CELEBRATE CONNECTION

Seasickness happens because your body and brain have stopped getting along. On a boat, your body starts capturing the natural sensations that occur once you start bobbing up and down on the swells. However, your brain doesn’t like focusing on things like that. It tries its best to erase the motion from your awareness so you can focus on other, more important, things. Neither brain nor body communicates this very well to the other, so your eyes, inner ears, and stomach all get caught in a nasty feedback loop.

Cue the retching.

If you’ve ever taken a cruise, you know that they keep a healthy supply of Dramamine packs on board at all times. They do this because even people who have never experienced a moment of motion-induced nausea before in their lives can be reduced to a vomiting, sobbing mass as soon as the boat leaves the harbor. And that’s on a 200,000-ton Carnival Cruise Line ship. Imagine what could happen on a boat that weighs less than a Prius.

Every ocean rower experiences some form of seasickness. It’s impossible to avoid. For some competitors this is a small annoyance that they can shrug off with a swig of water or a few hours’ rest. For others it can be completely debilitating or even deadly. Unfortunately for Latitude 35, Nick was trending hard toward the latter condition.

We had been in La Gomera for two weeks prepping our boat, checking our gear, and, most importantly, taking the American Spirit on a handful of important practice jaunts around the harbor. On each of these rows Nick had been hit with haymaker after haymaker of seasickness that forced us to return to shore without getting a full test run under our belts.

We expected this adventure to be difficult, but we were hoping those difficulties would at least wait until the race actually started. We had reached a crossroads.

I’d like to say that I rallied the troops, pushed Nick through his pain, and won a Nobel Prize for curing seasickness. But the reality is much less ideal. We were a team, but this was not a team decision. It was Nick’s, and he decided to race.

DECEMBER 2015

The Atlantic Ocean

Day 1

Rowing is a game of inches and seconds. That applies to ocean rowing as well. Every movement matters. Every decision has consequences.

As soon as we hear the crack of the gunshot through the tropical air, Latitude 35 puts its plan into action. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but in an ocean race, the shortest route is not necessarily the fastest. Bonecrunching currents, scorching trade winds, and varying wave conditions all need to be taken into account by teams as they plan their paths to victory.

Some teams like to start with as many rowers on the oars as they can get. Power is crucial at the start if you’re trying to cannonball through the momentum of the shore waves as they roll toward land. But not all currents need to be fought.

Our plan isn’t about power. It’s about consistency, skill, and clever routing. We hug the shore and let the currents work with us, all the while listening closely for the telltale gunshot that will let us know another boat has launched, that another shark is in the water.

That first day is mercifully uneventful. We lock comfortably into the two-men-on-two-men-off routine that will become our life for the next month at least. As the sunlight fades to a golden brown, the team seems strong, our chances seem bright, and the Atlantic seems friendly.

But looks can be deceiving.

Day 2

The American Spirit slides silently past El Hierro, the final island in the Canary Islands chain. As we press on, the island’s lush green peaks wink playfully under the horizon.

I don’t have a good word to describe what comes next. “The Atlantic is really big,” doesn’t do justice to the psychic gut punch you get from that first moment on the ocean.

Usually, you’re surrounded by landmarks that provide an easily digestible sense of scale. The office is right down this hall, the Starbucks is just over the hill, my dad lives 10 miles down Main Street. Simple. This certainty makes your brain very happy. It loves gathering reference points around it like a soft security blanket of predictability. As long as it can orient itself, your mind can plan your steps, advise your actions, and ensure your safety.

But the moment that the final speck of El Hierro slips out of sight, the entire world becomes water. My brain has no idea what to do about that. It has nothing to grab onto. Everything is blue and white and moving. My body is in the most open space on planet Earth, but my mind is crumbling into a paradoxical claustrophobia. We are locked inside an infinite cage.

This is the most dangerous part of ocean rowing. If your bearing is off by even a fraction of a degree, you could find yourself moving in circles for weeks until your food runs out and you die. Or you could wander accidentally into a storm system that destroys your boat and you die. Or you could get caught up in the wrong current and wind up in New Jersey instead of Antigua.

To keep on the right track in the face of unlimited possibilities, ocean boats use an autotiller. This is a mechanical arm that keeps the rudder locked on to a very specific heading so that you don’t spend a day rowing in the wrong direction. Autotillers serve a vitally important purpose, but they’re also like the people who comment on YouTube videos—temperamental, needy, and much more fragile than they should be.

If your autotiller breaks, which it will, you either have to replace it fast or keep your heading by hand. One man’s arm against the might of an entire ocean isn’t exactly a fair fight. Tilling by hand also keeps one crew member off the oars and out of bed. It’s brutal. Just to be safe, we brought four autotillers.

