What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

by Jim Collins

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Jim Collins, international bestselling author of Good to Great, offers transformative lessons on constructing—and reconstructing—a life through the cliff moments and transitions we all will face repeatedly in our lives.

What to make of a life?

It is a question we all wrestle with more than How do we find our way in the world? How do we make it past the cliffs, significant events that can radically change a life? How do we keep the inner fire burning bright, long and late? Inspired by relentless curiosity, Jim Collins devoted a decade to studying these questions and to minutely analyzing those moments when life flips from clarity to confusion and casts us into a befuddling fog.

His exploration follows various lives side-by-side, paired together at cliffs, and analyzes the different choices made and divergent paths taken. Two rock musicians confronting a future without the group that had brought them success. Two public figures tainted by scandal having to make decisions about how to rebuild their lives. Two suffragists achieving their epic goal and so left with the puzzle of what to do next. Two figure skaters seeking new purpose when their Olympic careers come to an end. What emerges from Collins’s extensive studies—of writers, actors, scientists, leaders and many others—is a framework for understanding how individual lives can be built, sustained and constantly renewed.

By examining the long arc of these remarkable lives, Collins tackles life’s questions. What does it take




Discover a deeply fulfilling role in life—one that you are naturally ‘encoded’ for—and then to find a second one, if the first one ends?Overcome a major cliff—a fracture point that forces choices about what’s next and calls for you to re-envision the years to come?Make your personal economics work so that you can focus on one big thing that feeds your inner fire?Navigate the fog, when you feel uncertain or even outright lost, and build confidence step by step?Build personal momentum decade upon decade, so that your most creative and energetic years are spread across an entire lifetime?Achieve the imperative to “Know Thyself” and apply self-knowledge to each phase of life?


And for the first time, Collins movingly chronicles his own story to reveal how undertaking this project transformed him, changing his thinking and reshaping his emotions in fundamental ways. Surprising, story-driven, deeply researched, and uplifting, What to Make of a Life is a book like no other, convincingly showing how a richly fulfilled life is within reach of us all.

Genres: Self Help, Nonfiction, Business, Philosophy, Leadership, Psychology, Personal Development

416 pages, Hardcover

Published April 7, 2026

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

James C. Collins is an American researcher, author, speaker and consultant focused on the subject of business management and company sustainability and growth.

Reviews

[SusanTalksBooks]

*** 5/5/26 *** This book started and ended on a less engaging note for me, but I got a few nuggets in the in between. The first nugget is "The Curse of Competence Doom Loop" where you become reasonably (or even exceptionally) competent at something that ends up defining a large part of your life despite it not being a "hedgehog" (passion). The second nugget is from Toni Morrison: "...the point is that freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilities; it's choosing the ones you want." Love this definition.

The chosen nomenclature of seeking "hedgehogs" that meet 3 tests: you're encoded for it (talent and interest), you "flip the arrow of money in doing it" (can support yourself somehow), and "it focuses the inner fire" didn't click for me. I had a hard time keeping all of that in my mind throughout the book.

I thought the book's last section should have ended before the Constitutional Convention storyline/example. Immediately before introducing this part, he writes what I thought was a book conclusion referencing many people already written about in the book.

The book begins by saying it is not a self help book, but a vehicle to "know thyself." It opens with the author's own "cliff" and goes into other people's cliffs as a primary lens for his study. I personally found it hard to understand why he organized the study around comparing 2 people with similar trajectories. It took me a while to get into the book and what the point is except to analyze exceptional people, but there are a lot of ways to do that already. In time, I did enjoy different stories and history about certain people, as well as a few nuggets that landed more deeply for me. Overall I'd give it 3.25 stars because it didn't really speak to me as a reader and I'm not sure the investment was worth the nuggets I got out of it.

*** 5/2/26 *** Started this with a group of women all going through our own cliffs of life. I have read a lot of business and self-help books, and this book basically tracks highly successful people, and seemingly builds a hypothesis around their commonalities: Finding your true encoding (innate skills/interests), navigating cliffs (big changes) and fog (periods of uncertainty), and managing different life economic/financial models (having to support yourself). I thought about a recent conversation with my son, now graduating college, where he excelled in his studies for a minor degree, and I commented that he could have easily majored in that. He replied, yeah, but then I wouldn't have had a job (in his more employable major). It is a fine line navigating life between pragmaticism and passions.

