The Mayday Distress Call's 100th birthday

M'aidez, m'aidez, m'aidez

Asking for help can be hard. But when it’s hardest, when it’s most desperately needed, it needs to be easier than ever to do. Mayday calls are a structure, and we need something similar in real life. That’s what we’re talking about today. Maydays. In February.

When you’re in a genuine emergency, there should be no barriers to asking for help, nor any fear that help should be denied, or the request not heard. That being the case depends on a few things.

Mainly, it depends on the person doing the asking being clear about the ask. But, to avoid victim-blaming, that itself depends on them having confidence in asking and being heard, and that requires that there be a structure, and permission for doing so.

My Personal Mayday

I am not great at asking for help unless it is an emergency. I have done so one memorable time, when it became apparent that my mother’s health was declining beyond a point where she was safe to be left alone. She had MS and I was living with her in a sort of primary care role, but got to a point where I realised I couldn’t cope. Mum’s cognition had declined to such an extent that I was literally worried she might set the house on fire. We were going under. I needed help.

I sent up every flare I could at that point, calling in a favor from anyone who had ever said, during Mum’s long, slow decline ‘if I can ever help….’. That was often uttered as a castaway phrase, and I was embittered by hearing it most times, infuriated, feeling that it was a cop-out people used to excuse themselves from actually helping. But I realise now that I stored those moments up in my subconscious for when I really needed them. And with that tacit permission structure in place, I felt I had could reasonably expect people to respond to the Mayday I was about to issue, either out of obligation or embarrassment.

And, thankfully, people did respond, and helped when Mum & I needed them most. Not a single person wavered. I set up a rota of care (read: rotating visitors) over a two-week period for any time I couldn’t be there with Mum in person, giving my dad and I enough cover to organise a more permanent care solution. The immediate crisis was averted. The Mayday was heard. The Mayday call worked. Rescuers responded.

MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY

The phrase MAYDAY just turned 100. The word ‘mayday’ was chosen as a way to ask for help over the airwaves in an emergency because it sounded distinct from anything else, and so would stand out when uttered on the airwaves, even at a time where radios were weak, signal strength poor and the quality of sound was abismal. It was chosen because it ensured that the ask for help would be heard and unambiguously understood as a cry for help.

It was also chosen because at the time, the person charged with coming up with what would become an iconic piece of comms history, was handling flights between the UK and France almost exclusively, and M’aidez means Help Me in French. Frederick Stanley Mockford was the Senior Radio Operator at Croydon Airport, and he coined the iconic phrase in 1923, which was then codified in the Year-Book of Wireless Telegraphy & Telephony in 1924. It’s been in use ever since.

Mayday came about because lack of clarity in radio/telephone comms was a huge risk for aviators, and remains so. To this day pilots are trained in simple, clear communications on the airwaves and the importance of shared structures. It’s driven a massive focus on clarity, which has evolved over the years to give us things like the use of phonetic alphabets (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc). The Mayday call remains one of the best-known.

I’ve talked about how shared language and naming conventions help. I’ve talked about how a concise mantra helps. These are all just structures for how we communicate.

What happens when radio users hear a Mayday call? A few things. Firstly, they know there’s a major emergency going on. Nobody cries wolf with a Mayday (there are severe penalties for doing so) so if you hear one, it’s almost always the real deal.

At sea, you have a range of radio channels available, but people keep their radios tuned to Channel 16, because that’s the channel on which you A) hail people initially, before taking the conversation to another channel to keep Channel 16 uncluttered for further hails and B) it’s where you make emergency shout-outs when you’re in serious trouble. So everyone keeps their radios tuned to Channel 16 - it’s called maintaining radio watch - in case someone is trying to hail you, or just as a general precaution.

When a Mayday kicks off, unless you’re involved in the situation, or within range where you can be helpful, you maintain Seelonce Mayday, which means radio silence on that working channel unless you’re helping with the rescue. And if you’re in close proximity to the person requesting aid, you’re obliged to go to their aid.

These are the rules. Everyone knows the rules. Everyone abides by the rules because if they don’t, people die. The rules mean if you’re in trouble, you can expect a response.

The rules make it OK to ask for help when you need it.

WHAT IF THERE’S NO MAYDAY?

Why would there be no Mayday call? In aviation or merchant marine terms, you’re always going to send out the call (almost - more on that later). Maybe there’s someone in range, maybe there’s someone listening. It’s always worth asking for help.

When we transpose the Mayday back to real life, where it’s a metaphor and there are no regulations or agreed structures for how to respond, or even the reasonable expectation that someone will respond, things are less clear. People might not issue the Mayday, even if it is an emergency. They’re embarrassed, or ashamed, or procrastinating, or worried they’ll get in trouble or face other repercussions, or like me they just don’t like asking for help.

In the messy human world of real life, there are no codified rules to make it OK to ask for help when you need it. There should be.

A friend recently ended up in some serious health trouble and I couldn’t help but think the trouble might not have been so bad if we had all had a shared Mayday structure. Had that person known they were allowed send up a flare if things got bad, and that all of us in their friend group would respond if we saw it, in an agreed way, then maybe we could have done more to help. But we never heard the call, because there wasn’t one.

People don’t ask for help for a number of reasons, often cultural or emotional. Malcolm Gladwell talks about several famous aviation cases where, for a variety of cultural reasons, pilots or copilots failed to speak up about a pressing danger, resulting in a number of horrendous air disasters. Only after airlines started working on creating unique and highly formalised permission structures that everyone agreed would override cultural norms did the crashes stop. They created rules that made it OK for anyone to ask for help.

It’s something to think about with your friends and family. How do you tell each other that this is the real deal. How do you ask for help in a way that you feel safe and secure. How do you override the cultural norms of your peculiarly fucked-up family?

ALLOWING YOUR TEAMS ASK FOR HELP

Of course, the same works in work. As a manager, your teams need to know they can ask for help, and how best to do that. I always set my teams up for high autonomy. We agree on what we want to achieve and by when, ensure we have a shared understanding of why, and then we check in on the how but we need to align more loosely on that. And I always say that I’m there to help, and reiterate in the clearest possible terms that we should work through problems together as early as possible. I don’t want to get to the Mayday point with my team, so I make it clear that I’m there to help at any point, they NEED TO USE ME to help and should know that I will always put my experience and context to use to do so. And I outline how best to reach out to me, and how to signal how urgent something is.

My rules make it OK for my team to ask for help. Hopefully thinking about them helps you too.

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I’m gonna ask for your help. I’m building a business called NOAN. It’s an AI platform to help overwhelmed small business owners develop proper strategy, and then clone themselves so they can create content at scale using AI and run their businesses super-efficiently. Know someone who needs to make time to make themselves a success? Send them our way, and tell them to use the code NOANFREETRIAL at checkout to get the first month free.

⛵️Networks are fleets; fleets are networks

The juice must be worth the squeeze

I’m building & raising funds for a business at the moment – a brand new entity that has, as a constituent part, a two-sided network. Building a network-reliant business is hard (Go read this book!). Building any network is hard, frankly, even if you consider yourself rather good at it. The hardest part of building a network is establishing it, getting the first individuals on board – getting the momentum going, or in a human sense, being the new kid in school or making friends when you move to a new city.

A network’s value is intrinsic, the value in either side lies in the other, and the opportunity it presents to them. How does anyone know at the beginning that it’s going to be valuable? Well, you look at the connections, what they say about each other and what they offer. What and whom do those connections connect you to? How brittle or strong are those connections, really? How long will they endure? What do they say about the node of the network you initially attach to? Is the effort you’ll expend building the network likely to be returned to you? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

In the media world, we’re watching the unravelling of a major network’s value at the moment. Twitter as a public forum is becoming more and more toxic, causing people to move away from it in dribs and drabs, but dribs and drabs big enough to push it into irreversible decline.

Twitter managed to convince millions of users worldwide that that the juice was worth the squeeze, but of late they’re not too sure, even those who built their careers on Twitter are shunning its attempts at grovelling panhandling. I made my own career on Twitter, at least in part, but the time I spend on the platform now is drastically reduced.

Two major North American news orgs finally said what everyone in media has known for a long time: “It’s not really worth it”, and paused their ‘contributions’ to the network, robbing it of yet more value. NPR’s CEO John Lansing told his team “Twitter no longer has the public service relevance it once had” – it’s become more of a toxic back alley and whatever minimal traffic and conversion it once drove has winnowed further. The connections within the network are fewer, and of lesser value than at any point in its recent history.

When I started thinking about networks, it struck me that I’d started one in my teens - a small but rather successful one – without really thinking about it. I helped pick a dinghy fleet for my country.

In the late 90s I was sailing a Laser 4.7, which is the smallest of the three options for what was then known as the Laser (Now known as the ILCA because of a messy court case). The 4.7 is/was a rather uninspiring, underpowered boat but the only real singlehanded option that was any fun to sail (in my opinion) and had any sizeable fleet to race against. It was a leap from that to the Laser Full Rig in terms of physicality. Per the image below, you top out in the 4.7 at 55kg bodyweight. The reality is that to sail the Full Rig well you need to be 80kg, not 60kg - that’s a 25kg gap. I was too scrawny & weak to handle the bigger rig, and I was not alone in that dilemma. Kids who really wanted to sail something with more ‘ooomph’ would try to sail the full rig despite risking injuring their back in doing so. There was nothing in between it and the 4.7 - except there was.

Ireland hadn’t embraced the middle child in the Laser family yet. The Laser Radial existed in big fleets elsewhere, but there were none in Ireland. And because there were none in Ireland, nobody really wanted to be the first person to get one, because there’d be nobody to sail against. There was no network.

But then we did. A handful of us, including myself and Rory Fitzpatrick (Athens Olympian and coach to Ireland’s silver medallist Annalise Murphy) in Dublin, and a group of lads we knew who sailed out of Monkstown, Cork, after a bit of dancing about, decided we’d collectively be the first ones to take the leap. And so one winter, we all got Radial rigs. And the next summer, we had each other to race against, the boats and the racing were fun, and quickly others wanted in. 27 years later, the Irish Radial fleet still regularly breaks 50 boats at regional events, with kids and adults for whom it’s a better fit than either of the other options turning out in droves. The juice quickly became worth the squeeze, and has remained so ever since. It’s a nice legacy we all left Irish sailing.

If I had to visualize the decision-making that went into this on my part, here’s how it would look. I liked strict one-design boats - where each boat is identical. And I had previously had an experience with a fleet too small to be fun or develop me as a sailor. I didn’t want that again.

So I wanted a big, uniform fleet.

😬 I had been sailing a L’Equipe with a good friend. We were early adopters of this boat, we were the speculative network-builders, we hoped the juice would be worth the squeeze. And while it was a fun and very uniform boat, it never took off. There were limited numbers of them to sail against in Ireland. The motivation of having decent-sized fleets to go visit in France and on continental Europe was never enough to push enough Irish and UK people to buy them at scale. Fun to sail, but disappointing to race, as a result.

🤑 The Mirror dinghy fleet in Ireland was huge but it never really interested me - I had a few bad experiences in the boat early on and it soured me on them. The top sailors spent a lot on their boats to be competitive, and success was something of an arms race. The juice was arguably worth the squeeze, but it was expensive to buy a glass of that juice. They boasted huge fleets, but the difference between the top boats and even the middle of the fleet could be thousands of euros. (There were other factors I saw as negatives too - the boats were wooden, requiring a lot of maintenance, and also fragile as a result, constantly being dented and holed during a summer of fun junior sailing). Great for fleet size. Not great for equality of opportunity.