Our autotiller was set firmly to 240—a route that would take us southwest to the strongest winds and most favorable currents. But we weren’t alone. The overwhelming favorite to win that year’s Talisker was the Jean Marie, skippered by none other than Angus Collins—the man who built the American Spirit.

Angus had chosen a course almost identical to ours. For the first few days we tried to keep the odds-on-favorite in sight—keep your friends close and all that. But even small discrepancies in trajectory add up on the ocean. Before the third day ended, we had lost them over the horizon. Now our only indication of how well we were doing would come from the Yellowbrick.

The Yellowbrick—named after the famous road in Oz—is a plastic-wrapped brick of electronics that consistently pings an unusually strong GPS signal back to land. If a fish got too close to the Yellowbrick and bit you, you’d probably become some sort of aquatic-themed superhero with self-esteem issues.

The signals from the Yellowbrick are fed back to the land managers and out to the public through the Talisker’s official companion smartphone app. Each boat is represented by one of several multicolored arrows.

At the end of day three, our tiny yellow arrow was nearly overlapping with Angus’s purple one. We were actually giving the Jean Marie a run for its money. I felt like we were Rocky Balboa going the distance against champion Apollo Creed.

But I was wrong. We were actually Apollo all along, and the ocean was Ivan Drago. And he must break us.

Day 5

The farther we got from land, the larger the waves became. In no time we were climbing up and down 20-foot swells. As the watery slopes grew steeper, so did the severity of Nick’s seasickness.

Initially, he just needed a little more time in the cabin than the rest of us. I was in daily conference over the sat phone with race officials, who told us that time is the best medicine for seasickness. It’s pretty binary, they said; either his symptoms would die down over time, or he would.

By day four Nick was barely able to keep anything in his stomach for more than a few minutes. Precious calories and liters of fresh water were either going over the side of the American Spirit or, more often, onto her decks and crew members.

As Nick slipped further and further into his own personal hell, Ethan got irritable, Tom got quiet, and I got overly optimistic.

On day five I am pulled out of a sullen one-man strategy session inside my own head while on the oars by a shout from the cabin.

“Jay! JAY! Get in here!”

Tom has been in the cramped forward cabin with Nick trying to rest up for his next shift. I shoot up from my seat and stumble toward them as the American Spirit rockets down a massive wave.

“What is it?!” I grunt, nearly falling on top of Tom as I brace my weight on the cabin’s diminutive doorframe.

“Look!” he shouts, lifting a groaning Nick out of a pool of his own vomit and onto his side. What I see will stay with me for the rest of my life. Nick’s entire back is covered in bright purple sores connected by a patchwork of rapidly yellowing bruises. I like to think I’m a man of many words, but at this moment there are only two that seemed appropriate.

“Oh, . . . fuck.”

Evacuation

Nick is talking to himself again. This had become a nightly occurrence as dehydration, nausea, and infection pushed him toward the edge of madness. Sometimes he talked to himself. Sometimes he spoke to invisible loved ones. But most often he talked to God. He asked God why this was happening to him. He pleaded with God to make the pain end. He shrieked in the dead of night, begging God to take him home.

Nick has one of the sharpest athletic minds on the planet. His skill, discipline, and strength are why I recruited him in the first place. Seeing someone like that reduced to a state like this didn’t just scare me. It made me question every decision I was making as captain.

To make matter worse, our losses were about to double.

I should have seen this coming. Hell, I did see this coming. But I refused to listen to anyone, even myself. And now it was time to pay for my stubbornness. The rescue boat would be taking more than one of us back to shore. Despite my attempts to convince him otherwise, Ethan had decided to leave.

I was angry. Angrier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. But that wasn’t the issue. Anger on its own can be a good thing for adventurers. It helps you fight harder and hold on longer. But this was different. This anger had only shown up to kick in the door. And lumbering in behind it was something else. Something worse. Something dark. And so, for the first time since the Talisker filled my Google results years ago, I began to doubt.

Did I really lead a man halfway around the world just to torture him day in and day out? Could I really blame Ethan for running from something this terrifying? And, more importantly, did I actually expect that any other man would stay with me to face that terror together?

To his credit, Tom asks only for two hours to think it over. Those are the longest two hours of my life. In those two hours I have to realistically consider the possibility that everything I have believed about leadership, motivation, and elite athletics is wrong. Of everyone on my crew, Tom has the strongest why, and our years of friendship have made it possible for me to leverage his emotions more significantly than those of any of the others.

