# Jim Collins on Encodings, Hedgehog Homes, and Life Strategy

**Podcast:** Masters of Scale
**Published:** 2026-07-23

## Transcript

I used to believe much more in the idea of kind of having a life plan in some ways 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 an organic unfolding and highly, highly unpredictable process.
And I actually 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 till after that.
I now believe, actually, if you haven't found it by 30, the clock's not over.
This is Masters of Scale.
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.
I feel very welcome.
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...
I needed a business education.
I had a law degree, no MBA, no background in business.
And 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, I'm more than anything grateful to be able to say thank you to you for how much help you provided me in my journey.
Great.
And, you know, it's one of the wonderful things about writing is that it's a very interesting, sort of very solitary process when you're actually up at four in the morning and, you know, you're assembling research or putting sentences together or trying to figure out how to make concepts really come alive for people.
And then it...
becomes something that reaches people that you never even know that it reaches.
And of course, I now know that it reached you, and that's a wonderful thing.
One of the places that you have had a massive impact...
is a place of commonality for us, which is we are both Los Angeles Rams fans.
Yes.
And so I was on the phone this morning with my friends, Kara Henderson Sneed and Les Sneed.
And for those who don't know, Les is the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams.
And they were telling me that...
for Les's birthday several years ago, she had arranged for a tea with you.
And it was meant to be, in Les's memory, it was 15 minutes, whatever it was meant to be.
It ended up going, what sounds like, three or four hours.
And Les credits you enormously with helping shape his leadership, the leadership of the Rams, the culture that 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 then to really invest in the RAM's success?
Yes.
Well, so first of all, dear friends, then they became friends.
And I remember very vividly them coming to the lab or having a tea.
And I was just so taken with the application of the ideas to a world that...
I'd never directly connected with in terms of having impact of the ideas of how you would build a really great and potentially lasting NFL flywheel of results.
And how would that really work?
But what I then really fell in love with as we got into the conversation, it was clear to me that they had taken the ideas from good to great way back when they were just trying to become good.
And as you know, the NFL is part of its magic is it's really hard to have that sustained high-level performance for all the forces.
It's engineered for parity.
It's engineered for parity.
Exactly.
And so I was just taken with it and the spirit of it.
And we had such a marvelous conversation.
And if I remember it correctly, I just basically sort of stepped out and said to my team, clear the afternoon.
And we're putting X's and O's and drawing flywheels and talking about things.
And that was an absolutely wonderful start of what has been a marvelous connection.
And it's ongoing.
It just is a, it's a joy to be connected to it and to see the ideas applied in such a competitive world.
One of the things that Karen Les shared that really struck me was, you know, they went there.
to meet you and meet one of their heroes, someone they've learned from, but to learn more.
And they were struck by your curiosity, by the depth that you wanted to understand what challenges they were facing and really grok this incredibly complicated system.
Where does that curiosity come from for you?
Well, you know, I...
I really am curious.
And I think that's part of, you know, that conversation is a wonderful kind of moment of curiosity, but it reflects my approach to the world, which was, 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 talked about this notion of encodings.
I just think I have an incredible encoding for curiosity.
You mentioned good to great and great by choice and built to last.
And then the new book, what to make of a life.
One thing they all share in common is they all took many years of research.
It's just, it's a constant curiosity fest.
And even when I have people, executives come to my lab or like 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.
And if executives come here, I don't tend to give them answers.
I just ask questions.
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 that 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?
In the new book.
As you know, I'm studying people and their lives, right, as they wrestle repeatedly through life with the question of what to make of a life.
And I studied them through all these different phases, the cliffs 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 late.
And, you know, 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 worked best when they were doing something for which they were really deeply encoded, as opposed to just good at.
There's match pairs in the study.
There's a pair of women in science, Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper.
And 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 you can see this thing that is like a constellation of stars and their life shifted in such a way that these encodings, these are durable capacities that reside within awaiting discovery through the experiences of life.
And 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.
So if you take, say, Grace Hopper in computer science, you know, she just had this encoding for figuring out gadgets, this wonderful image of her as a little girl going around there like Summer House and finding all the clocks and all the rooms and taking them all apart.
right, and creating piles of taken-apart clocks because she just had to figure out how these gadgets worked.
And, of course, then later when the frame of her life shifted, she had been a math professor, World War II happened, she joined the Navy Reserves, and she gets assigned to this secret project at Harvard called the Mark I, which was kind of our first big computer in the United States, and she walks in and says, it's the most beautiful gadget I ever saw.
