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- [00:00]
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- [00:33]
Adam Grant
This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They they actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com
- [01:08]
Jim Collins
One of the things that happens with me, with all of my work, is just like you. Even if you discover things that are timeless, your thinking about them evolves, right? Your understanding of even things that you still hold to as a true principle, your understanding of that principle deepens, evolves, becomes more kaleidoscopic as the years go by.
- [01:32]
Adam Grant
Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking My Podcast with Ted on the science of what Makes Us Tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Jim Collins is one of the most influential leadership thinkers of our time. His previous bestsellers, Good to Great and Built to Last, among others, have focused on what differentiates exceptional companies and the people within them. In his new book, what to make of a Life, Jim's broadened his scope to examine individuals from all ranges of life who found their callings, as he puts it, their encodings. Along with interviewing and studying a wide range of people, Jim also shared his own journey toward finding his encoding. And I love the way he went about it. The process involved an interesting little lab notebook. The place I have to start, and I think maybe my favorite moment in the whole book is when I learned about your bug book.
- [02:31]
Jim Collins
Oh, yes, the bug book.
- [02:34]
Adam Grant
Tell me the story of the bug book.
- [02:36]
Jim Collins
Okay, so we'll start with the bug book. You know, I was in the fog of youth in my 20s, in fact, I would say really up until about age 30, I was really wandering. Even though it might have looked, I was kind of linear. I really wasn't. What happened was that I had a wonderful teacher by the name of Rochelle Myers who co taught a course on creativity at Stanford Business School when I was a student. And one of the things she said to me, she said, you should study yourself like a scientist and observe yourself. And so I bought one of those lab notebooks things, the ones we used to have in chemistry lab and stuff, and, and I put on the front of the book Jim. But what I meant by that was the book wasn't owned by Jim. The subject under study was Jim. And I decided to study myself dispassionately like a bug. So if you were a scientist observing a bug, you don't judge the bug. You don't say, oh, it's a good bug, or blue bugs are better than red bugs or anything like that. You just make detached clinical observations about the bug. And so I was really, I was casting about trying to find my way, but the entire time I had this book and I would make notes in it constantly, people thought I was a really good note taker on meetings, but I wasn't actually making notes on the meetings. I was making notes in the bug book. And so I'd be sitting there one of the times that I was very much not in frame. I was working for a large company. It was not a really good thing for me to be in a large company, but it was a wonderful laboratory to make notes. I'd be sitting there in meetings and I would note my just incredible frustration that I'd see a meeting go on for twice as long as it needed to and I would write in there the bug. Jim finds such meetings incredibly frustrating and enraging. Right. Just a simple no. But there was a moment of how it ended up shifting me towards the way I ended up choosing to spend my entire life. I got this assignment in the mid-80s and I was working in the personal computer area and I was asked to go off and figure out how network personal computing would work. And I went off and did this dive and kind of. I loved making sense of a really messy world that had a lot of pieces and getting my head around it. And then there was this point where I had to help the rest of the team understand. And so I was really puzzling like, okay, so how do I package what I've learned in a way that they can grasp and really internalize. I just completely lost myself in it. And there are notes about, you know, that bug. Jim just really loves making sense of a messy world and then figuring out how to framework it so that it affects the way people think. And that kind of bug book moment is when I got a glimpse of what ultimately ended up leading me back to teach at Stanford and then writing my books and all of that. But it was this observation, it was like this giant starred observation about the bug named Jim. And to this day, I still use a version of the bug book. It's this spreadsheet that I use every day. And in that spreadsheet, you have to do it before you go to bed. I write three things in the spreadsheet. One is just kind of a catalog of what was in the day, what time I got up and ways I spent my time, what filled the day. Then the second thing I put in the spreadsheet is the number of creative hours I got that day because I hold myself to an enormously difficult, disciplined standard that I have to keep that above 1,000 creative hours every 365 day cycle, no matter what, for 50 consecutive years. So I track it systematically. But the third thing I put in is a subjective read of the day. Plus two plus one, zero, minus one, minus two. And I've learned something interesting, Adam, which is that you can't put the score in the next day. Your emotional feeling of what the day is. And it's purely subjective. And I'll make notes. If it's a plus two, like why was it a plus two? If it's a minus two, why was it a minus two? And it becomes like this navigation mechanism through life where it's a series of iterative steps of I want to do more of what correlates with the plus twos, less of what correlates with the minus twos. And it's not like a plan. It's like an iterative adaptive self assessment mechanism. So that became kind of the bug book. 2.0, I guess, is almost how you think of it. So that's the bug book. As strange as it sounds, it really served me well.
