Unbreakable! How Shackleton'S Crew Survived Against All Odds (Lessons In

Grit)

Old-School Grit: Lessons from History on Willpower, Tenacity, and

Resilience (Live a Disciplined Life Book 13) By: Pete Hollins

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How to accomplish your goals, no matter the obstacle. King Leonidas

could repel 100,000 Persians – you can exercise more and eat more

healthy.

There are many ways to live, but the tried-and-true way is to embrace

grit and grind through hardship. History shows that it’s what every

single “great man/woman” and winner has done to reach their goals.

If there is a will, there is a way. Get inspired to be a self-discipline

machine.

OLD-SCHOOL GRIT is a book that shows the path. To be precise, the path

that some of history’s greatest figures have taken. You’ll learn from

them, hear about their struggles, and see the massive amounts of

self-discipline, willpower, and general tenacity they used to become

worthy of history books.

Old-School Grit:

Lessons from History on Willpower,

Tenacity,

and Resilience (Live a Disciplined Life Book 13)

Written by

Pete Hollins

Narrated by Russell Newton.

Few stories of resilience are as

amazing as that of the British

Endurance Expedition,

launched in 1914.

The mission was to cross the Antarctic

on foot,

but sadly,

this lofty goal was never to be

achieved.

Instead,

the Endurance mission took a completely

different shape - the ship,

aptly named Endurance,

got trapped in thick sheet ice on its

journey out.

The crew of Endurance was stranded for

months in the ice as they battled

abject cold,

hunger,

desperation,

and even insanity.

The expedition leader,

Ernest Shackleton,

first led his men to abandon the

trapped ship to the safety of nearby

Elephant Island,

and after that,

he bravely left his crew to seek help.

Because of his continued courage and

discipline,

he managed to save that crew,

even though everything else was lost.

The ship lay at the bottom of the ocean

for 107 years before it was

rediscovered recently in March 2022.

As the ghost of this vessel was brought

back to the surface,

historians were again reminded of

Ernest Shackleton and his crew.

But who was Shackleton,

and what exactly happened on the

expedition?

There were actually two ships – one

called the Ross Sea Party on the ship

Aurora that would drop supplies for the

other,

the Endurance.

On this ship were 69 dogs,

a tomcat,

27 men,

and one ship stowaway,

who was later put to work as a steward.

The expedition leader was Shackleton,

who saw the voyage as a way to make a

name for himself by establishing a base

on the Weddell sea coast.

Setting out in August,

the ship was trapped in thick sheet ice

in the Wendell Sea by December that

year,

and there was nothing the crew could do

to free her.

Though they could move the vessel for a

little while,

eventually the ice surrounded them so

they could not budge either forward or

backward.

As the ice creaked and shifted,

it took the ship with it,

slowly drifting the men off course and

crushing the hull bit by bit.

They had been within only a day’s

reach of their destination,

but with every day spent trapped,

they drifted further away.

For ten long months,

the crew sat on the trapped ship,

waiting out the winter.

One of the ship’s doctors,

Alexander Macklin,

later wrote that Shackleton,

“did not rage at all,

or show outwardly the slightest sign of

disappointment;

he told us simply and calmly that we

must winter in the Pack;

explained its dangers and

possibilities;

never lost his optimism and prepared

for winter."

For months,

Shackleton tried to lead his men

through the perilous Antarctic ice

packs on dwindling provisions and scant

morale.

But he could not ignore the writing on

the wall – they were going nowhere

and running out of provisions.

As seasoned sailors know,

“What the ice gets,

the ice keeps."

Waiting patiently was a recipe for

certain death.

Shackleton eventually ordered the crew

to abandon ship,

and in good time too,

since it sank shortly afterwards –

around 28 days later.

The team escaped with their lives on

just 3 lifeboats.

They made difficult decisions about

which of the barest essentials to take,

discarding everything else.

Most of the smaller dogs and the cat

were shot,

and the rest of their possessions were

left behind to go down with the ship.

It was gut-wrenching,

but the ordeal was just getting started.

Try to imagine it - these 6 men braved

the frozen wilderness in a small boat

roughly 7m or 22 feet long and pressed

on in this way for 800 miles,

heading for the whaling stations they

knew they’d find in South Georgia.

It’s hard for people to understand

the suffering they would have endured -

battered by gale force winds and near

constant freezing rain,

the men huddled in groups,

riddled with seasickness,

wondering which giant ice cap would

capsize the boat in an instant and kill

them all... Shackleton even wrote later

in his memoirs that they once

encountered a tidal wave so enormous

that he originally mistook it for the

sky.

Later,

in his book South!,

Shackleton recounts,

“Huge blocks of ice,

weighing many tons,

were lifted into the air and tossed

aside as other masses rose beneath them.

We were helpless intruders in a strange

world,

our lives dependent upon the play of

grim elementary forces that made a mock

of our puny efforts."

It's hard to imagine that these were

men who had already gone through one

unthinkable trial and had started this

second journey cold,

miserable,

hungry,

and ill.

The crew had already lived for months

trapped on board the Endurance in the

ice floes.

And now they were pitted against the

merciless elements,

each of them likely resigned to the

fact that they would die.

It was later reported that half the men

on the boats were already mad,

and some were viciously ill with

dysentery.

Some were chronically sleep-deprived,

not having rested for 80 hours or so.

Finally,

exhausted and barely holding things

together,

they reached the uninhabited Elephant

Island.

When they set foot on that dry land,

it had been a staggering 497 days since

the Endurance first set sail.

Shackleton’s second-in-command,

Frank Wild,

led the team to create a makeshift

shelter out of two upturned lifeboats.

The third boat was their last hope.

Giving himself ten days to recover and

prepare,

Shackleton then left to seek help.

He took with him five other men and set

sail on the third lifeboat named

“James Caird."

This time,

they knew what to expect.

They’d wake every morning to beat the

ice out of the sails and bail freezing

water from the boat before pushing on.

The punishing winds howled and tossed

the fragile boat on the open seas,

and the men,

with their last splinters of hope

barely intact,

somehow found it in them to keep rowing

until they reached their destination.

After 17 further days of fighting to

survive,

they landed on the shores of South

Georgia.

The men rested briefly before the

marathon hike of 36 hours across the

island,

finally finding Stromness Whaling

station.

It took beating out a path that no

human had walked before,

over mountain peaks and through icy

terrain and frozen cliffs,

but they did it – to the astonishment

of those at the whaling station.

Can you imagine the sight of these

three men turning up in the middle of

nowhere?

After nearly two years of suffering and

desperation,

they had long,

stringy beards,

ruined clothing,

and gaunt faces.

Thoralf Sørlle,

the station manager,

was so shocked at the sight of them

that he turned and wept when Shackleton

explained what had happened.

From there,

Shackleton could arrange for a rescue

ship to fetch the 22 sailors that still

remained on Elephant Island.

Again,

this was a story of one disaster after

another.

The first ship that Shackleton launched

ran out of fuel and was forced to turn

back.

A vessel offered by Uruguay made it to

within 100 miles of Elephant Island

before ice packs forced it to give up

and return.

It took several more attempts,

but eventually the Chilean government

agreed to lend him a small tugboat,

called Yelcho.

Heading back,

Shackleton must have secretly feared

the worst,

wondering about the men he’d left

behind.

He had taken a full 128 days to return

to them with help.

As he approached,

he noticed a smoke signal emerging from

the makeshift shelter,

and soon the men emerged,

calling to him – all of them had made

it.

In the meantime,

Frank Wild had been tasked with keeping

spirits up on the desolate Island

wasteland.

Every single morning,

he would instruct the crew to prepare

their belongings and get ready,

since Shackleton might return any day

now.

Despite how despondent and despairing

the crew felt,

Wild kept it up.

Many of the men had utterly given up

and had resigned themselves to their

fate,

rather than keep clinging to hope.

Their daily life was one of misery and

privation,

and they had little to do but ruminate

on their doomed fate and boil up seal

bones for nourishment.

But that fateful morning on day 128,

Shackleton really did return,

and the crew was packed and ready,

not quite believing that their

nightmare was finally coming to an end.

The crew all made it back to England,

and years later,

all were still alive and well.

Are you wondering what happened to the

other ship,

the Aurora?

Sadly,

this ship and its crew were essentially

left to fend for themselves and were

stranded.

The commander of the ship and two other

crew members perished,

despite faithfully fulfilling their

task of delivering food and supplies

needed by the Endurance.

The plan was to meet the Endurance in

the Ross Sea,

south of New Zealand,

bringing supplies.

So,

although Shackleton’s tale of

endurance and daring rescue was the

most compelling story to emerge from

these events,

the fact is that none of the original

aims of the expedition were met – in

fact,

the Antarctic was only explored on foot

decades later,

in the 1950s by Sir Vivian Fuchs.

Whatever happened to Shackleton?

Well,

he never did reach the South Pole or

cross the Antarctic on foot,

but he did attempt another expedition

years later,

with many of the same crew he had been

with on the Endurance.

They noted that he was never the same

again.

In fact,

Shackleton died at just 47 years of age

of a heart attack.

Granted,

the days of high adventure and

fantastic explorations to the poles

seem like they belong to a bygone era,

but the story of the Endurance and her

crew still captures hearts and minds

today.

People continue to be astonished at

just how much Shackleton and his men

must have endured – how on earth

could they have survived all that?

Take a look at any of the photographs

of the crew throughout their doomed

expedition and you cannot help but feel

awe at the black and white faces

peering back out at you.

The ship was a small,

wooden one with canvas sails,

and the men aboard it were working with

what we’d now consider rudimentary

instruments.

The men had,

in total,

spent years battling despair,

insanity,

starvation,

exhaustion,

and illness – all in a frighteningly

hostile landscape where temperatures

averaged roughly -66 F (-54 C).

Shackleton and his crew were forever

considered impressive proof of the

extent to which the human spirit can

endure and prevail.

Shackleton wrote a book about his

experiences that gives a peek into his

mind and allows us to guess at what it

must have been like out there in the

Antarctic wilderness - “When I look

back at those days I have no doubt that

Providence guided us,

not only across those snowfields,

but across the storm-white sea that

separated Elephant Island from our

landing-place on South Georgia.

I know that during that long and

racking march of thirty-six hours over

the unnamed mountains and glaciers of

South Georgia it seemed to me often

that we were four,

not three.

I said nothing to my companions on the

point,

but afterwards Worsley said to me,

‘Boss,

I had a curious feeling on the march

that there was another person with

us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea.

One feels ‘the dearth of human words,

the roughness of mortal speech’ in

trying to describe things intangible,

but a record of our journeys would be

incomplete without a reference to a

subject very near to our hearts."

Who was the fourth person on the

journey with them?

Shackleton knows that he can never

fully express what he experienced out

there,

but we can conjecture.

Perhaps he felt a divine spirit guiding

and protecting him.

Perhaps it was his own sense of hope

and the fearsome refusal to give up and

let go of his life.

Perhaps it was simply raw human

survival instinct,

wordless and unconscious.

Many of the men did give up.

Shackleton was a flawed man,

who had certainly been criticized for

his leadership skills over the course

of his career,

but one thing that people could agree

on was that he took his duty to inspire

hope and courage in his crew very

seriously.

Even though he was doubtless tormented

internally,

he never permitted himself to despair

openly to the others.

Besides his clear faith in something

greater than himself (“We had seen

God in His splendors,

heard the text that Nature renders.

We had reached the naked soul of man”

– Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage),

he also was a practical man.

He speaks about the importance of

grounding one’s daily life in

routine,

about humility,

and about simply getting on with what

must be done,

one way or another.

He remarked once,

after his team had already endured

countless months of sickness and

starvation,

the power of the little,

everyday things - “I heard one man

say,

"Cook,

I like my tea strong."

Another joined in,

"Cook,

I like mine weak."

It was pleasant to know that their

minds were untroubled,

but I thought the time opportune to

mention that the tea would be the same

for all hands and that we would be

fortunate if two months later we had

any tea at all.

It occurred to me at the time that the

incident had psychological interest.

Here were men,

their home crushed,

the camp pitched on the unstable floes,

and their chance of reaching safety

apparently remote,

calmly attending to the details of

existence and giving their attention to

such trifles as the strength of a brew

of tea."

Brave hope and the will to survive are

very grand endeavors – but they often

play out in mundane ways.

If we can focus on what is in front of

us,

no matter how small,

we can find a kind of dignity in them.

No matter how dire the situation is,

we can take solace in ritual,

in doing what little we can,

and in sticking with routines – even

if we don’t quite have faith in them

anymore.

Finally,

perhaps the most noteworthy of

Shackleton’s attitudes was his

seeming unwillingness to think about

defeat even as a possibility.

Like many deeply devoted and ambitious

people,

Shackleton simply did not allow himself

to give up.

“Difficulties,” he claimed,

“are just things to overcome."

No matter the size of the difficulty,

or how frequent they are,

they were never a reason to stop,

give up,

or turn back.

They were simply things that needed to

be gone around – speed bumps rather

than roadblocks that forever close off

the path.

If we can replicate make this subtle

shift in perspective,

we allow ourselves to stay proactive

and ask – how can I get around this?

If we assume that we will do everything

we humanly can do to get around it,

it simply becomes a matter of how.

“Just when things looked their worst,

they changed for the best.

I have marveled often at the thin line

that divides success from failure and

the sudden turn that leads from

apparently certain disaster to

comparative safety."

If you genuinely think this way about

life,

then no situation is so dire or so

hopeless that it cannot one day turn

completely and become something new.

Hope,

then,

is like keeping your belongings packed

and ready so that,

when better things come,

you are ready and waiting to seize them.

Real life example.

Not many of us will ever endure the

kind of suffering Shackleton and his

men did,

but we may well face other challenges,

like major illness,

poverty,

or natural disasters.

In more recent history,

there are plenty of examples of people

rising to extreme challenges,

like the brave firefighters who worked

tirelessly to retrieve survivors from

the rubble of the bombing of the world

Trade Center.

They did precisely what Shackleton did;

they dug deep and allowed the magnitude

of their task to sober them and inspire

them,

then they refused to give up as they

did what needed to be done.

Shackleton’s men were forced to find

out what they were really made of.

Senator John Kerry hints at the same

phenomenon when he remarked of the 9/11

attacks,

“It was the worst day we have ever

seen,

but it brought out the best in all of

us."

Shackleton’s lessons -

•Find purpose.

Seek a deeper meaning and significance

in your life,

and,

if it strengthens you,

anchor yourself in religion or

spirituality.

Shackleton never felt alone during his

most arduous challenges,

and that’s because he was a man of

faith.

•When times are challenging,

keep sane and even-keeled by engrossing

yourself in the details of day to day

life.

Keep a routine,

look after the basics of life,

and if need be,

find relieving distractions when things

get especially difficult.

•Finally,

don’t give up.

When you encounter a challenge,

reframe the way you look at it - it’s

not the end.

Difficulties are not a sign that your

journey is over,

just that the route has changed.

Difficulties are just things to

overcome.

If you have hope,

then you’ll be prepared and ready to

grasp opportunity when it does finally

come your way.

This has been

Old-School Grit:

Lessons from History on Willpower,

Tenacity,

and Resilience (Live a Disciplined Life Book 13) Written by

Pete Hollins

Narrated by Russell Newton.