What to make of a life? At first glance, the premise American researcher, author, speaker and business advisor Jim Collins poses in his latest bestseller seems simple enough.

For many executive leaders and founders, the story follows a familiar path: Earn the prestigious degree, build a career through years of hard work and leadership, or launch the company that changes everything in pursuit of success, financial security and the rewards that come with it.

But then what?

The day is just beginning in Sydney and coming to a close in Denver, Colorado when I connect with Collins to discuss his latest release and specifically, this question.

Yet before a single question is asked, we spend several minutes discussing early mornings, strategic napping and importantly, why every recording should have a backup.

“Two is one, one is none,” Collins says, matter-of-factly.

He’s curious about Australia and I’m curious about his routine. Somewhere between talking about Greyhound buses and Sydney ferries, it becomes obvious this conversation isn’t going to unfold like a typical interview.

Beyond good to great

For more than four decades, Collins has helped millions of leaders understand what separates good companies from great ones. But before we discuss his latest book, What to Make of a Life, he wants to know whether it changed me.

Did I find myself looking back over my own life through its lens? Did I recognize my own cliffs? Did the fog make sense now?

His questions were unexpected. But coming from one of the world’s most influential management voices, perhaps they shouldn’t be. After all, curiosity has been one of Collins’ most defining traits – or as he might say, ‘encodings’.

Long before Good to Great, he has been keenly interested in people – what shapes them, drives them and how some can emerge from life’s defining moments stronger and more fulfilled than others.

His latest work widens that lens.

“I thought this would be a project that I’d like to do, but I didn’t know it would end up taking 12 years,” he says, laughing. “But once I started, I couldn’t stop.”

Now after 10 years of research and two years of writing, What to Make of a Life is here. And unlike previous works, it’s less interested in building exceptional organizations than understanding the people who build them.

“I’ve always been fascinated with people,” he says. “The entrepreneurs, the leaders and the sheer human drama of what it takes to build a great organization.”

Inside the soft yellow glow of the book’s binding, Collins explores the inevitable ‘cliffs’ that shape and reshape us, the ‘fog’ that oftentimes follows and the hidden gifts he dubs ‘encodings’ that determine where we do our best work.

CEOs, founders and leaders will be glad to see that many of the principles that made him famous – getting the right people in the right roles, enduring leadership, disciplined thinking – are still there. But this time, they’re viewed through a more personal lens.

After all, before someone can build or lead a great company, Collins believes they first must understand the architecture of their own life.

Writing himself in

Although What to Make of a Life began as a project studying others’ lives, Collins reveals that while writing it, the spotlight inevitably turned to him.

Sure, the meat of the book distills his findings from systematically studying dozens of extraordinary people – writers, actors, scientists, leaders and more – looking for patterns in how they navigated success, failure, reinvention and profound change.

But the opening and closing: that’s where he leaves a bit of his soul on the pages.

“The story begins with a trip to New Mexico, where I discovered that my father would never be a father to me,” he reflects.

“That was just a shattering experience for me. I still picture being on that Greyhound bus with a sense that everything was heading into the fog of life – and I had no idea how to think about life at all.”

He didn’t immediately know the book would begin here. In fact, he initially had no clue. Collins admits he saves the opening chapters of his book for last.

So when the manuscript was nearing completion, he found himself confronted with a blank first page. He considered opening with one of the remarkable people he’d spent a decade studying, but none of them felt quite right.

Then another thought surfaced.

“There is one story that’s been with me this whole time,” he recalls thinking. “My life story.”

He couldn’t get pen to paper fast enough.

“I just started with my own story and once I began writing it, I still didn’t know if it’d be the opening,” Collins says.

Fifty critical readers later, the verdict was clear – the personal beginning needed to stay. And that one decision changed the entire tone of the book. Suddenly, rather than standing above the research as its narrator as he’d done so many times before, Collins became part of it.

He’s the first to admit the book has transformed him. One of the greatest revelations proved rather comforting.

“The fog is just part of the process,” Collins says. “It’s like a giant exhale. We all go through it and it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with us. We’re right where we’re meant to be.”

Fog, he insists then, is not failure. It’s simply what life looks like before the next chapter becomes visible.

The human advantage

If What to Make of a Life has a heartbeat, it’s the concept of encodings. And, according to Collins, they’re more nuanced than skills, gifts or personality traits.

“Encodings are durable capacities of our intrinsic construction that reside within us, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life,” Collins explains, noting that every person possesses their own constellation of them.

Life’s work then, he believes, lies in discovering where those encodings come alive. This idea has reshaped not only how Collins understands individuals but how he now thinks about leadership itself.

One of the book’s most compelling examples is astronaut John Glenn – a man who, during different stages of his life, was a decorated fighter pilot, astronaut, business executive and United States senator.

