Language shapes thought.
When Jim Collins began his research for Good to Great, he explicitly told his team to avoid focusing on leadership. He was skeptical of attributing too much success to individual leaders. After all, if a company succeeds, we call its leader great; if it fails, we say they weren’t. A circular logic that teaches us nothing.
But his research team pushed back. They saw something different: a specific type of leader who combined fierce professional will with personal humility. They were cut from different cloth.
This tension between initial assumptions and empirical findings is what drew me into Collins‘ conversation with Tim Ferriss. Not just for its insights about leadership, but for what it reveals about the systems that drive excellence, whether in organizations or individuals.
Through their two-and-a-half-hour discussion, a pattern emerged: the same principles that transform companies can reshape how we approach our own growth and decision-making.
The Mathematics of Creative Work
Collins approaches personal excellence with the precision of a mathematician. When starting his career, he sought advice from respected academics about time allocation. The answer was consistent:
“50, 30, 20. 50% of your time in new intellectual creative work, 30% of your time in teaching, and 20% of your time in other stuff that just has to get done.”
Instead of treating this as loose guidance, Collins built a rigorous tracking system. He counted creative hours daily, maintaining a rolling 365-day total that must exceed 1,000 hours. As he explains:
“Every single 365-day cycle. Every single one. Every single day, if you calculate back the last 365 days, the total number of creative hours must exceed 1,000.”
Beyond productivity; it’s about understanding the relationship between input and output. Like a company’s financial statements, these numbers tell a story. They reveal patterns, highlight inefficiencies, and most importantly, they create accountability.
But Collins didn’t stop at tracking time. He developed what might be his most intriguing system: a daily check-in using a simple +2 to -2 scale.
Tracking What Matters
The genius of Collins’ approach lies in its simplicity. Each day, before bed, he records three things: what happened that day, his creative hours, and an emotional score from +2 to -2.
“But when you’re in that other place, it’s not, it doesn’t feel that way,” Collins explains. “And so what I started to do is I started creating a code, which is plus two, plus one, zero, minus one, minus two… A plus two is just a great day. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t that it might not have been a really difficult day… but it felt really good.”
The timing is crucial. As Collins notes,
“if I were to ask you right now, 17 days ago, or even five days ago to give the score, you’re going to be distorted by how you’re feeling today.”
This real-time recording prevents our current state from coloring our perception of the past.
But the real power emerges when you analyze the patterns. Collins sorts his spreadsheet to understand what characterizes his +2 days versus his -2 days. He approaches this analysis like an operations researcher, using what he calls “the simplex method”, finding optimal solutions through iterative steps rather than trying to solve everything at once.
“I want more of the things that create the plus twos and less of the things that create the minus twos,” he explains. “But the difference that’s helped me is I know what they are. And I can start – it’s not that life is never perfect, but you can do a simple more of this, less of that.”
His patterns revealed two seemingly contradictory components of his best days:
“One is the solitude of really hard work… I get up, I never leave the house. And I basically get to just lose myself in the research, or in the writing, or in the making sense of things. It’s a very incredible simplicity of the day.”
As he reflects on what makes life meaningful at 61, Collins distills it down to three essential elements:
“I think about life as having three things at least I think are really important. And one of them is increasing simplicity, just sheer simplicity. Two is time and flow state. And flow state’s not even easy. And the third is time with people I love.”
This insight didn’t come from philosophical musing; it emerged from the data. By tracking both his creative output and emotional state, Collins discovered that his best days often combined focused work with meaningful connections. The spreadsheet became more than a productivity tool; it became a mirror reflecting what truly mattered.
The system also revealed surprising insights about sleep and performance. Rather than fixating on daily sleep targets, Collins learned to think in cycles:
“What I learned from this little journey… is it’s actually the number of hours that you get over, say, a 10-day cycle. So if you go off and you do a big climb, like when Tommy and I did our climb on El Cap together and do it in a day, that means 24 hours. You’re going to be awake for 36 hours… You can perform at really high levels with zero sleep over a day. You wouldn’t want to do it over 10 days, though.”
This systematic approach to tracking and analysis challenges our usual way of thinking about productivity and well-being. Instead of chasing daily metrics or quick fixes, Collins shows us how to build a sustainable system for understanding our own patterns and making better decisions.
The Flywheel Effect
This systematic approach to personal development mirrors what Collins discovered in his research of great companies. Success rarely comes from dramatic transformations or singular breakthrough moments. Instead, it emerges from consistent, well-executed actions that build momentum over time.
“And so it’s like if you’re watching an egg, right, and nothing’s happening, it just looks like an egg is just sitting there and all of a sudden it cracks open and out jumps a chicken. Well, you could have a big thing, a radical transformation of egg into chicken and visionary leader transforms egg into chicken. But what’s it look like from the chicken’s point of view? It’s just kind of one more step after a whole bunch of stuff that’s been happening inside the egg that you couldn’t see until it cracks open.”
This is the flywheel effect in action. Every tracked creative hour, every emotional check-in, every analyzed pattern becomes a push on your personal flywheel. As Collins explains:
“You start pushing on the flywheel and after a lot of work, you get one giant, slow, creaky turn and then you don’t stop… They eventually get four. They start to add upon each other. And then eight and 16 and 32 and 64 and 100 and 1,000 and then 10,000 and then 100,000.”
The alternative is what Collins calls the “doom loop”: the constant search for quick fixes and dramatic transformations:
“You are grasping for some sort of salvation, a new savior, a new program, a new strategy, a new direction… because things aren’t working. And because it really doesn’t have underlying flywheel logic to it, it doesn’t really get any traction. There’s a burst of hope and, well, gosh, maybe this will really work. And then that’s false hopes dashed by events.”
Building Your Own Flywheel
What makes Collins’ approach so compelling isn’t just its systematic nature, but its fundamental insight: the same principles that drive organizational excellence can transform our personal lives. Whether it’s tracking creative hours, monitoring emotional states, or analyzing sleep patterns, the goal isn’t perfection, it’s understanding.
“Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.”
His advice about decision-making captures this perfectly:
“Don’t make a hundred decisions when one will do.”
Many of our daily choices and challenges are variations of the same core decisions. By understanding our patterns, what truly makes a +2 day, what drives creative output, what builds sustainable performance. We can simplify these decisions and focus our energy on what matters.
The key is to start your own flywheel. It might begin with tracking creative hours or emotional states, analyzing sleep patterns, or simply noting what characterizes your best days. The specific metrics matter less than the consistency of measurement and the willingness to learn from the patterns that emerge.
After all, as Collins reminded us at the start, language shapes thought. And perhaps by changing how we measure and talk about our days, we can transform how we live them.