EVERY SPOKEN WORD
145 min read · 29,327 words- 0:00 – 1:51
Preview.
- JCJim Collins
Joanne just one day, she gasps out to me and, uh, it was just one of those moments, it's just, like, etched in my emotional memory. She just gasps, "I feel like I'm dying." And in a sense, she was, right? 'Cause that identity as, 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 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Jim, so lovely to see you yet again.
- JCJim Collins
Absolutely. I, I really, really, truly just revel in the idea of a conversation with you.
- TFTim Ferriss
We've had two previous dances.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim 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 [laughs] tour of duty to complete.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I decided that this morning I would go back, starting early with a lot of coffee-
- JCJim Collins
Hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... to reread the transcripts of our prior two conversations.
- JCJim Collins
Oh, wow. Yeah.
- TFTim 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 [laughs] in terms of where to start and what to do.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
But I do have a lot of notes and the latest work, What to Make of a Life, and we will certainly get to that, but we're gonna meander all over the place.
- 1:51 – 4:13
More energy at 68 than 37: Jim's mysteriously expanding battery.
- JCJim Collins
You got it.
- TFTim 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.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
You are now 68, and I wanted to dig into that for a minute or maybe even a few minutes.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Because looking back at the last two conversations, I wanted to spot gaps in the terrain. What had we not discussed?
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And [laughs] I wanted to look at some of maybe the, the mundane things related to routine.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
Food. Do you consume caffeine? Are you still rock climbing? Maybe we'll start with rock climbing, 'cause I just had elbow surgery and I'm looking to get back into it. Are you still climbing?
- JCJim Collins
Not so much. I've been doing cycling with Joanne.
- TFTim Ferriss
Okay.
- JCJim Collins
She has gotten me into going off to Italy and the Dolomites and places like that to do these huge mountain passes, and-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... it's something we can share together-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... with whatever years we have left, and I think that maybe the intense aerobic aspect of that, you know, if you have your heart rate above 160 for an hour or two hours, I mean-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... and spiking into the 170s, that's, I think that ha- does something for you. I'm not sure what.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
But I actually think that's part of it. And then I just have other ways. I, I can't really explain entirely... In fact, the, my team has heard me say multiple times, "Where's all this energy come from?" 'Cause it's only increased. I really do feel that I have more energy. I had a lot of energy at 37. I had a lot of energy at 17. I have more energy at 67, when I wrote that, 68 now.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
I need less sleep. My clarity, if anything, I think is higher. And I st- I mean, I really, really look forward to 4:00 AM.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
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 AM so that I can get up and get going." And that is... It's hard to explain, but that sense of almost childlike anticipation-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... uh, to get up and get rolling is, is palpable. It's there almost every single day. Well, I do get
- 4:13 – 7:47
Two mornings a day.
- JCJim Collins
one... We might have spoken about this in our first conversation, but I've always been a morning person, so I actually figured out how to get two mornings a day, and that I, I'm just really fortunate that I have the ability to nap under any conditions, anywhere, at any time. I can nap. And I [laughs] I was doing a, a talk once and it was, I don't know, a few thousand people in the room, and they had a nice couch backstage. And I was supposed to go on in, 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 like, I'm dreaming and I'm having a sleep, et cetera. And they come back and they look at me and they're like, "He's asleep. Oh my goodness, he's supposed to be on in, like, five minutes."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
And they shake me and I'm like, "Okay, good to go." I, I can go to sleep immediately, and then I can wake up immediately, and then I can walk out, 3,000 people, and I was asleep five minutes before. I don't know where that comes from.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- JCJim Collins
That's just a fortunate thing. But what that allows me is I get two mornings a day. I get first morning, you know, that when, after a night's sleep, but then I get second morning, which is after a nap. And, and in fact, my team knows that I'll sometimes say to them, "I'm gonna go get ready for second morning," which basically is I'm gonna go take a nap, and then I get second morning. And then I've learned really systematically what kinds of activities really fit with what times of day.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- JCJim Collins
So-
- TFTim Ferriss
Is your first morning, Jim, sorry to interrupt, is that 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM, something like that? What does your first morning look like?
- JCJim Collins
That's ideal. I love, I love the 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM. Joanne tends to sleep later than me, so, uh, especially when I was, like, 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 'cause you, you really need to... The only place I go where I don't take my own coffee is Italy.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
I make my own coffee, and I start the day, and that's that one, one cup that I make, and I get right into, usually that's when I do my most intense creative work. And I love that sort of three to four hours, if I can get it, of just, you know, the light changing and bang, into it. I like within 15 minutes, I'm fully into it and just go.
- TFTim Ferriss
When do you consume your first food typically, and what does, what does that meal look like, if it's a meal?
- JCJim Collins
I always have something with my morning cup of coffee so that I, I have enough calories to keep my brain going, and I just, I just grab something that's fairly easy to eat with, with a cup of coffee, a Kind bar or maybe a yogurt or something like that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
And then I have breakfast with Joanne. We have a morning when, you know, when I'm in town, which is most days, I don't like to travel that much. And once Joanne's up and going, 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, you know, The Wall Street Journal or from, you know, wherever, and she reads them out loud, and then we talk about them.
- TFTim Ferriss
Is this after your first morning that you're doing this?
- JCJim Collins
Usually after first morning, exactly.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah. Sometimes we might get up at about the same time, but most times I'm up early. And so then I have a pretty, a more robust breakfast and, and really listen to Joanne's curation, and I'm always just really curious what
- 7:47 – 9:46
How Marcelo Garcia avoids the "simmering six."
- JCJim Collins
she thinks.
- TFTim Ferriss
Could I just add a, a little running commentary if I could?
- JCJim Collins
Sure. Please.
- TFTim Ferriss
So 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 jujitsu, 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-
- JCJim Collins
Hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... for his particular weight class. It might have been the unlimited division, and they couldn't find him because he was sleeping under the bleachers. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
[laughs] Yeah. Yeah, I can relate to this.
- TFTim Ferriss
And they had to wake him up, and then he walked to the mat, kind of 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-
- JCJim Collins
Hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... and biking with Joanne.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
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-
- JCJim Collins
Hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... 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.
- 9:46 – 12:14
The portable coffee ritual.
- TFTim Ferriss
To ask a very, very specific question, you said you travel with your own coffee.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
I have to scratch the itch. What are you actually packing [laughs] specifically?
- JCJim Collins
Oh, okay. Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
So I take, I pack Peet's ground coffee, Arabian Mocha Java, a cone filter, the filters themselves, a water boiler so that you can, you know, make sure that you have hot water and, and have kind of the whole setup that way. And then when I start the day, you know, I, I get the whole sort of system going. And it doesn't really matter where I am or what time of day it is. It's actually an interesting thing because if I'm, you know, 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 kind of this sense of it doesn't matter if room service is open. It doesn't matter any of that kind of stuff, that opening kind of bubble of the day. Now, i- if it didn't work, I'd still be fine, 'cause you always have to be able to like adapt it. You know, if something just went awry, you just adapt. But for the most part, you got that opening bubble of the day. And to be able to basically replicate that-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... no matter where I am, no matter what time of day, it could be, you know, [laughs] 4:00 AM East Coast time or it could be 7:00 AM California time or wherever, right? It replicates that morning bubble.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. It's like a boot up sequence that you're able to preserve.
- JCJim 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 like, are they gonna have any good coffee or is it, you know, 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] So the, the particular idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, I think that's what you say of successful people, right?
- JCJim Collins
Yeah, their own idiosyncratic encodings, yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Yeah. There we go. And we're gonna really double click on this word encodings, is endlessly fascinating to me. I have a few of my own, and certainly in What to Make of a Life, uh, 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-
- JCJim Collins
Oh, yes
- TFTim Ferriss
... in some cases after 70.
- JCJim Collins
That's right.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I am 48 at the moment, so I found it very reassuring that there were so many
- 12:14 – 14:32
Side passions of high performers: Disco dancing, the occult, and Sunday school.
- TFTim Ferriss
case studies
- JCJim Collins
Oh, you're still warming up.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm still warming up, which, 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 AM.
- JCJim Collins
Yep. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Exactly, right, 5:19. And you gave a list at one point, this is gonna be a pretty odd segue, but you gave a list of some of the, let's call it side passions or eccentricities-
- JCJim Collins
Hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... of different people, and one of them [laughs] ... 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 [laughs] .
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I'm just wondering who was, who, who was the person?
