137: Randall Reeves — The Figure 8 Voyage: Doing What No Man Has Done Before.

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Well, this is a very special episode for me. This is not a typical episode. This is a satellite phone recording with a friend who is currently single handed sailing around Antarctica. So this is a satellite phone recording with someone who undertaken a first ever historic journey single handed sailing around the world twice in a figure 8 pattern. We're going to talk with Randall Reeves in this episode and the lesson or the reason for this is that I think there's a great parable or lesson here for business. We get inspired by something really extraordinary that calls us to a big challenge and then we have to deal with the planning and raising money and lots of things like that. And then the moment we undertake it, all the plans go out the window and then we have to deal with all the setbacks and the breakdowns and the loneliness of leading such a journey. So I think there's a great parable here for business leadership and scaling your business and I hope that you love it and get a ton out of it.

So listen in. If you've been listening to our podcast or you've read the book Scaling up, you might be interested in our workshop on the Scaling Up Growth framework for your own business. We have a workshop coming soon to San Francisco and we have a few hundred dollars discounts for our loyal podcast listeners while supplies last. Just go to scalingcoach.com workshops and then enter the code S U P. That's S U P for Scaling Up Podcast when you register. We'll see you there.

Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and growth coach Bill Gallagher. This is a very special show. Joining us from the south from the Southern Ocean is Randall reeves on the 45 foot purpose built aluminum sloop Moly. Randall, welcome to the show by satellite phone.

Hey Bill, thank you for having me. I'VE been at Sea for 123 days by myself. I don't have anyone to talk to, so. So it's nice to have the opportunity to use the vocal cords.

All right, create a picture for us of where you are right now. The temperature, the waves, the wind. Give us a little picture of where you are. You're south of Tasmania or south southwest of Tasmania. Create that whole picture.

So I don't know what time it is where you are right now. It's about 11 o' clock in the morning, 0200 GMT. I'm at 46 degrees south, 144 east, which as you said just now puts me at about 200 miles south of Tasmania, which is that island at the bottom of eastern Australia. So we're in the lee of Australia. Just about to come out of that. We're headed east. I'm headed toward New Zealand. I'm anticipating being passing under New Zealand in about a week. 125. No, no, that's wrong. 123 days at sea. So what does today look like? Today is dreary, rainy, cold. Actually that's not true. I'm cold. It's not actually that cold. It's 60 degrees in the cabin right now, but it's been a lot colder. Typical temperatures down here in the south, depending on the latitude are between 45 and 55. I don't have any heat in the cabin, so it's all a matter of staying fed and staying clothed. Wind today, we're headed east. Wind today is pretty much dead astern between 15 and 20, which is nice. I have two big sails out from the bow called head sails, pulling us along at about 6 and 7 knots. I'm expecting strange weather coming through some kind of a small front. So wind is west now. It's going to be northwest a little later, southwest a little later than that. So a lot of work on deck later today I'm talking to you from the pilot house of my sailboat which is 45ft long, as you said, aluminum and expedition boat made specifically for these kinds of high latitude adventures. And it's a flush deck so there are no windows down inside the main part of the boat. It's pretty dark down there where I sleep. But in the aft part I have a raised cabin in a pilothouse with four or five windows around so I can see everything that's going on on deck and see the ocean and see the waves. Right now there's not a whole lot of sea. We've had four or five days of fairly even and calm weather. I'd say the seas right now probably 5, 10ft, a little bit of break through them. There's some kind of a gale in back of us, but way, way in back of us. And we've been just trucking along, making good time. Our averages are at about 145 miles a day, which is good for the size of a boat. And I'm pleased. We're about to, as I said, come under New Zealand and at that point I'll be 5,000 miles from completing the loop around the bottom of the world. So making good progress and doing well.

