This title belongs to Roland Huntford’s for his superb book called "The Last Place on Earth", a massive, well-written comparative study of two men.I found about this interesting book while reading "Great by Choice" co-authored by Jim Collins who has as well co-authored two beautiful books and my favourite too called "Good to Great"(I write Blogs with the same name) and "Built to Last".
The book is about two expedition leaders called Roald Amundsen who was the winner, and Robert Falcon Scott, the loser.
But they were a near-perfect matched pair.They had almost similar ages-39 and 43.They as well had comparable experience.
I want to quote Roald Amundsen- “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck people call it.
Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.”
It was in October 1911 when two teams of adventurers made their final preparations in their quest to be the first people in modern history to reach the South Pole.
For one team, it would be a race to victory and a safe return home.
For members of the second team, it would be a devastating defeat, reaching the Pole only to find the wind-whipped flags of their rivals planted 34 days earlier, followed by a race for their lives—a race that they lost in the end, as the advancing winter swallowed them up. All five members of the second Pole team perished, staggering from exhaustion, suffering the dead-black pain of frostbite and then freezing to death as some wrote their final journal entries and notes to loved ones back home
Its sad that so many of us go through the same experiences in our own life.We love to blame someone for our failures and want to take credit for the success we got in life.I as well use to be the one till I met the man in the mirror.It was me who needs to change and not the man in the mirror or the mirror itself .
The world we built(or rather I will say get built )around us is the mirror of what we think and visualize (consciously & unconsciously) and we act upon (as a re/action to the situation which I say unconsciously or as a pro/active action to what I think consciously ).Mirror is the environment in which we operate.
Coming back to the comparable experiences of two adventurers -
In the year 1902 ,Amundsen led the first successful journey through the Northwest Passage and joined the first expedition to spend the winter in Antarctica.Scott led a South Pole expedition. Amundsen and Scott started their respective journeys for the Pole within days of each other, both facing a round trip of more than fourteen hundred miles (roughly equal to the distance from Delhi to Bangalore and back ).The environment was uncertain and unforgiving with temperatures reaching 20 degrees below zero F even during the summer and gale-force winds adding to the tough conditions.This was in 1911 when they had no means of modern communication to call back to base camp.There were no radio, no cell phones, no satellite links and a rescue would have been highly improbable at the South Pole if they screwed up.
One leader led his team to victory and safety. The other led his team to defeat and death
The reason I liked to blog about this real life story in the book were the principles being used by Amundsen and Scott and how we can learn from the same.We all can be one of the those two men.We all face crisis at times.It can induced by us or can be forced to us.The preparation helps as much as the approach to crisis.
We all may think and question -What separated these two men? Why did one achieve spectacular success in such an extreme set of conditions, while the other failed even to survive?
In real life situation which we all face The environment can be favorable or unfavorable. What helps to thrive and not just strive is our approach to the extreme conditions.
Here comes the clues to find out if you are Amundsen or Scott ?
In 1899 when Roald Amundsen was in late twenties ,he traveled nearly two thousand miles from Norway to Spain for a two-month sailing trip to earn a master’s certificate.
Ask yourself - How you would have traveled for your master's degree in case you would have similar personalty and dreams
So how did Amundsen make the journey? By carriage? By horse? By ship? By rail?
No none of them - "He bicycled"
Think of your current situation and suddenly everything turns upside-down .Everything which is important and dear to you is gone -not there anymore Amundsen used to experiment with eating raw dolphin meat to determine its usefulness as an energy supply.His logic was someday he might be shipwrecked, finding himself surrounded by dolphins, so he might as well know if he could eat one.
The point I am making is in his own mind Amundsen’s spend years of building a foundation for his quest, training his body and mind learning as much as possible from "real" practical experience about what actually worked rather then just reading & knowing about it .
Amundsen even made a pilgrimage to apprentice with Eskimos. What better way to learn what worked in polar conditions than to spend time with a people who have hundreds of years of accumulated experience in ice and cold and snow and wind? He learned how Eskimos used dogs to pull sleds. He observed how Eskimos never hurried, moving slowly and steadily, avoiding excessive sweat that could turn to ice in sub-zero temperatures. He adopted Eskimo clothing, loose fitting (to help sweat evaporate) and protective. He systematically practiced Eskimo methods and trained himself for every conceivable situation he might encounter en route to the Pole.
Amundsen’s philosophy as mentioned in the book was that You don’t wait until you’re in an unexpected storm to discover that you need more strength and endurance. You don’t wait until you’re shipwrecked to determine if you can eat raw dolphin. You don’t wait until you’re on the Antarctic journey to become a superb skier and dog handler.
