EIGHTY-MILE DAYS
In the introduction, I talked about building one incredible team and learning lessons along the way. Angus, Alex, Matt, and I were that team.
Together, we exhibited all the signs of a truly high-performance team. We were completely interdependent. We were all aligned to the same something greater. We all had strong whys for racing, and as the leader I was prepared to answer that question for my team every single day. Most importantly, we were 100 percent leveraged emotionally to and for one another.
All four men who stepped into that boat were products of the emotion-first leadership system I’d been putting together for over a decade. As I said earlier, high-performance teams need to become high-performance before the actual test that will define them as such. In my opinion, we were already a high-performance team before taking a single stroke.
But then we had to face our test.
LATITUDE 35 2.0
My second Atlantic crossing could not have been more different from my first. This was the most capable team I had ever put together, and it was also the most capable team to ever row the Talisker. Early news coverage was calling us a “superteam,” and we lived up to the hype.
Having Angus on board was transformational. His experience and skill on the open ocean is unparalleled. Together, we crafted what we considered the perfect route to the finish line.
We accounted for every mile. We considered every possible advantage or disadvantage. We did everything we could to reduce the environmental variable so we could focus on our biggest strength: strength.
A few days into the race, Matt gave me flashbacks of Nick by showing signs of acute seasickness. But by the time we hit the 1,000-mile milestone, he had rallied. I honestly don’t know if his symptoms subsided or if he was just too damn strong for them to slow him down. People say that I’m like a machine, but Matt is an animal.
True to his reputation, Alex talked less and rowed more than anyone else on the crew. Because of his inability to grow the thick, lustrous adventure beards that the rest of us were sporting, we teased him regularly about being our resident “baby.” He’d laugh sheepishly, but I honestly think the reason his hair follicles were growing so slowly is because every ounce of testosterone in his body was going to fuel our work. Because of him and Matt, the American Spirit was moving faster than she ever had before.
Together, we locked comfortably into the two-hours-ontwo-hours-off strategy that I had never really put in practice during my first attempt due to all the setbacks we faced. Two hours of sleep may not sound like a lot, but it beats the hell out of 40 minutes. Latitude 35 2.0 was in full force. But we weren’t the only boat on the water.
Angus and Ocean Reunion had left a massive power vacuum when they disbanded. I like to think Latitude 35 was able to fill most of it, but every competitor has its opposite number. For this race, the role of rivals would be played by Row4James—a team of four strong, skilled, young Englishmen.
Every morning, Angus and I got on the sat phone for an update from Tom and the rest of our land team. The update always included a weather report, an analysis of our pace, and routing recommendations. But we also made sure to get an update on R4J as well. They were giving us one hell of a race.
As we crossed the halfway point, we were in first place, with a close but respectable lead. We were also on track to break the previous world record. We were progressing exactly as planned.
Which should have been my first clue that things were about to go horribly, horribly wrong.
JANUARY 2017
The Atlantic Ocean
Day 17
With only 1,000 miles to go, things start falling apart. Literally.
If there were a Wikipedia entry for “things that should never, ever be mixed,” the number one entry would be “salt, and anything that is not potato chips.” Salt destroys things. It’s like a thousand tiny locusts that can get inside just about anything to create friction and start chemical reactions that cause decay. If salt had its way, we’d be the ones reduced to dust and trapped in shakers. Salt is a jerk.
Normally, this isn’t a problem. Salt might be mean, but it doesn’t spread. Unless you physically pour it onto your steak, it can’t give you heartburn. But on the ocean salt gets an MVP assist from miles and miles of crashing, spraying, energetic water. The water brings it onto the boat, spreads it around, dries, and leaves the sodium chloride behind to fulfill its dark ambitions. By day two of an ocean row, everything is covered in salt, including you.
The discomfort of being caked in salt 24 hours a day is almost indescribable. Anywhere where salt can get in, it grinds and creates friction. At first you’re itchy, then you begin to chafe, and then your skin starts to erupt into open salt sores. To make things worse, the only way to wash yourself off out there is to jump into the ocean. You know, the place where all the salt is.
By the time we hit 2,000 miles, each of us is covered in these sores, which present a very real risk of infection. In addition, each of us has picked up our own unique malady. Angus has a broken finger, Alex has a fractured rib, Matt has torn his shoulder, and I have an infected heel. These are real issues, but our bodies are not my biggest concern at the moment.
The only thing that hates salt more than skin is electronics. By the time we get to 2,000 miles, not only are our bodies starting to flake away before our eyes, but the vital electronics that keep us on course and in touch with the mainland are starting to malfunction.
We realize that we’ve been pushing things way too hard. If we don’t slow down, either the American Spirit will break, or we will.
Angus and I do some calculations. We come up with a plan that will allow us to work in more breaks and more time for maintenance without losing our lead. It is a good plan, a great plan even. But it is doomed.
The ocean has turned to glass.
JANUARY 2017
The Atlantic Ocean
Day 29
Most people think that your worst fear when rowing on the ocean is a storm. Sure, when the waves get bigger than your house, it can be a little unsettling. But that also means you’re going fast, very fast.