All right, so let me add a little color and description as well for our listeners who are primarily business people and there may be a few sailors in there, but Randall and I are newer friends from the Bay Area. Our wives are friends and we've become friends and we met on a stop on the last attempt at this particular voyage. So Randall is sailing around the world alone in a figure 8 pattern in a thing that's never been done before. Leaving from San Francisco, down along the Pacific around the Cape, then circling Antarctica in the Southern Ocean, then coming up the Atlantic side making a stop. I believe you're going to stop in Greenland to wait for the Northwest Passage to open and then so really one planned stop and then through the Northwest Passage and back home a figure eight. And of course I'll put a link to this in the show notes and tell folks how to go find him. And we're talking now via satellite phone. But this is a single handed voyage doing something that nobody's ever done before, a very, very challenging kind of a thing. And it's although your sea conditions and wind are good right now, they aren't always. You go through some pretty unbelievable storms that you manage in the middle of night with being doused by waves and that kind of thing all along. Yeah.

Oh yeah. I apologize if I gave you the impression that it's always nice. I'm down in an area of the world called the Southern Ocean. As you said, it's that donut of water between Antarctica and the bottom of the continents and to the north below Australia, below New Zealand, below South America, below Africa. And it's just a big ring of water around the planet. The winds blow mostly from the west in a big circle and there's no land to stop them. So this area that I'm in right now is called the roaring 40s. I'm in latitude 40. When you get down to latitude 50, it's called the screaming 50s. There was an old whaler's proverb that said, below 40 south, there is no law. Below 50 south, there is no gog. It gets really bad down here. Average wind speeds are 25-30 mph. I experience gale, which is. I'll speak in knots for a quick second, and gale is winds between 35 and 45. I experience one of those every other week with seas 15, 25, sometimes 30ft. Yeah, it's tough. Cold, wet, dark, lots of birds, which are fun to look at, but cold, wet, dark, and really rough a lot of the time. So big challenge. Sailing around the Southern Ocean is considered in the sailing community the same as climbing Mount Everest. So it's a big deal. And what I've done is try to combine this route around the bottom of the world with a route over the top of the world through the Arctic. So to your point, I'm sailing from San Francisco down to the bottom of South America, and then making a big loop around the bottom of the world in the Southern Ocean, returning to South America, the bottom of which is Cape Horn. Make a left, sail all the way up the Atlantic Ocean, all the way up to Greenland, about halfway up Greenland and make a left, there's an entrance into the Canadian Arctic. So my plan is to then sail across the top of Canada and Alaska, down through the Bering Seas, through the Aleutians, Gulf of Alaska, and back home to San Francisco all alone. And in one year. And those. Either one of those would be challenging enough. Putting the two of those together and the two routes together is just. It's. It's a tough road to ho. You know, I'm down here in the height of summer, winter where you are, but height of summer right now, and my warmest day is the last couple of days has been 60, 61 degrees. It's usually in the mid-40s, and the winds are still really high. Go ahead.

I'm sitting in a hotel room in front of a fireplace at the resort at Squaw Creek in Squaw Valley at Lake Tahoe, where I've been skiing for the day. It's the winter here, but I'm in a luxury place, And we're talking by.

Sail, as sailboats go. Pretty luxurious, but I don't have any of the amenities that you have. Let's just run through them. No, I don't have a fireplace. I don't have water under pressure. I don't have hot water. I don't have heat. I don't have a microwave. I don't have a coffee. Maker. I have a stove that operates on propane and I use the same kind of tanks you use in your barbecue. Or I carry four of them for a whole year. I sleep in a sleeping bag at night. I have six pairs of socks that I cycle through and they don't get washed because it's so cold and damp down here. They would never dry if I got them wet. So it's just a different. It's a different place. I look out at the birds. We call them pelagic birds because they spend their entire lives at sea. They only go to land to breed. And look at the birds. Some of them are the size of mice. They're tiny. They live their lives out here on this raging ocean and just as if it were nothing. And here I am struggling to stay fed and stay slept and stay warm.

