Jim Collins on What to Make of A Life, Part 2 Transcript

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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 ANDY to 55123 to start delegating and free up your leadership with Belay. And now back to today's episode. Today we are continuing our conversation with Jim Collins on his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Cliff's, Fog, Fire, and the Self Knowledge Imperative. If you missed last month's episode, seriously, you just need to hit pause on this one and go back and listen to part one, or better yet, just go purchase a copy of What to Make of a Life. Jim, once again, welcome back to the podcast.

(01:52):
Thank you for giving us another round of great content related to this great book.

Jim Collins (01:57):
I am really enjoying both of these conversations, let's continue.

Andy Stanley (02:03):
Yeah. Well, I'm sure so many people want to have you on their podcast and television shows and everything else, because again, you disappeared from us for, I think, almost 12 or 13 years to do this research and where's Jim Collins? So we're glad you're back. So before we pick up where we left off working our way through the book, will you do a quick recap of what it means to come into frame and maybe the three critical elements or however you want to talk about that, because that's kind of the framework for the book is getting into and staying in frame.

Jim Collins (02:31):
Yeah. So just a very brief kind of structural framework for everything. The book itself actually breaks into three parts. The first part called Coming Into Frame, the second part about navigating cliffs and fog. Third part being about feeding the inner fire long and late in life. And in the first episode, we really hit the first two parts of the book. And coming into frame basically means that your life is in frame around doing one big thing that meets three tests. One, you are deeply encoded for it and we talked about that a lot in our original session. Second, you're willing to flip the arrow of money to do it. And what this means is that you don't do what you do to make money. You need money to be able to do what you're encoded for.

Andy Stanley (03:19):
Say that again. This is such a big idea. Say it one more time. This is great.

Jim Collins (03:23):
Yeah. So the essence of it is that you don't do what you do principally to make money, but you accept the hardheaded truth that you need economic fuel, you need money to be able to do what you're encoded for. And in just a very brief, we have a whole chapter in there on this, which looks at how the people in our study created the economic fuel to do what really they were encoded to do.

Andy Stanley (03:55):
And in some cases made huge sacrifices financially and economically to keep doing what they were encoded to do. Exactly. Even when they had opportunities to make money, but it involved them doing things they weren't encoded to do. Like Robert Plant was such a great example of that.

Jim Collins (04:12):
Exactly, exactly. And Robert Plant, whether it was in his early life when he was just trying to survive so that he could sing. And then later in life, even when he had more money than he knew what to do with probably because of the success of Led Zeppelin, the motivation was still always the same. I just want to sing.

(04:35):
And so the economic conditions changed, but his fundamental drive was, I need to sing. It doesn't matter what my economic conditions are, but here's a key thing. There's a phrase out there and you've probably heard it, which is do what you love, the money will follow. This isn't what that's about because what it's about is I need to do what I'm encoded for and that feeds my fire, which is the third part of being in frame. It needs to be something that really feeds my fire, something I'm encoded for and I embrace the practical reality that in order to do that, I need to be very smart about how I generate the economic fuel to do it. But I'm clear that the direction of the arrow is I need economic fuel to do it rather than I do it just to make a lot of money.

Andy Stanley (05:24):
And for the parents out there, they're like, I don't think I want my child to read this book, if that's the case.That sounds like a lot of financial insecurity, but at the end of the day, a quick example, and some of our podcast listeners know this, my son went to university, got a finance degree, got a great job. This is my oldest son, great job with a big company here in the city of Atlanta, but he wanted to write comedy. And I said, "I don't know what that looks like. And maybe I know what it looks like at 25. What does it look like at 45?" But as time went by, clearly his encoding was toward comedy, not the world of business and marketing and all the other things. And so I just had to decide as a dad, "Hey, am I going to encourage that or not?

(06:14):
" And because of things like this and other fathers I've watched get this right, I'm like, "Hey, chase the encoding and the money, we'll see." And so I would say, "Andrew, how's your job going? " And he would say this, he would say, "I love my life, but I don't love my job." I said, "Well, welcome to being an adult." That's kind of how it goes, but eventually he figured this out and then I as a father had to hands off, you can do this. So this is an important principle.

