Surpassing Extraordinary Business Goals, Part 2

Beyond the Summit: Setting and Surpassing Extraordinary Business Goals
by Todd Skinner

(Page 2 of 8)

The obstacles seemed overwhelming. At altitudes above eighteen thousand feet, you begin to die from oxygen deprivation, which inhibits the rebuilding of muscle. Even walking becomes difficult in such rarefied air, and gymnastic climbing is much more like a sprint. The thin atmosphere transmits searing heat in daylight, and numbing cold in shadow and darkness. Uncontrollable rock and ice fall are a constant menace in this environment, avalanches sweep down without warning, and the fierce Himalayan storms are frequently deadly.

The rock itself on Trango was a beautiful Karakoram granite, the climbing features perfect and beckoning, but the sustained difficulty made it the most technically challenging mountain I could find in any range on any continent. Unlike other better-known and often-climbed Himalayan peaks, it had no long snow ridges and sloping ascents, but rocketed up three thousand straight feet, like three Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other, three hundred stories and no elevator.

So when the Polish climber Voytek Kurtyka first showed me a picture of the east face of Trango Tower and said I should go to climb it, I just laughed. But he was serious. It's not that he thought I could climb it; he didn't. But he thought this mountain represented the future of climbing, and I was the person best poised to begin the journey into that future. I had climbed the four most difficult big walls in North America, each of which could have been the goal of a lifetime.* I had won the American Alpine Club's prestigious Underhill Award for climbing achievement, and was recognized as one of the best rock climbers in the world. In theory I could have been content to rest on my laurels.

Why should I travel halfway around the world, pulling a team and tons of gear with me, to attempt an ascent of a mountain so obviously impossible to climb? What could I gain from it? How could I risk so much when I didn't really have to? But the idea of Trango Tower stayed in my mind, a knife blade of stone whose edge I could almost feel, and I began to think of it not so much as impossible, but as ultimate, the most difficult challenge I could undertake. And that was reason enough to try.

Trango Tower was more than just a mountain. It represented who I could become. Aspiration is one of the qualities that most defines us: who we want to be, where we want to go. Our real greatness lies in this desire to move higher, to step beyond where we are. It is both an individual impulse and the motivation behind a great team, whether that team is a partnership, a company, or a nation. We are always in the process of becoming setting goals, defining values, delineating landmarks where we would like to arrive.

We are all climbers because we have this innate desire to rise, to improve our lives, to succeed at our endeavors. The real question is how do we achieve that rise and increase the odds of our success? To answer that question for myself, I had to develop a strategy of movement, a framework for making choices that could answer the question "What should my next step be in order to increase my level of success?" I realized that if you take the element of luck out of the equation of success, and in most cases luck plays a minuscule role, then success becomes a matter of making correct decisions. The right choice moves us forward, and the wrong choice sets us back. (Even hard work, which we often consider an essential component of success, is a decision to work hard.) But how do we know what the correct decisions are?

In a simplified example, you come to a crossroad that requires you to choose the left or right fork. Which way do you turn? Your answer depends entirely on your intended destination. Where is it you want to go? Using the information you have, you choose the fork that is most likely to lead to your destination. If your destination is vague ("I want to go far . . ."), it is much harder to make the correct decisions because you can't begin to guess which turns lead there. If every decision you make is based on a well-defined destination, you are much more likely to arrive where you want to go.

But destination presupposes a direction. Before we can decide where to go, we need to know why we are going, what we expect to gain from arriving there, and how that arrival will further our continued ascent. I have found that successfully climbing one mountain does not automatically translate to success on the next mountain, or to success in the larger life. It can, in fact, have the opposite effect and be detrimental to future success when we choose the wrong mountain, start out for the wrong reasons, or climb in a way that injures our ability to keep climbing. Every destination has to be placed in a larger context we are not climbing to a solitary mountain top, but using each mountain as a step up a directed lifelong ascent of enduring success.

So "the next step" toward success is determined by the destination, and destination is determined by direction. While everybody has a different definition of what constitutes success, when you boil it down, success is gaining that which you find valuable. To achieve that gain, you first have to discover what it is that gives you value, which provides direction. Then you choose a destination that will move you in that direction. The destination you have chosen ultimately provides you with the answer of what the next step should be.

In mountain climbing, we refer to the organized effort to reach a defined destination as an expedition. That destination is the summit of the mountain, which might be a dollar amount if you are in sales, a finished book if you are a writer, a time or distance if you are a runner, a well-adjusted and capable child if you are a parent. A challenge of any kind can be thought of as a mountain, when your mission is to successfully complete the endeavor, or overcome a specific problem, and you have a defined destination in mind. Our lives are preoccupied with expeditions of varying difficulty, duration, and reward, and we often juggle many expeditions at once careers, family, demands of all kinds, each of which requires a conscious strategy to fully succeed on the climb. Expeditions become our primary means of ascent because they provide a destination and demand a strategy to reach that destination, and in the climb we gain what we seek.

Thus my strategy of movement evolved into a Trinity of Ascent, made up of the Climber an entity, including any person, company, or group working toward a shared purpose, whose desire is to ascend; the Expedition an organized effort to reach a defined destination; and the Lifelong Ascent a continuum of success that helps you choose mountains by clarifying direction and ensuring each mountain contributes to your further ascent. The primary purpose of the Trinity of Ascent is to increase the gradient of your success by precluding drift, to prevent your life raft from floating aimlessly on the whim of wind and current, to give yourself a compass and a paddle.

To succeed on an expedition, you must think from the summit back, because all decisions are based on the destination. To succeed on your Lifelong Ascent, you must also think from the summit back. If we agree that success is based on making the correct decisions, and that correct decisions are based on arriving at a destination, then we do need an extended destination to be successful in life. I have come to think of that destination as our Ultimate Potential, the farthest point of gain on the line of our Lifelong Ascent. It cannot be precisely defined, because that would be self-limiting, but it gives us a theoretical destination to move toward, which elevates our choices and correspondingly our level of success.

Understand that since all your actions affect your future, the future should determine what those actions will be. To gain success, you need a solid framework for making decisions, and this strategy doesn't apply only to an individual person, but to any group endeavor that seeks enduring success. A business without a goal based on its Ultimate Potential must look to the past to decide how far it can go. A team without agreement on a summit works against itself rather than toward a common purpose.

Most of this book is about how to succeed on an expedition by employing conscious strategies to make the correct decisions that allow you to reach a defined destination lessons I have distilled from the mountains that can be applied to any kind of mountain we set out to climb. But this chapter looks at how to choose mountains that fit on your Lifelong Ascent and move you farthest toward your Ultimate Potential.

Copyright © 2003 Todd Skinner. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Todd Skinner, a Wyoming native, has established new climbs at the highest levels of difficulty in more than twenty-six countries. His experiences have been described in National Geographic and Life, and his expeditions to places as exotic as the Amazon and Timbuktu have been featured in nine documentaries. He is also a popular speaker at business events around the country.