At the start of summer, I read a short novel by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) called The Shadow-Line. Conrad is best known for his novella Heart of Darkness, the source material for the film Apocalypse Now. He’s also an inspiration for getting to things a little bit later in life, as (1) he learned English in his twenties as a third language, after Polish and French, but still became one of the masters of English fiction, and (2) he didn’t publish his first novel until his late thirties, after a career of almost two decades as a seaman. (There’s still hope for my pivot to novelist after a career of almost two decades in data!)

The Shadow-Line is in the running for the best book I’ll read all year. And the reason I’m telling you about it is … It is an amazing book for managers, and especially first-time managers! The story is a fictionalized account of when Conrad first became the captain of a ship, the Otago in Southeast Asia. There are so many things that happen in this book that resonated with experiences I’ve had in my own career, though the environments differ significantly (obviously, lol):

  • The young narrator impetuously quits his job because he starts to feel “green-sickness” and “life-emptiness” and craves something more. (I did the same thing at 23! How common is this crisis?)
  • He gets his next break because a guy in power who doesn’t even know him randomly believes in him and helps him out. (That actually happened to me!)
  • And then you get the bulk of the story at sea: the narrator, now a first-time captain, must navigate a life-changing ordeal where he has to keep his crew motivated, pushing through extremely challenging conditions.

The Shadow-Line. Check it out. It’s only 100-something pages, and if you don’t see the management angle that colors my reading, it’s still a great read even as sea-story entertainment. (You could say the same thing about Herman Melville’s longer nautical novels: come for the sea yarn, stay for the philosophical outbursts.) There are so many great lessons on what it means to be an inspiring leader, how to take control of your career, how to work through life-emptiness, why you should mentor younger people, what resilience looks like. The beauty of literature is that you always find people who went through the same things that you’re going through, 100, 1000, 2500 years ago. Henry Miller says of discovering this fact in previous writers: “if I had known that in their own way they were thinking exactly the same things as I was, I think I’d have blown up.”