What to Make of a Life

Jim Collins spent a decade investigating how remarkable people address the question of what to make of a life. The project examined 34 carefully selected lives across 2,809 cumulative years, drawing on more than 20,000 articles, 400 books, and ancillary sources. Collins organized the study around "cliffs," his term for significant events that alter a life's trajectory and force choices about what comes next, and constructed matched pairs of people who experienced similar cliff events so he could compare their decisions and paths. The result is a book in three parts: finding a path, navigating upheaval, and sustaining the inner fire across the long arc of a life.

Collins frames the project through his own history. He grew up in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district before his parents split, after which his mother moved with her two sons to a basement in Boulder, Colorado. At age 13, his mother declared him the man of the house, and a final visit to his father in New Mexico on a Greyhound bus confirmed that "There will never be a father there" (2). The unanswered questions from that fracture planted the seeds for a study of how people rebuild when life breaks apart.

The first part introduces what Collins calls "One Big Thing," a framework built on three mutually reinforcing elements present in every life he studied. The first element is "encodings," durable intrinsic capacities that lie within a person, awaiting discovery through experience. Encodings differ from mere strengths: They are not taught from without but discovered from within. Collins illustrates the concept through Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, who pursued maize genetics for seven decades with such absorption that she once forgot her own name during an exam. Her matched-pair companion, Grace Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist who helped invent modern subroutines and championed standard programming languages, displayed radically different encodings, thriving as a team leader across military and corporate institutions rather than as a solitary researcher. Both women encountered the ceiling of limited opportunity for women in science, but they responded differently: McClintock continued her solitary research, while Hopper left academia to join one of the early computer companies. Their shared pattern, yet vastly different paths, demonstrates Collins's central claim: Common elements shape how people answer the question of what to make of a life, but no standard recipe exists.

The second element is "flipping the arrow of money," a shift from seeing work as a means to earn money toward seeing money as the fuel needed to do one's work. Collins traces this through Robert Plant, who endured years of privation as a teenager pursuing music in the English Midlands before co-founding Led Zeppelin, and who decades later declined offers of many tens of millions of dollars for a reunion tour because no amount of money could displace his drive for musical exploration. Collins finds that none of the 34 subjects measured their lives primarily by money, yet all understood they needed to make the economics work. He identifies 12 distinct economic streams, from mastering scarcity to creative flywheels (loops of creative work generating new opportunities) to family wealth, with the median person drawing on four across a lifetime.

The third element is "focusing the inner fire," which Collins distinguishes from discipline or ambition. He argues that the fire stems from love of the doing and illustrates this through Olympic gold medalist and surgeon Tenley Albright, who found the same exhilaration in the operating room that she had felt on the ice rink. Collins identifies an unavoidable "Stress and Drudgery Tax" present in every hedgehog, his term for an arena of activity where all three elements converge. The crucial question is whether the fire exceeds the tax. Collins concludes that love is the most powerful fuel, writing: "Love, I came to understand, is greater than discipline. Love is greater than ambition. Love is greater than ego. Love is greater than fear" (136).

Collins finds that about half of his subjects pursued a single hedgehog for life, while the other half were "serial hedgehogs" who transitioned to a second or third. Football Hall of Famer Alan Page moved from the Minnesota Vikings' defensive line to a 23-year career as a Minnesota Supreme Court justice. His matched-pair companion, Carl Eller, who played alongside Page on the Vikings, forged a second career focused on substance abuse prevention and later became a ceramic artist in his 70s.

The second part turns to cliffs and the fog that often follows. Collins defines fog as a phase of immense uncertainty about the best path forward. He traces it through Michael J. Fox, an actor, who spent seven years wrestling privately with his Parkinson's diagnosis before going public and founding The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. Fox's matched-pair companion, Maurice White, founder of the band Earth, Wind & Fire, received a Parkinson's diagnosis within months of Fox but chose to remain focused on music rather than becoming a public advocate. Collins identifies four recurring forms: fog of youth, fog of disappointment, fog of success, and fog of retirement.

To navigate fog, Collins proposes "simplex stepping," an iterative process of taking the next best step without needing a plan or destination, inspired by mathematician George Dantzig's simplex algorithm. The concept's most vivid illustration is Katharine Graham, who inherited ownership of The Washington Post Company after her husband's suicide. Despite deep self-doubt, Graham simplex stepped from learning the business to assembling the right people to making the courageous decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, ultimately delivering a 3,315% stock price increase over her tenure.

Collins also examines the role of luck, distinguishing between luck itself and "return on luck," meaning what one makes of the luck that comes. Gerald R. Ford became president through a cascade of fortunate events culminating in Watergate, while Jimmy Carter's political career turned on encounters such as meeting his mentor, Admiral Hyman Rickover, and journalist Hunter S. Thompson accidentally championing Carter after hearing a speech. Collins argues that return on luck better explains the study subjects' lives than luck alone and that there is not one hedgehog to find but many potential ones; nearly half of second hedgehogs in the study emerged in subjects' 50s or 60s, giving hope that previously unseen encodings remain discoverable at any point in life.

The third part addresses sustaining the fire across decades. Collins introduces "Extend Out/Circle Back," a process of pushing into new territory while returning to earlier capabilities. Meryl Streep, who feared turning 40 would end her career, instead tripled her starring roles and earned more Oscar nominations after 40 than any other actor had achieved across an entire career. Collins also identifies "choosing responsibilities" as powerful fuel, illustrated through Charles Colson, Nixon's political operative who went to prison for obstruction of justice, underwent a faith conversion, and founded Prison Fellowship, a ministry that eventually reached more than 100 countries. His matched-pair companion, John Ehrlichman, also imprisoned for Watergate, spent much of his remaining life looking backward through novels and memoir rather than turning fully toward new commitments.

The book's final matched pair, Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin, illustrates Collins's argument that total capability increases with age through the compounding of encodings, cumulative experience, and credibility. Sherman, a self-taught lawyer, played a decisive role in shaping the Connecticut Compromise, which established the two-chamber structure of Congress, and ensured the Bill of Rights was appended as amendments rather than woven into the Constitution's original text. Franklin, who spent his 50s and 60s in a relative trough, reinvested himself in the cause of independence in his 70s and served at the Constitutional Convention at age 81.

Collins closes by returning to his father, now viewed with compassion. His father never exited the fog of youth and never chose responsibilities beyond himself. Collins offers the book's questions as the gift he wishes he could have given his father: "I wish I could go back in time and give him those questions before it was too late. But alas, I cannot. So instead, I offer them here to you" (327).