How to unlock your potential

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COLLINS: I used to believe much more in the idea of having a life plan because I was very good at planning out objectives. But I now believe that a lot of really amazing lives unfold organically, through a highly unpredictable process. I also used to believe that if you didn’t really find your one big thing by the age of 30, it was maybe too late. Looking at the lives in this study, where some of them didn’t find it until after that, I now believe that if you haven’t found it by 30, the clock’s not over.

BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale.

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I’m Jeff Berman, your host. Jim Collins is the author of some of the most important business books of all time, like Good to Great, Built to Last, and others. For his latest project, he has done something a little bit different and much more personal. Instead of profiling iconic companies, he zoomed in on extraordinary individuals. The result is a stunning new book that I absolutely devoured called What to Make of a Life. Jim, welcome to Masters of Scale.

COLLINS: I feel very welcome.

BERMAN: Well, you should. And you don’t know this, but you have been very much inside my head for the last 20 years. I spent the first decade of my career in public service. I came into the private sector at MySpace. On my first day on the job, they were talking about CPMs, and if you’re in media, you know what that means. If you’re not in media, it’s just Greek. And I realized I needed a business education. I had a law degree, no MBA, and no background in business. The very first book I turned to was Good to Great, and it has formed a foundation of my learning journey in the business world. So as grateful as I am to get to talk to you and hear about the new book and all of it, more than anything, I’m grateful to be able to say thank you for how much help you’ve provided me in my journey.

COLLINS: Great. One of the wonderful things about writing is that it’s a very solitary process when you’re up at 4 in the morning assembling research, putting sentences together, or trying to figure out how to make concepts really come alive for people. Then it becomes something that reaches people you never even know it reaches. And of course, I now know that it reached you, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Copy LinkHow curiosity turns ideas into leadership impact

BERMAN: One of the places where you have had a massive impact is a place of commonality for us, which is that we are both Los Angeles Rams fans.

COLLINS: Yes.

BERMAN: I was on the phone this morning with my friends Kara Henderson Snead and Les Snead. For those who don’t know, Les is the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. They were telling me that for Les’ birthday several years ago, Kara had arranged for a tea with you. It was meant to be, in Les’ memory, 15 minutes, or whatever it was supposed to be. It ended up going, it sounds like, three or four hours.

COLLINS: Yes.

BERMAN: Les credits you enormously with helping shape his leadership, the leadership of the Rams, and the culture they’ve built there. What happened in the first 15 minutes of meeting with Les and Kara that inspired you to spend that much more time with them and really invest in the Rams’ success?

COLLINS: First of all, they became dear friends. I remember very vividly them coming to the lab and having tea. I was so taken with the application of the ideas to a world I’d never directly connected with in terms of the impact of the ideas — how you would build a really great and potentially lasting NFL flywheel of results, and how that would really work. What I really fell in love with as we got into the conversation was that it was clear to me they had taken the ideas from Good to Great way back when they were just trying to become good. And as you know, part of the NFL’s magic is that it’s really hard to have that sustained high-level performance because of all the forces at work.

BERMAN: It’s engineered for parity.

COLLINS: It’s engineered for parity, exactly. So I was just taken with it and the spirit of it, and we had such a marvelous conversation. If I remember it correctly, I basically stepped out and said to my team, “Clear the afternoon.” We were putting up Xs and Os, drawing flywheels, and talking about things. That was an absolutely wonderful start to what has been a marvelous connection, and it’s ongoing. It really is a joy to be connected to it and to see the ideas applied in such a competitive world.

BERMAN: One of the things Kara and Les shared that really struck me was that they went there to meet you and meet one of their heroes, someone they’ve learned from, but also to learn more. They were struck by your curiosity, by the depth of your desire to understand what challenges they were facing and really grok this incredibly complicated system. Where does that curiosity come from for you?

COLLINS: I really am curious. I think that conversation is a wonderful moment of curiosity, but it reflects my approach to the world, which is: This is just so interesting. And I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I think in the new book, as you read, we talk about this notion of encodings. I think I just have an incredible encoding for curiosity. You mentioned Good to Great, Great by Choice, Built to Last, and then the new book, What to Make of a Life. One thing they all share in common is that they all took many years of research. It’s a constant curiosity fest. Even when I have executives come to my lab, or when my dear friends from the Rams came, they’ll probably remember that the whole first chunk of our time together was just questions from me. If executives come here, I don’t tend to give them answers. I just ask questions.