So far, I'm finding that action, incredibly hard work, a 'worker's mindset,' and 'baby steps' are the recipe to learning and accomplishing good things, and many of those are simply hard coded into people for one reason or another. The best you can do then is develop an awareness of what you are intrinsically good at or interested in - helping children identify these things as they grow up is one of the most powerful gifts a parent can give their child in my opinion. Full review shortly.

[Meredith]

Live in your values. Don’t rely on external validation. Your life doesn’t have to be big and outwardly impressive to have meaning. Everyone’s life has challenges and phase changes, that’s part of being human. Take the next best step when you find yourself searching and wandering. That’s it.
I found all the life story comparisons incredibly tedious, but some people might find them interesting.

[Seawitch]

I borrowed the audio of this book from my library and had a few long drives the past week which enabled me to focus on it in some long stretches. I honestly didn’t think I’d make it through because the author reads his own book and I didn’t love his choppy reading style. Further, the way he mapped out his approach to his research in the beginning had me thinking it would be a very dry listen.

I’m so glad I kept with this book because I ended up finding it so interesting and pertinent to my own musings about vocation and life transitions and what makes something a “hedgehog.” (A hedgehog is his word for those activities/work for which we feel fueled by an inner fire, the abilities needed to be good at them match our personal talents and abilities (encodings), and the work is something we are so passionate about that we find a way to make enough money for ourselves but we aren’t driven by financial success.

Collins uses “matched pairs” of famous people to discuss his theories.

I was very pleasantly surprised that he is a feminist and he includes stories about women pioneers in STEM along with Katherine Graham and other influential women. Although, I most surprised myself by getting a bit choked up listening to the stories of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. I’ve always admired Carter but didn’t really know much about Ford and his life story was fascinating. Despite not thinking I’d care about these stories, I ended up really enjoying hearing about all of the biographies of these people.

Additionally, his extensive research led him to find that most of the people he studied actually reached the thrust of their success after the midpoint of their life.

He discusses how these individuals navigated “cliffs” in their lives and normalizes that almost everyone hits some bumps and spends time in periods of fog.

[Kostiantyn Koshelenko]

I’ve been reading Jim Collins for a long time. This one is different.

It’s not about companies. It’s about what you do when your previous path no longer works.

The idea is simple: life is not linear. You hit breaks, lose clarity, and have to decide again what matters. The value of the book is that it gives structure to that moment.

As the author of Management in Times of War, where I described how Ukrainians faced real cliffs and deep uncertainty they had never experienced before, I find Collins’s conclusions accurate and universal.

[Cody]

In the past several years, every time I’ve picked up a Jim Collins book, I’ve walked away feeling sharpened, challenged, and energized. His work has influenced the way I think about business and organizational leadership, mission, long-term vision, and even my own life. This newest book, though, has been a stranger experience for me. Not without value, but more conflicted, more frustrating, and honestly a bit of a chore to get through at times. I found myself taking breaks from it repeatedly, not because it lacked interesting ideas, but because I often felt resistance to the way Collins framed those ideas - or too often force-framed them.

Part of that is simply where I am in life. I’m 48 years old and spending a lot of time these days thinking about what the second half of life is supposed to look like. So while reading this book, I also found myself in conversation with other books and voices that kept pressing against Collins’ framework in interesting ways. The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley was one of them. Cleopatra by Sarah A. El Arifi was another. And somewhere in the background of my thinking the whole time was still Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler and the Earthseed philosophy that runs through Butler’s work: adaptation, hybridity, survival, responsibility, and the idea that human lives are shaped as much by change as by fixed identity.