- [07:08]
Adam Grant
Jim, this is fascinating on many levels. So I've got a whole battery of questions for you about this. The first one is just to make sure my math is right, that thousand creative hours a year is about three creative hours a day, right?
- [07:20]
Jim Collins
Yep.
- [07:20]
Adam Grant
Okay.
- [07:21]
Jim Collins
The key is you can have zero days because other days are larger than the three. Right. You have some days that it's like a 14 hour creative day. And then you might have two or three days of zeros or ones, but so long as the total is always above the thousand for the 365, that keeps me on track.
- [07:42]
Adam Grant
That's a much healthier version of a streak than the Snapchat version. I see my students. I need to take a picture of my ear and send it to my friend every day, or we'll lose our streak. Okay, so next thing that I think is really striking about your bug book and even the Excel version of this that you do today, is I think most people try to learn whatever they want to get better at, whether they're trying to become more creative or more productive. They compare themselves to other people, and they try to then borrow routines. And what I've always thought, which you just crystallized in a really good practice, is we actually learn more from comparing ourselves to ourselves. Your productivity or creativity routine may not work for me, but if I gather enough data on my own variations, I can start to figure out, okay, what did those best days have in common? What differentiated them from the worst days? And how do I build more of the good ones and erase the bad ones? And I'd just love to hear you riff a little bit on that idea that I should learn from my own fluctuations, maybe even more than other people's habits that might be different from mine.
- [08:45]
Jim Collins
Well, boy, this is something that has become. I really have become enormously skeptical of following recipes or advice from other people at all. And part of that flows from the work that led to the what to make of a life book? Because in studying all those lives, what I really realized is that's what they did. They discovered the modes that worked incredibly well for them, and then they trusted and gave themselves over to those modes. But there's also another piece of it. The question isn't trying to find what you can do better than others. It's about finding the ways that are better to expend yourself relative to other ways you could expend yourself. And that is a very, very different frame. It's a way of looking at things that is reflecting the idea of your own understanding of yourself versus a comparative sense to others. And then the other piece is, you're a writer. You relate to this. But two of the people in the study was Toni Morrison and Barbara Tuchman. And of course, the beauty of studying people who were prolific writers but also spoke a lot about their processes of writing is that you can really delve deeply. You can see their work, and then you can look at the actual processes. Did they Type did they use a pencil? Where did they work? How did they slice up their hours in the day? But what stood out is they came to understand what worked peculiarly well for them. And so instead of going to other writers and saying, how do you write a novel? It's a discovery of how I write a novel.
- [10:22]
Adam Grant
You know, Jim, as you talk about this, I'm struck that it's often said that comparison is a thief of joy. And I think what you've written here forces us to rethink that. It's true that social comparison is often a thief of joy, but self comparison is a source of growth.
- [10:38]
Jim Collins
When I looked at how these lives unfolded in was, even if they weren't processing it on a highly intellectual level. Right. I think sometimes it was just a real instinctive sense. But their actions, their choices, even in the face sometimes of really epic cliffs that change their lives. But their choices flowed from kind of an inside out understanding of themselves as opposed to an outside in sort of trying to form fit themselves. It's this notion of we're getting clues all the time, but do you trust them enough to be different? Because by definition you are different. And the ability to trust that differentness is, I think what so stood out to me was that level of self trust.