That's amazing. So people are starting to ask why. Before we answer the question why, I just want to point out out that you attempted this last year and got a late start and then had two serious accidents or a couple serious accidents with damage and unbelievable hardship and had to sort of head back. Which is where we saw you on a stop in Hawaii and then resume the journey again this year.

Yep, that's right. So I got a late start. I don't know that that had much to do with it, but I did start late. To your point, getting prepared for a venture like this was difficult and I just fell a bit behind on a couple of projects. So I left in late October of 2017 and just before I got to Cape Horn, which is that big rock at the southern tip of South America, I lost both of my self steering systems in the course of a week. I have an electronic stealth self steering system and autopilot like a plane or a car would have. And then I have a mechanical autopilot that doesn't use electricity, it uses the wind. And they both broke. So I had to hand steer this monster of a boat for about six days to get in off the ocean into Ushuaia, which is a little village down at about 55 degrees south. It's the most southerly town I think anywhere. And so that put me another two or three weeks behind. And then just west of South Africa, below Madagascar are a couple of small islands called Croisettes. And I was just passing those when I was overtaken by a big storm which was like nothing I've ever seen. You know, imagine like a 20 foot sea coming at you and it's not just tall but it's breaking, you know, been down to Ocean beach. And you see that surf break coming in off Ocean beach, it just all crashes at once. I don't know how people surf that stuff. So that's what it was like out there. It was just like this huge seas that were crashing and they picked the boat up, literally picked. This boat weighs 40,000 pounds. Picked this boat up and threw it down 20ft on its side. And it broke a window. I have windows that are about 1 foot high by 2ft long in the pilot house here. And water punched out a window, filled the boat with water. I had probably 100, 150 gallons of water floating around on the boat. No big deal, you just pump that out. But the big deal was that the window that broke was right above my electronics bay. So radios, chart plotters, you know, all of that stuff got wet and most of it died. So that left me without comms. It left me without a way of getting weather information. It made navigation difficult. And so I put into Hobart, which is the capital of Tasmania, that island right south of Australia. That took another two weeks to get everything put back together. Three weeks maybe. By that time it was just too late. That would have put me back at Cape Horn, which is very far south, approaching winter, which is nuts. I wouldn't want to even try that. So I sailed home, did a full circumnavigation of the globe in about five months and with the promise of starting again, give us a second try, which I did this last October 1st and 123 days later, here we are making good time and I haven't stopped yet.

Knock on wood. And may it continue. So let's back up then and answer the why question now. So where did you first come up with this idea? Why did it inspire you? Talk a little bit about the origination.