To be fair, Collins does eventually become more interesting than the first section of the book initially suggests. The concepts of “cliffs,” “fog,” “simplex stepping,” “return on luck,” and “extend out, circle back” are genuinely useful reflections on personal leadership and the second half of life. The simplex stepping chapter alone may be worth the cost of the book. Collins is strongest when he simply reflects as an older leader and thinker who has spent decades studying successful organizations and now wants to cautiously apply some of those insights to individual lives. There is real wisdom here, especially for those of us "approaching" middle age and wondering (practice ?) whether our most meaningful years may still lie ahead. His reflections on Benjamin Franklin, Meryl Streep, Georgia Frontiere, and others genuinely encouraged me at a moment in life where it is easy to become overly conscious of diminishing energy while forgetting the possibility of accumulated wisdom.

But the book repeatedly undermines itself by insisting on presenting these reflections as though they are clean “findings” emerging objectively from a rigorous research process. That's unconvincing here. Collins openly admits he conducted no interviews for this project and instead synthesized existing biographies, recordings, memoirs, and historical materials. That is still legitimate research — I’ve done similar work myself in anthropology and missiology — but it is not the same thing as a classic qualitative research design where theories emerge primarily from firsthand participant observation and interview data. What this book actually feels like is Jim Collins wrestling personally and intellectually with aging, meaning, responsibility, purpose, and legacy while using the conceptual vocabulary of his earlier works to make sense of it all. Ironically, the more autobiographical and self-aware Collins becomes near the end of the book, the stronger the book becomes.

I also increasingly felt that the book was unaware of just how much privilege its framework assumes. Even when Collins discusses adversity, most of his examples still involve people who possessed enough freedom, mobility, support, or opportunity to pursue some deeper “encoding” or calling. But many people in the world experience life less through the lens of Maslow-style "self-actualization" and more through the lens of responsibility, survival, obligation, and constraint. That tension became especially visible to me while thinking about The Making of a Leader by J. Robert Clinton, the Biblical story of Esther, and Butler’s Earthseed philosophy. Collins often assumes fulfillment comes from discovering and aligning with one’s essential core. Earthseed, by contrast, assumes survival and meaning emerge through adaptation, permeability, and continual becoming.

The book also struggles to account for people whose lives are defined less by singular specialization and more by breadth, adaptation, and responsiveness. Collins’ framework continually assumes that the most fulfilled and impactful lives emerge from alignment around one core “hedgehog.” But some people are naturally generalists. Some lives are built through learning many things, carrying many responsibilities, adapting across different contexts, and discovering new capacities over time. Throughout the book, I kept feeling the absence of any real category for the jack-of-all-trades life except as a kind of unresolved fog before one eventually settles into a proper hedgehog. I’m not convinced that’s true. And as one of those Jacks myself, we tend to be sort of insecure when people seem to be accusing us of not being focused. It's not usually a focus problem though, it's about constraint and responsibility.

Still, despite all my criticism, I’m glad I read the book. Collins remains one of the most influential leadership thinkers of my life, and even here, in a book that often feels like it is fighting against its own limitations, there are moments of real wisdom and humanity. In the end, this is probably a 3-star book for me, though sentimentality keeps tempting me toward a fourth star simply because I respect the man so much and because there are passages here that genuinely stayed with me. This is not a clean triumph of a book. But it could have been if Collins had just admitted to himself and his readers up front that he wanted to bring the insights of his career to bear creating a book about personal life leadership and renewal.

[Michael Meskill]

If I refuse to finish a book, I rate it one star.

I like to mix in a self help or self awareness book from time to time. This book was both unrelatable and silly. You can be in “hedgehog” mode (what??) (meaning work passion). You have “encodings”, meaning permanent attributes, although you can discover different encodings over time but I’m unclear whether you can evolve your encodings. You can encounter “cliffs” and “fogs” in your life. Self explanatory.

The life examples are even less helpful. Alan Page played for the Minnesota Vikings and became an NFL hall of famer, hit a cliff when he retired, and became a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. Wow, that’s helpful! (It’s an elected position in Minnesota for pete’s sake.) Meryl Streep won a few Academy Awards as a serious actress, hit age 40 and was concerned about her age in Hollywood and hit a cliff, and viola (!) pivoted to comedy movies. Problem solved!

I was happy to toss this book aside and move on.

[Matthew Jacobs]

Occasionally good. Not great.