“When he’s an astronaut and an aviator, he’s so in frame with a big, bright set of his encodings,” Collins says.

“He’s like a lightning bolt. Then, other times in his life, he was less in frame.”

The distinction led Collins to a profound shift in his thinking.

“You can have the same person on the bus, but if you have them in the wrong seat, they can be like a lightning bug,” he explains.

“In the right seat, they’re like a lightning bolt.”

Anyone familiar with Collins’ earlier work will recognize the evolution of one of his most famous ideas. For years, leaders have quoted his principle of getting the right people on the bus.

Being the right person, it turns out, isn’t simply about capability. It’s about fit and whether someone’s role allows the brightest parts of who they are to shine.

“You can change the frame they’re in, but you don’t change them,” he says.

Hedging uncertainty

The philosophy feels particularly relevant as organizations wrestle with AI, rapid technological change and shifting workforce expectations. Collins, however, sees the current moment as less revolutionary than many suggest.

“It doesn’t matter what age we’re in,” he says. “Whether it’s AI or the advancement of microelectronics or the bringing forth of the automobile, we’re always being swept up with different kinds of technologies.”

Through that viewpoint, the leader’s responsibility then also hasn’t changed.

“If you can’t predict what’s coming, your best hedge against uncertainty are the people with you on the bus who can adapt to whatever changes come,” Collins says.

Admittedly, finding those people is only half the challenge. The harder, and perhaps most rewarding, task is creating an environment where they can truly come into frame.

“One of the most profound changes for me throughout this journey was the shift from once feeling frustrated with what people are not to suddenly feeling grateful for what they are,” he says.

Now, instead of focusing on gaps, weaknesses or unrealized potential, Collins looks for the unique brilliance already present within someone.

“I don’t spend my life trying to change people anymore,” he acknowledges. “I really look for what big, bright and beautiful set of encodings they do have.”

Trusting in encodings

The lesson is reinforced repeatedly through the book as Collins introduces remarkable people whose paths could not have been more different.

For example, computer pioneer Grace Hopper discovered she was encoded not only to solve technical problems but to also lead teams and transform the entire industry.

“They trusted their encodings, regardless of what anybody else thought they should be or do,” he says.

This is an area where, Collins believes, many tend to lose their way.

“We’re always discovering more things about our encodings as we go along,” he says.

Sometimes they reveal themselves through work, other times through unexpected opportunities and even through advice that resonates so deeply it feels impossible to ignore.

Returning to his own career, Collins describes being encouraged by professors to join a large corporation to learn how business worked. It was well-meaning advice, but at the same time, it was completely wrong for him.

“I really languished,” he admits.

By contrast, another mentor – the late John Gardner – offered a sentence Collins says he still carries with him today: “Don’t set out in life to be an interesting person. Be interested.”

The advice landed because, as touched on earlier, it aligned well with one of Collins’ deepest encodings, curiosity.

It explains why he was willing to spend more than a decade on a project without outside praise or recognition.

“I had no external market feedback, validation – none of it,” he says.

“What kept me going was the love of actually doing the work. Not the idea of doing it, but the actual joy that comes from the process.”

He turns the conversation to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Barbara McClintock, whose response to receiving the world’s highest scientific honor perfectly captures the mindset.

“It’s a tremendous honor, but it seems almost unfair to reward a person for having just had so much pleasure over the years,” he says, recalling her quote.

This, for Collins, is the ultimate expression of someone living in frame. The reward wasn’t the Nobel Prize, it was the work itself.

The art of leadership

The same concept applies to leadership. In fact, Collins now believes there’s no universal leadership formula because every leader is encoded differently.

He reaches for his favorite example, which is unexpectedly close to home – his wife Joanne Ernst. She never led through charismatic speeches.

As a former world-champion triathlete and successful cross-country coach, she motivated young athletes using spreadsheets and performance data tailored to each athlete.

“She led from her encodings,” he says. “She didn’t lead by copying other leaders.”

It’s one more reminder that leadership is less about style than authenticity. Or, as Collins now defines it: “Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. It’s an art, it’s not a science.”

And Collins doesn’t subscribe to the notion that only certain people can be leaders.

“The idea that there’s this special group of leaders and then there’s the rest of us, I have concluded, is absolutely wrong,” he says.

“To every single person, the question is not, are you a leader, but, in any given situation, are you leading?”

When success is a cliff

For someone who has spent a lifetime studying success, Collins has become surprisingly fascinated by what happens after it. In What to Make of a Life, perhaps one of the most confronting ideas is that success itself can become a cliff.

He believes it’s one of the least discussed transitions in modern leadership.

“They are in a role that fits them so well,” he says of CEOs and other senior leaders. “But here’s the thing, for most of them, that role is going to come to an end when they’re still young – because 65 is young.

