THE WILL NOT TO GO UNDER

Posted on October 10th, 2013

On determination, fear, and what remains when motivation disappears

There are moments in life when motivation becomes irrelevant. You do not need encouragement, a vision statement or somebody reminding you of your potential. You do not even need to feel particularly courageous. Sometimes circumstances reduce themselves to something much more primitive: you have to decide whether you are going to continue.

I learned that distinction long before I had words for it. My grandfather once told me something extraordinarily simple: “If you really want something, you can achieve it. I am the best example. I achieved what nobody thought I could.” There was no theory attached to the sentence, no lecture about resilience, discipline or personal development. It was simply something he believed because his own life had given him reason to believe it. Perhaps that is why it stayed with me.

Only much later did I begin to understand the difference between motivation and something deeper. Motivation is often stimulated from outside. It responds to encouragement, recognition, success, competition and sometimes fear. It is useful, but also remarkably unreliable. It comes and goes. Determination is quieter. It does not necessarily need an audience and, strangely enough, sometimes becomes clearest precisely when there is nobody around to applaud it.

Some of the moments in which I discovered that difference were not moments I would consciously have chosen. They were situations in which the margin for error suddenly became very small and all the sophisticated explanations we construct about ourselves became rather useless. What remained was not philosophy. It was instinct, experience, judgement and the willingness to make one more decision.

When the Choice Becomes Very Small

I was still very young when one of those moments came on the Steinhuder Meer in Germany. It was cold, around twelve degrees Celsius, and there was a storm warning. I was windsurfing on a white Blue Marlin board with a 5.2-square-metre Mistral sail. In those days the equipment mattered enormously to me. It represented freedom, speed and independence, but it was also expensive equipment for a young man. The board and rig were worth roughly 800 Deutsche Mark each, which was real money to me at the time.

Then the Powerjoint connecting the rig to the board broke.

From one second to the next, something that had been one functioning piece of equipment became two independent objects being driven across rough water by wind and waves. The board was moving in one direction, the rig in another, and I was swimming between them, one arm holding the board and the other trying to keep hold of the sail.

There is something almost comic about the mind in such situations. You are in cold, stormy water, your physical strength is becoming relevant in a very immediate way, and some completely inappropriate part of your brain is still calculating the financial value of the equipment disappearing from your hands. Sixteen hundred Deutsche Mark. Board. Sail. Do not lose either of them.

Survival eventually corrects the mathematics.

The longer I remained in the water, the less important those calculations became. Cold changes priorities rather efficiently. So does exhaustion. What had begun as an attempt to save my equipment gradually became an exercise in maintaining control over myself. The problem was no longer simply how to keep two pieces of windsurfing equipment together. The problem was how not to allow a deteriorating situation to become psychologically larger than it already was physically.

I held on.

Eventually the sea rescue service found me. Remarkably, they recovered not only me but also the board and the rig. Looking back, I have never considered the outcome entirely my own achievement. There are moments when preparation, physical ability and determination take you only so far. After that, something else enters the equation. Some people call it luck. Others coincidence. I have always been more inclined to call it providence.

What remained with me, however, was not a heroic memory of having defeated a storm. I had defeated nothing. The storm had been stronger than I was, the water colder than I wanted it to be, and without being found the story could have ended differently. The lesson was much more modest, and perhaps therefore more useful.

I could not control the crisis. But I did not have to allow the crisis to control me.

That distinction has followed me ever since.

The Current

Many years later, on Apo Island in the Philippines, I encountered almost the opposite lesson.

Apo Island is a small island surrounded by beautiful tropical water and known particularly for its sea turtles. Swimming there feels almost effortless at first. The visibility beneath the surface is extraordinary, the temperature inviting, and with fins on your feet it is easy to develop the confidence that comes from moving quickly through clear water.

I decided to swim around the island.

