#856: Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck

Welcome back, friends. Today’s a special one. Jim Collins returns, the rarest of guests, with a new book, What to Make of a Life, and a one-night-only live appearance in San Francisco. Links are in the notes, and we’re jumping right in.

I’m genuinely excited to be here. Our past conversations lit me up, and I’ve been looking forward to this one.

You wrote that you have more energy at 67 than at 37. I want the playbook. Are you still rock climbing, what’s the routine, caffeine, food, all of it?

Less climbing, more cycling with Joanne on big mountain passes, and the long, hard cardio seems to do something powerful. I wake up before dawn almost eager to leap into the day, and I’ve figured out how to get two mornings by napping anywhere, even five minutes before walking on stage.

Is your first morning that 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. window?

That’s the sweet spot. One cup of coffee only, my own beans unless I’m in Italy, and I go straight into my most creative work while the light changes.

When do you eat, and what does breakfast look like?

I have a small bite with coffee to fuel the brain, then a proper breakfast with Joanne. I make her a latte, she reads stories aloud, and we talk them through.

I love the nap-to-activation switch. And I’m curious about your travel coffee kit. What’s in the bag?

Ground Pete’s Arabian Mocha-Java, a cone and filters, and a small kettle. It’s a portable boot-up ritual so the day starts on my terms, no matter the time zone.

Your book nods to the quirks of high performers and to late-life excellence, which is motivating. You also listed people’s side passions, including one eyebrow-raiser. What did you learn there?

Most of the extraordinary lives I studied had intense interests beyond their main arena, from disco dancing to mountain climbing to teaching Sunday school. They weren’t one-note obsessives; they made room for joy outside the core.

You once told me you were deep into research on self-renewal. How did that become What to Make of a Life, and what’s the origin story?

John Gardner planted the self-renewal seed years ago, and Joanne’s Ironman win with a torn hamstring—and the cliff that ended her career—gave me a way to study it. I used matched pairs who hit the same cliff, traced their lives before, through, and after, and realized the larger question wasn’t renewal itself, but the recurring choice we all face: what to make of a life in youth, after a shock, and again in later decades.

I’m in a fog myself. My partnership is clear and strong, but projects feel muddy. I want your energy at 67. How should I think about it, and about encodings?

Fog is common and often follows a cliff. Everyone in the study had thick fog phases. What from the book helped you navigate it?

Don’t panic was first. Your return on luck lens helped, and so did simple steps and naming encodings. Energy feels like the core currency. Prepared people meet cliffs differently than the unprepared. If I asked Joanne why you have more energy now, what would she say?

She once described living with me in one word: exhausting. I likely have a high energy set point, but the unlock is loving the doing itself, anchoring to a big project, and a rhythm of extending into new things while circling back to old strengths. My fire shifted from anxious red heat to a steady, generative glow.

What caused that shift in fuel?

Years of living alongside the lives in this study softened and changed me. Watching their joy and purpose recalibrated my own fire.

Let’s define encodings versus strengths, and how to find them if you weren’t handed your cello at age four.

Encodings are innate capacities waiting to be discovered when life slides them into view. Think of a moving window that sometimes puts your gifts in frame. John Glenn found his in the cockpit, lost them in a corporate role, then regained them in the Senate. The bigger move is trust—once you feel the click, commit. I’d put most of the weight on trusting what lights you up, not on test-hunting.

I’ve asked people when they’ve seen me at my best, noticed I ask beginner questions that open doors, and I cross-pollinate ideas across fields. Recording founder sessions also surfaced skills I take for granted.

Discovery is messy and social, but the standout trait is backing your encodings even when others doubt them. Double down on what you do better than other ways you could spend yourself. With teams, seat people where their encodings and fire fit, and adjust roles when you spot a spark.

Quick Enneagram aside, then a trap I hit. I drift into managing more than making. Did that ever happen to you, and how did you correct it?

Success brought a fog of glittering opportunities that could have stolen my life, so I set hard constraints. I track more than one thousand creative hours every rolling year and use a punch card with points that make travel and intense sessions costly. Life itself is the ultimate punch card of five year projects.

How do you say no without burning bridges?

We lead with relationship and set low odds early, explain the punch card, and decline with warmth. I sometimes send a personal voice memo so the no still feels like respect.

The other fix was putting people in the right seats. Once I did, management angst shrank and the joy of working together grew.

How do you spot and use a teammate’s crisis-calm without creating chaos?

I watch real behavior, then tilt the role toward that encoding and trust them. The same person also coaches daily, so they’re fully utilized between storms.

