10 Life-Changing Lessons I Learned From Jim Collins
#8. Effective people take time every day to just think.
Jim Collins is a bestselling author of books, Good to Great, Great by Choice, and Built to Last, which combined sold more than ten million copies worldwide. He is a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick, and his works are often cited by businesspeople all around the world.
He is my hero, and here are then ten lessons I learned from him.
#1. The ‘Hedgehog Concept’
There is a famous Greek parable about a hedgehog and a fox. A fox does many things well, but a hedgehog does one job great: it rolls up into a ball and it invincible.
According to Jim Collins, if you want to succeed as a company or individual — you’ve got to be a hedgehog: do one thing great.
In the book Good to Great, Jim explains that companies do so by being at the intersection of three circles:
- Passion
- What the company is best at
- What drives their economic engine
But if you apply this same concept to yourself as an individual, you’ll have essential insights about what you want to do with your life.
Imagine three circles.
Circle 1: Passion
What are you passionate about? What are your deepest values? What are you good at? What is something you do and say, “Oh my God! Even if nobody paid me, I would still do this.”
Circle 2: Genes
What are you genetically encoded to do? There is a big difference between ‘being good at’ and being genetically encoded to do something.
When I was 16, my father really wanted me to attend a competitive maths school in Russia. I was pretty good at maths in my old school, so he decided that I should pursue this learning career further. After three years of failing at exams, I eventually got in the second-best maths school in Russia.
When I looked at my classmates, that’s when I learned the difference between me — someone who is ‘good at’ (better than average) math and someone who is genetically encoded or naturally talented at maths.
Find something you’re genetically encoded to do. The best way to do that is to ask your family members what you were always good at.
Circle 3: Usefulness
Because you’re not a company, you don’t have an ‘economic engine.’ But you do have something you could be useful in. What’s something where you can give value? What can you contribute to society? Where can you be helpful?
The intersection of these three circles — is something you should be doing with your life.
When I asked myself these questions, here’s what I came up with:
- Passion — writing. For many years nobody paid me for writing. But I still wrote.
- Genetics — teaching and inspiring. That’s not something I thought pursuing, but I noticed (and people told me more than once) that I am great at teaching and inspiring others.
- Usefulness — creating content, blogs, books.
Hence, my intersection would be teaching and inspiring people by creating written content. And that’s precisely what I am trying to do.
Imagine what the world would be if everyone did what they were meant to do.
What’s yours?
#2. Best days are the simplest ones
After listening to Jim Collins’s interview with Tim Ferriss, I was inspired by Jim’s life tracking method (In short, he used an Excel spreadsheet to track his daily activities and figure out what makes him tick). So I decided to adapt his system to my own needs and track myself too.
The beauty of tracking yourself is that it allows you to get to know you. There’s no one answer to everyone because you are wired differently than other people. What makes your best day — best, won’t make the same for the other person.
So I highly suggest you give it a try.
After 30 days of keeping track of my ‘day quality’, ‘sleep levels’ and daily activities, I sorted the spreadsheet by the quality and realized something important:
My best days were the simplest. And my worst days were those where I didn’t get enough sleep and didn’t do anything creative.
In that interview, Jim Collins talks about his own insights from this exercise.
The three simple life fulfillments that Jim Collins discovered to be the most important in his 40-year long career:
- More simplicity in life
- More time spent in deep work/flow state
- More time spent with loved ones
That’s it.
It wasn’t cars, money, houses, vacations, or fancy job titles. It wasn’t working yourself to death, or squashing your competition until they go out of business. It wasn’t about doing MORE. Maybe yours will be different, but I’ll bet you can’t go wrong with these three to start.
#3. No matter what happens, keep marching 20 miles
Jim Collins is an ardent rock climber. When Jim talked to one of the most famous rock climbers and asked him what made him successful, the rock climber replied:
“I can focus on and suffer for the BIG THING longer than anyone else.”
It wasn’t his knowledge. Nor was it his physical strength. It was perseverance.
And throughout his decade-long research, Jim Collins found something similar in the business world as well. In Good to Great, Jim talks about a concept (which I personally adore), called “20 Mile March”: no matter what happens, you march 20 miles per day.
If the weather is terrible and it’s raining outside, you march 20 miles. But if the weather is good, and it’s sunshine, you still march 20 miles.
The key to perseverance is about capping not only the bottom but the top as well.
If you want to stay in the game long enough (and that’s the key to success), you’ve got to keep going every day for a long time.
A lot of people make the mistake of burning them out too quickly.
If you find yourself struggling to get a big project done, or set up a business, or get anything you want, remind yourself: just keep marching, 20 miles per day.
#4. Fire bullets, then cannonballs
If you’re going to get anything extraordinary done, you will have to go to extremes. You will have to take risks. And you will have to make bets.
So the question is not whether you should or should not take risks. You will have to take risks.
The question is, where should you place the BIG bets. Because if you don’t place the big bets, then you won’t get exceptional results.
And the key to that is to calibrate your big bets by placing small bets at first. An uncalibrated cannonball is risky. A cannonball that was calibrated by firing bullets at first — is a calculated bet.
Think about business. The way you start a company is not by taking on massive debt and renting an office and hiring employees. It’s by testing the ideas first. You can launch a Facebook Ad campaign and drive $50 of traffic to your landing page where you describe your company’s idea.