And all of a sudden, Those same encodings were just encoded for gadgets and how they work and how to make them work better.
That led her to figure out we need to do subroutines and software and how to make this machine almost sing, right?
And that was her really tapping her encodings.
How do people find out what their encodings are?
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 you're leading 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 that are maybe on your team and then shifting the frame of what they do to activate those encodings.
Grace Hopper, gadget encoding.
What she didn't know she had was she had the encodings of incredible leadership within organizations.
The guy who ran the program, a fellow named Commander Aiken, who was the commander of the secret project, noticed her ability to keep everybody focused and organized and to get the software team getting things done, that he essentially turned over part of running the Mark I program to her because he noticed her natural leadership in codings that were good in that environment, which then played out for the rest of her life.
We're having this conversation in the spring of 2026, which is notable for two reasons for this conversation.
One, you've got scores of college students graduating and being given advice of follow your passion.
Yeah, yeah.
Great.
Sure.
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 that we're making about our careers, what jobs to take, what companies to start?
What's the insight to draw from that to people in this roiling market?
There's two big aspects of this.
One has to do with the overall notion of what it means to be in frame, which is not just the encodings, and let's touch upon 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?
that 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.
Let's maybe spend a minute on the first one because you asked about this notion of passion and so forth.
And there's that saying, you know, do what you love, do what you're passionate about, the money will follow.
And that actually really isn't true.
I love riding my bicycle with Joanne.
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 kind of talk about this notion of what really happens to kind of come in frame.
And I would share that this is 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, right?
One is being in frame with something you really encoded for.
Second is that it is something you're willing to flip the arrow of money for.
And I think this is maybe even 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 pursuit of excellence, doing what you're encoded for and that really feeds your fire.
And if you have that kind of work, you just want to continue doing that work 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 or writing novels or leading teams or whatever it happens to be, the greatest reward.
The greatest reward, if you find that, is not that someday you're successful enough at it that you get to retire.
The greatest reward is that you get to keep doing it.
I just hope I get enough days and enough years that I can do this for a really, really long time because there was nothing I'd rather be doing.
There's nothing that makes me feel more like a childlike sense of enthusiasm and excitement.
Like, why would I ever want to stop this?
And when you have that feeling, you are really in frame.
But it has to have all three pieces.
You're encoded for it.
You flip the arrow of money to do it and say, I need economic resources.
And the thing is, I'm flipping the arrow to say, the purpose of money is to be able to fuel it.
Think back to the flywheel from good to great.
The flywheel is like what you do in the world.
On one side, you have what you're...
feeds your passion, where you can be best in the world at.
But then this part of the flywheel is all about generating economic fuel, right?
To go back and turn the flywheel further.
If you think of economics as fuel rather than a measure of your worth or success or comfort, but rather it's fuel, then you flip the arrow to 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 they've solved the equation of how to generate the economics.
There's a whole chapter in the book on how the people did it because they all did it in different ways.
Then you have the complete package.
I've been coded.
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.
Still ahead, more with Jim Collins on how to find the mentors who will fuel your growth.
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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 angel 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 just is not who they are.
You can be doing an activity that you really love the doing, that really fits your encodings, that you're certainly...
You know, it's not about the money.
You just really, 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.
And in fact, we talk about having all three of those pieces together as kind of the personal version of the hedgehog concept, right?
Encoding the economics and the fire all together.
Do you just want to take one second to explain the hedgehog concept?
The idea being 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 on the Fox.
And 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 interest 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 and roll.
I'm leading this company.
It's a big thing.
And so you commit yourself in kind of hedgehog mode into 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 when I go back and I look at it because I just keep thinking about my own experience.
A happy hedgehog needs a happy hedgehog home.
And so you could be doing hedgehog activities, but not in a happy home.
So Barbara McClintock, the geneticist we talked about earlier, she 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, that 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 really what your hedgehog is.
And you might have to change or construct or find a different platform or to make one for yourself that will be that happy hedgehog home.
And that I really encourage people to separate title, position, prestige, moniker, all that stuff.
That's just noise.
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 I'm so deeply conscious of how much I benefited from the mentors I met through work.
Wisdom, generosity, 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.
And in a world of hybrid and remote work, I worry about those opportunities for them.
In the book, you mentioned Bill Lazier, who was more than a mentor.
You said 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 bit 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.
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?