- [11:25]
Adam Grant
Okay, this takes me back to what I think is maybe the most striking part of the bug book, which is to be this nonjudgmental of yourself is highly unusual. And you use the term dispassionate when describing it a few moments ago. I just want to give you a couple examples, maybe to answer this with. So you said you started to discover things about yourself that most people would be very bothered by is, I guess how I would paraphrase it. There was one that stuck out for me, which is I made dispassionate clinical notes like a scientist making precise observations about a bug moving about in a lab container. I would note things like my utter incapacity to endure with enthusiasm meetings that could have been half as long and twice as productive. You spoke to that. However, you also say I noted that I lacked the political instinct to be more discreet in pointing out people's logical inconsistencies. It simply didn't occur to me that being right doesn't matter if you offend people by asking a series of questions that trap them in a corner. I mean, those are not pleasant self observations, Jim. You could read those and say, wow, I have real problems with focus in meetings. I'm not a good team player, I'm disloyal you could read your lack of maybe political instinct or savvy, as I'm kind of an arrogant prick. I'm more interested in being the smartest person in the room than actually trying to learn from other people and teach other people. How did you not judge yourself? How did you stay dispassionate?
- [12:52]
Jim Collins
Yeah, somebody was once doing a profile on me, and so I invited the reporter out and the reporter wanted to meet with Joanne. And I was like, okay, this is going to be interesting. But one of the things that this person asked was if Jim has a really unusual capability or strength, what would you say it is? Like, what's the number one? And Joanne said, jim takes critical feedback better than any human I've met. And I've thought about that because actually, that's really true. So first of all, when I get critical feedback, it might sting. Okay, it definitely can sting. But my response to it is again, to process it as almost clinical information. And I think it comes from my desire to be better relative to myself. Oddly, doesn't let my emotional response to critical feedback impede my development to being better.
- [13:53]
Adam Grant
Yes, one of the things that stands out as you talk about this is feedback. Research has long distinguished between the informational content of feedback and the motivational impact of feedback. And one of the reasons people have such a hard time learning from criticism is they overlook the informational value and they overreact to the motivational part of it. A lot of people focus on how feedback makes them feel, and you were focused on what it could teach you.
- [14:21]
Jim Collins
That's right.
- [14:22]
Adam Grant
It's also interesting, as I think about it, because you're just trying to basically map your own qualities and tendencies as accurately as possible. But I think some people would take that information and say, well, I can only succeed in the following environments, and I need to adapt the world around me to me. Forgetting the other part of the George Bernard Shaw quote that you have to also adapt yourself to the world. And I'm just curious about how you think about striking that balance, because I think there's a precious version of this where people say, okay, I've identified the perfect environment for me, and if I'm not in it, I should expect nothing of myself. I can blame the environment. It's not my fault that I didn't thrive.
- [15:07]
Jim Collins
And.
- [15:07]
Adam Grant
And that's not how you operate at all. It almost seemed to me like you were ruling out settings and roles that were just clear misfits and then saying, okay, what's the bare minimum level of match that I need in Order for me to express my encodings. Talk to me about that.
- [15:23]
Jim Collins
Yeah. So if you don't mind, I actually want to pop back to the people in the study because I think it illuminates this. Please do. But when I look over the whole span of the lives that I studied in this book, what you can see is there's these times when this notion of this durable set of capacities that await discovery by the experiences of life. And I describe these as encodings. Right. They're just kind of there to be discovered. And they're vast. Right. You have many you will not discover. I have many I will not discover, so long as we discover some of them. But what's interesting is you sort of watch over the course of their lives at the same exact person. Think about John Glenn, who became a tremendous American hero as an astronaut and first to orbit Earth from the United States, and so on and so forth. But you can see these different points of his life where I sort of think of it as being like a window frame, looking out at this constellation of encodings. And at any given moment, that frame captures either very few encodings or a lot of encodings. They're there, but the frame of your life is shifting around. And early in his life, when he first went off to the local college, you know, he wasn't flourishing in chemistry class and in sports and so forth. And so it's not that he didn't work hard, but there just weren't a lot of encodings in frame there. Then, through a series of fortunate events, he'd had an experience once with a flight when he was a kid, and it ignited something in him. He goes off and he starts towards his pilot's training, and something just like, all of a sudden, the frame of his life shifts and these things that he is enormously instinctive at piloting an aircraft. And then he becomes, of course, a combat fighter pilot in World War II in the Pacific, and then stays in the military. Fighter pilot, jet fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut. And that entire time of his life, he's in frame in a way where big set of these amazing encodings. I mean, one of my favorites is just how his heart rate goes down in the face of speed and danger. I'm fairly confident that if I were in a jet and there's another jet behind me trying to knock me out of the sky, my heart rate doesn't go down. It was finding frames in life where more of the things that he was encoded for were shining through the window, and they were better ways of expending himself relative to other ways. And so it's a matter of kind of whether it's a search or a creation or a happy accident. There could be a lot of different ways that it happens, but there's a point at which you kind of click in frame and things work better.
