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Episode 226 – Brad Borkan: When Your Life Depends On It – Extreme Decision Making Lessons

Steve Shallenberger: Welcome to our Becoming Your Best podcast listeners, wherever you may be in the world today! This is your host, Steve ShallenbergerI’m delighted to have an adventurous guest with us today! He has a graduate degree in Decision Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania and has a fascination in how people and businesses can make better decisions. He has presented at Antarctic conferences, appeared on cable TV in the US and on Internet radio talk programs. His talks focus on leadership, teamwork, and winning against the odds. He’s based in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. He’ll tell us about his background here, in a moment, but, welcome Brad Borkan! 

 

Brad Borkan: Thank you, Steven. It’s great to be here! 

 

Steve ShallenbergerI’m so delighted! Before we get started today, I’d like to tell you a little bit more about Brad. In his book, Brad focuses on the real life-and-death decisions made by early Antarctic explorers and reveals amazing lessons in leadership, teamwork, and sheer grit and determination that can help all of us make better decisions in our lives today. These can be especially useful when confronting adversity – and man, do we have adversity today, don’t we, Brad? 

 

Brad Borkan: We sure do! 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Also, building effective teams and trying to succeed against the odds – all important skills in today’s world. I’ll tell you why I’ve been so excited to have this interview with Brad: one of my favorite all-time books is “Endurance” by Ernest Shackleton. We’ll talk about all of those things. I’m excited to have Brad share stories today. So, before we dive into this interview, Brad, tell us about your background, including any turning points in your life that have had a significant impact on you and how did you end up where you are today? 

 

Brad Borkan: Okay, well, that’s a long question! A lot of places to go with that! I work for a large software company. So, my career has been working for large software companies, and I’ve always had this underlying interest in Antarctica – and therefore Antarctic explorers – which really started from about the age of eight, and having my mother working in a public library, and every day after school, I’d have to go to the public library and hang around until she got finished work. And I was just as a typical eight-year-old boy would be, just bored out of my mind, until I picked up a book – and it probably was something like the book about the endurance – the Shackleton’s voyage, where the ship broke up in the ice, and they had to fight for survival. It just captivated me, and it’s just stayed with me for the rest of my life.  

 

Brad Borkan: But the turning point, I think, what’s interesting in the whole journey just as a normal person working for large software companies and thinking that’s my career, and yet, in the back of my mind, there’s always these Antarctic stories. And what was interesting was, the more I looked at the Antarctic explorers, the early ones – they never achieved any of their primary goals. In fact, they all failed at their primary goals. And here I am, trying to move up in the software company, thinking “I’m not getting as high up as I want to be.” And it’s a remarkable thing when you look at – I’ll tell some of the stories from my book – the real-life stories from the explorers. I got to a point where I’m thinking, “I’m not getting to my goal, so what else can I do?” And it was at that point, when I thought, “How do I put my two passions together – focus on decision-making, focus on Antarctica and the likes expeditions” and I thought, “Actually, no one’s ever written a book where they said, what’s the most interesting thing about the early explorers, was the life-and-death decisions they made.” And so, at that point, I said, “I’ll still work for a large software company, but I’m going to turn my life towards creating that book and writing that book.” Because it is not about writing history. What I’m interested in is writing a book for modern people, very similar to your book, in the sense that it’s how do you help modern people make better decisions – and the Antarctic explorer stories are the framework for telling how to make better decisions. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Well, first, before we get going – for all of our listeners, that is so inspiring, Brad! Way to be! Way to take your native interest and figure out how to bring these worlds together, and how to lift the world and make it better, just joining these forces in a way that is very positive. Way to go! That’s inspiring! 

   

Brad Borkan: Thank you! 

 

Steve Shallenberger: You bet! Now, tell us about your book. The book is, “When Your Life Depends On It: Extreme Decision Making Lessons from the Antarctic”. Tell us all about that. 

 

Brad Borkan: Great! Yes, that’s the title. We tend to just call it, “When Your Life Depends On It” – and it’s the life-and-death decisions that the early Antarctic explorers made on the ice, and then what we can learn from them, for modern-day decision making. And the remarkable thing is they made a lot of life-and-death decisions, and they all came very near death all the time, but actually, very rarely died. So, in a way, it’s very uplifting because you’re reading about all this adventure, and danger, and science, and discovery, and exploration, and at the same time, it’s about risk and danger and challenges – at times they’re starving, at times they have scurvy, at times they just have so much hardship and yet, for the most part, they get through. And it’s just the most remarkable uplifting stories.  

 

Brad Borkan: I think this is where it becomes so valuable for modern-day people because even ignoring what’s going on in the world today, in the early 2020 – I mean, whether people listen to this audio within two years from now, and hopefully this will be in the past what’s happening right now in the early 2020 – but the concept that we all have adversity, whatever period we are in our own lives, we face a certain amount of adversity. And here, you have a bunch of people who faced extreme adversity for long periods of time, and how they got through it. It’s just a great roadmap for how we can deal with adversity. The stories are really just incredible! And maybe I can just tell one, for a little bit. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Yeah, sure, please! I hope we’ll be able to hear quite a few of these stories! 

 

Brad Borkan: Okay, this was probably what struck me the most; of all the stories, there’s this one story where Shackleton is going out on Scott’s expedition. The first real major expedition to Antarctica, where they were really going to try to penetrate the interior of Antarctica was Captain Scott’sAnd this is around 1903. So, he takes a team of men – like 40 men – and they’re really mostly scientists, and they’re basically doing science down there. But Scott has this idea. He’s going to take three men – well, him and two others – and they’re going to explore, at least travel as far as they can, just to learn how to travel in Antarctica and get into the interior. They know they’re not going to get to the South Pole, but they’re just going to try to get somewhere along the way. They go about 300 or 400 miles, they don’t get to their goal – like I said, no one ever gets to their goal in Antarctica – so they miss their objective by about 130 miles.  

 

Brad Borkan: As they’re returning, Shackleton gets scurvy. Shackleton, at this point, is a junior member of their team and he’s literally dying. So, they’re putting all of their belongings on the sledge, they’re pulling this sledge by harnesses – it’s called manhauling – they’re literally pulling the sledge along. Now, Shackleton’s so weak and so ill and close to death that he’s laying on the sledge on top of all their belongings – which is their tents and sleeping bags, whatever remains of food they have, their cooking equipment, their scientific equipment – and he’s literally dying. He does survive, they get back to base camp on the relief ship that comes back that next season to restock the scientists with the supplies and food and things like that. Since Shackleton’s back home in disgrace – here you have this guy, he’s got a lot of pride, he’s got a lot of ambition and he’s sent back home to England. And you’d think, this guy is nearly dead, he nearly died, they missed their goal – what did he do? The remarkable thing is he comes back to England, he tells everyone what a great expedition it was and how exciting it was to be in the middle of Antarctica. And yes, he almost died, but it was just absolutely thrilling to be there, and he wants to go back again. It’s just like, he took what many people would have just deemed as failure and just turned it on his head and said, “This was a big success!” And I think that’s just such an inspirational story! 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Oh, that is, isn’t it? Boy, isn’t that a great lesson in life for people? 

 

Brad Borkan: Yes, exactly! And then, to take this to the next story – and this is where it really affected my life was listening to this next story – he sets up his own expedition and spends two years fundraising and getting a ship and getting men and getting supplies and then he’s like, “Well, we’re going to go back to Antarctica, do what Scott did – we’re going to follow the same route – we’ll take four men this time and we’re going to actually get to the South Pole because now we know what to do, and now we’ve got a bit more experience.” They get to within 103 miles – so they’ve walked about 700 miles pulling a sledge, and they get to about 103 miles to go – and they’re running out of food. They know they’re going to run out of food on the journey back. So, the question then, becomes, what do you do? Your goal is in sight, you’ve spent two years setting up the expedition, your goal’s in sight, what are you going to do?  

 

Brad Borkan: And this is really quite remarkable. You’d think it’s like a binary decision; it’s like, either you go forward and you’ll probably die on the way back – because they had so little food left – or you just turn around. It really just feels like one or the other, doesn’t it? But Shackleton sees a third way. He’s like, “No! What we’re going to do is, we’re at 103 miles, we’re going to leave the tent, the sleeping bags, everything behind, we’re going to walk south as far as we can for one day, we’ll plant the flag, and we’ll turn around and start heading home.” And the question, then, is why did he do that? And he did that because he wanted to cross the 100-mile mark. He wanted to get back to England and say, “We got to within 100 miles of South Pole”, which he thought sounded a whole lot better than 103 miles of South Pole.  

 

Brad Borkan: And it’s just a way of how do you deal with failure? In modern-day business, how do you deal with failure? How do you deal with setback? And I now think of it as like, you plant the flag, you say, “Okay, now I’m going to plant the flag and somehow eke out a victory out of this.” And this is really the way I deal with my career. I basically said, “Okay, I’ve gotten to this level in corporation, this is where I’m going to plant my flag, and now I’m going to turn around and find my next goal” – and my next goal was working on the book. There are just inspiring stories like that. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Well, what a terrific insight! And, wow, that’s so powerful, isn’t it? That it’s not necessarily binary – we want to be thinking about all of the different options. Is that one of the things you’ve discovered from these stories? 

 

Brad Borkan: Yes, exactly! I think there are many times – and Shackleton was really the best at this, but actually, all the explorers were like that – when it really feels like you’ve got a choice, which is a or b; you get so caught up in this a or b, you actually miss that actually, there’s a third option. I just need to finish that story because Shackleton is missing his goal – he spent two years like I was saying, planning the expedition, raising funds, all this stuff – he misses his goal, he writes to his wife, he sends her a letter and he says, “I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.” 

 

Steve ShallenbergerThat’s great, isn’t it? Good job, good perspective!  

 

Brad Borkan: It is! It’s amazing! 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Live to go after it another day, right? 

 

Brad Borkan: Exactly! 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Gain the lessons you’ve learned. 

 

Brad Borkan: I could go on for hours about this. There’s so many lessons that come out of the books that you can bring into modern living. One thing that they were very good at was making decisions. Every time they came to a decision point – and this was true across all the early expeditions – they made decisions and they took them on head-on and they were just like, “We’re here, we’ve got to make a decision” and they made decisions very quickly.  

 

Steve Shallenberger: Yeah.  

 

Brad Borkan: Our book opens with this incredible story of these three guys on the ice. We don’t tell you who they are – just three guys on the ice. They’ve gone out 700 miles. We don’t tell you which expedition it was on or anything like this. They’re on the way back and similar, in a way, to the Shackleton story, one of them gets scurvy, but he actually is their commanding officer. And he’s really, literally, dying, and they’ve got like 200 miles to go, and they’re pulling him along in the sledge and he is really in dire straits and he’s their commanding officer and about 70 miles to go to base camp – there’s just no one that will come out to rescue them because they had no communication methods; they had no telephony or radios or anything – he says to them, “We’re all running out of food, and I’m just weighing you guys down. So, you go carry on without me. Just leave me on my sleeping bag on the ice to perish.”  

 

Brad Borkan: And when they hesitate to make a decision – think about this difficult, complex, moral, ethical decision – he says, “I’m your commanding officer – as your commanding officer, I’m giving you a military order. To disobey is mutiny.” But they made a decision very quickly. They decided to stay with him and that they would continue on as far as they could go. It’s just a remarkable story about survival. And they all came near death a lot. He had a very long military career – he was Lieutenant Evans – he had a very long military career afterwards, and he said, after being part of the Royal Navy for 50-60 years, that the only military order he ever gave that was disobeyed was that one. 

 

Steve Shallenberger:  Wow! And they survived! That’s amazing, isn’t it?  

 

Brad BorkanIt’s just a remarkable story, but the thing was what they were able to do, and I think this is important in modern business because people say we’re here now – and this is true even when you look at where we are right now in business today – we are where we are, and you can’t blame situations. You’ve got to focus on how do we take our next step forward? And in Antarctica in the cold, in the winds, in the terrain and in the frostbite and in all those different things they’re suffering, risking, you can’t waste a lot of psychic energy being, “Why did we get here? How did we get here? Look at all the things that went wrong!” Or blame this guy, blame that guy. They just said, “How do we move forward?” I think it’s a good lesson.  

 

Steve Shallenberger: Yeah! That is! Well, Brad, from your experience, what are the three biggest leadership lessons you’ve learned from doing the research for your book?  

 

Brad Borkan: I think probably the most interesting one was the idea of the second in command. And we don’t see this in modern business, today. We tend to set up teams – and working for big software companies, we set up teams all the time – we tend to have, “Here’s the team leader and here are the people on the team.” And the second in command concept – in Antarctica, everything was done in teams; there were small teams of three people, five or four people, 10 people, but whatever team they had, there was always a second in command – whether it was a spoken second in command or it was unspoken, but it was very clear this guy was second in command. I think this is a wonderful concept that businesses could use because that second in command enables the other people in the team to go to somebody who’s not the leader and gripe about another person or get more guidance about a task that they’re unsure of without feeling like, “Am I jeopardizing my job? Is the boss going to think I’m an idiot?” So it’s actually a structure that works extremely well that I think it’ll be great to bring back into business. It worked really well in Antarctica.  

 

Brad Borkan: The one thing about these expeditions is they’re all multi-year expeditions, so they’re there over the summer – well, the Antarctic summer is still frighteningly cold – and they’re there through the winter when it’s dark for six months of the year. And yet, across these six expeditions that we studied, there’s not even a history of fistfights. There’s no murder, there’s no mayhem, there’s no sabotage. These people acted with purpose. And it is just remarkable because, certainly, in other expeditions to Antarctica, to the Arctic, around the world, there have been horrible situations of murder and things like that. And yet, here you had these people acting purposefully – and I think that’s the second big lesson, was that everyone knew the purpose, this sense of knowing why you’re there and the role you play and the value you play in the team. In any team of the big expeditions, I think that was important.  

 

Brad Borkan: The third one was really around the concept of, they couldn’t always make perfect decisions, but they had this sense of – and this was from the leaders downwards – even if we make a bad decision, we are resilient enough to recover from it. And that’s an important skill. I think a lot of times we make a bad decision and everyone’s like, “Oh, we made a bad decision.” It’s like, “Wait a minute! How do we figure out the strategy that we’re all resilient, we’re all brave, we all have the wherewithal to figure out how to get out of this bad decision? How do we start making good decisions?” 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Wow, that’s good. That’s something I don’t hear often, but I love it! Just kind of the recognition that we’re in this together, this is a process and we’re going to make the best decision we can and if it doesn’t turn out perfectly, we’re resilient. We can fix this and get to a better place. You’re saying it works out? 

 

Brad Borkan: Yes! For them, it always worked out. I mean, we were talking about the book, “Endurance” at the start of the show – and this is where Shackleton’s ship gets crushed in the ice. So this is after the South Pole’s been conquered, and now Shackleton sets up another expedition where he wants to set the first team of people, to be the first man to walk across the continent of Antarctica. So, he sets up an expedition where there are two ships: one going from Australia, New Zealand, coming down to one coast of Antarctica – they’re going to depose along the way up about to the South Pole; the other ship that he’s on is going to come down from the Argentina side and they’re going to drop off a set of men and then that set of men is going to walk across, and then they’re going to pick up the supplies on the other side.  

 

Brad Borkan: I think that expedition is quite a remarkable one because Shackleton never starts, actually. His ship comes down into the Weddell Sea, which is the sea just off the coast of Argentina – if you look at a map of the world, it’s the one closest to Argentina – and gets stuck in the ice and gets crushed, and then they’re stuck and trying to survive and trying to get out. All they have left is three lifeboats – how are these 28 men going to survive? A remarkable story, but the reason they got into trouble in the first place was because Shackleton made a bad decision – and the bad decision was there was a landing spot… You don’t want to land and set up your camp on ice. You’ve got to set your camp on the continental land. Even though there’s sea ice all around, at times the sea ices are breaking up and you can steer your boat towards land. And he’s like, “I don’t want to land here because we can get closer, so my starting point would save me 60 miles of walking.” And so, they get to the first spot, basically, and they never found the second one because the sea ice just crushed the ship – just trapped the ship and crushed it. The men never really blamed Shackleton for that bad decision, and I think that sense of saying, “We are where we are in this. We’ve just got to move forward.” And this sense of just being resilient and saying, “Okay, we’ve got a new goal, we’ve got to get ourselves home and we’ve got to just accept that there’s a bad decision, but we can recover from it.” 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Okay, that’s nice. That’s excellent! Brad, how can we apply the lessons learned from the Antarctic explorers to our lives today? 

 

Brad BorkanThat’s a good question! It has a lot to do with what we think of as adversity. When I read these stories about the early explorers, I’d encourage your listeners, whether it’s my book, or there’s so many wonderful books written about Shackleton, about Captain Scott, about Amundsen, about Mawson and other explorers – these stories are so inspirational because their decision-make was very pure. Their decision-make was there on a place when they were not going to get any help from anybody else. There was no one they could call, they didn’t have that sort of electronic equipment to call anybody – even if they could call somebody, there was no one that had ever been in their place and could give them any advice. When you read about what they endured and what they did and how they survived and where they got their inspiration from, it is things that we can bring into our personal life. It’s very much like your book, in the sense of there are so many inspirational stories – your book is filled with these wonderful quotes and wonderful stories – and the Antarctic stories are equally exciting and, at the same time, they’re inspirational.  

 

Brad Borkan: There’s a story where Mawson falls into a crevasse – he happens to be on its own at this time, but that is a longer story about why he’s on his own, but he’s on his own, he falls in that crevasse and the only thing that holds him from death is the harness from his sledge – that hadn’t fallen in on top of him – that was anchored at the top, on this ice and he’s dangling below. He’s very weak, he’s got very little food, he’s very malnutritioned, and he tries to climb up the harness – this rope is about 14 or 15 feet down in the crevasse. And then, he was not wearing Thinsulate, he was wearing old-fashioned cloth – woolen clothing, heavy boots; he was all covered in ice, and he starts to climb up, and he falls back down, and luckily his sledge doesn’t come crashing back down on top of him. And he just thinks he should give up. But he gets inspiration from a poem that he remembers. These stories are so fascinating because you can apply them to your modern life and it’s like, when I really feel down, where can I get inspiration from? It may not be poetry, but it may be a story, a book, a quote – you’ve got so many great quotes in your book – there’s so many things you can get inspiration from to give you that little extra energy to get to the next day. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Well, how inspirational! I can see that! Well, before we end up – and I’m always amazed at how fast this goes – what’s one of your favorite stories? Another one of your favorite stories, Brad? 

 

Brad Borkan: Actually, this is one of my favorite stories! I don’t get a chance to tell it very much. After Shackleton’s ship gets crushed in the ice, you’ve got 28 men and they’re on the sea ice. And because there were only about 10 men that were going to walk across the Antarctic continent, they were the ones who had fur sleeping bags. It wasn’t a military operation, but still, you had officers and men – they’re all male, but they always had this classification. The officers would get better food, they get better equipment, they get better accommodation on the ship. The men were the lower-ranking people. And so, they end up all on the ice, there are 10 fur sleeping bags – the rest are these wool cloth sleeping bags, not as warm. And where normally everyone assumed that the officers got the fur sleeping bags – that’s just the way it worked – Shackleton has brought everyone together and said, “We’re going to draw straws for who gets the fur sleeping bags – and there’s no trading. Once it’s decided, it’s decided.” He sets this up and remarkably, to the disbelief of every low-ranking men on the ship, they were the ones who got the fur sleeping bags. None of the officers got fur sleeping bags.  

 

Steve Shallenberger: Wow! 

 

Brad Borkan: Shackleton clearly rigged the textbook. It was his way of saying, “We’re all in this together and rank, now, doesn’t matter. It’s about survival.”  

 

Steve ShallenbergerThat’s awesome!  

 

Brad Borkan: This is a great story, isn’t it? 

 

Steve Shallenberger: It is a great story! Yeah, very inspirational. So, any final tips you’d like to leave our listeners with, today? 

   

Brad Borkan: Well, I think, actually, it’s funny. I saw your list in your book of your 12 points and your last one says, “Never give up” – and that is exactly what we have, actually, as the last point in our book. And we say it slightly different; we say, “Never ever give up trying.” And I think this concept that, yes, Shackleton couldn’t get to the South Pole – he got to 97 miles – he kept trying until he got to a point where it’s like, “Okay, now we’re really risking our lives.” But that’s the concept of just, “Never give up!” Just keep on going; keep on going one foot in front of the other and just don’t give up. You’ve got to find other angles as you may have to set new goals, you may have to pivot from one goal to another, you may have to look at how you change your teams around. Nowadays, it’s like, how do you rejig your business? How do you turn from doing X to doing Y? But you just keep going, you just keep pursuing and seeking and challenging yourself and achieving. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Wonderful! And Brad, how can people find out about what you’re doing? 

 

Brad Borkan: Well, my website is called www.extreme-decisions.com. The book’s available on Amazon – it’s in print and on Kindle, and it’s an audiobook. And just a quick note about the audiobook because I listened to easily 100 voices before I chose Dennis Kleinman. Dennis has the most remarkable voice! I’ve tried to figure out, “What would early Antarctic explorer sound like?” And I thought it’s a rough, gravelly, male deep voice – I thought I don’t have that. I tried to record my own audiobook but then, after two paragraphs, I thought, “This is just not working!” And I found Dennis – he has the most remarkable voice and it’s the most remarkable recording. And we ended up in Hollywood at the Voice Arts Awards for the best audiobook in the history category. We didn’t win, sadly – we lost to “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan – but we were up against a book that was up for Pulitzer Prize; all the other books were New York Times bestseller books, and then, there was our book – a book about Antarctica. At that point, we had around 28 reviews on Amazon, but that’s what we were in there for – it’s Dennis’s voice recording this audiobook. So, I’d encourage your listeners, if you have a subscription to Audible, it’s just a remarkable rendition of these stories. It’s just incredible! 

 

Steve Shallenberger: I cannot wait to get it! I’ll start listening to it right away, Brad! 

 

 Brad Borkan: Thank you! Thank you. Yeah, we were there. That was Voice Arts Awards, we were in Burbank at Warner Brothers studios, a red carpet event; Sigourney Weaver was there and Van Jones and it’s just incredible! It’s like the Grammys or the Oscars – a celebrity analysis, the category and then the entries and then they rip up the envelope – but it wasn’t us. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Yeah. Well, dang it! Sorry about! What an honor to even be there though, right? 

 

Brad Borkan: It was actually one of the most exciting things in my life. And when we started the show, we were talking about changing your life. Literally, the change from saying, “Am I going to achieve my goal in the software business?” And thinking, “No, I’m not. How do I pivot from that?” And check and choose another goal. So many remarkable things have happened, and being on your show is one of the highlights as well. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Great! Well, congratulations! And if you don’t mind, for our listeners, before we started the show today, Brad and I were just visiting, would you mind sharing your comment in regards to Becoming Your Best? 

 

Brad Borkan: I started reading this book and I thought, “All of these 12 points, every single one of them applies to the Antarctic explorers.” When you look at what these guys achieved in these science discovery explorations in the harshest conditions possible, every single point in Steven’s book, they applied. Absolutely! If I had a cookie cutter, I could cut and paste my book into your book or your book into my book.  

 

Brad Borkan: And these guys achieved the most remarkable things of science – and I know we’re going to run out of time, but the baseline for science, for climate change in Antarctica today came from these early expeditions. The banning of DDT, in the 1960s and 1970s when they were trying to prove that DDT was harmful, and it was pervasive in animal species around the world, even in Antarctic penguins, people said, “Wait a minute! I supposed DDT is inherent in a penguin’s skin, in penguin’s DNA – is part of their DNA.” And they went back to penguin’s skins that are preserved – because they’re in taxidermy exhibits in the National History Museum in London – gotten from Scott’s expedition in 1903, and compared the skins and they realized there was no DDT in penguins in 1903.  

 

Brad BorkanThere’s so much science! They’re taking the science that was done on Captain Scott’s expedition, and they’re applying the scientific methods we have in 2020 and analyzing their data and coming out with new results from data that was captured 100 years ago. It’s just remarkable! And then, also, they were like the NASA of their generation. When we think of NASA and all the spin-off technologies that came out of NASA – there were spin-off technologies that came from there. Like treaded vehicles; they were experimenting with all-terrain treaded vehicles. This was before World War One tanks, before people made tanks or anything like that, they were playing around with treaded all-terrain vehicles which are the basis for tanks, are the basis for the vehicles today. The clothing: when we think about dressing for the cold, if you live in Minnesota, you live in Maine or wherever, and you wear layered clothing – all that came from Scott’s expedition. Before that, explorers wore it first. There’s so many interesting things that come out of these stories. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: Well, that’s fabulous!  

 

Brad Borkan: Your book dovetails so well into this and I’d encourage your listeners and readers to learn more about the early explorers as well. 

 

Steve ShallenbergerThat’s really good! Well, you know, I didn’t invent those things. They came from research of what sets apart high performers from all others. Wherever we saw excellence, those 12 principles were present, and you just have observed them and written about them in these great leaders from the Antarctic. Thank you, Brad! It has been such a delight to have you with us today! So fun and we could go on, but I’m excited to read your book. We wish you all the best as you’re making a difference in the world!  

 

Brad Borkan: Thank you, Steven! It’s just a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to be on your show and to meet you. 

 

Steve Shallenberger: You bet! And to all of our listeners, this is a great reminder today – the things you’re doing, your efforts are literally leaving a legacy for others that you may not even be aware of. And just like these explorers, you do these things, you make a difference, but it’s still touching people 50 and 100 years later or hundreds of years later. So, thanks so much! This is Steve Shallenberger, wishing you a great day, and signing off with Becoming Your Best Global Leadership. 

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