“As you discover something you are encoded for and you love doing it, then you can’t help but want to do it more, which means you can’t help but get better at it, which means you can’t help but move toward the intrinsic satisfaction of excellence in what you do.”
These words are from this month’s feature book, Jim Collins’ What to Make of a Life.
Over ten years, Collins and his team studied 34 remarkable lives in 17 matched pairs — two people who faced the same kind of cliff, then chose differently. He’s careful not to rank them; this isn’t a contest over whose life turned out “better.” What he’s after is the pattern underneath, and it keeps coming back to one thing: whether each person found and followed their encoding.
Collins uses the word to mean something larger than DNA and bigger than the “follow your passion” we hear at commencements. Encoding is a changeable, lifelong adjustment to what genuinely drives your interest and your sense of self.
Keeping in mind that excellence is a relative term, my own first encoding arrived by accident — a summer job on a congressional campaign. Summer turned to fall, I was making money and thrilled by the work, and when I went back to college I changed my major to Political Science. For once, my grades reflected my interest.
I’m still identifying my encoding.
Collins studied famous people because they’re the ones with enough written about them to study. But he believes, as I do, that following your encoding matters just as much for the rest of us.
As an anxious adolescent, I found that music calmed me — focus and expression, both at once.
As an anxious adult, I was surprised to find the same calm in silence, through meditation.
Running, which I despised as a boy, became forty minutes alone to think and, every other day, to pray — forty years of it, quietly building both my body and my mind.
Reading and writing came to me as a legacy from my mother and have given me a steadier understanding of myself and the world.
And the outdoors, in nearly any form, has always fit; pursuits such as boating, golf, running again, and riding in open containers — motorcycles and convertibles.
The encoding that changed everything, though, announced itself when I was desperate.
It was 1988, and I was running out of time to find the right job. The outplacement office gave me a behavioral test, and the result was not subtle: teaching and consulting were, by a wide margin, my greatest natural assets. So I made a plan. If nothing better came along by summer, I’d open a one-person consulting shop and bet on myself.
Nothing better came along. Contract Marketing opened on July 4, 1988.
I chose the date for the symbolism — this month marks thirty-eight years – an independence day in more than the obvious sense. That is, the day I stopped waiting for someone to hand me the right job and started building one out of what I was encoded to do. Everything that followed traces back to that small, frightening, stubborn decision.
So — what’s your encoding? Whether you’re at the beginning of your working life, the middle, or long past it, finding your best self and pursuing it is the only sure path to happiness I know. Doing something every day that has meaning to you — not to anyone else — beats every other thing I’ve tried.
Even riding in open containers.
Peace,
Tim McCarthy
