In April, I gave a talk on gumption, discipline and withitness in career development
[Reyn, make this a hyperlink to the paper under “Ideas”]. At the end I asked for stories about gumption, discipline and withitness, promising that I’d post them on our website.
Only a couple of people, Heather Johnson and Emily Sylvester, responded. It’s not too late, though! I’ll continue collecting if people are interested in supplying these stories.
Many thanks to Heather & Emily!
Dave
Here are the stories:
Heather Johnson
I was hired to do change management in a financial institution with the administrators, who were shifting from full-time permanent employees to contract workers who had to market their wares. The first two teams I met with shared that although they did not know what they were doing, to the point that they were unable to work; they were too afraid to tell anyone, worried they were putting their necks on the chopping board. Then, a ray of light in Prince George, where this wiry woman with red hair told me she had gone to the manager and said they didn’t know what they were doing etc. and he instantly promoted her to VP! The power of gumption.
A Starbucks store in California started making cold coffee drinks in the blender one hot summer. As the drinks were popular, they informed head office who had a fit. “We are making coffee here, not slushies! Stop that, don’t water down our coffee!” The store continued to make the slushies and the critical mass of desire for the drink was so huge that, voila, the frapuccino was born! A gentle stick-to-it-ness.
As I listened to Richard Warner introduce the graduate level statistics course and share his excitement about the multivariate analysis we would be conducting, a terror, far worse than I had encountered reading Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds when I was 11, coursed through my veins. Looking around the room, I noticed another woman with a clammy complexion, shallow breathing and darting eyes. We connected immediately after the class, pledging our allegiance to help each other through this nightmare.
We attended every lecture, arriving early and leaving late, reviewing our notes together.
We attended the typical tutorial and also a tutorial Dr. Warner had generously offered for those challenged by the course content. Four weeks later, as the numbers seemed to fly around the page mysteriously, we convinced the tutorial leader for dummies to meet with us an extra hour a week, for a handsome fee.

Then I merely disciplined myself to put in the time, plodding through the exercises and numbers slowly, like climbing the ugliest, most barren, unappealing mountain, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I put one foot in front of the other, often struggling for oxygen and losing all sense of where I was.
Then the final exam, where it really all came together! Surveying the landscape from the peak of the mountain, I rejoiced in the intensive hours I had spent, the intertwined issues of reliability, sample size, degrees of freedom formed a comprehensive web of social science and I got an A-!!!!! I even still remember the concepts!
I tell this story to myself and my daughters whenever I need to remember the value of scheduling in consistent time on a reliable basis to achieve some degree of freedom.
Emily Sylvester
NOTE: The following is an activity in which the facilitator’s instructions are italicized.
Draw a rough map of Europe, including the British Isles, the Mediterranean, the
Straights of Gibraltar, (and Italy kicking Sicily to make it recognizable).
Say: The year is 1707. England is at war with France. An English Admiral has just won an important battle against the French in the Straights of Gibraltar ( point to them ) and is now leading his fleet back to England for provisions and girlfriends ( point to England ).
But it’s October, and the autumn fogs have begun to blow in from the Atlantic. The
English are navigating by dead reckoning. For two weeks they sail without sight of stars or sun. At last the Admiral shrugs and summons the best navigators from each of his ships to his own - and to bring their charts and compasses with them.
There’s a bit of debate among the junior officers trying to impress the Admiral with their navigation skills - but finally consensus. They are here ( point to the western tip of
France, the tip of Brittany ). The officers return to their own ships and the Admiral turns to give his orders to the helm. Just then a sailor, an ordinary seaman, approaches. He tugs at his forelock. “Admiral, sir,” he stutters, “I don't think we're where the others say, sir. I think we're here.” ( Point west of Brittany a bit .)
The seaman had been keeping his own reckoning all through the fog, but no one knew better than he how dangerous it was to admit this. In his day, only officers were allowed the mysteries of navigation. Why, once ordinary seaman learned how to navigate, whatever would keep them from mutiny? The mutineers on the Bounty had to take
Fletcher Christian with them; he was the only one who knew how to read charts and find
Pitcairn Island. A regular seaman who knew how to navigate could sell navy secrets to the enemy and trade route secrets to the competition. The seaman who stood tugging his forelock in front of his Admiral was admitting he could do all of that.

So the Admiral hung him on the spot.
That night, the fog still hiding their exact location, the first of the Admiral’s ships foundered on the Scilly Isles. The Scilly Isles are the tiny islands 20 miles east of the southwest tip of England ( point to them, a little north of where the ordinary seaman had said they were sailing ). They reach up like jagged teeth to snatch the unwary. They’re exactly what the lowly seaman had been warning them about. Then another ship foundered. And another. 2,000 men drowned that night. The Admiral wasn’t one of them. He survived to reach the shore, but the scavengers waiting there killed him for his emerald ring.
(Turning this story into an exercise.)
Say: It’s a sad story. And a true one, of course. Perhaps some of you have lived it yourselves - speaking up when it wasn't safe, or politic. We’re not allowed to hang you from the yardarm any more, but it sure feels like it. So I’ve got three questions. The first is, what advice would you give the seaman? He needs to tell what he knows - he knows the risk if he doesn’t, but how? What advice can you give him to get his story across, to be heard, and respected? (Wait for responses. They can work as groups to create them.)
He’s not the only one who needs advice. My second question is what advice would you give the Admiral? He paid a high price for not listening to the frontlines and he made
2,000 others pay it too. How can the Admiral open himself to what he needs to hear, without losing himself in an endless crosswind of indecision?
And here’s my third question. I think it’s the most important. How are you and I going to act differently? We also have to speak up more, and listen well, too. How are we going to do that? Take a moment and think of a few things you are going to do to find your voice, and to find your ears, then share them someone beside you.