- [18:03]
Adam Grant
Well, that search process also, I think, speaks to something that a lot of people overlook, which is, you know, we've been talking in part about thinking like a scientist.
- [18:11]
Jim Collins
Yep.
- [18:12]
Adam Grant
I read your writing about this, and it hit me. This is a missing chapter in Think Again. It's something that's been implicit in my habits, and I didn't. I failed to articulate it. It's not just making observations. It's saying, okay, I've got a hunch. Let me now go and test that hypothesis by treating my life as a mini experiment. And it reminds me a little bit of the way that Herminia Ibarra has studied people adapting to new workplaces and new jobs by trying on provisional selves and saying, okay, who I want to be and how I want to operate. Let me not hold that so tightly. Let me think about that more as I am trying on a new outfit, and I'm going to see if it fits, and I might have to walk around in the shoes.
- [18:53]
Jim Collins
Just love to ask you, Adam, is do you think it's just that that gives you language for something you've been doing all the way along anyway, or is it actually something that you hadn't been doing all the way along?
- [19:06]
Adam Grant
I didn't have the notebook, and I wasn't taking the observations nearly as systematically as you were. But I read that and I said, oh, this is what I've been doing my whole life and my whole career. I have been doing this with other people for a long time. So I keep a bug book on anybody I interact with. It's also not written down. It's more of mental notes. But I had a funny interaction yesterday where somebody emailed me and it was a congratulations on your new book. How do I get a free copy? Unless, of course, you want me to order it, then I'm happy to do that.
- [19:37]
Jim Collins
Huh?
- [19:38]
Adam Grant
And someone I'm very close to was looking over my shoulder and saw that message and was really bothered by it and said, how could this person not know? Support an author, buy their book, don't get in line for a free copy. And I didn't care. I had no emotion about it. I just filed this away as another observation about this person and a domain in which their judgment isn't the same as mine or their idea of what it means to support someone is different from mine, but it doesn't mean it's better or worse. So let me turn this into a question, which is I think that this idea of observing other people's behavior and when you see something that is different from the way that you operate, not ignoring it because you're trying not to judge them, but rather just kind of noting it and saying, oh, I've just discovered something that's different or idiosyncratic about them that will help me understand where they are well suited to thrive and where they might struggle. It'll help me figure out how to interact with them more effectively, because I realize that's a difference between us. I think you do this. I think this is why you're so good at learning from other people, is you are keeping this notebook about everyone you interact with. Am I right or wrong?
- [20:51]
Jim Collins
So, no, you're very, very right. But it's evolved substantially. I used to spend an enormous amount of emotional energy feeling frustrated with what people are not. And I can assure you that would cause a lot of pain. It would cause me pain. It would cause them pain, and I would be especially frustrated if they weren't more like me. Right. My shift went from feeling frustrated with what people are not into feeling grateful for what they are. And that shift emotionally has been. It's like the entire color of the lens of which I look through the world and look at other people has changed and their lives are better, my lives are better, the pain is less, the results are better. So I began to sort look at all the people around me and think, are they in seats that really fit their encodings and really feeds their fire? And back in good to great, everybody grabbed the principal, right? People on the bus. Okay, first two. But my evolution in thinking is it's much less about the bus and much more about the seats. What I began to do was that same idea of observing dispassionately where somebody would do something and I would just notice, wow, that's a really instinctive capability in that person. And then I would kick the frame of what they do to the side so that more of that encoding would shine through the window. And it's gradually kind of shifting and widening so that their responsibilities aligned much more with the encodings that they have. And once what they're responsible for lined up with those things, I truly. My main experience is I'm incredibly grateful for what they are. And that is when a whole bunch of lightning bolts go off. And I think it's inhumane to try to turn people into what they're not. And it is supremely humane to help them get in frame with responsibilities that just activate them. And that for me has been a huge journey.
