Author Jim Collins on unlocking your potential

**Jim Collins** (0:06)
I used to believe much more in the idea of kind of having a life plan in some ways because I was very good at planning out objectives. But I now believe that a lot of really amazing lives unfold as a kind of an organic unfolding and highly, highly unpredictable process.
And I actually used to believe that if you didn't really find your one big thing by the age of 30, it was maybe too late. Looking at the lives in this study where some of them didn't find it till after that. I now believe actually, if you haven't found it by 30, the clock's not over.

**Jeff Berman** (0:51)
This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host.
Jim Collins is the author of some of the most important business books of all time, like Good to Great, Built to Last and others. For his latest project, he has done something a little bit different and much more personal. Instead of profiling iconic companies, he zoomed in on extraordinary individuals. The result is a stunning new book that I absolutely devoured called What to Make of a Life. Jim, welcome to Masters of Scale.

**Jim Collins** (1:22)
I feel very welcome.

**Jeff Berman** (1:24)
Well, you should, and you don't know this, but you have been very much inside my head for the last 20 years.
I spent the first decade of my career in public service. I came into the private sector at Myspace on my first day on the job. They were talking about CPMs, and if you're in media, you know what that means. If you're not in media, it's just Greek.
And I realized I needed a business education. I had a law degree, no MBA, no background in business. And the very first book I turned to was Good to Great. And it has formed a foundation of my learning journey in the business world. So as grateful as I am to get to talk to you and hear about the new book and all of it, I'm more than anything grateful to be able to say thank you to you for how much help you provided me in my journey.

**Jim Collins** (2:14)
Great. And one of the wonderful things about writing is that it's a very interesting, very solitary process when you're actually up at four in the morning and you're assembling research or putting sentences together or trying to figure out how to make concepts really come alive for people.
And then it becomes something that reaches people that you never even know that it reaches. And of course, I now know that it reached you. And that's a wonderful thing.

**Jeff Berman** (2:45)
One of the places that you have had a massive impact is a place of commonality for us, which is we are both Los Angeles Rams fans. And so I was on the phone this morning with my friends, Kara Henderson Snead and Les Snead. And for those who don't know, Les is the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. And they were telling me that for Les's birthday several years ago, she had arranged for a tea with you. And it was meant to be, in Les's memory, it was 15 minutes, whatever it was meant to be, it ended up going what sounds like three or four hours.
And Les credits you enormously with helping shape his leadership, leadership of the Rams, the culture that they've built there. What happened in the first 15 minutes of meeting with Les and Kara that inspired you to spend that much more time with them and then to really invest in the Rams' success?

**Jim Collins** (3:47)
Yes. Well, so first of all, dear friends, and they became friends, and I remember very vividly them coming to the lab and having a tea.
And I was just so taken with the application of the ideas to a world that I'd never directly connected with in terms of having impact of the ideas, of how you would build a really great and potentially lasting NFL flywheel of results, and how would that really work? But what I then really fell in love with as we got into the conversation, it was clear to me that they had taken the ideas from good to great, way back when they were just trying to become good. And as you know, the NFL is part of its magic is, it's really hard to have that sustained high level performance for all the forces.

**Jeff Berman** (4:43)
It's engineered for parity.

**Jim Collins** (4:45)
It's engineered for parity. Exactly. And so I was just taken with it and the spirit of it. And we had such a marvelous conversation. And if I remember it correctly, I just basically sort of stepped out and said to my team, clear the afternoon.