- JCJim Collins
Yeah, nope. I won't say who it was. I would've put it in the book.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
But that list was really interesting because one of the things that I was very curious about, 'cause our people became really, once they really locked onto a big thing for a given period of their life, as-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... you know from the reading, I mean, they were really, really, really focused, and the level of intensity and energy over years or decades or multiple decades they put into it. And I was really, I was just curious, though, did they have any room for anything else in their lives, or were they just monomaniacally obsessed freaks, right? And, and then I just kinda went through just a very simple, like, okay, on that particular dimension, did they have really intense side passions of some kind, even if the big thing was over here. And I think I can remember there was something like 80-some percent had some kind of an intense side passion. And what I was struck by is the range of them. Oh my goodness. I mean, disco dancing, [laughs] the, the studying the occult, but also, like, teaching Sunday school and running and mountain climbing and some people were really into just hosting interesting dinner parties. Others wouldn't have been interested in that at all. But they had things that absolutely they were incredibly passionate outside of the big thing that they focused on, and I found that a, just an interesting data point, that they didn't h- make a life where they had nothing else except the-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... primary arena of their work to focus
- 14:32 – 17:12
Genesis of *What to Make of a Life* and the sage down the hall: John W. Gardner.
- JCJim Collins
on.
- TFTim Ferriss
So let's set the table a little bit, and I apologize in advance. I know you like to shine the spotlight on other people and research and data sets, but I'm, I'm probably gonna turn the spotlight back on Jim.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
The bug called Jim.
- JCJim Collins
Oh, yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
That's a callback for people who-
- JCJim Collins
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
... listened to the first conversation.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] So when we spoke, the second conversation we had, I asked you what was on deck coming up, and you said, "I'm five years into research on self-renewal," and I really like this term, self-renewal.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
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.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
Self-renewal-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... 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 my, our first conversation was your first long-form podcast.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
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, on how you wrote it, so you can tackle it in any direction you like.
- JCJim Collins
In my 30s, I came across a, a remarkable man, a wi- one of the many sages I've, I've had the joy to be affected by in my life, of John W. Gardner, who was kind of a wise man in residence at Stanford Business School, emeritus at that point, just down the hall from me when I was teaching there. And 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 l- a life of this followed by, you know, just kind of a long degradation.
- TFTim Ferriss
Peak and then a decline.
- JCJim Collins
Exactly that. And John encouraged me to consider doing eventually some research on the question of self-renewal, and I was off working on Built to Last and Good to Great, and I was working on my company research, but I still have my notes from long conversations with John about how you might think about self-renewal. And so that seed had sort of been in there and it was gestating, and I thought someday I might return to that. Then what happened is I started thinking, that, that question was always, you know, like, how would you actually study it? And, and then a seed got activated that had been planted back a decade before that in my 20s.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- 17:12 – 22:24
Jim’s wife Joanne's IRONMAN triumph: winning by 90 seconds on a shattered hamstring — then the cliff.
- JCJim Collins
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, Howie Long, and she was really constructed to compete, and that sense of... You know, we talk about, when we talk later about this notion of being encoded for something, there's just some athletes that, they need to win.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
It's a need. They need to win.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
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. And we go off to Hawaii, and she raced in '84, '85, '86. In '85, she won the world championship in Hawaii. And there was a backstory to that race, which is that Joanne had a hamstring injury, and that hamstring injury just was chronic and it wouldn't really go away, and in the race it began to catch up with her. So she had this 10-minute lead with 10 miles to go in the marathon. As you know, it's a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile marathon in sort of 90-degree temperatures and 80-some percent humidity on the lava fields. I mean, it's just horrendous out there. And she'd had a good swim and a great bike, and she had this 10-minute lead- With just 10 miles to go coming back into town, and the hamstring caught up with her partly because it did limited her training and, and, you know, that was always there. And she began to lose a minute a mile. And I remember watching the ABC feed because the Wadwell, the sports truck was in front of her. And I could sort of see the race unfolding. I could watch it in real time with the camera, the truck right in front of her. And you could see her starting to lose time, like just a nine-minute lead, eight-minute lead, seven-minute lead, six-minute lead, like, and you're getting closer and closer to the end, but is she going to get there before somebody else does? And there is this moment, I mean, I'll never forget the moment where she stops in the middle of the lava fields and she has this extraordinary discomfort and pain and she's looking at her legs hoping they would move and she reaches down and she sort of massages them and she kind of like pounds on 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 kind of fixed her gaze on the horizon and there was this sort of stoic countenance that came over and she just like 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, like 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. And 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. And 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 like etched in my emotional memory. She just gasps, I feel like I'm dying. And 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 sort of 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 kind of 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 kind of 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.
- 22:24 – 28:01
Cliff events, matched pairs, and the bigger question that swallowed the smaller one.
- JCJim Collins
And I thought if I could find people, if I could study people at the cliff and I could study their lives up to the cliff, through the cliff and after the cliff and how they come out and how they kind of constructed life after that, I would be able to have a method for understanding this thing that I used to sort of think of as about self-renewal. And so I just need to fill in a couple other pieces because yeah, sort of the creative journey of how I got here. But then as you know, I always like pairs. I like to have two entities in the same situation to kind of 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 had my matched pairs. I had my people who'd gone through these cliffs. I was studying their whole lives. It was overwhelming in scale, this project. I honestly thought at times I might never be able to finish it because it was just so monstrously big. But it began to dawn on me the more I worked on it because I was looking at the, you couldn't understand this cliff out thing if you didn't understand the whole life. And so I had to study from their entire lives, right? And most of them are deceased, a few are in their 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 like an objective. And rather what I really saw were people who achieved what I might call self-renewal, but that's kind of not what they were doing. They were leading their lives and they were leading their lives through these cliff events and in between the cliff events and somehow all the way through to the end for the ones that had passed away. And I began to realize that what I had was a huge and rich data source for Really the big question, and, and just, just so that you kind of 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, and our original question was to study the concept of corporate vision, 'cause it was sort of what would that be, was back before it was, uh, something that p- anybody had ever studied. And then our method of matched 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, right? Partway through your life when you have one of a, a big enough cliff, you have to answer the question, well, well, now what to make of a life, because all that's done, or all that's changed. And then I realize there's a third time, which is when you're in the later decades of life, and many never get around to answering this question, and, and I hope they will after reading this, is, well, now what to make of a life so that my 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 I've 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Bigger question.
- JCJim Collins
And then I just gave myself over to that question.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
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, right? Trying to figure out life. That is really kind of the creative journey. And when you get the book, it feels like, God, it's so, it's almost, like, 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.
- 28:01 – 31:18
The fog-clarity inversion: clear on life, foggy on projects.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, a few things. So we are gonna get to childhood for sure, probably sooner rather than later. And separately, as I was reading this book, particularly given the end of our second conversation, I was really cheering for you because I am in the middle of a fog with a draft that is 850 pages long.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I won't get into that, but I was like, "Oh, so there can be light at the end of the tunnel."
- JCJim Collins
Yeah. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
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-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... me. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
So are you in the fog on the book itself or in a general Tim wandering in the fog time?
- TFTim Ferriss
So I am, I would say, in the inverse of where I've found myself typically before.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
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.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
Here is the podcast I am building. Here is the fill-in-the-blank business project where I would have extreme clarity.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
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, 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.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I feel like that is the Archimedes lever for everything else. I don't feel like I have much to prove anymore from a professional perspective, but I do also want to end up where you are in the sense of feeling like you have, or a- 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-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... in terms of what does Tim 3.0, 4.0 look like, because I do love the podcast. I c- plan to continue doing it, but it's also become one of the most saturated, noise-filled playing fields imaginable. And I think anyone who expects the same music to play forever probably does not anticipate the inevitable, which is probably a cliff of some type, right? So I have a fog as it stands currently around a few things, one of which would be writing.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
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, [laughs] I'm gonna still be paying the taxes-
- JCJim Collins
[laughs] Oh, yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... that you need to be prepared to pay. So that is a bit of a crossroads at which I find myself right now.
- 31:18 – 37:09
Fog happens to everyone — don't freak out about it.
- JCJim Collins
My question for you is, so first of all, just for anyone who's listening to this, we're using the term fog, and I'm just gonna put a quick context on that and then ask a question.
- TFTim Ferriss
Please.
