• By: Ray Brimble, August 24, 2018

As a small business owner, you are the captain of your own ship, right? The only problems are you are not a ship and the ship you may be on probably needs no captain.

I fancy myself as the captain of my ship—meaning that I am in control, in the lead, able to direct where and when I am going.

So the revelation that it’s not exactly an aircraft carrier I am sailing is something to think about. The truth is: my ship is modest. It’s more like a boat, or perhaps even a canoe. So the captaining involves different skills. It’s necessary to understand this because a canoe takes a different course than a battleship and requires different steerage.

For instance, a canoe has little stability but much agility. Part of the experience is surviving  a few spills in the drink. On a battleship, you are high and dry. In my canoe, you are gonna get wet.

One of the things I like about a canoe is the ability to portage. If your river runs out or it gets too rough, you just pick up your boat and walk it to the next place you can put back in. This is not easy or comfortable, but possible when necessary. Portage is a tactic a real ship’s captain would never learn, need, or even understand. It requires different instincts, and much endurance. Canoe captains are a different breed than ships' captains.  

Another difference is in how you see yourself. The truth is, paddlers of canoes do not consider themselves captains. The canoe is generally just a simple means to an end. The relationship between man and boat is organic and symbiotic, and certainly not meant to imply status. The captain of a battleship is, well, THE CAPTAIN. Aye aye, sir! How much time does he spend acting this out and considering his role? Canoe paddlers need not apply.  

As a canoe paddler, we depend more on anticipatory instincts. Watching the river characteristics is much different than plowing through open water, irrespective of that occasional iceberg (aka, what sank the mighty Titanic).

There is also a sense that we are gliding over the water rather than through it, so the relationship we must have with the water and elements should be different than oceangoing ships. It’s part accommodation and part luck, rather than brute force. 

A lot has been written about the virtues and independence associated with being a small business owner. However, comparatively little attention is paid to the instinct of “going with the flow.”  After all, entrepreneurs are usually Type A control freaks. However, being on and part of the water in a small boat will eventually inform you that you are not the thing, but rather just part of the process, and your job is often just to keep everything afloat and moving forward in the right direction. 

Gerard d’Aboville was the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a small rowboat. When asked, “How did he do it?” he replied, “I did not cross the ocean….it let me pass.” As talented as we think we are, and as good a plan as we think we have, sometimes our accomplishments are facilitated as much as executed. Recognition of this dynamic is not a passive thing. As captains of our small canoe, even though we cannot control the elements, we are not adrift. We are just aware that we are accomplished captains of our own kind of boat and that we have developed appropriate instincts and skills which fit our world. One of the most important of those skills is… gratitude. Gratitude that we are all part of a big plan, a mysterious system that occasionally… perhaps even OFTEN… lets us pass forward even as we are not sure how to cross.