Now coming to Robert Falcon Scott who presents quite a contrast to Amundsen.In the years leading up to the race for the South Pole, he could have trained like a maniac on cross-country skis and taken a thousand-mile bike ride. He did not.
He could have gone to live with Eskimos. He did not. He could have practiced more with dogs, making himself comfortable with choosing dogs over ponies. Ponies, unlike dogs, sweat on their hides so they become encased in ice sheets when tethered and struggle in snow, and don’t generally eat meat. (Amundsen planned to kill some of the weaker dogs along the way to fuel the stronger dogs.) Scott chose ponies. Scott also bet on “motor sledges” that hadn't been fully tested in the most extreme South Pole conditions. As it turned out, the motor-sledge engines cracked within the first few days, the ponies failed early, and his team slogged through most of the journey by “man-hauling,” harnessing themselves to sleds, trudging across the snow, and pulling the sleds behind them.
Unlike Scott, Amundsen systematically built enormous buffers for unforeseen events. When setting supply depots, Amundsen not only flagged a primary depot, he placed 20 black pennants (easy to see against the white snow) in precise increments for miles on either side, giving himself a target more than ten kilometers wide in case he got slightly off course coming back in a storm. To accelerate segments of his return journey, he marked his path every quarter of a mile with packing-case remnants and every eight miles with black flags hoisted upon bamboo poles.
Scott, in contrast, put a single flag on his primary depot and left no markings on his path, leaving him exposed to catastrophe if he went even a bit off course.Amundsen stored three tons of supplies for 5 men starting out versus Scott’s one ton for 17 men.
In his final push for the South Pole from 82 degrees, Amundsen carried enough extra supplies to miss every single depot and still have enough left over to go another hundred miles. Scott ran everything dangerously close to his calculations, so that missing even one supply depot would bring disaster. A single detail aptly highlights the difference in their approaches: Scott brought one thermometer for a key altitude-measurement device, and he exploded in “an outburst of wrath and consequence” when it broke; Amundsen brought four such thermometers to cover for accidents.
Amundsen didn't know precisely what lay ahead. He didn't know the exact terrain, the altitude of the mountain passes, or all the barriers he might encounter. He and his team might get pounded by a series of unfortunate events. Yet he designed the entire journey to systematically reduce the role of big forces and chance events by vigorously embracing the possibility of those very same big forces and chance events. He presumed bad events might strike his team somewhere along the journey and he prepared for them, even developing contingency plans so that the team could go on should something unfortunate happen to him along the way. Scott left himself unprepared and complained in his journal about his bad luck. “Our luck in weather is preposterous,” penned Scott in his journal, and wrote in another entry, “It is more than our share of ill-fortune…How great may be the element of luck!”
On December 15, 1911, in bright sunshine sparkling across the vast white plain, with a slight crosswind and a temperature of 10 degrees below zero F, Amundsen reached the South Pole. He and his teammates planted the Norwegian flag, which “unfurled itself with a sharp crack,” and dedicated the plateau to the Norwegian king. Then they went right back to work. They erected a tent and attached a letter to the Norwegian king describing their success; Amundsen addressed the envelope to Captain Scott (presuming Scott would be the next to reach the Pole) as an insurance policy in case his team met an unfortunate end on the journey home. He could not have known that Scott and his team were man-hauling their sleds, fully 360 miles behind.
More than a month later, at 6:30 p.m. on January 17, 1912, Scott found himself staring at Amundsen’s Norwegian flag at the South Pole. “We have had a horrible day,” Scott wrote in his diary. “Add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature–22°…Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”
On that very day, Amundsen had already traveled nearly five hundred miles back north, reaching his 82-degree supply depot with only eight easy days to go. Scott turned around and headed back north, more than seven hundred miles of man-hauling from home base, just as the season began to turn. The weather became more severe, with increasing winds and decreasing temperatures, while supplies dwindled and the men struggled through the snow.
Amundsen and his team reached home base in good shape on January 25, the precise day he’d penned into his plan. Running out of supplies, Scott stalled in mid-March, exhausted and depressed. Eight months later, a British reconnaissance party found the frozen bodies of Scott and two companions in a forlorn, snow-drifted little tent, just ten miles short of his supply depot
Amundsen and Scott achieved dramatically different outcomes not because they faced dramatically different circumstances. In the first 34 days of their respective expeditions, Amundsen and Scott had exactly the same ratio, 56 percent, of good days to bad days of weather.
If they faced the same environment in the same year with the same goal, the causes of their respective success and failure simply cannot be the environment. They had divergent outcomes principally because they displayed very different behaviors.
In summary what I learnt from this is that -
"You prepare with intensity, all the time"
When conditions turn against you, you can draw from a deep reservoir of strength.
