ve got the founding of the country, I’ve got the 1920s or ’40s or ’60s or whatever. But the other is they all had to be people where their life, even if it’s not over, and most of them it is over, is largely in the record books. They couldn’t be at an age where you sort of don’t know what’s really going to happen. There’s too much more yet to live. And I’m really glad I stuck to that because that’s what really showed the, “Hey, look at what happens after 50, 60, 70.” And beyond.
Tim Ferriss: Let me ask a sort of holistic question about all the folks that were included also. And that is, it’s dangerous to assume, but presumably you could have chosen a cohort. And I’ve looked a lot, just given my involvement in science and studies and so on.
Jim Collins: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: These meta analyses of key contributions to science and perhaps they’re awarded with the Nobel Prize or something much, much later. But a lot of scientists, it seems, produce their most compelling work, let’s just say, sort of in their startup years. In quintessential startup Silicon Valley terms like 18 to 25 or 18 to 30, something like that. If we take that just as a placeholder to be true for some, many scientists, and maybe even more broadly speaking in other disciplines, what separates the people in the book who in the book are so consistently incredibly productive in their later years from the people who don’t do that?
Jim Collins: First of all, before we even just get into this a little bit, I want to ask you a question, which is —
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Jim Collins: Where do you think this mythology comes from that creativity, innovation, breakthroughs, best work, et cetera, et cetera, is the province of the young?
Tim Ferriss: Where do I think it comes from?
Jim Collins: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, okay. So my thoughts may not be appetizing, but let’s give it a shot. So I think about this too, part of how I’ll answer echoes, I think, some of how you approach your work in the sense that why do you study publicly traded companies? Because you can compare them across metrics and criteria that are publicly available. You have the data.
Jim Collins: I have the data.
Tim Ferriss: And I don’t want to make everything about startups, but I do find startups a really strange, fascinating laboratory within which you can look at different types of phenomena. And one, I’m currently right now, I have a whole group of people and we’re also using Claude Code and all sorts of stuff to do the most intense, fine, detailed analysis of my last 20 years of investing in startups that you could possibly imagine. It’s pretty incredible what you can do with enriching data and so on.
But one of the questions is age of founder, right? What do you see when you’re sorting by ages of founder as one variable, which is not independent? And I would say that I think the belief, whether it’s a myth or not, and I think it’s situationally dependent, part of it is, hence my incessant annoying questions about energy is that for certain disciplines, the intensity required to sustain a Natalie over years of intensity is constrained by energy. And sometimes it’s also constrained by responsibilities. So if you are early 20s, you’re living on a futon in a cockroach infested apartment eating ramen to survive and that’s good enough for you at the time, there is a certain competitive advantage to that. I think there’s also possibly just a mitochondrial physical advantage.
So you see a lot of home runs are created in, it seems like to me, I haven’t done a fine tooth comb analysis of this. People produce a lot of their best work when they’re in those kinds of professional sports peak years. It’s not that they’re limited to that. I think that’s a piece of it is just energetic intensity endurance advantage, which may be physiologically bound.
Jim Collins: I think it’s really interesting, and I would process this through a different lens, actually, at this point.
The way I would process this is having done this study is I think it’s not a question of energy. I think it’s a question of being in frame with your encodings and that if you are, I don’t think the energy is — I mean, there’s physical things like you can have something that catches up with you physically, of course, or you might have an autoimmune disease or something like that. Okay? But setting aside things physically, health-wise that begin to come at you. I just see repeated levels of evidence from the lives I studied here and people I’ve known over the course of my more classic work, people building companies and so on and so forth, that there’s no evidence to me that the energy goes down, it goes up, that the creativity goes down, it goes up.
And what I would say is that a founder that kind of burns out might have not even really been in frame being a founder. And the ones who really are in frame building a company is just — so if you take a Sam Walton or a Walt Disney or Steve Jobs, there’s no evidence to me that their creativity, that their intensity waned until they were basically expiring and it’s a — I mean, Sam was — he had bone cancer and he still — and he lived a very simple life. I mean, I don’t think that some of the people I studied that their lives changed very much. Their circumstances changed in terms of the amount of wealth they had, but the way they lived didn’t really change.
And they still get up every day and they go to work and they do the thing that they’re there to do and Walt is still thinking about what the next thing at Epcot might be and Sam is still thinking about the expansion of stores and what could happen with the culture and Steve Jobs is thinking about what will be the next iteration of sort of things and how can he set up Apple to be outstanding beyond him? And then the clock stops at some point, but until then, they don’t stop. They don’t stop. They just don’t.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Collins: So this idea that somehow it goes like this —
Tim Ferriss: Peak and fall, right.
