5 Lessons Learned In Survival Situations That Prepared Me To Lead Through Crisis
Managing uncertainty and fear are part of surviving in the wild. As a survivalist, I’ve learned lessons in the wild that have helped me lead as an entrepreneur during economic crises.
1. Survive, then thrive
The first hours of a survival situation are the most critical. You must prioritize what allows you to live another day: water, shelter, food, and fire. There is no “wait-and-see.” Once you’ve ensured the basics for your survival, quickly begin identifying areas of opportunity that allow you to get out of survival-mode and eventually thrive. This means improving your shelter, finding diverse sources of food, and discovering things that bring joy (think “Wilson” in Tom Hank’s “Castaway”).
During an economic crisis, business leaders must also prioritize what they need to survive: cash. Conserve it immediately by renegotiating leases, cutting expenses, and adjusting payroll. There’s no time to waste. Based on learnings from running my first business during the Great Recession, during COVID we moved quickly at my current business (Cotopaxi) and did this in the first few days of the crisis. After taking those actions, we quickly transitioned our mentality from survive to thrive. We had our jacket factory start production on hundreds of thousands of face masks, converted our 24-hour Questival adventure race into a virtual event (achieving record attendance), partnered with a company that was booming during the crisis — allowing them to use our warehouse and team as over-flow, and started exploring new retail stores in prime locations that were suddenly available and cheap.
2. When in trouble, don’t wait, communicate
Nature teaches us this lesson regularly. During one survival trip, while swimming out to a reef, I heard a desperate cry for help. We were swimming against a strong current and making very little progress. One of my two friends became fatigued and was struggling to stay afloat. He immediately dropped his weight belt (which is used by free divers to get deep, fast), and we swam to his rescue. If he had waited any longer to communicate or refused to dump his weights, he likely would have drowned.
In business, the moment we see signs that something is wrong, we have to drop everything and communicate. When the COVID period began, we prioritized communication. We shifted executive meetings from weekly to daily, our all-hands meetings from monthly to weekly, and my communication as CEO to the team increased to multiple times per week. Together we frequently assessed the rapidly evolving situation, innovated, strategized, and ensured team members could quickly communicate if they were feeling fatigued.
3. When sharks attack, stay strategy-focused vs. fear-focused
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson. During a recent survival trip, my friends and I went hungry on Day 1 as we unsuccessfully searched for the right reef to spear some fish. By Day 2, we were starving and desperate for food. Fortunately, we spotted a large mutton snapper deep in a coral head. I was able to get a solid hit on it, and we celebrated as I surfaced with the fish. From one moment to the next, three sharks were just feet away from us. Our first instinct was to make a fear-focused decision to abandon the fish and swim away in fear. Instead, we adapted our plan. We kept the fish between us, swam backwards so we could face the sharks, and used our spears to keep them at bay. Within a few minutes we were in shallow water and the sharks abandoned their attempts at our fish.
During a crisis, we can’t afford to resort to fear-focused decisions. A week into the COVID crisis, after reading an inspired Forbes article about how different CEO’s responded to the crisis, I challenged our team to decide if they would be fear-focused or strategy-focused in their roles. Together, we decided we would be strategy-focused. We brainstormed over 100 ideas that were either cost-cutting, brand building, or revenue driving. It was a game-changing day for our business and for us individually.
4. Surviving is hard, surviving alone is harder
Earlier this year, six entrepreneur friends and I spent a week in the Brazilian Amazon, catching and eating crocodile, drinking water from water-vines, paddling up winding rivers, cutting through the jungle with machetes, and sleeping in hammocks with monkeys swinging through the canopy overhead. Unlike previous survival trips, this time we brought a guide. As darkness fell upon us, the humid night air filled with the deep guttural roars of the jungle’s apex predator, jaguars. As we tried to sleep, we heard intense bouts of counter-calling between jaguars and even the sound of a jaguar attacking a sounder of wild pigs, just a couple hundred meters from where we slept. The sound was haunting, equal parts beautiful and terrifying. Our guide tended fires around the camp throughout the night and helped us re-light candles around our hammocks. While jaguars have no fear of water, they have evolved to avoid fire. Our guide stayed up all night and would tell us “sleep calmly, but don’t sleep deeply.” He wanted us to be aware, but to not be overcome with fear. He taught us how to identify our enemy and how to protect ourselves.
Without an experienced guide, I’m not sure we would have survived. In times of crisis, we need to rely on experienced friends and mentors to help us make the right decisions. Over the last few months, I’ve relied heavily on the insights and advice of other leaders that I respect. I’ve dedicated time to reach out to them, learn from them, and to discuss challenges openly. My trusted group of friends has helped guide me through this challenging time.
5. Remember, the sun will rise again
As much as I love the ocean, it also terrifies me. Fifty miles in the middle of the ocean, my cousin and I set up “camp” in our kayaks on top of a reef surrounded by ocean in all directions. We speared a fish and enjoyed our meal as we took in a beautiful sunset. Things changed quickly. In the darkness, massive waves inched the ocean closer to our camp with the rising tide. There was no land to retreat to as we watched our reef slowly disappearing beneath us. Water rushed through the reef underneath our kayaks, which we had disassembled, allowing us to use them as sleeping pods. I was having a difficult time managing the anxiety I was feeling.
Week-one of the COVID crisis didn’t feel much different. From one minute to the next, a perfect and serine sunset evolved into a nightmare full of uncertainty and fear. That night in Belize, sleeping on a reef, I learned the importance of staying mentally positive and on focusing on what was in our control. Ultimately, the tide turned just in time (as we believed it would, based on the tidal charts) and didn’t wash us away. The sun rose in the morning, and boy was it a beautiful sunrise. Our ability to remain calm, to focus on the positive, and to stay confident in our knowledge that the sun would rise again was key to our weathering the storm.
Survival trips are something I look forward to with anticipation. Every trip is unique and provides new opportunities to grow and learn. While I’ve yet to look forward with anticipation to a financial crisis, I actually look back at the last few months with gratitude as I’ve been able to grow and develop as a leader and as a team. That said, not unlike a survival trip, I’m really looking forward to my first great meal in a restaurant!
Davis Smith is the founder and CEO of Cotopaxi, an outdoor brand with a humanitarian mission at its core. Davis was Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s CEO of the Year and previously started Brazil’s Startup of the Year. He is an adventurer who has floated the Amazon in a self-made raft, kayaked from Cuba to Florida, and explored North Korea.
