I am travelling this week, reading more than working, which is its own kind of honest. The book I'm listening to is Jim Collins' new one, What to Make of a Life, and it has been doing the thing the best books do, making me uncomfortable in a useful way.
The idea that is interesting for me is what Collins calls an encoding. Not a strength you build through training, but a durable capacity that is already in you, waiting for the right conditions to switch on. He says, and his research backs it, that most of us carry more of them than we will ever discover in a lifetime. The work is not to invent yourself. It is to notice what clicks.
So how do you notice? Collins points to a practice a mentor gave him in his twenties, what he calls the bug book. You carry a notebook and you observe yourself without judgment, the way you would study a bug, and you just take notes. He still does a version of it. Every night he logs the day in a spreadsheet, counts his creative hours, and scores the day from minus two to plus two. Do that long enough and the pattern shows up. The days that score high have something in common, and that something is pointing at an encoding.
I contemplated this because I already keep a version of it, but not in the way that Jim speaks about it. A gratitude journal most mornings, a daily log, years of meditation behind it. I had the data. I had just never read it back the way Collins reads his.
So I read it honestly. My plus-two days are not the days I invoice the most. They are the days I used a bit of high agency to make something happen, and the days I talked to a person and turned a conversation into a relationship. Not the spreadsheet. The phone call, and the thing built right after it.
And the days those two things point hardest at are not the client work. They are the days I do something for the fund we run in my son Finn's name. High agency and talking to people, aimed at him. On the evidence of my own scoring, that is not a thing I do when the client work goes quiet. It is the thing the encodings are for.
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Day 101 of 365.