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

My next book, The Price of Becoming comes out soon. And in the meantime, I have sent it to some leaders, thinkers, and authors that I really look up to. One of them is Brent B. Shore. And this is what Brent said about The Price of Becoming. Quote, I've been on Ryan's podcast twice. In both times, his preparation was exceptional. What stood out was that he'd actually thought deeply about the messy parts. And that's what The Price of Becoming is about. After interviewing so many elite performers, Ryan has identified the unglamorous compound practices that lead to sustained excellence. The best leaders know how messy they are. They acknowledge their imperfections. They do the work no one sees. That's what this book shows you. Exactly what that work looks like and how you can do it too. Again, that's Brent B. Shore, founder, CEO of Permanent Equity and Bestselling Author. I'd love it if you would pre-order The Price of Becoming. You can do it at learningleader.com or go straight to Amazon and pre-order The Price of Becoming. Thank you so much for your support. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show. Presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now onto tonight's featured leader, Jim Collins. Is the author of some of the most influential books ever written, like Good to Great, Built to Last, and Great By Choice. Just to name a few, his concepts have become part of all leaders vocabulary like level five leadership, the flywheel, first two, then what? The hedgehog concept. He spent more than a decade at Stanford as a professor and has advised CEOs, four star generals, and heads of state. His new book is called What to Make of a Life, Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. During our conversation, we discuss how Jim's grandfather, Jimmy Collins, who was a test pilot and an author, shaped how Jim thinks about courage and living fully. Then we discuss what Jim calls encodings and why it's so important that you discover yours. Then we get into what the three by three reflective practice is and why Jim uses it to sustain excellence across decades. Now, this is a very special one for me. We flew to Boulder to record with him in person, and I'm so glad that we did. As you'll hear, this one gets very personal and is quite emotional at the end. Jim's super kind words mean the world to me. He is one of my heroes. He is a great example of why you should meet your heroes. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Jim Collins. I loved reading about your namesake, Jimmy Collins, your grandfather, and Dolores, your grandmother. There's a lot there. Can you tell me the story of Jimmy Collins? Well, Jimmy Collins is my namesake, and as you know, he comes at the end of the book, but basically he was one of the early test pilots. And he and my grandmother, Dolores, met and got married four days after they first met. He was flying across country, landed at Wichita for fuel. My grandmother was from Oklahoma. She was working at the Wichita Airport. Four days later, they were married, which of course leads to a series of sequences that I exist. And my grandfather was, in fact, his original memoir at the bottom of it says, it's a true stuff of an airman or something like that. And it was kind of the first sort of right stuff kind of book that had been written. And he was writing it in chapters serialized by the Saturday Evening Post. He was testing a variety of planes. And then in 1935, my grandfather, I think, was 30, he died in a test crash. He was testing a Navy plane, a Navy fighter, I believe, and he was doing a series of dives over Long Island and the plane failed and he died. As he was writing the chapters of the book, they were coming out in different publications. I think mainly the Saturday Evening Post. He told my grandmother that if he died, which was not an unlikely outcome, given test piloting in that era, that he'd already written the last chapter of the book. And it was in a desk drawer. And that if he died, she was to go get the last chapter, pull it out, put it on the back of all the other chapters and publish it as a full book. So my grandfather crashes, dies. My grandmother, after the service, goes to the desk drawer, pulls out the last chapter and reads the title of the last chapter, which is, I am Dead. And the last chapter is in first person about the death of the test pilot. He writes his own death story of the plane coming out of the sky and the engines and the screaming of the wings and he crashes. And his last words in his own memoir by his own pen, or I am dead now, those are the last words in the book. My grandmother then was a single mom in the middle of the Depression. So I had never had her tell me the story of Jim and the crash and all of that. So when she was in her 90s, I traveled down to Oklahoma where she had been residing for quite some time. She'd grown up there, returned there. And it just has her to tell me the story of Jim and meeting and their life and my grandfather's death. And then she cried and she said, thank you for that. I've never done that before. And I said, well, never done what? She said, well, I never told that story before. She said, no, no, I've never cried before. And I think about this. It had been almost seven decades that my grandfather had died, that she'd lost the love of her life. I said, you'd never cried? And she said, no, I was a single mom, middle of the Depression. I had two kids and I sat there in the service and I just gripped the sides of the chair and I just willed myself to hold it together. I had to. And finally, after all those decades, she was able to tell the story and then to let loose and to cry about it. Of all the things kind of I feel good about in my life, I didn't plan for that to happen. I didn't know that that was the case. And it was one of the ones I feel really, really good about. Like, what if I hadn't gone down there? What if I hadn't gone and asked her to tell me the story? Her life might have come to an end, which it did just before age 100, without ever crying about losing Jim. And so it's one of those things where like, okay, I feel great about that. And I feel especially great about that because the dedication to the book has two dedications. One is to Dolores, my grandmother. And it's who stood strong for me when I was most vulnerable. And she was this one person in my life that she was just so strong and she was always there. Like just always there. She was a very difficult person. She was difficult in part because of the shaping forces of her life. But she was this incredibly strong person. And the one person I knew that kind of no matter what, she could not break and she wouldn't ever, ever let me be cast adrift and alone. And the second dedication is to Joanne, right? Just very simple for Joanne, always. You write that your grandmother had a ferocious will to survive seven decades, but that also led to your dad, which this book you talk about fogs and cliffs. And you said, my first big cliff came quite young. When I lost my father, wow, he was still alive. The Greyhound bus, can you take me inside that? That's how you opened this book. Yeah. So the book is a research based book like all of my other books, but I decided in this book to open with my own story because part of the frame of the book are cliffs and periods of fog and how people answer questions of what to make of a life. And I was really struggling with where I was gonna start the book actually. I didn't wanna just start with one of the people I'd studied. And finally decided I realized I had my own story as to kind of start with. And what I meant by that opening line is that I had my first big cliff when I lost my father while he was still alive. So let's go back to the story we had a moment ago. My grandmother goes over this. I mean, she went over a cliff of cliffs. So a cliff is an event that alters the trajectory of your life in some significant way and forces you to reconsider or reconstruct everything that comes after. What comes next forces big questions about that. So losing Jim and having to recast her life. That was a major cliff event. My father was just a little kid. I have a photo of him and my grandfather. My grandmother told me it was the day before my grandfather died in the plane that's in the picture. And so my grandmother went over the cliff and in a way kind of took my father with her and it was kind of cast the landscape. So my father then, one of the things we know from this research is that in the wake of cliffs there's often these periods of fog being lost and confused and befuddled and you can be really lost in the fog. I think my father never got out of the fog. And so what happened is when I had my father versus my father having his father my father was just kind of off in his own beatnik artisan world. And he took me and my brother and my mom off to San Francisco in the 1960s. We lived a few houses down from Hate Street on Ashbury 1964 to 1967 right down the street from the whole summer of love thing. But it was actually also a violent neighborhood. And when a man was shot dead on our doorstep my mom finally said, that's it. We're leaving, brought me and my brother back to Boulder, Colorado. We moved into this really cold basement, Cots, hot plate. It was just really bleep. The Christmas Rock. We had a Christmas Rock. My brother and I didn't have a Christmas tree came to the fort of Christmas tree. So my brother and I rolled the Boulder into the basement and called it our Christmas Rock, right? But throughout this entire time I just kept hoping my dad would come back and what actually emerges a father. I just had this desperate desire for a father. And in early high school, he had moved to New Mexico at this point. And he was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor. I thought, well, I had this idea. This really romantic vision in my head. And so I got this pre-packaged turkey at Thanksgiving and I got on this Greyhound bus and I carried this turkey with me down to New Mexico and I was gonna bring it to my father and I had this image where we were gonna cook the turkey and share Thanksgiving and we would bond his father and son and there would be a father there and the whole weekend was just a shattering experience because I realized, near as I could tell he had no interest in me. And he mainly spent the weekend trying to convince me to convince his mother to give him money. And when I got back on the Greyhound bus, that was the cliff moment for me at that point in life. I mean, it was just crystal clear that will never ever be a father there. And so I remember being on the bus kind of heading back more this kind of that time of year, right? Where it's, the days are short and I'm looking out the window coming up from New Mexico. But it's like just heading into this fog, the fog of youth, the fog of life. I had no idea, no male role models, no frameworks, no guidance, nobody giving me values, none of that. This desperate need for a father and realizing he didn't have one. And I was cast into what do I do with this thing? And I've got this one life, like what do I do with this? And no clue how to answer that question. And so the reason I start the book there is because I think that's actually the real seeds of where studying this came. It looks like I'm making a big departure for my prior work, perhaps, you know, make sure a company's ticked, but in many ways it's a return to something much earlier. I think the question kind of ultimately of what to make of a life was the question I had as a kid, lost as I was heading back to Colorado and then lost for some time. And then you have to answer the question many other times in life. But I start there because that's really where I think the book began all those years ago. Your mom tells you that you got to be the man of the house. What was that moment like? Well, I mean, that was when my parents finally divorced, which was before the trip down to New Mexico. I think it was like 12 or 13 years old. And I just had no idea what to make of that. I mean, what do you do when you're a 12 or 13 year old kid? And your mom says, you're the man of the house now. And you're just like, what's that mean? I don't know what that means. I mean, it's not that she was wrong. You did have an example. I know, I did not have an example. I did not have an example. So it was just one of those, huh, what do I do with that? As a fan of your work, I have to say I love when you talk about yourself