If enough people click, “I am interested,” then you’re onto something.
There’s a famous 10,000 rule (which is or is not valid, but it doesn’t matter now). I suggest we adopt a 10,000 experiment rule and be like Thomas Edison.
(Is that the guy who invented the lightbulb?!)
No. He didn’t create a lightbulb.
Instead, he invented 9,999 ways of how not to create a lightbulb.
Experiment. Test.
Fire bullets. And only then cannonballs.
#5. Don’t confuse outcomes with decisions
We often confuse results with the decision-making process. I learned from Jim to separate the two.
There are good outcomes that come out of the right decisions. Everything is going great.
But sometimes, you can get good outcomes from bad decisions. You got lucky. And this reinforces bad choices even more, because now you think, “Ok, this worked, let’s try it again!” — and the more it works, the more likely you will repeat that bad decision until the luck stops, and you turn to 0.
And then there are bad outcomes that result from good decisions. You got unlucky. And it’s not your fault.
We often confuse outcomes with decisions and put the whole blame on our decision making.
A good way to separate the two is to draw a decision tree.
A decision tree has decision nodes — and each outcome (the end of the decision branch) always has a probability set to it. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try and no matter how accurate decisions we make, we still end up with a bad outcome.
#6. Never start with a vision
The Silicon Valley mentality is to start with a vision, “I want to make the world a better place.”
In an interview with Shane Parrish, Jim Collins talks about going the other way: not starting with a vision.
Instead, start with brutal facts.
Having a vision of where you want to go and hopes — is good. But always start with the brutal facts first. A vision can make things that are going bad look better than they are. And then you’ll neglect them.
On the contrary, having a stoic approach will help you see things more clearly.
#7. “You can either build great businesses or great ideas.”
Not everyone is an entrepreneur. Just like not everybody is a painter, a writer, a cook, etc. It all comes down to the hedgehog concept (Lesson #1).
And when Jim Collins had a defining moment in his life, he learned that too from Peter Drucker — the father of modern management theory.
When they met, Peter said something that at the time young Jim remembered for the rest of his life:
You see, Jim. You can either build great businesses or great ideas. You cannot do both.
And Jim learned that. To this point, he has less than five employees in his company. Yet, his books are selling tens of millions of companies worldwide.
I often think about this concept of not being able to do both. Yes, some might argue that people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos manage to do both, but I would disagree. These people build businesses — and ideas that they come up with are business ideas to be executed.
People like Jim Collins (and Peter Drucker, too), though, exist and contribute to society on a different level. They are teachers. They inspire us. And they help those that make decisions and build companies do so better.
This is a lesson in essentialism — doing what you’re best at, and only that.
When I went to Draper University entrepreneurship program, Tim Draper — the venture capitalist and billionaire, told me: “The decision you will have to make at some point is whether you’re an entrepreneur or someone who helps other entrepreneurs.”
It all comes down to knowing yourself and being true to who you are. Luckily for us, Jim Collins was true to himself all his way.
#8. Effective people take time to think
“There’s nothing less effective than doing effective something that shouldn’t be done at all,” — said Peter Drucker.
And he was right. Sometimes though, we should do nothing at all.
Jim Collins is famous for his habit of scheduling ‘white spaces’ in his calendar. In those white spaces, he reads, ponders, reflects, and thinks.
Shane Parrish, the founder of Farnam Street Media — talks a lot about the value of purposeful thinking. And Warren Buffett spends most of his time reading and thinking.
I believe that these people are, in many ways, successful thanks to this habit of daily thinking.
When was the last time that you turned off your phone to just look around and think?
#9. Leadership is not personality
We tend to associate leaders with famous people like Oprah, Steve Jobs, even Jim Collins. And then, like many people, we try to ‘decode their secrets to success’ and copy them. We push ourselves to be someone we’re not because we think it will make us more successful.
As the saying goes, if you’re trying to build the next Facebook, you’re not learning from Mark Zuckerberg. He (and many other extremely successful people) became successful simply because they were true to themselves.
And true leadership, according to Jim, doesn’t have to be charisma or any other inborn quality. Leadership itself is not personality.
Instead, real leadership is getting your persona, your ego, and you out of the way of a more higher cause. Real leadership is extreme dedication to a mission or a value that’s more than yourself.
Who will follow you as a leader, if it’s all about you? Instead, when you have a big mission — a cause that’s bigger than you are — people will readily jump on board.
#10. Be interested
Successful people also have mentors and heroes. One of Jim Collin’s heroes is John Gardener — an American politician and author of books on self-renewal, leadership, and excellence.
And the key lesson that Jim Collins learned from J. Gardener was to be interested.
Everyone wants to be interesting. But you become interesting by being interested first.
That’s a quote from a chapter called ‘Personal Renewal’ that my father and I reread every New Year’s eve.
“If you have any kind of obsessions,” says Jim, “it’s better if it’s curiosity.” Nothing starts until you have a question that you want to answer. And oftentimes you don’t pick the questions. Instead, they pick you.
Be open and curious. Let your questions pick you. And remember that in order to be interesting, you’ve got first to be interested.
Thank you for reading. Let me know in the comments if you want me to write about a specific person. And join my email newsletter to stay in touch.