The cook always goes down with the ship

In today’s Far Side cartoon, we see several things happening:

1. A disaster has befallen an ocean liner somewhere in the middle of the ocean.
2. The people who’ve managed to escape on a life raft are really bad at optimizing available space.
3. The captain has a conspicuous lack of Vojdaan. He has evidently convinced the cook it is his sacred duty to “go down with the ship” in the event such an event might occur, while he escapes on the life raft to live another day.

Of course we all know the phrase, “The captain goes down with the ship.” It’s classic Leadership 101. The leader eats last, gets paid last, and takes care of the troops before taking care of themselves.

And we also all know that reality doesn’t always line up with this idealistic way of doing things. Too often when something goes awry, the fingers go to pointing.

Everyone else becomes the cook that should go down with the ship when it begins sinking.

Real leadership is shown when things go wrong. Heck, life itself is defined by the errors, the failures, the trials we endure and ultimately survive. How boring would things be if everything was perfect? What would we talk about?

It’s those hard times that give us motivation to keep at things. Each day we get up and work on tackling that gorilla in our lives, be it debt, unemployment, maybe a relationship difficulty, we show the world and ourselves we’re not quitters.

But taking ownership of the failure is really the first step to overcoming it. When you’re the captain in the life raft, putting the blame on the cook, making it incumbent on him or her to go down with the ship, you’re not doing yourself nor anyone else any favors.

You’re guaranteeing the same mistakes that led to that disaster will happen again in the future.

A captain that goes down with his ship might actually save another crew and group of passengers from a similar fate. The business that fails today might actually save yourself a lot of time and heartache.

Meanwhile you’re planning the next venture, allowing those emotional scars to guide you away from making similar mistakes which led to the undoing of the enterprise.

There’s so much to unpack with that silly little cartoon, I could go on and on.

Suffice it to say I’ve been in both positions: on the life raft escaping someone else’s mistakes; and on the ship, rightfully going down after making some pretty poor decisions.

But it doesn’t matter what happened yesterday.

What matters is what we’re doing today.

We’re either rebuilding a new ship, making repairs to a damaged one, or just scrolling on Facebook watching others build their ships.