Ranjay Gulati

So I think we have to understand how these kinds of people find interesting ways to deal with this thing we call fear, which is a natural human impulse.

And once they find their way to work through fear, I know you know the work on regret.

And research by some Cornell professors like 25 years ago showed that people have much more regret in life about inaction than action.

Yeah.

If we can only resource ourselves in dealing with fear, a lot of things open up for us.

Sure.

I must give you an embarrassing example of this.

Please.

So for 15 years, one of my favorite leadership case studies that I teach in the classroom is about the South Pole explorer, Ernest Shackleton.

So Shackleton in 1913 goes down to the South Pole and he's going to navigate from one end of the pole to the other.

And somehow he and his 28 men, they get stuck on ice.

And the winter comes and the winter is minus 70 degrees.

Somehow they survive the winter.

But at the end of the winter, when summer is coming, the melting ice crushes the ship and sinks it.

And now they only have three lifeboats, 21 foot long in the roughest sea on the planet.

Even today to cross the Ross Sea, it's really, really hard journey.

And there's nobody down there.

And these guys survive for two and a half years.

And somehow, magically, he brings them all back alive.

We have video here, a primitive camera then.