Today we talk a lot about influencers. They have followers, sponsors, and a number next to their name that tells you how much influence they have. But the word is new. The thing itself is not. We are all influenced, and we all influence others, most of the time without noticing either.
It usually doesn’t arrive as advice. It arrives as recognition. You see something, or hear something, and a small voice says: that’s me. This feels familiar. This is what I want to do.
My first one was a BBC soap. I have written before about Howards’ Way, a series about a boatyard on the south coast of England that had a Dutch teenager glued to the television every week. Nobody told me to build yachts. I watched that yard and thought: that’s what I am going to do. That one set my compass. I had other jobs along the way, but the course never changed, and in the end I followed it. The people who made the series never knew they had set a Dutch teenager on course for the longest career of his life.
Many years ago, on a night flight from Cape Town to Amsterdam, I sat next to a Norwegian man who knew nothing about sailing. It was the very beginning of my life as a yacht builder. Nothing had been built yet. I had drawings, a plan, and a head full of ideas. We chatted a little after take-off, and again in the last hour before we landed. Full of pride and enthusiasm, I told him about my very first yacht, a radical design I was about to build. He listened, and then he asked me one simple question: “If you want to build a business out of this, is this what the market wants, or what you want?” I have forgotten his name. I have never forgotten the question. It changed the way I approached that first yacht, and everything I built after it. If he ever reads this, I hope he doesn’t send me an invoice!
The people you love, the people you work with, the people you share part of your life with, all leave something behind. Even when you go your separate ways, you never leave with empty hands.
None of it feels like much while it happens. Each one is a drop. Some are small and simply correct your compass by a degree or two. Others set a completely new course, and not always in the right direction. But drops are how oceans are made, and looking back, much of who I am arrived that way, one drop at a time, from people who never knew they had given me anything.
What took me longer to realise is that it works the other way around, too. Halfway across the South Atlantic, racing to Brazil, I was on a yacht full of men who got on really well. We laughed a lot, and the atmosphere was good from the start. But it was a man’s world, where feelings were not something you talked about much. It was a long way to Brazil, though, and I missed my girlfriend terribly. So, over a satellite connection that worked whenever it felt like it, I sent her flowers from the middle of the ocean. Everyone on board soon knew. It was not exactly the toughest thing you could do on a racing yacht. But it opened something up. Suddenly there was room to be a little vulnerable, and the team came together in a slightly different way for the rest of a long voyage.
Sometimes you only find out years later. A while ago I shared on LinkedIn that I was about to give another lecture, and a young woman replied straight away. She had been in the audience at a lecture I gave at a college on the Isle of Man in 2022, about transitions and the art of the possible. She had even written a short piece about it for the college magazine at the time. She still remembered it, she said. Reading that, I felt grateful, and happy. I don’t imagine one lecture decided anything for her. But maybe she took one or two things with her that felt like hers. For a man who mostly talks about sailing and composites, I will take that. It was one drop, nothing more, but somewhere along the way it had landed.
Most of the time, though, it happens without anyone planning it. Not long ago, on my usual walk along the coast from Castletown, my dog Quattro started barking at a sheep stuck between the rocks below the path. I climbed down, but a sheep is a lot heavier than it looks, and it took a man passing by, recently moved over from Scotland, to get it loose. We walked back to Castletown together, and on the way he told me about his grandson, whom he looks after and takes to school. That was why he had moved to the island. There was a gentleness in the way he talked about that boy that I have not forgotten. Here was a man who had simply rearranged his own life to look after someone else.
I suspect it sometimes works the other way too. I am not walking around on tiptoe, trying to hand out wisdom. What I say is not everyone’s cup of tea, and that is fine. Some people pick a drop up, some leave it where it fell. And yes, I can be a pain, and not everything I have left behind was helpful. We all receive drops, and we all hand them out, mostly without knowing which ones landed.
Somewhere, someone is probably watching you right now, at work, at home, on a Sunday night, deciding what they want to become. You will never know.