“There’s this looming cliff that a lot of leaders and executives have coming.”

Essentially, one day, the title will disappear. The corner office will be gone. And the identity they spent decades building ends.

Too often, Collins believes, leaders mistake this moment as the end of their story.

“I see a lot of executives who have not prepared well for that,” he says.

“They sort of think the peak of their life happened in that CEO role when, in fact, it’s just the warm-up for what’s going to be the most spectacular part of their life.”

It’s one of the book’s most optimistic conclusions. Rather than encouraging people to protect what they’ve built, Collins urges them to remain open to what they’re yet to become.

The ROI of luck

The optimism is reinforced by another of the book’s central themes: luck.

Not luck in the simplistic sense of fortune or fate, but rather in the opportunities life unexpectedly places in front of us.

Drawing on earlier research with colleague Morten Hansen, Collins identifies three distinct forms: ‘what luck’, ‘who luck’ and ‘zeitluck’. The first is circumstance, the second is people and the third is being born into or finding oneself in exactly the right moment in history.

Looking back, Collins sees every one of them in his own life. There was a chance meeting with Stanford Professor Bill Lazier, who became what Collins describes as “the closest thing to a father I ever had.”

There was the unexpected opportunity to teach at Stanford Business School when another lecturer suddenly became unavailable just before the semester began.

“It was like being a pitcher way down in the minor leagues,” he says. “You’re in Yankees Stadium and the coach points to you and says, ‘Hey kid, grab a glove and get out there on the mound and pitch.’”

While luck created the opening, it was Collins’ preparation that determined the outcome.

“What really matters is the return on luck,” he points out.

This philosophy has guided some of the biggest decisions of his career. After the extraordinary success of Good to Great, Collins was presented with opportunities to build a global consulting empire around his ideas.

It seemed like an obvious next step to everyone – except Ernst, who drew on her deep understanding of her husband to advise him otherwise.

“She saw very clearly that yes, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but it would be the wrong opportunity for me because I’m not encoded for that,” he explains.

“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is merely a fact, it’s not a reason.”

For leaders constantly confronted by attractive offers, bigger titles and seemingly irresistible opportunities, this train of thought can be a powerful filter.

Just because something is exceptional doesn’t mean it’s yours. In fact, sometimes the greatest act of leadership is saying no – and staying in frame.

The legacy trap

Collins has similar ideas about legacy, a concept he’s grown increasingly skeptical of over the years. Studying dozens of lives, he noticed that very few of the people who ultimately left extraordinary legacies spent much time thinking about them at all.

They were too consumed in the work directly in front of them. Collins points to the illustrious architect I.M. Pei. He didn’t spend his seventies wondering how he’d go down in history. No, he had more important work to do like designing the Louvre Pyramid.

Then in his nineties, he created the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.

“He could have stopped,” Collins says.

“But what he really put his energy into is, ‘I have this next project.’”

The same is true for a long list of names, he says, bringing up novelist Toni Morrison, prison reformer Charles Colson and one of his mentors and famous management thinker Peter Drucker.

Drucker, he says, was once asked about the legacy he’d hoped to leave, leaving him a bit ruffled.

“He just got so irritated with the question,” Collins says, with a chuckle.

“Gesturing impatiently to the books on his shelf, he said, ‘All of this and I’m still working on it.’”

The answer delights Collins because it captures the essence of his book: that legacy isn’t something to chase. It’s something that quietly accumulates while your attention is on the task at hand.

A really good life

As our conversation comes to an end, I ask Collins the question that gives his latest book its title: What should we make of a life?

After more than an hour of discussing cliffs, fog, luck, encodings and leadership, he pauses for perhaps the longest silence of the interview.

“The way you answer the question of what to make of a life flows from encodings,” he answers finally.

“Trust your own encodings, what feeds your fire, what responsibilities you’re going to choose. It will be different for different people.”

“But I would say in my own case though, from what is deeply important to me encodings-wise and what really feeds my fire are the relationships with the wonderful people in my life – 50, 60-year friendships, a 45-year marriage and the wonderful people on my team.

“I may be a solitary person who loves to burrow away in monk mode, but I love what I do. And I also really love the people in my life. I feel truly grateful for them.

“And if I have a life with people I feel really grateful for, that is a really good life.”

Want to dive deeper into the ideas behind What to Make of a Life and the timeless principles of Good to Great? Join Jim Collins live in Denver, Colorado on Tuesday, 13 October 2026 for the Good to Great Immersion Workshop, an exclusive full-day experience exploring the research, frameworks and leadership insights that have shaped generations of executives around the world.

Special discount prices for The CEO Magazine readers are available before tickets sell out. Find out more and buy your tickets here.