I mean, 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 and wise and thoughtful people who've helped me understand the norms of the industry, the norms of the organization, you know, the unwritten rules that are important to understand and the best ways to do things.
And, you know, what I've tried to do as best 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.
And so I don't have as good an answer as I wish I had.
And it's something I'm really curious about how you think about that.
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 also, I've learned over time that there are these unexpected hulak events that happen in life.
There are different kinds of luck.
And one of the most powerful kinds of luck, 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 a who luck event with Bill Azir, I got a who luck event with Jerry Porras, who just built to last in my whole research career.
Wouldn't have happened if Jerry hadn't.
just by chance happened to have read a little article that I wrote that was puzzling on a question.
There's this contingent moment of the kind of the huluck of somebody that steps into your life.
First of all, you never know when and how the huluck is going to show up.
And so it's becoming attuned to recognizing when who's crossed your life.
And 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, though, part of it is there's kind of a random bumping that happens in life, right?
But if you're not sort of in the flow of bumping, where you might bump into some wonderful huluck, and I have to fight this as a reclusive introvert, my guidance to folks is you've got to find ways to just increase the chances.
that you're just going to have a marvelous conversation or bump into somebody or to 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 Azir.
Who luck's always a two-way street.
And Bill really instilled in me the principle of relationships, right?
You can go at life as a series of transactions.
You can go at life as building relationships.
And what Bill taught me is through his eyes, he didn't feel he could have a great life unless it was built on relationships.
And so I asked Bill, I said, well, Bill, what makes a great relationship?
And he thought about it for a minute and he said, it's 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 hulak part is, if somebody shows a mentor interest in you, it's also, are you going to contribute back to that person?
Are you going to be somebody that the time they invest in you is a wonderful investment?
And it's not transactional.
It's relational.
And so if you're just working at home, isolated from everyone, the chances you're going to have a marvelous random bumping are small.
You spent a decade researching and writing this book, and it's clear so much of what you learned as one reads the book, as I read the book.
What I'm curious about is how you changed through the process.
Yeah.
Well, 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, which on the left-hand side of the table is I used to believe, and the right-hand side of the table is I now believe.
And I think it's 15 layers deep, for instance, that you might indeed find that much of what people might do in their life would show up when they're young.
And 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, really creative stuff.
And I'd always sensed that, but I still felt that the evidence would show may be different than what I sense was possible.
But this study really showed me what they could do.
I used to believe much more in the idea of kind of having a life plan in some ways because I was very good at planning out objectives.
I now believe that a lot of really amazing lives unfold as a kind of an organic unfolding and highly, highly unpredictable process.
And I actually 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 till after that, and I now believe actually if you haven't found it by 30, the clock's 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 to make good on while you're here.
And I used to believe that giving mainly meant like philanthropy, giving, volunteering, and it does.
But I think the highest form of giving is to give of your encodings, what genetics puzzle you solve.
Or I.M.
Pei, who gave us the Louvre pyramid in his 70s.
I mean, that's giving too.
So those were ways I evolved my thinking.
But the second bucket and the biggest one was emotional.
And there's so many ways in which I changed emotionally over the study.
A couple of the really biggest ones are, I don't know about you, but certainly I had spent a lot of energy in my life feeling frustrated with what people are not.
And people on my team, I would try to change them into what they're not.
Or I'd be frustrated that they're not more like me or whatever it happens to be.
And I'm sure a lot of founders and entrepreneurs face this too.
They're frustrated with what their people are not.
But all these lives, I was so overwhelmed with how their lives sparkled when they were really in frame, when they were really in frame with what really they were.
And it began to have this effect upon me where I began to say, you know, 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 to move kind of the frame in a way that brings that to light.
And what really changed for me, not only in my team, but also in my life is a shift.
It took years.
But 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 to not judge people when they're in the fog, because we're all going to be in the fog at times, to not judge myself.
When I'm in the fog, all those people that maybe their lives are going to 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 to not judge a life that's in progress.
I don't think we should probably be judging lives anyways, but just to even assess what a life adds up to while still in progress.
It's never done until it's done.
What might be coming next could be big and wondrous and totally unforeseen.
I mean, Jim, when you sit down, when I sit down to read a book broadly in this category, I'm hoping I come away with one or two, you know, 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...
offered marginal improvements in life.
It really is a reframing for so much.
I'm grateful for it in the book.
I'm grateful for not just your opening up your intellect, but your heart here and 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.
Well, you're very welcome.
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.
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