Copy LinkWhy encodings matter more than passion alone

BERMAN: There are about 17 threads I want to pull on. I’m going to start with encoding, just because you referenced it, and it’s a term I’m not sure everyone will be familiar with. What are encodings, and how do you differentiate them from passions or strengths or talent, for example?

COLLINS: In the new book, as you know, I’m studying people and their lives as they wrestle repeatedly through life with the question of what to make of a life. I studied them through all these different phases — the cliff phases of life and the fog phases of life and the youth phases of life, and then the later phases of life to keep the fire burning really long and latent. There’s a rigorous approach I took to it. One of the things that came out of that was that we found that their lives tended to work best when they were doing something for which they were really deeply encoded, as opposed to just being good at it.

COLLINS: There are matched pairs in the study. There’s a pair of women in science, Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper. Barbara McClintock was a geneticist, and Grace Hopper was a computer scientist, both seminal in their fields in the first half of the 20th century. What’s very interesting is that you can see this thing that’s like a constellation of stars, and their lives shifted in such a way that these encodings — these durable capacities that reside within us, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life — begin to show themselves. The experiences of life kind of move a window frame across that constellation, where all of a sudden some of those encodings start to shine really brightly through the window. If the window was over here, you might not see them.

COLLINS: So if you take Grace Hopper in computer science, she had this encoding for figuring out gadgets. There’s this wonderful image of her as a little girl going around their summer house, finding all the clocks in all the rooms, taking them all apart, and creating piles of clock parts because she just had to figure out how these gadgets worked.

COLLINS: Then later, when the frame of her life shifted — she had been a math professor, World War II happened, she joined the Navy Reserve, and she got assigned to this secret project at Harvard called the Mark I, which was kind of our first big computer in the United States — she walked in and said, “It’s the most beautiful gadget I ever saw.” All of a sudden, those same encodings, that deep encoding for gadgets and how they work and how to make them work better, led her to figure out that we need subroutines and software and ways to make this machine almost sing. That was her really tapping her encodings.

BERMAN: How do people find out what their encodings are?

COLLINS: It’s a constant discovery process. You discover more of them, and other people can help you discover them too. If you’re leading a team or an organization, one of the great gifts you can give your people and your organization is to get really good at seeing what other people’s encodings are, then shifting the frame of what they do to activate those encodings. Grace Hopper had a gadget encoding. What she didn’t know she had was an encoding for incredible leadership within organizations. The guy who ran the program, a fellow named Commander Aiken, who led the secret project, noticed her ability to keep everybody focused and organized and to get the software team moving. He essentially turned over part of running the Mark I program to her because he noticed her natural leadership encodings in that environment, which then played out for the rest of her life.

Copy LinkUsing encodings to navigate careers and AI disruption

BERMAN: We’re having this conversation in the spring of 2026, which is notable for two reasons in this conversation. One, you’ve got scores of college students graduating and being given advice like, “Follow your passion.”

COLLINS: Yeah.

BERMAN: Great, sure. I’m not sure how everyone makes money doing that. And two, we’re just at the beginning of a massive disruption of the job market, largely due to the introduction of artificial intelligence. How should we take this insight about encodings and apply it to decisions we’re making about our careers, what jobs to take, and what companies to start? What’s the insight to draw from that for people in this roiling market?

COLLINS: There are two big aspects to this. One has to do with the overall notion of what it means to be in frame, which is not just the encodings. Let’s touch on that. But the other is: What do you do when maybe you’re in frame and then your life goes through a cliff event and you no longer get to do the thing you were in frame for? Maybe AI wipes it out. Maybe the demand for what you do disappears. Or maybe you reach a point, like a professional athlete, where you can’t do what you’ve done before.

COLLINS: Let’s spend a minute on the first one, because you asked about this notion of passion and so forth. There’s that saying: Do what you love, do what you’re passionate about, and the money will follow. That actually really isn’t true. I love riding my bicycle with Joanne.

