21 Days Alone in the Amazon: What It Taught Me About Leadership

21 DAYS ALONE IN THE AMAZON: WHAT IT TAUGHT ME ABOUT LEADERSHIP

October 1981. I was 22 years old. I had been in the Bolivian Amazon for several weeks with three other men — Marcus Stamm, Karl Ruchprecher, and Kevin Gale. The four of us had walked into the jungle together on the word of a man called Karl, who claimed to know where uncharted gold was and where indigenous tribes had never seen outsiders. We followed him. We should not have.

The group fell apart slowly. Marcus was ill and could not walk. Arguments. Exhaustion. Karl's claims began to not add up. We split into two pairs. Marcus and Karl turned back on foot. Kevin and I built a raft and took the Tuichi River.

The Tuichi has a waterfall that does not appear on any map. We hit it.

Kevin made it to the bank. I did not. The river carried me. When I came to the surface, I was alone, and there was no way back.

THE FIRST DECISION: DO NOT LIE TO YOURSELF

The first thing the jungle teaches you is that lying to yourself costs more than the truth does.

For the first day, I told myself Kevin was somewhere downstream. I told myself I would find him around the next bend. I told myself someone would come. The jungle does not reward that kind of thinking. It is not interested in your hope. It is interested in what you do.

By day two, I knew I was alone. I made the decision to act on that reality rather than the one I preferred. I stopped looking for Kevin and started looking for food. I stopped waiting and started moving.

This is the first leadership lesson the Amazon gave me. The situation you are in is the situation you are in. Not the one you wished for, not the one you planned for. The gap between those two things is where most leadership failures happen. Leaders who are honest about the actual situation — not brutal, not catastrophising, but honest — make better decisions than those who manage up a better story.

THE SECOND DECISION: MOVE OR DIE

The Amazon is not hostile. It is indifferent. It does not want to kill you. It simply has no reason to help you. If you stop moving in that environment, the environment moves around you, and eventually you are beneath it.

By day four I had almost no food. The hunger was not the worst part. The worst part was the voice that said: rest here. You have done enough for today. Stay until the morning.

I learned to treat that voice as the enemy. Every time it said stop, I moved. Not fast. Not with a plan. Just forward, toward the river, toward the sound of water, toward anything that represented direction.

In a business context, this is what I call decision velocity. Not making decisions quickly for the sake of it. Making the next decision before the cost of waiting exceeds the cost of being wrong. Most organisations I have spoken to have the opposite problem — they wait too long to decide because they are afraid of the wrong decision. In the jungle, the wrong decision and the move forward almost always beats the right decision that never happens.

THE THIRD DECISION: DEFINE WHAT YOU ARE PROTECTING

There was a moment — around day eleven — when I came close to giving up. I was weak, feverish, and had no idea how far the nearest settlement was. I sat on a log and thought: this might be it.

What changed my mind was not hope. It was responsibility. I thought about my parents. I thought about what it would mean for them to never know what had happened to their son. I decided that I did not have the right to stop trying.

That sounds simple. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.

The leaders I most admire have answered the same question I answered on that log: what exactly am I protecting? Not what they are building, not what they are achieving. What, specifically, are they responsible for? When you can answer that precisely, the decision to keep going does not feel heroic. It feels like the only available option.

THE LESSON THAT STAYED LONGEST

Kevin found me on day 21. He had not given up. He had organised a search with local villagers who knew the river better than anyone. When they pulled me from the bank, I weighed 18 kilograms less than when I had entered the jungle.

The lesson that has stayed with me longest is not about strength. It is about the specific people who do not give up on you. Kevin could have declared me lost. The villagers had their own lives. They kept searching because they had made a decision that the search was not over.

Find people who do not give up on the search. Be someone who does not give up on the search. In 40 years of speaking, I have never found a more useful definition of what a team is supposed to do.