What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative - By Jim Collins
Date read: 2026-05-26How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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Jim Collins explores how to build a meaningful life by discovering your personal “encodings,” trusting them, and aligning your work, responsibilities, and energy around what fuels your inner fire. Some good frameworks and questions, especially around the curse of competence, hedgehog mode, fog, and return on luck, but it felt more reflective than practical.
Contents:
My Notes
Encodings are durable capacities of a person’s intrinsic construction that lie within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life.
The thing that set them apart is their ability to play so consistently to their own individual (and sometimes quite peculiar) package of encodings.
The question is not whether a person has encodings. Everyone has encodings. The question is this: Which encodings will the journey of life lead you to discover, and will you trust them enough to align your life around them?
Every person in our study made this flip at some point in their lives, from seeing money principally as the output of their efforts (“I work to make money”) to seeing money as an input to fuel their efforts (“I need money to do what I’m encoded for”).
To find a personal hedgehog means that you’ve found an arena of activity that meets three tests: (1) You’re encoded for it; (2) you flip the arrow of money in doing it; and (3) it focuses the inner fire. To be in hedgehog mode means you’ve committed to organize your life and channel a huge chunk of your energy toward the pursuit of this One Big Thing. The point here is not that the people in this study are hedgehogs (or foxes) as a personality type, but that they went into hedgehog mode for extended periods of time.
Be wary of advice based on other people’s specific experience. The advice might be well meaning, and perhaps even inspiring, but it might reflect their own encodings, which differ from your encodings.
The task in life is not to find the one thing you are made for. Some people in the study, like Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper, stayed within a single hedgehog for the rest of their lives once they’d found it. Whereas others, such as Page and Eller, made mind-boggling transitions, discovering and deploying radically divergent sets of encodings and flourishing in wildly different arenas of activity.
It’s not about finding what you can do better than others, but about finding what you can do exceptionally well relative to other ways you could expend yourself.
One view of the world argues for a two-phase approach to life: success to significance. First achieve success, then do something significant and meaningful. This study leads me to a very different approach: First discover a set of encodings, then trust that full commitment to a hedgehog built around those encodings is in itself a meaning-filled answer to the question of what to make of a life.
Become reasonably competent at something that doesn’t capture your encodings or ignite the inner fire, but it pays well. Work hard at it, become better at it, achieve a modicum of success with it. This then leads to increased opportunities to do even more of what does not fit your encodings or ignite the inner fire, and you are getting paid even more to do it. You gain more valuable experience doing what you’re not encoded for, which generates more opportunities and even better pay doing what doesn’t feed the fire. And one day, you wake up to discover that years or decades have passed. You’re well paid and out of frame. The inner fire is still there but gradually going dormant.
There is a big difference between being in love with the idea of one’s work and being in love with doing the work itself. It means not just the love in the 0.001% highlight moments; it means love in the other 99.999%.
There are three prevalent sources of fuel for the inner fire across the vastly different lives in the study. In addition to love of the doing, the two others are:
The tax is not about stress and drudgery outside doing a hedgehog but about stress and drudgery in doing the actual hedgehog.
You know you are in a hedgehog when you feel so compelled by what you are doing, so compelled to focus the fire on it, that you are willing to pay a lot of Stress and Drudgery Tax to be able to do it.
A “cliff” is a significant event that alters the trajectory of a life and forces choices about what’s next.
Cliffs, as terrible as they can be to live through, can also reveal encodings you never knew you had. When a cliff wrenches you out of one frame and throws you into another, you might discover entirely unforeseen capabilities. The big cliffs of life force you to confront yet again the question of what to make of a life, and you might well answer the question very differently than you ever envisioned before the cliff.
Fog is when you go through a phase of immense uncertainty and lack of clarity about the best path forward, perhaps even having no clear idea where you want to go. When in the fog, you can feel confused or disoriented or unsteady or reeling—or maybe all of these. You might be expending a lot of energy in the fog, but it can feel more like wandering and stumbling than purposeful strides toward a clear destination. In the thickest fog, you can feel truly lost.
