#856: Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Welcome back to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm Tim Ferris. My first interview with Jim Collins is one of the most popular episodes of the podcast of all time. It is episode 361, titled Jim Collins, A Rare Interview with a Reclusive Polymath. And I believe it was his first ever podcast, first ever long-form podcast for sure. I'm very excited to bring him back. But first, who is Jim? Jim is the author of multiple mega bestsellers, including Good to Great, with more than 11 million copies sold worldwide, all exploring the big questions of leadership and life. He also practices what he preaches. His own personal protocols and routines and tracking are second to none. It's pretty remarkable. His brand new book is What to Make of a Life, subtitled Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. You can also catch Jim live, which is incredibly, incredibly rare, on April 9th at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. So just hop on Google or somewhere else to find the details for that. You can find the links to everything we discussed in the show notes for this episode at tim.blog/podcast. Without further ado, please enjoy the one and only Jim Collins. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Jim Collins** (1:20)
Can I answer your personal question?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:39)
Jim, so lovely to see you yet again.

**Jim Collins** (1:42)
Absolutely. I really, truly just revel in the idea of a conversation with you.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:47)
We've had two previous dances, and I wanted to thank you slash blame you for a very difficult morning, because I had done lots of research and reading, certainly on your latest work, which took quite a tour of duty to complete. And I decided that this morning I would go back, starting early with a lot of coffee, to reread the transcripts of our prior two conversations. And typically when I do something like that, I have a few highlights, a few marginalia to refer back to, and I ended up underlining about 50 different things, and it caused a bit of a crisis in terms of where to start and what to do. But I do have a lot of notes in the latest work, What to Make of a Life, and we will certainly get to that, but we're gonna meander all over the place. And I wanted to start with, and I'm paraphrasing here, but a line in this new work, which is effectively that you have more energy at 67 than 37, you are now 68 And I wanted to dig into that for a minute or maybe even a few minutes, because looking back at the last two conversations, I wanted to spot gaps in the terrain.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:07)
What had we not discussed?

**Tim Ferriss** (3:09)
And I wanted to look at some of maybe the mundane things related to routine. Food, do you consume caffeine? Are you still rock climbing? Maybe we'll start with rock climbing, because I just had elbow surgery and I'm looking to get back into it. Are you still climbing?

**Jim Collins** (3:27)
Not so much. I've been doing cycling with Joanne. She got me into going off to Italy and the Dolomites and places like that to do these huge mountain passes. And it's something we can share together with whatever years we have left. And I think that maybe the intense aerobic aspect of that, you know, if you have your heart rate above 160 for an hour, two hours, and spiking into the 170s, I think that does something for you. I'm not sure what, but I actually think that's part of it. And then I just have other ways. I can't really explain entirely. In fact, my team has heard me say multiple times, where's all this energy come from? Because it's only increased. I really do feel that I have more energy. I had a lot of energy at 37
I had a lot of energy at 17 I have more energy at 67 when I wrote that 68 now. I need less sleep. My clarity, if anything, I think, is higher. I really, really look forward to 4 a.m. Because that's the point at which I give myself permission if I'm awake to leap into the day. And it really is true that I will wake up and I will think to myself, please, oh, please, oh, please, let it be at least 4 a.m. so that I can get up and get going. And that is, it's hard to explain, but it's that sense of almost childlike anticipation to get up and get rolling is palpable. It's there almost every single day. Well, I do get one, we might have spoken about this in our first conversation, but I've always been a morning person. So I actually figured out how to get two mornings a day. And I'm just really fortunate that I have the ability to nap under any conditions, anywhere, at any time I can nap. And I was doing a talk once, and there was a few thousand people in the room, and they had a nice couch backstage, and I was supposed to go on, and I don't know, whatever it was, 30 minutes or something, and I laid down on the couch, and I just went bang, right out to sleep. I'm like, I'm dreaming. And I'm having a sleep, et cetera, and they come back and they look at me, and they're like, he's asleep, oh my goodness, he's supposed to be on, and like five minutes, and they shake me, and I'm like, okay, good to go. I can go to sleep immediately, and then I can wake up immediately, and then I can walk out 3,000 people, and I was asleep five minutes before. I don't know where that comes from. That's just a fortunate thing. But what that allows me is I get two mornings a day. I get first morning after a night's sleep, but then I get second morning, which is after a nap. And in fact, my team knows that I'll sometimes say to them, I'm going to go get ready for second morning, which basically is I'm going to go take a nap. And then I get second morning. And then I've learned really systematically what kinds of activities really fit with what times of day.