“We have a punch card system. Any use of you is an investment. It's a punch and you can't get it back. It's irrelevant whether I'm free to give a speech on October 17. The relevant question is, do I have any punches left? One thing I've learned, I've come to see now at age 68, life is the ultimate punch card. If you end up spending five years or 10 years pulled away from what you're really encoded for in some way because of whatever sets of reasons, you can't get that punch back.”
“Irv said, it's not in your interest to have the option to come back. And I said, well, I thought options always have positive value. He said, no, options sometimes can have negative value. Because if you know you have the option to come back, it will change your behavior, the level of commitment. In low odds games, games where there's a very low odds of success, statistically, if you don't go 100% all in, the odds will be zero. So you're either looking at a 2% chance or a 0% chance.”
Joanne's Ironman cliff seeded the entire self-renewal study
“Joanne had a hamstring injury. And in the race it began to catch up with her. So she had this 10-minute lead with 10 miles to go in the marathon. And then there is this moment, I mean, I'll never forget the moment where she stops in the middle of the lava fields. And she reaches down and she sort of massages them and she kind of like pounds on her quadriceps and she looks up to the sky and it almost looked like she was pleading with somebody to help her somehow. And then she just kind of fixed her gaze on the horizon and there was this sort of stoic countenance that came over and she just started to move and then she started to run and she ended up winning a 10-hour plus race by about 90 seconds.”
Success means your spouse likes and respects you more over time
“Joanne and I, the ultimate hula, right? We got engaged four days after our first date. Your spouse knows you like no one. The measure for me is that Joanne will love me, unless I did something really stupid. Joanne will love me regardless, but will she like me more as the years go by? Will she respect me more as the years go by? If I had all kinds of external success, but I lost Joanne's respect, or Joanne woke up one day and was like, well, I actually don't really like you anymore. Yeah, that would be the worst possible kind of failure.”
Fire shifts from molten rage to sustained warming glow
“When I was younger, I had a lot of fire, but it was really painful fire. It was burning hot red molten lava in my stomach. Almost like channeled rage, channeled ferocity. And I used to worry that if I ever lost that, I'd lose my drive. And I think what's happened, I know what's happened, is the fire's changed. The fire used to be like this molten hot burning ferocity in the belly. And now it's like this, it's not red, it's, I think of it as green and yellow and it's like this sustained warming glow.”
“We were able to demonstrate that the big winners, the ones who had the huge outsized returns relative to their direct comparisons, did not get more good luck. They did not get less bad luck. They did not get bigger spikes of luck and they didn't get better timing of luck. So luck as a distributed variable was pretty even between those that were the huge 10x winners and their direct comparisons. So clearly luck didn't separate. And then that led to the observation that but it was the return on luck that when the luck came they had this amazing ability relative to the comparison to make more of the luck.”
Encodings beat strengths — trust them when they click into frame
“Encodings are these kind of durable capacities that reside within and they're awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. And first huge thing about encodings is, most of us, our lives will come to our end with probably vast swaths of our encodings never discovered. If you said, Jim, 100 points allocate between two buckets, how much of it is about discovering a set of encodings and how much of it is about trusting the encodings you've discovered? I'm going to put 70 points on trust because I think we're getting clues all the time.”
“What's the arrow of money? Are you doing what you do to make money? Or do you need money to do your work? Is money fuel back to the flywheel? What I found with our people is if they'd flip the arrow of money that the only purpose of money is to be able to do what I'm encoded for, that feeds the fire, that that's the point of it, so I never have to stop. Then you have a very different relationship to success when it comes.”
“Toni Morrison, doesn't even become a writer until her 40s. She comes into frame as a writer. She doesn't publish Beloved till she's 56. She doesn't publish jazz until 61, which is an astounding thing. And then she just goes on and she does about half of her contributions after the age of 60. And there's no evidence. Anybody want to say that, well, Toni Morrison was slowing down when she did Beloved because she's after 50? No.”
Joanne describes life with Jim in one word: exhausting
“So we're at breakfast, and he says, I have one real question I really want to ask you. So if you could just pick one word to describe what it's like to live with Jim, what one word would you use? I'm sitting there waiting for the answer. I'm always an adventure-inspired, energizing, creative, right? All these things are going through my mind as possible. She gets one word, and after a long pause, she just kind of looks at him completely serious, completely just straight, single answer, exhausting.”