COLLINS: No one is ever going to write me a check to ride my bicycle with Joanne. I can assure you, I love biking with Joanne, but the money will never follow there. So I want to talk about what it really means to come in frame. This applies either if your world gets wiped out and you have to change, or if you’re in the fog of youth, finding your way in the world. There are really three elements of being in frame. One is being in frame with something you’re really encoded for.

COLLINS: Second, it is something you are willing to flip the arrow of money for. I think this is, especially in certain worlds, a really important idea to grasp. Is the purpose of doing your work to make money, or is the purpose of money to be able to do your work, where work is essentially defined as the pursuit of excellence in doing what you’re encoded for and what really feeds your fire? And if you have that kind of work, you just want to continue doing it, because the greatest reward for doing the work — solving genetics puzzles, working on your computer gadgets, flying fighter jets, playing rock and roll if you’re a lead singer or lead guitarist, writing novels, leading teams, or whatever it happens to be — is not that someday you’re successful enough at it that you get to retire.

COLLINS: The greatest reward is that you get to keep doing it. “Gosh, I just hope I get enough days and enough years that I can do this for a really, really long time, because there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. There’s nothing that makes me feel more of a childlike sense of enthusiasm and excitement. Why would I ever want to stop this?” When you have that feeling, you are really in frame. But it has to have all three pieces. You’re encoded for it. Then you flip the arrow of money to do it and say, “I need economic resources, and the purpose of money is to fuel it.” Think back to the flywheel from Good to Great. The flywheel is what you do in the world. On one side, you have what feeds your passion, what you can be best in the world at, but then this part of the flywheel is all about generating economic fuel to go back and turn the flywheel further.

If you think of economics as fuel rather than a measure of your worth, success, or comfort, then you flip the arrow and say, “I need resources to do what I’m encoded for.” And then that third part: What really feeds my inner fire? When you have all three and you’ve solved the equation of how to generate the economics, there’s a whole chapter in the book on how these people did it, because they all did it in different ways. Then you have the complete package. I’m encoded. It really feeds my fire. And I have figured out how to generate enough economic fuel to be able to pursue it with a big chunk of whatever energy I have to give.

Copy LinkFinding the work that fits and the home that supports it

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with Jim Collins on how to find the mentors who will fuel your growth.
Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and much more on our YouTube channel, and be sure to check out the link in the show notes to subscribe to our newsletter.

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I started my career as a public defender, and I can feel, as I tell you this, the sensation of the clouds parting and the angels singing and the epiphany of, “Oh, this is what I’m meant to do next.” I can also feel the sensation from five years later, when I knew it was time to go do something else. I’m curious what lessons can be shared with folks who know that part of what they’re doing is absolutely right, but part of it is just not who they are.

COLLINS: You can be doing an activity that you really love, that really fits your encodings. It’s not about the money; you just really want to do it, and you need the resources to be able to pursue it. But you also might wake up and realize that it’s not a happy home for you where you are in doing it. In fact, we talk about having all three of those pieces together as kind of the personal version of the hedgehog concept: encodings, the economics, and the fire, all together.

BERMAN: Do you want to take one second to explain the hedgehog concept?

COLLINS: The idea is that the fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing. That goes back to an ancient precept, and Isaiah Berlin then popularized it in his wonderful essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Being a hedgehog means that you’ve found a big thing to focus your energy on, a really big thing. You might still have some other interests in your life, but it is, “I’m acting. I’m flying. I’m solving genetics puzzles. I’m writing novels. I’m singing rock ‘n’ roll. I’m leading this company.” It’s a big thing. And so you commit yourself in kind of hedgehog mode to this big thing that organizes your energy, your time, your life. “I’m leading the fight for the 19th Amendment.” There’s the big thing. And it’s a big thing that meets all three of those tests we talked about earlier. Then you have a hedgehog, and you are in hedgehog mode.

There’s a sentence in the book that I kind of smile at when I go back and look at it, because I keep thinking about my own experience: “A happy hedgehog needs a happy hedgehog home.” So you could be doing hedgehog activities, but not in a happy home. Barbara McClintock, the geneticist we talked about earlier, stayed with her genetics over the course of her life, but she realized, particularly for women in science in the first part of the 20th century, that traditional academia would not be a happy hedgehog home for her to continue doing her research. And Grace Hopper found the same thing when her contract ran out at Harvard and they didn’t promote women at Harvard at that time. She realized that the platform where she was doing her computer science was not going to be viable anymore, so the hedgehog home was going to go away.

