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Andy Stanley (00:02):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster. I'm Andy Stanley. Before we get into today's content with today's amazing guest, I want to share a special offer from our friends at Belay. One of the traps leaders fall into is that as our organization grows, so does our involvement in all the aspects of the day-to-day stuff that goes along with running an organization, right? More meetings, more decisions, well, more everything. And eventually every problem, every decision ends up on our desk or in our inbox. And if that sounds familiar, our friends at Belay can help. Belay connects leaders like you with the nation's largest pool of US-based pre-vetted remote support. They personally match you with assistants and accounting professionals who fit your needs, your business and your budget. You can focus on doing the work that matters most with the flexibility to scale as you go.
(01:00):
And right now, Belay is offering a free download of their latest book, The Freedom Framework. This resource is designed to help leaders step out of the operational center of gravity and get back to the work that only they can do in most cases the work we love to do. So to claim this offer, text the word Andy to 55123. That's A- N-D-Y to 55123 to start delegating and free up your leadership with Belay. And now back to today's episode to introduce our guest today who needs no formal introduction. I want to tell a quick story about four paragraphs into the book, his latest book that we're about to discuss together. I did something I've only done one other time. I asked Sandra, my wife, I said, "Hey, would you read this book along with me because I want to discuss it together." And about a third of the way into the book, she said, "Well, Andy, we need to get our children, all of our children are adult children and married." She said, "We need to get our kids to read this and their spouses to read it.
(01:58):
And then we need to have a family retreat to discuss this book. That is how good it is and that is how important it is. And our guest today is none other than Jim Collins. Jim, welcome to the podcast.
Jim Collins (02:12):
I feel very welcome and it's wonderful to be here with you Andy, after the many years that we've known each other.
Andy Stanley (02:19):
Yeah. Well, you've been hiding out and for good reason as we're about to discover, I think you call it monk mode. Is that what you said? Monk mode, yes. Monk mode. Yeah. Well most of you who know Jim, you know him by way of his books, Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall. His writing and teaching is based on extensive research designed to uncover timeless principle and all of his books share this one common thread. It's really the study of people and how they navigate the big questions of life and leadership. And this book is no exception. The title, of course, is What to Make of a Life. It's been a long time coming and it has been worth the wait.
(02:56):
So Jim, I'm going to try not to read your book to you today during this conversation. Oh, you're welcome to. Well, I have so many quotes, so I'm just going to start with one and then you just go, you write ... I love this upfront. You see, let me be clear right up front that it is not my intention to direct or advise you on what to make of your life. I promise no prescriptions or recipes or directives. No one can tell you what to do with your life or how specifically to lead your life. This is decidedly not a self-help book, but it is a self-knowledge book. And wow, did you ever deliver on that? So why this topic?
Jim Collins (03:36):
Why this topic? Well, as you know from your reading, the seeds of this really go back a very long way. And I've always been really interested in the question of what to make of a life because it was a deeply personal question. I begin the book with the story of realizing that my father would never really be a father. I made this trip down to New Mexico after he'd been largely missing in my life and I brought this turkey to share at Thanksgiving in hopes that we would share this wonderful Thanksgiving Adobe Hut with a dirt floor where he was living and a father would emerge and we would be father and son and then he would give me direction and guidance about how to go about life. And what happened, of course, that weekend is I had the shattering experience of realizing that my father would never really be a father and never provide that guidance.
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And when I left that Adobe hut with the dirt floor and got back on a Greyhound bus and headed back to Colorado where I was living as a young teen at that point, I felt like I was heading into the fog of life and I really didn't know how to go about it and no idea how to answer the question of what to do with this one amazing gift of a single life to live. That question just always really stayed with me. And even though in the intervening decades, I eventually found my way to studying what makes great companies tick and great organizations and how you build flywheels and level five leadership and all of that. The seeds of that question just kept coming back to me and ultimately one way or another, I had to address these larger questions of how you think about life.
(05:20):
And I wanted to do it in my own way, finally turned my attention to it.
Andy Stanley (05:25):
For 10 years.
Jim Collins (05:26):
Yes.
Andy Stanley (05:27):
You write in the book, you say the purpose of this book is to share with you what I learned in a 10-year research project into a set of remarkable lives. And I'd love for you real quick the way you've formatted this book around these pairs of lives, the way you brought their stories into the narrative, not just the narrative, but the theme of this book was so powerful. So will you explain to the audience sort of the template for this book before we jump into the content because it was so brilliant and I can understand why it took 10 years to do this research.
Jim Collins (06:03):
Sure. So if you think about the question, what to make of a life. And what became clear to me is that you have to address this question multiple times across the life. Once when you're coming out of the fog of youth, at least a second time when you go through what we describe as a cliff event, which is an event that radically alters the trajectory of your life and it forces choices and maybe even force you to answer the question entirely anew, "Well, now what to make of a life given that my life has so significantly changed, I have to rethink the question." And then a third time, which I'm sure we'll get to, which is when you're well past midpoint and you're wrestling with the question, you and I are both 68 and we want to make sure that whatever years and decades remain, we answer well the question of what to make of a life from here to the end.
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And so as I was thinking about doing the study, I kept thinking, well, how could I study this in a way? And I came up with this idea of looking at pairs of people where I could match them at the same or very similar cliff because this is the time in life when they're both facing the same kind of changed moment in their life. Their life has changed in a very similar way. And I can look at how two different people make different choices about how to answer the question of what to make of a life and then come back and learn from those different choices. So we have, for example, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns who fought side by side for suffrage and then the cliff is they won and they faced the question of, well, that's done. Well, now what do I do with the rest of my life?
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I have to answer the question again. Or you have two professional football players like Alan Page and Carl Eller and they were going to be in the Hall of Fame, but their football career would come to an end. And well, now what to make of a life? Or Robert Plant and Jimmy Page with the End of Led Zeppelin and after one was the lead singer and the other lead guitarist,
(08:03):
Zeppelin's over. Now what to make of a life? And I just repeated this pairing process over and over again to look at all these different lives all wrestling with the question at these distinct points and then looking at the entire lives.
Andy Stanley (08:18):
And the thing that's so fascinating and you say this is many of the people you study are dead. The point being you're able to see the trajectory of their entire lives and the ones that are still alive, enough has been written about them. And my goodness, Jim, you read so many biographies about the same person over and over. I'm like, oh my gosh. But again, those parts of the book are so powerful. And at the end you actually ask the reader, "Hey, who was the favorite person or the person you felt like inspired you to go deep?" And we'll get to that later. So backing up just a little bit, one of the frameworks for the book is what you call these three elements or the one big thing. Well, you call it stepping into frame or staying in frame. And the frame is made up of discovering encodings, flipping the arrow of money and focusing on the inner fire.
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Fortunately, you are going to be with us for two podcasts, which I appreciate so much. I know your time's so valuable, but I would like to unpack the discovering and codings and flipping the arrow of money and then spend our second conversation around this whole idea of focusing on our inner fire. And one of the reasons I want to do it that way is in our second conversation, I've just got a bunch of quotes from this book I just want to read and let you respond to because they're so ridiculously good. So will you begin by talking about, what do you mean by staying or stepping or staying in frame and then encodings and flipping the arrow of money? And I may interrupt you as you go to just read some of these amazing quotes. So anyway, take it from there.
Jim Collins (09:49):
Yeah. The way to sort of think about this is that these people's lives worked best when they were what we call in frame. Think about it this way that Andy, you have a set of encodings. I have a set of encodings. Anyone listening to this has a set of encodings and I think of it as almost like a constellation of stars. And these are kind of durable capacities of your intrinsic construction and they're awaiting discovery through the experiences of life and that when you discover them and then orient your life in alignment with those that tended to be when their lives worked particularly well, whether it be before a cliff or after a cliff or late in life. So let's maybe first of all help everyone grasp the idea of encodings, what these are like. If we take a pair in the study, women in science from the first half of the 20th century, Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper.
(10:52):
And what's interesting is that you can see sort of evidence of their encoding showing up early. Barbara McClintock always just loved to get lost in thought and to solve puzzles. She was just encoded to solve puzzles so much so that later when she became a geneticist and she had a genetics puzzle in her teeth and she just couldn't let go of it in her teeth. And she was driving across country to go to Caltech to visit some colleagues and people said, "Well, it's dangerous these days to drive on the roads." And it was two lane roads back then and all of that. And what she expressed was, "Well, I'm not worried about dying in a car crash so much as I'm worried about dying in a car crash before I've solved the puzzle."
Andy Stanley (11:35):
Right.