Sure. I was bit really hard by sailing. When I was in high school, my father bought a small plastic classic boat. We lived in Stockton. We I learned to sail on the river and I just loved everything about it. I mostly loved everything about doing it all by myself. You want to share anything with my sister. I wanted to steer and do all the same work myself. And that kind of continued on into adulthood. I've been sailing since high school and sailing pretty pretty much constantly. Although I didn't start cruising until pretty recently. 2010, I had my own 30 foot boat. I took off. My wife, my lovely wife Joanna let me go. She said go do this cruise you've been talking about our entire marriage or stop talking about it. So I did in 2010, I left San Francisco, sailed around the Pacific. So sailed from San Francisco down to Mexico, Mexico down to French Polynesia, French Polynesia up to Alaska and then home. Supposed to be a one year cruise, San Francisco, Mexico, Hawaiian home. But when I got to Mexico, everyone there was talking about this place I'd never heard of, called the Marquesas, which turned out to be very close to Tahiti. So I don't know how I did it, but I convinced the wife that a one year cruise should become a two year cruise. So I got to do a big 15,000 mile loop of the Pacific. That really, it demonstrated to me that I really like doing that kind of thing. It was a lot of fun. Not just the exploring of the exotic places I got to go visit, all the way from Tahiti to Alaska. But the ocean crossings in particular were really the difficulty of them, the planning, the time that it takes, the kind of the removal from the norm. You get out here and there's just, you could be on the moon, you could be on Mars, you could be anywhere out here. I mean, I'm in places that people don't go. It's the trackless sea, right? There have been a lot of ships over the centuries that have made loops around the Southern Ocean, but there's no evidence that a person has ever been here. The birds that I see flying around very likely have never seen a human before. So there's real attraction to the exoticness of and the foreignness of it. So in any case, I got home in 2013 and was really excited about what I'd done and wanted to do something big. And in that year, a guy named Matt Rutherford, who sailed around the American continents, left Boston, went up through the Arctic, down around Cape Horn and back up to Boston in a year, nonstop, solo. And that had never been done before. And it clicked in my brain, this loop that I'm doing down south in the Southern Ocean. This is a very common route. This is what the clipper ships used to transport cargo from Europe to Asia before the Panama Canal. This is where all the big sailboat races, the global races are, are all down here. So this is a fairly common, not easy, but common challenge. The Arctic is another deal. It's really only been open enough during the summer that a yacht can get through for maybe 10 years. And so that's a big challenge to get through there. And putting them. That just clicked. I don't know, how does one get inspired, right? How does the bubble pop? I don't really know, but it just clicked in that year of 2013, when I heard about Matt Rutherford and what he had done, oh, I should put those two routes together into one mega long sailing adventure. So I talked to my lovely wife Joanna about it. She said, if you can make it happen, good on you. And so I've been working at it since about 2013.

It's interesting, you said it's a little bit sometimes like being on the move down here. Like you're ice isolated, and it's extreme austere environment at times. And I'm reminded of two quotes. One, when Kennedy stood before the nation and said, we choose to go to the moon. We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Right. And the notion of that we would undertake something because it was so awesome, it was so extraordinary, it challenged us to be more than we'd ever been. And there's another one of my favorite quotes from this urban planner architecture architect guy Daniel Burnham, who designed the rebuild of the city of Chicago. And he said, make no small plans, for they have little power to stir the hearts of men. And when I learned about your journey, and I'm like, yeah, that is kind of what it is, right? Undertake something really extraordinary.

Yeah, that's a great quote, both of those, actually. But the Kennedy quote really struck me. I had not thought of that in years. Yeah, that was actually a big part of it for me. I was. I was actually. It won't sound genuine, but it's true. I was actually thinking of things along those lines a couple of hours ago, which is. I got back from this cruise around the Pacific, which most people would think, that's huge, right? Crossing an ocean of any kind by yourself and anything huge is a big deal. But if you're a solo sailor, going from Mexico to French Polynesia is nothing. I mean, it's not even. It's hardly worth writing home about. So I really wanted to do something that was really kind of beyond the pale, and boy, did I pick it. Right now that I'm trying to do it, realizing, wow, this is a big piece to bite off. I really wanted to do something hard. That was my own invention, you might say. Leaving from San Francisco, sailing around the bottom, returning to San Francisco, very difficult, but it's been done. Leaving from San Francisco, going through the Arctic and back to San Francisco, hugely difficult. It's been done putting the two together to do them in one year, mostly nonstop. No one's even tried that before. So that. It's funny, thinking back on it, I knew it would be difficult. How could it not be? But there's just no way to imagine the nuts and bolts of difficulty. And I've really been wrestling. It's been difficult, especially the last month or two, in ways I hadn't imagined. I remember specifically being at a boat show back in 2014 and being asked by a guy there, says, well, how are you going to manage the Southern Ocean? And I've been reading about the Southern Ocean since I was a teenager. I mean, that's just more sailing down there. I was really freaked out at the point about the Arctic, and I'd never seen ice, much less tried to sail through. So I was really focused on the Arctic and strategies for getting to the archery. No, no, Randall. Actually, Randall, the Southern Ocean is really hard. It's not just more sailing. There's a lot to it. So, yeah, the difficulty is a big deal. I did want to bite off something really big, seemed like to do it. And I'll tell you, Bill, I was really successful. I bit off the Big Chew.

