To My Magnificent Agents, Staff and Friends:
Ever since I was in grade school I’ve been a history buff. A lot of it had to do with the myriad tales of courage, sacrifice, and honor I found when exploring the past. I wasn’t alone. The heroes of my childhood, as it was for most of my contemporaries, were primarily taken from both the real world and fiction. They included names like Davy Crockett, Audie Murphy, Ivanhoe, Nathan Hale, Geronimo, Prince Valiant, Gen. George Custer and the Daniel Boone to name a few.
During the summertime, my parents would banish me from our house just after breakfast and admonish me not to come home (except for a quick luncheon sandwich) until sunset. I would gather with the neighborhood “gang” and commence role-playing the adventures, battles, victories and defeats of our chosen idols of the moment. In our “battles” it was understood that there would always be winners and losers. The fact that you might fall in such conflict was not only accepted, but relished. One would suffer a mortal wound, only to rise up as another hero and continue the skirmish. Failure and losing was accepted as a normal part of our quests. There was no irreparable shame associated with either. You just got up and carried on to ultimate victory.
Today things are so much different, and not, in my humble opinion, for the better. There is a vocal part of our society today that is embracing and pushing the philosophy that failure and loss should be eliminated. They believe that grading anyone on anything only diminishes their self-esteem. Anyone who loses is entitled to win and there is nothing positive, empowering or noble associated with confronting and battling in the face of struggle to achieve victory. Leadership expert and author, John Maxwell, poses this question, “Why are some individuals able to fight off handicaps and hardships, only to fail forward, not backwards?” He answers his own question by stating, “I know of only one factor that separates those who consistently shine from those who don’t: The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of, and response to failure.”
Perhaps you’ve never heard his name before, but Artic explorer, Ernest Shackleton was a renowned leader who failed forward to greatness. In 1902, he undertook his first mission to the South Pole. Battling extreme cold and horrendous elements, he broke down with sickness and was forced to abandon his expedition and return home shortly after he had started. He had failed miserably, but he did not give up. He remained undaunted.
In 1908 he returned to Antarctica determined to reach the South Pole. This time, he and his crew a record south latitude, only 112 miles from the South Pole. Fighting starvation, near the end of his trek, Shackleton and his team were forced to survive on rations of a biscuit a day. Forced to abandon his quest again. He returned to England determined to continue, despite his failures, to achieve his ultimate goal. In 1914 he tried again.
Despite his considerable investment in research and planning, this journey began to unravel early on. Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, carrying the main body of his expeditionary team became frozen solid in an ice flow and broke apart. Shackleton and his men were forced to abandon ship and floated on ice floes drifting aimlessly with only a hope that they would drift to some land mass. Five months later, the ice flow broke in half and Shackleton ordered his men to embark in their emergency lifeboats for the nearest land. After five harrowing days at sea, they finally reached land – an cruelly inhospitable swatch of land named Elephant Island. According to Shakleton’s diary, they had not touched solid ground in 497 days.
Knowing that they could not survive for long on the island, Shackleton assembled a few of his crew and set sail for South Georgia Island, a small island with whaling stations where they could find food, shelter and provisions to return and rescue those that remained on Elephant Island. The precious little provisions that could be spared for this attempt meant that if they missed the tiny island of South Georgia, surely they would die.
Thanks to the navigational skills of Shackleton and miraculous good fortune, they did make it to the southern tip of South Georgia Island. Now they had to journey over mountainous, unchartered terrain to reach the nearest whaling station. Shackleton took two of his men and set off. After 36 harrowing hours, they arrived at the station. Shackleton wasted no time. He immediately began outfitting a small ship to return for both the crewmen who remained on the southern tip of the island and the main party on Elephant Island. After more than a year at sea, everyone was safely rescued. Not a man was lost.
Shackleton never reached the South Pole or completed his transcontinental expedition, but, despite multiple failures, his remarkable story of human strength, audacity, stamina, determination and survival became an inspiration for future explorers and leaders. When reporting on their journey, one of his surviving crewmen was quoted as saying, “When disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
One last observation–before embarking on his expedition, Shackleton placed the following ad in a London newspaper looking for men to accompany him:
If this ad ran today. How many would answer and apply? Would you? In his time, Shackleton received many more applicants than he needed to crew his expedition. It begs the question, are we a better society today? Are we now just an average people instead of an achieving people? Have we lost our ability to embrace failing forward to success? I pray not. I pray for Shackleton!
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure … than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Have an AWE-full weekend!
Bill