[Bill Pence]

This purpose of this book is to share what Jim Collins (Good to Great) learned in a ten-year research project into a set of 34 remarkable lives. He looked at his subjects in pairs, such as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, Allen Page and Carl Eller, etc. He and his team set out to learn how the people they studied addressed the Big Question of what to make of a life, and how they addressed it again at different phases of life. He offers no prescriptions or recipes or directives. Indeed, one of the conclusions of this entire effort is that no one can tell you what to do with your life or how specifically to lead your life. He tells us that this is not a self-help book, but is a self-knowledge book.
The book is broken into three parts:
Part 1: Coming into Frame. This part has to do with how the people in the study found and committed to a path that met three tests:
1. They were deeply encoded for it.
2. They made the economics work to pursue it
3. It ignited their inner fire and they focused that fire into doing it.
Part 2: Navigating Cliffs and Fog.
A “cliff” is a significant event that alters the trajectory of a life and forces choices about what’s next. Episodes of fog are when people find themselves feeling lost or confused or befuddled or disoriented—can roll in at any point in life, but they are particularly prevalent in the wake of cliffs. He writes that even the most accomplished people can land in a major fog funk.
Part 3: Feeding the Inner Fire Long and Late.
The lives that he looks at devastate the myth that our younger selves must tower over our older selves, that our best, most creative phase of life necessarily comes in the first half.
He tells us that we might read the book differently at different times of life, depending on which of the three parts most resonate when you are reading it.
The book introduces us to several terms, such as encodings. He defines an encoding, which to me was similar to what I would refer to as a calling, as durable capacities of a person’s intrinsic construction that lie within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. He tells us that everyone has encodings. The question is: Which encodings will the journey of life lead you to discover, and will you trust them enough to align your life around them?
In discussing money or economics, he writes that every person in the study made the 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”).
Regarding the inner fire, he tells us to imagine that focusing the inner fire with great intensity does the exact opposite of causing burnout: It feeds the fire.
He at times uses the term hedgehog, as being “in a hedgehog” or “in hedgehog mode” to wrap the idea of these three specific elements integrated together into the pursuit of One Big Thing. To find a personal hedgehog means that you’ve found an arena of activity that meets the above three tests.
He writes that no matter how exciting or interesting or meaningful or accomplished the early decades of life, you simply do not need to accept the premise that life peaks early. If one fulfilling path comes to an end, that does not mean the best of life comes to an end. What comes next might be even more fulfilling. The task in life is not to find the one thing you are made for.
You may be a single hedgehog or a serial hedgehog across the long arc of your own life. Either way, Collins writes, the same three elements apply: discover and deploy encodings, flip the arrow of money, and focus the inner fire.
The lives Collins looks at in this study illustrate the wide range of ways people answer the question of what to make of a life, but they all found a way to activate all three elements and bring them together into One Big Thing that they pursued with great intensity for years to decades.
Life worked best for the people in the study when they deployed themselves into activities that aligned with a big bright set of their encodings. Collins will at times shorthand this with the phrase “in frame.” When their lives didn’t work as well when they deployed themselves into activities poorly aligned with what they were encoded for, Collins will sometimes shorthand this with the phrase “out of frame.”
Among the many topics Collins addresses in the book were love of the work, choosing responsibilities, uncertainty, clarity, the roulette wheel, luck, NATILIE “Not All Time In Life Is Equal” moments (episodes of outsized opportunity or peril that call for summoning a level of energy and focus far beyond the person’s normal set point), extend out/circle back (a looping process of, on the one hand, pushing out the edges and doing new things and, on the other hand, returning to the wellspring of encodings tapped before), and leadership.
Near the end of the book, Collins lists a set of catalytic questions that he hopes the reader will be inspired to consider. Some of these questions might feel particularly pertinent to the moment, whereas others might become more pertinent at a different time in your life.
Although not written from a distinctly Christian point of view, I found this to be a an excellent book.