🧐 The Laser Radial. Lasers came in three rig sizes, but Ireland had only developed sizable fleets in the large (Full rig) and the small (Laser 4.7). There were large Radial fleets all over the world, but not in Ireland. The wonderful thing about Lasers across the board was their absolute uniformity. Strict class rules meant every component on the boat was uniform, it was true one-design racing and there was, effectively, a cap on spending. You couldn’t buy extra performance. They had their design flaws, for sure, but every single boat had the exact same design flaw, without fail. The boats aged reasonably slowly, so you weren’t constantly buying fresh gear to be in with a fair shout of winning. Because the boats were interchangable (everything but the bottom half of the mast and the sail was uniform across all three sizes) there was a baked in second-hand market too. The juice seemed worth the squeeze. But we needed to build a fleet for the middle child from scratch. We still had no network.

In reality, we weren’t building a network from scratch - we were versioning an existing network, two existing, adjoining networks actually, both of which were accelerants to the network we wanted to build. One (the 4.7) was the on-ramp, the other (the Full rig) was the natural off-ramp. We were building the pass-through network.

That off-ramp was a doozy. The Laser Radial was part of a progression path. The end point of that pass-through journey – the Laser Full Rig – had been around since 1970 and had just been selected as an Olympic boat for the 1996 games. Neither the Mirror nor any other boat on the diagram above was part of a network that connected so directly to the Olympics. We had reason to be confident that that endpoint was a significant enough draw that any initial momentum we could kick off would build without too much effort.

We didn’t think of it in those terms, obviously, or that deeply, because we were a bunch of spotty 16-year-olds who just wanted to find a fun boat to race that wouldn’t break our backs, or the bank.

There are may ways to think of this kind of decision-making. If you’re trying to build a network, especially where none exists, you have to think about existing behaviors, needs, and if you can tap into the power of existing networks to kick off your own, so much the better.

At Noan, for example, we’re creating a marketplace of experts, connecting them with a network of our client businesses. We have to build both sides, and we’ll do so by tapping into other networks to do so.

If there was one thing I wish someone had opened my eyes to as a youngster, when I was choosing this dinghy and more broadly in the circles I had around me, it’s the nature and value of the networks I was part of, and that I was creating in school, through friendships and sport. I was oblivious to networks then. I’m somewhat more attuned to them now. Networking is a dirty word to some people, it’s synonymous with transactional relationships, reducing everything to commerce. In reality, your network(s) represent a dynamic web of shared reliances, supports and interests. They are the ever-morphing fabric of humanity. They should be nurtured, tended to, pruned, fertilized - all those metaphors. How you choose and foster your own networks of friends, colleagues, competitors or employees likely, subconsciously, comes down to a matrix like the one above.

Plot two of the defining values of any network you’re a part of on the horizontal and vertical axes – honesty & humor, love of crochet and twitter, number of scarves owned & boat ownership, beard length and fondness IPA – whatever your fancy – and you’ll find that your strongest connections group toward the top right. They are the people from whom and for whom the juice is worth the squeeze.

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😢 Totally unrelated: My dad’s aunt Peggy was a trailblazing feminist, an educator and an inspiration. She worked as a Loreto nun in Kenya for more than 40 years, teaching girls, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. She passed away this week, aged 92. I loved her dearly, and made this radio project about her life when I was in college. Her story is great, I’m delighted I captured it in her own words and voice, and I hope you like it.

Startups are like short-handed sailboats, and vice versa

You gotta do it all

I’m embarking on my fourth startup adventure. I’ve been involed in three different startups in the past, all media, always in a senior leadership role. This time is different, for two reasons. The startup is non-media, and I’m a co-founder. NOAN is a global accelerator platform for small business, combining a proprietary strategic roadmap for business-building, a marketplace of top-tier consulting talent, and (in the medium term) generative AI solution to create all the strategic and marketing content small businesses need to go to market. 

Since starting this newsletter, I’ve kept a list of potential topics, and a note at the top saying: Startup founders as solo sailors? Dinghy sailing as startup life? Feels like it’s time to explore that. 