My conclusion, based on the evidence we do have, is that parents encouraging young people to follow their encodings might be helpful. But the evidence also shows that parental support and encouragement are not absolute requirements. In fact, well-meaning parents and mentors can actually increase the fog of youth if they encourage or drive young people away from their encodings.
Just because you’ve achieved success doesn’t mean your encodings have expired. If part of the answer to the question of what to make of a life is to continually discover and deploy encodings in a direction that feeds the inner fire, then success (in whatever form and level) is simply more of a by-product that happens along the way. When we forget that, success itself can be a catalyst for fog.
Each evening, before I fall asleep, I open a spreadsheet and insert three sets of information. First, I detail the ingredients of the day, how I spent my time. Second, I note how many “creative hours” I got into the day, which I track to ensure that they’re kept above 1,000 per every 365-day cycle (to sustain my rhythm of creative work). Third, I note the quality of the day, a score of how the day felt, on a plus-two, plus-one, zero, minus-one, minus-two scale. I also make notes when I get a plus-two day or a minus-two day about why the day proved exceptionally positive or exceptionally negative. Over time, I’m able to do sorts and correlations.
Simplex Stepping Through the Fog: Imagine all you can see is a small 360-degree circle around you, and you cannot see possible steps beyond that circle. So, you simply take what looks like the next best step within that small circle. Then you reset and look around the little 360-degree circle of visibility from the vantage point of your new location, and ask, “Okay, now standing here, what looks like the next best step?” You take that next step. Then you reset and take the next step. Even if a step doesn’t prove particularly helpful, or even feels like a small mistake you need to reverse, you simply readjust and ask, “Okay, so now what looks like the best next step?” You just keep next-stepping, one step after another, until you reach a destination.
This study shows that there are fog phases of life and there are clarity phases of life. In the fog phases, we see simplex stepping as a highly functional method of navigation. In the clarity phases, we continue to see simplex stepping at work, but we also see more big decisions and life commitments. In both phases, we have action and movement, not just sitting in a room contemplating.
If we hold to the idea that each of us has only one hedgehog and much of life depends on whether we find it, then this would be a very depressing study. But if we embrace the view that each of us has many possibilities to potentially discover—that the constellation of encodings within each of us is vast and largely undiscovered—then the challenge changes dramatically from the low odds of finding that one elusive unicorn hedgehog to finding just one of many possibilities.
Luck is something that happens to you, largely out of your control. Return on luck is what you make of your luck (good or bad) when it comes. The question is not whether you will get luck, both good luck and bad, but what you do with the luck that you get.
“Not All Time In Life Is Equal.” NATILIE moments are episodes of outsized opportunity or peril that call for summoning a level of energy and focus far beyond the person’s normal set point.
The question is not whether you will get NATILIE moments in life, but whether you meet those unequal moments with unequal intensity, summoning the best you have to give when the moment comes.
Extend Out/Circle Back can be a very private journey. You might have a role in the world that is more visible, in your work or profession, yet doing a big part of your Extend Out/Circle Back into activities largely unseen except by people close to you. It doesn’t matter whether other people see what feeds the inner fire in your life. What matters is that you feed the inner fire. You might have a Zen Garden personal hedgehog or a private side of your life that is even more fire filled than anything highly visible in the world.
This pattern of circling back to water early seeds led me to some useful questions for figuring out the next phase of life that will feed the inner fire: Do you have dormant seeds from earlier in life that, for whatever reason, you’ve never watered? These might be interests you’ve always had, but your life went a different direction. How can you use those seeds as clues to figure out what’s next? And how can you take steps to water those seeds? The elements of a fire-filled “what’s next” might already be inside you, in seeds of interest you buried away long ago.
Freedom does not mean the absence of responsibilities; freedom means that you get to choose your responsibilities.