In August 2001, while on a random business trip, Mike walked into a Barnes and Noble book store and saw this photograph on a cover of a business book, titled "Shackleton's Way."  Having no prior knowledge of Shackleton or the story, Mike saw the value of this story within minutes of thumbing through it.  

I thought to myself, "Why would Shackleton and 27 others attempt to do something that nobody else had ever thought of or tried before, that was somewhere between difficult and dangerous?"  That something the 28 men were attempting to do was to become the very first people to ever cross the entire Antarctic continent on foot, some 1,800 miles.  My instinctive thought was "I wish I worked for someone like this."  

The metaphors started running through my mind quickly as I stood in the aisle of the book store on that random day in August 2001, so I bought the book and could not put it down.  That started me on a path to discover many other stories from Polar history, and eventually led me to Antarctic twice in 2006 and to writing the program "Leading at 90 Below Zero."