If he chooses to leave, it will be lights out for everything I’ve been building since Mark first found me, wounded and reeling, in the Sonoma State weight room. If he chooses to leave, I will have to face the fact that what I thought was leadership is actually just megalomania and obsession sprinkled with a dash of reckless insanity. If he chooses to leave, I won’t just have failed. I will have become a failure.

Tom spends his two hours in the main cabin with the sat phone. Exactly on time the door opens, and he emerges onto the deck. Once again, his face is unreadable. I prepare myself for the worst.

“Okay, Jay,” he says, “I’m in. Let’s go.”

I’ve been grateful before. I was grateful when my dad took me to a Giants game. I was grateful when Michiel took me back after I left Vesper. But this is something different. The only other time I’ve felt anything like this is when Amelia agreed to marry me.

That moment, like this one, featured a decision that marked a powerful emotional transaction between two people. Amelia told me she would spend the rest of her life with me. And, in a way, Tom is saying the same thing. Even if the rest of his life ends up being short, violent, and wet.

When the race was over I finally asked Tom why. Why did he decide to stay? His answer echoes in my head to this day. “It was because of you, Jay,” he said. “I knew as long as you were there, everything would be okay.”

With two sentences, Tom proved that the style of leadership I’ve built my life around is correct. No one would ever have blamed Tom for leaving. He was being given a free pass out of hell but instead chose to ride shotgun into its core. And he didn’t do it because he was being led. He did it because of how connected he was to his leader.

There are so many things for the two of us to do, but the most important is finally sailing into view. The rescuers have arrived.

Anchoring a boat in the middle of the ocean is no small task. It’s not like we can just drop some tattoo-like anchor with 20,000 feet of chain down to the ocean floor. With our luck we’d probably end up awakening some sort of Tokyo-destroying monster.

Instead, ocean boats have what’s called a “para-anchor.” This is exactly what it sounds like—a parachute that fills with water and creates enough drag to keep your boat rooted in place. Well, mostly rooted.

There really is no way to make a boat completely still on those waters. The para-anchor gets you close, but the waves still lift you, the currents still pull you, and the winds still buffet you. These motions are negligible, however. They would really be a problem only if you had to do something like catch a line of rope that’s being hurled at you from another vessel.

As the rescue boat grows from a speck on the horizon to the size of a tissue box, we can clearly see that the water is far too wild for them to risk getting as close as they would like. One bad wave could send them careening into us—and, as proud a vessel as she is, the ultralight American Spirit would be torn to pieces by a fully equipped, motorized ocean rescue boat.

Our para-anchor is deployed, and the four of us are waiting on deck as the rescue ship attempts to wind its way between waves bigger than the house I grew up in.

The captain of the rescue boat is named Thor—like the superhero. But I’ll take this Thor over any one of the Hemsworth brothers any day of the week. Thor and I are in constant contact over the sat phone as they approach. As the waves continue to grow in strength, they finally have to settle in a little over 100 feet away from us, disappearing and reappearing as we rise and fall on opposite sides of every swell of the juggernaut waves.

We hoped we’d be able to avoid this next part but, since that is as close as they can possibly get, there is no way around it. Nick is going in the ocean.

To get him as ready as possible, we help Nick pull on his foul-weather gear—a full bodysuit of thick rubber moisture-shredding armor. He won’t be winning any fashion contests, but he also won’t go into shock as soon as his fever-ravaged body hits the water. Compromises.

At this distance, I can just make out Thor’s powerful Nordic frame hanging off the stern of the rescue launch. I suddenly feel the familiar time-slowing sharpness that always hits me before a race at Vesper or a bottom-of-the-ninth stint on the mound. It’s a feeling that means my team needs me to be the best I can possibly be. Until he is on that boat, I will do anything I can to keep Nick safe.

Ethan is another matter. He has also donned his foul-weather gear and stands staring at the means of his retreat with the same face I make every time I finally find the San Francisco side street my Uber is hiding in.

“You know, Jay,” he says, “I guess years from now, when this thing’s been over for a while, it will still say that all four of us finished. No matter what, all our names will be on that list.”

In my younger days I was something of a brawler. I didn’t take much lip from some beer-swilling frat bro at a party before connecting my fist with his face. That’s not something I’m proud of, and I’ve worked on it. I’m down to one snide comment and two middle fingers a week.

But those words from Ethan threaten to bring the old Jason roaring back to life. It isn’t just the audacity of what he said. It is how wrong he was for saying it.