Jim Collins: Peak and fall. I mean, I see it as a peak when you’re young isn’t this, it’s a peak and then there’s this and it just goes up and up and up and up and up and up and up. I mean, you found a media empire, peak, you found a nation.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Jim Collins: And so, I mean —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. It’s a pretty tough act to follow.
Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly. And even in the science or creative areas, you know what it’s like to write a book.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Jim Collins: And how exhausting it is, how draining it is. And you look at Toni Morrison, doesn’t even become a writer until her 40s. She comes into frame as a writer. She doesn’t publish Beloved until she’s 56. She doesn’t publish Jazz until 61, which is an astounding thing. And then she just goes on and she does about half of her contributions after the age of 60. And there’s no evidence. Anybody want to say that, well, Toni Morrison was slowing down when she did Beloved because she’s after 50.
Tim Ferriss: No.
Jim Collins: No. And Barbara McClintock, Grace Hopper, Grace Hopper made huge contributions to computer science. Those happened as her second career. Barbara McClintock’s breakthrough on transpositional genetic elements when it all came together, happened after the midpoint of her life, which was in her late 40s.
So this idea that it happens early, and then I go back to my classic work and the people who built companies, the ones who really built companies, the reason why I think they didn’t have this peak early and then they’re just sort of exhausted and burnout is because they were in frame. Sam Walton was encoded to build Walmart. Steve Jobs was encoded to build Apple. Walt Disney was encoded to build Disney. And if you’re encoded to build your company the way they were encoded to build their companies, a startup is just kind of the first step and you would still eat ramen to do it.
Tim Ferriss: Can I offer an alternate?
Jim Collins: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to —
Jim Collins: Anyways, forgive me. I just —
Tim Ferriss: No, you’re good.
Jim Collins: I so chafe against the —
Tim Ferriss: I love it.
Jim Collins: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I want the chafing, a sentence you don’t hear very often. No, I’m into it. The alternate explanation I wanted to offer, maybe it’s complimentary, but let’s just say we rule out my theory of professional sports.
Jim Collins: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Physiological advantage. I think there’s a piece of that sometimes, but —
Jim Collins: Sure. For singing and stuff, sure.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Look, I won’t drag that particular piece out, but let’s say I take it off the table. The reason I was asking about the 50/30/20, right? How do you actually maintain the 50 percent of your time allocated to new intellectual creative work is because the alternate explanation I would probably vote for as to why some people seem to get lost or certainly don’t focus on their encodings after some initial success. And therefore you do see a peak and maybe a decline or plateau is that in the beginning, sounds like you’ve sustained this very well, they wake up, they know exactly what they’re doing.
They are doing one or two things, but there’s a primary, and let’s just say it’s a startup, it’s making this metric go up five percent per week or per month compounding over time. That’s it. That is the focus, period, end of story and when you have a modicum of success or a lightning bowl of success and you see this in Nobel Prize winners, right? I can’t remember the term for it. It’s like Nobel Syndrome or something —
Jim Collins: Nobel Curse. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Where their productivity just plummets afterwards. Why? Because they’re now getting all of these invitations over the transom. And similarly, it’s like when fill-in-the-blank founder, putting Steve Jobs aside, although he had his periods in the fog for sure.
Jim Collins: Well, for sure after he got fired, which was a cliff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. So taking someone who’s maybe, you could take your pick of hundreds of founders who’ve had an exit of some type or done well enough that now they don’t necessarily feel like they have a demon whipping them at their back. Again, that is not necessarily entirely compatible with the encodings. But the point being, now they’re thinking about the charity whose board they just joined. They’re thinking about any number of other things that slowly or quickly eat up the pie chart of time such that they are well below their 50 percent in terms of new intellectual creative work or applying it to their encodings.
How have you seen people most reliably preserve that? Outside of some mutants who are maybe like, I certainly see this in Silicon Valley on the spectrum, who seem unable to do anything but focus on their encodings, what have you observed in all of your studies to people who are — how they are good at preserving the majority of the pie chart for their encoding? Because I find it very, very, very challenging. Yeah, I do. I do. I’m not going to lie.
Jim Collins: It is. It is. And I have, I mean, just for myself, I have one great advantage, which is part of my encodings going all the way back to what you even wrote about, described our first conversation. I’m belligerently reclusive and it’s a temperament, right? It’s a temperament. People have often said, “Well, Jim, you must feel really lucky that you’re in such an enviable position, because it’s easy for you to be selective and to say no to stuff because you have so much to select from.” And what they don’t see is that I was always selective even when I didn’t have anything to select from. It’s an encoded mode that I’ve always had. So for me, it’s been, I think, easier than for some people, because they maybe don’t have that encoded mode of belligerently reclusive and naturally selective as a way of being independent of circumstance.