Jim Collins (06:44):
It is. And just to briefly flesh this out a little bit, because something actually really pleased that we did in the research was we took all the people in the study and we did an analysis of how did they make the economics and their life work because it's practically real that we have to deal with economics in our lives. That's practically real. But what we did was we said for all the people in our study, because most of them didn't come from family wealth, how did they make it work? And it turns out there are 12 different economic streams and they usually drew upon three or four of them. It could be as simple as they're working over here like Carlos Santana at one point was dishwashing while he was also getting his guitar career going, or it could be that you get really good at building a little flywheel where doing this kind of work generates fuel to do more of the work or you start a social organization that actually has resources behind it.

(07:39):
There are all these different models, but basically one way or another, they very pragmatically figured out how to put enough of the pieces in place so that they could focus on doing what they were encoded for

(07:53):
That fed the fire. And when you have all three of those come together, then you're really fully in frame.

Andy Stanley (07:59):
Yeah. So it's discover your encodings, flip the arrow of money and focus on the inner fire. So the third section of the book is entitled Feeding the Inner Fire Long and Late. And of course, I love this section because I'm late. You and I are the same age. We're in the season of life where we've been told, "Hey, you did your thing, you're done, go to the beach, play golf." And neither of us are wired that way. And this book just comes in around all of that and says, "Hey, long and late, there's plenty of fire. And as long as you've got the fire, there's something to do. " So talk a little bit about that second half. And then maybe I think Meryl Streep, that example from her life is a phenomenal example. And of course my wife is a huge Meryl Streep fan and love that illustration.

(08:42):
So talk a little bit about that.

Jim Collins (08:43):
Okay. So first of all, I just want to sort of set a frame with this. So as you get to this part, there's kind of a conventional view, which some people might hold, maybe not everyone, which is that our best and our most creative, our most energetic, our most breakthrough, all of this stuff tends to come early in our life and that our younger selves will tower over our older selves. And then whatever we do in our later years, it will never measure up to those younger years. But you take a look, for example, we have, I mean, it's really, really interesting to look at Meryl Streep's creative productivity over the course of her career. And yes, and it's really spread across the entire career. I think she had 21 Oscar nominations by the time we finished the research and roughly half of them half happened after the age of 50.

(09:40):
And she was just as productive and doing great acting in her 60s as she was in her hyper-creative phase in her 30s. And so you just basically see this incredible creative evolution over the course of decade upon decade upon decade. If anything, she was amazing when she was young and she was amazing as the decades went by. I want to share one little thing that's one of my favorite little tiny data points from the book, but it just summarizes this for me. If you take all the pages in the major biographies of Benjamin Franklin and you ask a simple question, what percent of the pages in those books remain on average when Franklin hits age 60 and the answer is 53%. So I think about it this way, when you hit 60, you're not even halfway with what could be the most creative and breakthrough and spectacular phases of your life or as I've started to think of it as when you hit 60, you finish your warmup.

Andy Stanley (10:49):
I like that. I'll go with that. But again, our culture and the average age of retirement and all of that just ... You and I grew up in a world where people didn't think that way. In fact, we grew up, I'm sure you as well as I did, around people who were longing for and reaching for that point in time where they could quit work. I mean, that was kind of the goal, which is neither healthy nor necessary. So the research demonstrates the very opposite of that, which is super encouraging. And it's also encouraging for people, professional athletes where you profile some professional athletes, professional athletes' career generally ends early in their 30s. Again, it's like, "Hey, I circled the earth.What am I going to do now?" So this is super important. Here's a couple of quotes I like, "Don't confuse the need for a break with the need to quit." That's huge because at some point everybody needs a break, but that doesn't mean you need to quit.

(11:47):
And then I love this one too, differentiate between that's it and that's it for now. So those statements that allow for a break as people retool and rethink about what's next and in some cases it's a fog, in some cases it's just a break. All those things are super powerful.

(12:06):
Can I read one more thing from the book?

Jim Collins (12:07):
Please.

Andy Stanley (12:07):
Okay. And this is personal. So I'm giving you a moment to decide if you want to dive in. You write. In finishing up this chapter, I realized something about this entire project and its role in my own life. You write, "I've puzzled on the question of why I seem I love this, why I seem to have at least as much energy at 67 as I did at 37 and perhaps even more. I need less sleep. I feel I'm up on the balls of my feet tilted forward. I can't wait to get up before 5:00 AM and throw myself into each day. The inner fire burns brighter than ever." Now, you are an author and a business leader and a thought leader who has circled the earth. You did your thing. I mean, good to great and built to last and on everything you've done, I mean, you could have just put a fork in it and yet here you are this season of your life and not only did you write this fabulous book, it is so different than your other books and you are willing to take a risk and not come back into the marketplace with another business book or another book for business leaders that would have been, you and I understand this because I've read the book, that would have been Robert Plant accepting the invitation to just play his old music over and over and over and travel the earth, do concerts all over the world.

