The Responsibility Ethic: 12 Strategies Exceptional People Use to Do the Work and Make Success Happen

By Adam Kreek

Learn the 12 principles of self-leadership, the most important factor in driving results and achieving success.Adam Kreek has consistently defied the odds to find greater achievement in all facets of his life. After 73 days alone at sea, Kreek and his expedition team survived a capsize in the Bermuda Triangle, the subject of the Dateline NBC documentary “Capsized”. Four years earlier, Kreek won Olympic Gold with his eight-man rowing team. A two-time Olympian, he holds 60 international medals and multiple Hall of Fame inductions.In The Responsibility Ethic, he shares the 12 essential principles of self-leadership that have fueled his incredible accomplishments—and shows you how to master these principles too.Kreek is a powerful guide who teaches us how to realize our full potential at any stage of our career and lives. Drawing on his eight years of intensive Olympic training, near-death ocean expeditions, and career as an executive coach and corporate trainer, Kreek shares winning strategies from the trenches, where the strongest minds prevail.A compelling narrative with powerful instruction and direct application, The Responsibility Ethic challenges business leaders globally to chase their ambitions and to take responsibility for their success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Kreek
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781989603024

Adam Kreek

Adam Kreek is one of North America’s top Management Consultants, and Executive Coaches, with degrees and education from Stanford University, UBC Sauder School of Business, and Queen’s Smith School of Business. He is a guest lecturer at the University of Victoria and teaches strategies and skills of leadership, high performance and perseverance to corporate and government teams globally through keynotes, workshops, and online seminars. Long-term clients on retainer include leadership teams from the Aerospace, Healthcare, Nutrition, and Energy Sectors. Adam has coached, trained, and taught hundreds of thousands of people including teams at Microsoft, General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, L’Oréal, Shell, YPO, EO, TedX, but most importantly, Adam walks the talk. Kreek runs two corporations—KreekSpeak Business Solutions and Ergo Sustainable Solutions, a low carbon initiative that connects small businesses with small governments. A two-time Olympian, Adam holds sixty international medals, including Olympic gold, and multiple hall of fame inductions. In 2013, Adam made the first-ever attempt to row unsupported across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to America, the subject of the NBC Dateline documentary “Capsized.” He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and three children.

Book preview

ETHIC 1

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR FEAR OF FAILURE

We all want to achieve the goals we set, yet there is much to be learned and enjoyed in not achieving every single goal, every single time. What we experience during the process of reaching and failing can change our lives for the better, forever.

The saltwater splashed my face as I was falling asleep. Pat and I had entered the small cabin after our early morning rowing shift. Watching the sunrise was beautiful, but now I was exhausted. Aw, man! I shouted. My sleeping bag is soaked!

Then I heard it.

A wave slammed onto the stern of our twenty-nine-foot ocean rowboat and began flooding our sleeping cabin. Terror-fueled adrenaline rushed through my veins. Trapped in the confined space, I was hammered by rushing water as the small compartment rapidly filled with the salty sea. This wasn’t happening—at least I didn’t want to believe it was happening. But there we were, on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle, after rowing away from the coast of West Africa, seventy-three days earlier.

I saw my crewmate Pat in a crouch position. He was lunging and grabbing at the hatch door as the ocean violently entered our tiny cabin. We were hundreds of miles from the nearest land.

Jordan Hanssen, Markus Pukonen, Pat Fleming, and I were rowing unassisted from Dakar, Senegal, to Miami, Florida. We were alone. We collected scientific data and communicated our experiences to the outside world using satellite technology. Rogue waves, high winds, and absolute darkness gave us a visceral respect for the tremendous power of the ocean wilderness; whales, turtles, and flying fish inspired us with wonder.

Get out now! I screamed to Pat. He was lunging to the port side of the boat, hoping his 170-pound frame could prevent the inevitable capsize. Seconds earlier, Pat had grabbed at the hatch door to slam it safely shut. But the powerful water threw the hatch wide open, tearing both door handles out of his hands.

The sleeping cabin was our main protection against the violent indifference of the ocean. A closed hatch door kept the cabin full of air. It was an airbag that could re-right an upside-down boat. In training, back in the Puget Sound off Seattle, we had capsized our boat and it had easily returned upright. Over the past ten weeks at sea, whenever a giant wave hit our sealed cabin, the boat righted itself and we were held unturned. The buoyancy of the cabin and the weight of our ballast kept the boat in its upright position.

But the hatch door was blown open, and ocean water was rushing in like a waterfall. I pushed Pat out of the hatch with all my might. We’re going over! I yelled. Get outta here, Pat! And that’s when I ran out of air.

I was underwater. The world went silent.

That time underwater in the small cabin felt like an eternity. My eyes popped open. The water pouring into the cabin was filled with tiny air bubbles. I was taking in as much information as my brain would allow. I saw a floating cushion and punched it. I felt an air pocket! I went for it.

I gasped the trapped air. My survival instincts had kicked in. All language was gone from my brain. I was completely present and alert. I thought in pictures, emotions, and visions of energy. I knew it was go time. I would either get out of this cabin alive or stay trapped—leaving my wife a widow and my son and unborn daughter without a father.

So, I paused. I had not felt such deep presence since international racing. My body was alive. My mind still. Focus. Presence. Volition. It was time to perform. I needed to deliver my best. Instinctively, I slowed down to speed up. Each second felt like a minute. I took a second breath.

My inner voice returned. Take your time. Poise. Do this properly!

I dove into the cabin’s rising water. A blue light shone where daylight was penetrating through the seawater into the submerged cabin. I swam toward the light, not even feeling the saltwater that was burning my eyes. I squeezed myself through the tiny cabin door that was half a foot narrower than my shoulders. I grabbed onto the safety line and pulled my body out of the cabin. It was eerie to see our vessel underwater.

Lines hung underneath the water. Oars bobbed. Sundries cast off from the exposed deck of our ocean rowboat floated in the void.

I popped my head above water and gasped a big breath of air. Seeing Pat on top of the boat, I scrambled up to join him, grabbing onto the daggerboard that was now pointing up to the sky. Pat had grabbed a lifejacket on his way out of the cabin. Jordan and Markus were floating in the water. A big wave crashed down on us—a reminder that we were still in danger’s powerful grip.

Seconds before the capsize, Jordan and Markus had been on deck. Jordan was steering the vessel and hooting with pleasure in admiration of the powerful seas. The wind was just over twenty knots, and the waves were just under seven feet high—certainly not the largest seas we had encountered on this voyage. Markus was literally caught with his pants down. He was sitting on the five-gallon bucket that we used as a toilet. Then two short, boxy waves collided with our boat, instantaneously flooding our sleeping cabin, flipping us over.

Another giant wave crashed over me as I clung to the daggerboard of the overturned vessel. I looked down at Markus and couldn’t help but crack a smile. I know this is the wrong thing to say at this moment... I said. His eyes were burning red from saltwater. But there is a piece of poop floating beside your head.

Yeah, he said. The shit really hit the fan, didn’t it?

Is everybody present and accounted for? Jordan boomed. Pat and I were riding the hull like cowboys. Markus was floating on the side opposite to Jordan. We did a quick count—all four members of the crew were present and accounted for—and then moved into action.

The greatest cure for fear, it seems, is action. No one was feeling particularly afraid as we moved to correct our upset.

Jordan passed me his brown leather cowboy hat, which I promptly put on. It was warm and surprisingly comfy. Jordan went underwater to pull out our life vests. They were clipped to the grab line for easy access. Let’s turn on the beacons? Jordan asked, referring to the ACR Artex emergency locator beacons we had with us. We glanced at one another. Do we want to be those guys? The ones who call for help? Is this a real emergency?

I looked at Pat, who had been on the other side of backcountry mountain rescues and had helped a number of people get out of trouble. "I’m okay being those guys, Pat said as he held up his blinking beacon. I’ve already pressed mine." We laughed. Jordan flipped the rest of the switches. Was anyone going to show up?

Jordan swam under the submerged hull to free the life raft. The white plastic case opened easily enough, but the boat was tightly packaged in plastic wrap. He swam under the submerged hull again and found the knife we had tied to our deck, which he used to take the shrink-wrapped plastic off our life vessel. We heard a hissing sound as the raft inflated. I jumped into the water, still wearing Jordan’s leather cowboy hat, and looked up.