and your family and Joanne and Jimmy, I know the other stuff's amazing and I got pages and pages of notes, but it does, I think connect you probably with your readers because you write about great companies. You write about these amazing people and their stories. But when you write about yourself, I hope you do more of it as all I'm saying, because I love it. I think a lot of other people probably do too. As it feels like it brings us closer. Yeah, it's interesting. We've known each other for quite some time. We've got to be close to a decade since we had our first conversation. And when we first had our early conversations, it was about what makes great companies tick and all the years of research and all of that. And we didn't know any of this story. And so it could look like my life really had had it all figured out from early on and it was a clean shot and it was not like that at all. I mean, eventually once I clicked fully into frame, things were pretty clear, but there was a pretty foggy period. I just thought of this because my parents are still like my heroes to this day and I still look up to them and go to them for a lot of things. But I know others in my life who are friends or people who have met through doing this podcast that are really fueled by an upbringing that wasn't like mine or maybe they had a dad like yours where they didn't have him. How much of that is like fuel that's driven you to be these achievements or did Jimmy Story say, I want to be a writer like Jimmy Collins, like the guy who wrote this great memoir that got published and is really well written. How much of it are you fueled by some of the history of Jimmy Collins versus fueled by I had a dad who didn't want me. I don't know if I'm saying that right, so apologize, but it kind of seems like that. Yeah, I would say it was largely uninterested is the way I would put it. So one of the things that became clear to me as I was actually writing this and sort of seeing how I was evolving is that I've always had a ton of fire. I mean, I have had an abundance of energy. I do have more energy at 68 than I did at 38. That's a very strange thing, but it's true. And it just kind of grows over time and love to get up early in the morning. I just never stopped. But the sources of the fuel, the sources of the fire, those have changed over time. So when I was young and figuring out my way through the fog of youth and then finally kind of getting things working where I was really doing the work that I became more known for, a lot of the early fuel really did feel like these burning hot coals in the stomach. I mean, there was kind of rage and fury and sense of just sort of terror with NOFA safety net, those sorts of things. And it's really like this hot burning fire inside. And I'm gonna sort of overcome by applying that fire in the world. And people who knew me could feel it, right? And I used to worry that if I ever lost that, I'd lose my drive. I somehow needed that, that that was somehow important to- Is it a chip? I don't know if it's a chip. There was so much is it was just, best way I can describe it, it was just like channeled ferocity. And I was really good at channeling it. That's the one thing is that once I could get focused on something, I could really like take all of it and laser beam focus it on something, but it was intense and hot. But what's happened, it's been really a marvelous evolution is I don't really feel that anymore. And yet my level of fire and intensity and energy is as high as ever. And what happened is the color of the fire changed. And so what I began to realize, and it just sort of happened organically, it wasn't conscious, it just happened in a series of steps over time, is that I began to realize that just the sheer love of being curious, being lost in giant projects, engaging in marvelous conversation with interesting people, figuring out how to make sense of something and put a framework around it. The joy of sharing what I've learned from the research with other people, the absolute spectacular energizing experience of having marvelous people on my team, all of these sorts of things, they also fuel fire, but it's a very different fire. It doesn't burn, it doesn't hurt, it doesn't have that sense of channeled ferocity. It's like, this is red and hot and burning and rap. And this is kind of green and yellow and warming and perpetual. And so this has largely gone away. And what remains is this very creative kind of fire that is very generative. I can't ever really see it going out, I only see it growing over time. And for me, that's been a marvelous thing because I don't have to carry around that kind of ferocity channeled almost anger and rage that I felt, I don't need that at all. It can just go away. And my drive is as high as ever. And it feels a lot better. And I know on the outside it softened me a lot. And that's a good thing, right? That's a good thing about hitting this stage of life at 68, which for me is still quite young, right? I'd still think of it as roughly mid-career. So there's a long way to go. And to have sort of the edges soften, that's a good feeling. So going back to Jimmy Collins and how he met Dolores and how quickly that they decided. Four days. Four days. So you are 22, you're at Stanford. You go on a date with a woman. It seemed like this happened pretty quick. Can you tell me this story? Yeah, so people, my grandmother's case with a grandma and grandfather, they were really fast because they got married after four days. But I wasn't too far behind because I got engaged after four days. Four days, man. Four days. So what happened is Joanne and I were both undergraduates. We're both there on scholarship. We both came from difficult upbringings. And I'd always admired Joanne from afar, but never quite had the courage to ask her out, right? And she was one year behind me. And finally in my senior year, we had a conversation. And I knew that she was a runner. I knew that she'd run cross-country and track for Stanford. And so I said to her, I asked her if she was still running. And she said, yes. And then I said, I'm thinking about being my mileage. Now, that was actually a true statement because I had just thought of it. And any number greater than zero is an increase. So she says, would you like to go for a run on Sunday? And I said, sure. So she said, why don't you come on over to my dorm and we'll go for a run. So I go and I kind of show up. I don't even really have what looked like running shoes and running clothes on, but if something I figured it would work, she takes me out on an eight mile run through the Stanford Industrial Park. We walked five of the eight. But that walking, which was because I just couldn't keep up and couldn't go that far, we got to know each other. And that was on Sunday. And by Thursday, we were engaged and that was that. So that was almost exactly 46 years ago because it was spring quarter of 1980. Wow. How much has Joanne played a role from this fire and fury guy to the more green and more generative stuff? Like how much do you think she's played a role in helping that happen? Well, I'm thinking of love and the power of that. But I don't want to answer for you. You know, my life has had a lot of different kinds of luck in it. Good luck and bad luck. But other than the bad luck of maybe not getting a father that I would have liked to have had, I've had a string of really, really good luck events, particularly who luck events and Joanne is number one, right? You know, just the sheer luck of we were in the same place at the same time and that we found each other and that then we're so well matched. And here we are 46 years later. I mean, it would talk about people ask us, how did we know? You don't know, but you don't know. We thought we knew and then we just committed to make it work. But the way I put it, and I really, really believe this, I look back on different stages of my life so far, the inflection point in my life is Joanne. Because what happened is I began a process and I was, I think reasonably conscious of it. I just didn't know how to do it, conscious process of it, of I needed to become a person worthy of being married to her. I didn't really know exactly what that meant. I didn't really know exactly how to get there, but what I did know was I needed to become a person that would be worthy of being married to her. If I sort of think about like, what is the most significant inflection point in my life? It is Joanne and me together, and then me trying to become somebody that deserves to be married to her. And that is a never ending journey. And it's almost impossible to envision, I can't envision what my life would have been otherwise, it's impossible. We're just so completely woven together as to how we've created our life together. What's that like today? Like what are some of the things you do to deserve? I think it's a Charlie Munger, like how do you get a great wife and you deserve one? Right? Did he say that? Yeah, yeah, I think that's something along those lines. I was like, that's a good idea. But as you mentioned, that's a daily thing. I'm curious about like the Jim Collins specifics, what do you do to deserve a great wife every day? Well, in any given relationship, and I don't know other people's relationships, it's more a matter of how the two of you weave together. So for Joanne and me as a couple, what works really well, part of what works really well, is that Joanne is really good at seeing things clearly, and she's really good at seeing what's needed attention, and very, very good at articulating it. So that's part of her encodings and her capacity as a person. I'm encoded to hear it. Somebody once asked Joanne what she thought my greatest strength was. And after thinking about it, she said, Jim takes critical feedback better than any person I've ever met. And actually, I think that's that, I hope that's true, that not necessarily comparative to others, but Joanne sees what's needs attention, I hear it, then we adapt and adjust. And I think that that's sort of the inner flywheel. One of the others is life is difficult, right? You go through whether it be disease events, or whether it be other cliffs you go through life or difficult times. And one of the things that Joanne helped us see is that when life gets really difficult, when you circle the wagons together, you always make sure you're both on the inside of the wagons with the guns pointing out, never at each other. Never at each other. You are always together. And I think that that has helped us through the inevitable challenges and difficulties of life. You know, on a daily basis, there's a lot of really simple things. As much as possible, well, I tend to get up before Joanne and often have a big creative bubble, but as soon as Joanne's up, that kind of first hour of the day is timed together. I make her a latte. It's a very good latte. I'm a coffee elf, it turns out, for Joanne's, I make her a latte and she has a latte, and she selects articles to read out loud that then we can discuss, and I'm very curious what she thinks about them, because her mind is so sharp that I love what she curates, what she chooses to share. And then we often talk about it, but more I really love to hear what she thinks. She often picks up, like, what might do an article on kind of the implications of current Fed policy in the context of 10 years of essentially close to zero interest rates and the way that that has affected the way economics work, and it's interesting. And then I love to hear what she thinks about it. Wow. So it's funny that we're in the studio where you recorded your audio book because I'm listening to you talk about this, then 10 minutes, then nine, then eight, then seven, when she is trying to win that Iron Man race, and all of a sudden she basically dies at the end, and she's getting caught by everybody else. Can you go to that 1985 Iron Man in Hawaii? You write so beautifully about it. You speak it on the audio book. It was like a movie for me. I'm in the gym listening to you describe what happened in that race, and then ultimately the ending of it too. Yeah. Joanne is really an amazing athlete, and she did indeed become world champion, won the Hawaiian Iron Man in 1985. She was the first featured female athlete in Nike's famous Just Do It campaign. In the 1980s, it's actually, there was a story in Good to Great, but it's a really true story. She had been working at Bain, the consulting firm. She had admissions to Harvard and Stanford Business School, and she'd