What to Make of a Life Quotes

“(whatever anyone else thinks about me is none of my business).”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“He cared far more about how God would assess the way he spent his life while alive than what people would think of him after he was dead.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“If you simply make the decision that you will choose responsibilities in line with your encodings and that you feel compelled (for whatever reason) to undertake, that very act will feed the inner fire. And with that, the fire can continue to burn from within, growing hotter as the years click by.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Which brings me to a useful method for reigniting the inner fire, especially in episodes of fog: the value of watering seeds planted earlier in life.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Richard P. Carlton, former CEO of 3M, once put it: You so often get where you are going by stumbling, but you can only stumble if you’re moving.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Courage, the saying goes, is not the absence of fear but the ability to act in the presence of fear.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“There is absolutely no point in dwelling on what’s past; there’s just too much energizing stuff yet to do.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“There is a big difference between being in love with the idea of one’s work and being in love with doing the work itself. It means not just the love in the 0.001% highlight moments; it means love in the other 99.999%.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“You don’t create encodings; you discover them. You don’t add encodings from without; you find them within.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“While playing in the NFL, Page began to discover encodings and forms of inner fire that would eventually be elements of his second hedgehog, as a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“But what happened surprised me. The fire did not cool down or disappear. The fire not only remained but increased, yet it felt different.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“The Changing Color of Fire While the fire remained burning hot long and late for the people in our study, the feel of that fire sometimes changed in a very interesting way: They gave themselves permission to have more fun. By “have more fun” I don’t mean that they took more vacations or time off to go have fun. Rather, they evolved to have more fun in doing what they were encoded for, more fun in the pursuit of excellence in a hedgehog.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“The Changing Color of Fire While the fire remained burning hot long and late for the people in our study, the feel of that fire sometimes changed in a very interesting way: They gave themselves permission to have more fun.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“I have a committee at home, aged 12, nine, six and one, and they’re the reason I never returned to the stage. They don’t care what I do all day as long as I’m home at night.” She didn’t get drawn into the consuming role of directing. She became increasingly selective in considering film projects that might take her away from home for big chunks of time. “Motherhood has a very humanizing effect,” she explained. “Everything gets reduced to essentials.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“When I described Streep’s Extend Out/Circle Back evolution to a friend of mine who worked for NASA as a rocket scientist, he lit up and drew me a picture. “It’s like a rocket using the gravity of a planet as a source of acceleration!”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“But when somebody experiences death, near death, you realize you’re all alone at the end. And I said I can’t do something another day that I won’t be completely fulfilled in.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“She worked her way out of the fog and into the clear by simplex stepping.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Imagine you’re trying to find your way to a destination, but you don’t know what that destination is. Imagine all you can see is a small 360-degree circle around you, and you cannot see possible steps beyond that circle. So, you simply take what looks like the next best step within that small circle.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“A Compass in the Fog”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“building,” Pei lamented. “It absorbs me completely and I can’t think of anything else. This may be a matter of hours or it may take as long as a month of sleeping badly, being irritable, sketching ideas and rejecting them. I am useless to everyone else. It is traumatic for my wife.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Some people were fired up by a cause or noble purpose, while others simply wanted to solve puzzles or make music. Some felt a burning ambition to achieve visible success or climb the highest peaks of power, while others sought mainly to be left alone to do their own thing. Some people simply wanted to create something exquisitely beautiful for its own sake, while others felt more fired up by making a social impact. Again, every person in the study differed from every other person in the study in how they were encoded and in what drove them.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative