Lead Like Shackleton

The objective was never the point

By: Timothy Goodlife

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In January 1909, Ernest Shackleton stood ninety-seven miles from the South Pole — closer than any human being had ever been — counted his food, and turned around.
He had spent eight years getting there. Four more days would have done it. He worked out that he could reach the Pole and that his party would not get home, so he planted a flag, took a photograph, and walked eight hundred miles back. He told his wife afterward that he thought she would rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.
Shackleton is taught as a story about never giving up. The record shows almost exactly the reverse.
He gave up on the objective, quickly and without ceremony, on every expedition he ever led. He abandoned the Pole in 1909. He abandoned the crossing of Antarctica on the day his ship was crushed. He abandoned the plan to haul the boats across the ice twice inside two months. And because he did, twenty-eight men came home from the Weddell Sea after twenty-two months on a drifting floe, an open-boat voyage of eight hundred miles, and a winter crossing of an unmapped mountain range.
He was not a man who refused to quit. He was a man who was unusually good at telling the difference between what he was doing and what he was trying to achieve.
This book doesn’t skip the hard parts. He lost money at every business he touched, stood for Parliament and came fourth, was in debt his whole life, and died owing it. He was away for most of his marriage. And while he was saving twenty-eight men on one side of the continent, three others died on the other side laying depots for a crossing that never happened — because his plan required them to be there.
This is a book in the Lead Like series: true stories told in scenes rather than lessons, every quotation sourced, every failure included. It ends with a Field Manual that gathers everything practical the story contains, and a chapter called The Ledger that honestly lays out what Shackleton had that you don’t.
The famous recruitment advertisement is almost certainly not his. Chapter Nine explains why, and what he did instead.