won the honors thesis of prize for her honors thesis in economics, and as an undergraduate, and she was Phi Beta Kappa. She had all these things. All these things that she could have gone to do, right? Kind of normally think a person would do. But she still had this athletic side of her, and one day we're sitting at breakfast, and she says, I think I could win the Iron Man. And she had some evidence of that, right? She'd done some races, done better than she expected on a really heavy bike and some stuff like that. I looked at her and I said, I bet you could. And so she quit everything. She turned down all her graduate schools, she quit her job, and as one of the ways in which we have been really good together is we make really big bets together. And she went all in on committing herself to this path and to pointing towards winning the Iron Man. So we get all the way to the 1985 race. She'd already now been full-time racing professional, all that, but she'd had this hamstring injury, all that season, that limited her running training to something like 16 or 17 miles a week. If you've run marathons, you know that you should probably be running at least 30, maybe 50 plus for the marathon part of the course. She could only run limited to the, say, 16 miles a week. So she had a good swim, great bike, and she came off of the bike with a really solid lead. And by the time she got to 10 miles left in the race, she had a really sizable lead to sort of picture what the Hawaii Iron Man is like. It is brutally hot. It's on the cone of sight of Hawaii, so there's no real vegetation. I mean, it's just, it's a brutal course. So you're racing, not just other athletes. I mean, you're just also trying to survive the course. And so out there on those lava fields in the marathon course, there was this turnaround, and she had 10 miles to go back into town. And that hamstring injury caught up and the limited training that, you know, the way it accretriled it caught up. And her 10 minute lead, which she'd built up by that point, started to shrink. And then there's a nine minute lead. And then there's an eight minute lead. And then there's a seven minute lead. There's a six minute lead. And she's getting closer to the end, but the time is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. And there's this moment. I was able to see parts of this on the feed from the ABC Wild World Sports Truck that was kind of in front of her. There's this point a few miles from the end, where she just stops in the middle of the lava fields. I'll never lose the image of this. She just stops. And I mean, I don't know how you see pain, but you can see the incredible discomfort. And she sort of looks down at her legs and she's massaging your legs, like just desperately hoping they would move and kind of just doing anything, just like almost like pleading to run. And there's this moment, she kind of looks up at the sky, almost like pleading. And then there's this shift. Her gaze fixes somewhere down the road and you just see her go almost calm. And somehow she just starts to run. And she ends up running and still the lead keeps shrinking, three minute lead, two minute lead. She ends up winning the race, 10 hour plus race by something like 92 seconds or around a minute and a half. And it was, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I admire Joanne so much is that there was no guarantee she would win that day. And in any competitive elite competitive thing, there's no guarantee that you'll win, especially when you get to the highest levels. Lots of things can happen. And in our case, dealing with the injury could happen. And so at some point you're racing for something else. And Joanne described it to me as, in the end you're really racing for self-respect. And do you know whether you got first or third or tenth or whatever, do you know? And only you'll know that when it was all said and done, you couldn't have run a step faster. You could not have run a step faster. And if you know that you couldn't have run a step faster, then that's actually winning. And Joanne knew that she did win. That was life changing for her. But she also carried away that winning the battle for self-respect because it's one thing to sit here and sort of talk about the importance of doing that and all of that. It's another thing about there on those lava fields with your body falling apart and the incredible discomfort. And you've already been going for nine hours and you just wanna stop. And it's at that moment, it's at that moment when it would be so easy to capitulate, to getting to the end of the race and having not expended every single little bit that you had to do because you can talk about it here but to be there in that moment, in that searing heat, with that level of discomfort, with that level of exhaustion. And at that moment, you don't break. That's where I look at it. It's just like, yeah, I'm married well. That's really cool. I also think it's an amazing metaphor for, you know, what to make of a life and how to live a great life of, is it Miles Monroe, this idea of dying on empty, there's gonna be nothing left, man. I'm gonna give everything I got. You don't know when that day is coming. We don't know when that day is coming but I gotta do that every day. And I think that that story kind of like brings that to life for me of this idea of just getting after it. Like what's the point? Not to. And it's interesting. So in the way that there's so many ways it's impossible to envision the things I've done without Joanne's fingerprints all over them. And one of the ways that she has fingerprints on things is there are times when I'm writing that I'm on the lava fields. And so when I finish a book like with this one, what I wanna know is I couldn't have written one sentence better, same idea, right? Now later I could go back and I will learn things and I'll hopefully improve as a writer, et cetera. But that when I'm done with it, I know that whatever flaws I might see later at that moment I couldn't have made it any better. I didn't leave anything out that any, anything I could see to make it better I did before it was done. And there have been times and back on one of my earlier books there was a chapter I was struggling with. I mean, I was lost on the lava fields. I was, I was cramping. I was suffering. Very foggy time. Well, this chapter was really not working. And so I remember sitting in my home office and Joanne had kind of given it back to me with a lot of critical feedback. And again, I take the critical feedback well because it'll make it better in the end. And I go back to work on it and I'm working on it really hard. And I like, I put everything into making it right. Finally, it's like, okay, I got it. And I give it to Joanne to read. And I don't remember whether it was the same day or another day, but I'm back in my desk and Joanne comes into my home office and she just, she says, you have to do it again. It's still not there. And I looked at her and I said, but I can't. I can't, I don't have it in me to do it again. I don't have, I don't know how to make it better. She says, you have to. It didn't matter that I didn't feel that I can't. And so what I was getting from Joanne was essentially, she wasn't saying this, but it was, you're on the lava fields. This is the moments where like, you just wanna say, this is it, I'm done. And she's like, you're not. And I remember the pain of rewriting that chapter again and then again, until finally she's like, okay, that's the very best you can do that truly is. You can, now you can put it in. And so, I don't know how I found it other than there was no way Joanne was gonna let me, let it be less than that. When you're stuck like that, do you go back to research? Do you try to just look at a blank page? Do you call a mentor a friend? Because I think this is a very normal feeling for writers and thinkers where you're sitting there saying, I'm reading this, I don't love it. It's okay, but it's not good enough. Where do you go? For me, what it is, is that if a chapter isn't working or something isn't working, you have to go back to a simple premise, which is that writing is thinking. And the reason that you work so hard on writing is ultimately to discover what you think in the most clear way possible. And to sharpen your thinking is the ultimate testing ground of your thinking. So what I do is I go back and I say, okay, this isn't working because I'm clearly not thinking well. My thinking is not clear. I'm missing something logical, something rigorous. I'm fuzzy in here somehow. And the reason the writing isn't working is because my thinking isn't working. And so I've got to go back and think, what is the clear conceptual line and point here? And how does it tie? Now, once I re-clarify that, then I can begin to put the text more around it and the narrative around it and the data around it and things like that. But I could have all that and sort of think about it this way. Imagine, sort of think of as the through line of the thinking is like your skeleton. You could have all the muscle and blood and everything else, but if it doesn't have a good skeleton, it's just kind of a blob. And so if something's not working in the skeleton, if that's not clear and really sharp and good, it's gonna be blobby and fuzzy. Even if my bicep is good, if it isn't hanging on a good framework, it doesn't matter. And so I go back to where is my thinking flawed? And once I go back there, sometimes the way I do that is I go back to the data. I go back and I say, what is the data really telling me here? What is the evidence from the research really telling me here? Where have I gotten maybe waylaid by something that I thought was really interesting, but really isn't what the data is most trying to tell me? And usually it resolves itself, but not necessarily easily. And that chapter was, I'll never forget. Which one was it? It was one of the chapters in Great by Choice. And it was a really important chapter that my own writing was just struggling. And I had conversations with my co-author Morton Hanson. And we also worked on it together, of course. We need to think together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 20 mile march, I'll never forget. We implemented that at work. One of the things I like about this book is I think especially now leaders are almost not allowed to change their mind, especially in like politics, they're flip floppers. Whereas you have a whole section in the book that says, I used to think this, now I think this, and there's, I don't know, 20, 15. 15 layers of that. Of I used to think this, now I think this, where this book doing this work over the past 12 years has transformed you, as you've said. One, can we focus for a second on this idea of that excellent leaders are willing to change their mind or willing to update their thinking because the evidence has presented itself and shown actually I was wrong or at least a portion of my thinking. You used to think two versions of luck, now there are three versions of luck, right? That's one example. So I would love to hear your ideas, like if you're working with leaders saying, no, no, you're supposed to change your mind, that's how this works, if you're actually thinking. Yeah, so let me just sort of step back right on this a little bit, cause I sort of think of it as, so there's kind of maybe two or three different layers. So one is that, and something that I want to be really clear on is that when I look back over my prior work, anything that made it to a major concept level, like level five, the flywheel, first two, then what, preserve the course, stimulate progress, all those key ideas, 20 mile march, if we did our research right, we should never have to go back and say, 20 mile march is wrong, or level five is wrong. And I can say now, looking back over decades of work, that the primary concepts that came from the research, never had to go back and say, one of those fundamentals is wrong. However, what does change is my understanding of them evolves. So when the first row could grade, right about the level five leaders, and I'll put a lot of emphasis in the writing about that they were more reserved, they were often shy. And those are characteristics of the level fives that were in that book, but what I later came to understand is that you can actually have very colorful and very flamboyant level fives. So long as they say, you can have personal humility and indomitable will, but in a very colorful and charismatic package. And