Assume the sensational; pursue the impossible

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

(Page 8 of 8)

When a mountain is known to be climbable, the summit will be crowded and the route there overrun. To be a first ascensionist, you must think beyond known summits. Because the unimaginable dreams of only last week become today's level of assumption, the platform of pursuit must be continually raised to leap beyond the present. If something is said to be impossible, that might be reason enough to try.

My mind-set for dreaming is to work continually on the frontier, to be a first ascensionist. If any piece of rock has been climbed anywhere, I have no drive to climb it myself because it has been shown to be achievable. If someone else has done it, I can eventually do it also, for the questions have already been answered. But on the frontier, the answers aren't known, and we often don't even know the questions. That is where the greatest gains are made, by launching into the unknown.

I didn't start on such a high ledge, but have reached this point by continually raising the platform of my pursuit. Aspiration has to be an evolution, because goals, once reached, must be recalibrated to continue your Lifelong Ascent. Aspiration often begins with admiration wanting to emulate someone who is better than we are, and striving to become as good.

When I first started getting serious about rock climbing, at college in 1977, it was a sport still on the fringes, cultlike in its small circle of practitioners, infinite in its potential. There was no money attached, no structured hierarchy or referees. People pursued climbing as another skill of the outdoors, or simply because they loved to leave the ground, for there were no external rewards save a certain notoriety for seeming to taunt death from unhealthy elevations.

Because the sport was relatively new and formative, its leaders those on the frontier of their time were especially mythical, and the routes they put up on vertical stone were legends to be dreamed about, far too great for mere mortals. And in this arena I felt very much a mortal. At the University of Wyoming I was lucky to meet a fellow rock climber who was light-years ahead of me in knowledge and technique, for my skills were keyed to the 1950s era of my father's first ascents.

Paul Piana was from a small town in eastern Wyoming. I was from a small town in western Wyoming. The university was in another small town with a fine climbing area nearby of weirdly cracked and stacked bulging knobby granite. We were isolated from the larger climbing communities, places like Boulder, Colorado, and Yosemite in California, but we would read about what was happening there in the thin climbing magazines with their grainy, black-and-white photos.

And we were insulated from the rating system that was being defined on its upper edge by mythical climbers like John Gill, Jim Collins, John Bachar, and Tony Yaniro, a system that measures the difficulty of ascent from 1 to 5, with 1 representing a meadow walk, 3 approaching vertical, and 5 requiring technical skill and safety equipment. The fifth class is further divided into degrees of difficulty that increase with the decimal number. A forty-foot vertical ladder would fall just below the 5.0 rating because of the size and security of the hand- and footholds. Remove two-thirds of the rungs and that ladder might rate 5.5. The difficulty of a route is affected by the size of the holds, their distance apart, and the degree of slope. A rock-faced chimney would come in around 5.7 if the mortar was set back half an inch, but tilt that chimney out ten degrees and the difficulty could increase to 5.11. A brick wall with few gaps in the mortar, while merely straight up, might be a nearly impossible 5.14.

In 1960 the frontier of climbing was approaching 5.10 in difficulty. By the late seventies it had been pushed out to a seemingly mythical level of 5.12. There were no 5.12s in Wyoming when Paul and I started to climb together, and we had no idea how hard that really was. We would read about climbs like "Tales of Power" in Yosemite, or "Psycho Roof" outside of Boulder, and when we thought about them, we could hear harps, and angels singing. We would traverse the stone walls in our dorm's basement, back and forth, back and forth, and hang on fingerboards at night when we should have been studying, and do pull-ups on doorframes between classes, anything to increase our strength and power in an attempt to rise toward that extreme level.

In 1979 Paul and I finally took our first road trip to Yosemite, to see what we had been dreaming about. It was like going into a cathedral, shoes off and head down. Paul still laughs at my trepidation when I began leading "Tales of Power." I expected it to be so much harder, and I kept thinking I would come to the hard part and be stopped. We were both astonished when I completed the route. We had imagined it to be so impossibly difficult that we had trained correspondingly hard in preparation for what we had imagined, and we ended up much stronger than we had to be.

We were shocked by our success and realized that the routes we had been creating at our local area were as difficult as anything we knew about in the world at that time. It was exactly our isolation and insulation that had propelled us to the climbing frontier, because we had nothing to measure ourselves against but dreams and legends, and nobody to tell us that we couldn't climb something harder than had ever been done. We could be visionaries purely because where we were mattered not at all, but where we might go meant everything.

The real value of aspiring to what somebody else has done is that it begins the process of aspiration. Paul and I never dreamed we could go beyond the climbs we read about; we were only trying to approach becoming equal to them. The standard was set for us, and we rose to meet it. But where, then, when you have met your heroes, do you go next? It makes me think of two brothers near Paul's hometown who climbed on boulders at their own local area. They were only interested in short, extremely gymnastic problems of movement, and they aspired to be like John Gill, a legendary boulderer whose book of outlandish climbing feats captured in black-and-white photographs more powerful than video because they froze the improbable in midair was read like a Bible, in short passages, because you simply couldn't consume it all at once.

These brothers were also isolated, working in their own small climbing area to somehow approach the feats of Gill. Not only were they insulated from the larger world, they started to insulate themselves from each other: one became this static power master, and the other a specialist in dynamic moves. Nobody could repeat their boulder problems, and they could not repeat each other's.

Like Paul and me, the two brothers eventually took a road trip to see what they had been dreaming about. When they succeeded on all of John Gill's boulder problems, they went home and eventually quit climbing. They had exceeded their aspirations, they had nothing more to pull them onward because suddenly they were out ahead, and they lacked a new destination to draw them farther. That is the danger in aspiring only to what someone else has already done, and why reevaluating your aspirations is essential to continued gain. Achieving your aspiration should give you courage to raise the platform to a new level, to set the standard higher even if you are out ahead. Remember that the magnetism of a mountain's pull is created by the magnitude of the dream. To accomplish great things, you must dream remarkable dreams.

If you aspire beyond what you know to be possible, how do you know if it is impossible, if you will be wasting your time chasing the end of the rainbow? In truth, the term "impossible" is applied more to things that have not been done than to things that cannot be done. Impossible is what you look for as a first ascensionist, because it clearly marks the frontier. Just setting your sights on it makes it merely improbable.

Pursuing the impossible is a creative way to expand your ability to both recognize and encounter opportunities. If your aspiration is not limited to what has already been done, your imagination is always looking for what hasn't been done. You cannot find what you do not seek, and the farsighted can always recognize more mountains on the horizon. The pathways to the impossible are rarely crowded, which leaves room for the intrepid to forge ahead. And the rewards of attempting the impossible, however you want to measure them, are the real opportunities of any unclimbed mountain.

In the 1980s Paul and I continued to find new heroes to admire, for European climbers swept in with breathtaking ability and raised the American standards by a full notch. When we reached that new platform, we again had to reevaluate, for what was above us now was untraveled ground. We were looking at the biggest walls in North America multiday climbs up sheer faces thousands of feet high where you didn't come back to the ground until you had reached the top. The difficulties in all aspects were enormous.

We would have to become pioneers, because there were no guidebooks to show the way. We would have to be first, and it is so much harder to break trail than to follow. What makes it easier is belief in your ability to raise yourself. While aspiration begins with admiration, and adjusts itself to achievement, in the end the only thing your aspiration can be anchored to is the pursuit of your own Ultimate Potential. The more fantastic your aspirations, the farther you will go.

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.