It's hard being a leader.
Especially in an early stage company, where leadership often requires that every few weeks you have to make a pivotal, game-changing decision based on incomplete, inconclusive, or ambiguous information.
In my book That Will Never Work, I write about the brutal decision we made early on at Netflix to stop selling DVDs, which at the time accounted for 95% of our revenue, and focus entirely on making our nascent rental business successful.
I leave one important detail out: the name of my mentor, a deeply experienced leader who provided indispensable advice and gave me the confidence to move forward with a non-intuitive decision. Alright. I'll tell you. It was Ernest Shackleton.
The British polar explorer got trapped in Antarctic pack ice in 1915, and faced an impossible choice on his ice floe "Ocean Camp": stay comfortable until the inevitable happened and the floe broke apart, or abandon it while his men were still strong and attempt a desperate 800-mile journey across stormy Antarctic seas in open lifeboats.
Seventy-five years later, just one year into the Netflix experiment, we faced a similar choice: Should we keep selling DVDs until Amazon got into the game, and that comfortable existence slowly but surely disappeared?
Or abandon our comfortable perch and invest all our efforts in rental, a completely unproven market?
As I wrestled with how the company should proceed, I thought back to Shackleton on the ice floe.
The great explorer eventually decided that his best opportunity to save his crew was to take the chance, no matter how slim the odds. In April of 1916, he and his men finally left Ocean Camp behind, setting off on one of the most remarkable stories of survival and leadership ever. Netflix, too, piled everything into open boats, abandoned the deceptively comfortable business of selling DVDs, and bet everything on rental.
Shackleton's lesson to me was as a simple one—and something that I have taken to heart ever since.
It's far better to take the long shot at uncertain but momentous success, than to take the sure shot at mediocrity.
Or to put it somewhat differently, it's when you're most comfortable that you're most vulnerable.
Shackleton ended up coming ashore in hurricane-force winds, thirty-two miles from the whaling station where he'd find respite and rescue.
He and his men traveled the last leg of the journey over mountainous Antarctic terrain, armed only with a carpenter's adze and fifty feet of rope.
But they made it. And although no one at Netflix had to pick up an oar, chop through ice, or hammer nails into the bottoms of their shoes to grip the terrain of the South Pole, I like to think that we did, too.