So I think it'd be great to give folks a sense of some of the. The work that went into plan. Our listeners are people who have an idea for growing a business, and then they want to change the world, make it a better place, prove their teacher wrong or some parent or somebody. There's something that's yearning and burning in them that they're out to accomplish in the world. And so they get inspired by something and they undertake something, and then there's all of the planning and all of the work and raising a team and raising money. So talk a little bit about your preparation and the work that you've done to get even before you got underway.

Yeah, sure. So, like I said a few minutes ago, I've been at this project since 2013, and it has been mostly planning, quite frankly, planning to find the right boat. I'm in very treacherous waters in the south and very treacherous waters in the north, and those two waters are very dissimilar right down here. There's no land up there. It's all land and all ice. So you need very different technologies you're looking for in terms of boat types. So that actually took a couple of years to find the right boat that could handle easily, as it were, those two very different environments. And then there was the research for me of the Arctic. I had never been up there, and I read voraciously of the early explorers and the contemporary explorers and ice. And there's what's called the ice egg, which is a way of describing ice types today. In this and that location, to memorize that. But then I decided I really wanted an experience of the Arctic before I tried to do it by myself. So I went in 2014 as a crew member on somebody else's sailboat. And we left from Nuuk, Greenland, sailed through the Arctic around nome, Alaska, in 65 days in the summer of 2014. Very difficult. One of the strange things about the Arctic is it's very different year to year. 2010, 2011, people sailed through the Arctic, and so I didn't see any ice at all. 2013, very tough year. 30 boats tried. Only seven made it through. And the only boats that made it through were made of steel and aluminum. So that really changed my ideas about the type of material that I would need for the hull of my boat. And it just showed that it's gonna. It's been really bad the last two years, quite frankly. I mean, there's a very high risk that the figure 8 will fail simply because the Arctic Northwest passage doesn't open this year. Last summer, one boat of about 35 made it through. So it's a risky endeavor up there. So there was the finding the right boat, getting more familiar with the territory, with the route, and then just the planning of. All right, I'm going to be alone for better part of the year. I need food, I need water, I need fuel for the stove. How much? Mo is great. I call the boat Mo. Her name is Mo Lee, but I call her Mo. Great boat. Really simple. Designed by a high end aluminum boat builder in Norder in 1989, but built like a tractor. So I don't have any electric water pumps, no electric bilge pumps, no fridge, no freezer, no water maker. But I carry 200 gallons of fresh water in the keel. So I have to be very economical about what I use. I budget 1 gallon of water per day, fresh water, and I use seawater for everything else, like 2. Washing dishes and washing me. So there's the food planning. What's the menu? I don't have a fridge or a freezer, so it's all dried and canned. Big boat. So I can carry canned goods, lots of them. And I do. I probably have thousand pounds of canned goods on the boat. But what is it, you know, what's the meal? So I have probably five different entrees that I eat for dinner, and I have two different kinds of breakfasts, and I have nauseous for lunch. What's the calorie count? How many calories will I need when I'm in the South. And the ambient temperature in the cabin is 47 degrees. Well, in truth, I eat about three times what you would normally eat. I just eat voraciously. I eat constantly down here. It's the way you stay warm. So how much food is that? And that was actually a lot of fun. The planning stage of food, water, fuel, clothing. What clothes do I need for the warm doldrums in the middle parts of the planet versus the cold north and south. How many pairs of socks of what thickness? How many pairs of, how many fleece jackets of what thickness? Stuff like that is really a lot of fun. That took a long time. And when I started filling the living room at the house with provisions, that was really a test of my marriage with Joanna. She didn't really enjoy my taking over the house that way. I had mounds, absolute mounds of food in the front room.

