Collins introduces What to Make of a Life as a “self-knowledge book” (3) intended to help readers understand themselves without prescribing how they should live. The question at the center of the book has personal roots. As a teenager, Collins experienced what he later came to call his first major “cliff” when he accepted that his largely absent father would never become the parent he had hoped for. Collins describes this experience as one of the early influences that left him questioning how to find a path, become an adult, and decide what to do with his life. He presents such questions as recurring ones that can resurface in youth, when an established life is disrupted, and later in life when people seek renewal.

To investigate how people respond to these questions, Collins conducted a 10-year study of 34 lives, selected from an initial pool of 500 possibilities and representing 2,809 combined years of experience. His primary method involved creating matched pairs of people who encountered comparable “cliffs,” which he defines as significant events that alter the trajectory of a life and force decisions about what comes next. For example, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page both had to reconsider their identities and futures after drummer John Bonham’s death brought Led Zeppelin to an end. Other pairs experienced the deaths of spouses, the end of elite athletic careers, or the achievement of a long-pursued political goal. Collins uses these turning points as a research lens because major disruptions force people to reconsider their direction and can reveal how they reconstruct or redirect their lives.

Collins does not use these comparisons to determine which subjects made the “right” choices. Recalling his wife Joanne’s warning that “people are not stock returns” (6), he explains that lives cannot be ranked according to a universal measure of performance. He therefore avoids classifying his subjects as winners and losers or imposing his own definition of a successful life on the research. This approach supports the book’s emphasis on self-knowledge: The patterns Collins identifies are intended to provide a framework for examining one’s own life, without presenting any single life as a model to follow.

The study also has methodological limits. Collins acknowledges that his subjects are not a random sample and that many are prominent figures. He selected well-documented people because reconstructing lives from youth through later adulthood required an extensive documentary record. This provides substantial material for tracing individual trajectories over time, but it limits how broadly the experiences of the study group can represent other lives. Economic circumstances, social opportunities, discrimination, caregiving responsibilities, and other constraints can affect the choices available to people when they encounter major transitions. Collins’s findings are therefore most useful as patterns to consider in relation to individual circumstances, an interpretation consistent with his refusal to offer universal prescriptions.

Collins then establishes the book’s three-part framework. Part 1 examines how people find paths suited to their underlying capacities, make the economics of those paths work, and focus their “inner fire.” Part 2 explores “cliffs” and “fog,” Collins’s term for periods of feeling lost, confused, or disoriented that can occur at any point in life but are particularly common after cliffs. Part 3 considers how people sustain their inner fire into later life. Collins emphasizes that these processes overlap and recur because lives do not unfold in orderly stages. His own experience illustrates this continuing process: His relationship with his wife Joanne and the guidance of his mentor Bill Lazier helped him find a path in research, writing, and teaching, while undertaking this study decades later changed his understanding of life and helped him reconcile with the memory of his father.

Chapter Lessons

• Major life disruptions, or “cliffs,” can occur at different stages of life and force people to reconsider what comes next.
• “Fog”—periods of feeling lost, confused, or disoriented—can arise at any point in life and is particularly common after major cliffs. 
• Studying other lives can reveal useful patterns, but those patterns are tools for developing self-knowledge, not prescriptions for how to live.

Reflection Questions

• Think of a past “cliff” in your own life. What choices did that event force you to make about what came next?
• What question about your current life path are you trying to answer, and what could you learn from how others have approached similar turning points?