Right Boat, Right Seat, Doing the Right Thing
The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, captures the US rowing teams’ quest for gold during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Amazon.com captures the tale - It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler.
A diehard rowing fan characterized this achievement similarly to “The Miracle” when the USA hockey team beat the mighty Russians during the 1980 Olympic Games in Mt. Placid, New York. I will have to take his word for it. I can say while I enjoyed learning A LOT about rowing, the impact was in the quotes - some of the quotes in the book have had a lasting impact on my life.
Resolve
“It’s not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.”
“It doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down,” he told his daughter, Marilynn. “What matters is how many times you get up.”
“The ability to yield, to bend, to give way, to accommodate, he said, was sometimes a source of strength in men as well as in wood, so long as it was helmed by inner resolve and by principle.”
“Men as fit as you, when your everyday strength is gone, can draw on a mysterious reservoir of power far greater. Then it is that you can reach for the stars. That is the way champions are made.”
“It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can't waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead.”
“Look, Son, if there’s one thing I’ve figured out about life, it’s that if you want to be happy, you have to learn how to be happy on your own.”
Teamwork
“What mattered more than how hard a man rowed was how well everything he did in the boat harmonized with what the other fellows were doing. And a man couldn’t harmonize with his crewmates unless he opened his heart to them. He had to care about his crew.”
“They were now representatives of something much larger than themselves - a way of life, a shared set of values… But the things that held them together - trust in each other, mutual respect, humility, fair play, watching out for one another - those were also part of what America meant to all of them.”
“Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental—the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.”
“The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.”
“Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you’ve ever imagined.”
“All were merged into one smoothly working machine; they were, in fact, a poem of motion, a symphony of swinging blades.”
The Reason
“The wood...taught us about survival, about overcoming difficulty, about prevailing over adversity, but it also taught us something about the underlying reason for surviving in the first place. Something about infinite beauty, about undying grace, about things larger and greater than ourselves. About the reasons we were all here.”
“for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn’t enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart.”
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WOW – amazing wisdom and insight packed into a very readable book! BUT – these great quotes do not capture MY life-changing NUGGET.
Throughout the boys training, the coach is swapping the rowers between different boats and different seats (and thus, roles) in the boat. In addition, he is teaching improved rowing technique and synchronizing the rower’s actions to the commands from the coxswain. Their optimum performance came when he achieved the Right Person, In the Right Boat, In the Right Seat, Doing the Right Things. Tell me if you think this resonates with Jim Collins’ Good to Great, “It is better to first get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats, and then figure out where to drive.”
For ME, I feel the greatest amount of stress and dissatisfaction when I am NOT in the right seat, doing the right thing… This personal discomfort can come in both my professional and personal life.
Professionally – I have experienced the Peter Principle, where you rise up the ladder until you reach the point where you can no longer perform well. For me – peace of mind came in understanding my situation and making role changes that better fit my skills and desires. Personally, I feel stress and dissatisfaction when I am passive and let others direct my actions. I now employ The Patty Principle, which states, I am an adult and I can make my own decisions.
YOUR Questions: What is YOUR assessment of your position in YOUR boat? Are you the Right Person, In the Right Boat, In the Right Seat, Doing the Right Things?