Jim Collins (11:37):
Solving the puzzle, she just had to do it. And she could even get so immersed in things that, for example, on a college exam once when she finished solving all the puzzles in the exam, she realized she'd forgotten her own name because she was so immersed in solving the puzzles. So she had this, it was like this prepackaged capacity. Well, if we take her matched companion in this study, Grace Hopper, who was in computer science, you can also see, and in her case, it wasn't about puzzles. She was encoded to just want to figure out how to make gadgets work. She's a little girl. Her family's like Summerhouse or something and there's all these rooms and they have all these clocks in them. And little Grace Hopper, she's just a little kid, goes around to all the rooms, takes apart all the clocks. And you can just picture the piles of springs and hands and whatever made up the inside of the clock because she just had to figure out how they work.
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Well, this encoding then came to life partway through her life went through a series of events. She had joined the Navy Reserves for World War II and they assigned her. She'd been a math professor before this. They assigned her to the first computer for the secret computation project called the Mark One at Harvard. And as she put it, the Mark one was the prettiest gadget she ever saw.
Andy Stanley (12:59):
And it was huge. Tell it.
Jim Collins (13:01):
Huge. It was like four stories long.
(13:04):
And she fell in love. And of course then all those encodings of imagine now this huge gadget and she just couldn't help but figure out how that gadget worked and how to help that gadget work better. So these two women discovered this path in life, one with computer science, one with genetics that so fit their encodings that that was what it meant for them to be in frame. You think of the constellation, your life moves and at any given time you can only see so many stars through the window. So if you move to a place where looking through that window, a big bright set of those encodings such as happen for Barbara McClintock or for Grace Hopper pop into frame, you are in frame with your encodings.
Andy Stanley (13:49):
And one of the things you say is you don't create encoding, you discover them,
(13:55):
Which is a journey. But I think the value of this book, because as I thought about my kids, they're in their mid 30s, part of me was like, is it too early for them to read this book? And I'm like, no, because they are in the process of, I think in a couple of cases, they've discovered they're encodings. But if you don't know to look for it, you end up in sort of the drudgery of a job. In fact, you talk about this later in the book where you're able to do well enough to keep going, get some raises, you're doing fine and they keep offering you opportunities. I forget the phrase you used for this and you wake up one day later in life and you've done okay, but you're never able to wrap your life around and your time around these encoding. So knowing this is a reality for people and to begin looking for them is huge.
(14:37):
Then you talk about, this was a surprise, that the people in the study, you called it flipping the money script. Can you talk about that a little bit? That was fascinating as well.
Jim Collins (14:47):
Yeah. So first of all, I just want to pick up on one thing that you said there, Andy, that I think is about the sort of timing of discovering these encodings. And across a single life, there can be different times when you're more in frame with your end coatings and times when you're lesson framed. So you describe somebody who's caught in a role or a job that isn't really in frame with their encodings. It can be sort of an okay time in their life. And then when they pop into frame with something that really does sit there in coatings, it can feel like they went from being a lightning bug to a lightning bolt. And one of the people in the study, John Glenn,
(15:25):
When he was flying jets and being a test pilot and being an astronaut, you could really see that lightning bolt go off for him. And then when that was done and he went off and became an executive at Royal Crown Cola, he didn't do badly at it, but it wasn't the same. It was more like the lightning bug. He was sort of out of frame. And then when he became a senator, he was back in frame with a new frame and boom, lightning bolt. But there's one really key thing about that I just want to, and we'll come to the flipping the arrow in a moment, but one of the things that I found very exciting about this is that life is a continuous discovery of these encodings. And so you can discover some of them early and very young, but if you haven't yet discovered the ones that will really pop for you, it's never too late.
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You can find at some point that maybe at a midway point of life or a later point of life that the frame will shift and bring into frame and coatings that you never knew were there until maybe a cliff exposed it or you made a step forward to put you more in frame and just this idea that there isn't only one opportunity to discover encodings. It is a continuous unfolding journey of discovery of those-
Andy Stanley (16:42):
Yeah, it's not career specific. It's encoding specific. There's so much in the book. One of the things that's so helpful about the book is you help people understand how to identify those encodings when we trip over them accidentally or an opportunity comes along or a different opportunity comes along.
Jim Collins (16:58):
And can we just pick up on one thing with that? And I'll go to the flipping the arrow in a moment, but this is such an important piece of our conversation. There's so much in the book. I mean, after spending 12 years, 10 years of research, it's huge. I'm glad we're doing two episodes to converse on it.
Andy Stanley (17:14):
Me too. Right.