And this is, I think, the lesson that I would offer to people: Don’t confuse your title, your organization, your position, your thing that you can put on a name tag if you’re at a gathering. Don’t confuse any of that with what your hedgehog really is. And you might have to change, construct, or find a different platform, or make one for yourself, that will be that happy hedgehog home. I really encourage people to separate title, position, prestige, moniker, all that stuff. That’s just noise.

Copy LinkHow mentors and luck shape a life

BERMAN: One of the things that I worry about for my kids, who are in their late teens, and for the younger people on our team and in my life who I care about, is that I’m so deeply conscious of how much I benefited from the mentors I met through work: their wisdom, generosity, and the ability to sit in the room and watch them work, to walk and get a coffee and ask them questions about why they did what they did, and try to take what I can that would work for me. In a world of hybrid and remote work, I worry about those opportunities for them. In the book, you mention Bill Lazier, who was more than a mentor. You said he was the closest thing to a father figure. What’s the counsel to both young people who are looking for their Bill Lazier, someone who can help shepherd them through the fog, and also for the folks who are a little more of our vintage, where we have a good bit to offer in a very complicated world, where we’re not building the human bonds as much as we were in a fully in-person universe?

COLLINS: First, I’m curious, because you obviously think about this for yourself, for your kids, with people you know, and you’ve watched all these changes happen. How do you answer that question?

BERMAN: Jim, I wish I had a great answer. I’ve been very lucky in so many ways in my life and my career, and I have been blessed with incredibly patient, wise, and thoughtful people who’ve helped me understand the norms of the industry, the norms of the organization, the unwritten rules that are important to understand, and the best ways to do things. What I’ve tried to do, as best as possible, is pay that forward to the younger people in my life. But I’m increasingly struggling with the fact that we’re not in person with each other as much as I would like to be, so I don’t have as good an answer as I wish I had. It’s something I’m really curious about, how you think about that.

COLLINS: Yeah, I struggle with this as well, maybe for slightly different reasons, just because I tend to be a very reclusive person. Actually, I describe myself as a socially adept introvert, and I love being in monk mode, working on my research and things like that. But I’ve also learned over time that there are these unexpected who-luck events that happen in life. There are different kinds of luck, and one of the most powerful kinds, when you really look at it, is who luck. It’s the luck of people who cross paths with you, and they play a huge role in your life. And when you get a who-luck event, as I got with Bill Lazier, or with Jerry Porras, Built to Last and my whole research career wouldn’t have happened if Jerry hadn’t, by chance, happened to read a little article I wrote that was puzzling over a question.

There’s this contingent moment of who luck, of somebody stepping into your life. First of all, you never know when and how the who luck is going to show up, so it is about becoming attuned to recognizing when a who has crossed your life. You don’t know when it will happen. It could literally be almost a random type of event, and the key is to recognize it. Now, when you think about this notion, part of it is that there’s a kind of random bumping that happens in life. But if you’re not in the flow of bumping, you might miss some wonderful who luck. And I have to fight this as a reclusive introvert. My guidance to folks is that you’ve got to find ways to increase the chances that you’re going to have a marvelous conversation, or bump into somebody, or be curious about something.

And the thing is, you can’t plan it. It’s not networking. It’s being aware of when a who-luck moment happens. But there’s one thing that I learned from Bill Lazier: who luck is always a two-way street. Bill really instilled in me the principle of relationships. You can go at life as a series of transactions, or you can go at life as building relationships. What Bill taught me is that, through his eyes, he didn’t feel he could have a great life unless it was built on relationships. So I asked Bill, “What makes a great relationship?” And he thought about it for a minute and said, “If you ask each person in the relationship who benefits more from the relationship, they would each say, ‘Well, the other person is so marvelous in my life. I do.’ But they both feel that way.”

So the who-luck part is, if somebody shows a mentor’s interest in you, are you also going to contribute back to that person? Are you going to be somebody for whom the time they invest in you is a wonderful investment? It’s not transactional. It’s relational. And if you’re just working at home, isolated from everyone, the chances that you’re going to have a marvelous random bumping are small.

