A year after my experience with the South African arms embargo, I left my career in the Foreign Service. The disconnect between what I was asked to do professionally and what was in my heart got too great to continue. I was excited by the prospect of using my experience and my ideals to help resolve conflicts, not keep them going. I had no real plan in mind, but I loved to talk about my vision, and my friends patted me on the head and told me what a fine fellow I was.

But I quickly began to get second thoughts, especially when my government paychecks stopped coming. I told myself that I had the whole rest of my life to put my vision into action. It might be wise to first earn some significant money. So I set up a consulting business in New York City, where I’d advise banks and other companies about the political risks of investing in the Third World. I’d tell them, for example, when I thought there’d be a revolution in Nigeria or a coup in Angola. So I rented office space and put a carpet on the floor and my name on the door.

That business should have been a success—I had high-level contacts all over the Third World, and really did know a lot about the subject. But I didn’t get a single damn client. Within a month, I had to close that office, leaving me very broke and feeling very sorry for myself.

Then a friend of mine, who knew I’d always had a good gift for gab, suggested that I could make some easy money by lecturing on cruise ships. So to make a long story short, that’s what I did. I signed up as ship’s lecturer on the SS Prinsendam, sailing from Vancouver to Tokyo. As promised, the pay was great, and I also got to bring along my then thirteen year-old daughter Malory. All I had to do was give two lectures—the shipping line didn’t even care what I talked about. I was officially a member of the ship’s entertainment staff, which meant that part of my job was also waltzing widows with blue hair around the dance floor.

So Malory and I board the ship in Vancouver and three days later we’re way up in the Gulf of Alaska, heading for Japan. But that night, we’re woken up about 2:00 AM by a call over the public address system. A voice tells us that there’s been a fire in the engine room but that it’s been put out. Passengers are requested to come up to the ship’s lounge while fans blow the smoke out of the corridors. Free drinks will be served. Disarmed by the message, Malory and I don’t even take our life jackets with us.

The lounge, however, is full of acrid black smoke, so the passengers spill out onto the deck. It’s October, in the Gulf of Alaska, and the night air is cold. Some people pull cloths off the tables or curtains off the windows and are using them as blankets. There’s no moon, and a dancing green belt of Northern Lights is so bright it hides the stars. Beneath it, a dark, still ocean spreads in all directions. But the most interesting sight is behind us: any fool can see that the smoke coming up from below is getting blacker and thicker. That fire can’t possibly be out. The PA message was a lie.

At about 4:00 AM, the PA voice directs all the passengers to move to the stern of the ship. They bring out the ship’s orchestra, but, unlike on the Titanic, they don’t play “Nearer My God to Thee,” but show tunes from Oklahoma. Once or twice an airplane flies overhead, and dumps CO2 canisters. Worried looking firemen climb up and down the stairs. The rest of us are sitting on the stern, watching the black smoke boil up out of the bowels of the ship, drinking brandy and listening to “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye…”

At 4:30, we’re ordered to lifeboat stations. Malory and I are assigned to Boat #2, far up on the port bow. Malory counts over 90 people waiting there but a sign on the boat says it’s made for 48. We’re there perhaps ten minutes when a dull explosion rocks the ship, followed by the shattering of glass. The heat has blown out the windows in the dining rooms and salons. The flames gulp the rush of oxygen and within thirty seconds the whole middle of the ship is wrapped in flames, leaping into the night sky.

Jammed back against the railings by the flames, some people scream. Others moan quietly. A panic would have sent people into the water, but to jump into the Gulf of Alaska, at night, in October, meant certain death: even if you could swim, you'd die from hypothermia very quickly.

Suddenly the Captain appears on the bridge, in full-dress uniform, with a microphone in his hand. “I regret to inform you,” he says, “but we have lost the battle with the flames. We must now abandon the ship. Please follow the instructions of the crew.”

The ship’s six lifeboats and four life rafts began to load 550 passengers and crew. The seamen keep fouling the lines—nobody thought this almost new ship would ever face conditions like this. But by a series of miracles all the boats hit the water safely.

It’s now 5:30 AM and still very dark. The sea then is calm so the little boats float low but well. The problem is the weather. Almost as soon as we hit the water, a stiff breeze begins to blow from the west, and dark clouds erase the Northern Lights. The lifeboats begin to roll gently in a light chop. A serious storm, the tail end of Typhoon Victor, is headed our way. The rescue effort, when it starts, is a race against time.

Currents shove the lifeboats away from each other, and from the burning ship. At first light, three helicopters appear, sent from shore bases 140 miles away. Each begins picking people out of the boats one-by-one, using a metal chair at the end of a long cable. When a chopper has a full load of 8 or 9 people, it takes them to the deck of an oil tanker than has answered the SOS and is steaming in our direction. About noon, I see Malory go spinning off into space and into a helicopter.