Jim Collins (17:15):
So you think about this notion of the encodings and one of the things I think as leaders that a role that we can play that can be very powerful is if we're perceptive and observant of the wonderful people around us,
(17:33):
That we can also play a role in helping them see their encodings that they might not see themselves. And that a couple aspects of this is that one is that as you have wonderful people around you, you think about the notion of the right people on the bus, which you and I have talked about before, but the real question is, do you have the right people in the key seats? And what that means is are they in a seat that makes them a lightning bolt versus in a seat that they're not in frame and they're just a lightning pug. And so going back to Grace Hopper, it's a very interesting part of her evolution. Barbara McClintock, the geneticist, was always encoded to be a solitary scientist and that's where she spent her life in frame. Grace Hopper, when she went to the Mark one, Commander Aiken, who ran the program, perceived that she had some management and leadership encodings that she had never touched before.
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And then he kind of kicked the frame to the side and let her run parts of the Mark One program. And then eventually she ran the software development and the development of the subroutines. And she had people, she had this amazing ability to lead people that she didn't even know she had, but he sensed them and helped sort of move the shift, the frame. And then later over the rest of her life, she not only had the gadget and coatings, he had helped her discover her leadership in coatings, which then multiplied times the gadget, made her such an influence in computer science. And so as we have our conversation today, Andy, I think one of the interesting things is mainly about our own lives and the lives we love, of how the people we love, but also as leaders, we can really play a role in if we can help every person on our team come into frame and we can help them see their encodings that they might not see, I think that's a huge leadership contribution.
Andy Stanley (19:39):
And there are people, my experience is I am not great at that. I work with some people who are phenomenal at that. Again, I have a tendency to play checkers. They know how to play chess and they understand that. And when I lean into their insight about the other people in our organization, they just have an intuition about how to properly position people and again, put them in positions where they thrive. And the same is true in parenting, right? I mean, one of the things I think a takeaway for parents for this book is again, because the tendency is you have several kids, one of them's just like you, and so they just follow along because you have the same encoding, you have two or three other kids, completely different encoding. We try to treat them all, parent them all the same, but discovering and helping our kids discover their encoding and then help provide opportunities or point them in the direction of that is a huge headstart for kids.
(20:33):
So the implications of this are massive. Okay, you've already alluded to this idea of cliffs and fogs. Can we go there and just talk about that? So you write, you say a cliff, you define it so perfectly. A cliff is a significant event. You've already said this. A cliff is a significant event that alters the trajectory of life and forces choices about what's next. And then later you say there is, and this was encouraging, I guess, there's no such thing as a life without cliffs. And they become a powerful way to shed light on the big question because life altering cliffs force people to reconsider questions anew. So talk about the inevitability and the inevitable cliffs in life and then we'll talk a litle bit about how you leverage them on the other side. This was such an important part of the book.
Jim Collins (21:22):
Well, you know the construct, right? We match people at cliffs and when I first set out to do the study, I had this little side effort going on. I was actually, we spent a couple of summers. I had wonderful research teams. And I said, "One of the things we're really going to need to do in this study is we need to find people who had really interesting lives that we could study, but they were lives without cliffs so that we could set that side next to the lives with cliffs since are the patterns any different." And after two summers of work where we were studying all these different lives that were our candidates for the cliffless lives, the more we studied them, they all also had cliffs too. And what that led me to conclude is that cliffs are us and there are lots of types of cliffs.
(22:11):
In this study, there are career cliffs, there are tragedy cliffs, there are cliffs of great loss, there are disease cliffs, there are scandal cliffs
Andy Stanley (22:23):
And there are retirement cliffs.
Jim Collins (22:25):
Retirement cliffs.
Andy Stanley (22:26):
Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Collins (22:27):
That's a huge one for people and there's so many different ways in which cliffs can hit our lives. I have a little list here just to share a few of the kind of types of cliffs we all might relate to. Not all of us are going to fight for suffrage and win the 19th Amendment or then have to notice the question or have be the first to orbit Earth.
Andy Stanley (22:46):
Just circle the earth, right?