[Michael Beaumont]

I’m a big Jim Collins fan. I facilitate LifePlans. I work with leaders and businesses helping level up their leadership health. I’m a retired pastor. That’s a long way to say that this book is 100% in my lane, and I loved every story, example, and most importantly, data point. While a research project, it’s also a collection of mini-biographies of political, spiritual, scientific, and artistic influencers across history. Some will steer away because it is about research, others will avoid it because there are too many stories, and there will be a group that declare it to be too preachy. I would say, read it to discover valuable knowledge (research), inspiring real-life stories (biographies), and practical wisdom (the preachy part). Worth every penny, and more importantly, worth every minute of your time. (4.5 out of 5, but I rounded up!)

[Claire McKenna]

I think Jim would consider me to be deep in the fog

[Naythan]

Expands on third-party scenarios to the degree that what could’ve been a concise, impactful message became lost. Would benefit from brevity and more concise chapter recaps, the closing chapter does this well.

[Jerre Mcquinn]

Once or twice a decade, I find a book so good I have to pass it on with a glowing recommendation. Jim Collins’s newest book is one of those: What to Make of a Life. Jim Collins, the guy who wrote Good to Great, has an approach I especially enjoy. He collects lots of data and does his best to find patterns that support the conclusions he presents. In the new book, WTMOAL, he finds pairs of people who have confronted some crisis (a cliff) and then looks at what they did afterwards (finding their way through the fog).

He identifies pairs of people and what he calls their “endowments”. They are what I might call innate talents or what my daughter calls “super-powers”. I think my endowments include sorting, categorizing, pattern-finding which led me to an interest in math and science. Further my endowments include abilities at geography, geometry, design, and an interest in teaching. As life goes on we discover new endowments and one of my later finds was writing. (The fact that I made this list at all testifies to my endowment to categorize and sort.)

Then Collins looks at pairs of people and the cliffs they encounter, the fogs they wandered through, and their paths to going on to live a life fired by meaning well into their final years. Not all cliffs are bad but they all require readjustment. My cliffs have been few: parenthood and retirement. The book is uplifting as it shows how people continue to be fired up well into old age.
Most of the illustrations Collins chose are famous people—because that is where the data was rich, although he points out that the lessons also apply to people making contributions that are less visible, e.g. parenthood.

Some of his matched pairs include:
• John Glenn and Gordon Cooper, astronauts who went on to careers after their space missions. In John Glenn’s case he became a senator and then late in life went on another space mission.
• Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, presidents who were fired after one term and went on to new accomplishments, including Habitat for Humanity for Carter
• Katharine Graham and Georgia Frontiere whose cliffs were death of their husbands. Katharine went on to successfully manage the Washington Post and Georgia took over management of the Los Angeles Rams.

You get the idea. I recommend the book for you to reflect on your own “endowments” and the cliffs and fog you have already navigated. And most importantly as a tool for navigating the cliffs (bad and good) that you have yet to encounter and how to keep your own fires burning bright long and late.

[Scott Beddingfield]

Wow! And I thought, “Good to Great” was good and quotable. This book has the potential to change lives. Rarely is an author so self-revealing in an otherwise potentially left-brained analysis. Remarkably readable, the stories about mostly famous people, and what makes/made them successful - and there’s LOT’s of helpful reflection on what exactly ‘success’ is - are both entertaining and useful to anyone and everyone who might find the time and desire for self-reflection while pondering their own answers to ‘what to make of a life’. This one will stay with me for a while.

[Krishna]

Finding your hedgehog. An interesting book where you feel like you're reading a bunch of mini-biographies all at once so you definitely learn a lot from a lot of people. The basic premise of the book is that we all have encodings and when they're in the right frame they help build us a meaningful life. These characteristics of building me a meaningful life also have to do with flipping the script on money and using money to help you do what you love to do and finding ways to fuel your fire.

Jim Collins goes into that in great detail, using these people as examples. Unfortunately all the people are obviously famous and are extraordinary in their own sense and probably are talented in ways that we cannot measure but it had to be done this way because of the available data

[Angela]

This is the first non-fiction book. I have read in quite a long time. I heard a speech given by him about this book that I enjoyed so I thought I would give the book a read. I actually listened to the audiobook and it’s narrated by the author himself. It was a deeply researched and uplifting book. I think I liked it mainly because it was story driven and tries to show how richly fulfilled life is in within reach of us all. You gotta be in the mood for a non-fiction book but it’s one I recommend.

