Deep in the soul of each human lurks an often unsated and unspoken desire – to be remembered. This is the blessing – and the curse – of sentience, awareness of our own mortality and an unquenched fear that our life will be little more than a flickering shadow, here, gone, and quickly forgotten. We all ache to be part of something greater than ourselves, to be remembered for having done something – anything – good and memorable, best of all, as part of a likeminded and committed group. Shakespeare eloquently captured that hope in the St. Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V:
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
The opportunity for immortality is unexpectedly thrust upon some, though a few remarkable individuals seize it themselves. Sometimes the moment makes you; sometimes you make the moment.
An extraordinary few create it for those around them. (See On the Etiology of Heroes.) Who are these people? What makes them the subject of story and myth? More than masterful storytellers, they are the weavers of dreams, theirs and ours, into something connected, alluring, and compelling, making the rest of us believe in the seemingly impossible, so much so that we astound ourselves by joining them in making the impossible a reality.
Apple’s Steve Jobs was a master of the reality distortion field, with his insanely great ethos, but he was by no means the first nor the last. (As Jobs said when recruiting John Sculley from Pepsi, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” Microsoft’s leaders made a similar pitch when recruiting me.) Shackleton, West (so wonderfully described in the Soul of a New Machine), Musk, they all knew the power of signing up.
The Naked Soul 
The story of Ernest Shackleton’s famous 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, an attempt to make the first land crossing of Antarctica, is of mythic proportions, memorialized in stories and in Frank Hurley’s extraordinary photographs.
Shackleton’s wooden ship, the Endurance, and his crew became trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. Eventually, the relentless ice pressure crushed the Endurance, forcing Shackleton and his men to abandon ship, then later, drag their lifeboats over the melting springtime ice to open water. Only then could the crew set sail for the desolate and uninhabited Elephant Island. (Explorers recently found the Endurance, intact except for the ice damage, resting nearly two miles deep on the frigid ocean floor.) This overland crossing was itself extraordinary, but it was but a prelude to what lay ahead.
Then, in a journey never before attempted, Shackleton and five others, took the sturdiest of their lifeboats, the James Caird, and set sail into almost certain death, hoping to cross 800 miles of treacherous waters in search of help for the remainder of the crew, who waited fearfully on South Georgia island. Fortune smiled upon them only a bit.
After seventeen torturous days at sea, Shackleton and the other five made landfall, albeit on the wrong side of the island. Leaving the weakest to wait, Shackleton and two others had no choice but to attempt the first land crossing of the South Georgia interior, crossing both a mountain range and a glacier. Only upon reaching a whaling station on the other side, was Shackleton able to mount a rescue for his remaining crew on Elephant Island.
With failure and death lurking at every turn, Shackleton’s 1914 expedition and the subsequent rescue of his men is one of the most extraordinary tales in exploration history. Lost in Antarctica for almost two years, fighting for their very survival, all were saved by their belief in one another and the undaunted determination of the expedition’s leader. As Shackleton put it, “Not a life lost, and we have been through hell.”
Since then, the story of Shackleton’s heroism, courage, perseverance, and an unwavering commitment to the rescue of his men has become the stuff of modern legend, de rigueur for any leadership or management training. Yet like all great stories, it reveals as much about us as it does the protagonists.
In the decades thereafter, stories began circulating about a London newspaper advertisement, where Shackleton had first sought the twenty-seven volunteers for his expedition. The advertisement is succinct in both its warning and its allure:
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.
It was soon reported that five thousand men had responded to Shackleton’s call, and this pithy statement has been hailed as one of the greatest advertisements of all time.
Several groups have since offered rewards to the first person who found the advertisement in the newspaper archives. All these searches failed for a very simple reason; Shackleton never placed such an advertisement. That we so desire the story to be true speaks worlds about our own hopes and dreams and our deep desire to sign up and be part of something greater than ourselves.
As Shackleton himself later wrote in his book, South:
We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had 'suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.' We'd seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.
Grasping at glory. Shackleton knew that the most arduous and rewarding journey was in finding one’s own self.
Signing Up 
In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder tells the story of Data General’s desperate bid to build a viable competitor to Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) 32-bit superminicomputer, the VAX 11/780. (If you haven’t read Kidder’s book, stop reading this meandering essay immediately, order a copy, and savor the insights of a proper writer!)
I was a graduate student when Kidder came to Purdue to talk about his recently published book. Mind you, this was when computing was still viewed as arcane art, practiced by an obscure priesthood with its own rituals and incantations. Microcomputers were still mostly a hobbyist item, workstations were still birthing, and the IBM PC had yet to be announced. At the time, I was using a VAX 11/780 (and a CDC 6600) to complete my Ph.D. thesis, working on the then crazy idea of building supercomputers from lots of interconnected microprocessors.
During his presentation, Kidder discussed the Eclipse MV/8000 and the late-to-market challenges facing Data General, but more than that, he told a tale of extraordinary adventure, personal sacrifice, and shared dedication to an upstart cause. As the “Hardy Boys” built the hardware, the “Microkids” fused the microcode with the software to create a working machine; these were people like me! By the end of Kidder’s lecture, I knew I was part of something bigger than myself; the desire to build a beautiful machine was a secular, though holy thing.
The most compelling aspect of Kidder’s book, one Shackleton would have recognized instantly, was the notion of “signing up.” As Kidder explained it,
West [the team leader] invented the term, not the practice— “signing up.” By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success.
I have signed up a few times myself, dedicating long nights, sleep-deprived days, and countless weekends to a cause and a team (e.g., the first NCSA Linux clusters and the TeraGrid, and most recently, to ensure the University of Utah continued to function and flourish during the COVID-19 pandemic). I suspect most of you reading this essay have signed up for something yourselves. (See Memos, Janitors, Teams, and Innovation.)