The helicopter comes back one last time and takes eight more, but it won’t be back—it’s suicidal to fly in weather this bad. So now the only hope for the eight of us who are left in Lifeboat #2 is that a Coast Guard cutter, frantically crisscrossing the ocean in this wild storm, will find us.

By 5:30 PM visibility is down to fifty yards. We are all deathly seasick. There is no cover. The crest of every tenth wave or so blows off in the gale, sending torrents of seawater into the lifeboat so cold they suck the breath out of us. We are dying of hypothermia. I recognize the symptoms from all the mountain climbing I’ve done: first you get cold, then you begin to feel warm again, then you go to sleep and don’t wake up. I judge that we can last three or four more hours before we either die where we sit, or are thrown out of the boat and drowned.

But the key thing is that now there’s only a half hour of daylight left. The odds are small enough that the cutter can find us in the fading light, but they disappear completely with the dark. We have no flares and no lights. The radio doesn’t work. I’m tapping out an SOS I remember from Boy Scouts and it’s going nowhere. It seems certain that our fates will be settled by the darkness—in half an hour.

It was only then that it occurs to me that this time I might actually be going to die. Until that moment, I’d assumed that this crisis, like all the others in my life, would take me to the brink but not past. And before, when I’d faced odds this bad, I’d never had this much time to think about it. All those other near misses—whether a bullet or an avalanche or a climbing fall—had been sudden, and swiftly over. This time I have half an hour before my fate is sealed—then three or four more hours before I lose consciousness.

Now I never considered myself a particularly religious person, but let me tell you, in circumstances like these, one is led to prayer. But what I did wasn’t much of a prayer. Instead I got mad. “My dying now is idiotic,” I said to Whomever up there might be listening. “I’ve left the Foreign Service so I can devote everything I have to this new life of making the world a better place, which I’d assumed would be doing Your work. So how is it now, just as I’m beginning, I’m being wiped out? It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make one damn bit of sense. “I can accept dying,” I kept arguing. “Promising young people die every day. But at least I deserve to know why. I’ve always assumed there’s an order and logic to the universe. My death now seems so illogical. And so stupid. I have a right to know what’s going on!” The more I reflected, the madder I got. Looking through the storm into the fading light, realizing that I was going to die, I condensed my anger into just one word, and I turned my head up and soundlessly hurled that word into the slashing rain: “Why?”

I never knew what the other seven people in that lifeboat saw or heard at that moment, but I know what I did. I heard a voice that drowned out the storm.

“Stop kidding yourself,” the voice said, “and stop kidding Me. You know very well what will make your life meaningful but you run away from it. You tried to set up a consulting service that failed. Then you signed up to lecture on this cruise ship, and if you get out of this one alive you’ll find something else to waste your life on. “So now you have a choice. You can keep running away from your ideals, and you’ll die out here. Or you can get serious about your life and do what you know you need to do. It’s your choice.”I looked at the other seven shapes in that lifeboat. None of them seemed to have heard anything. I was so seasick I couldn’t even dry heave. I could hardly feel my feet and hands. I had no energy, no resources left. No will to resist.“OK,” I said silently into the storm. “OK.”

What happened next sounds straight out of a grade-B movie but so help me, it’s the truth. At that instant—an instant of total surrender—a dark shape burst out of the storm off the port side. It was a Coast Guard cutter, heading so right at us that it would have cut us in two had the lookout not seen us. And I came back to New York and I kept my promise. I started developing and delivering the work that’s now consumed me for the two decades since.

I like to tell this story, as you can see, but I tell it not just because it’s a good story, but because it’s the best way of illustrating what I mean by fear of success.

Back in New York before that trip, I knew in my gut that if I really got serious with my ideals, my life would change in ways I could never predict.

But more than that I sensed deep down that for the first time in my life I would be driving without any brakes on, that I could experience a passion and a clarity and a power that I’d never known before.

And these prospects scared the you-know-what out of me. I was a lot more comfortable seeing myself as this nice, slightly nerdy guy with good intentions that never quite got fulfilled.

I wasn’t afraid of failing—I knew I could survive giving a bad speech, for example. What scared me was the thought of giving up all the devil you know limitations I thought I had and taking on this passion, this power. It was fear of success.

I know this story is exotic, but the message is not. I think we all confront fear of success at some points in our lives, especially in work where our impact on other people’s lives can be so obvious.

Half the battle is acknowledging this fear for what it is.

Accept the passion and the power of what you can accomplish.