But then that brings me to, I think, what I would really see with the people in our study is that there’s phases of life and I don’t think they’re common stages, by the way. They’re just phases. You’re kind of in a phase or out of a phase. And there’s what I would describe as kind of clarity phases and fog phases. And we talked about the fog phases, but there are also these times of great clarity when they click into frame with a really big thing and sometimes they click into frame with a really big thing and it is the big thing till the day they die. They just all the way to the end. And they may have cliffs, but it doesn’t knock them into doing something else.
Toni Morrison just kept writing and Barbara McClintock just kept doing her genetics and Robert Plant is still doing music, right? They found the big thing and it’s just like, “That’s just what I’m going to do.” And then there are others who life would hit them or they would make a change and they kind of go through a fog phase and then there can be a lot of these different sorts of noisy things around them, but then they click in again with a big thing and what happened with the people in our lives is there are these times when they’re doing something they’re encoded for that really feeds their fire, that they’re willing to flip the arrow of money to do. And this is the other part we need to talk about, about this, that what happens is once they do that, it’s a big thing, right?
And they go into what I was describing in the book as hedgehog mode. There are times in life when you’re in hedgehog mode. This is the big thing I’m doing. Now I may have some other things around here, but I’m really clear on the big thing. And sometimes they get out of that, but then they’ll come back to a version of being in the big thing. Science, building my company, founding a nation, right? Big, big, big, right?
Tim Ferriss: Tuesdays, got to focus on founding the nation. Yeah.
Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly. And so I think that once you click in with the really big thing, you give yourself over to it and it sort of dominates. It’s kind of like, sure, you may have tributaries in your life of water, but there’s a big river, which is the Mississippi, of how you allocate yourself. Now, there can be a lot of pieces within it. It can have a lot of sub points to it. It might not be as simple as just, “I solve genetics puzzles.” But it’s got a big organizing theme around it.
Tim Ferriss: If that’s simple, man, I don’t know what my life is, but yeah.
Jim Collins: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Pickup sticks.
Jim Collins: But this thing about flipping the arrow of money, so now thinking about this with the startup community and so forth, one of the things that is very clear about how people really got in frame in our study, and I really resonate with this as I reflect on my own life too, but question is, what’s the arrow of money? Are you doing what you do to make money or do you need money to do your work? Is money fuel? Back to the flywheel. Is it simply fuel to make the flywheel go further? Is money fuel to write your next book? Is money fuel to do the next Zeppelin album? Is money fuel to be able to do your science? Is money fuel to be able to be a provocative questionnaire in the world? Is money fuel? Money is a fuel and that’s the direction of arrow this way.
The other is the direction, the flipping of the arrow of money of actually the truth is, if I strip it away, the truth is, in the end, a big part of this is I’m doing this to make money. And what I found with our people is if they’d flip the arrow of money that the only purpose of money is to be able to do what I’m encoded for that feeds the fire, that’s the point of it. So I never have to stop. Then you have a very different relationship to success when it comes.
If it was about the money, and then you get the money, and you were never really in frame in the first place maybe, or maybe you were, but I think that notion of what is the direction of the arrow plays a big role in what happens when you get, say, to the other side of having built something, succeeded, or whatever. And I go back all the way to my classic work, I think the great company builders that I studied was never about the money. It was what they were building, and that’s why they never ran out of steam. And no matter how much money they made, they never ran out of steam. And I think that’s a really critical part of how this cycle gets managed.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s a huge piece from what I can tell. And I’ll just throw a few things out there and then I want to also make sure I don’t forget to ask you about this live event that I believe you’re doing not too far from now.
Jim Collins: Oh, yeah. Thank you for reminding me about that. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. So I’ll sprinkle some thoughts. So the first is, the older I get, the more I think about, I guess, finite and infinite games, cars and just along the lines of what you were saying, fuel, being very clear to distinguish between fuel for the journey and the journey itself.
Jim Collins: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it makes me think of this quote, people should look up — I think I may have had him on the podcast, in fact, Tim O’Reilly, fascinating figure in Silicon Valley, publisher, but much more than that. And I’ll paraphrase his quote, which is, “Imagine life as a road trip across the country, you need fuel for the trip, but it’s not a tour of gas stations.” And also, if you’re selecting, perhaps using a reframed question from Seth Godin, so the question people often hear is, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” It’s like, okay, and I have a mug with that on it, and it’s helpful to think about that, but Seth’s reframe is what would you do if —
Jim Collins: You’re a six! You’re always going to be worried about failing.
Tim Ferriss: Well, the way Seth puts it is he said, “What would you do if you knew you would fail?” Right? Which forces you to think about the actual day-to-day process of traveling on whatever that journey happens to be. Those are just a few things that came to mind. And also, it’s like the more I do certain things in my life, the more I realize, yes, there might be — it’s a big might, a monetary reward. And I’ve maybe been rewarded in the past, but now I just want those additional chips if they come so I can keep putting them back into play.