That's fascinating. So that's all the planning and preparation stage. And people helped you and provided for our listeners. If you want to go be a virtual stowaway and provide some financial support, Randall would love that. And I'm going to give you the link to the figure8voyage.com so you can go not only to get the latest blog posts, see the video clips, see his current position and all of that at the website, but you can go there and you can, you can be become a supporter of the voyage as well if you'd like to do that.

Let me just, let me just piggyback on that, if you don't mind. So it's, you know, primarily it's a self funded voyage. But one of the goals for the voyage, which I haven't discussed previously, is that I wanted to make it as real time, readily available to an audience as technology would allow. And it's amazing actually what technology allows. You know, we're having a telephone conversation. I'm in the middle of nowhere. There isn't a telephone within a thousand miles of. But there's also now, as in the last couple of years, the ability for private vessels like this to send photographs and videos over satellite connection. So I really wanted to do that. I post every day to the figure8voyage.com that's figure8voyage.com I post every day a report on what's going on with photographs and every week or two I post a video report on what's going on. And that's unprecedented. Quite frankly, I don't think there's another private yacht. And I'm differentiating between the corporate race boats which do have this kind of technology, but they're a different. I don't think there's another private yacht that's ever done this while making a very long passage. And it's really expensive. So the GoFundMe campaign is really focused on if you're interested in the voyage, if you enjoy following along, if you're getting something out of it, then please feel free to make a contribution to the GoFundMe campaign, because this is the part that's really challenging.

It will make a difference. Are we on a Iridium phone connection here?

No, we are on Inmarsat in Marsat. Sorry, Two big technologies. No, no worries.

Radium's providing the tracking, right?

Yes, that's right. Yeah. Two different. Now that's a totally different radio that does that. Now, this is a big unit. This. This the computer for this. What we're talking about now is bigger than a laptop. There's a dome the size of a basketball in the back of the boat with an antenna. It's a big deal. It's very expensive. Quite frankly. Could not have done this without the help of the now very large team of virtual voyagers. So thank you to everyone who's already contributed.

So let's talk about then, what happens after planning? So we know. I mean, look, I work with all my teams. We plan incessantly. We're planning all the time. The process of planning we know is priceless. And yet I have a couple favorite quotes around planning. The first one is that no plan survives contact with the enemy. And the other is maybe a little.

Love that quote.

Right? And then the other one is Mike Tyson, who says, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Basically the same quote from two different vantage points, Right? That's really funny. Yeah. I don't think that Molke, the German. The German general who gave you that first quote ever got punched in the face.

So.

Talk about dealing with that was. I guess I referred to the Figure 8 voyage attempt of last year, we call it Figure 8 1.0, as the longest shakedown cruise in history. I had sailed the boat a fair bit before leaving for that first attempt. I bought the boat in Alaska, sailed it down to Hawaii and then back to San Francisco. So I had maybe 10,000 solo miles on this boat by the time I left. Thought I knew something. I was wrong. Boy, I tell you, you get down here and you get into seas that everything. You probably think of sailing as being slow. And you're not wrong, right? I travel at like six miles an hour. I travel. I sail 24 hours a day, and my average is 145 miles a day. So things on the boat happen slowly until the seas are big and then everything is happening way too fast. Seas are 20ft, 20 foot seas will probably travel 25 knots, 25 miles an hour. Throwing the boat around. Crazy boats going faster than it's supposed to go. It should really top out at about 7, 8 miles an hour. It's going 10 12. It's actually a 40,000 pound boat is actually surfing down the front of a big wave. Bad idea. You get to the bottom of the wave and if the boat turns left or right a little bit, it'll actually roll over. Very bad idea. So I got down here and got into big seas and it was just more than I knew how to handle. I had read all the stuff, I'd read all the storm tactic books. I knew what I was supposed to do. But I'd forgotten that part of the preface that says there's no one answer to handling a boat in a storm. Because all storms are different and all boats are different. So I really had to learn in that. Figure 8, Juan Dado and you know, cross myself here. I hope I have learned something. I'm not through the tough bit yet by any means, but I really had to learn how to handle this boat in big weather. And unfortunately for me, it took crash landing a couple of times to really figure it out. That was demoralizing, right? This boat has done this kind of thing its entire career. It was built in the 90s and it spent most of its time sailing six months a year in high latitudes. No one has ever broken a window before. No one's ever put 150 gallons of water in the boat. I'm the only person who's had that privilege. So it's rather embarrassing and I felt a bit ashamed. I didn't know how to handle the boat. But the only way to deal with it is to be thankful that you can bail the boat out and keep going and give it another try. Really, I'm just so fortunate. I don't feel fortunate every morning when I wake up. But I am fortunate to be able to give this another try.

