I believe in being prepared. But when I say, “be prepared,” I don’t necessarily mean what other people mean when they utter the Boy Scout motto. I’m not talking about bringing extra matches. I’m talking about extreme preparation.
On May 16, 1975, Junko Tabei reached the summit of Mount Everest and became the first woman to stand on top of the world’s highest mountain. She was four foot nine, thirty-five years old, and had a two-year-old daughter at home in Tokyo at the time. What made her accomplishment even more remarkable was that twelve days earlier, she and four of her teammates—all part of a Japanese women’s expedition—had been caught in an avalanche at Camp 2 and were completely buried. It took six Sherpas to dig them out. Miraculously, they all survived, but their bodies were beaten up and bruised, as were their psyches. Junko herself was in so much pain immediately after the avalanche that she could barely stand. Still, something got her to the summit. What was it? Here’s what Tabei will tell you: “Technique and ability alone do not get you to the top—it is the willpower that is the most important. This willpower you cannot buy with money or be given by others—it rises from your heart.”
Fair enough, but I would add this: while willpower may help you get you to the top, you better have technique and ability if you plan to get yourself and your team back down. People often forget that the top is only the halfway point. The majority of deaths on big peaks occur after people have reached the summit, because they have used every ounce of energy they have to get to the top and have nothing left to get themselves back down. The descent on Everest’s summit ridge is harrowing—it’s a 10,000-foot drop on one side and an 8,000-foot drop on the other. You have to descend the infamous Hillary Step, a forty-foot spur of near-vertical rock and ice at 28,740 feet, and make it back down to the South Col at 26,300 feet, so you better have enough reserves—both in your oxygen tank and in your body. Otherwise? You’ll die.
The cruel fact is that many people who are absolutely, categorically determined to succeed on Everest die on the mountain because they’re not ready for the reality they encounter on the peak. In fact, sheer desire accompanied by a lack of preparation is often a deadly concoction up there. Tabei was right on the money when she said that you need mental toughness to get to the top, but rarely is it enough by itself: in extreme environments you will vastly increase your odds of success if you add proper training and preparation.
Over the years I have seen many expeditions end in disappointment because of a lack of preparedness. If you’re going to take on a big, hairy challenge, be it in the mountains, in business, or in life, you understand up front that you may succeed or you may not. But you don’t ever want to fail and wonder if the outcome would have been different had you only been more ready. When you get shut down because of environmental factors, you face disappointment, but you don’t second-guess yourself or your abilities, since the environment is something that you cannot do anything about. But if you turn back short of your goal because you just weren’t strong enough to make it, that’s when you start to beat yourself up and ask the tough questions: Could I have trained more? Trained harder? Trained smarter? Was I dedicated enough? Was I focused enough?
Only you can answer these questions. You want to go into a climb feeling as if you have done everything humanly possible to set yourself and your team up for success, because once you get to the mountain everything is working against you: the cold, the wind, the altitude, the physical deterioration, the psychological challenges, the teammate who steals your extra toilet paper—everything. There is no excuse for showing up in less than top form. You owe it to yourself, and more important, you owe it to your team. Leaders have got to show up ready for battle. People will expect more from you than they do from others. You need to be able to perform at a level, both physically and psychologically, that exceeds expectations.
High-altitude expedition training is no easy task for anyone, but it is especially challenging for those who don’t live near the mountains and have to find alternative ways to get into shape—people like me. In 2001, when I was preparing for the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, I was just one year out of business school and was a new associate at Goldman Sachs. I had just transferred to the firm’s San Francisco office after spending nine months at its headquarters in New York City. Getting a job at Goldman came as a shock to me. I had competed with applicants who had Ivy League educations, and many of them had worked in finance prior to earning their MBAs. I was liberal arts major at the University of Arizona and had no finance or accounting background. The fact that I didn’t do particularly well in my quantitative classes in business school made getting a job at a blue-chip financial firm seem even less likely. But I did have tenacity, drive, and determination. I also sent postcards to the firm’s recruiters every time I went on a climbing trip during my vacation time from business school, so I think I scored some creativity points there (as that stands out more than sending a postcard from a CFA* class). And the people who made the hiring decisions had faith that I was at least intelligent enough to learn the business.
I had gone to business school with the intent of opening an adventure travel company someday, and working for an investment bank was not what I had envisioned for myself. But I did want to learn about finance, and to that end, I figured there was no better place than a Wall Street firm. Not surprisingly, I was out of my comfort zone every day in that job at Goldman. I was surrounded by people who truly had a passion for the markets. Most of my colleagues were at their desks by 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., and many came in even earlier. I wasn’t really all that sure what they were doing there that early every day, but everyone looked busy, which wasn’t hard to do—you could just stare at your computer screen and either nod or shake your head excessively based on what the markets were doing.
