simplerich

“I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to beleive differently”
~Meriwether Lewis’ Journal via
Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition.

Into the Unknown by Jack Uldrich talks briefly about Lewis & Clark’s expedition, but the focus is what leaders can learn about Lewis & Clark themselves both from their writings in their copious journals and notes and from their actions. I can say they were interesting men and the book has piqued my interest in them to the point where I will probably read a more bibliographical book to get a more complete story about them. It was published in 2004 and I’m surprised I didn’t hear of it sooner. I discovered it while looking for kindle books. I’m glad I did.

I started with a quote from Meriwether Lewis’ journal. After cresting the first of a range of mountains, and expecting to find a river leading down into a land of milk and honey he saw mountains as far as the eye could see, and no easy going. His response wasn’t to give up, wail or despair… it was to marvel at the beauty before him and to expect the road ahead to be an easy one until it proved otherwise. This optimism of Lewis & Clark’s is credited with being a primary reason they succeeded.

But as optimistic as they were, and they were, in the face of overwhelming odds, they planned extraordinarily and didn’t count on wishful thinking or the power of positive thinking to solve their problems for them. They packed a 200olb steel shell to make a boat with in anticipation of needing it. (It didn’t work out and they abandoned it… discarding ideas that didn’t work when it became apparent they wouldn’t work. New Coke anyone?)

My biggest takeaway from Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition was to plan exceptionally, proceed confidently, and believe unflinchingly in your success. I suspect this was my takeaway because this is how I strive to comport myself in my daily life. I confess to slipping at it at times. Sometimes my optimism bulb dims a bit. Sometimes I tend to see the shadows rather than the light, and sometimes, when I’m tired, I forget that I’m not alone and that I’ve got the help of friends, co-workers, and a support system out there willing to help if all I do is ask and trust them to help me.

The book itself has lots of lessons from the expedition which is exactly what it advertises itself as. What it doesn’t have is concrete, memorable examples of how to directly apply the lessons to real life. OK. That’s not fair what I did there. I added the word “memorable” because I can’t remember any of the examples they gave. I know they gave some. But what they mostly did was talk about the character of the men who were Lewis & Clark and how that relates to leadership on the whole.

Remembering I don’t know much about the men I’d like to stress that this book was written by a person who liked and respected the men. It’s possible they did things that others would like to talk about badly, he didn’t free his slave right away when he returned from the expedition for example, but I’m not interested in hearing about or studying famous men’s faults. I’ll assume they had some. I’ll assume that the men in the party had some. The part where they kept coming down with VD tells me they weren’t saints. I get that. Please… nobody take an opportunity in the comments to post some sort of Lewis & Clark expose of how they were Expansionist White Men who were only great by trampling minorities and blah blah blah. That’s a different book. The one I reviewed made mention of some of this stuff, but it wasn’t the focus and wasn’t intended to be.