- JCJim Collins
And so we just talked about the notion of cliffs, and as you... You know, the whole study structure was around cliffs and so forth. And, and so I, I knew cliffs would play a critical role in how I look at things. I was really overwhelmed with the prevalence of fog in the lives that we studied. That was not something I expected to find. And fog are these periods of time where you're kind of either in some portion of your life or maybe overall in life at a given point where you're lost, confused, befuddled, disoriented, uncertain, right? And there's kind of these clarity phases of life. Like, I'm in a clarity phase right now. I was in a fog phase about 2013, 2014. Certainly in a fog in my 20s. There's kind of fog phases and these clarity phases. And every person in our study had these sometimes even extended episodes of, 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-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... of kind of, well, this question of the things that you'd done up to this point, are you ready to be done with them? Are you, 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
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, I could send you, uh, photographs of these if, if you're curious at some point.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
But in terms of navigating fog, I think the first is rule number one, don't freak out. So [laughs] and that was more of an interpretation than something you said literally, but in effect, like, "Hey, if you're in the fog, guess what? Everybody ends up in the fog."
- JCJim Collins
That's right.
- TFTim Ferriss
So don't panic, number one. And then there were a few th- 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, we'll definitely talk about this, but the concept of return on luck and different types of luck I found very compelling.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And thinking of how you take advantage of or widen the aperture on luck, because I, I think broadly speaking, luck is thrown around as something you either have or you don't.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
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, you talk about simplex stepping, which I think we may spend some time on, but I have, I think, upstream kind of cascading questions that I want to ask you about first, principally around encoding.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
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, right? Like, outside of accidents and so on, like, there is a point when you die, and that is the cessation of energy. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
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 l- reading about these different case studies, these profiles in the books, and there were s- there were so many fantastic ones. I really have to say, I loved the Katharine Graham.
- JCJim Collins
Mm. Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] It's, it was just so compelling.
- JCJim Collins
Hard not to love Katharine Graham.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hard not to love because you see people who are put into, say, cliff situations-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... and they are unprepared.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And then there are counter examples where people are effectively have prepped for 10 or 20 years for the cliff they eventually face.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And those are very, very different-
- JCJim Collins
Yes
- TFTim Ferriss
... in a lot of ways. And you also, not to keep bearing the lead on this, have people who sort of methodically find their encodings, and I want you to distinguish that from strengths. You have people who are forced into a situation, and thank God they just happen to have an overlap with the circumstances forced upon them and these inner workings that allow them to find their stride as if, you know, Michael Jordan was sent to, like- basketball prison camp. And like, lo and behold, what luck, you know, he happens to be incredibly good [laughs] and, and built for basketball.
- 37:09 – 44:01
Jim's wife's one-word review of life with him.
- TFTim Ferriss
So my question for you that I want to hit on before we dive in, 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 honing in on encodings as a wellspring of energy, but you seem like you've always been pretty good at that, at least after-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... some of your experiences at Stanford. What would her answer be, do you think?
- JCJim Collins
Years ago, there was a profile being done on me, and I, I'm not big on a lot of profiles. I'd rather just have people read my books and take away the ideas. But anyways, the profile was gonna happen, and so I said, "If we're gonna 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, I... Okay, here we go."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
And, uh [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
What kind of profile is this gonna be? [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
So we're at breakfast, and he says, "I have one real question I really wanna ask you. So if you just pick one word to describe what it's like to live with Jim-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
... what one word would you use?" Okay, so you got a picture. [laughs] I'm, I'm, I'm sitting there waiting for the answer, and I, I'm went like, you know, always an adventure, inspired, energizing, creative, right? All these things are going through my mind as possibilities. She gets one word, and after a long pause, she just kind of looks at him completely, completely serious, completely just straight, you know, single answer, "Exhausting." [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
You know, that's hilarious 'cause I knew that word was coming. I, like [laughs] and that's me projecting. I'm thinking about my partner.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
That's hilarious. I literally in my head-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
... had exhausting. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
[laughs] Exhausting. And so she would relate to the question.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
I think what she would say is that, yes, I've always had a high energy set point. And just as an aside, it's not something I think I even put in the book, but the way I came to think of it is that we all have kind of an energy set point, and maybe mine is just a reasonably high energy set point. And just to be clear though, I think that the thing I would want people to take away from what they read here is that whatever your energy set point, you know, you can have variation around that set point. And, and the question is, how do you lead your life in such a way that you're on the positive side of that variation in the set point, and it sustains until you run out of breath?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
'Cause 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. 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
That sense of if you're doing it, you can't not do it, right? Like, I, like you, I don't have to demonstrate that I can do well at what I do. I don't have to worry about do I know how to, I don't know, have a teaching moment or whatever, right? How to come up with the right questions to ask somebody running a big company. But if I sit down, I still get joy out of preparing for a, a moment or being at it or, or just a sense of excitement that morning because the actual doing is something that I so love that I put in the book, and Joanne is the one that helped me sort of see this. I'd always thought of myself as an incredibly disciplined person, and everybody else saw me as really disciplined, and I kind of finally came to the conclusion I'm really not very disciplined. I mean, I am somewhat, but look, if you just can't help, you just can't stop yourself-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... 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. You're just... it's, it's almost a form of compulsion, which isn't discipline, right? And, and if it's sheer love of the actual doing itself, well, how's that discipline? Just love doing it. So that's one. But I think she would also say that, like you, I love having a big project, and this has been a huge project, right? So for 12 years from the time I first started noodling on this till 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 AM. There's always the project, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm. Yep.
- JCJim Collins
Every single day, there's the project, and that's energizing, even if it's huge and monstrous. And, and then the third is this sense of extending out and circling back that, that I saw in all the people in the study of that, this really interesting, and it'll be very interesting to see for you as well as it happens with this, with the sense of this notion of kind of radical reinvention isn't really what we saw. There weren't people who quote, "Radically reinvented themselves." It was this organic process of kind of extending and pushing themselves out into new modes or new things or new activities, et cetera, kind of 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 over the c- you know, what keeps him so full of fire for music and for singing all these decades later. And if you look at him, he's like, you know, he, sure, he's no longer in Zeppelin. He doesn't need to be. He's, he was extending out into bluegrass, and he was extending out into, you know, going off to the desert and playing with trance musicians and all these kinds of really... and learning to blend his voice with Alison Krauss. I mean, utterly marvelous extensions. With Alison Krauss or with some of his extensions, he'd come back And re-bring to life a Led Zeppelin song.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
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, right? That's consistent. That's a circle back. The extend out is it's a different question and different unit of analysis, so
- 44:01 – 49:11
When the fire went from red molten rage to a green-yellow warming glow.
- JCJim Collins
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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know the feeling. [laughs]
- JCJim 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. It's, I think of it as green and yellow, and it's like this sustained warming glow. And I don't have that, I do not have those kind of insecurity, prove myself kinds of things that are driving me. And as a result, my energy's gone up. And I think that because the fire is different, because the fire is this sustained warming glow, it is just, like, constantly generative, and I think that's a really, really big part of it. That sense of, like, you write a sentence and you look at it and you go, "Wow, that's almost a good sentence."
- TFTim Ferriss
So let me ask you about that color shift, right? Going from the red to the greenish yellow.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
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, is that what provoked the shift? Is there something else? What, what actually happened that led to that shift in fuel, so to speak?
- JCJim Collins
First of all, I would imagine that a number of people, and maybe you yourself, relate to the raging, burning lava coals, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, yeah. Oh, boy. Yes.
- JCJim Collins
And you kinda 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 [laughs] 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 Joanne and I don't need to worry about, like, are we gonna hit the pavement, like, 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 gonna work?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
So it's nice to not have that, but I, I don't think that's the essence of it. I think it didn't happen like a flash. I think what 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, like, 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 that, this wonderful video I came across of Grace Hopper, the great computer scientist who invented software essentially. It's an amazing story. Silicon Valley should know her story more. It's really an incredible story. 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, you know, Barbara McClintock solving the geneticist, solving a genetics puzzle and, and her sense of she didn't fear dying in a car crash, 'cause there were all these car crashes that she was driving across the country, so much as she feared dying in a car crash before she'd solved the puzzle that she had, right? 'Cause she just so needed to solve the puzzle. And every life was one of these ones where it's like they got to this point where the thing that they were engaged in, in doing was so reinforcing in itself for itself, 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, like, rubbed off on me.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
And they all somehow got to this point, and I think that it just affected me. I mean, I can't really explain it, and other than that is it just affected me.