The worst thing that can happen isn’t a storm; it’s being on the wrong side of one. Even without a sail, wind is everything out on the ocean. When it’s blowing, the water’s moving, and so are you. But when it stops, you may as well be rowing your way through hair gel.
With 500 miles to go, we have been on the ocean for 28 days. We are 185 miles ahead of R4J and 24 hours ahead of the world record. But then the wind stops, and so do we.
A storm has appeared on the weather report, a storm that has no logical reason to be there. But I shouldn’t have been surprised; the only thing the Atlantic is consistent at is inconsistency.
At this point we are already rowing what’s called “three up.” This means that three people are on the oars at all times while only one rests. This means everyone gets more rowing time and less sleeping time. It’s not like Christmas, but we have to be prepared.
The effects of the impending storm will be twofold.
First, while we approach it, we have no wind. The weather is against us, meaning any progress will be difficult. With no wind to help offset the currents, we’ll be lucky if we manage to just stay still.
Second, when we do finally hit the storm, we will have wind, lots of wind. But not the wind we want. This wind will come at us from all sides, forcing us to deactivate the autotiller and steer manually. Once again, the odds of making any meaningful progress are basically zero.
This news is devastating. According to the projections, this storm will shrink our lead on R4J to a razor-thin margin. And it effectively wipes out our chances of achieving the world record. That goal has become impossible.
So I find myself crammed into the American Spirit’s claustrophobic cabin, rubbing the salt and shredded skin off my forehead, and trying to will a plan into place. But nothing comes.
There is no “solution” to this problem, and problems without solutions are the ones that truly test the mettle of high-performance teams. The only way to achieve the goal we are all leveraged toward achieving is to do something nobody has ever done before. Right there, in the middle of the raging ocean, Latitude 35 will have to do the impossible.
The storm has destroyed our pace. By the time we’ve fought our way through on manual steering, our speed has gone from 3.0 knots to 0.8 knots. It is worse than we thought it was going to be, and my team needs a plan.
Crunched into that cabin, I push away the maps, turn away from the GPS, and take out my notebook. I close my eyes and let myself start to think.
I’m not sure how long I spend in there. I’m guessing at least a good hour or two. By the time I open the door to face my anxious team, my brain has done its job; the problem has been solved. I have a plan, and it is absolutely insane.
We have 400 miles left to go—400 miles exactly. We have five days left to beat the world record. Even a rower can do math like that. The answer is clear. In order to hit our goal, we will have to row 80 miles every day for the next five days.
The fact that most readers don’t gasp at that means that I should probably explain. What I just said does not happen. Some would even say that it cannot happen.
A great day in the Talisker is 70 miles. Any team averaging that would break the world record. It’s a fantastic pace that requires an elite crew pulling at 100 percent for 100 percent of the time.
A 75-mile day is extraordinary. Maybe your big engine guys had an extra helping of freeze-dried pierogis that morning. Maybe a friendly whale gave you a little shove. It’s cause for celebration. Eighty-mile days are almost unheard of. They require a powerful storm to push the boat at a pace outside of expected human limitations. You might get one in a race this long. We need five, and there are no more storms in sight.
This is it. This is my plan. The only way forward is the way forward. Our goal has been locked inside a vault. The only way in is to tear the door off the hinges. That’s not something a person is supposed to be able to do, but there is only one way to find out.
I have reached the greatest test of my career as a leader. This will be the defining moment of my life’s work. The way my team reacts will confirm whether or not quitting like a winner, learning how to rest, making bad decisions in a good way, motivating individually, answering the question why? and leveraging human emotion works.
I have been trying so hard to become a good leader that I never realized the biggest truth of leadership. You have to make good decisions. You have to put in the time. You have to care. But, ultimately, your success isn’t up to you. It never was. It’s up to them.
This is the test that will truly measure whether or not we are a high-performance team. The test is not whether we can or cannot row 80-mile days. The test is whether or not my team will even try.
Matt is the first to respond. “Thank God,” he says. “I thought you were going to say something like 100 miles a day.” He looks around at the others. “You guys don’t actually think this is out of reach do you?”
“Not at all, mate,” Alex responds. “I’ll do whatever you need me to do, skip. I’ll row all night if I have to.”
Now it is Angus’s turn. A silence takes over the boat as we wait to hear his opinion. Three out of four will not cut it. If Angus is out, we all are. “When Jason and I agreed to team up for this year’s race,” he says at last. “It was with the assumption that we had a better chance at history together than we did apart.”
He takes another pause. “I’ll be honest when I tell you that I wasn’t sure how well we’d work together. But now . . . we’re brothers.” I nod my head in agreement. Angus turns back toward Matt and Alex. “And so are we.” They nod also.
“We aren’t the same guys who went into this. We’re different. Jay gave us that.” He looks me dead in the eyes. “You gave this to all of us. All we asked for was a chance at history. Well, boys, here it is: five days to row 400 miles. It’s not a very good chance, but it’s our chance. And I personally wouldn’t want to be taking it with any other team.”
This moment, hearing these words from my team, is the pinnacle of my athletic career. It is better than any finish line I have ever crossed. This team—a team that I built in the hopes of finally becoming the type of leader I always dreamed I could be—has just shattered the only expectation that really matters: mine. After that moment, I can never be the same.