What began as an adventure gradually changed character. At some point I became aware that I was no longer determining my direction as easily as before. A strong current had caught me and was pulling me away from the island. The change was not dramatic in the cinematic sense. There was no sudden wall of water and no obvious moment of catastrophe. The island was simply becoming more difficult to reach.

That kind of situation creates an immediate instinct: the land is there, therefore swim toward it. If you are being pulled away, swim harder. Increase the effort. Fight.

But water is unimpressed by determination.

A strong current does not negotiate with ambition, and exhausting yourself in a direct contest with it can transform a manageable problem into a dangerous one. I remember thinking about this very consciously while I was still being carried outward. I had fins, which gave me an advantage, but they did not change the fundamental problem. If the current was stronger than I was, simply increasing my effort would eventually reduce my strength without necessarily reducing the distance.

So I did something that felt counterintuitive. I stopped trying to defeat the current directly.

My reasoning was that the concentrated pull around the island would eventually weaken farther out. I could not know with certainty where that would happen, and I certainly had no guarantee that my calculation was correct. But continuing to fight directly toward the shore seemed increasingly irrational. I therefore allowed myself to be carried farther away while conserving as much energy as possible, trusting that the current would eventually lose some of its force.

It did.

Once I felt the pull diminish, I changed direction and began swimming back, not directly against the path that had carried me out, but in a broad arc toward the island. Slowly the distance began to close again. What had initially felt like surrendering ground had created the possibility of returning.

I eventually made it back.

The experience stayed with me because it seemed to contradict the obvious lesson of the Steinhuder Meer. There I had survived by holding on. At Apo Island, the intelligent response had been to stop fighting in the obvious direction. One experience demanded resistance; the other demanded adaptation.

Yet perhaps they were not contradictory at all. The underlying decision was the same: remain sufficiently calm to understand the situation you are actually in, rather than the situation you wish you were in.

Determination does not always mean resistance.

That may be one of the more difficult lessons to accept, particularly for people accustomed to solving problems through effort. We are taught that persistence means pushing harder, that strength means resistance and that retreat is synonymous with failure. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes the only way through a situation is to keep pushing long after it has become uncomfortable.

But there are other moments when continuing in exactly the same direction is not courage. It is stubbornness.

The distinction matters.

The Geography of the Edge

Looking back over my life, I do not think I deliberately searched for dangerous situations. I was searching for experience, movement and possibility, and perhaps sometimes simply for the next horizon. But horizons have an interesting characteristic: once you reach one, another appears. Somewhere along that journey, inevitably, you encounter your own boundaries.

Not the boundaries we describe in conversation or construct retrospectively because they make a good story. I mean the real ones: the point at which confidence becomes uncertainty, strength becomes exhaustion and a theoretical willingness to continue suddenly acquires a price.

Those moments are useful because they remove decoration. Titles become irrelevant. Social status becomes irrelevant. What other people think of you becomes spectacularly irrelevant. The sea does not know who you are. A current is not impressed by your résumé. Cold water does not care how persuasive you can be.

There is something almost liberating about that.

At the edge, pretence becomes expensive. You are left with whatever judgement, character, instinct and experience you actually possess. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes it is not. But at least the answer is real.

This is also why I have become increasingly sceptical of the enormous industry surrounding motivation. We are constantly being told how to become stronger, more resilient, more focused and more successful. There are books, seminars, podcasts, coaches, quotations and formulas promising to reveal the habits of people who supposedly possess some exceptional ability to persevere.

I do not dismiss all of that. Encouragement can matter enormously, and there are moments when another person’s belief in us changes what we believe possible for ourselves. But motivation remains volatile. It responds to mood, success, recognition and circumstances. Precisely when circumstances become difficult, motivation can disappear.

Will is different.

Not because will makes us invincible, but because it can remain when enthusiasm has gone. It does not necessarily feel heroic. Often it feels unpleasant, inconvenient and lonely. It can simply mean getting up when staying down would be understandable, making another decision after the previous one failed, or accepting that the original route is closed without concluding that the destination must therefore be abandoned.

Sometimes it means holding on to the board.