I also came to see, I used to believe, for example, this is back on the prior work, and I'll talk about this because I'll have a question for you about it. But I used to believe that, or I used to be more pessimistic about people being able to become level five. It was such a high standard. And I thought, well, maybe there's so few good to great companies because there are just so few level five leaders. I knew what level five was, these humility and will kind of combined leaders who were able to funnel all their ambition into a cause or a company that's bigger than they are and do it in a way that is inspired versus inspiring in a way. But over the years, I would have said maybe less than 20% of leaders could become level five. Today, I believe more than 80% of leaders can become level five. And so that's a place where even on my prior work, level five is a level five, but my belief and my understanding is how many people can become level five has completely transformed. And I'm incredibly optimistic about the capacity of people to rise to become level five leaders. All kinds of people to rise to become level five leaders. And so I'm always evolving in my thinking that the foundational principles start to come out. So in this book, we have the concept of encodings doing what you're encoded for. I'm convinced that when we have our next conversation, however many years down the road, my understanding of encodings, it'll still be encodings, but we'll have advanced considerably, right? That's the joy of learning. Now, in this work though, because we all have our theories of life and our philosophies of life and our presumptions about how life works and so forth, over the course of 12 years of doing this study, there are ways in which all these ways I used to think life worked at its best just got changed. And it's not because those original views I had were based on research, the original ones where they were just my own kind of views on life. But having done a 12 year project and 10 years of research, I can kind of see that a lot of ways I used to think really got changed by their search. So my thinking changed and my emotion changed. But I have a question for you as we sort of go into this. So I'm curious. So you think, look at that list of the 15 layers of ways in which I just changed and the way I think based on the evidence. As you read the book, and it's got a mountain of evidence behind it. It's not Jim's opinions. This is what the study showed me. What for you might be things like if after having read the book you would say, you know, I used to believe this, but actually having read what you found in the research, I would kind of now have a change. Ways in which it might have changed the way you think life works at its best. I just brought up luck with you. Yeah. So I wrestle with this. I have to ask you about it too. Because I'm maybe changed, maybe not. That I like to think that luck plays a smaller role than maybe now you think, but maybe I'm wrong. I get the idea of who luck and believe in it. And I think there's something very real there. I think the luckiest thing for me personally was when, where and to whom I was born to and who they've remained in my life. And that by the way, congratulations on a tremendous luck event. Very much so. You didn't cause it. None, but when you look back, you'd like to think about like your talent and work ethic and grit and resilience, but older me would say I was like 5% lucky and now I would probably say it's 95% lucky. And that's some of the stuff that you talk about. Cause you have, you added a third version of luck now. But I think that also comes maybe with maturity and age and reading more and having conversations with guys like you to say, dude, you grow up thinking you're the man and you're special and you're awesome. And then you realize like, well, a lot of it's not your fault. It's because of all the lucky things that have happened. And then you've tried to capitalize and make the most and work really hard and be prepared and make the most of opportunities. So, yeah. So let's, let's just take this from. All right. So what's really interesting about this, there's a whole chapter in the book on the roulette wheel of life. Yep. And I think the objective reality is you, we have to accept that there is a lot of luck that happens in life. And my colleague Morton Hansen and I got very interested in the question of luck back when we were working on great by choice. And Morton's a wonderful methodologist and a wonderful colleague and partner. And together we said, you know, nobody's ever really looked systematically, at least in the world in which we'd studied. And what role does luck play in all this? I mean, it could have been that everything we studied in great companies is like a giant equation where there's level five and first two and there's all these things. But then there's just this giant residual variable at the end called plus L, which is, oh yeah, and be really lucky, right? And so, but it could be, right? So we said, we have to study that. And so with Morton, we said, well, if we're gonna study it, we have to define it. What is luck? I mean, really clearly, rigorously. Cause people toss around luck. Well, what is luck? Luck's an event. And it's an event that meets three tests. You didn't cause it. So when people say you make your own luck, by definition, you don't. If I get a cancer diagnosis tomorrow morning, that's a bad luck event. I did not make my own bad luck. If you just happen to meet somebody, you have no expectation to ever meet and they become a mentor in your life. The becoming the mentor might be something you did, but the random chance of meeting them, my mentor Bill Lizer, who played a huge role in my life, closest thing to a father I've ever had. How did I end up with Bill in my life? I was trying to take somebody else's class at Stanford. That class was full. So literally the random course sorting mechanism threw me into this guy named Bill Lizer's class the first time he ever taught. I'd never heard of him, didn't know who he was. Random chance I'm in this class, assigned by a computer. And there's the person who ends up being the closest thing to a father in my life. I did not cause that. You do not make your own luck. Luck is not something you cause. You did get into Stanford though. Sure, that's a different question. You can set conditions. But Bill, that's a luck event. Okay, so a lot of things you're doing in life, but luck event you gotta be really clear. You don't cause whether the coin comes up heads or tails. You just don't. So one, it's an event you didn't cause. Two, it is a potential significant consequence, good or bad. And three, it has an element of surprise. It either comes as a complete surprise or you didn't see it coming or you didn't know what format was gonna take. Or the timing of it was a surprise. There's a lot of elements at any event that meets those three tests. You didn't cause it. Potential significant consequence, go to our bat. And a surprise in some significant way is now a luck event. Once you have that definition, you can then do a very simple analysis which Morton and I worked very hard on. We were studying entrepreneurs at this point who started some of the greatest companies in the second half of the 20th century in comparison to other companies that got started in the same industry, same time. And then we could ask a very simple question. Were the big winners luckier than the comparisons? And this is where we get to and it eventually comes over to this idea will apply to people. But what the data showed is one, there was a ton of luck in the building of these companies. But the big winners weren't luckier. And that was the first key punchline was there's a lot of luck, but the big winners weren't luckier. They didn't get more good luck. They didn't get less bad luck. They didn't get better timing of luck. They didn't get bigger spikes of luck. So on the one hand, you have a lot of luck. On the other hand, the winners weren't luckier. But what they had was when the luck events came, they made more of the luck events that walked in the door. Good or bad, they mitigated the bad ones. They managed their lives to be able to absorb the shocks, manage their companies to be able to do that. But when the good luck events came or bad luck events came, they had a way of making more of those luck events than others did. And it was the return on luck that was the change variable. You'll get luck events, I'll get luck events. The question is what will you do with the luck events when they come? And that return on luck now, park that for a moment because that was clear in the data, get into lives and you start looking, there's no way you can look at these lives and not see a ton of luck happening. There's good luck, there's bad luck. Ultimately what we came to see through this study made clear to me is there are three types of luck. There's what luck? I get a cancer diagnosis, bad luck what event? Or something just breaks my way in a really good way and it could just be a good luck event, right? Or it could be a good luck event in the sense of like, you're riding your bike and you just make a turn and you end up finding something really interesting down the road and whatever, right? So what luck event? There's who luck. And I think this is the one people often underestimate, Joanna's who luck for me, Morton Hansen who luck for me, Jerry Poros my research mentor who luck for me, Bill Lizier who luck for me. These are people that intersect with your life and building the relationship is the return on who luck. And then the third is this one that became clear in this, which is the zeitluck. And this is when what you're doing just happens to the luck of kind of the surrounding zeitgeist is this huge accelerant for what you're doing. And so if you take Jimmy Page who is the guitarist, right? The luck event was that his family had moved across town in London and he was a kid. He was like 10 or 11 years old or something around that age. And they moved into a new house. And in that new house, the former owners had left oddly one thing behind, a guitar. There's just this guitar in the new house that you just sitting there. The house is empty except for a guitar. And in walks this young kid, Jimmy Page. Then you got to remember now this in Surrey, it's near London. It's gonna be around the late fifties, early sixties, right? And the whole blues rock explosion is about to happen. So he's in this place where all this is going to happen. He hears music coming over from America. He hears like Elvis Presley, baby, let's play house. Wonders if he can like replicate these chords. There's the guitar, right? So the what luck of the guitar. He had wonderful parents who were supportive. So he had who luck with that? Who luck just down the road? And the fact that Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton were in the same neighborhood, right? And then just up the road, there were all kinds of wonderful things happening with music and he played sessions. It was background guitar on some of the great songs with some of the great bands of the early 1960s, which put him right in the middle of what then became the explosion of British rock, which he was in the middle of when he and Robert Plant and John Bonham and John Paul Jones all came together to create that great big sonic boom of Led Zeppelin. And along the way, so you look at Jimmy Page, right? And you kind of say, well, he's got the what luck of the guitar, he has the who luck of great parents and then like meeting these other four players. I mean, the who luck of Plant and Page and Bonham and John Paul Jones all coming together and to create the fifth element of a band, which was the four of them together with the chemistry of all four of them creating the chemistry of the band that made this amazing band go. This who luck and then they all happened to be in the middle of the blues rock explosion of British rock coming out, right? What luck, who luck, the zeit luck, bang. And so you can see all of them. But on the other hand, think about this, there are a lot of other kids who probably saw guitars. There are a lot of other kids who might not have, once they recognize the talent of when you met Robert Plant and how they could sing together and then bringing in Bonham and to recognize the talent of the other players and the who luck of all that coming together. There might have been a lot of others who wouldn't have done multiple sessions a day, like