In my world, the world of goals that are life-risking and take years to accomplish, no points are given for participation. It’s completely binary: either you walk onto that dock in Antigua as a champion, or you don’t. This clarity gets muddled back in the real world. Leaders are afraid to confidently call a spade a spade. Or, in this case, to call a weakness a weakness. When someone owns their weakness, that’s when they start to improve.

But if you have someone who’s content to sign their name on an A+ paper they had nothing to do with, that should be grounds for an instant dismissal. I would rather have someone on my staff lose 10 clients with honest effort than gain 10 they don’t deserve. It’s a simple practice that will serve you well. Give credit where credit is due, but don’t be afraid to take it away just as easily.

That’s why I tell Ethan to his face on the deck of the American Spirit that he is dead wrong. No account of this race will ever say that four men rowed this boat to the end. It will say that four started, one was taken, and another gave up. I am going to make sure of that.

Quitting is allowed. Quitting, when done correctly, is intelligent, beneficial, and intentional. Giving up, however, gets you no glory. Swinging from one vine to the next can get you through the jungle of life, but letting go will send you splattering onto the ground below.

Ethan is seething and ready to retaliate, but his retort will have to wait. The sat phone crackles to life. They are ready to evacuate.

Thor has managed to close the distance between our two boats to just 30 feet. He throws the line, but every inch of the ocean between us is raging, and I miss it. In the time it takes the line to travel from his hand toward me, a series of nasty waves drop the American Spirit too low for me to reach it. It sails 20 feet past me, piercing the Atlantic with the weighted rod on its end.

“Next time!” I call through the wind and spray to Thor, only then realizing that Tom has his arms wrapped tightly around my waist, saving me from going in the water instead of Nick. Every team needs a Tom.

Thor retrieves the line and coils it back into his throwing position. In the split second before his next attempt, we lock eyes. This is it.

Thor lets the line fly, harder and faster this time, and with much less loft. With the benefit of Tom’s grip, I am able to reach just far enough into the expanse to wrap two fingers around the rapidly unspooling lifeline. I’ve never been so grateful for my freakishly long arms.

We have the line, but this is where the real danger begins. We are now tethered to the rescue boat, and at any moment the ocean could take us in opposite directions. Whatever is holding onto that line would be launched into oblivion. In this case, that’s me.

“HURRY!” Thor bellows from the bottom of a wave, 20 feet below me.

Since he is healthier, Ethan takes the line first. He leaps into the water, and Thor manages to pull him through the foam without incident. Thor returns the line just as easily to my waiting hands.

Without wasting a moment, Tom and I attach the line tightly around Nick’s waist. He is already trembling from the exertion of standing for so long.

“ARE YOU READY?!” I yell to Nick, hoping to spark some alertness back into his misty eyes. He nods weakly and flashes a half-hearted thumbs up. I signal to Thor and help Nick position himself on the edge of the American Spirit.

Before he jumps, he looks back at the two of us. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry to be leaving you and Tom. This is my worst nightmare.”

“You don’t have a damn thing to be sorry about,” I assure him. “Not a damn thing.”

Three. Two. One. He jumps. As soon as he hits the water, we know something is wrong. He isn’t swimming, and he isn’t moving closer to the rescue boat as Thor pulls on the line.

“MY FOOT!” he shouts as his mouth finally breaks through the surface of the waves. The line is wrapped around his foot. If he doesn’t do something, it could pull tight enough to create a very quick, and very unnecessary, boatside amputation. We have to cut the line.

I scramble for the deck knife and, in one of the stupidest moments of my life, throw it to Tom instead of handing it to him. Tom catches it with ease, however, and in one movement slashes the taught line between our two boats. Nick is now free from the line, any line. He is floating in the middle of the ocean.

At this point, a lesser man than Nick would have died. His body is so weak, and the ocean is so strong, that none of us could jump in and save him or we’d risk facing the same fate.

Tom and I shout encouragement helplessly from the deck as Thor quickly tosses him a floatation device on a fresh line. Nick is close now, but even a simple toss is next to impossible when you’re rising and falling two stories every 10 seconds.

In what is perhaps the greatest athletic achievement I’ve ever seen, Nick does what should have been impossible. He swims. He swims to the life preserver and holds it tight. Within seconds Thor has him out of the water and onto the deck of the rescue boat.

A few days later they would hit Cape Verde—the closest land mass with a hospital. Nick would make a full recovery, and Ethan would return to his old life. They were safe.

But we, definitely, were not.

LEADERSHIP LESSON:
CONNECT OR REMOVE

For every team, there are only two types of failures: the ones you can control and the ones you can’t. Latitude 35 had to endure both.