When conditions turn in your favor, you can strike hard
Keep working hard ....Hope for the Best,Prepare for the worst ....
The book is about two expedition leaders called Roald Amundsen who was the winner, and Robert Falcon Scott, the loser.
But they were a near-perfect matched pair.They had almost similar ages-39 and 43.They as well had comparable experience.
I want to quote Roald Amundsen- “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck people call it.
Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.”
It was in October 1911 when two teams of adventurers made their final preparations in their quest to be the first people in modern history to reach the South Pole.
For one team, it would be a race to victory and a safe return home.
For members of the second team, it would be a devastating defeat, reaching the Pole only to find the wind-whipped flags of their rivals planted 34 days earlier, followed by a race for their lives—a race that they lost in the end, as the advancing winter swallowed them up. All five members of the second Pole team perished, staggering from exhaustion, suffering the dead-black pain of frostbite and then freezing to death as some wrote their final journal entries and notes to loved ones back home
Its sad that so many of us go through the same experiences in our own life.We love to blame someone for our failures and want to take credit for the success we got in life.I as well use to be the one till I met the man in the mirror.It was me who needs to change and not the man in the mirror or the mirror itself .
The world we built(or rather I will say get built )around us is the mirror of what we think and visualize (consciously & unconsciously) and we act upon (as a re/action to the situation which I say unconsciously or as a pro/active action to what I think consciously ).Mirror is the environment in which we operate.
Coming back to the comparable experiences of two adventurers -
In the year 1902 ,Amundsen led the first successful journey through the Northwest Passage and joined the first expedition to spend the winter in Antarctica.Scott led a South Pole expedition. Amundsen and Scott started their respective journeys for the Pole within days of each other, both facing a round trip of more than fourteen hundred miles (roughly equal to the distance from Delhi to Bangalore and back ).The environment was uncertain and unforgiving with temperatures reaching 20 degrees below zero F even during the summer and gale-force winds adding to the tough conditions.This was in 1911 when they had no means of modern communication to call back to base camp.There were no radio, no cell phones, no satellite links and a rescue would have been highly improbable at the South Pole if they screwed up.
One leader led his team to victory and safety. The other led his team to defeat and death
The reason I liked to blog about this real life story in the book were the principles being used by Amundsen and Scott and how we can learn from the same.We all can be one of the those two men.We all face crisis at times.It can induced by us or can be forced to us.The preparation helps as much as the approach to crisis.
We all may think and question -What separated these two men? Why did one achieve spectacular success in such an extreme set of conditions, while the other failed even to survive?
In real life situation which we all face The environment can be favorable or unfavorable. What helps to thrive and not just strive is our approach to the extreme conditions.
Here comes the clues to find out if you are Amundsen or Scott ?
In 1899 when Roald Amundsen was in late twenties ,he traveled nearly two thousand miles from Norway to Spain for a two-month sailing trip to earn a master’s certificate.
Ask yourself - How you would have traveled for your master's degree in case you would have similar personalty and dreams
So how did Amundsen make the journey? By carriage? By horse? By ship? By rail?
No none of them - "He bicycled"
Think of your current situation and suddenly everything turns upside-down .Everything which is important and dear to you is gone -not there anymore Amundsen used to experiment with eating raw dolphin meat to determine its usefulness as an energy supply.His logic was someday he might be shipwrecked, finding himself surrounded by dolphins, so he might as well know if he could eat one.
The point I am making is in his own mind Amundsen’s spend years of building a foundation for his quest, training his body and mind learning as much as possible from "real" practical experience about what actually worked rather then just reading & knowing about it .
Amundsen even made a pilgrimage to apprentice with Eskimos. What better way to learn what worked in polar conditions than to spend time with a people who have hundreds of years of accumulated experience in ice and cold and snow and wind? He learned how Eskimos used dogs to pull sleds. He observed how Eskimos never hurried, moving slowly and steadily, avoiding excessive sweat that could turn to ice in sub-zero temperatures. He adopted Eskimo clothing, loose fitting (to help sweat evaporate) and protective. He systematically practiced Eskimo methods and trained himself for every conceivable situation he might encounter en route to the Pole.
Amundsen’s philosophy as mentioned in the book was that You don’t wait until you’re in an unexpected storm to discover that you need more strength and endurance. You don’t wait until you’re shipwrecked to determine if you can eat raw dolphin. You don’t wait until you’re on the Antarctic journey to become a superb skier and dog handler.
Now coming to Robert Falcon Scott who presents quite a contrast to Amundsen.In the years leading up to the race for the South Pole, he could have trained like a maniac on cross-country skis and taken a thousand-mile bike ride. He did not.