(13:29):
And he's like, "No, that's looking backwards. I want to look forwards." So you really are an example of this principle. So what lights you up? What's burning bright inside of you these days? And a man, you may not want to talk about it publicly, but-

Jim Collins (13:45):
I'm happy to chat about that. And it actually ties into one of the key chapters in the book, which is this notion of extend out, circle back. And there were multiple seeds of this book. And one of them was I was always curious in the question about how do people remain self-renewed? It was a question that had been inspired by the great John W. Gardner who thought about that question many decades ago. I met him when I was teaching at Stanford and he was just down the hall for me as kind of a wise man in residence, but I always kind of puzzled like, what are the elements of that so that you're just full of expansion and fire all the way to the end? And there was this very interesting pattern we began to see. Let's pick up Robert Plant for a moment and then I'm going to answer it relative to myself.

(14:33):
Very interesting with Plant. He'd never lost his fire for music. And as he went along, he was always extending out. So as you think of this pattern of kind of extending out and always exploring and pushing your own edges and so forth and circling back. So the extend out would be instead of I'm just going to try to repeat the Led Zeppelin expression.

Andy Stanley (14:55):
Sing Stairway to Heaven for the rest of my life.

Jim Collins (14:57):
For the rest of my life in the same way. Instead, what he does is he starts exploring other genres of music and he ends up doing this marvelous album as he's heading into about age 60 at this point with Alison Krause,

Andy Stanley (15:11):
Yeah

Jim Collins (15:11):
This Bluegrass album called Raising Sand. And one of the most remarkable things about it, if you remember Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin, the golden god on stage with all the curly hairs and so forth. And he was always the lead singer and then he extended out to learn how to blend his voice with somebody's voice who he described as like the voice of an angel. That was a huge extend out for him. That was new. He was learning, he was expanding, he was extending. He was the genre, bluegrass, blending, but notice something else. At the same time, he would also circle back and there's this marvelous video that we came across. There's that classic hard rock Zeppelin song, Black Dog starts out, "Hey, hey, mama, bam." And it's just like, wham, full on blues rock. Then he and Alison Krause do this version of it in bluegrass that is slow and it's melodic and it is mature and it is seductive.

(16:16):
And it's still Black Dog because he's going back to a Zeppelin. That's a circle back. But the extend out is now he's doing it as a duo in a whole different genre. So what we found was a really cool thing is this constant process of extending out the edges, also circling back

(16:36):
To from things earlier that act almost as accelerants to extend out further. So let me just pause there for a moment. I'm just curious if this idea rings true for you in your own evolution. And then I'll be happy to talk about why this feeds my fire.

Andy Stanley (16:52):
Well, at the end of the book you say, I love the way that book ends. I'm not rushing to the end. You say, "Hey, I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm not even sure what you should do with this book, but I'm going to give you a list of questions to get you thinking about how the content of the book intersects with your life." And one of those questions is related to this and I had a hard time answering it. There were two questions that were really challenging that I have to go back to and one of them was about this extend out and circle back. What came to mind, it didn't scare me, but it challenged me because something came to mind I would've never thought about apart from that question. That's all I'm going to say about me. So what about you?

(17:33):
What's extend out in circle back?

Jim Collins (17:35):
Yeah. So the extend out circle back here is starting in about 2013 I realized that I had largely satisfied a lot of my curiosity in the question about what makes great organizations and great companies tick. And I didn't want to do another seven year study on that. And the seeds of this one, as we talked about in the previous conversation, really went into me very early in life and then they kind of started to flower as I watered the seeds of this project. So on the one hand is a huge extend out. I'm studying lives, pairs of lives, people going through cliffs, wandering through the fog, I'm looking at geneticists and computer scientists and astronauts and rock musicians and politicians and people and all these different business leaders, sure, but that was only a very small fraction of it of the book. And so it was a big extend out all these worlds I was learning about, things I never knew about and how these lives intersected with these entire universes.

