What you were built to do

Grit, grace & growth: Part one of a continuing series on encoding, purpose, and the long arc of a life well worked

By Jerry Bilicek

Jim Collins has spent decades studying the architecture of extraordinary lives. Not famous lives. Not lucky lives. Lives that were aligned — people who found, or eventually discovered, the work they were built to do.

His newest work, “What to Make of a Life,” introduces a concept that stopped me cold the moment I encountered it.

He calls it your encoding.

Not your résumé. Not your job title. Not the identity the market gave you.

Your encoding is the constellation of wiring inside you — the way you naturally think, work, create and lead. It’s your operating system. And Collins argues, through meticulous research across dozens of extraordinary lives, that most people carry their encoding their entire lives without ever fully reading it.

That idea landed differently for me than it might for someone without 45 years in agricultural inputs. Because farmers understand something about soil that most business people have forgotten:

Different ground is built for different things.

You don’t fight the soil. You read it.

Constellation within you

Collins uses Toni Morrison as one of his study subjects. What emerges isn’t just a portrait of a great novelist — it’s a map of how she actually worked.

She rose before dawn, writing as the darkness gave way to light. She went “underwater” on projects, losing herself completely. She wrote compulsively, not as discipline but as necessity. She heard the words before she wrote them. She saw herself as reader No. 1.

None of those traits were taught to her. They were in her.

Collins calls these operating modes — and together they form a constellation. No single star tells you much. But when you step back and see the full pattern of how you think, how you work, what energizes you, and what you can’t stop doing even when no one is watching — that is your encoding.

The same principle holds across his entire study, from Barbara Tuchman’s curiosity-driven historical storytelling to Barbara McClintock’s patient, obsessive work in genetics. Each person carried a specific and irreplaceable way of being in the world.

And here is what Collins found in the data:

Most people don’t fully activate their encoding until their 30s — or later. Some not until their 40s, 50s, or beyond. Morrison’s first novel came in her mid-30s. Her Nobel Prize came at 62.

Tuchman’s breakout book arrived when she was 50.

McClintock won the Nobel at 81 for work she had been doing, largely unseen, for decades.

The encoding was always there. It was just waiting for the right conditions — or the right season.

What the chains have to do with it

I’ve written recently about two kinds of chains that hold us back.

One kind is forged from failure — repeated discouragement that teaches us effort doesn’t matter. We stop raising our hands. We assume the word is impossible even after it has become solvable.

The other kind, more insidious, is forged from success. We build a system around what worked. The system hardens into an assumption. The assumption becomes invisible.

And before long, we’re defending a formula instead of asking the better question: What would actually create the most value here?

Both kinds of chains do the same damage. They pull us away from our encoding.

They substitute the identity the world gave us for the identity we were built to inhabit.

Collins’ research quietly insists on something radical: the encoding doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t expire. The wiring is still there, waiting to be read — and acted on.

My father used to say: “If it’s stuck, you’ll figure out how to unstick it.”

He meant equipment buried in gumbo soil.

But every time I encounter someone who feels like they’ve lost the thread of their purpose — like the work they were born to do has somehow passed them by — I hear that saying differently.

The encoding isn’t buried. It’s just waiting for someone willing to look.

Question for you to sit with

Collins frames the central task of a well-lived life as a question of self-knowledge: Do you know your own encoding well enough to build a life around it?

Not the encoding the industry assigned you. Not the one your first job shaped. Not the one that got you to where you are.

The one that was already there — before all of it.

In the coming installments of this series, we’ll go deeper into Collins’ framework and what it means practically for those of us in agriculture, energy and industrial markets — industries where the pace of change is reshaping not just the business landscape but the very identities of the people who built it.

For now, I’ll close with the question I keep returning to:

If you stripped away every title, every credential, every system you’ve built — what’s still left? What would you still be doing?

That might be your encoding.

And it might be the most important thing you’ve never fully named.

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Jerry Bilicek is Founder & Managing Partner of Iron Acre Group, a strategic advisory firm serving agricultural inputs, specialty industrial, and energy infrastructure sectors. His Grit, Grace & Growth content series blends personal memoir, agricultural metaphor, and business strategy. This piece is Part One of a continuing series exploring purpose, encoding, and the long arc of a life well worked.

“If it’s stuck, you’ll figure out how to unstick it.”