- 49:11 – 56:53
Encodings vs. strengths: The window frame metaphor and John Glenn's click moment.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm. 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 wanna look at it. But if we're trying to put dominoes in order, that seems like a very important domino to tip over first.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
It seems to be a prerequisite for a lot of the other things. And I'm wondering if somebody flew out to spend time with you for a day, and they were like, "Jim, I know you're good at asking questions. That's what you do. How the hell do I find what my encodings are?" Because without that, it seems like having the conviction to know when you wake up exactly what you're gonna do becomes a lot harder. And I'm not trying to speak for you, but it does seem to me that if you are always suffering from decision fatigue, paradox of choice, man, that's a great way to use up all your chi and end up dead before you should be. I mean [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... creatively or physically-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... [laughs] 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 [laughs] age God knows whatever, right? [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
So we should go back and forth on this a little bit because there's kind of two strands that will come together, and I think they're-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... for me were really, really, really eye-opening and very uplifting in the end by looking, you know, the study across these lives because there's the luck piece of kind of how the roulette wheel of your life spins as to which encodings you discover. [laughs] And then there's what the encodings are. They're actually kind of joined, if you will, as an idea. We have 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, that they decided to dedicate themselves to.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
So first of all, let's just talk about encodings. I'm gonna describe what encodings are and how they kinda work. But if you don't mind, Tim, given that you're in the fog, I wanna ask you a question about encodings for yourself.
- TFTim Ferriss
Love questions. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
Encodings are these kinda 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, 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. They're just, you have a constellation of encodings. I have a constellation of encodings. Everybody on the planet has a constellation of encodings, and it's like a vast galaxy of encodings. But at any given moment, your life is looking through like a window frame at those encodings, and that what happens is that there's points in life where the window frame, right, c- captures a set of en- a big, bright set of those encodings coming through the window, and you're kind of in frame with them. And then if the window frame shifts again and doesn't capture very many encodings, you're kind of, if you will, out of frame. You're not really capturing many encodings. The encodings are still there, right? They're, they're just there. But the kind of... Your life can shift around whether you're capturing a set of encodings or whether you're really not. So I think about the test pilot John Glenn, who you read about, and how he was not capturing encodings when he was a young man. At first, I mean, his parents thought, "Well, maybe he'll come into the family business," or, you know, "Maybe he should go try to be a doctor." But he just wasn't... I mean, the encodings were not really in frame when he was, like, taking chemistry and physics and things like this. And then through a, 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. His encoded ability that he only discovered, he didn't add it, it was just there, that under extreme danger and immense speed, he could have a heart rate that is, you know, 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 gonna go down.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
But John Glenn's would go down, right? [laughs] And then, of course, he becomes an astronaut, and Gordon Cooper, his matched pair, very similar. And so it's all of a sudden, bang. And then after his career, that came to an end. Very interesting little story of how he thought, uh, 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 anymore, 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 [laughs] where he's got, of his memoir, his time at Royal Crown Cola is, like, almost 10% of his life, and it's 0.2% of his memoir.
- TFTim Ferriss
Not much to report here. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
Exactly. Exactly. And so he's still John Glenn, but what happened is the window frame shift shifted, and it wasn't until he got back into the Senate where it shifted again. You know, he, I'm sure he was an adequate executive, but it wasn't like when he was flying fighter jets and-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... going up and orbiting the Earth, right? He was now kind of out of frame.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- JCJim Collins
And 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, you know, 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-
- TFTim Ferriss
Right
- JCJim Collins
... the way he was encoded for being a senator and encoded for being a fighter pilot and an astronaut. And so the key is discovering some set of them and letting them, letting them go, and that's an empirical set of observations. So now I come back to the question for you. You've written.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
I mean, you clearly have encodings for doing what we're doing today. You have other kinds of encodings around just sheer curiosity and so forth. So as you thought about this, as you were making notes, as you were thinking about what are your encodings as distinct from... Sure, you've turned your encodings that you've discovered into strengths, but the things that were really have a basis of, of encoding coming into frame, I'm curious what occurred to you, and especially as you think about, like, what's gonna be next.
- 56:53 – 1:03:18
My encoding candidates.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right. I'll return serve. So [laughs] I'll, I'll then have a ton of other questions, but I'll answer that in a 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-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... benefited from asking other people questions who are very close to me.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And those have been coaches, agents, friends, collaborators, almost like a 360-degree kind of analysis, and some of those questions have included: When have you seen me at my best, and when have you seen me at my worst, right? What do you think I find easier to do than other people? These types of questions. And I suppose where I've landed, but let me postpone the punchline first to say that I've really found it fascinating to look at, this is gonna be seem like a hard left to people, but the sort of Soviet and also Chinese approaches to sourcing athletes.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
How on earth are they so successful? How were they so dominant for so long? And, uh, yes, you can explain some of it with kind of 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, right? And they'll make it fun. It's not some kind of back-whipping exercise, but they'll have them do a handful of things, hold a broomstick overhead, and get into a squat, right? And that's how they start to source potential candidates for-
- JCJim Collins
Hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... Olympic weightlifting gold. But unfortunately, as a single person, as an N of one, y-you don't have the luxury of infinite time to try everything, right? 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, is a strengths finder test helpful for this? Like, could you do five or six of these and look for the overlap to try to get some direction so that you're not penalized for trial and error by losing decade after decade? Where I've landed for myself is through my own experimentation, I think asking a lot of dumb questions. I'm very good at asking seemingly dumb questions, which often are not dumb. Sometimes they are just straight-up dumb, let's be honest, but oftentimes 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 sort of the fifty-thirty-twenty from respected faculty. I am a novelty seeker. That's an intrinsic drive that I have in a lot of ways. And the upside of that is that I can do angel investing in, in different industries. I can interview people from yet a different set of worlds, and I can borrow practices and copy and paste different principles from one area into a disparate area, and sometimes those really, really work. So I think I'm good at combining those worlds. Separately, and maybe people listening can give me feedback if they're interested in this, a friend of mine, one of my closest friends, said to me, "You know, you should really do some podcast episodes where y-you are recording conversations that you have with founders," because I've been-- I've invested in a hundred plus companies over more than a decade, probably close to two decades. And he said to me, he's like, "There are things that you are really good at that I don't think you realize you're good at [laughs] 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.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I even go back and listen to it, and I'm like, "Yeah, I don't think there's anything special a-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, I am still wondering if there are ways that people can facilitate the process of finding those encodings.
- JCJim Collins
So I was listening very carefully to what you were saying, and a couple things really popped into my mind as, as you were, you were talking, is that, first of all, I think if we re-round... Well, I did rewind the tape of their lives, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
And, you know, I wouldn't describe that the process of kinda 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 kind of, you know, deliberate test-taking or anything like that. It was that life kinda spun them into a situation where they could feel the, the encodings kinda light up, if you will. And I think what really stood out, the more I think about this, the question is less about... Well, there are two ways in which I wanna kinda sharpen the question a little bit for you. One is, 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
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 him to be a pilot. They wanted him to be in the family business or be a doctor. Robert Plant's parents didn't want him to be a singer. They wanted him to be an accountant.
- TFTim Ferriss
[chuckles]
- 1:03:18 – 1:07:53
70 points on trust: Discovering your encodings matters, but trusting them matters more.
- JCJim Collins
Think about that. I mean, with all that, I mean, you know, you go through these, these different ones. What really stood out is that when they got a sense for them, they trusted them. It was their trust of them when they got a, a glimpse of them that is what really stood out to me. They-- 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 it is about trusting the encodings you've discovered? I'm gonna put 70 points on trust-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, that's cool
- JCJim Collins
... 'cause I think we're getting clues all the time.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right. Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- JCJim Collins
Which is a very different question.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, it's very different.
- JCJim Collins
It's a very different question. It's like I could expend myself asking these supposedly dumb questions, or I could expend myself, you know, in some other way. And it's not competitive comparative to others. It's this is in frame, and this is out of frame. And then I have learned something in my own experience. This book is not about business. It's not about leadership. It's not about management. There's a few ways, though, that it's really affected me a lot when I think back to my prior, my classic work. And one way that it has really affected me is we talk about the right people on the bus from good to great. Still true. But what I'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, in my work, what I found is that they gravitated towards some walk of life, some arena of activity where they really hit a big, bright set of their encodings. It really fed their fire, and then they just kind of went once they kinda clicked into frame. And I think that I used to spend a lot of time trying to turn people into what they're not and feeling very frustrated with what they're not. And as I did this study, one of the things that just really went over me like water and, like, just softening me and softening me and softening me as I began to realize that what I really had to learn how to do was to begin to find what the people around me, what their encodings are. 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 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, you-- If you have a bus issue, you deal with it. They're not-- They, they shouldn't be on the bus. But the real question could be, you have them in a seat for which they-- that doesn't line up with their encodings, that doesn't feed their inner fire, and if you try to spend your life trying to turn them into what they're not, they'll be miserable, and you'll be miserable. And I think you, other people can really play a role And helping you see what those encodings
- 1:07:53 – 1:10:31
Enneagram as an acceptable horoscope for tech guys.
- JCJim Collins
are.