Odd moments of calm occur amid disaster—when focus is lost, when you have no job to do or are thinking about what to do next. But fear preys on us in these moments. That’s when I felt the severity of our situation. Fear snuck in, uninvited. If action is a cure for fear, then inaction is a cesspool for doubt.

An uneasy terror penetrated my being. This was not what we planned. We were supposed to be in Miami in less than two weeks. I wanted to see my pregnant wife, Becca, and Jefferson, our two-year-old son.

As fear and non-acceptance of our situation festered, I looked up. An ocean seabird—a skua—was hovering over our heads. I instantly thought of Rick Mrazek, an educator from Lethbridge, Alberta, who had fervently supported our mission and died of a heart attack while we were at sea. The bird’s eyes locked with mine. He was gently soaring over the waves and our capsized mess. I felt oddly at peace.

Rick? I asked. Is that you?

Was it Rick’s spirit that propelled that particular bird to that particular spot at that particular moment? No one can say, but I know how real the feeling was in my heart of hearts. Our boat was named after Jordan’s late father, and the ashes of both of Markus’s parents were in the sea. Through the eyes of that ocean bird, we felt supernatural protection. Someone, or something, was watching over us. The terror receded.

Jordan says that birds are an omen of good spirits and good luck to those at sea. We had the spirit world on our side. I felt my own spirit rise. There were no other humans for miles around. But if anyone could help us, it was someone from beyond this world. It was at that point that, despite our massive failure, I knew we would be safe.

Hope returned.

The Clustered Science of Non-attainment

Research tells us that people who set goals are happier and more successful. Professors who set goals earn tenure faster, employees who set goals get larger raises, and students who have goals set for them learn up to 250 percent faster than those who do not. When we are achieving a goal, our brains release the powerful neurotransmitter dopamine, which makes us feel good—and motivates us to attain even more.

So, what about those who set goals and then fail to achieve them? What about those people? Ha ha! That’s all of us.

One problem with setting really, really big targets—like my team’s goal of rowing across the Atlantic Ocean—is that our brains react negatively to them. Science shows that the larger the goal, and the greater the consequences, the more stress and anxiety is created within us. We then worry even more that we won’t attain the goal. We worry about feeling like a failure. We fear failure. That fear can stop us from taking responsibility.

The best way to get around this natural mental barrier is to manage the risk of a single, large goal with a series of smaller objectives that don’t carry the same burden of potential failure—a cluster of smaller benefits that will be achieved regardless of the outcome of your massive goal. If you’re about to spend two weeks preparing a pitch for a request for proposal (RFP), what else will you gain in the process besides a possible successful end result?

In his bestselling book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb writes about unlikely outcomes. If we plan smartly and anticipate unlikely, extreme events, we can have more positive results and fewer disasters. I agree wholeheartedly with his philosophy. Our goals should be structured to minimize the likelihood of strong negative outcomes, while simultaneously maximizing the likelihood of strong positive outcomes.

Clustering smaller beneficial outcomes under one large goal is powerful. It’s a winning strategy that can also create more unpredictable wins.

Cluster benefits are a group of goals that support and elevate your next Gold Medal Moment to its highest heights. For the four of us in that rowboat, our ultimate goal was to experience and share the ocean wilderness as we rowed from Dakar to Miami. Indeed, by setting this massive goal, we could achieve many other valuable objectives in the process.

One objective was learning. I had to learn how to fundraise. Learning project management skills was also key, as it took four years to put all the pieces of this expedition into place. Another objective was connecting. I connected deeply with each of my teammates, each of whom are close friends to this day. I connected deeply with the environment. I connected deeply with God and the spirit world. I connected with my authentic self. I connected with students, professors, volunteers, and family members who supported us and followed our mission. Discovery was another objective. We collected data on the state of the planet’s oceans. We experimented with how humans and smart phones interacted. We documented how human psychology reacts to extreme environments. We observed rare weather phenomena.

Cluster benefits hedge for a great future regardless of your big goal outcome. Remembering cluster benefits in times of doubt gives you the courage to take responsibility.

Let’s say your goal is to roll out a new product in Q1 of the next fiscal year. Instead of focusing on that as your only outcome, uncover the clusters that your pursuit of this single, large goal will achieve. The process of pursuing your product release will support your personal and professional development in many arenas.

The first cluster might be to initiate strategies that increase your proficiency for new product design.

