When Portuguese sailor Vasco de Gama departed from Lisbon on the 8^th of July 1497 after finding the coast of present day Sierra Leone, de Gama took a course south into the open ocean, crossing the Equator and seeking the South Atlantic westerlies that Bartolomeu Dias had discovered in 1487. His course proved successful and on November 4, 1497, the expedition made landfall on the African coast. For over three months the ships had sailed more than 6,000 miles of open ocean, by far the longest journey out of sight of land made at the time. Vasco de Gama made his triumphant voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and this initial journey opened up a direct sea route to Asia. Vasco de Gama started out on July of 1497 with 160 men. Two of Gama's ships made it back to Portugal, arriving in the summer of 1499 returned with only 60 men.

The imagination goes wild, from pirates raiding to open sea storms stealing the lives of those brave sailors. But every one of them died because of a disease we now call scurvy.

Fortunately, in 1601 an English sea captain named John Lancaster discovered a cure for scurvy. He gave a little lime juice to every sailor every day and after that, other than battling pirates or an accident or human error, every sailor returned home safely.

Lancaster had found the information to save the lives of countless sailors and yet it took nearly 200 years for his practice to catch on. In fact, the British were initially mocked for this weird practice, hence the derogatory term, limey. The method for saving lives was available, but for the next 200 years many enlightened captains and ship doctors did not take action on the information they had in their hands.

I now call this the LIMEY principle: “They KNEW IT but they DIED because they didn’t DO IT!

What do you know, but have not put into action, that would catapult you ahead today?

Ryan