- TFTim Ferriss
I've found a number of friends around large companies who, and not, not to say this is the right tool for everyone, but who've used Enneagram actually as a sort of heuristic.
- JCJim Collins
What's your point on the Enneagram?
- TFTim Ferriss
Which type am I or what's my perspective on it?
- JCJim Collins
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Both?
- JCJim Collins
Have you identified an Enneagram point for yourself?
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm a self-preservation six, which-
- JCJim Collins
Ah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Honestly-
- JCJim Collins
Totally. I'm married to a six
- TFTim Ferriss
... is- There you go. It resonates for me. I have a bunch of caveats that I'm about to put out, but it resonates for me. I have found it to greatly inform, uh, doing a postmortem on things and people who have not worked-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... 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. Like it's so clear the types that work and the types that don't. And there's no right or wrong. It's just for me, as a strong-willed, hopefully decent leader, but at the same time, very demanding person with certain preferences and so on, there are certain people on the bus who work and certain people who don't, and Enneagram I found very helpful for that. I think sh- Shopify and Dropbox both, I think, still use Enneagram as two examples, but very good for conflict resolution as well. The, the caveat is sometimes I think, at least, say, in Silicon Valley, that Enneagram is an acceptable horoscope for tech guys. Um [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
I mean, it definitely rhymes-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... in some ways.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
But when I read my particular... And it's helpful to have a person who is experienced with typing do this. I'm sure there are online tools that can also help. Side note, also found this incredibly helpful. People are gonna hate this. Some people are gonna hate this. But for thinking about dating and ultimately ending up with a woman who is an incredibly, incredibly good match for me.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And vice versa, I'm a good match for her. But the Enneagram was dead on. I was like, "This is nonsense for the... Like, I just don't believe it can be that simple," and it's not that simple, but incredibly helpful. So I would say there are some people who go down the rabbit hole to an extent that I think ends up turning everything into an Enneagram exercise. I think that's probably losing the forest for trees, but as one input of many, I've, I've found it helpful. And let me
- 1:10:31 – 1:19:06
The 1,000 creative hours rule and Warren Buffett's punch card: Life is the ultimate finite resource.
- TFTim Ferriss
ask you a question for, for you personally-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... and this could also be reflected in people in the book, but for you. This is one of the 7,000 highlights I had from this morning over my several cups of coffee. So this is, I, I can't recall if this is from our first or second conversation, but let me just read for a second here. All right. Well, here, here's the, the recap. "Jim was clear that he didn't want a half-life of quality in his work." I'll skip forward a little bit. "When he was invisible at Stanford, he could do deep work and long cycles of reflection for six years. He worried that if he became visible, he might wake up years later and realize his subsequent books were only half as good because he hadn't returned to the wellspring of quiet solitude."
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
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-
- JCJim Collins
Yep, mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... or highly socialized, but very little in between.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
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."
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And to elaborate on that, it's pretty simple. 50% equals new intellectual creative work, 30% equals teaching, 20% equals other stuff, committees, et cetera.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
Okay. And you organized your life and tallying things-
- JCJim Collins
I do
- TFTim Ferriss
... in a, in a very methodical way.
- JCJim Collins
And I still do that to this day.
- TFTim Ferriss
And you still do that.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
So people should listen to our prior conversations on that. But this 50% new intellectual creative work, 30% teaching, 20% other stuff, committees, et cetera, and this might feed into the, I'm going to screw up the exact terminology, but the sort of doom cycle of competence or, or whatever it might be. What I've found is one of the penalties of being a novelty seeker is that sometimes I will get pulled into things that I am quite good at, they could be new, they could be older, that do not align super strongly with my encodings, right?
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And so the days end up being very choppy. In other words, I'm doing a lot of management stuff. Maybe I've said yes to a speaking engagement I regret. Maybe I've invested in a few too many startups, and all of a sudden I'm on Zoom calls when I'm quietly grinding my teeth because I feel like I should be working on a book project, et cetera, et cetera. And my question is, A, have you ever succumbed to this type of gravitational pull to other things, where you end up kind of managing more than making perhaps?
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And then separately, if that's true, how have you corrected course?
- JCJim Collins
There's kind of two aspects of how I have really struggled getting pulled. First of all, just way earlier in my life, I, I was very close to, you know, I was getting pulled into things f- though I was not gonna be encoded for. And fortunately, by a series of really good events and choices, I ended up very much in frame. But if I'd stayed too long doing some of those things or taken some opportunities that were very glittering opportunities, that my life may- 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 eventually finally got my way to both, 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- JCJim Collins
And when success came, it surprised me, number one. I was like, you know, okay, I was prepared for the catastrophe on the other side. I didn't expect this to be coming, and now I gotta deal with all this stuff coming at me. And all of a sudden you have all these s- wonderful things, some of them maybe not so wonderful, but they're all coming at you, right? And you have all these, all these voices and, and people, and opportunities, and glittering things that, 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 sort of reeling from the suc- I was in sort of the fog of success phase. And I was, I was really trying to sort through, like, how I would allocate my time, and I was kind of reeling on my back feet, and I would say yes to things that later, that today I would never in a million years say yes to, but I did, whether it be involving too much travel or whatever sorts of things. But I began to realize, man, my whole life could be sucked away accepting opportunities. And so I had to really fight that and to eventually just kind of clamp it all down, but to do it in a really systematic and disciplined way. And that's when I started counting my hours, right? I basically just like, "I gotta have above 1,000 creative hours every 365-day cycle every single day looking back for 50 years without a miss." Right? I just set that. I will not ever break it. And, 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 as something that I, you know, was very impressed by Warren Buffett's view of the world, which is, you know, any use of you is an investment. It's a punch, and you can't get it back. And so when we're laying out for the year what sorts of things I will say yes to, we literally have every year we s- we'll be talking, "Well, what's the punch card look like? How many punches are left?" And it's not a question if somebody calls up and says, "Are you free to give a speech on October 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- JCJim Collins
I mean, think about it, right? So you're 48. If any given good sized 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, and so life is the ultimate punch card, right? And if you end up spending five years or 10 years, you know, pulled away from what you're really encoded for in some way because of whatever sets of reasons, you can't get that punch back. And so I began a punch card process, and that's how I, how I managed that. But then the other goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
- TFTim Ferriss
Could I pause for one second? Please don't lose your-
- JCJim Collins
No, please
- 1:19:06 – 1:22:47
"The most wonderful, disappointing answer": How Jim's team says no with grace.
- TFTim Ferriss
So when you and your team are turning something down because you're lower on points-
- JCJim Collins
Well, we turn things down sort of all the time. Yeah. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Do they say, "We're very sorry, but Jim is out of points," or do they say, [laughs] "Sorry, Jim has reached his maximum allotment of commitments"?
- JCJim Collins
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Actually, it's a real question.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah, yeah, it is.
- TFTim Ferriss
What is the language that you use for those polite declines?
- JCJim Collins
Well, 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 in everything we do. And as part of that, we're always thinking ahead to the fact that we're likely to say no. And all-- And just statistically, we're almost certainly likely gonna 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, and so that he can focus on his research and his writing. It's a limited punch card, and I have to set expectations that there just aren't very many spots on it. And then once we've sort of established all that, then there's a conversation about what, 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, you know, "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, right, from the get-go, 'cause we want people to walk away feeling better. No matter what answer they get, we want them to walk away feeling better about us than before they ever reached out to us, even though they're likely to 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, the person expressing my appreciation for, for what they're doing and for the invitation and sort of try to close the whole thing out with a sense of, I want them to walk away and say, "That was the most wonderful disappointing answer I've ever received."
- TFTim Ferriss
I love that. Fantastic. Very, very helpful. By the way, the 850-page monster that I was describing-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... shouldn't malign it by calling it a monster.
- JCJim Collins
Oh, no. All books are monsters. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. Okay, there we go. Right. My little pet monster.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Maybe it's more like a monster from Monsters Inc.-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
... as opposed to like a cr- a kraken, but it's entirely about how to say no.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And that's a simple way of putting it. But turns out, just like I think [laughs] what you realized with What to Make of a Life, can't remember if it was Emerson who said this. Of course, I wanna call it Emerson or Thoreau, but, you know, whenever you try to isolate one thing, you find that it's hitched-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... to everything else in the universe.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
Turns out that saying no is related to saying yes, which is related to decisions, which then you're like, "Fuck, now I have to talk about everything in life."
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
So pardon my French, but thank you for that answer. I would love to come back to a few things you said, which-
- 1:22:47 – 1:34:11
Right people, right seats, encoded edition: When management angst shrinks to almost nothing.
