The Why is Not Their's to Answer

"The why is not theirs to answer."- Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

When pressed for a reason, men who do these things tend to do one of two things. They either invent one retrospectively, or they refuse the question outright. George Mallory, asked why he wished to climb Everest, gave the most famous refusal of all: Because it’s there.

He was not answering the question. He was blocking it forever.

I’ve often found myself thinking of Mallory’s answer when people ask me why I sailed around the world alone.

The true why cannot be set down on a page because it is not a single thing. It is the sum of every desire, fear, hope, philosophy and ambition a person carries, resolved into one act.

To name it is to shrink it.

Answer the why completely and the magic leaks out, and the residue it leaves behind is a white-collar mission, a project, an objective, a framework or a business case.

But not magic.

The pattern is not unique to sailors. The same instinct, and the same inability to explain it, recurs wherever someone has left a safe shore for an unproven one.

When Jeff Bezos walked away from a senior position at a New York hedge fund in 1994 to sell books over a network almost no one used, the rational case was to stay. He did not justify the leap on an Excel sheet.

What he did instead was to reach for what he called a regret-minimisation framework, projecting himself forward to the age of eighty and asking which choice he would regret less. It was a way of admitting that the numbers could not have brought him to the decision, and that he was following a road only he could see.

The meaning of such a leap is rarely legible at the time.

Steve Jobs was echoing Søren Kierkegaard when he said that you cannot connect the dots looking forward. He took up calligraphy.

The list runs long and crosses every field. There were Shackleton, Moitessier, Schultz, Dyson and Musk.None of them could have made the spreadsheet say yes.

So the what is chosen by an instinct that sees what calculation cannot, and the why is assembled later, looking back. This is as true of a bookstore or a mountain as it is of a thirty-two-foot yacht alone in the Southern Ocean.

The analysis that follows does not pretend to explain the why.

It takes the what as given. An instinct cannot be dignified with a rationalisation, and concerns itself only with the how.