just up the road getting everything he could learn. Yes, he was in the right place at the right time, but he lived music. He went and did all these session gigs. He met everybody, he learned how to produce. All right, so what you have there is what luck, who luck, zeit luck. But what made the difference was with each of those, Jimmy Page got a really high return on luck. And it was the return on luck that ultimately creates the great accelerator because lots of other kids had that same luck. But don't make the most of it. I think part of it too, when you, again, this maybe this comes from maturity, when you realize some of the luck that you've gotten in your life, to me it's really inspiring. I use it as fuel to say, well, when you've been given a lot, you should give even more. Leave a positive dent in the world, leave it better than you found it. And so like the more you realize the good luck that you've had, I think at least, the more of a responsibility you have to make a positive difference for other people. Try to help them, try to put something out that is useful, that is entertaining, that is fun, that will change your life. How much of it do you think of the luck that you've gotten both good and bad, and then use that as fuel to be so impactful in the world and to leave such a positive dent? So for me, it's really interesting because the way I've always looked at it is that I think it's just incredible, instinctive trust in my curiosity. And I just have this, it's almost like just an article of faith that if I get infected with a question, then I have to answer. Like what would happen if you look at all these people going through these different cliff events and how their lives unfold, what would you discover? Why do some companies make a leap from good to great? When others, when the same conditions, didn't. Whatever the question happens to be, what really is luck and how does it really work and what role does it play? I mean, it's a great example of like, I'm curious. I hope our work has an impact, right? But what really drives me in doing it is, I'm too curious to stop until I've resolved my curiosity. So think about what back back in the classic work, the notion of flywheel, right? My flywheel, I have a flywheel and it's very clear. It starts with at the top is follow my curiosity and find the next big question. And if I do that, then I can't help, but want to conduct research and to study and to learn and do these monster projects, five year projects, seven year projects, 10 year projects. And if I do that and I've structured it well, well, then I can't help but wanna go from chaos to concept out of all that evidence. I can't help but wanna find the ideas like level five and first two and things like that out of the research makes sense of it. And if I do that, then I can't help, but want to write it and to teach it once it's clear in my head. I can't help but wanna do that. And if I do that, then I can't help but have impact. If I write it well, if I teach it well, then you're working around this, I can't help but have impact. And if I have impact through the power of ideas that came from the curiosity, then that will generate resources and funding to be able to go back to the top of the flywheel and follow my curiosity and do the next big question. So if you really look at what's driving the flywheels, all these pieces together and the impact on the world, the impact on others is over here in the flywheel as I come up from writing and teaching it. But the animating force is the curiosity. And the belief that if I follow that and do all of this, impact will happen and that will ultimately lead me to be able to do more curious questions and around and around the flywheel will turn. And so for me, that's really how it works. I never really over thought the kind of impact the work would have. I just believed that if I trusted the curiosity, followed the curiosity, did the work, however many years it would take, not stop. And then when writing a chapter, when Joanne says, you gotta do it again, right? You just keep going that the impact would happen and you never know what it'll be. This is the beauty of being a writer. You never know who you're gonna reach. I don't tend to read reviews of my work. I don't find it very healthy to do that because I love what James Mischer said. Critics are perfectly fine for telling me how to spend my money. They're not qualified to tell me how to spend my talent. And I've always thought about that relative to like critics and reviews and things like that. So I don't tend to pay attention, but you know what I do pay attention to? I just wanna get a letter like I did the other day from somebody who had read my very first book when she first immigrated to this country and made her way as an entrepreneur and picked up beyond entrepreneurship, which I wrote with Bill Lissier way back in the early 90s. And it became the framework for how she built her companies that gave her this incredible path and then all the things she's doing, touching all these other wonderful young people in the world. Now that actually means a whole lot to me. I had no idea that would happen when Bill and I were working on that book, but that has been a guide in her hand for years and years. I don't write to get those letters, but I love seeing the impact. I don't think about impact on like this grand millions of people scale. We've reached millions of people, but that's how I think about it. I think about it as like an individual person. I got a text just the other day from the son of one of my longest time friends who sent me a text and said, I wanna thank you for the new book because I've just come through a few cliffs. I've been wandering through the fog. My dad gave me the book. It's proving incredibly helpful as I navigate and just wanted to text you and say thank you. I didn't even recognize the number at first because I had never texted with him before. And he's in his 20 somewhere, probably navigating the fog of youth. That's really meaningful to me. It's a single person. It's the son of one of my best friends in the world. I'm not trying to make that happen. It just happens. That's the juice, call it the juice, Jim, because there will be people who will send follow-up emails and notes and they're gonna say that conversation you had with Jim Collins in Boulder, Colorado was the dinner table conversation with my family and it led to an enriching deepening of our relationship. Man, does that feel good? Like I'm human, that feels amazing when people say, hey, I tried just to chase down my curiosity and because of that it's changed and helped some family's life in the middle of wherever. The curiosity part's really interesting to me because I think I'm curious of how much you're encoded that come from birth or did you develop it? And for others, because I think it could be potentially the most valuable skill in the world is to be a deeply curious person about others, about people, about things. Sounds like Joanne is with these searching for articles. So curiosity, how much of it are you encoded to be a very curious person? And then to have the skill, strength, ability to chase that down really hard. So great question because one of the things that I, I was writing about other people in this book. I mean, I studied these amazing set of lives. I realize I am focusing on you because I'm most curious about you. The book is though just so good with the other stories as well. They're so good. The other story I know I'm focusing because honestly that's one of the most curious about. So that's why we're focusing on it. That's fine. It's a conversation, right? So anyways, one of the things in the book and it just ties into your question about am I, are they encoding for curiosity versus it being a really important thing in any life? Yeah. So I'm doing 2,800 years of people lives in this method of putting pairs of people rising together, sharing a cliff event together, very similar cliff in life. And then I see how they go through the cliff and how the choices they make coming out of it over the remaining decades. And I learned from all these different lives. We have professional athletes with the end of their careers. We have astronauts that came to the end of that. We have suffragists who won the 19th amendment. They had to figure out what to do with their lives. We have people who lost a spouse and their lives were completely ripped apart. We have people who got disease diagnoses and had to figure out how to reorient their lives. There's a lot of different versions of this. In any case, one of the big things to come out of this is this idea that their lives tended to work best whether it be before the cliff or navigating out of the cliff or long arc of life towards the end when they were doing something that they were really encoded for. And encodings are these kind of durable capacities of your sort of intrinsic construction that are there. They're just in there. And they're awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. Then kind of shows them that they're there. And this idea that you have, you have a constellation of encodings. I have a constellation of encodings. They're like a set of stars. And our life is kind of going along. And at any given moment, you can only see a portion of the constellation. It's like a window frame. If you are doing something in life that captures a big bright set of those encodings, you're in frame with those encodings. And if your life is over here and only capturing maybe a couple little encodings, you're sort of out of frame because you're not capturing a lot of encodings. And what we found is that people's lives tend to work best when they're in frame with a set of encodings. There may be other great encodings. So just not in frame right now versus out of frame. So that's one of the things we found in the book. And the same person can look amazing when they're in frame and look not very amazing when they're out of frame. And yet they're the same person, right? And we see that as these lives unfold. So I started thinking, because I was writing about other people, but I started thinking about, huh, I wonder if I really tried to write it down. Like what are my own encodings? Now that I've done this study, part of what got me thinking about that a little bit is you had kind of indicated that in some of your pre-questions. I thought, well, that's kind of interesting because I haven't really turned that on myself in a rigorous way of like, let's just write down what my encodings are. And I have a few of them. So there are two answers back to your question. First is that I think I really am encoded to be curious. I'm just giving an example of how this comes to life. I mean, obviously comes to life in these giant studies and all of that. I take these courses and been taking them for years. When I first started teaching at Stanford, way back when I was 30 years old, I didn't know how to teach. But there was this friend of mine who had started a company called the Great Courses Series, teaching company. And his idea was simple. Every university campus has one or two professors that whatever they teach, everybody takes their course, not because of the material, but because of the professor. And his idea was to get those professors all over the country, maybe all over the world, to do a version of their course, brought them to Washington, DC at that point, is the course, and then you could buy these courses. So I bought all of his, because he was, I don't know, or maybe 40 of them at the time or something like that. And I made notes on how people teach. I bought them to learn how to teach because I figured if these are the great teachers, I'll study their teaching, like game film. So I did all their game film. But what happened was I also fell in love, like I'd be taking courses on game theory. I'd be taking courses on theories of philosophy. I'd be taking courses on the origins of evil. I would be taking courses on, I mean, just, you know, there's scientific courses and physics courses and courses on world history and all these things. And I just couldn't stop. So finally I got all the notes on the teaching. But I just kept going. I've done maybe, oh, it's gotta be well over 300 of those courses now. And they're in almost every imaginable subject area. I'm doing one right now on, I just did one on constitutional law. Before that I had done one on the rise and fall of Napoleon and the French Revolution. And before that I did one on the entire 14th