- [23:07]
Adam Grant
I mean, first of all, it's a major aha to make the shift from being constantly frustrated and probably exasperated by
- [23:15]
Jim Collins
what people aren't and feeling It's a form of pain, actually.
- [23:18]
Adam Grant
Yeah. And also conflict.
- [23:20]
Jim Collins
Yes.
- [23:20]
Adam Grant
Relationship conflicts in particular, because there's this tug of war going on where you're trying to pull them to be more like you or more like you want them to be. And the harder you pull, the more force they pull with in the other direction and either the rope snaps or somebody just lets go and falls down.
- [23:36]
Jim Collins
Yep. And then everybody's in pain.
- [23:38]
Adam Grant
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- [24:33]
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- [25:30]
Verizon Advertiser
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- [25:40]
T-Mobile Advertiser
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- [25:44]
Adam Grant
Nah, I'm just kidding.
- [25:45]
Jim Collins
Let me get my phone out.
- [25:47]
Verizon Advertiser
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- [25:49]
T-Mobile Advertiser
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- [26:01]
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- [26:04]
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- [26:34]
Adam Grant
Now, I'm curious about how this is different from playing to their strengths because I think there's a nuanced distinction there.
- [26:40]
Jim Collins
Yeah, there's a huge distinction there. There is a direct relationship, of course, between what you're encoded for, these instinctive, durable capacities that get exposed by the experience of life and strengths. But I also think you can turn things into strengths that aren't necessarily deep encodings just by sheer force of will. Right. By just sheer discipline and hard work. I had a strength at math. I majored in math as an undergraduate, mathematical sciences. But I met the people who were encoded for math and they're different than me. And so while I could really will myself to be strong at math, I'm not deeply encoded for math. And so all the difference in the world of those two.
- [27:26]
Adam Grant
So you mentioned good to great and some of what you've rethought from there.
- [27:29]
Jim Collins
Yes.
- [27:29]
Adam Grant
I want to give you a chance to dispassionately answer your critics while we're on that subject.
- [27:34]
Jim Collins
Yeah, sure.
- [27:35]
Adam Grant
As you know, one of the consequences of just the sheer impact that you had with that book is it stimulated a lot of academic research and I know of a couple articles that have, you know, sort of questioned whether the companies that you studied actually made the good to great leap. And, and one of those articles concludes that greatness did not appear to be sustainable. That if you study their long term stock performance, only one of your 11 was able to stick it out. And then another article says these firms basically are good, but they're not great. That never really bothered me that much because you could have said this was a study of how do leaders find a North Star? And actually arrived at the same valuable insights about the importance of humility, for example. But I'm curious about how you think about that, because obviously science evolves. The firms you studied at one point in time are not going to look the same over time. Does it get under your skin a little bit to think maybe the firms I studied didn't make a sustainable leap from good to great?
- [28:35]
Jim Collins
It doesn't, and here's why. So there's a couple key things about this. Jerry Porras, my research mentor at Stanford, is the one who really gets the credit for this. Jerry, way back on Built to Last, said, what we need to do is for every one of those companies, we should be able to find another company that was in the same spot in the same time and same resources and same potential with the same potential customers and the same technology changes that was beginning with them. And then we tracked them over time and one did this and the other didn't. And the real part of the research is not what did the visionary companies and Built to last or what did the good to great company share in common? That was not the question that we asked. The question we asked was what did they share in common that was different from their very carefully, very clinically selected comparison companies that were in the same environment? It is unassailably true that if you have two companies that are both kind of not doing particularly great and then one goes through an inflection and for a minimum of 15 years dramatically outperforms and the other that was at this same exact situation or very, very close to it, at that moment of inflection keeps going sideways. You have two points of comparative change. One is you have the not great era to the great era for the good to great company. So you've got that contrast, but you also have the good to great company in contrast to the comparison company. And so what you're always asking is what was different that separated them? Lastly, there's kind of an ultimate answer to it, which is my wife Joanne said to me, you need to write the book about how they lose it.