Even in the short time I’ve been sharing the helm of this new startup, it’s clear that being a co-founder is a lot like racing a small, short-handed boat. Most of the time, on dinghies or other short-handed boats, there’s just you, or one other person. Everything comes down to the decisions you make, so success means understanding every aspect. You have to know how to prepare the boat, rig the boat, and set it up to perform in the conditions you face. You have to know all the systems well enough to set them up for success, and fix them if they break. You are responsible for setting out strategy, breaking that down into tactical decisions, correcting as conditions change. You work all three sails. The whole shooting match - it all comes down to you. You own it all. You are immersed, and always in action. You are constantly calculating, constantly communicating. There isn’t a moment where you’re not engaged in the race. 

Random aside: I’m told this pic (which I shot) was, bafflingly, used as a frame-filler on the set of Desperate Housewives. I have people checking.

Big boats are different. You might be among as many as 12 people on a crew, maybe even more. Unless you’re sat at one or the other end of the boat, where the decisions are consequential, you’re not making calls, you’re following orders, adhering to process, watching metrics. Your job is more specialized, and it’s likely only in demand at certain times. There may be long periods where you’re waiting to be called into action. This is the corporate world for many people. There’s a little more room to hide a lot of the time, it’s a little more comfortable, you might get less spray in the face and work up less of a sweat, and for many folks that’s exactly what they need. Of course, you own less of the wins, when they come. You’re slightly more of a passenger. You’re rarely, if ever, driving. You might make it to one of the business ends of the boat on occasion, but if you’re mostly in the middle, you spend a lot of time wondering what the next order is going to be. 

Big boat sailing includes long periods of sitting on the ‘rail’, for most of the crew.

And let’s be clear, for boats or businesses set up a certain way, or at a certain size, those people in the middle are essential. You can’t get around the course safely or successfully without them on your team. Twitter is a great example of a company that grew to rely heavily on its middlefolk. Elon Musk clearly thought he could shed almost all of them, but his new boat has now hit plenty of rocks. Not sure how many more hits it can take. 

LESS IS MORE

It’s not hard to guess which scenario I prefer - I’m a fan of small boats and small crews, or of being at either the front or back end of the rail.  If you’re in strategic leadership or running a startup, it’s unlikely you’re a ‘middle person’. During my forays in the corporate world, I’ve never been content to sit quietly in the middle of the rail. It was nice to have the comfort afforded by that bigger corporate boat, for sure - larger teams, better equipment, even some perks. But I always worked my way to the business end where the action was more constant and the decisions made were more directional & meaningful. I wanted the spray in my face. I wanted to see if I could help make it go faster.

It is very much a way of thinking, I believe. You either want to run the boat or you don’t, you either seek out that accountability and opportunity and the risk that comes with it or you’re happy to have someone else take that heat. My co-founder is an ambitious surfer & climber – two sports where the effort is a risky, singular, solo affair so he’s of a similar mindset, and understands what it means to own the success or failure in its totality.

Over nights and weekends, we have built the initial product for our new startup - NOAN - working ourselves using no-code tools, so we are intimately in touch with the systems. We’ve pivoted since we started, correcting as conditions changed - the emergence of ChatGPT being a big change & source of opportunity for what we’re building. We’ve brought customers onto our platform and adjusted based on their activity and feedback. We are running the marketing (Sign up! 📬), the engineering, the fundraising. (WE ARE RAISING - read to the end for more). We’re laying out the strategy and doing our best not to be distracted. We’re set up to profit from chaos, because our business leans into the secondary effects of layoffs and recessions. We’re in business to help people build businesses - and we know there’s a lot of talented people with time to think and severance money in their pockets right now. We think they’re going to be launching a lot of new businesses in the coming months and years.