century and the plague. Then you have one on the history of the United States in the second half of the 20th century. Then there's a whole thing, one on the entire history of World War I. And then there's what science knows about cancer. And then, I mean, you just pick almost any subject area. The entire course on the fourth amendment of the constitution. I mean, just fascinating stuff. Okay, you look at it and say, Jim, what's the theme here? The only theme is, I'm curious. The idea of a 60 lecture course on the history of China. I don't know, I'll never do anything with it. But it's really interesting. How does 5,000 years of Chinese history come to life today? So you started these because you wanna be, you wanna learn. You wanna teach. You learn how to teach. And then your curiosity at the best of you. I'm just gonna stop. It's like kind of what reading does to you. You read good to great. And all of a sudden, I wanna read all these, that's honestly what happened to me. Like I read good to great. It's like, I didn't realize books had the power to do this to you. I need to go read much more books because it could literally change your life. So you're saying, I wanna be a good teacher and studying the actual teacher, but then they pulled you in and now you can't stop. I just can't stop. And I've been doing this for, I mean, you could. So you're encoded. I'm encoded. And so this comes to the big point though. We all tend to look through a lens of our own encodings and tend to think that that's the way life works. What I've learned through this research, studying all these lives is the way life works is not my encodings. My life works because I'm in frame with my encodings. But it would be wrong for me to say, therefore, other people should lead their life the way I do. And the reason it would be wrong is they have different encodings than I do. So I do actually don't think that curiosity is a universal need to follow. Really? No, it's my encoding, but there are people. Do you think it's a skill? I think for some people it's a skill, but I think it's an encoding for me. What I mean by that is I would not take the fact that it's a central encoding for me and then pronounce that everybody should be more curious. Gotcha. See, that's one of the key findings from this book is that you actually shouldn't follow the advice of anyone else because their advice will be well-meaning. Their advice will maybe be coming from a wonderful place. Their advice may have worked very well for them, but why did it work well for them? Because it was something that flowed from their encodings and they're not your encodings. So you take the two women in science in the beginning of chapter two, they start with Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper. They were encoded very different. Both monumental figures, one in computer science, Grace Hopper, one in genetics, Barbara McClintock. But if you look at how these two women are encoded, McClintock had encodings for just being lost in solving puzzles and going so deep that she could even forget her own name as she did on an exam once. She was once, she was so engrossed in solving puzzles that when somebody said, you're driving across country to Caltech, that's dangerous because way back in the 1930s and she was like, well, I didn't worry so much about dying in a car crash so much as I worried about dying in a car crash before I'd solved the puzzle. But that was the thing is like, once she got her hands on a puzzle, she couldn't stop and she would just go deeper and deeper in studying the control dreams and she worked as a solitary scientist. She didn't even get a telephone. When she won the Nobel Prize, she heard about it on the radio because they couldn't reach her because she just was this solitary solo scientist off doing her and she loved that. That was so perfectly encoded for Barbara McClendon. You have a Grace Hopper encoded to figure out gadgets, right? She's a little girl. She says, all these clocks in their summer house, she takes them all apart. She can't stop herself. Where does that come from? It's encoded. I have to figure out how gadgets work. She gets on the first computer, the Mark I in World War II calls it the most beautiful gadget she'd ever seen and that cast her life for working on computers for the rest of her life. But she had a different set of encodings. She worked well through people. She worked well by being a pirate to advance the cause of computers within side bureaucratic institutions that tried to resist change. She even kept a pirate flag in her office and she would get people swept up at one point. She was in the Pentagon. She's leading all of this stuff in the Navy. She gets all of her team swept up in the idea we need better furniture for our little computer renegades. They go out in the middle of the night. They steal a bunch of furniture from other people's offices for their own and then when called on it, she goes, well, it wasn't bolted down. I mean, just, just, just, and of course everybody just loved being on her pirate ship of changing things despite all the bureaucratic resistance through computers. Okay, now you look at these two women. One is encoded to work through other people and to get things done in institutions and create pirate teams. The other is, I don't even have a phone. I just love to get so lost in a puzzle I can forget my own name. And you would never say that Barbara McClintock should try to do what Grace Hopper did or Grace Hopper should try to do. No, what they shared in common was not the specifics. Pirate teams or solitary work not having a phone. What they shared in common was their lives were in alignment with their encodings. So if somebody doesn't have the curiosity encoding, I would never advise them. You should be more curious. I would say, you should discover your encodings. You should trust your encodings. And maybe your encodings are about something entirely different from that. And one of my big ones just happens to be I'm incapable of being anything but curious. With that said, one of the ways to find that out is you gotta be curious enough to want to, I mean, go through some of the questions that you've put in this book to be helpful to say, what am I encoded to do? Yeah, yeah. And that takes work, right? Because it's not just, well, what am I passionate about? Right, you write about this. So what am I encoded to do? That takes some reflection, some thought, probably some help from people who know you really, really well internally. You have to be willing to question yourself and really think about that. So when someone's like, Jim, that sounds great. But how do I figure out what I'm encoded to do? What do you say? So I think you're getting clues to your encodings all the time. So remember the definition of an encoding. It's a durable capacity of your intrinsic construction that resides within a waiting discovery through the experiences of life. And so my own experience with those courses, I was discovering how curious I was because once I got into taking this, I began to notice, and I was interested in learning everything that these folks are teaching as opposed to just learning how to teach. And then I can't stop myself. And then I could observe, I'm so curious that I could do a five year project without getting any feedback, basically to go five years into a cave to finally get my curiosity satisfied. The fact that I could do that without deadlines, without pressure, without other people forcing me to do it, that I could just march every single day because I'm curious, well, that's an observation of something that's very natural for me to do, to lose myself for five years or seven years or 12 years in a project until I'm done. So I'm getting clues, I'm acting, and I think what happens is life happens. So we talked about that thing with Jimmy Page, right, finding the guitar, but when he starts experimenting with the guitar, he starts seeing if he can replicate chords. It's not just that the guitar was just in his hands, it's that the guitar felt really good in his hands. Right, and kind of noticing, I have an instinct for this. He could have picked up the guitar and maybe it wouldn't have activated music and coatings. Maybe those encodings wouldn't have been there and would have thought was kind of curious there's this guitar there, but just leave it in the corner. But it was the experience intersecting with an encoding that's already there that the encoding kind of pops into frame. And so I think what really happens is you're sort of going along through life and then you have these things that when you hit them, they kind of click. And the key is to recognize when they click, that's natural instinct of it. Talk about your friend, John Glenn from Ohio. He became one of the great aviators, first American to orbit the earth. And he was interested in flying from a young age because his father bought him a flight on a biplane and it just felt interesting to him. And then through a luck event, he was able to get a pilot's license. A luck event was the, I think it was the department of commerce was offering to pay for people to get the pilot's licenses. And he just happened to see the card on the Bolton Ford and then convinced his parents against their fears of the dangers of flying to let him go do this. But once he got into flying, there were things that just suited him really well. And World War II came and exposed more encodings. So he was really good in combat. Well, there are lots of training that goes into being a good combat aviator. But also there's this thing of, he's able to keep his heart rate quite steady and calm in the face of speed and danger. Calm in the chaos, man. He's calm in the chaos, right? He's on top of a rocket ship that's about to be blasted into space back when, I mean, it was scary to do this stuff. And his heart rate's like the same as when he's watching TV on a couch. So you discover that through the experiences. It could have been that maybe he would have gotten into combat situations and he's not calm in the chaos. Even with all of his training, but he was. And his ability to think clearly when things are falling apart, yes, they train that. But also there's just like, how many people really do have the encoding that this is so dangerous that getting nervous is just gonna increase my chance of getting killed. So therefore I have to remain calm. Okay, that's all logical. But to be actually able to do that, breathe, focus, go to my training, focus on task, stay alive. Now, he discovered those encodings through the experiences of life. And then he discovered more pedestrian encodings like John Glenn was, I think of them as like captain checklist. John Glenn was just encoded for checklist. I mean, you know, there are some people who they just love checklist. Like they almost even add things that they've already done so they can check them off. Right? And they just love like, it's just kind of natural approach to life. What's on the checklist and check, check, check, check, check. He described himself as check happy. He loved doing checklist. But actually think about how then when you learn how to fly and you learn how to fly in dangerous situations, what keeps you alive is in part checklist. You stay on the checklist. You check, cross check everything before you get into the chaotic situations. Think about all the checklist before the launch of a Mercury 7 rocket checklist, checklist, checklist. And you're going through all of your checklist. But the interesting thing is, sure, he learned about checklist, but it was actually he was encoded for checklist because when he went to the Senate, he ran his office off checklist for he was just encoded for using checklist. So life happens and they expose encodings and then you trust those encodings and you follow them. Tony Morrison, the writer was encoded to get up at four in the morning every day and write. Nobody taught her that, she just is that. And that's what encodings are all about. So the question when it comes to leadership, a lot. I've heard it a million times, you've probably heard it a billion times. Are leaders born or are they made? Are a certain percentage of the population encoded to be leaders, to be the ones who take on those roles? Or can you grow into that? Can you develop those skills? When it comes to leadership as that thing, the art of getting people to want to do what must be done, my favorite definition of it, 216, I learned it from you, is that it encoding that you're born with. Okay, so we have to spend a moment on this for your listeners because I know many of you. This was for me, man. But guys, no, seriously, this is, I didn't set out to write a leadership book. It's not ultimately a leadership book unless you think it was like leading your life. But in the last chapter, I write about people. I write about leadership. Wasn't planning on it. But I don't, so it's ironic because I mean, I even held a chair at West Point in the study of leadership for two years. There's among a number of marvelous people, it's a two year rotating chair. Tremendous honor to serve my country in that role. Yeah. I wasn't formally in the military, but I could contribute back to my country by spending time with the cadets and being one of the world's great leadership development institutions. And as the class of 1951 chair for the study of leadership at West Point, you would think that maybe I know something about leadership. But the interesting thing is, I don't think I really understood leadership until I did this study. I mean, I understood it at some level, but this study really nailed it for me. And here's where it's really important. First of all, I kind of reject the overall question of leaders born or made, because I just sort of see it differently now. It's not a bad question. I just think it's an early question, primitive question. So let's take a look. You gave the definition. That's what I discovered at West Point by researching, learning, engaging, and being influenced by General Eisenhower's writings. Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. The more I live with that definition of what leadership is, the more I love that definition. And just again, think about this. You're walking down the street. You're just a person. You don't have a budget. You don't have a title. You don't have stars on your lapel. You don't have a team. You're just walking down the street. And you notice someone's in trouble. Could be they're under threat. Could be they're having a health issue. Could be a car crash, whatever it is. Somebody's in trouble. And you notice what must be done. And then suppose it's something like maybe you gotta pull someone out of a car, whatever it happens to be, right? And you realize you need other people to be engaged with you, to deal with the situation, with what must be done. And though somehow you then get other people who are on the street to join you in doing what must be done for this person who's in trouble and you get it done. Okay, now let's stand back. Notice there's none of the accoutrements of leadership. There's no budget, no title, no stripes, nothing. You're just walking down the street. But what did you do? You exercised the art of getting people to want to do what must be done right here. At that moment, no matter what else you're doing in your life, you are leading. So if you sort of change the word from leader to leading, you are leading in that moment, exercising the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. And in that sense, what I have come to the conclusion is, I say this to CEOs all the time now, that means every single person in your company is by definition a potential leader. Because every single person in your company, right now, in your organization, right now, in your nonprofit, right now, every one of them is sitting somewhere in a seat, is somewhere in a role where they offer the opportunity to see what must be done. And they have the opportunity in that moment to figure out how to use their artistry to get people to want to do what must be done. And it has nothing to do, they could be the person who stalks the refrigerator. And they see that we have a door that's too narrow for the cart to get in. And what must be done is I gotta get people to agree to change the door. But if you do that, you're leading. So by that definition, the conclusion I've come to is there is no line between those who are leaders, those who want, there's a line between those who choose to lead and those who don't choose to lead. And so that's clear to me. Every single person in your organization, without exception, if they have that definition alive for them, can lead. Now, the thing that's really happened for me now, though, to see is notice that word artistry. Everyone's a different leadership artist because everybody has different encodings. And so the way you would get people to want to do what must be done, you're encoded. I've known you now for a number of years. You have incredible encodings for what I would describe as attractive persistence. You don't have a pushy tone. You're not aggressive in some sense, but you are persistent. I mean, once you see what must be done in your view, you are relentless in your persistence. That's part of your encoding. So you're just kind of like, I'm just not gonna let go. It's true, isn't it? It's very true. But that persistence, there are some people could be that way and it's off-putting. Yours is welcoming. This is also part of your style, the way you're put together. It's a relentless persistence of invitation. That's the way I experience your encoding. The invitation's not going away. So that persistence of invitation is a Ryan Hawk encoding of leadership that works really well for you, but it's your encoding. It's very you. Now, my encodings for leadership are different. My encodings for leadership have to do with, I'm really good at creating a framework and then giving people incredible freedom in that framework. And then I just trust they'll do incredibly great work. And because I trust them, which I do, they absolutely do not wanna fail the trust they've been given. Now, I don't do that as like, well, this is how people will work. It's very natural for me. I get great people, build a great framework, trust them deeply, and they don't wanna fail that trust. But it's not me like, well, that's how I'll get them. It's just I just do it. And so what we found in this, when you look at how John Glenn led or Roger Sherman led or Catherine Graham led or Georgia Frontier led, and we could go through pairs in the study of how they led in life, but they led all differently from each other because they all did the art of getting people to want to do what must be done, but they all did it differently because they all had different leadership encodings. And so one of the big things for those, for you and for the leadership audience that you reach so much, it's not a question of how other people lead. It's a question of what are your leadership encodings that allow you to be peculiarly effective with those encodings at getting people to want to do what must be done. And if you do that, you are leading and you are leading brilliantly because it's reflecting your encodings. That for me is one of the big takeaways from this work. And what it means is, it's wonderful to read what other leaders do, but always keep in mind, they're effective because they're following our encodings and they're not yours. So that's gonna be, I hope people get that. Well, it just, this whole idea of like, it was out in the world, you may not have even seen it like that, great leaders or builders of companies aren't reflective, they just charge forward. And I just so, did you see that Mark Andreessen? No, I haven't seen that, I'm simple. It was out on Mark Andreessen and other people saying that they don't reflect, they just go forward and they're just too busy working and building and working and building, they don't reflect. And that's just the opposite of my experience in life. Any part of that that could be true, I don't think so. It would be true for somebody who's encoded that way. I get, yeah. But not true for somebody who's not encoded that way. I just don't know anyone who's encoded that way. Okay, so let's use- Or that sustained excellence over an extended period of time. Maybe it happened, I don't know. There has to be examples, but most of them, 700 of these now, very reflective people for the most part. It's in the 90 plus percentages of the leaders I've met with, very reflective, very thoughtful, very curious, humble, aggressive, relentless, these are some of the things that I see. But they also know themselves well. And I don't think you can know yourself that well if you're not willing to do that reflective work and to actually think, right, those types of things. Well, I'm totally open to the possibility that there are some leaders I'm thinking about in the sum. Some leaders for their encoding is a very unreflective, charging, I just see clear and I go. But my response to that would be, that's great because that's their encoding. Yeah, yeah, agree. That's their encoding. I wouldn't try to tell someone else to stop reflecting. Exactly, but that's their encoding. And so after having done this research, I am extraordinarily clear that it's marvelous to listen to what other successful people did. You should just largely ignore it. I mean, it's marvelous, it might give you ideas, but everything that worked for them reflects their encodings. Yeah, yeah. They are not your encodings. Yeah. And so it'll be interesting. And there may even be some fascinating things that help you maybe even see some encodings. You can give you some ideas though. You can give you some ideas. Listening to podcasts or reading books could give you some ideas to try to experiment or figure out am I encoded? Or you might just resonate with something where you kind of go, oh, that's interesting. That rings true with my encodings. And so therefore, if that rings true with my encodings, then this could work for me. So somebody might be really encoded for curiosity and they might actually start taking these courses because it expands their thinking. Not because I think they should do it, but because it activates, they already recognize their own encoding for curiosity. But I think this notion of that there's, well, we've covered it well. By the way, on the reflective piece, there are some enormously reflective leaders and that's the way that they're constructed and they're really, really, really good at it. I mean, it's interesting because I'm thinking about the people in the study. There's a range on this question of them being reflective. I mean, one of my favorite people in the study is this guy, Roger Sherman, who's the match to Benjamin Franklin. I have a lot of favorites. I had some probably bad phrase to you. One of my favorites as if I have favorites. I love all the people I studied, but Sherman had a big impact on me because he's one of the most important founders of the country. He saved the US Constitution not once, but twice. The first was he was the one that came up with the compromise that created a bicameral legislature. We should have two per state in the Senate and we could have proportional for the house. And that allowed the Constitution to actually get done. Otherwise, the large state, small states would have been unreconcilable. We would not have had maybe getting out of Philadelphia with the Constitution. Second came on the Bill of Rights when he argued successfully against James Madison's proposal to introduce the Bill of Bites by rewriting parts of the Constitution itself. And Sherman was alarmed by that and said we should use the amendment mechanism. And that's why the Bill of Rights are the first set of amendments to the Constitution is because of Roger Sherman's insight. But if you look at Roger Sherman, the way he led, and so saving the Constitution not once, but twice, there's only one person I know of who did that. That was Roger Sherman. Tremendously significant figure in American history. But notice something, you don't know much about him. I'm sure historians do. But I didn't know as much about him as I did say about Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Hamilton or George Washington or Tomf's Jefferson, James Madison, right? And it's because actually Sherman was very much that quiet, reflective one. He, first of all, almost never spoke. He was very quiet. He was described by a later biographer, said he was the personification of awkwardness. And he would sit in committees behind the scenes and he would listen and listen and listen and listen and then wait for the precise moment to get clear in his own mind about what was really essential and at the exact precise moment behind the scenes, often in committee, when no one could see it, he would introduce just the right reflective point to turn the vector of American history. Roger Sherman was constantly reflecting, constantly evolving his thinking. He initially was