Kelsey Pfendler: Resilience Is Always Messy

A note to young leaders.

Last month, American Kelsey Pfendler rowed a 21-foot boat some 2,400 miles from Monterey to Honolulu. It took her 43 days, 17 hours and 55 minutes.

She broke the women’s solo rowing record. She broke the men’s record too.

Before heading off, Pfendler interviewed every solo Pacific rower she could find and asked them all how they had survived the first week. Smart.

Her first week was brutal anyway.

She barely slept, rowing 30 to 40 minutes at a time between ten-minute “deck naps” to escape the Californian coast. The sleep deprivation triggered hallucinations. Then, on Day 7, she lost all the fresh water she had made for the week, and had to break into her emergency bottled water early.

“Resilience is always messy,” Pfendler said afterwards. Few sentences deserve to be tattooed. This one comes close.

You will not feel competent when you’re in the midst of a crisis. Nobody ever has. Resilience on the inside is alarmingly unconvinced of itself.

The open ocean is a metaphor for life. It’s too large to overpower and too indifferent to bargain with. The trick is to understand its rhythms, accommodate its moods and borrow its momentum wherever you can.

As for Pfendler, she intends to “forever do hard, scary things.” There are worse ways to organise a life.