SMALL BOATS BECOME BIG BOATS

Of course, the thing about startups like ours is that the successful ones have a habit of becoming larger companies. How does the small boat analogy work as you scale to a bigger boat? Top-class competitive race boats, even the big ones, keep things lean even as the length of the boat grows. They restrict their crews to the minimum viable number, opting for pure professionals, because more people means carrying more weight, more baggage. The highest-performing offshore racing boats these days, in the 60-70 foot range, often have no more than 2-4 people on deck (the average amateur 40-footer would have 8 on deck). 

If you look at the skippers who have won the Volvo Ocean Race, the vast majority, particularly in recent iterations, have been ex-Olympians or otherwise world-class dinghy sailors – they have small-boat roots. Paul Cayard. Torben Grael. Ian Walker. A handful (Franck Cammas, Charles Caudrelier) were top-class solo offshore sailors - and again, they started their careers in smaller boats where all the decisions rested with one or two individuals, who took full responsibility. All of these pro skippers will have done some time in bigger, bulkier boats along the way - comparatively sluggish boats with large crews, whose speed is restricted by their weight and drag. But when they want to feel competitive, get the spray in their face, when they want to win against the best, the dinghy mentality returns, regardless of the size of boat. 

What’s the takeaway here? Well, two things. 

One is how we plan to build our team. We want to create a startup that can scale to high performance. To that end, I’d much rather hire fewer, better people with the same mindset of ownership that I share with my co-founder. I don’t see there being room for many middle-of-the-rail folks. Everyone needs to be comfortable being a decision-maker. 

💵 Two is the obvious fact that we’ll need money to hire the best, lightest crew crew and build the best, lightest boat. We’re going out for fundraising and have a limited number of slots for friends-and-family investment. If you or someone you know might be interested in investing in building a global accelerator for small businesses - do please send them our way - we’re at investor@getnoan.com

Know your systems

Know where the bungs & mallets are.

One evening in the summer of 2003 I was on a boat full of teenagers, thrashing upwind through lumpy seas en route to Antigua in the Caribbean. We were part of a small flotilla of 50-foot sailboats I was in charge of at the time, all of the boats manned largely by teens, with two or three ‘grown-ups’ (most of whom, like myself, were below 25 years of age) in charge.

As evening became night a call came through on the radio. One of the other boats was filling with smoke and taking on water through an aft cabin. Either of those things is alarming. Both at once is terrifying. The skipper thankfully was a cool head and, miles apart, we calmly worked through the few things we figured it could possibly be over the VHF radio until we landed on the problem. A $2 jubilee clip had come loose on an engine exhaust hose. With the clip in place, the hose and its exhaust smoke usually exited through the hull at a point that would, if the boat was flat & level, sit just above the waterline. But heeled over as they sailed upwind, that opening was now underwater most of the time, and because the hose had popped off, the smoke that should have burbled out into the seawater was now filling a cavity behind a cabin where three kids were meant to be sleeping, while at the same time seawater was rushing in and sloshing about aggressively.

The situation was distressing but the solution, once diagnosed, was pretty simple: tack over so that the boat leant the other way, raising the hole through which the exhaust hose exited the boat above the waterline; turn off the engine; and then find and reattach the jubilee clip.

Of course, it was only simple because we all knew the systems on those boats inside and out. One of the greatest things about working at Sail Caribbean was the preparation. The staff were a gang of unusually competent and resilient twentysomethings, and the first week of the summer was devoted to learning the boats from stem to stern, then running on-the-water simulated emergency drills about all the things that could go wrong. Loss of steerage, engine fires, cabin fires, loss of electrics, blocked pipes, leaks, medical emergency, mass hysteria. You name it, we gamed it out. We learned not only the various systems on the boats, but created our own procedures and processes to handle most situations and permutations.

Boat systems (like, say, the one below) can be intensely complex. Ours were floating caravans, so the systems were all pretty domestic. But you still needed to know every line, every pipe, every valve & cable, in case you got a call in the middle of the night from a captain who suddenly found herself with a two-pronged disaster unfolding in real time. Or, in case the emergency was on your own boat.

Inside the carbon hull of Tulikettu Racing - something vastly more complex.

Knowing the systems that keep you afloat is generally a good thing to do. Some people choose to ‘stay high level’ and refuse to get into the weeds. To them, I say this: I don’t want you on my boat. If you don’t at least show curiosity about the underlying systems, I don’t believe I can rely on you in an emergency, or when other surprises show up. You want to work through problems with people equipped to help you tackle things in a logical way. You want people who carry parts of the equations in their heads at all times. You want them to know where the bungs & mallets are, and how and when to use them.

When I landed at WWE in 2019, a huge technical project was coming to its climax, a massive content and systems migration that would have a huge impact on my next few months at the company, and dramatically change the experience of WWE’s most valuable digital users, much of which I would be in charge of.

I threw myself into understanding the content systems and the underlying engineering on both sides of this migration – new and old, front-end and back-end. Like a man possessed, I wallpapered my new office with process diagrams, Carrie-from-Homeland-style, highlighting and annotating them with scribbles, arrows and post-its. For my first two weeks, my new team met me in strobe flashes of intensity as I pulled them in to help me tease sense from a chaotic mess of flowcharts and process diagrams, soaking up their explanations with a maniacal fervor. What’s this thing here? Who owns this? Why was it set up this way? They would tell me later, when we all really got to know one another, how insane they thought I was.

It was oddly satisfying, though, and I was extremely glad I’d done it when, two weeks in, the project hit an impasse with a disagreement about how ready we were to make this migration. On one hand, some claimed we were on the cusp of completing this huge task, a culmination of months of effort with teams in three countries all working together, and we should carry on through. Facing them was one particularly livid engineer who said he had identified a risk that could mean some content – an untold quantity, in fact – could effectively be lost in limbo as we repathed every file and asset post-migration.

Somehow, the casting vote in that packed, tense conference room fell to me, the newcomer. I asked a few questions based on the systems and processes I had gotten to know from my manic wallpapering, and the answers led me to side with the irate engineer and push the milestone out until we could be certain it wouldn’t result in a messy, costly roll-back. I might not have had the confidence to make that very uncomfortable call had I not gone deep, and fast.

Many people master breadth of knowledge, the mapping of thin, superficial layers & networks, and can get by just fine by so doing. They understand the ‘who’ and the ‘what’, and some of the ‘where’. But the people who manage to match breadth with depth, the people who add an understanding of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ at least in some key, critical areas, are the ones who make the difference. They are the ones equipped to be decisive in a pinch. They don’t have to spend time gathering intel when there is no time to gather intel. They’re ready to act, and act confidently. Decisions that seem hugely intimidating to others come easily to them. Want some business jargon? These are your 10Xers. These are your bias-to-action, key-outcome drivers.

On a racing boat, on a big boat specifically, you’ll find them at the back, and at the very front, where it’s critical that knowing how key, interlocking systems on and outside the boat need to work together is second nature.

At the bow, you need someone who can think five moves and half a mile ahead of where you are. The bowman is always calculating, like a poker player, the odds of what maneuvers they’re going to be asked to be ready for. As the slanted, slippery deck bucks like a bronco under their feet, they’re mentally mapping out how to preposition ropes, clips, sails and spars for the most likely next maneuver. What maneuver that will be is ultimately decided at the back of the boat where the helm, tactician and mainsheet trimmer (the latter two often the same person) are mapping out short-range strategy based on patterns of wind and tide, the positioning of the competition and how all that comes together dynamically. They have the headspace to think about that while at the same time driving the boat as fast as possible because they innately know the systems well enough to understand how the boat is running just by feel, by how it moves under them, by keeping a few key visual cues in their peripheral vision.

And, of course, in all of these situations – on the caravan boat full of teens, in the WWE conference room, on a high-performance sailboat – the key system you have to understand as a leader is the human one. You need to know that human system and all its constituent parts are likely to work in a given moment, in a given situation, so you can decide whether or not to lead them into it. Will they perform? Will they freak out? Will they know where the bungs & mallets are? During staff training at Sail Caribbean, were weren’t just teaching people the systems, we were evaluating the system that was the staff, so that we could group them into functional sub-systems. At WWE, I had already done a parallel dive on the various teams adjacent to mine so I knew who to listen for, and to, in the conference room. And in any sailboat race, you’re not just keenly aware of the capacities of your own team, you have to bear in mind the capacities of the systems that surround you, and their breaking points.

Of course, if you’re a leader, the hope is that you have been deeply familiar with many systems, human and otherwise, and you get this, and the systems you’re relying on to keep you afloat are ones you’ve built yourself, based on that experience. You know where the bungs & mallets are, and you know that all the other people in your system do too - that’s why you have them there.

'NO TV': Possibly the best mantra there is

Four letters worth more than scores of self-help books

In my late teens/early 20s I sailed a type of sportsboat called a 1720. They were fast and fun and new, part of a new style of racing (asymmetrics, for the sailing crowd reading this) which many people didn’t quite have the hang of at the time.

As a result, when the wind picked up, thing got a little more… spectacular on the racecourse - especially when the fleet tended to compress around turning marks, with boats jockeying for position in close proximity, all while carrying out their highest-risk maneuvers.

When you put less experienced crews in high-stress situations where they had to make quick decisions and change sails and direction fast, wipeouts were inevitable, and also highly entertaining, assuming you weren’t too close for comfort. For the non-sailor, these out-of-control spinouts are called ‘broaching’.  They are one of the few things about sailboat racing that make for reasonably good TV. They are the epic fails of our sport.

So it may be a little odd that one of the better crews at that time - a boat consistently near the top of the fleet where competence begat safety - saw the slapstick antics of lesser crews as an existential threat, even when they were usually safely out of range of the carnage. 

To counter the threat, they wrote two words prominently on either side of the boom on that boat, a highly visible mantra to keep their team focused. 

‘NO TV’

‘No TV’ meant no rubber-necking, no gawking, no paying attention to the entertaining mayhem. Don’t be distracted. Stop looking at the losers, lest we become them. They are dead to us. Focus on what matters. Focus on greatness. Focus on US.

In high-stress, high-stakes moments, putting a single foot wrong can mean losing control; even a second of distraction can cause you to see all your hard-win gains slip away. Having a short, shoutable mantra to snap you back to reality is a great tool. In the 20 years since, I’ve never seen anything more concise than ‘No TV’. (The power of concise communication is becoming a theme for me). No TV. NO TV!!

Eliminating distraction is the focus of vast reams of self-help and management literature. One of its best-known tropes, hugely popular in startup culture, is the ‘stop doing’ list. In business terms, it means not allowing mission creep in your business - be clear on what it is you can do well, avoid doing anything non-core. Know what you do, but know and adhere to what you do NOT do. No TV.

On the racecourse, you win by reeling in the people ahead of you, not by paying attention to the people creating chaos all around you. In business, you win by reeling in customers, rather than paying attention to the share price roller-coaster or most recent workplace drama of competitors. No TV.

Of course, business isn’t the only realm where this mantra is relevant. Sometimes ‘No TV’ means just that. Turn off the television (Or TikTok, or Twitter, or the news) and spend your time doing the most high-value thing. Maybe it’s getting exercise, maybe it’s hanging with your kids, maybe it’s going to sleep earlier, maybe it’s reading that book or writing that newsletter post or taking that course or finally selling that damn screenplay you wrote for Brendan Gleeson. Whatever it is: No TV.  

And next time you tell your kids, ‘No TV’, and they ask why, you have a long-winded adult metaphor to bore them with. No TV.
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Side note: Building a small business in the health/wellness space? Creating a brand around fitness/diet or something adjacent? Know someone who is? Even if you or they are just getting started - I'd love to talk about a project I'm involved in that might help supercharge it. markham.nolan@gmail.com