Shackleton, shipwrecks and the relative worth of optimism vs. clarity

    Optimism is an over-rated habit of mind, especially in hard circumstances. What hard times call for isn’t mere smiling in the face of adversity, but dogged work directed with clarity: do what matters.
    I often marvel at the way superhuman feats get done one step at a time. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes character.
    My favorite example is British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, about whom I recently wrote in a stem-winder for my paper’s holiday charity drive.

Shackleton's "Endurance

    Shackleton is one of my heroes, so I often cite him. The leader of the sailing ship “Endurance” was my bible lesson when I was invited to speak at Morning Prayer, the quick hymn-and-homily service that’s been held every morning before class at Harvard for 370 years. Hell didn’t freeze when I stood in the chapel pulpit at Memorial Church , nor did lightning strike the spire.

Memorial Church, Harvard Yard

It was finals week and a certain glumness had settled on faces around campus, so hope was my theme. A year later, I see headless chickens on the loose in Congress and in American newsrooms, so again I offer Shackleton as the model for leadership of uncertain enterprises. Here’s my sermon:

“When hope is a problem, I think about Ernest Shackleton, a British explorer whose goodness was not of the sweetness and light variety.
His story comes to mind when I feel I’ve put myself in an impossible position and others are depending on me.
I am the editor of an obscure newspaper in a state most people can’t properly locate on the map: Idaho…not Iowa or Ohio… We are one of a very few employee-owned independent papers in the country, competing with corporate radio, three national television chains and neighboring papers that draw on the resources of conglomerate media companies. I’ve spent a dozen years there, hiring the smartest young people I can find and teaching them the discipline of verification, the power of multiple revisions and the habit of dogged public service.
A couple of years ago, I had to cut my already-meager staff by almost a quarter. I fought despair. Only an investment banker or a Harvard MBA believes you can do more with less. Every gain we had made was threatened. At first, I felt like a wrecker. I had to lay off good people I had recruited and trained, most of whom I had invited into my home for brunches, dinners and cocktails. I knew their kids’, the name of their dogs and many of their parents.
Looking back, I’m ashamed to say I wasted time in self-pity. Luckily, though, at the time of the lay-offs, I had just been to an Antarctic Exploration Exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Natural History, and I had started reading Alfred Lansing’s book: “Endurance”.
It’s the story of Ernest Shackleton’s cursed journey to Antarctica. His ship froze into the pack ice near the South Pole in 1914, was crushed to kindling and the crew had to abandon it and take their chances, living on the floating ice for five months.
Shackleton and his crew were alone in a bitterly cold place about which almost nothing was known. All were there by choice. Most were experienced expeditioners, with useful skills and knowledge about the earth and sky.
But most important of all, they had clarity. When the ship was wrecked, they used the salvageable pieces to make shelter and feed fires. When food ran short, they killed their sled dogs…and ate some of them.
Purpose bound Shackleton’s crew together: Bring everybody home alive. Keep gathering (and protecting) the photos and field observations that were the reason for the voyage.
Purpose enabled them to control their internal weather, not letting pack ice and other forces beyond their power extinguish hope. Certainly this required a strong leader. But Shackleton’s crew seemed to intuit the necessity of fighting despair in themselves so as not to drag down their comrades, who would in turn buoy them up. Good humor proved contagious.
In the end, they rescued themselves.
The crux move was an open-sea crossing in a tiny rowboat, navigating only with a sextant (while underway) to the one island whaling outpost in the vast ocean wilderness at the end of the earth. In five months shipwrecked on the ice, they did not lose a single member of the crew and they brought home invaluable photos and scientific data that continue to thrill students of Antarctica a century later.
In my business, Journalism, hope is in short supply. Our elders and high priests obsess over the mythic past, and heap coals on the heads of those who seek the way forward. American politics indulges in despair these days, too, choking on our legends instead of our future. And maybe, facing a deadline, the crush of the holidays, or even a term paper, you feel a little hopeless this morning as you make your way across the icy and cheerless Harvard Yard.
Our circumstances are not quite as dramatic as Shackleton’s. I’ll stipulate that mine is but a wee paper in the middle of nowhere. Many of you in range of my voice have great responsibilities and worries. But Shackleton’s story reminds us, in hopeless moments at work, that none of us are actually stuck here. We all choose our dangers and that’s the first thing to remember when our luck runs out.
Certainly, what we do matters and so focusing on our mission is immensely important. The crew of Shackleton’s lost ship “Endurance” demonstrated the wisdom of the good books of many faiths: You can’t control circumstance, only your reaction to it.
At my newspaper, we never regained the staff we lost…But in the intervening years we’ve done better work than in the years before, largely because of the way that adversity focuses one’s attention. Clarity is a skill you can learn from Shackleton.
Our enterprise is now growing. So, we were right to have hope. It’s not the journey any of us expected, but now that we’ve survived some bad weather, we wouldn’t give up the lesson learned: You gotta find your own way, which means you have to be clear about where you need to go…and you can’t read a sextant in rough seas if you’re busy crying.
I have no idea what the world or even my life will look like in five years. But I am accumulating skills and knowledge and experience every day. I have the happy clarity of a person with a family to support.
When hope is a problem, I think of hard-eyed Ernest Shackleton and I believe I’m up for what storms may come.”