Stories from Microsoft's early days were legion of developers and team leaders taking a sleeping bag to work as the crunch time of product shipment neared. Eat, code, sleep a little, repeat. When the code pirouetted before you, embodying the logic of your imagination, and then the product shipped – that was the true reward. (See A Feeling for the Code.) The stock and the money were nice, but they weren’t why you did it. Money was just how you kept score; it was the idea, the adventure, and the team that mattered.
I am not suggesting that one must sacrifice one’s personal life for work; balance is critical for personal well-being ad family partnerships. There are times and circumstances, however, that require one's all.
Mars Beckons 
Although the Age of Heroic Antarctic Exploration ended abruptly with the brutality of World War I, the desire still burns bright across the intervening century. It is perhaps evident no place more than in the ambitions of Elon Musk to make humans an interplanetary society.
Outspoken and controversial, but unquestionably committed to this vision, Musk has transformed the global space industry by attracting a team of talented engineers who believe passionately in that vision. All of them “signed up” for a high stakes’ disruption of space exploration.
Musk put his money where his mouth was, remarking,
My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.
That’s called “all in.”
Against great odds and on its final attempt before likely bankruptcy, SpaceX became the first private company to reach low Earth orbit (LEO), with its two-stage-to-orbit Falcon 1 rocket. Successive iterations of the Falcon 9 have made much lower cost launches commonplace via reusable rockets, and for the first time since the space shuttle was retired, given the U.S. a human-rated launch vehicle with the Dragon 2.
The Falcon Heavy now has the largest payload capacity of any operating launch vehicle, trailing only the mighty Saturn V and Soviet Energia. All that, however, has been but a prelude to the future launch of Starship. Designed as a fully reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle, Starship is powered by new Raptor engines, and is the system designed by SpaceX to take humans back to the moon and to Mars.
Whatever one thinks of Musk, there is no doubt that he has transformed the thinking of all national space agencies, including NASA, about lower launch costs, rapid reusability, and the timelines of aspirational goals. Embodying a fail fast, iterative design process, failure IS an option, one from which you learn and continue innovating, even if you do sometimes experience what is euphemistically known as “rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD).” It has also exposed the fallacy of the cost-plus Artemis program to return to the moon using expendable launch vehicles.
Equally importantly, Musk has rekindled the passion for spaceflight that galvanized the world in the 1960s and created new possibilities for what might be. That’s what dreamers do. (See That’s One Small Step for {a} Man.) Who can help but marvel at the Falcon Heavy side boosters landing at Cape Canaveral or the regular cadence of landings on SpaceX’s offshore barges.
As Musk put it once, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” Shackleton knew that, as does anyone who has “signed up.” It’s all about being part of something bigger than yourself and your personal risk-reward quotient, something I discussed in an essay entitled, A Question to Ponder.
The question I posed there was simple but revealing, “What probability of successful return would you accept to be the first human to set foot on Mars?” It’s the modern-day version of the opportunity posed by Shackleton’s apocryphal advertisement. There’s only one wrong answer, guaranteed success, for all adventures and explorations entail risk. Shackleton knew this well, and Musk does too.
As for me, I want to go.
Personal Connections 
As a member of the National Science Board, I have been privileged to visit Antarctica, and I recorded a few of my experiences in a video here. I have stood in the very places where Shackleton and Scott once looked out at the forbidding glaciers, the frozen ocean, and the windswept landscape. I have marveled at the still-preserved provisions in both Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition Hut on Cape Royds (that’s it below) and Scott’s Discovery Hut on Ross Island. I have also felt the howling winds at the South Pole.
Even under its most benign conditions, Antarctica is a brutal and unforgiving place, still largely cut off from the world. It is easy to forget that Shackleton’s expedition also lacked both electricity and any means of long-distance communication, Marconi’s first transatlantic radio transmission having been less than fifteen years before. Even now, communication bandwidth at McMurdo Station is limited, as most satellites are low on the horizon, barely accessible at all.
A few years ago, I re-read the Soul of a New Machine. The technology has changed (RISC rather than CISC, CMOS rather than bipolar, microprocessors rather than multi-board designs), but the stories and the people remain deeply familiar. Although none of the protagonists risked life or limb as did Shackleton and his team, every one of the Data General designers felt the same call, to make a difference, to do something memorable, to be dissolved into something truly great.
Forty years ago, I had no idea that multiple characters in Kidder’s tale, notably Craig Mundie and Steve Wallach, would become deeply intertwined with my own life. At the University of Illinois, I worked on the Cedar project, led by David Kuck, which designed a shared memory multiprocessor. The hardware building blocks of the Cedar prototype were based on the Alliant FX/8, developed by a company co-founded by Mundie. Years later, our lives intersected again when I joined Microsoft and worked with Craig on a variety of multicore and cloud computing projects.
My connections with Steve Wallach are equally deep, as I used the Convex C1, a mini-supercomputer developed by a company co-founded by Steve. Later, we discussed the OSF/1 operating system performance challenges for the Exemplar, Convex’s shared memory multiprocessor, and while I was at Microsoft, we explored the potential cloud hardware applications of Steve’s later company, Convey. In between, we have served on more high-performance computing and government panels than I can count. I still have my first edition of Kidder’s book, and a few years ago I reached out to Steve, who graciously signed my copy one night at the SC conference.
Coda
Though the ravages of time inevitably bend our backs and palsy our hands, each of us yearns for a late life requiem, when even as we stare at the rheumy-eyed reflection of age, we can, just for a moment, stand tall, hold our head high, and say with confidence and pride, “My life mattered!”
Find your passion; sign up; take some risks; make a difference. Even if never lauded in the history books, you will know, and that is the most important knowledge of all. Your future self will thank you.
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