Jim Collins (22:47):
Yeah. And then figure out what happens after. And so it's a big cliff when astronaut comes to an end or a big cliff when you've won the 19th Amendment, you got to figure out the rest of your life. But morning the end of a significant relationship can be a cliff. Getting fired, getting laid off, dealing with a health event or a diagnosis, discovering that someone important to you is untrustworthy, crossing a major educational milestone and having no clue what comes next. Accomplishing some goal that was important and now it's done. It doesn't have to be winning the 19th Amendment. It could still be something that's a real marker and you haven't figured out what's next successfully raising children to adulthood and then sending them off into the world, making the decision to retire. There's any number of these that we begin to look at lives and we realize some cliffs are gigantic 3000 foot L Capitan scale cliffs and some are smaller cliffs, but our lives are punctuated by cliffs.
Andy Stanley (23:56):
And on the other side of a cliff is often the fog. Let's talk about that.
Jim Collins (24:04):
Well, so-
Andy Stanley (24:04):
If you're ready to talk about it.
Jim Collins (24:08):
Oh I'm ready. I love the fog. I love the fog finding. And
(24:13):
As we got into the study, of course we're looking at all these different kinds of cliffs and how people head into the cliff, go through the cliff, come out on the other side. But the thing that really surprised me is the prevalence of fog. And it happened in part because I kept trying to figure out, okay, what happens after the cliff? And what I noticed is that people would go into a period of time where they're feeling lost, confused, disoriented, uncertain, reeling, befuddled. And that sense of just feeling lost and to realize that that was very prevalent in the wake of cliffs made me attuned to the idea that there's this fog. And as you know from the people in the study, we have a really remarkable set of lives and the only reason that they're such famous lives is because that's where the data is.
(25:08):
So we had to study people for whom there was a lot of data. The study isn't about becoming famous or even as successful as they were. It's about life, but I needed people who had lots of data. Yet when you get to the fog finding and you find that even these people had thick episodes of fog that not only didn't just last for weeks, they could last for months or years or even longer. And just as a hassle along, just something I would say to anyone that's part of our conversation with you and me today, there's nothing wrong with you if you're in the fog. Everyone seems to have these episodes of fog. Fog is not a defect. It is an artifact of living and it's certainly prevalent in the wake of cliffs, but there can be the fog of youth and there can be the fog of retirement or the fog of success or the fog of disappointment or the fog of grief and it comes and it goes and it can take time to get out of it.
(26:17):
I've done this a couple of times now that the book is out where I've asked a group of people, "How many of you have ever had an episode in your life when you've been lost in the fog?" And all these hands go up. And then I ask a second question, how many of you were self-critical when you were in the fog? You felt there's something wrong with you because you're supposed to have it figured out. And this study is like a giant exhale for me because I've had episodes of fog, my 20s were the fog and I've had other episodes and to realize it's natural, it's expected, it's not a defect.
Andy Stanley (26:54):
There's nothing wrong with you.
Jim Collins (26:56):
There's nothing wrong with you.
Andy Stanley (26:58):
That's one of the statements in the book that I underline. And when you think about, I mean, I'm a pastor, so people only call me after cliffs and in the fog. Nobody calls during the week to tell me, "Hey, everything's great. I'm in frame. I have found, I'm playing to my strengths, I've delegated all my weaknesses. I don't get those calls." So the point is the natural inclination is to ask the question, "What did I do wrong? What's wrong with me? How could I have avoided this? " Because there's a sense in which the goal in life is to avoid all the cliffs and all the fog. And if I can't blame myself, I have to find something or someone else to blame, which just facilitates more fog. So I think that just the takeaway that, hey, it's an artifact of life, it's just part of life.
(27:43):
But anyway, let me read this one great quote because I think this is great. You said, "When you're lost in the fog, avoid big irreversible decisions." Here's what came to mind when I read that. When I talk to people who've been through divorce or they've lost a spouse, this is exactly the advice I give. I say, "I want you to go out one year from today and mark your calendar and promise yourself between now and a year from now, you're not going to make any big financial decisions and no big relational decisions." And I say, "And I promise you between now and then, the right person is going to come along, but they're not the right person. The right deal's going to come along. It's not the right deal. Don't make any big irreversible decisions." And every once in a while, Jim, someone actually takes my advice.
(28:33):
It's rare. It's rare. And they'll come along and they'll say, "Andy, you know that thing you said?" I'll tell people, "Hey, you need to don't date for a year. Don't just don't date for a year." And so many people, they'll come back and say, "I did that because what you say in the book about while you're in the fog, it's not going to last forever, avoid big irreversible decisions." So, so good, so powerful. And then this is one of Sandra and I's favorite statements from the book. When you talk about coming out of the fog, you talk about simplex stepping. Can you unpack that a little bit?