- JCJim Collins
Can I just close-
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm not sure I wa-
- JCJim Collins
... one quick thing out?
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh. Yeah, of course.
- JCJim Collins
Which was you, you asked about this notion of dealing with the staying on track, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yes. Right.
- JCJim Collins
And, and not getting section... I'll 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. I used to s- a lot of getting knocked out of frame was trying to manage my small system, and I did a pretty bad job of it. Took a lot of my energy. What changed is once I got really good at people in seats for which they're encoded, my time and energy that goes to that has shrunk to almost nothing in terms of that extraneous angst and replaced with just the joy of working with my people. So I think that's the second answer, is go 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
So let's, let's double-click on that actually before I hop to where I was going. I'm imagining, and maybe this is not the right way to think of it, but 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-
- JCJim Collins
Similar
- TFTim Ferriss
... at least if we're looking at broader corporate America, let's say, you have a small team.
- JCJim Collins
Yes, absolutely.
- TFTim Ferriss
And you can run some trial and error.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
Once you get up to 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people, maybe the trial and error becomes a little harder to systematize. Uh, but even on a small scale, one could make the argument that you have fewer players on the chessboard, so you also don't wanna chew up too much of their cycles with endless trial and error.
- JCJim Collins
Right.
- TFTim Ferriss
Are there ways that you have thought about making that process as fruitful as possible?
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
You're like, "Hey, there are five types of tasks. I'm gonna have everybody do trial and error with five types of tasks, and that'll help us hone in quickly." I'll stop there.
- JCJim Collins
First of all, I just wanna comment something about scale, two aspects of scale. The first is this: Never confuse scale of impact with scale of enterprise.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- JCJim 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, right? So you and I have chosen that, 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, 'cause there's a wider range and a larger number of seats in which you could do that. And, 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 is, I guess there's a little bit of systematic, but it's very... I'm not gonna package any of this 'cause I don't know how to package any of it. And it's not my, it's not my encoding to package and put out programs or anything. For me, it's been just I observe. So I, I have a member on my team that is absolutely marvelous at keeping a cool head in the face of unexpected crises. It's not me 'cause I, I have a little bit of the four Enneagram in me, and I can go pretty overly dramatic.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
It's not helpful. But this person is really, really, really encoded for this calm for the unexpected crisis. We had an unexpected thing happen yesterday that was like, "Whoa." But how did I discover that? It was just, it was observation, and what really became clear to me was in the middle of COVID when everything is kinda chaos and, you know, there's just this sense of just everything spinning out of control. And what I observed was this person was, was like the calm ballast through everything, right? Just, I could just see the behavior, and it was more just kind of recognizing it, and then once I recognize it and I just see little snippets, it could be just something I just notice, then I kick the frame to the side. I just kinda kick it a little bit so that what they're doing captures more of that. And it's, it's a very iterative process, so I don't have any magic dust on this. That's just kinda what I do.
- TFTim Ferriss
So in that example, this is a great example for a follow-up question, which is if someone is good, you don't wanna manufacture crises to-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah. Let's see how y'all do in crises. Right
- TFTim Ferriss
...slake the thirst of the, of the, of the crisis manager. So [laughs] how do you harness that if it seems like intrinsically it's contending with destabilizing unexpected events? How do you use that encoding?
- JCJim Collins
So it was really interesting. You know, so yesterday it was just my [laughs] wh- it was really simple. It's like, "Boy, I'm really glad you're encoded for this." [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- JCJim Collins
It was that simple. Like, "Let me know how it goes." [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- 1:34:11 – 1:42:30
Return on luck deep dive: What luck, who luck, and zeit luck.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, I'm curious in maybe too many ways that can be problematic. And actually, that relates to, I do wanna come back to what you just said since that's, that's a nice cliffhanger, pun intended. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
What I do wanna ask you, because this is, after all, in some ways, a self-indulgent therapy session for myself-
- JCJim Collins
Yep
- TFTim Ferriss
... let's take a sidebar.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
I wanna 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-
- JCJim Collins
It did
- TFTim Ferriss
... but we never really did a deep dive, and then it comes up again more substantially in what to make of a life.
- JCJim Collins
Whole chapter on it.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, I wanna talk about it because it strikes me, and I want you to poke holes in this-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... if need be. It strikes me that one of my encodings might actually be maximizing return on luck.
- JCJim Collins
Oh, interesting.
- TFTim Ferriss
Because I do so many different things, and very often if... And we have to be careful about hindsight twenty/twenty 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 six hundred tennis ball shooting machines on the other side.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm. Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I seem to be very good at picking out when there's six hundred balls in the air which one I should actually take a swing at. And I may be giving myself too much credit, but I, I think my closest friends would say that also.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
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?
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I might add something else that I picked up from someone in Silicon Valley that I think is also pretty helpful, but let's start there because I do think it's a mistake for folks to think I either have this thing called big luck or I don't, and that's the end of the story. Because you mentioned clues all the time.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I think this relates.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm. 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, you know, 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, well, it goes all the way back to when Morton Hanson and I were doing our book, Great by Choice. We're looking at really chaotic environments and some of the most successful startups to great companies that came out of really turbulent worlds. And because of the environment we were looking at, it allowed us to be able to say, "Well, wait a minute. These are environments where luck events can happen," right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Okay.
- JCJim Collins
I mean, you can think about, you know, two companies both having IBM walk in the door looking for an operating system, and they both get-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- JCJim Collins
... the same luck event, right? But one got a return on that luck event. And so what we did was we said, "Well, we need to systematically understand this." And, and Morton really gets a lot of credit for, for this because we, we figured out how to do it. You have to first of all define what luck is, right? If you're gonna study luck, you have to understand what it is and realize that luck is not an aura or something. It's an event. It's a luck event. And, and if we could put the parameters of what is a luck event- And what with Morton's collaborating together, we, 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
By definition.
- 1:42:30 – 1:42:55
"NATALIE" moments: Not All Time In Life Is Equal
- JCJim Collins
is a big one, too, and then what we found in this study is, and I think it really is a, it's a very true finding, they were really good at getting a return on luck when re- luck came because they have the, 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
- 1:42:55 – 2:01:17
Maximizing surface area of luck, return on luck, and Jim's chain of who luck.
- JCJim Collins
unequal moment. And so now I come back to you, Tim.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
If you're good at this return on luck thing, okay?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- JCJim Collins
So the 600 tennis balls are coming at you. One of them is the one that you decide to, to hit. What about your ability to kind of recognize it's a Not All Time In Life Is Equal moment-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- JCJim Collins
... and to go to kind of a 10X intensity in that moment? I'm curious how that plays out for you.
- TFTim Ferriss
I think there's a lot of overlap, and, and certainly I, I think my maximizing return on luck has an ROI distribution very similar to angel investing.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
I th- [laughs] So 80% of the times I hit the ball, it's like Marco, and there's no Polo. Nobody hits it back, right? [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
But, but every once in a while I'm like, "Holy cow, I just scored the winning point in Wimbledon. That's crazy. Didn't see that coming."
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
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.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
For instance, when I started angel investing, 2008 roughly.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
2008, 2009, 2010. I mean, [laughs] 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, it's usually some combination. But There are definitely periods of time where I've felt that not all time in life is equal, and this is where you need to apply some pressure to the vessel.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right? And that could be the first book, which, you know, we don't need to get into right now. It could be early on, the angel investing.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
It could be, for instance, around 2015 deciding to like tr- 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, uh, bioelectric medicine, brain stimulation, I think that's... I have very high conviction that that is around the corner. So taking a peek at the future that's not evenly distributed-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... I feel that way about bioelectric medicine right now. So I, I think they're very tightly bound in a sense. And question for you, there's this term that I came across, I, I wish I had the attribution, but, uh, I believe it was from someone in Silicon Valley or at least someone in tech. They talked about increasing the surface area of luck.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
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-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... it was entirely dependent in the world of startups, and even one could argue the, the success of the first book, on me moving to Silicon Valley, being in the middle of that switch box. Without that, forget it. There was not enough surface area to which who luck could really stick.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I'm just wondering if that resonates.
- 2:01:17 – 2:05:15
Cardiss Collins and return on bad luck: Cliff events that expose encodings you never knew you had.