[Stephen]

Knew I’d like this as Good to Great is my favourite business book.

This drew on the Hedgehog concept from that book applying it from a personal rather than business perspective.

Some fascinating life stories in this book and a lot of encouragement for those entering their later years - you may yet be still to discover your encodings.

Liked the idea that just doing what you are encoded for is a source of happiness rather than achieving any specific goal related to doing it.

[Jer]

4.5 stars rounded up. Not sure how I feel about the term “encodings” (and was certainly sick of it by the end), but otherwise a creative look at a topic many care about.

I expect there’s a lot that maybe gets absorbed on second, third, or fourth iterations, so I’ll be getting it on Kindle now and re-reading for those applicable nuggets in my current stage of life.

Worth checking out.

[Rahdika K]

Author compares influential figures and comes up with some ideas of how do we make of our lives. The comparison was interesting. But using famous figures to explain adversities wasn’t something I could relate to. Nevertheless intriguing read.

[Chris Brady]

Discover and nurture your inner Encodings

Flip the script of money

Fuel the inner Fire.

[Chris M.]

It’s objectively a well-written and researched book. A major theme of this book is identifying the things that drive you personally which give meaning to your life. The author put a lot of research into the different people discussed in the book. If you like biographies, you might find this book interesting, but for me personally, it was about as engaging as watching paint dry.

[Rick Ruble]

What to Make of a Life spells out the conclusions of Collins and his team discovered from comparing pairs of famous pairs of people from a diverse set of environments - athletes, actors, tech geeks, politicians, test pilots, and more. Some are very famous, some I had never heard their names let alone their stories. The comparisons are fascinating. The concepts of fog, cliffs, encoding, and framing ring true for those just entering the work force and those in the last laps of life. If you want your life to count, and be personally fulfilling, it is challenging reading.

[Jefferson]

Liked:

* I liked the premise that people can be good at multiple things and may have more than one meaningful path in life.
* I liked the idea of “cliffs” as abrupt turning points that can enable major changes in life.
* The stories and real-life examples were interesting and helped illustrate the book’s ideas.

Didn’t like:

* There wasn’t enough directly applicable advice. Much of the book focused on examples of high achievers who successfully found a second calling in life rather than giving practical guidance for how the average person might do the same.

[Fernando figueiredo]

A good framework for personal reflection, with a narrative that is excessively long relative to the depth of the thesis.

The book advocates looking beyond external rewards and expectations, and instead identifying the recurring patterns — the “encodings” — that make us feel most fully ourselves.

The underlying concept is simple, and the book offers countless stories that attempt to prove it, often repeating the same idea in different forms. In the end, these stories almost reduce much older, more original, and less deterministic ideas — such as know thyself — into something presented as a framework that would encompass most personal journeys of self-discovery.

The concept resonated with me, particularly given the moment I am going through, and I found it genuinely useful. But I found much more resonance than intellectual addition.

Yet I found it somewhat paradoxical that this argument is so heavily illustrated through people who achieved extraordinary external recognition.

It is almost a paradox:

“Don’t confuse a good life with prestige — look at how these prestigious people discovered this.”

I would not recommend this book to someone looking for a deep concept. Perhaps it could be useful to someone looking for reassurance or validation during a period of uncertainty.

[Nema]

Encodings encodings encodings!!! I feel bad being so critical considering how much time Collins allegedly put into this book. It was somewhere between wildly mediocre and below average. It’s literally him repeating the words “encoding” thousands of times and occasionally throwing in “hedgehog” to unsuccessfully break the monotony. It’s almost impressive how long this book was considering it says almost nothing. Collins should fire his editor for not cutting 2/3rds of this book. Here you go, I’ll do for you what Collins or his editor should have: There were many successful people. They followed their encodings. They succeeded in different ways. They didn’t chase money. They fueled their fire. I have nothing tactical or practical to offer you. Encodings! The end.

Save your money. You’re welcome.