LEADERSHIP LESSON:
BE CHANGED
When you do what we did out there on the water, you are giving yourself wholeheartedly to a goal you believe with all your might is worthy of yourself. When you do that, when you surrender yourself completely to the process, it changes you. It always changes you.
Accomplishing that goal requires you to thoroughly leverage the emotions of your team, but it also means that they will leverage yours as well. When you get to a moment like I did, and you will, and this team that you now genuinely love succeeds in the exact moment you need them to, you will not walk away from that moment the same way you entered it.
Some people aren’t interested in that. They don’t really want to be changed by their goals or their teams. And, to be honest, there’s nothing objectively wrong with that. You can have a perfectly fine career being an individual contributor to a company. Seriously.
You can punch the clock and have a terrific life. But you will not reap the rewards of being on a high-performance team or of leading one. If you want those things, you have to give yourself to something greater than yourself. You have to be vulnerable.
Doing the strong thing means showing a lot of weakness. But the reason I, and others like me, do what we do is because there is an intense reward that comes from identifying an object you think might be too heavy for you to move, setting your shoulder against it, and pushing as hard as you can. Because if you are actually able to move that massive weight, you’ll never doubt your own strength in the same way again. Ever.
Self-confidence does not exist in a vacuum. It has to be earned, and the best way to earn it is to attempt something you didn’t think you’d be able to do. This is true for teams as well, but at an even larger scale. Big goals can bring self-confidence, but impossible goals require a team.
Achieving those brings you something beyond confidence. It’s a form of transcendence that shows you not only how powerful you can be as a single person but how powerful we can all be as people who work together. That’s the real goal of high-performance leadership.
It’s not just about hitting that sales number or winning that race. It’s about you and your teammates discovering together what can happen when emotional human beings connect and commit to a goal. Once you see that, you’ll be changed.
You’ll never again hear a story like mine and say, “I could never do something like that.” You’ll say, “I am going to do something even greater.”
Every step of the high-performance process in this book is designed to help you move those immovable objects with your team. But, fair warning, once you do that, you won’t be the same person you were before. And neither will your teammates.
Together, each of you will have become someone exceptional. Someone powerful. Someone with true, earned confidence. Someone impossible.
JANUARY 2017
The Atlantic Ocean
Days 32 to 35
The first day after we realized our predicament we rowed 79 miles. The next day we did 94 miles. Then 91 miles.
With just 48 hours until the expiration of the chance for a world record, we have only 136 miles to go. The team is driving the American Spirit’s jaws around the jugular of the Atlantic Ocean. And, for the first time, the unbeatable ocean suddenly feels mortal. But so are we.
With 48 hours left, we have little left in the tank. We are sleeping for only 40 minutes or less and then rowing for a minimum of two hours. Matt especially has kicked into high gear. He routinely ends his shift only to strap back in for another one. But our efforts are taking a toll.
All of us are hallucinating. At one point Angus taps me on the shoulder to warn about the old lady running around the boat trying to smack us with an oar. I am having visions as well, but mine are a little more serious.
I see people: the people who have mentored me, coached me, and molded me over the years into the exhausted but powerful leader I have become. I see Mark and Michiel, I see my dad, I see Don Wiper and my sponsors. I talk to them, and they talk to me. I can never remember their responses, but I always remember their lessons.
As the sun goes down on January 17, I come off my shift, switching with Angus in a quick 15-second interchange that he and I have performed more than 200 times now.
I heave myself into the cabin to figure out where we stand. I know we have been weak that day. There is no way we’ve been keeping up with our 90-mile pace of the past few days. I’ll be surprised if we’ve hit even 70 miles. For a moment I feel that we have been defeated, but then I check the map. I start crying.
Eighty-eight miles. We have gone 88 miles on our “weakest” day so far. That means we have to cover only 48 miles in the final 24 hours. We are ahead of Row4James. We are hours ahead of the world record. We are going to do the impossible.
In the late afternoon of January 18, 2017, Latitude 35 crossed the coordinates of 17 degrees north, 61 degrees west, which marked the official finish line of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. It took us 35 days, 14 hours, and 3 minutes to cross it, breaking a 13-year-old world record by a shockingly close 11 hours. My team achieved our something greater.
Together, Latitude 35 has made history.
Now it’s your turn.
GATHERING POINT:
BECOME IMPOSSIBLE
Plan to change: If you choose to give all of yourself to a certain endeavor, you should expect to be changed by it forever. This is the consequence of being part of a high-performance team. As a leader, this is ultimately the trade-off you must be comfortable with for yourself, and for others.
Mercenaries: Those who say no to being part of a high-performance team can still be great individual contributors to a larger organization. There is nothing wrong with that, and every organization needs those people as well. But they are not the people who make up high-performance teams.
The high-performance leader: As a leader, you help others achieve their goals by building trust and acting authentically and selflessly toward them. When the moment comes that separates good teams from high-performance teams, you will have to look them in the eye and ask for nothing less than everything they have. If you practice what you’ve learned in this book, they will look straight back at you, and give it.