(18:39):
I am pay as an architect or you could look at Tony Morrison, the novelist, all these different worlds for me and that was wonderful. But notice something else. I'm also circling back because I'm encoded to do big giant projects where I lose myself. I have a research method. I lose myself in evidence and really let the evidence lead me. If I have to spend five years on it or seven years on it, or in this case, 10 years to do the research, I'm encoded to go into monk mode and do that. And so the circle back is I have research, I have pairs, I have method, I have evidence I'm drawing upon, I'm being surprised and delighted by the data and then I have to make sense of it all. I have to figure out what it all means, how it all fits together. That process I used on Good to Great.

(19:34):
I used it on Built to Last. I used it on Great By Choice. I used it on How the Mighty Fall, that process. So the process is circle back and then learning how to write it and learning how to communicate the ideas, that's all circle back. The extend out is instead of companies and organizations, it's people-

Andy Stanley (19:53):
What to make of life. Yeah. Questions of what? And you also bring the hedgehog concept back around as well.

Jim Collins (20:00):
Which is that integrate, it's sort of the personal version of the hedgehog is encoded for it, flip the arrow of money to do it and focus the fire on it, which is the personal version when you have that all into one big thing, like Robert Plant singing, Meryl Streep acting, Barbara McClintock Genetics, John Glenn, when he was an astronaut, they are in a hedgehog.

Andy Stanley (20:25):
Yeah. So I want to move to one other section, even though that brings so many other things to mind I'd love to talk about. So chapter 11, you just mentioned Tony Morrison. So let me just read this quote from Tony in chapter 11. The name of the chapter is Choosing Responsibilities. He writes, "You see the point is that freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilities. Freedom is choosing the ones you want. " And then you write, this is your quote and this is what I sent to our whole family. "Freedom does not mean the absence of responsibilities. Freedom means that you get to choose your responsibilities. What a big idea. I sent that out to our family not on our little text stream and my daughter-in-law drove to the bookstore and bought the book when she read that. The whole idea of choosing a responsibility and then making ourselves accountable to that responsibility.

(21:20):
Can you talk a little bit about that? I just think that is a massive concept. It's both liberating and focusing at the same time

Jim Collins (21:29):
At the same time. So there was this real moment I saved my pair of writers as kind of my last pair to study and it was Tony Morrison and Barbara Tuckman. And so Tony Morrison had a lot that she said about writing itself and she gave a lot of interviews and then of course I had all of her novels. So I read all of her novels in sequence.

Andy Stanley (21:54):
All of them.

Jim Collins (21:54):
I also read all of her interviews and all the things that she said about how she went about things and the choices she made and how she wrote and so forth. And in the mid 1980s, there's this one little snippet and that's where that quote comes from when she talks about what freedom is. And it hit me so hard and it was like all of a sudden all these dominoes when I thought back to all the other people in my study, it was like a tumbler just went tumble, tumble, tumble, tumble. And I realized that part of what fed the fire for people all the way along in their lives, but especially late when you could just decide," I'm done, I'm not going to choose any more responsibilities. I'm free. I'm retired. I can just do what I want at 10 and o'clock in the morning.

(22:39):
That their response was the Tony Morrison response as her comment, "Freedom means you get to choose your responsibility."

Andy Stanley (22:50):
It's such a big idea.

Jim Collins (22:52):
Bang. And the responsibilities and that's what that sense of self-accountability to a responsibility that you choose. We haven't talked about Catherine Graham yet in the study, but she didn't have to run the Washington Post when she lost her husband to the disease of manic depression and ended up with the Washington Post on her hands. She chose the responsibility to begin simple act stepping and then eventually emerge and to truly lead the Washington Post. And she discovered her encodings. Charles Colson, who we talked about in the last conversation, he chose his responsibility and he chose to hold himself to account for his responsibility all the way till the end. I think when people choose responsibilities, whatever they are, they may be very private, they may be very personal. One of the things that really impacted me as I thought a lot about a lot of people when I was doing this study is you may not know about the responsibilities people are choosing.

Andy Stanley (23:57):
Right

Jim Collins (23:58):
You might see a big visible one that somebody does, but we have in our own lives, do I choose the responsibility like Tenley Albright in the study to practice every surgery I do with the highest level of surgical conscience of care for the patient because that is simply the sacred standard I choose to live by.That's not seen on a grand scale. It's lived on a daily scale.