Jim Collins: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Which may not be the most financially responsible all the time, but I’m also not anywhere — much like Richard Branson or a lot of these other folks people think of as risk-takers, they’re actually really expert risk mitigators. If you really dig into their stories, they’re very rarely at risk of ever touching that deathline that you were talking about.
So if you want to hop into it, since I know we’ve got to be coming up on three hours now, do you want to mention this live event?
Jim Collins: There are very few times when I’m just out there in a public event that people can sign up for, but related to this on April 9th at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco —
Tim Ferriss: Great spot.
Jim Collins: Yeah. I’m going to be doing a conversation on the evening and around the ideas in this book. I don’t know what direction the conversation exactly will go, but I know sometimes people are like, “Is Jim ever going to be live at something?” And usually there are things people can’t sign up for, but this is one they can. So I would hope to see some friendly faces there and maybe even people are provoked a little bit by our conversation in some way. And I would look forward to that very much.
Tim Ferriss: So if people search Jim Collins Commonwealth Club, would they be able to find it easily online?
Jim Collins: I think they should be able to. I would hope so. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You would.
Jim Collins: And so yeah, there’s the Commonwealth Club, April 9th, San Francisco. Yeah. What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins, they can find it there.
Tim Ferriss: In our second conversation — we’re going to start to land the plane shortly — but I was looking at a reference to the Good to Great acknowledgements. This was also something that I think you may have brought up, and I’ll just read the line, because there may be something that was alighted here, but, “Success is that my spouse likes and respects me evermore as the years go by.” And I’m wondering if you would keep it to that, if you would revise that, add to it, simplify it? How do you think about success these days?
Jim Collins: I think that’s one of the best paragraphs I ever wrote is the final acknowledgement paragraph in Good to Great, and I really would still see that as, for me, the ultimate definition of success in life. Joanne and I, and the ultimate who luck, right? We got engaged four days after our first date.
Tim Ferriss: Seems to run in the family, I guess.
Jim Collins: It does. And the Natalie moment was, “She’s saying yes now. I should say yes. Let’s get married.”
Tim Ferriss: Smart, smart man.
Jim Collins: I was very much. But then the thing is that, and then 45 years is the return on luck, right? And we’re going to do 46 this year. Your spouse knows you like no one. And to me, I mean, the depth of my — not just my love for Joanne, but the depth of my respect for her, for her intellect, for her integrity, for her amazing ability to speak so directly and sharply to me about what needs attention, our marriage works because we have this multiple reasons it works, but one of it is Joanne is incredibly good at seeing what needs attention and I’m encoded to hear it and the combination is what — is a great combination for us. And she’s strategic guidance mechanism, I’m creative propulsion. And I, over the years, somehow just began to realize that Joanne can see me for really who and what I am, what my real motivations are, why I’m doing things, my weaknesses, my flaws, my fracture points, my unlikeable tendencies, whatever they might be.
And I just, when I wrote that sentence, and this is true today as ever, the measure for me is that Joanne will love me unless I did something really stupid, Joanne will love me regardless, but will she like me more as the years go by? Will she respect me more as the years go by? And for me, this is like the truest, most searing test is if Joanne likes and respects what she sees, I’m not too far off the mark and other kinds of success have come and I want my work to be read and all those sorts of things, but that really is. If I had all kinds of external success, but I lost Joanne’s respect or Joanne woke up one day and was like, “Well, I actually don’t really like you anymore.”
Tim Ferriss: Be a bummer of a day.
Jim Collins: Yeah. That would be the worst possible kind of failure.
Tim Ferriss: Jim, that’s deeply inspiring. I find your life and your examination of your life and the lives of others deeply inspiring. People can find you at jimcollins.com, the new book. I encourage people to check it out. I read every page of it. What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. That’s the book that people will be able to find everywhere. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wind to a close?
Jim Collins: I would just add that it is truly a great joy to connect with you in conversation again. The range of things that we get to talk about, the quality of your questions, it is, as you know, I track my days minus two, minus one, zero, plus one, plus two. Our conversation makes today absolutely, for me, a plus two day. I would converse with you anytime.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks, Jim. That makes my day and always a pleasure to connect. Hopefully, we’ll have a chance to break bread in person in the not too distant future.
Jim Collins: That would be great.
Tim Ferriss: That would be nice.
Jim Collins: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I like getting to the mountains. And for everybody listening, we will link to everything, including the new book, What to Make of a Life and the Commonwealth Club and so on. In the show notes, tim.blog/podcast, just search Jim Collins and go to the most recent episode. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but also to yourself.
Jim Collins: Oh, I love it. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you, Jim.
Jim Collins: You’re welcome.
Tim Ferriss: And thanks to everybody for tuning again. Till next time. Take care.
Jim Collins: All right.
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