For years, I thought strength meant making things less vulnerable, and that probably came from building yachts.
A yacht has to survive thousands of miles of ocean, with people depending on every part of it. We spent an enormous amount of time making things stronger and lighter, calculating loads, and building things again when the first version was not good enough. The whole point was to remove weakness, or at least that is what I thought.
Then you take the yacht out to sea, and you realise that no matter how well you have built it, there are still things you cannot control. The weather changes, a sail tears, someone makes the wrong decision at the wrong moment. You can prepare for almost everything. Almost.
I remember one particular moment during a race when something went wrong that had nothing to do with the quality of the yacht. We were mid ocean when a massive gust hit, and we did not ease the sheets fast enough. The yacht went into a full broach, the spinnaker blew apart, and for a few seconds we were genuinely close to losing the mast. The boat was still doing exactly what it was designed to do. We were the vulnerable part.
Someone had to call it in the moment, with the boat already on its side and no time to think it through, and everyone else had to trust that call immediately, without discussion. That moment taught me more than the technical problem ever could, because there is a strange thing about trying to make something strong: the stronger the system becomes, the more obvious its remaining weak points are.
A yacht can be incredibly strong and still depend on a few millimetres of rope. A business can have millions behind it and still depend on one person being willing to say, I do not know.
I have seen that in business too. For a long time I thought being the person with the answers was part of what made me useful. If someone came to me with a problem, my instinct was to solve it and keep things moving. But the older I get, the more I realise that sometimes the most useful thing you can say is that you do not know. That is not giving up control. It is recognising where your control ends.
Vulnerability is not something to hide. It is the sign that something really matters. That does not mean being careless or exposing yourself to risks you could avoid. It means knowing which parts of something you can make stronger, and which parts will always remain exposed to the world around them.
The things we care about most are often the things we can never make completely safe. A yacht has to go to sea. A person has to trust someone. You can build carefully and prepare as well as you can, but eventually you have to let the thing you built out into the world.
And perhaps that is the real test of strength, not whether something can be made invulnerable, but whether it is strong enough to live with the fact that it never will be.