- [30:16]
Adam Grant
I was going to say that was your sequel then.
- [30:18]
Jim Collins
That's why I wrote how the Mighty Fall. And so my response is in the end is none of the fundamental principles in Good to great I would overturn at this point. My understanding has deepened and I think this notion of that the companies after 15 years in some cases fell is simply fascinating. Not condemning
- [30:39]
Adam Grant
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- [33:49]
Jim Collins
I'm bad at these, by the way. We'll do something I'm not encoded for. Let's go.
- [33:53]
Adam Grant
Perfect. First question is, what is the worst leadership advice you see given today?
- [33:57]
Jim Collins
To follow other people's recipes for leading.
- [34:02]
Adam Grant
You get to host a dinner party of anybody in human history, alive or dead, to learn about leadership. Who are the five people you invite?
- [34:12]
Jim Collins
Oh, five to learn about leadership. Well, I would have Winston Churchill. My first leadership text was reading all of Churchill's books. I would have Katharine Graham, who I think is Washington Post's greatest corporate level five leader that I've ever studied. Third on leadership, probably George Catlett Marshall and his amazing capacity to hold together the coalition as needed with such grace and such stability. Number four, Lincoln. Because what I would want to know from Lincoln is how he maintained his resolve when he was getting those battle reports from Antietam. Number five, Grace Hopper. Oh, man. I would just so delight in a dinner with Grace Hopper. She's in the book. She's the one who is the pioneer in computer science. But what's so amazing about Grace Hopper is that she wasn't just a great computer scientist. She had these amazing abilities to lead as a woman, in science, in industry, in the Navy, in the original Mark 1 project. And her capacity to move, move not just inside an organization, but an entire world around software and languages outside of It. I just think it's one of the most sparkling, wonderful examples of leadership. And you want to talk about someone who it would be fun to have an evening with, it would be Grace Hopper.
- [35:40]
Adam Grant
Okay, last two questions for you. One is, what's the biggest thing you rethought? As I know you have a whole list of. Whole book.
- [35:48]
Jim Collins
Yeah. Rethought. Yeah.
- [35:51]
Adam Grant
What was the biggest rethinking in what to make of a life?
- [35:53]
Jim Collins
There's that whole table in there. I used to believe. I now believe the top line of that is I used to believe in the primacy of discover and follow your purpose. I now believe in discover and trust your encodings, even if you don't know what purpose they're leading towards. That's a big rethink for me. I used to think you need to have the purpose clear. Yes. There it is. There's another one on that list, and this is huge. The importance of thinking about legacy. I just don't think it's important. And then when I studied all these people, they didn't really think about legacy. They focused on what was right in front of them until they were done with their lives. And this whole notion of what my legacy is going to be is ultimately egocentric. You're not going to be here to enjoy it anyway. I think far more important is to ask the question, what is the responsibility for making the most use of myself? Well, I am here right now. You have too much to do to make use of whatever encodings you have. I'm going to give you a third one, though, just for fun. I think I really rethought what giving is all about. And kind of my primitive view was giving means giving away money or volunteering, giving your time. And those are giving. But take AI and pay. Suppose he'd stopped his architecting and he started giving away his money as his main use of his time and volunteering for causes which wouldn't have been bad to do. But would that have been a better use of IM Pei than giving us the Louvre pyramid? And what I see giving really is, is giving of your encodings responsibly. And that takes many, many possible different forms of. I'd like the Louvre pyramid, please.
- [37:39]
Adam Grant
Me, too. Me too. I have to tell you, there's one other in here that I found especially powerful. You wrote that I used to believe freedom means lack of constraint, and I now believe freedom means choosing responsibility.
- [37:52]
Jim Collins
Yes. Why does that one speak to you?