Copy LinkWhat a decade of research changed in Jim Collins

BERMAN: You spent a decade researching and writing this book, and it’s clear how much you learned, as one reads the book, as I read the book. What I’m curious about is how you changed through the process.

COLLINS: Yeah. As you know from having engaged with the pages, it was a real transformational journey for me. In the last chapter, I put a little table in there. On the left-hand side of the table is “I used to believe,” and the right-hand side is “I now believe.” I think it’s 15 layers deep. For instance, I used to believe that much of what people might do in their life would show up when they’re young. Of course, I now believe, after this study, that much of what is really spectacular that people do can happen well after 50, 60, 70, even 80 or 90, even the really creative stuff. I’d always sensed that, but I still felt the evidence might show something different from what I sensed was possible. But this study really showed me what people could do.

I used to believe much more in the idea of having a life plan, because I was very good at planning out objectives. But I now believe that a lot of really amazing lives unfold as a kind of organic unfolding and highly unpredictable process. I also used to believe that if you didn’t really find your one big thing by the age of 30, it was maybe too late. But looking at the lives in this study, where some of them didn’t find it until after that, I now believe that if you haven’t found it by 30, the clock is not over. That’s a wonderful thing to discover. I used to believe that thinking about your legacy would be a worthwhile use of time. I no longer believe that at all. I think it’s far more important to think about the responsibilities you choose right in front of yourself, and to make good on them while you’re here.

And I used to believe that giving mainly meant philanthropy, giving, volunteering, and it does. But I think the highest form of giving is to give of your encodings. What genetics puzzle you solved, or I. M. Pei, who gave us the Louvre Pyramid in the ’70s — that’s giving too. So those were ways I evolved my thinking. But the second bucket, and the biggest one, was emotional. There are so many ways in which I changed emotionally over the study. A couple of the biggest ones are these: I don’t know about you, but I had certainly spent a lot of energy in my life feeling frustrated with what people are not.

On my team, I would try to change people into what they’re not, or I’d be frustrated that they’re not more like me, or whatever it happened to be. And I’m sure a lot of founders and entrepreneurs face this too, feeling frustrated with what their people are not. But in all these lives, I was so overwhelmed with how their lives sparkled when they were really in frame, when they were really aligned with who they were. And it began to have this effect on me where I began to say, “I’m not going to try to change people into what they’re not. I’m going to try to make adjustments and changes where I can really see what they are, and move the frame in a way that brings that to light.” What really changed for me, not only on my team but also in my life, was a shift that took years.

If my primary emotion was, “I’m frustrated by what people are not,” it really is now mainly feeling grateful for what people are. It’s a dividend that pays every single day, not just in terms of people’s productivity and stuff, but just how I feel and how they feel. And that happened by doing this. The other is my sense of compassion for people going through the cliffs and fog of life, and not judging people when they’re in the fog, because we’re all going to be in the fog at times. Not judging myself when I’m in the fog. All those people whose lives may be hit by AI or whatever, they may go through a very foggy period. But fog is to be expected, and there’s nothing wrong with them. It’s just a period of fog that you have to step through, and not judge a life that’s in progress.

I don’t think we should be judging lives anyway, but even trying to assess what a life adds up to while it’s still in progress misses the point. It’s never done until it’s done. What might be coming next could be big and wondrous and totally unforeseen.

Copy LinkWhy great lives unfold later and less predictably than we think

BERMAN: Jim, when I sit down to read a book broadly in this category, I’m hoping I come away with one or two actionable insights. If I’m lucky, there are 10 or 12. And this is the rare work that doesn’t just — and I’m putting quotes around “just” — make you better at your job or offer marginal improvements in life. It really is a reframing for so much. I’m grateful for the book. I’m grateful not just for your opening up your intellect, but your heart here, and for bringing your spirit to this conversation. I hope we get to do it again soon. Thank you so much for being on Masters of Scale, Jim.

COLLINS: Well, you’re very welcome.

BERMAN: Thanks again to Jim Collins for joining us. This was definitely a bucket-list conversation for me. His new book is What to Make of a Life, and it is an incredible read. I traded sleep to finish this one. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes.

I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.