[Sharon Broughton]

Fascinating offering from the management research guru who gave us Good to Great, who has applied his analysis skills to understanding what makes humans who have faced significant challenges stand out. Lessons in living a full life, no matter the obstacles, turning the idea of retirement on its head … there are many ways to live fully in each or life’s chapters that we are fortunate enough to experience.

[Norman Praught]

Great mid-life pep talk. Hedgehog is an odd metaphor for flow, but it’s original. Would have like to hear more everyday people stories because it’s borderline hero worship. He reserves two paragraphs for doctors, nurses and everyone else.

[Aidan Ainslie]

Jim Collins is one of the most frustrating yet interesting writers I’ve read. I can get frustrated with his methods of research; it feels as though he takes any situation and massages it to fit his framework. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

At the same time, Jim did look at subjects in this book who were incredibly high achievers, yet also appeared to be happy in their lives. It was inspiring to read about these people, and I took several lessons away from just their stories alone.

While frustrated at time with how he framed his arguments, I did resonate with what Collins was saying throughout this book. His encodings, cliffs, fog, and fueling your fire framework is incredibly useful, and has prompted me to do a lot of thinking recently. I’m particularly intrigued by the questions this book has prompted me to ask myself because I’m in this fog period in my life. Indeed, I know life is not black and white, but this book provided a useful framework for me and I now am more excited about my future because of it. I no longer think “What is my passion?”, or say “I just want to have a positive impact on the world.” No, I am more directly looking at the activities and specific work that brings me joy and am going to continue pulling on those threads. Who knows what this beautiful life has in store for me? Only one way to find out.

[Todd Buegler]

I love Jim Collins work. And if this were the first of his books that I'd read, I am 100% certain that I'd give it 5 stars. However, I've read several of his other books. And while this book was excellent, "Good to Great" and "How the Mighty Fall" were outstanding books that changed my thinking. So as unfair as it seems, I can't help but compare.

What I liked about this book was A) he took the principles he's talked about in other books and really applied them to an individual instead of an organization. And I loved the application concepts. And B) He really challenged me to think differently about my leadership.

I highly recommend this book...but really, I recommend it as a part of a series of his earlier writings.

[Jin]

One of the best non fiction books I’ve read in a while. A perfectly timed read for where I’m at in life.

[Beth Bonini]

There are really just a few key ideas in this book but there are many, many illustrative examples. Collins uses pairings of significant people - some of whom are very famous, like Benjamin Franklin or Meryl Streep - and some of whom made enormous contributions but will not be as well-known to the general reading public. (I was really impressed by some of the women in this book and amazed that they are not better known for their accomplishments.) One of his premises is that ALL people, no matter how seemingly successful, brilliant or blessed, have challenges in life where they are confronted by a “cliff” which invariably results in a period of being in a fog. One of the things he is interested in is how successful people navigate their cliffs and work their way through their fogs. Another key idea is the idea that we all have specific “encodings” which are our innate strengths, forms of intelligence and interests. When we are able to discover those encodings, we are truly able to lock into our potential and find that inner fire and enthusiasm - no matter what our age.

There are many, many inspiring stories in this book and one of the most interesting pairings to me was that of former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. These were the presidents of my childhood, but in some ways I knew little about them. Not only was their bipartisan friendship inspiring, particularly in this age of political divisiveness, but they were truly excellent examples of Collins’ thesis that it is possible to live a successful and meaningful life well into old age. He says that the long period of doing the research for this book - more than a decade, if my memory serves me right - made him rethink his own long-held belief that our younger years are our most significant and productive. I am not as old as Collins (68), but that was a heartening message.

I was largely unaware of Jim Collins and his considerable body of work on business/self development before reading this book so I cannot say whether his other books are so personal. He begins and ends this book referencing the difficult relationship he had with his mostly absent father - a man who was never able to recover from the early tragic loss of his own father or to fulfil his own potential. In the course of researching this book, some of Collins’ core beliefs were altered, by his own admission, and a self-reported byproduct of his new insights has been an alteration in the way he regards and critiques his own father. Personally, I deeply value any path of self-knowledge that furthers compassion and I always enjoy self-knowledge books that share the author’s own experiences and challenges.

Enjoyable, interesting and definitely a worthwhile read.
4.5 stars