He could have gone to live with Eskimos. He did not. He could have practiced more with dogs, making himself comfortable with choosing dogs over ponies. Ponies, unlike dogs, sweat on their hides so they become encased in ice sheets when tethered and struggle in snow, and don’t generally eat meat. (Amundsen planned to kill some of the weaker dogs along the way to fuel the stronger dogs.) Scott chose ponies. Scott also bet on “motor sledges” that hadn't been fully tested in the most extreme South Pole conditions. As it turned out, the motor-sledge engines cracked within the first few days, the ponies failed early, and his team slogged through most of the journey by “man-hauling,” harnessing themselves to sleds, trudging across the snow, and pulling the sleds behind them.
Unlike Scott, Amundsen systematically built enormous buffers for unforeseen events. When setting supply depots, Amundsen not only flagged a primary depot, he placed 20 black pennants (easy to see against the white snow) in precise increments for miles on either side, giving himself a target more than ten kilometers wide in case he got slightly off course coming back in a storm. To accelerate segments of his return journey, he marked his path every quarter of a mile with packing-case remnants and every eight miles with black flags hoisted upon bamboo poles.
Scott, in contrast, put a single flag on his primary depot and left no markings on his path, leaving him exposed to catastrophe if he went even a bit off course.Amundsen stored three tons of supplies for 5 men starting out versus Scott’s one ton for 17 men.
In his final push for the South Pole from 82 degrees, Amundsen carried enough extra supplies to miss every single depot and still have enough left over to go another hundred miles. Scott ran everything dangerously close to his calculations, so that missing even one supply depot would bring disaster. A single detail aptly highlights the difference in their approaches: Scott brought one thermometer for a key altitude-measurement device, and he exploded in “an outburst of wrath and consequence” when it broke; Amundsen brought four such thermometers to cover for accidents.
Amundsen didn't know precisely what lay ahead. He didn't know the exact terrain, the altitude of the mountain passes, or all the barriers he might encounter. He and his team might get pounded by a series of unfortunate events. Yet he designed the entire journey to systematically reduce the role of big forces and chance events by vigorously embracing the possibility of those very same big forces and chance events. He presumed bad events might strike his team somewhere along the journey and he prepared for them, even developing contingency plans so that the team could go on should something unfortunate happen to him along the way. Scott left himself unprepared and complained in his journal about his bad luck. “Our luck in weather is preposterous,” penned Scott in his journal, and wrote in another entry, “It is more than our share of ill-fortune…How great may be the element of luck!”
On December 15, 1911, in bright sunshine sparkling across the vast white plain, with a slight crosswind and a temperature of 10 degrees below zero F, Amundsen reached the South Pole. He and his teammates planted the Norwegian flag, which “unfurled itself with a sharp crack,” and dedicated the plateau to the Norwegian king. Then they went right back to work. They erected a tent and attached a letter to the Norwegian king describing their success; Amundsen addressed the envelope to Captain Scott (presuming Scott would be the next to reach the Pole) as an insurance policy in case his team met an unfortunate end on the journey home. He could not have known that Scott and his team were man-hauling their sleds, fully 360 miles behind.
More than a month later, at 6:30 p.m. on January 17, 1912, Scott found himself staring at Amundsen’s Norwegian flag at the South Pole. “We have had a horrible day,” Scott wrote in his diary. “Add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature–22°…Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”
On that very day, Amundsen had already traveled nearly five hundred miles back north, reaching his 82-degree supply depot with only eight easy days to go. Scott turned around and headed back north, more than seven hundred miles of man-hauling from home base, just as the season began to turn. The weather became more severe, with increasing winds and decreasing temperatures, while supplies dwindled and the men struggled through the snow.
Amundsen and his team reached home base in good shape on January 25, the precise day he’d penned into his plan. Running out of supplies, Scott stalled in mid-March, exhausted and depressed. Eight months later, a British reconnaissance party found the frozen bodies of Scott and two companions in a forlorn, snow-drifted little tent, just ten miles short of his supply depot
Amundsen and Scott achieved dramatically different outcomes not because they faced dramatically different circumstances. In the first 34 days of their respective expeditions, Amundsen and Scott had exactly the same ratio, 56 percent, of good days to bad days of weather.
If they faced the same environment in the same year with the same goal, the causes of their respective success and failure simply cannot be the environment. They had divergent outcomes principally because they displayed very different behaviors.
In summary what I learnt from this is that -
"You prepare with intensity, all the time"
When conditions turn against you, you can draw from a deep reservoir of strength.
When conditions turn in your favor, you can strike hard
Keep working hard ....Hope for the Best,Prepare for the worst ....
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