part0295

Many people don’t understand that how you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top. (…) The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won’t happen if you compromise away the entire process.

All goals require you to go through a process to attain them. If you compromise away the process by cutting corners, you’re missing out on what goal achievement is really about: personal growth, through making the journey.

When all is said and done, you aren’t going to talk for hours about how you stood on top of the mountain, but about the ordeal you had to go through to reach the top.

You won’t grow because you got to the peak — it’s everything that happens prior to reaching it that results in growth, not the mere act of putting your foot one more step forward and achieving the summit. Whether you take that last step or not, it won’t erase all that you’ve had to go through to get that far.

In the quote, Yvon Chouinard refers to the wealthy individuals with no climbing experience and skills — or any desire to develop them — who pay huge sums of money to reach the top of Mount Everest (with the help of the Sherpas who carry the equipment needed to make the ascent as easy as possible). Those rich men and women aren’t after the personal growth — they’re after the bragging rights of getting to the top of the tallest mountain the world at all costs. They reach the top, but they deprive themselves of the lessons the difficult process would offer them.

When chasing after your goals, don’t be like those wannabe climbers. By all means, do whatever you can to achieve your dreams as quickly as possible, but don’t cut corners, compromise your moral principles, cheat, or hurt anyone, just so you can brag that you accomplished your objective.