We had to evacuate two men off of a four-man boat 600 miles into a 3,000-mile race. Tom and I stayed on the boat, but we were not expected to finish. Some experts wondered if we would even survive.

Nick did not choose to leave. Ethan did. The failure of Nick to complete the race was one of biology and ecology. It was not something I could control as a leader. But the failure of Ethan was.

It might be easy to look at Ethan and think, how could he abandon his team like that? But this failure was not Ethan’s fault. It was mine.

It’s become a cliché now for leaders to take responsibility for other people’s mistakes. I don’t do this. When someone on my team messes up, they hear about it. Remember, high-performance teams are always personal, and being personal means being honest.

Ethan’s leaving was my fault. I knew he wasn’t right for the team from the day I recruited him. I saw how he interacted with the other team members, and it wasn’t good. But I didn’t care. He was a good rower, a great rower, even. And I wanted to win a rowing race, so Ethan stayed on the team.

If I had been an actual leader at that point, I would have given Ethan a ticket home in La Gomera and apologized for wasting his time. I would have seen that Ethan was missing two qualities that every leader should look for when building and leading a high-performance team: malleability and flexibility. And I would have known that I was lacking two elements that every high-performance leader needs: sensitivity and severity.

We’ve all been on teams with bad eggs, but when that happens, it’s important to step back and ask yourself what’s really going on. Is your company purposely hiring bad people? Probably not. Nobody ever hires someone they think will do a bad job. But somewhere along the line, all that talent goes to waste.

Teammates on high-performance teams need to be malleable and flexible. This means that when you’re building these teams you should spend less time looking at résumés and more time looking at the emotional states of the people you might bring in. Instead of asking interview questions about how many sales they made last year, ask them about a time at work when they did something they didn’t want to do and still performed at a very high level. Someone who can answer that question decisively is the sort of person you need on a high-performance team.

But that’s what you do if you’re building a team from scratch. What if you’ve inherited a team, or what if you don’t have the luxury of being quite so picky? That’s when you need to become either sensitive or severe.

Your job as the leader of a high-performance team is to constantly be connecting your team to something greater. But that doesn’t always work the way you want it to. Some people just don’t get it. In those cases your first step should be to be sensitive—to try to figure out why the person isn’t connecting and see what you can do to help them improve things.

But if that fails, you need to be severe. If you cannot connect a person to the same something greater as that of the rest of the team, that person becomes a threat to the goal for everyone. Then your job is to move them to a place where they can hopefully connect with something greater somewhere else. It might be another role, another project, another manager, or another company altogether.

Firing shouldn’t be the first thing you consider with a struggling teammate, but it also shouldn’t be the last. If you choose to be a leader, you will, at some point, have an Ethan on your team. It’s not about firing a bad hire; it’s about removing a person who doesn’t want the something greater that you’re offering.

Back at Sonoma State, Coach Mark let the brutal 5 a.m. workouts decide who was and was not connecting to that something greater. When a member of the team couldn’t take it anymore, they stopped coming back. In a similar way, you as a leader need to notice and celebrate who is coming to your 5 a.m. practices.

Leaders need to prioritize and celebrate resilience in their teammates. You can’t control the outside forces that will affect you and your team, but you can control how you respond to them. Results are one thing, but watch for the people who achieve good results even when the circumstances change.

Who are the people who raise their hands not just once but consistently, project after project. Who always seem to have too much on their plate? Who never seem all that happy when a project gets completed? Who can never make it to the monthly happy hour?

All these signals will help you find the adaptable people on your team—the people who are connected to your something greater and willing to become whatever it takes to make it happen. On that first Latitude 35 team, Tom was the most connected and adaptable.

On paper, he was the weakest rower, but when the chips were down, he was the one who was ready to endure what came next in order to achieve our shared goal.

The roads that high-performance teams choose to walk are not comfortable. In fact, they’re often blatantly painful. That is why you have to be willing to be severe with people like Ethan and why people like Tom are so valuable.

Those are the people who create the teams that can truly do the impossible.

GATHERING POINT:
PRIORITIZE RESILIENCE

It stops with you: A team member who is creating a toxic work environment is ultimately a failure of the leader.

Identify and encourage: You cannot control the way outside forces act upon you. You can only control how you respond to them. This is known as resilience. Structure your team in a way that reveals and rewards resilience over anything else.

Connect or cut: Everyone wants to be part of something greater than themselves. But if they don’t want to be part of your something greater, then you must either convince them to become part of it or move them to a place where they can feel that connection. Anything less is a disservice to that person and an often insurmountable risk to the goal of the high-performance team you are leading.