In 2023 I rowed across the Pacific Ocean with three teammates, from mainland America to Hawaii. It took 39 days. We covered 4,800km, rode out two storms with waves as high as 40ft, and raised more than £150,000 for marine conservation.
Not long after we landed, I sat down with Shebs the Wanderer for the 100th episode of his show. He asked the questions everyone asks: why do it, did you film it, what did you learn. This article is my longer answer to the last one, because it is the one that matters most to the teams I speak to.
Rare company
Before we set off I learned that only 82 people in history had attempted to row the world's largest ocean. That number did two things to me. It scared me, because there was very little precedent to lean on. It also focused me, because if we were going to be part of that small group, we had to prepare as though our lives depended on it, which in many ways they did.
Lesson 1: Resilience is a team sport
On the ocean you can't step out of the room. Four people share a small boat, rowing in shifts around the clock, tired, wet and hungry. Each person's mood becomes everyone's weather. What I learned quickly is that resilience isn't only something you carry inside you. It is something a team builds together through small habits: checking in, sharing the load when someone is struggling, and refusing to let a bad shift turn into a bad day.
The best teams I've worked with on land are the same. They don't rely on one heroic individual. They have a culture where it is normal to say "I'm not OK right now" and where someone else picks up the oar.
Lesson 2: You can't control the weather, only your response
We had two storms. In one of them, waves of around 40ft came at us for days. Nothing about our plan could make the ocean calmer. The only thing we controlled was how we reacted: how we secured the boat, how we rested and how we spoke to each other.
Every business faces its own storms, whether that's a lost client, a market shock or a project that falls apart. The instinct is to put energy into things you can't change. Resilience starts when you deliberately move your attention back to the few things you can.
Lesson 3: Purpose gets you through the night shifts
At three in the morning, in the dark, with your hands blistered, motivation disappears. Purpose doesn't. We were rowing for a reason bigger than ourselves, raising money to protect the ocean we were crossing. When things got very hard, that reason was what kept the oars moving.
I see the same in organisations. Targets motivate people on good days. On bad days, people keep going because they believe in why the work matters.
Lesson 4: Strange things happen out there, so stay curious
Not every memory from the Pacific is about hardship. We had some remarkable encounters with marine life, the kind of moments you only get when you're far from land and moving slowly. Curiosity is an underrated part of resilience. When you can still find something interesting in a hard situation, it stops feeling like pure survival.
From the ocean to the stage
When Shebs asked me what I would do with all of this, I told him it had become the foundation of my grit talk. That talk is now The Grit Code, my keynote on how ordinary people and teams build the resilience to keep going when the plan stops working. It is built on the Pacific row, the World Marathon Challenge and 17 years of making television in the Gulf.
The point is never "go and row an ocean". The point is that the same tools that kept four tired people moving across the Pacific work just as well in a boardroom, on a factory floor or in a team going through change.
Bring resilience to your next event
If your organisation is facing its own storm, or you want your people to leave an event with practical tools for staying steady under pressure, have a look at my mindset keynote or contact my team to check your date.
This article builds on my conversation on the 100th episode of Shebs the Wanderer. Watch the full episode on YouTube.