A freeing insight is that you’re not encoded for just one thing. Some stay in one frame for life, others shift radically like Alan Page or Benjamin Franklin, each drawing from different parts of their constellation.

Let’s talk return on luck and how to expand the surface area of luck.

We define a luck event as something you didn’t cause, that can meaningfully affect outcomes, and that arrives as a surprise. Winners didn’t get more good luck or less bad luck; they got a higher return on what showed up. Beyond what luck, there’s who luck and zeit luck, and great performers spot heavy moments that call for an outsized response.

I’ve felt those heavy moments with books, early angel investing, and backing psychedelic science and bioelectric medicine. Moving to Silicon Valley multiplied who luck.

Return on luck can happen anywhere, but bigger arenas fire more shots. My path is a chain of who luck I acted on, from Bill Lazier opening a teaching door after a tragedy, to Jerry Poras’s email, to the surprise USA Today splash. The toughest calls are the once-in-a-lifetime offers you should still decline because they don’t fit your encodings.

Kicking off with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s challenge to tell apart a chance worth grabbing from a lure to ignore, I ask if return on luck applies to both good and bad breaks, and whether there’s a skill curve to spotting and using each.

In companies I once used matched pairs to judge performance, but with people there isn’t a single scoreboard, so pairs here show different choices at similar cliffs, not better lives.

For firms, you only learn from misfortune you survive, which means managing buffers and relationships so you never cross the death line; stay alive and you’re positioned to harvest the rebound while others are gone.

On the personal side, devastating events can shove you into a new frame and surface encodings you didn’t know you had, like a widow stepping into Congress or Katharine Graham discovering she could lead at the highest level without the loss ever becoming a blessing.

Founders who lose control or cash out, and veterans leaving elite service, often drift because they don’t reframe; many of their best years could be after fifty, but they need a way back into frame instead of leaping off the next cliff.

Most founders copy scripts instead of reasoning from first principles, which fuels identity crises like athletes face after retirement, and it sets up my question about Irv Grousbeck’s guidance that an option to return can actually harm a creative path.

When I left Stanford, Irv told me not to keep a bridge back because knowing I could retreat would sap commitment; in low-odds games you either go all in or you effectively choose zero.

It’s the Declaration of Independence mindset—signing meant we win or we die—which concentrates the will in a way no fallback ever can.

You used constraints to choose pairs; did you learn as much from who you left out as from who made it in?

Constraints helped us find true matches, like pairing Franklin with Roger Sherman by scanning founders who rose from the leather apron class, built businesses, and shaped the nation’s core documents; we skipped Lennon–McCartney and chose Plant–Page to get symmetry over time, and we favored people whose lives are largely on the record to reveal how much great work happens after midlife.

There’s a belief that big breakthroughs belong to the young, maybe due to stamina and fewer obligations, which you see in some labs and startups—what explains the counterexamples?

I don’t think it’s energy so much as being in frame with your encodings; when you are, intensity often climbs with age, as seen with Toni Morrison, Grace Hopper, Barbara McClintock, and builders like Walton, Disney, and Jobs who never let up.

After success, distractions multiply and focus erodes—the Nobel dip shows it—so how do people protect the core of their time for what they’re encoded to do?

My temperament is defiantly reclusive, which helps, but more broadly people cycle through fog and clarity; when the big thing snaps into view, they enter hedgehog mode where everything flows into one river and tributaries don’t derail it.

They also flip the arrow of money so cash becomes fuel to propel the work rather than the aim itself, which keeps the fire burning long after external rewards arrive.

I think of finite and infinite games, Tim O’Reilly’s reminder that life isn’t a tour of gas stations, and Seth Godin’s twist—what would you do if you knew you’d fail—which spotlights loving the daily journey, and before we wrap, tell us about your upcoming live conversation.

On April ninth at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, I’ll be in a public conversation about the ideas in this book, a rare chance to dig in live and take questions.

In Good to Great you defined success as your spouse liking and respecting you more as the years pass—does that still hold?

Absolutely; Joanne and I got engaged four days in, she sees what needs attention and I’m wired to hear it, and my clearest test is whether she likes and respects me more over time because losing that would be the worst failure regardless of accolades.

This has been inspiring—people can find you at jimcollins.com and the new book What to Make of a Life—and as we close, be a touch kinder than you have to be, to others and to yourself.

Your questions made this a plus-two day for me, and I’d happily do it again anytime.

P.S. I also share a brief Friday email of discoveries and keep my mornings maker before manager, doing the generative work before the reactive.