Jim Collins (29:08):
Yeah. And just out of curiosity because I want to explain what this all is, but first of all, I'm curious, what did you think of the case and story of the cliff and the life of Charles Colson?
Andy Stanley (29:20):
Oh, well, I actually read his book and knew a great deal about him and he lived a remarkable life and what he did for the world and his organization that of course continues to to this day all over ... For the world that would have never been established apart from a major, major public embarrassing, financially destructive cliff in his life. It's sort of a paradigm in some ways or he's kind of the poster child for this whole thing to some extent. So yeah, he lived quite the remarkable life after Watergate.
Jim Collins (29:56):
Yes. And so what I'd love to do is to, there's maybe a couple people we could use to really illustrate how Cliff Fogg simplex stepping all goes together. And you know the Charles Colson story yourself as well. I thought it might be an illustrative one for us to unpack this. So first of all, what is simplex stepping? So you're in the fog and you have this impulse, you want to get out of the fog. I mean, it's uncomfortable in the fog. We prefer clarity. We prefer knowing where I'm going, but what if you're in the fog and the truth is you really don't know where you're going. And first of all, to realize that the people in our study didn't know what was on the other side of the fog, it's not like they knew what the destination was. And then it was just, "Oh, I got to find my way through the fog to the destination." They didn't know what the destination was.
(30:44):
So they're in the fog. So what do you do? One, your guidance that you give people is very much validated by this, that avoiding the big irreversible decisions. Because when you're in the fog and it's uncomfortable, you have this impulse, "I've got to do something."
(31:01):
I don't feel comfortable in this uncertainty and befuddlement and lack of clarity. So if I just make this big move, this big investment, or I'll jump over here and do this, that can just sometimes lead to another cliff. And yet at the same time, just sitting and doing nothing feels very uncomfortable too. So what did our people do? They took what we call simplex steps. So you're in the fog and you can only see maybe two, three feet ahead of you. So what you do is you just say, "Of all the steps that are right in front of me right now, what's the next best little step I can take?" And once I've taken that step, I'll kind of look around in the fog again and I'll go, "Okay, so then now what looks like the best little small step I can take?" And then I'll reset again and then take another little small step.
(31:52):
And this process of making a series of iterative little small steps over time the fog starts to lift. The other thing that can happen while you're doing that is you might actually be discovering what's really coming next and even discovering encodings you didn't necessarily know
(32:37):
That you have because the cliff can actually be part of what ultimately brings you into frame. So if you don't mind, I'd love to pick up with the Colson story. It's one of the interesting ones in the book. His life was split in half by his years in politics and being a political operative and then Watergate, he's in the Nixon White House and the cliff is Watergate and prison.
Andy Stanley (32:44):
Big cliff.
Jim Collins (33:46):
You go from the height of power in the White House right next to the president to prison. Imagine the friend you lose, imagine the opportunities in your life that go away. Imagine the loss of financial opportunities. Imagine everything that happened.
Andy Stanley (33:09):
Well, your whole future just goes dark.
Jim Collins (33:12):
Just dark.
Andy Stanley (33:12):
Right. There's nothing to anticipate or even to be able to imagine. Yeah, keep going.
Jim Collins (33:17):
Exactly. And so Colson comes out of this experience and now what's interesting when you really look at the story, it's not like, oh, all of a sudden he comes out of prison and says, "Bang, it's clear to me one big step I'm doing prison fellowship." He comes out and actually takes a series of small steps. He explores whether he should get his law license in a state where it hasn't been bad or go be able to practice law where he hasn't been banned, or maybe he explored some business opportunities. He was just taking little steps meeting with some people trying to figure out, but along the way, he had this image in his mind of bringing faith to prisoners, but he didn't do it as a big giant step. It was just amongst other steps. He just started with a simple X step, which was he partnered with a person that was in Congress and said, "Let's just do a small step. Let's bring a small number of prisoners if we can get permission to do it to come for a two week discipleship program and let's just see how it goes."
(34:21):
It was a simple, simplex step. And then it worked and then he did another one, but he still certainly was wanting to do it, but the more he worked on it, the more he took little steps, the more the fog began to clear and the more he realized it was feeding the fire and he was starting step by step to click into frame. And there's this wonderful thing, I think I put the quote in the book, all I can say is that over a period of 18 months, so there was stepping for 18 months, it became evident I couldn't do anything else.
