Exclusive: Jim Collins On ‘What To Make Of A Life’

Jim Collins is the author of a shelf full of the best business books ever written—Good to Great, Built to Last, How the Mighty Fall, Great by Choice—an unparalleled library of concepts that continue to shape how leaders think decades after he first published them. Hedgehogs and flywheels. Level 5 Leadership. First who, then what. Fire bullets, then cannonballs. Return on luck.

But at no point in his career has Collins pursued bigger questions—or embarked on a more ambitious research agenda—than he has for his latest book, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative (Harper Edge, April 2026). Ten years of research. Two years of writing. Thirty-four subjects drawn from across human endeavor—musicians, athletes, politicians, scientists, writers—studied in matched pairs to reveal how different choices at life’s pivotal moments produce radically different outcomes.

The result is part research project and part field guide to the examined life, a massive undertaking that transformed the way Collins views himself, other people and leadership. “My prior view of the world… had kind of this ‘worthiness hierarchy,’” he says. “And now I don’t look at it that way. It’s not about better, it’s about different.”

At a recent online event with Chief Executive Group, I got the chance to talk for an hour and a half with Collins, where he shared some of the key concepts from the book. Here’s a primer:

Encodings & Frames

Every person carries what Collins calls a constellation of encodings—durable, intrinsic capacities built into your construction, waiting to be discovered through the experiences of life. Think of it less as a list of strengths and more as a genetic code for what you’re capable of becoming when conditions are right.

The key variable isn’t your encodings themselves—it’s whether your current circumstances are drawing them out. Collins uses the metaphor of a window frame: At any given moment in life, you’re looking through a frame that either captures a “big, bright set” of your encodings, or it doesn’t.

When you’re in frame, things tend to work. When you’re out of frame—doing work that doesn’t engage your intrinsic capacities—you feel it. So do the people around you.

Astronaut John Glenn languished in high school chemistry and couldn’t make a varsity team to save his life. The day he got into the cockpit of a biplane, the frame shifted. Encodings built for spatial reasoning, calm under pressure and physical precision came firing through—and the trajectory of his life (pun intended) changed permanently.

Critically, there is no single right frame. Half of Collins’ subjects found one major “in-frame” role and stayed in it for decades (geneticist Barbara McClintock worked on the same maize genetics puzzles from age 20 to 90). The other half had serial in-frame lives—fighter pilot to senator (Glenn), NFL standout to Minnesota Supreme Court Justice (Alan Page). Both paths are valid. Neither is better.

The research fundamentally changed how Collins manages people. “I used to spend a lot of emotional energy feeling frustrated with what people are not. And most egregiously, I would sometimes feel incredibly frustrated that they weren’t more like me.” Now he focuses on finding the frame for each person—not fixing them—and his dominant emotion isn’t frustration. “It’s gratitude.”

Cliffs

A cliff is any event that ends life as you knew it—creating conditions so changed that you have to face the question: “What to make of a life?” all over again. It can be externally imposed or self-chosen, sudden or long anticipated. What defines it is that the old frame is gone.

Cliffs are universal. Collins tried to find subjects without them, as a methodological control. He couldn’t. “The odds that you’re going to get to the end of a reasonably long life without at least one major cliff are astronomically close to zero,” he says.

That isn’t inherently bad. What Collins found repeatedly is that cliffs can reveal encodings you never knew you had. Cardiss Collins (no relation) lost her husband in a plane crash—and inherited his congressional seat. She had never considered politics. Twenty-five years later, she was chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. The cliff knocked her frame to the side. Encodings she didn’t know existed came through the window.

Anticipatory cliffs are manageable. Alan Page took law classes while still playing in the NFL, watering a seed planted in childhood watching Perry Mason. When his athletic career ended, the fog phase (see below) was shorter because he’d pre-cleared some of it. Collins’ advice: If you can see the cliff coming, start preparing for what’s next before you go over.

Fog

After a cliff comes fog—a period of genuine disorientation, uncertainty and, often, loss of identity. Collins found it was nearly universal among his subjects and frequently underestimated by people who’ve never experienced it.

The fog is not a failure state. It’s a transition state—again, nearly universal. But it can last a long time, months, years, sometimes a decade.

The trap, especially for high-achieving executives, is that the discomfort of fog triggers premature action. “What can happen is they find the fog very uncomfortable, because they’ve actually had a long period of life leading their companies where they were not in the fog.” The result: They leap. They take another CEO gig. They join 18 boards. “Leaping just to get out of the fog can send you right over another cliff,” says Collins.

The right move is what Collins calls simplex stepping: Take the best step that’s visible right in front of you, without needing to know where you’re ultimately going. Then, from that new position, identify the next best step. Katharine Graham spent seven years simplex stepping her way into her leadership identity at The Washington Post—one small decision at a time—before the Pentagon Papers and Watergate gave her the chance to demonstrate what she’d become.

Feeding the Inner Fire—and Going Late

The third section of the book is the most counterintuitive and, for many CEOs, arguably the most immediately useful. Its central argument: Your most creative, most impactful, most fire-filled years are very likely still ahead of you.

Collins offers a striking data point: Across all the biographies written about Benjamin Franklin, who he studied for the book, 53 percent of the pages remain when Franklin reaches age 60. Even in an era of far shorter lifespans, more than half of what was most worth writing about Franklin hadn’t happened yet. “I kind of want everybody to reframe what 60 means,” says Collins. “Or 50 means. Or 70 means.”

The research subjects who burned brightest late in life shared a common practice: They continuously asked themselves what they would “choose to be responsible for.” Not what was obligated of them. Not what would burnish their reputation. What they would choose. He quotes Toni Morrison: “Freedom doesn’t mean the absence of responsibilities. Freedom means you get to choose your responsibilities.”

To feed this fire, Collins’ research suggests a looping process of reaching into genuinely new territory while drawing energy from established strengths, what he terms “extending out and circling back.” Robert Plant learned bluegrass, performed with trance musicians in Marrakesh, partnered with singer Alison Krauss—and picked up more Grammy nominations and wins after Led Zeppelin than during it. Collins sees his own chapter writing What to Make of a Life as an extend-out. The result: “I have more energy at 68 than 38,” he says.

Forget Legacy

Among the dozens of remarkable lives Collins studied, he found almost no evidence of subjects who were preoccupied with how they’d be remembered. They were preoccupied with what they were still responsible for. “Life is the ultimate punch card. Every punch, every few years, is a punch gone, and you don’t get them back—ever. So why would you spend your final punches worrying about how you’ll be remembered after you’re gone?”

Charles Colson didn’t try to rehabilitate his Watergate reputation. He chose a forward responsibility—prison reform—and worked on it until he collapsed. Franklin was still at it in the last years of his life, writing the first petition to Congress from an American organization calling for the abolition of slavery. “Your encodings are going to expire when you do,” Collins says. “Use them.”