- JCJim Collins
and all that sort of stuff. From a personal standpoint, I think about one of the people in the study who you met. 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, right? You didn't cause a c- plane crash. Huge negative consequence. Total surprise out of the blue when you get that call that afternoon. And you look at Cardiss Collins, whose husband-- Both of these women, their husband serves in Congress, which meant that they had the opportunity to take their husband's seats 'cause of 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, D.C. She was totally unprepared for being... She'd never thought of being a congressperson. Her whole frame of her life had shifted, and her life had been shattered. And while she was there, she began making these steps. Like, she just started... You know, she would serve on a committee. She started, right? And she wasn't even sure she was gonna stay, but... And then what happened is she began to discover- A marvelous set. It's 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, 7th District of Chicago. Now, I, I want to be really clear. I wouldn't look at it as that, oh, it turned out that it was a good thing she lost her husband. It wasn't. It was a terrible thing. So you don't look at it and kind of denigrate or in any way dismiss the pain and the grief of losing her husband. That's just awful, tragic, terrible luck. But what the story illustrates is that sometimes these bad luck events, cliff events, 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. Your life has just been just bang. And what happens, I think the way I think of it through this study is it isn't just kind of like, I will make good from bad. Look, it's just awful to lose your husband. But in many ways, what it showed is this sense of that those cliff events, which are often a form of bad luck in some cases, there are sometimes good cliff events, but can be bad luck events, can reframe your life in incredibly unexpected ways and expose encodings 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. You're not Pollyanna-ish about it at all. They can be terrible, terrible things. Katherine Graham, another one, right? Just she had no idea she had the encodings to be one of the greatest corporate leaders of all time. But when the frame shifted and she began to discover those leadership encodings, doesn't take away the pain of what she lived through. But when she really committed to and trusted, "I am the leader of The Washington Post company," that was the ultimate return for the company, for her, for journalism, for the whole deal. So that's kind of how I, how I think about
- 2:05:15 – 2:08:00
A warning for founders: Sell your company, lose a decade — the cliff nobody plans for.
- JCJim Collins
it. And, and think about it this way. This is going to happen. There are going to be founders. There's just-- 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. There's multiple groups of people that I really, really, really hope engage with this book. But one of them are my friends in the military, veterans coming out of places like special operations who have to reframe their life, et cetera. But I think the, for, 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. And I would love to see that not happen. And one of the big questions I would put to corporate, 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 ten years goes by and fifteen years goes by. And as you know from the book, your best years are starting to hit at about fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, seventy anyway. And all of a sudden, those punches in life have just expired without being really used.
- TFTim Ferriss
I would say very few founders have a plan. They have scripts they can copy, [chuckles] but it's not reasoning from first principles or from seeking encodings. It's I guess this is what you do now, and that typically ends up with a crisis of identity, much like you described after an athletic career, after special ops, after anything that has been a linchpin of your identity for such a long time.
- 2:08:00 – 2:11:19
"An option to come back has negative value": Irv Grousbeck's counterintuitive wisdom.
- TFTim Ferriss
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.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I'd love for you to expand on it. So here, here's the line. His mentor, Irv Grousbeck, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, told him-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah, Grousbeck. Yep
- TFTim Ferriss
... "An option to come back," in quotation marks, "has negative value on a creative path because it will change your behavior." Could you expand on this? Because part of the reason why I have the confidence, I'm not sure if that's quite the right word, to pursue all these different paths and chase different laser pointers of novelty is that I know I don't have to stick with any given boondoggle if it turns out to be a boondoggle. So could you just ex- 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-
- JCJim Collins
Irv was another one of the, you know, wonderful people that hit my, my surface, if you will, a great who luck event. The story you're referring to essentially was I was at the point where I was gonna be really com-- you know, contemplating and confronting leaving Stanford to head out on my own, bet on my own work. And, and of course, the key is, you know, now we know the result, right? 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. I mean, most universities are political. You had to be good at that. I'm, I wasn't very good at it. I was singularly terrible at it. But, you know, there was a question on 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, right? If this, if Built to Last didn't work or whatever, right? 'Cause it was all right about that time. And Irv said, "It's not in your interest to have the option to come back." And I said, "Well, I thought options always have positive value." He said, "No. Options sometimes can have negative value because if you know you have the option to come back, it will change your behavior, 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 gonna 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, you know, 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. And this is the key. In low odds games, games where there's a very low odds of success statistically, if you don't go 100% all in, the odds will be zero.
- TFTim Ferriss
[chuckles] Right.
- JCJim Collins
So you're either looking at a 2% chance or a 0% chance. I'll take two over zero.
- TFTim Ferriss
And zero is like anything from 0% to 80% commitment is a zero.
- JCJim Collins
Exactly.
- 2:11:19 – 2:13:06
Signing the Declaration as a death warrant: When there's no option, the mind focuses.
- JCJim Collins
And, and you can see it in the people in our study at certain points in their life when they went-- Once they got clear, right, or 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, it was, "This is what I'm doing. I'm not looking back. Here we go." That moment when Franklin gets dressed down by the Privy Council and he realizes that it is finally, you know, there has to be the separation from-
- TFTim Ferriss
Such a great story
- JCJim Collins
Oh, God
- TFTim Ferriss
It's so good
- JCJim Collins
... they're dressing him down, and he's just like, he's st-
- TFTim Ferriss
Walked in an Englishman and walked out an American.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah, as a history professor put it, I, and I, I am pretty sure I quoted him, the history professor. He goes, "Perfect. He walked in an Englishman, walked out an American." But then think, 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, uh, 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 th- the pair of these people, and this difference between separating from like Parliament and separating from the king. And the Declaration of Independence was separating from the king and that thing of the understanding that when we sign this document, we lose, we die. We all die. This is a death warrant if we don't win. And 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. [chuckles]
- TFTim Ferriss
[chuckles] Yeah.
- JCJim Collins
No options.
- 2:13:06 – 2:18:06
The hunt for Roger Sherman: Choosing matched pairs and the man who saved the Constitution twice.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'd love to hear you discuss for a bit what you learned from simply choosing who to include.
- JCJim Collins
In the book. Yeah, yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
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-
- JCJim Collins
Yes
- TFTim Ferriss
... of filtering, right? 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.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I'm wondering if as an entire group-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... you learned from who you chose to omit as opposed to who to include and if anything distinguished one group from another-
- JCJim Collins
Hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... meaning who made it and who didn't make it outside of the matched pair forcing function.
- JCJim Collins
There was a, 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 one of the, the first-- You put it right on it. Number one, if I was gonna have matched pairs, I've gotta find the opposite side of the pair. So 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. He is 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 'cause I don't think there's gonna 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 just 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've been kind of a comparable age cohort to Benjamin Franklin," right? The whole thing, like just go through. And you start taking all these people on this long list, and you start ticking it off and ticking it off, and then all of a sudden we discovered Roger Sherman, who met all of those tests, who 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
I didn't either. I was shocked.
- JCJim Collins
And he saved the Constitution twice.
- TFTim Ferriss
The way you penned the introduction to that-
- JCJim Collins
Oh, yeah. Who is this?
- TFTim Ferriss
... section was really, really fun also.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah. [laughs] Who is this guy? And he 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. And so it was... But if I wouldn't have found Sherman, I wouldn't have been able to have Franklin 'cause I wouldn't have had the match. And, 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, like, 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, you know, I wanted different, very different kinds of roles and things that people did, and different eras, right? I've got the suffrage era, I've got the founding of the country. I've got, you know, the 19, you know, 20s 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, right? They couldn't be at an age where you've, you sort of don't know what's really gonna 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.
- 2:18:06 – 2:31:52
The mythology of youthful creativity: Jim's rebuttal — Toni Morrison wrote Beloved at 56.
- TFTim Ferriss
So let me ask a sort of holistic question about all the folks that were included also, and that is, it's dangerous to assume, but presumably you could have chosen a cohort. And I've looked a lot, just given my involvement in science and studies and so on, these meta-analyses of key contributions to science, and perhaps they're awarded with the Nobel Prize or something much, much later.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
But a lot of scientists, it seems, produce their most compelling work, let's just say sort of in their startup years, right? In quintessential startup Silicon Valley terms, like 18 to 25 or 18 to 30, something like that.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
If that, if we take that just as a placeholder to be true for some, many scientists, and maybe even more broadly speaking in other disciplines, what separates the people who in the book are so consistently incredibly productive in their later years from the people who don't do that?
- JCJim Collins
First of all, before we even just get into this a little bit, I want to ask you a question, which is, where do you think this mythology comes from that creativity, innovation, breakthroughs, best work, et cetera, et cetera, is the province of the young?
- TFTim Ferriss
Where do I think it comes from?
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, okay. My thoughts may not be appetizing, but let's give it a shot. So I, I think about this, part of how I'll answer echoes, I think, some of how you approach your work in the sense that y- why do you study publicly traded companies? Because you can compare them across metrics and criteria that are publicly available. You have the data.