- [37:55]
Adam Grant
You know, it's funny. I was talking with Esthera Perel about this recently. And I realized that some of my most frustrating experiences in life are when I feel like there's a tension between my desire to help others and my desire to maintain my own freedom and autonomy. And Esther said, well, you realize helping others is an expression of autonomy. She said, that means you don't need other people. They need you. Touche, Esther. But also, I think that if I choose who I want to help and how I want to help them, that's a commitment I'm making, and it does impose constraints on my life. It means that I don't have complete freedom to choose how I spend my time, but I chose that constraint because I care about the person, and the impact matters to me. And the way that you articulated that really took something that was implicit for me and made it explicit to say, yeah, I want the freedom to choose my responsibilities. Those responsibilities, if I choose them, don't feel like constraints.
- [38:58]
Jim Collins
And to be very clear, who that comes from is Toni Morrison in the study. And I read all of her books in sequence, but also studied her life alongside those books. And there's this obscure interview, like, way back in the mid-80s sometime, and there was just this line in there where she says something like, people don't understand freedom. It's not the absence of constraint. It's not the absence of responsibility. Freedom means you get to choose your responsibilities. And it's very interesting, Adam, because when I read that line, it was like a whole bunch of dominoes just fell because I cast back through all the other lives, and I read, realize, Franklin chose the responsibility to lead in the revolution, and McClintock chose a responsibility to continue to do her genetics because she could, Right. They're all different permutations. But that notion of choosing responsibilities was such an animating force in their life, particularly in the later years when they could have chosen not to choose any more responsibilities. And the incredible power of choosing those responsibilities, which are very different than externally imposed obligations. It's freely chosen responsibilities, and that I hope, for people.
- [40:05]
Adam Grant
Me, too. Okay, last thing before I let you go.
- [40:08]
Jim Collins
Sure.
- [40:09]
Adam Grant
Quick anecdote. I was on a stage in Europe last year, and as I always do, I asked, what's the one change that will make the biggest difference as I try to improve moving forward? And the response back from the host was, you know, the speaker who outrated you, made everyone cry, and just had an extraordinary story. And that's not you. You're. You're a cerebral teacher, not an emotional preacher. And he said, but Jim Collins reached people that way. I was like, damn, You, Jim Collins? No, I was like, okay, yes, I know Jim does that. How did he do it? And the host said, Jim left people with a question that shook them to their core. And instead of putting his emotions on the stage, he helped people unlock their own emotions. So what I want to know is what is the question that we should all be asking to make the most of a life?
- [41:04]
Jim Collins
I think it would be the idea that, first of all, you start with the idea that life is the ultimate punch card, and you then take the Warren Buffett idea of there's only so many punches for investment, so you have to be disciplined. Well, think of every five year chunk of life like a punch. And you get one. You get one punch card, one life. And the punches are going and you don't get them back. And it doesn't mean you have to go out and do the biggest things. It's just an awareness of the punches. And with that, a question that I really. Many questions I like to ask people to think about, but one of them is this question of what responsibilities will you choose that reflect your encodings but would not happen but for you, and for which you may never receive any credit? And that only the people who are really close to you, your spouse, your very, very best friends, they might know, but you have, in the end, this question of did I spend the punches well? And do those around me have a respect and affection for that?
- [42:15]
Adam Grant
I can't think of a more profound question to reflect on than that. And, and Jim, this is just. It's such a good example of why it's always a joy, but also a mental workout to learn from you and
- [42:28]
Jim Collins
learn with you well and back and forth as well. We get to just have a conversation. And I will look forward to another one.
- [42:34]
Adam Grant
I look forward to it, too. Thanks, Jim.
- [42:36]
Jim Collins
Okay.
- [42:40]
Adam Grant
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standards. Our producer is Jessica Glaser. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne hi. Lash Ban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Layton Brown.
- [43:12]
Jim Collins
I keep thinking about this idea of people seeking advice from other people. And I kind of want to say to young people, it doesn't work that way. Their advice worked for them, but they're different people than you are.
- [43:27]
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- [44:18]
Jim Collins
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- [45:15]
Adam Grant
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