Sometimes it means letting the current carry you.

The difficulty lies in knowing which situation you are in.

What My Grandfather Actually Gave Me

It took me many years to understand what my grandfather had really given me with that sentence: “If you really want something, you can achieve it.”

Taken literally, the statement is obviously untrue. Desire does not abolish biology, circumstance, chance or the actions of other people. We cannot achieve everything merely because we want it badly enough. Sometimes people prepare perfectly and still lose. Sometimes the storm wins. Sometimes the current carries somebody farther than expected. Sometimes life simply refuses to cooperate.

My grandfather was not offering me a scientific proposition. He was giving me an orientation toward difficulty.

There is an enormous difference between beginning with the question Why can this not be done? and beginning with How far can I go before I know that it cannot be done?

The first question searches for reasons to stop. The second searches for possibilities.

That does not guarantee success, but it changes the person asking the question.

Perhaps that is why his sentence survived so many other things I was taught. He did not explain a system to me. He had lived something and condensed it into a few words. I could interpret those words differently at eighteen, thirty, forty or fifty because experience kept adding meaning to them.

At eighteen, I probably heard: Push harder.

Later I understood something more complicated: Do not surrender too early.

And later still: Do not confuse changing direction with surrender.

That last distinction may be the most important.

The Intelligence of Persistence

We tend to admire persistence because it photographs well. The lone person against the mountain, the athlete crossing the finish line, the survivor emerging from adversity: these are images we understand immediately. What is harder to depict is the judgement that makes persistence useful.

Persistence without judgement can destroy exactly what it is trying to preserve.

A person swimming indefinitely against a stronger current may demonstrate extraordinary determination while making a catastrophic decision. Someone who changes direction may appear to retreat while actually increasing the probability of survival. The visible action tells us surprisingly little about the quality of the decision behind it.

Perhaps resilience is therefore not simply the ability to endure. It is the ability to remain mentally flexible while under pressure. To distinguish between the things that must be defended and the methods that can be abandoned. To preserve the objective while being willing to change the route.

That requires something more subtle than stubbornness.

It requires humility.

The Steinhuder Meer reminded me that there are moments when letting go too early has consequences. Apo Island reminded me that there are moments when refusing to let go has consequences too. Between those two experiences lies much of what I now understand about determination.

You need the will to continue.

But you also need enough clarity to recognise what “continuing” actually means.

The Will Not to Go Under

The older I become, the less interested I am in heroic definitions of resilience. Life is too unpredictable for them.

I do not believe resilience means believing that everything will turn out well. Sometimes it does not. Nor do I believe that sufficiently determined people can control every outcome. We cannot. Anyone who has spent enough time at the mercy of weather, water, other people or simply chance eventually learns that lesson.

What we can influence is smaller, but perhaps more significant.

We can influence the next decision.

That decision may be dramatic, but usually it is not. Often there is no audience and no memorable soundtrack. It is simply the private moment when stopping would be understandable and something within us answers: not yet.

Not here. Not like this.

Let me try once more.

Perhaps that is what my grandfather understood long before I did. Perhaps that is what I learned in the cold water of the Steinhuder Meer and rediscovered, in a completely different form, in the warm water around Apo Island.

One taught me to hold on.

The other taught me when not to fight.

Together they taught me something I could never have learned from a motivational slogan: strength is not always pushing harder, courage is not always attacking the wave, and determination is not always resistance. Sometimes survival requires extraordinary effort. Sometimes it requires patience. Sometimes it requires the humility to accept that the forces around us are stronger than we are and the intelligence to work with them until another possibility appears.

I no longer need the certainty that I will win. I do not need the illusion that I can control everything that happens, and I certainly do not need to believe that every difficult experience exists in order to teach me some convenient lesson.

What matters is more elemental than that.

When the plan disappears, when circumstances become stronger than expected and when motivation has long since left the room, there is still one thing that remains ours for as long as consciousness and circumstance permit it:

the next decision.