So talk to us about the dark moments. What scares you? When do you get lonely and how do you deal with all of it?

Yeah, interesting question. And I don't have all the answers because quite frankly, I have been feeling isolation and loneliness over the last month or two and it's new to me and I don't really have tactics for handling it, or I should say, didn't come into the situation with tactics. So I've done a fair bit of ocean crossing by myself now. Probably have 35,000 miles of six or eight different ocean crossings. My longest passage, however, was 50 days, 60 days. And, well, you get into the 100 day range and it just begins to feel like a long time away. And I remember being in what we call the Antipodes, which is the exact opposite side of the world of somewhere else. In my case, the antipodes was about 58 degrees east, which was the opposite side of the world from San Francisco down below Saudi Arabia. And so my noon was my lovely wife's midnight. And I had a really hard time connecting with her. And I really felt, boy, what's that David Bowie song? Major Tom all the world is blue there's nothing I can do. Really felt on the other side of the world and really disconnected. And I guess the way I deal with it is the way I deal with the stress of the voyage in total. And especially being down here where you're at the mercy of the weather. The weather, low pressure systems, gales, storms travel from back of me to in front of me. They all come from behind me and they travel about twice my speed. So I can't outrun anything. I can't miss it. If it's going to take me, it's going to take me. And all I can do is prepare myself for the boat as best I can when the big weather comes. So there's a fair bit of stress that goes along with living in that kind of an environment. You can't hide. And I guess the way I deal with it is just to keep the boat as prepared as possible, keep myself as busy as possible. I have certain habits. I have ways that I like to live, things that I like to do in particular ways. I like to make sure that the bilges are always empty. I like to make sure that the lines are always tidy. You have certain how, you know, I keep myself very well fed. I try to keep as dry as possible. Just keep busy, keep focused. Somebody else asked me the other day, how do you stay inspired in the middle of the voyage? And it struck me as an odd question because it's like, how do you stay inspired in the middle of a marathon? You don't, because you're focused on one foot in front of the other. You're focused on the techniques and the practice and what you've learned about what you need to do to get through it. It's not about inspiration anymore. It's about execution. It's about staying focused. So my focus is keep the boat in good order. Keep the boat in as good a position relative to the weather as you can. Keep yourself as healthy, which means slept. Sleeping is easy, but it's hard to find the time for it when you're up a lot at night, which is quite frequent. So keep, as you know, keep yourself as well swept as possible. Just stay, just try to stay ready. Try to stay ready. Focus on. I want to complete this. This isn't a race. It isn't about being fast. It's not getting to the finish line. Stay focused on what it takes to do that.

Right. It's an endurance event.

Does that resonate?

