Author Jim Collins on unlocking your potential

Jim Collins's new book, What to Make of a Life, shifts his research focus from iconic companies to extraordinary individuals, continuing his data-driven approach. Collins describes his process as solitary, often working at four in the morning assembling research and constructing concepts. The book's final chapter contains a table of roughly fifteen belief changes he underwent, contrasting what he used to believe with what he now believes, and several of those reversals carry direct implications for how people should think about work and purpose.

The central concept Collins introduces is encodings, which he defines as durable capacities residing within a person that wait to be discovered through life experience rather than deliberate planning. He distinguishes encodings from skills, arguing that life works best when people are doing something they are deeply encoded for rather than merely good at. Encodings may not be visible until specific circumstances shift the frame to illuminate them, making their discovery an ongoing process rather than a single moment of clarity. Grace Hopper illustrates this: her encoding for gadgets was visible in childhood when she dismantled every clock in her summer house, but it was activated when she was assigned to the Mark I computer project at Harvard during World War II. Commander Aiken also recognized her natural leadership encodings and handed her part of running the program, an activation that shaped the rest of her career. When Harvard's institutional barriers ended her contract there, Collins uses her story to argue that title, position, prestige, and organizational affiliation are noise and should not be confused with one's core encoded work.

Collins frames the personal version of the hedgehog concept around three elements: being encoded for the work, flipping the arrow of money so that economics fuel the work rather than serve as the goal, and having the work genuinely feed one's inner fire. He explicitly rejects the saying that doing what you love means the money will follow, citing cycling with his wife Joanne as something he loves but will never be paid for. The greatest reward for finding work one is encoded for is not retirement but the ability to keep doing that work indefinitely.

Collins no longer believes that failing to find one's core purpose by age thirty means it is too late, arguing that spectacular creative work can happen well after fifty, sixty, seventy, or even eighty or ninety. He also no longer considers thinking about legacy a worthwhile use of time, prioritizing instead the direct fulfillment of responsibilities in front of oneself. He describes the highest form of giving as contributing one's encodings to the world, placing I.M. Pei's Louvre pyramid alongside genetic discoveries as examples of that contribution.

Collins distinguishes who luck from networking, defining it as the contingent and often random crossing of paths with people who play a large role in one's life. Jerry Porras entered Collins's life by chance after reading a small article Collins had written, which led directly to the Built to Last research collaboration. Collins warns that remote and hybrid work reduces the flow of human interaction that makes who luck encounters more probable, and that younger workers lose meaningful mentorship opportunities that in-person environments historically provided. This is a structural cost of distributed work that he treats as underappreciated.

When a cliff event such as AI disruption, disappearing demand, or athletic decline wipes out what someone was in frame for, Collins says the critical question becomes how to reframe rather than how to recover the prior frame. He expects people whose work is disrupted by AI to go through foggy periods and argues that fog reflects no flaw in the person experiencing it. He extends this to self-judgment more broadly, saying one should not assess a life still in progress because what comes next could be large, wondrous, and entirely unforeseeable. Studying these lives shifted Collins emotionally from frustration with what people are not toward appreciation of people when they are fully in frame, a shift he says pays dividends daily in both his own productivity and personal wellbeing.