The second cluster might explore different ways to engineer the best, most cost-efficient design.

The third cluster might be the career-enabling connections you develop with your colleagues in pursuit of this important release.

There might be dozens of smaller clusters within the larger goal of rolling out a new product release, and each will be more easily attained than the overall outcome. Clarifying to yourself that you are gaining in many areas will boost your motivation and drive to completion.

Outcomes do matter. Winning is more fun. Realizing big goals feels incredible. Reaching a goal that requires you to grow significantly in the process is far more thrilling than attaining an easy goal. When a company encourages its employees to achieve audacious goals, it has higher employee engagement and the organization takes responsibility together. That said, we need to set our goals like an intelligent investor monitors their finances; we must protect the downside while maximizing the upside.

Fail Forward

The emotional downside of big goals isn’t the fear of feeling you’ve failed if you don’t attain them. It’s the feeling that you are a failure. The key is to realize that there are valuable lessons to be learned from non-attainment. I personally believe that failure in many ways is as important to us as success. Success and failure are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

Indeed, the very word success is derived from the Latin succedere, to come after. Success comes after you’ve delivered a freighter-sized effort of work—and that work often takes us through... failure. One cannot exist without the other. This interplay is the yin and yang of success and failure. We cannot have one without the other. Rudyard Kipling, in his powerful poem If tells us to treat those two imposters just the same.

Forward-thinking organizations embrace the philosophy of failing forward. Netherlands-based ABN AMRO Bank started an Institute of Brilliant Failures to encourage entrepreneurship. Recognizing that 90 percent of drug trials fail, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company began throwing R&D-focused outcome celebrations—failure parties—two decades ago to honor data gleaned from trials for drugs that didn’t work. Tata Group has a dare to try award, Procter & Gamble has a heroic failure award, and Google’s X moonshot lab rewards failures as well as successes.

Why reward failure? Perhaps it’s because the most successful people tend to be those with the most failures, as pointed out by Dean Keith Simonton, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.

Successful people have more ideas, both good and bad. We need to recognize failures as another way to take responsibility.

How we react to failure can directly dictate our next success in life. Can we make the most of our failures and then wear them as a badge of honor? We know that failure is a stepping stone to future greatness—so many great achievers thank their failures for being their greatest teachers. But when we are living in the guilt and shame brought up by failure, we can have difficulty seeing how this new, unpleasant reality could possibly give us a boost.

By identifying cluster benefits on the road to our largest goals, we can see the value of an audacious vision, even when it is not realized. When we then set our next major goal, we can use cluster benefits to minimize our fear of failure and maximize our opportunity to achieve results as unlimited as our imaginations.

It was just past 7:30 a.m. After a short team meeting to ensure we were all safe and our survival equipment was in good order, we decided to attempt to right the James Robert Hanssen. We spent the next three hours trying to flip our boat.

On our first try, we tied lines to the riggers opposite us and used our bodyweight as best we could—rocking, leaning, and using the daggerboard as leverage.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, we ran lines under the submerged deck to the riggers underneath us. This gave us a bit more leverage, and we almost got it. We were leaning with all our might and had the boat nearly at the tipping point. That’s when Jordan let out a gentle prayer to our skua guardian angel. Come on, Dad. Tears welled in my eyes and the prayer only made us pull harder. Pat let out a passionate scream: Come on!

We hauled with all our might, but one by one we fell off our lines.

We were more than a bit demoralized. I climbed back on top of the boat and announced to my teammates, "Remember the first three rules of the James Robert Hanssen? One—don’t die! Two—don’t kill your mates! Three—don’t sink the boat! Well, two and a half out of three is not that bad."

It’s pretty good, actually, Jordan chimed in. At least we were staying positive.

With our try at righting the boat unsuccessful, we were becoming noticeably exhausted. Pat was zoning out. I think I need to go into the life raft, Pat said with a dazed look on his face.

Go, go! I shouted. Get warm. You, too, Jordan. Your skin is looking purple.

Jordan glared at me. I look good in purple, he quipped.

During our righting attempt, Jordan had spent twenty minutes cutting off the emergency raft plastic casing and the poop bucket that was clanging against the hull. He was exhausted and knew it. The water was sucking out all his heat and Jordan was approaching hypothermia.