Set Sail, Set Rhythm
I’ve recently been reading through the harrowingly incredible journey of the Endurance and her crew. First off, let me highly recommend it. What an amazing story. It is simultaneously beckons terror when consider what these men went through while also conjuring up that deep seated explorer that seems to lie dormant in many of us.
Amidst the crew’s various trials lie all sorts of lessons for life. Yes, even our normal lives in all the coziness that defines our experiences. The lessons from their extremities bear down on our comfortable, safe day-to-day’s all the same.
Here’s a quick context for you: After longer than a year of surviving on a floe in the Antarctic, floating through the ocean wherever the winds and currents decided, a subset of the men had launched out in hopes of doing the impossible: crossing the Drake Passage—arguably the most treacherous waters on Earth—while in a small, 22-foot wooden boat. Further, they were to not only survive such a brazen attempt, but aimed to do so whilst maintaining an accurate path to their island destination of South Georgia. All this despite the lackluster equipment used for tracking their location and the horrid weather conditions undercutting not only their actual progress but also the means of tracking their location, the sun’s position in the sky. You can check out this Google Map to put things a bit more in perspective.
Needless to say, the trip was beyond arduous.
After their roughest few days at sea, wrestling for their own survival amidst a three day gale, a passage I read this morning struck me with awe and surprise. I’ll quote the passage in full:
"The sight of the Caird presented one of the most incongruous imaginable. Here was a patched and battered 22-foot boat, daring to sail alone across the world’s most tempestuous sea, her rigging festooned with a threadbare collection of clothing and half-rotten sleeping bags. Her crew consisted of six men whose faces were black with caked soot and half-hidden by matted beards, whose bodies were dead white from constant soaking in salt water. In addition, their faces, and particularly their fingers were marked with ugly round patches of missing skin where frost-bites had eaten into their flesh. Their legs from the knees down were chafed and raw from the countless punishing trips crawling across the rocks in the bottom. And all of them were afflicted with salt water boils on their wrists, ankles, and buttocks. But had someone unexpectedly come upon this bizarre scene, undoubtedly the most striking thing would have been the attitude of the men…relaxed, even faintly jovial—almost as if they were on an outing of some sort."
While I don’t want to in any way make light of the unbelievable perseverance these men displayed during their journey, I can’t help but see overlap with the entrepreneurial spirit here.
The unknown, pitting your will to survive against all odds, and risking much—if not everything—is what draws entrepreneurs to their respective tasks. The safety of the cubicle simply isn’t exciting for them. A guaranteed pension is a guaranteed bore. But adventuring into the wild, on the other hand, calls to them. Things going from bad to worse is a daily exercise in patience and tenacity.
For those who answer that call, there must be an ebb and flow. Without such it is inevitable to falter in the task at hand. Seasons and rhythms must be employed if the journey is to be completed. At times they’ll come naturally and according to forces larger than ourselves, as was the case of our explorers above. In business, unlike a journey into and out of the Antarctic, these rhythms can be manufactured. And, again, for anyone wanting to make the long trek home, they must be.
If you’ve been battling day and night, have metaphorical blisters all over your hands from rowing against the winds and currents of competition, and are chilled to the bone from the waves of your specific market crashing again and again against your small ship of a business, then here are a few ideas to create some reprieve and sunny weather, however temporary it may be.
- Grab dinner and/or drinks. Coworkers need camaraderie. This is crucial if they’re to continue jumping in the foxhole together. With everything else chafing against you, the last thing you want is for the personalities within to be doing the same. Go out, have some fun, and remember that everyone is working towards a goal—a greater quality of life for themselves and their team—and not merely a bottom line.
- Celebrate. When the storms have passed there needs to not only be appropriate mending of the sails, but also a celebration, however small it may need to be, of the fact that you weathered it together. Weekly stand-ups are a great way to not only keep everyone attuned to the ever shifting landscape of your business, but also to celebrate together the victories, both large and small, that occurred throughout the week. Friday’s are an ideal time to do so. Don’t let the needs of the business, or even the customers, overshadow the need for the team to savor their victories at every turn.
- Look back to look forward. Similar to the above idea of celebratory stand-ups, doing retrospectives can be helpful for team focus as well as morale. The key difference between a retrospective and a general stand-up is the depth. A retrospective will take the requisite time to review the good and the bad of a given sprint (typically a week, two weeks, or month’s worth of work). This isn’t a chance for management to lambast employees or their work, but rather an opportunity for everyone to agree on what went right and what has room for improvement. This helps everyone to simultaneously celebrate the victories of the last battle while also better preparing them for the next one that will invariably arrive.
- Retreat. This is a tough one as it requires the three pillars of a small business’ resources to all be invested simultaneously: people, time, and money. At any given point in time while trying to make a retreat happen you’ll likely face a snag in at least one of those categories. Even so, time and again, companies find that it’s well worth the expenses requisite to make it happen. If you’re a small team that is bootstrapping then one of the best ways to get the benefit of a retreat without those pain points is to simply double-dip: make some of the big conferences relevant to your business double as a lead generating tool as well as a chance for the team to get away from their daily routines and hunker down together in a semi-retreat context.
- Leave work. Perhaps the most obvious—and thus the easiest to forget is at our disposal—is to simply leave work. Simply go. Send everyone home on Friday at lunch time or early afternoon. Let them go on to enjoy their families, friends, or hobbies. A few hours of output is a small price to pay to keep spirits high and your team well-rested. The dividends on that investment will be well worth it. Quality of life is a composite of many metrics, plenty of them happening outside of the day-to-day work grind, so make sure to occasionally encourage their enjoyment in a strong and unmistakable way.
While we’re not faced with the peril that Shackleton and his men were, those of us attempting to do something creative, valuable, and novel will find ourselves near the proverbial brink at times. Will we survive another day? With questions like that swirling around at various times we should be well prepared with solutions that help us to avoid jumping to a wrongheaded answer.
To survive to the end we must learn how to pace ourselves and create productive rhythms, balancing our enjoyment with our endurance. The hope and joy and longevity that these sorts of reprieves or breaks can create have a way of being the differentiators between those who fall under the weight of their journey and those who make it safely to shore.
Land ho!