Andy Stanley (34:57):
Wow.
Jim Collins (34:58):
And that was when the fog cleared and his wife said, "If you want to do this, I'll be there with you. " And then we have the whole second phase of what happened, which Charles calls up. But the key is in that time he had to take a series of small steps to get clear.
Andy Stanley (35:19):
Yep
Jim Collins (35:20):
That's what Simplex stepping is. He didn't know that's where he was headed.
Andy Stanley (35:23):
And that's the problem. We get the highlight reels of people's stories and it looks like on Monday this happened, but by Wednesday and then the next Friday and off they go. And so I just want to just say something to our podcast audience real quick. If you can relate to the concept of a cliff and if you find yourself in the fog, I'm telling you this portion of the book is worth by far the price of the book because when you're in the fog, you need a little light sometime just a little bit of light is the light you need to know what that next step is. And reading some of these stories and following these individuals through major, major cliffs where you think the end game over, we will never know their name. They are so extraordinarily inspiring. One statement I want to read from the book too about this, you said, "Simplex stepping works in part." I love this.
(36:13):
I love this, Jim, because it allows you to take small steps to get moving and movement creates energy that fuels more movement. This is so important because the only other option that you write is if you just sit in the fog doing nothing and hoping the fog is somehow just going to clear on its own, you might never get to the other side. And I love the imagery of fog because all of us have been in situations where you're in fog driving and if you stop driving, you just sit in the fog and then three or four minutes later, three or four minutes later, you just pop out. So you need the movement because you need the energy to keep going and there's hope on the other side. One of the examples you give, you talk about Michael J. Fox that's so fascinating. One of the big takeaways was of course just the snapshot of his life.
(37:05):
I was under the impression that once he was diagnosed with Parkinson's, he began talking about it and you say he didn't talk about it publicly, what I think for seven years again. Again, we don't have the full picture of these famous people and the amazing things they did. This was a quote from his memoir that you put in the book, Sandra and I, we're probably going to post this somewhere for us to look at every once in a while. He wrote, "Whatever anyone else thinks about me is none of my business." What a great line. Whatever anyone else thinks about me is none of my business. So Jim, we're going to stop at this point in the book, but don't worry everybody. He's going to be back next month and we're going to do part two. But Jim, before we go, you began our conversation talking about your dad.
(37:53):
And so I just want to thank you for something real quick if that's okay. I just want to thank you on behalf of what I hope are millions specifically of men because you begin the book with that story about your father, a story that didn't end well. And then at the end of the book, you take what you learned through your research and you applied it to that unresolved and unresolvable relationship. And I think that your insight and your vulnerability at the end of the book within the context of that specific often challenging relationship between father and s, I think it is going to help. I hope millions of men who are living with that dangling, unresolved, what happened, what went wrong, thing that they've carried with them for years and the fact that you were able to extract from your research what you needed personally to get to where you got.
(38:47):
I'm telling you, I know that's not the purpose of the book, but I think there's going to be extraordinary transformation perhaps in the hearts of men who are able to reframe their fathers in light of what they take away from this book. So on behalf of those men who will not have an opportunity to say thank you, I just want to say thank you.
Jim Collins (39:08):
Well, that's wonderful. It did indeed lead me to be able to understand why my father couldn't be a father and then ultimately to let go of the need to condemn and to feel incredible compassion for what my father went through and in the end, even though he died many years ago to forgive him. And when I wrote about that as the book unfolds, as you know, I sat at my home office desk once that hit me full force and I cried nonstop for an hour.
Andy Stanley (39:48):
Well, there are some men who need to read this book and cry nonstop for an hour. Wow. As I said, Jim's going to be back next month for part two of this conversation. You can find what to make of a life wherever books are sold and you need to pick it up. Now, don't wait till our second part of our conversation. We're going to get linked to it in the show notes. To learn more about Jim and his work, you can visit jimcollins.com and thanks to all of you for listening. Before we go, we do have one ask as always and that is to subscribe to the podcast by subscribing. You help us grow the audience, which allows us to keep improving, bringing you great guests like Jim Collins and great content to help you go further faster as a leader. Also, be sure to visit theanystanley.com website where you can download the Leadership Podcast application guide that includes a summary of our discussion plus a few questions for reflection, either for you or for your group.
(40:42):
And join us next week for our reverb episode where Suzy and I dig deeper into this topic. We will talk about Jim instead of to Jim on the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. We'll see you then.