Andy Stanley (24:28):
And it's personal accountability to a responsibility they chose. You say, talking about the people in this study, they chose responsibilities for something or someone beyond their own individual success, comfort, recognition, enjoyment, or achievement that they dedicated a sizable portion of their energy to choosing responsibilities pointed outward beyond self and that is one of the most powerful forms of fuel. And I think that's a critical component to this. It's not simply choosing a responsibility and becoming accountable to something that's just for me. The people who change the world, the people who leave a legacy, and we'll talk about legacy in a minute, but the people who make an impact are the people who've chosen a responsibility, made themselves accountable to it and it's not centered on them. It's centered on making some part of the world or somebody in the world a better person or making the world a better place.

(25:24):
And those are the people we celebrate, but so oftentimes they had an opportunity to just be done and yet they stayed accountable to that responsibility.That section of the book was so inspiring to me and brought to mind so many people that I've had the opportunity to work with and work alongside who are just committed to the thing they feel called to do that they don't have to do, but they've again, chosen to stay accountable to it. It's amazing. What else on that? Anything else?

Jim Collins (25:52):
Yeah. So the thing about this notion of the choosing of the responsibilities, I think first of all, I think it does something very powerful. I'm going to mention two things. One that's not in the book, so don't let me forget that part because I want to circle back to something that-

Andy Stanley (26:10):
Bonus material right here on the podcast.

Jim Collins (26:13):
Yeah. And it'll tie into some of our prior conversations. But one of the things that I think the choosing responsibility does is it helps you live this thing I wrote about called the Mothershed Mantra, which was this wonderful professor I had when I was in college who was a philosophy professor. And I asked him," I'd like you to look back on your life and just tell me what are the most important lessons from your life that you give. "And in a very kind way, he said," I reject your question because there's two ways to go through life. One is to be riding on a horse, sitting in the saddle looking backward and the other is to go through life riding in the horse, sitting in the saddle, pointed forward. I'm the second. I have no interest in looking back. And he was already emeritus at this point, but he was as fire filled and just pointed forward as anyone I'd ever met and that stayed with me and that's what I think our people in the study did was they just stayed pointed forward in the saddle until they just ran out of road.

(27:12):
The other thing though is that I think that how do you do that? I think what choosing responsibilities does, if it's beyond yourself, it spins you forward in the saddle.

(27:23):
It's what it does. It's a mechanism for it. Now, here's the bonus thing.

Andy Stanley (27:27):
That's great insight. Yeah.

Jim Collins (27:29):
You and I have talked about something that goes all the way back to good to great of level five leadership. These leaders who have the personal humility and indomitable will for something that is not about them. And one of the ways that my thinking has evolved over the years and it really got reinforced in doing this study is when I first wrote about level five leaders way back in 2001, this was the first time I wrote about it coming out of the good to great study, I thought it was such a high standard that I thought maybe 20% of people could be level five leaders. I now believe that well over 80% I have evolved to tremendous optimism about people being able to become level five leaders. And I think the reason is because I understand that the catalyst for true level five is asking the question, what responsibilities beyond myself am I going to choose?

(28:27):
And that any human can make that choice. It may not be something that the rest of the world can see or it might be, but the very act of choosing that responsibility, I choose to be responsible for this. It's not about me. Is the level five ultimate simplex step.

Andy Stanley (28:46):
Wow.

Jim Collins (28:48):
And I think that when you think about when people have said, how do you become level five? I never felt I had a great answer for that. I had some good answers. I think this study gives the answer. It's in chapter 11.

Andy Stanley (29:00):
Yeah. It's an understanding freedom as the choice of a responsibility that I choose and holding myself accountable to it.

Jim Collins (29:06):
That's right. And it's something that still fits your encodings, your giving of your encodings, it feeds your fire and you're choosing it and it's a real responsibility. That's the path to level for.

Andy Stanley (29:19):
And it's an outward focused responsibility. That's amazing. Okay. Now I want to read just a random quote that I love by your wife. This is from Joanne. Okay. And the reason I love this, I'm going to brag for just a minute. I love this statement. This is what I wrote in my notes. I love this statement from Joanne because I thought I was the only person who thought this way. So I've never said this publicly because I thought I'm probably wrong, but your wife said it, so I'm going to be more bold. Here's what she said. You were talking to her about legacy and why you didn't talk much about legacy and you need to give more thought to legacy. And she said, and I quote, speaking of legacy, it's a waste of time to think about your legacy or how you want To be remembered, Joanne said, "It's self-centric and distracts from doing what's right in front of you.

(30:06):
Besides, you won't be here to enjoy it anyway." I think that is so true because when people start thinking about what's my legacy going to be, I'm like, "Just do what you're supposed to do and let other people determine what you're..." I don't know. I just love that. So you can thank her for that.