skeptical of the idea of the Bill of Rights but evolved to see its essential point and then really pushing for the amendments as the way to do it. And then wait, wait, wait, wait, and then the precise right instant. And so what I look at that as I said, that's not, we don't normally think of that as grand shaped nation leadership. It's very behind the scenes. It's very uncharismatic. It's very unglamorous, but enormously effective because it reflected his encodings. Very different than Benjamin Franklin. So for anyone, for you, for anyone that's listening to this, there's so much out there that says, a leader does this, you should do that as a leader. This is how the best leaders lead. Level five, I still believe. The art of getting people to want to do what must be done, I believe 100%. The way you do it should be different than the way everyone else does it for a very simple reason. You are encoded differently in composite than everyone else. Man, I could go all day. I'm gonna wrap this up though with a final question, Jim, before our next time we talk, which I already can't wait for. And there will almost certainly be a next time because we have had multiple marvelous conversations. And I have to tell you, it makes me so pleased to hear that that definition that we talked about all those years ago has stuck so clearly in your brain. I think about it all the time. Bringing up all, we have these meetings and sessions and I'm doing keynotes and Q and A's and they ask and I'll say, it's the art of getting people that want to do what must be done. All the time, all the time there's Jim Collins and they're like, oh yeah. I was like, did you read Goody Grade or don't you like read his stuff? Like it's out there, it's pretty, because sometimes they get complex and they're this long and like, that's not, I don't remember all that. Like I just remember that started getting people that want to do what must be done. So this is a, we started personal, we're gonna end personal. Okay, it's a fun one. I have no idea, it doesn't matter if you drink champagne or not, but this is called the champagne question. It's a year from now, okay? One year from now. And we are, you and Joanna are popping bottles and whoever else you love are popping bottles. You're celebrating like crazy. What are we celebrating? What are you celebrating, I should say? Well, I'm not sure I'm very encoded for celebration. So it's a hard question for me to answer. Also another commonality among people who have sustained excellence over time, they don't celebrate that well or maybe frequently enough. When this book came out, did you celebrate? When you turned it in, did you celebrate? No. When you hit list, any of this stuff? No, I... When do you guys celebrate? Celebrate birthdays? Like... So first of all, let's just, how I think we celebrate. To the extent that I could, this is clearly a skill I could develop. I don't think it's part of my natural encodings, but you can learn new skills, right? Even if you're not encoded for it. I know you could add it as something that you, just like I might not be encoded to write legibly, but I could probably learn the skill of writing legibly, right? I think the way it really works in our life is celebrating in little ways, all the way along. So for example, if we go for a wonderful hike or a walk and we catch up on the day, and we just are reflecting on maybe, and it's often, it's not the big visible things. I mentioned earlier, but I really mean it's like, getting the text from the son of one of my best friends, thanking me for the book. I celebrate that. In fact, I went right downstairs, I said, Joanne, you gotta see this. I haven't showed her any of the media coverage of this. I said, you gotta see this. It's that personal connection. That's what I celebrate is the personal connection, the personal impact on individual people. And my team celebrates well. I always like to watch the game film and figure out what plays I could have run better. And in fact, it's interesting, I'm doing that all the time. I mean, I do these, I just started a recent practice, I call three by threes, which is a real simple thing, which is that after almost any conversation, intense one or teaching moment or some interaction, or sometimes it'll even be the way I was at a lab at a given day. I just simply write down and write down three things that went well or I did well or I could build upon. And three things that I could, like plays I could have run better or missed opportunities. And I just write them down and remind myself. And I do that, I've been doing that in some version for years, I'm now doing it systematically. I don't really pause to celebrate. I just sort of pause to learn quickly and move on. And I spend a lot more time on, so maybe you won the game 34 to seven, but what you really remember is there was somebody standing wide open in the end zone on the fourth drive and I missed them. What you want 34 to seven? Yeah, but they were wide open in the end zone and I missed them. And that's just how I kind of come at things. Doesn't mean I'm unhappy or glum or grim or any of that kind of stuff. It sounds the opposite. You seem very happy, you have wild energy. Wild energy. Enthusiasm for everything from the second you walked in this building. Yeah. Well, seeing you is a big part of that. I mean, so look, I mean, write down. Yeah, I saw that, I've never seen anybody do this before. Oh no, I always do this. I mean, it's sort of like, it's a, it's... The other crazy thing is you obviously haven't even looked at it for a second and yet you have these beautiful stories that are really in depth. In a way though, sometimes you, a football coach, a good one creates, they create the big play chart. And all of the prep, this stuff. It's all in here, but then the game happens. Right, and so you can just let it rip once the game happens. That's right, once the game happens. It's nice to have it, but like you don't really need it. That's right. It's the doing of it. But you need to have it, but what did I write here? The biggest reminder for today, reconnecting with an old friend. Oh man, you're the best. And that's like the top of the list today, walking in here is reconnecting with an old friend. And so we just sort of start with that. But see, that's a celebration. Right, what could be a better celebration than reconnecting with somebody we've had marvelous conversations. I appreciate that. Yeah. I don't really know where to go, but I appreciate that means a lot to me. I'm sorry. All right. Yeah, I don't know. I think we're good, man. This is amazing. I really appreciate you and the impact you've made on my life and so many others. It's just, it's awesome because you have a chance to come here and do this in person with you. And we definitely need to do it again. We're gonna go hike after this. Oh good. We already went and hiked yesterday. We're gonna hike some more. Great, you're gonna have a great day for it too. It looks awesome. It looks awesome. And it's beautiful out here. I get why you and Joanne would wanna live here. It's awesome. Yeah, and so I have a wonderful mini celebration with Miranda and enjoy the hike. It really is absolutely marvelous to reconnect with an old friend. Awesome, thank you. We'll do it again. Thanks man. This is great. Sorry about that. Oh no. I'm sorry. It's all right. You're trying to do that. This is just awesome, man. You're the best. I'm just really honored that you would come here and do this in person. And marvelous questions as always. I make sure I gotta give Miranda her book. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Thanks for all that work. That was crazy. You know, what goes into this can't help that. But also, you know, I do, the game film thing really is, that's how I think of it. It's like. Well, I think there's a lot. It's almost like with this stuff too, sitting there and typing and writing and handwriting and thinking of it so that when it comes to it, you might peek every once in a while, but for the most part, it's okay, this is how I remember all this. Yeah, well, and I would imagine it's for you the way it is like, so you think to be sort of the NFL coach thing, you probably have your first three or four plays you're gonna run, right? Yeah, yeah. But then the game happens. Right, right. And you gotta like, you know, we're gonna run the jet sweep, but that's what the good coaches, the best ones are really, really good. That's when all of a sudden they come out after half time and it's like, wait, these guys could adjust on the fly. Like so well, that's when you know you gotta get a coach and you can do a confident as a player, I know. Yeah, first of the ones who are like, well, we have a plan, let's go run it. Yeah, it's just they're blitzing. Then the game happens, we gotta do stuff. But they keep blitzing. I know, I know. It's great, man. Hey, by the way, any recommendations of where we should go? Ah! Oh! What an experience that was to be with Jim for a few hours. In studio in Boulder, Colorado, I am so glad that Miranda and I decided to fly out west to be with him in person, listening to that back, watching it back is still a really emotional experience for me. Jim is one of my heroes and it can be risky to meet one of your heroes. There's a great chance to be let down and yet he surpassed all my expectations. So focused, so present, so kind, so curious, so thoughtful. I'll treasure that day for the rest of my life. I hope you enjoyed it. I am grateful that you're a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me an email, ryanatlearningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Jim Collins. A few takeaways from my notes. There is no way to capture all of this in just three bullet points, but I'll get a few of them. Classify your luck. Jim breaks luck into three types. What luck, who luck, and zeit luck. The question is never whether you got lucky. The question is what you chose to do with it. He said the critical factor is your return on luck, how you manage and make the most of the luck events that occur. How are you making the most of these opportunities? The three by three. Jim does regular reviews after interactions with people. What went well and what are three opportunities to improve? Three and three, a simple reflection that could lead to continued improvement for you. Reflection is critical. And then leadership to choice. Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. That is my favorite, and I think best definition of leadership, the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. Leadership is not a trait. Leadership is a choice. Anyone in any organization can lead depending on their desire to make a difference, the takeaway. Nobody needs to wait for a title. Leadership is available to all of us right now. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do amazingly cool things like fly to Boulder, Colorado, and hang out with one of my heroes for a few hours, talk about leadership and life. Because you continue to do that, and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and you write reviews, rate the show, hopefully five stars, subscribe to it, do all those things. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Get ready. So, Ryan, I'm trying to remember where you grew up. Ohio. Still there. Well, that's right. You mentioned in your notes. That's right. I fell Ohio in with John Glenn. John Glenn. Yep. Yep. I love. We're in Ohio. I'm dating. Yeah. He's a, that was cool. Big there. And then we'd love coming out to anywhere where you can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can. We can.哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎 way to catch up on the day. Yeah. Yeah, but most of what I've been doing is going cycling with Joanne and the Dolomites and things like that. Because as we have had more years together, it's looking for things that we can really enjoy doing together. Yeah. And now, that doesn't mean we really cycle together because she's so much better of a cycling thing. I was gonna say, does she kill you? Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, she doesn't because I can't get off. I was reading about how good she is. I'm like, she probably crushes you as a cyclist. I just, we start together. Okay. Really? That she's like, Jim, you're too slow. Sorry. She just is so strong. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that's fine. It works out really great. She got really good at taking photos while waiting for me. I love it. I love it. I love it.