- JCJim Collins
I have the data.
- TFTim 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-
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... at different types of phenomena. And 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.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's pretty incredible what you can do with enriching data and-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... so on. But one of the questions is age of founder, right? What do you see when you're, when you're sorting by age as a founder as, as one variable which is not independent? And I would say that I think the belief, whether it's a myth or not, and I think it's situationally dependent, part of it is, and hence my incessant annoying questions about energy, is that For certain disciplines, the intensity required to sustain, like a Natalie [laughs] over years of intensity, is constrained by energy. And you, 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 seeming, 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 kind of professional sports peak years. It's not that they're limited to that. I think that's an, a piece of it, is just energetic intensity endurance advantage, which may be physiologically bound.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah, you know. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
That's one. That's one, yeah. What are your thoughts?
- JCJim Collins
First of all, I think it's really interesting, and I would, I would process this through a different lens, actually, at this point-
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, great
- JCJim Collins
... which is that, yeah, the way I would process this, 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 a, something that catches up with you physically, of course, right? Or you might have a autoimmune disease or something like that, okay? But setting aside things physically, health-wise, that begin to, to come at you, I just see repeated levels of evidence from the lives I studied here and people I've known over the course of my more classic work, people building companies and so on and so forth, that there's no evidence to me that the energy goes down, it goes up, that the creativity goes down, it goes up. And what I would say is that a founder that kind of burns out 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 a Steve Jobs, there's no evidence to me that their creativity, that their intensity waned until they were basically, like, expiring. And I mean, Sam, he had bone cancer, and he lived a very simple life. Now, I don't think that some of the people I studied, that their lives changed very much. Their circumstances changed in terms of the amount of wealth they had, but the way they lived didn't really change, and still get up every day, and they go to work, and they do the thing that they're there to do. And Walt is still thinking about, like, what the next thing at Epcot might be and, and Sam is still thinking about the expansion of stores and what could happen with the culture. And Steve Jobs is thinking about, you know, what will be the next iteration of sorts of things, and how can he set up Apple to be outstanding beyond him? And then, and then life, the, the clock stops at some point, but until then, they don't stop. They don't stop. They just don't.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. Yeah.
- JCJim Collins
So this idea that somehow it goes like this-
- TFTim Ferriss
Peak and fall, right
- JCJim Collins
... peak and fall, I see it as a peak when you're young isn't this, it's a peak, and then there's this, and it just goes up and up and up and up and up and up and up. I mean, you found a media empire, peak. You found a nation.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's a pretty tough act to follow, but yeah. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
Yeah, exactly. And even in the science or creative areas, you know what it's like to write a book-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- JCJim Collins
... and how exhausting it is and 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 till she's 56. She doesn't publish Jazz until 61, which is an astounding thing, and then she just goes on. And there's no evidence. A- anybody wanna say that, well, Toni Morrison was slowing down when she did Beloved 'cause she's after 50?
- 2:31:52 – 2:36:01
Flipping the arrow of money: Is money fuel for your work, or is your work fuel for money?
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- JCJim Collins
But this thing about flipping the arrow of money, so now thinking about it is with the startup community and so forth, one of the things that is very clear about how people really got in frame in our study, and I really re- 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 that's, that that's the point of it, so I never have to stop. Then you have a very different relationship to success when it comes. If it was about the money- And then you get the money, and you were never really in frame in the first place maybe, or maybe you were. But I think that notion of what is the direction of the arrow plays a big role in what happens when you get, say, to the other side of having built something, succeeded, or whatever. And I go back all the way to my classic work. I think the great company builders that I studied, it was never about the money. It was what they were building, and that's why they never ran out of steam. No matter how much money they made, they never ran out of steam. And I think that's a really critical part of how this cycle gets, gets managed.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's a huge piece from what I can tell, and I'll just throw a few things out there, and then I wanna also make sure I don't forget to ask you about this live event that I believe you're doing-
- JCJim Collins
Oh, yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... not too, not too far from now.
- JCJim Collins
Thank you for reminding me about that. Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Absolutely. So I'll sprinkle some, some thoughts. So the, the first is the older I get, the more I think about, I guess, finite and infinite games, cars.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And just along the lines of what you were saying, like fuel. Being very clear to distinguish between fuel for the journey and the journey itself, and it makes me think of [chuckles] this quote people should look up. I think I may have had him on the podcast, in fact, Tim O'Reilly.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
Fascinating figure in Silicon Valley, publisher, but much more than that. And I'll paraphrase this quote, which is, "Imagine life as a road trip across the country. You need fuel for the trip, but it's not a tour of gas stations." [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And-
- JCJim Collins
Oh, yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... 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. [laughs] And it's helpful to think about that.
- JCJim Collins
You're a six. You're always gonna be worried about failing. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, the way Seth puts it is he said, "What would you do if you knew you would fail?"
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
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, a few things that came to mind.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And also, it's like the more I do certain things in my life, the more I realize, yes, there might be, 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. [laughs] Which may not be the most financially responsible all the time, but I'm also not anywhere... I'm much like Richard Branson or a lot of these other folks people think of as risk-takers. They're actually really expert risk mitigators.
- JCJim Collins
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
If you really dig into their stories, they're very rarely at risk of ever touching that death line that you're-
- JCJim Collins
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... talking about.
- 2:36:01 – 2:37:02
Commonwealth Club event: Jim Collins live in San Francisco, April 9th.
- TFTim Ferriss
So let's, let's, uh, if you want to hop into it, since I know we're gotta be coming up on three hours now, do you want to mention this live event?
- JCJim 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-
- TFTim Ferriss
Great spot
- JCJim Collins
... yeah, I'm gonna be doing a conversation on the evening 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, you know, [chuckles] gonna be live at something?" And usually there are things people can't sign up for, but this is one they can. So I would hope to see some friendly faces there, and maybe even people who are provoked a little bit by our conversation in some way, and I would look forward to that very much.
- TFTim Ferriss
So if people search Jim Collins Commonwealth Club, will they be able to find it easily online?
- JCJim Collins
I think they should be able to. I would hope so. Yeah. It's the Commonwealth Club, April 9, San Francisco. Yeah. "What to Make of a Life," Jim Collins. Uh, they can find it there.
- 2:37:02 – 2:40:24
The ultimate definition of success: "My spouse likes and respects me evermore as the years go by."
- TFTim Ferriss
In our second conversation, we're gonna start to land the plane shortly, but I was looking at a reference to the Good to Great acknowledgments.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
Uh, 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.
- JCJim Collins
Hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
But, "Success..." dot, dot, dot, "is that my spouse likes and respects me evermore as the years go by." And I'm wondering if you would keep it to that, if you would revise that, add to it, simplify it.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
How do you think about success these days?
- JCJim Collins
I think that's one of the best paragraphs I ever wrote, is the final acknowledgment 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, the ultimate who luck, right? We got engaged four days after our first date.
- TFTim Ferriss
Seems to run in the family, I guess. [laughs]
- JCJim Collins
It does. And the Natalie moment was, "She's saying yes now. I should say yes. Let's get married." [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] A smart man.
- JCJim Collins
I was very much. But then the, the thing is that... And then 45 years is the return on luck, right? And we're gonna do 46 this year. Your spouse knows you like no one. And kinda to me, I mean, my-- the depth of my, not just my love for Joanne, but the depth of my respect for her, for her intellect, for her integrity, for her amazing ability to, to s- speak so directly and sharply to me about what needs attention. Our marriage works because... 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 unlikable tendencies, whatever they might be. 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 [laughs] , 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 f- for me, that 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 w- want my work to be read and all those sorts of things, but that really is... If I had all kinds of external success, but I lost Joanne's respect or Joanne woke up one day and was like, "Well, I actually don't really like you anymore,"
- TFTim Ferriss
That'd be a bummer of a day.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah. That would be the worst possible kind
- 2:40:24 – 2:42:09
A plus-two day and parting thoughts.
- JCJim Collins
of failure.
- TFTim 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, subtitle 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?
- JCJim 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Thanks, Jim. That makes my, makes my day, and always a pleasure to connect. Hopefully, we'll have a chance to break bread in person-
- JCJim Collins
We will. It'd be great
- TFTim Ferriss
... in the not too distant future. That would be nice.
- JCJim Collins
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'd like getting to the mountains.
- JCJim Collins
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
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.
- JCJim Collins
[laughs] Oh, I love that.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Thank you, Jim.
- JCJim Collins
You're welcome.
- TFTim Ferriss
And thanks to everybody for tuning in. Till next time. Take care.
Episode duration: 2:42:20
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