Jim Collins (30:24):
Well, I thank her for that too, because it was part of spinning around in the saddle to always be looking forward. And there's actually the end of that chapter of choosing responsibility is about the dangerous lure of legacy and all this worry about legacy and what's going to happen after. And actually one of the things I closed that chapter with a paragraph, which is basically the real questions in front of you are what responsibilities can you choose even if you receive no credit? What can you help make happen that might not otherwise happen, but for you, what responsibilities can you choose that fit your encodings? And changing the question from what do you want your legacy to be after you are gone to what responsibilities will you choose right here, right now with the limited time you have left on this earth.

Andy Stanley (31:20):
Big questions.

Jim Collins (31:21):
And that was Joanne's question. She was like, "Why would you take your eye off of what's right in front of you? "

Andy Stanley (31:27):
Why would you spin around in the saddle now? I love that. So you brought this up. So you closed the book with a series of questions and I worked through all of them as I mentioned earlier and a couple of them I'm still working through. And I just want to say this again, without going into detail, two of those questions gave me immediate clarity around a big decision I've been wrestling with. And what it did for me, the question pulled me back into frame because I was trying to solve a problem or answer a question out of frame. And getting back into my frame, I had almost instant clarity about something I was approaching completely wrong. It was that catalytic, that powerful. So I just wanted to say thank you for that. And I'm telling you, for the people who get this book, after reading the book, working through those questions, you're going to walk away with greater clarity, steps to move out of the fog.

(32:22):
When cliffs come, you won't be shocked and you won't be knocked out of the saddle to go back to the other metaphor.

Jim Collins (32:28):
Well, I think Andy, I just want to underscore something that you highlight there, which is that as you mentioned in our very first conversation, this book doesn't give people prescriptions. It has a few cautionary things like don't make big irreversible decisions when you're in the fog and stuff like that, but it doesn't end with a bunch of like, okay, now here are the 10 steps or anything like that. Basically it gives you questions that flow from the research. And interestingly, what I hope is in some ways people that the questions even recede into the background that what really happens is that they wrestled with them and that then maybe ultimately they had conversations with people they love about them.

Andy Stanley (33:12):
That's why I love the fact that Sandra is reading. In fact, she'll finish up the book probably the next couple of days because she started a couple days behind me. That's why I love the fact she's reading this book with me that we've been able to talk through it and so many of the concepts and the terminology, you've created some terminology about things everybody's experienced, but if you don't have terminology, you can't talk about it with somebody else. You've given us some phrases and some concepts and terminology. I think we're going to carry with us probably through the rest of our marriage in this book because they've been so catalytic and they're so memorable, which makes them portable, will carry them along with us. Any last things you want to say before we wrap this up?

Jim Collins (33:50):
Just I would love to express my gratitude to you for one, really engaging with the book itself. And as you've written many books yourself and you know that the ultimate currency is about having wonderful readers who the book becomes theirs.

(34:10):
At this point, it's your book and it's not my book, it's your book. And as somebody who spent all these years on that, it gives me a tremendous satisfaction that you engage so richly with it. And that's what I really, really hope is that people engage and have conversations. I intend to be going for many more years. I'm 68, right? I'm a litle past my warmup. I guess I'm into the full force now and I'll have other questions I am sure that will eventually reach me. But with this one, if by some strange reason this ended up being the last thing I ever did, which I fully don't expect that to be, I've got great health, but if it did, I'd feel like it'd been a really, really worthy one to end with and I really want to share it with people. And then of course I'll extend out and circle back to what comes next, whatever that next big question will be.

Andy Stanley (35:04):
Wow, that's amazing. The book is What To Make of A Life by Jim Collins. And if you aren't already convinced that you need to pick it up, just go get the book, download it however you get your book. Sandra and I always read on a Kindle now because we can mark it, we can notate it, we can word search it. So anyway, we love this book. Jim, thank you so much for giving us this much time to our podcast listeners. Thank you so much for listening. Before we leave, we do have one ask and that is to subscribe to the podcast. If you subscribe, you allow us to continue to grow the audience, which allows us to keep improving and bringing you great guests like the on we've had for the last two episodes. Also be sure to visit theanystanley.com website where you can download the Leadership Podcast application guide that includes a summary of this discussion plus some questions for reflection either for you individually or for your team and join us next week for our reverb episode where Suzy and I will dig even deeper on this topic on the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast.