In this Episode my guest is Brad Borkan. Brad has a great interest in how people and businesses build resilience. In this episode Brad shares his thoughts on how lessons from leaders of the past can help us make better decisions today.

Brad's first book was the award-winning book: WHEN YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT: Extreme Decision Making Lessons from the Antarctic. This book puts the reader right into the action of the life-and-death decisions made by early explorers. In it, we reveal unparalleled lessons in leadership, teamwork, and the sheer determination that can help all of us make better decisions in life. It won 1st Place in the Chanticleer International Book Awards for Insightful Non-fiction.



Brad's second book, AUDACIOUS GOALS, REMARKABLE RESULTS: How an Explorer, an Engineer and a Statesman Shaped our Modern World, focuses on six epic achievements made by three extraordinary people, one of whom is Theodore Roosevelt and another is the great Victorian-era engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The book explains the mindset they each developed to make monumental impacts in their fields.

Transcript

Scott: [00:00:00 ] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of How Mike We, And on this episode, I'm pleased to welcome Brad Balkin and we are gonna be talking about how might we learn from history, make better decisions. So, Brad, welcome. Would you like to introduce yourself

Brad: please? Hi, Scott. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.

I'm Brad Borkin, as you said, and I've written two books that have to deal with history in terms of looking at great explorers and great people in history and great endeavors that were occurred in history and ask what can we learn from this? Focusing on the decision making side of these people and these endeavors.

Scott: And I think, I mean, I like decisions cuz I think we've mentioned before when we're off air is decisions are basically the precursor to every action we.

Brad: Yes, they're at the heart of, of everything. And one of the things when it came to the early [00:01:00 ] Antarctic explorers was there's lots of books written about them as people, about the expeditions, like what they ate and how, where they traveled and the challenges they faced.

But actually up until the, the book that my coauthor and I wrote, no one ever looked at the decisions. And we looked at the life and death decisions, which were actually the most exciting ones because they all, they all came near death all the time, but they actually very rarely ever died.

Scott: Well, I can't, I suppose dying only happens once, so Yeah, that's it.

Brad: That's that's true. But, but they, but they came, they came, they faced all sorts of commodities and, and challenges and, and you know, these, these, you know, everything from frostbite, curvy to, to flowing, harasses and, and all sorts of things and that, but somehow they, they were sort of at one level sort of indestructible.

Yeah.

Scott: I think the interesting thing is, as I say, you make a, you make a decision. I think we've talked about this as well before, is, and basically you're trying to predict the future with a decision. Cause when [00:02:00 ] we don't know the outcome, until we actually make that decision and enact it.

Brad: That's right. Yeah.

And, and, and actually a good, good point is, is I retired from my main job in 2021 in, in July, 2021, which coincide with to launch my second book. And inflation was 2% and the stock market was slowly growing and the world was at peace. And a year later, you know, it seemed like a sane. Normal rational decision.

Inflations at 10%, the stock market is down 25%, and the war, you know, at least Ukraine and, and Russia at war. And it's, it's just a complete un perhaps not predictable, but it's, it's the, the outcome of a decision that you, you don't know until you look back many years later on. What's that? A good decision or a bad decision?

Scott: Well see, I, my view on decisions is I think the decision, we make decisions, and usually it's one of the, with the. Capabilities we have at that time, whatever they may be with the best [00:03:00 ]intentions for the outcome that we want this, that that's there. So I would say a decision either has the desire, Or unexpected outcomes.

Brad: Yes. And I think one of the things that's exciting about life and about looking, whether you're looking at explorers or you're looking at, at his great people in history, is that you can't, no one could predict the future. And even for them, like, just like we can't predict the weather that well, we really can't predict what the outcome is.

Whether you're heading to the South Pole and you're running outta food and you're trying to decide what do we do next? Or you're trying to build a Panama Canal and you're dealing with workforces, dying of yellow fever and, and all sorts of other engineering challenges and building the Panama Pinella.

It's like you just, you, you make. Best decision you can. But one of the things we learned, my co-author and I figured out in looking at these great decisions and great people, was that it's not about making the best decision, it's [00:04:00 ] about having the resiliency to recover from a bad decision.

Scott: Okay. And I suppose that's, especially when you're talking about the, the extremes in which they were doing the Panama Canal and the and the explorers is they are extreme.

And I imagine that a decision has an impact and you can see that quite quickly. And then you have to say, make a recovery decision or a

Brad: another one. Right. But that's true in modern life as well. I mean, in a sense like we all have to make the, we all make decisions about jobs and houses and cars and all the things that we do in our, in our day to day lives, relationships, all sorts of things.

And you can strive to make the perfect decision by, I've got a friend who tr want to buy a car, and he spent years, several years analyzing, looking at websites, trying to find the perfect car. as opposed to just going, buying a car and being like, Oh, if it's not the one for me, I'll just sell it and buy another one.

It's you can't it. We have so many tools at our disposal to make perfect decisions, or we think we can make perfect decisions that we're actually [00:05:00 ] better off making a decision and it might be the right one. As time will tell, or it may be not a good one, but there are many different ways to recover from, from a not good decision,

Scott: I suppose, making.

Well, the other thing I'll say is not, deciding not to do anything is a decision in itself.

Brad: That's right. That's right. Yeah. And, and there's some famous quote from Teddy Roosevelt about something like, you know, the something to the effect of the best thing is to make a decision, and the worst thing you could do is just not make a decision.

It's, it's that to make. The, It's better to even make the wrong decision than to make no decision. Cause at least then you're taking action that you're not being

Scott: on the path, aren't you? Something's happening. You've got momentum, right?

Brad: And if you're on that path and it's wrong, As happened with Panama Canal, you can start making, making the right decision.

So what? Yeah, the interesting thing with the Panama Canal was that the question was do you build a sea level canal? Basically you build a big trench and let the Atlantic Ocean of Pacific Oceans fill it. Or do [00:06:00 ] you build a, a canal with locks as the p Panama Canal exist today? And they started out with this idea, well, you just build a big trench and.

Dig across Panama and across all the swamps and the jungles and the rain forest and you big build this big trench. And, and it, and the problem was, it was the wrong decision. You just couldn't, they, the. The soil of the clay, the, the very wet, dense material earth that's there, that kept the more they dug, the more they had landslides.

I was just destroying the work they were doing. And they had, And what they found was that, So let's go back on the original decision and say that was the wrong decision. We try to the wrong decision, now we've gotta go to build locks. And they end up building 12 locks, each lock being like a thousand feet long and you know, three times bigger than any lock ever built in the world.

And they built 12 of them in 19, you know, in the years between 1910 and 19 four. . [00:07:00 ] So it's looking at a decision and saying, Okay, now we've got, make the wrong decision. Now it's gonna cost a whole ton of effort and money to to, to correct it, but we will correct it, and they were successful.

Scott: So in your view of all these, the, the people that you've done, they've all not been afraid to make decisions and actually enact on something and then say, Oh, that's not quite worked out properly.

And then made have say, the resilience then to make corrective.

Brad: Exactly, exactly. You saw that, we saw this in Antarctica a lot. Mm-hmm. that there's a wonderful decision that Shackleton had to make. He was, so this is his first expedition that he led in Antarctica, and it's lesser known than the expedi