Yeah, it completely does. So I see like you're attending to. It's the execution side of things. It's working on being everything ready, whole, complete. It's the integrity of systems and the primary leader of the enterprise. Right. You're working on your own health and that kind of thing. And you have a new phenomenon with the lonelies. Just, I mean, less of an interview, but more as a friend. When you're lonely, don't forget that there are countless friends and people who've never met you, who are following you, who are thinking about you, who are logging on. I'm looking at your tracking page right now. It's updated as of four minutes ago. It says you're doing 6.75 knots. It shows me your position. It says you're probably in about a 25 knot wind. So there's lots of us who are thinking about you and looking at you all the time. I mean, I personally look at your thing every day and I'm a lifelong sailor, but I've only ever sailed and only ever choose to sail in very warm waters, gunk holing and cruising with friends. My main concern is, is the water maker and the ice maker still working?

Yeah, right. Well, thank you for saying that as a friend and an interviewer, because it is meaningful. I remember. So during the Figure 8 Voyage 1.0, all of the bad stuff in the Pacific happened right around Christmas. So on Christmas day of the figure 8 1.0, I was really busy saving my life and I had a boat full of Christmas presents which I did not think of at all and actually left in their packages until this last Christmas. We had already rounded Cape Horn and I was probably two weeks past it at that point. And I remember, oh, thanks. Those presents. I'd only been gone for probably 75, 80 days at that point. So still early ish in the passage, but it was Very, very, very meaningful to feel that connection. I was gone Christmas two years ago and Christmas this year. I haven't really seen my family for two years. And so you kind of live in an emotionally delicate universe. Things like you just said have a lot of impact. It can make me feel very warm and fuzzy or make me feel very emotional, and that's really unusual. So thank you. I appreciate that.

I have a talent of making people cry in a good way. I don't know if you recognize this, but when a person undertakes a challenge and others live through it and support it, you are a champion, right? We would send a champion for it to do battle and do whatever. And the champion is a very, like, a special role. And we all have a special relationship with the champion. And even if we're watching a character on tv, like, we're deeply related to the champion. So I just want to say thank you for doing something extraordinary and reminding us that human beings are extraordinary and making us feel like we're part of that with you.

Wow. Well, Bill, no one has ever said that to me before, so thank you very much. I'm a champion who hasn't shaved or showered in 122 days. So I don't really feel much like a champion.

Oh, you are. I'm sure you're stinky and funky smelling and all alone.

Oh, my.

But you're awesome. And thank you for being out there and we are with you.

Hey, thank you. Thank you. That's really awesome. I appreciate that.

All right, so for our listeners, figure 8 voyage. Figure the number 8 voyage.com. you can see where he is right now. You can see the latest photos. You can follow him. You can support him. He could use the support. And you'll follow the fulfillment of the journey and the eventual success. And then, of course, you'll have a chance to hear more of him. So I really just so treasure having you on and thank you so much and wish you easy sailing ahead.

Hey, Bill. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. Like I said at the top, I don't get much of an opportunity to talk. So it's been great to have a conversation with you about the figure eight voyage. And best to you and your listeners. Thank you very much.

Don't forget to register now for our next workshop on scaling up. To get one of our limited $100 discounts for our podcast listeners while supplies last, just go to scalingcoach.com workshops and then enter the code sup. That's sup for scalingup podcasts. When you register, we'll See you there.

Well, once again, if you're inspired by Randall's journey and you'd like to give him a little, a little financial support to help him fund the completion of the journey, he could use it. It's figure eight, voyage figure and then the the number eight and then voyage.com and of course you can follow his live updates and posts and see the tracker of where he is right now at that website. You'll find us@scalingcoach.com where we've got free tools. You can get a copy of the book there for free and all kinds of things like that. We bring you a podcast like this every week where we share a story or an idea or a tool that relates to scaling your business. And so please go there and find us. I want to give special thanks to.

Original growth guru Vern Harnish.

This show is produced by Crystal Carson and our audio production is done by Podfly Productions with audio editing by Albert Burge and show notes compiled by Ein Codina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of the show show, please, more than ever before, pass it along. Let's have the whole world know about Randall's historic journey and let them be inspired by him. You can also drop us a Note@info scalingcoach.com we'd love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening and keep scaling up.

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