I really wanted to do well at the firm; after all, landing the job in the first place was such a long shot, and I didn’t want to disappoint the people who had gone out on a limb to hire me. I was sure that they would eventually figure out they had made the hiring mistake of the century, but I didn’t want to blow it right away, so I came in early and worked late and pretended that I had what it took to get meetings with important people. I would pick up the phone and speak at an abnormally loud volume level for the benefit of the people who were seated around me in the office. “Yes, yes, Mr. Gates… well, okay, Bill… if you insist… yep, looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday. Yep, ten a.m. works great. Give my best to Melinda.”
Of course there was no one on the other end of the phone. I couldn’t seem to get any business prospects to meet with me. That might have been why I never earned a penny of commission and made less money than most of the administrative assistants there. Then again, they were better at their jobs than I was at mine. But while I felt incredibly out of place at Goldman, I was also determined to make it work. I was learning a lot, and although I truly sucked at the job, I really liked the firm and the people. And whether I enjoyed the work was irrelevant—I had signed up for the job, and I didn’t want to fail.
Things got even trickier when the markets took a nosedive in 2001. Everyone was worried about layoffs, so work turned into a huge face-time contest. Everyone started coming in earlier and earlier and staying later and later. No one wanted to be the last one in or the first to leave. I was now getting home around 8:00 p.m.
Meanwhile, I was still trying to find a corporate sponsor for the Everest expedition, because there would be no trip unless I raised the funds. I didn’t have $30,000 lying around, and no one else I knew who was a climber had any money, either. In addition, I was also trying to raise money for the V Foundation for Cancer Research, an organization founded by ESPN and legendary college basketball coach Jim Valvano, who died of cancer in 1993. I was a big fan of Valvano because of his “Never Give Up” speech, which he delivered during ESPN’s ESPY (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly) Awards just eight weeks before he died. I wanted this climb to have some impact and figured that was a good way to do it.
Of course, I was banking on the fact that the Everest expedition was actually going to happen, so there was some pressure to ensure the trip became a reality, since I had already told the V Foundation I was climbing in honor of Coach Valvano. So I would get home from work, open my mail, get some food in me, and then I’d spend what was left of the evening focused on finding an expedition sponsor and on soliciting donations for cancer research. I was writing dozens of letters and sending out hundreds of e-mails each night. By the time I thought about looking up at the clock it was already midnight—often later. I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. every morning, which left me about four hours each night to both sleep and train to climb the world’s highest peak.
I eventually came up with what I thought was an ideal solution to this conundrum. I found a health club that was open twenty-four hours, and I would go there around 1:00 in the morning and find cardio equipment that I could do with my eyes closed (StairMaster with a heavy pack, or stationary bike with a lot of resistance). As I was stepping or pedaling away, I tried to convince myself that during my visits to the gym I was both sleeping and working out at the same time. I figured that if I could build some leg strength, work on my cardio, and also get some REM sleep in before the sun came up, it was a pretty good use of my “free time.” I congratulated myself for being a master multitasker. Ha!
Of course I wasn’t accomplishing either of the things I needed to be doing (sleeping or training properly), and the exhaustion caught up to me after about ten days. Meanwhile, my stress level was through the ceiling. I was compromising my health by existing in a chronic state of sleep deprivation and extreme exhaustion. And worse, I wasn’t training efficiently, which meant I risked showing up for the climb unprepared. Not an option. As the team captain of the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, I couldn’t afford for that to happen. But I had to stay focused on the job as well, or I would find myself without one. Also not an option. My paycheck barely covered my monthly living expenses, and I was carrying student loan debt, so I couldn’t afford to be unemployed. I needed to remain focused at work because I absolutely could not lose my job, and I needed to be focused on the training because people would be counting on me during the expedition.
Ultimately, I knew I had to give up the 1:00 a.m. gym workouts, which weren’t cutting it anyway. You can’t prepare your body (or your mind) for a serious expedition in a gym. I knew my teammates would be training outdoors in Colorado and Washington State, and I owed it to them, as well as to myself, to show up in the best possible shape that I could. With that in mind, I completely changed my training regimen. During the weekdays I stayed totally focused on my job at Goldman and tried to get as much sleep at night as I could, given my 5:30 a.m. start time. I focused on fundraising in the evenings after work. And then I dedicated my weekends to training properly for the climb. I would work a full day in the office on Friday, and then on Saturday I would drive up to Mount Shasta in Siskiyou County, California—a five-and-a-half- or six-hour drive from my apartment in San Francisco.
The summit of Mount Shasta is 14,179 feet above sea level, and the mountain is covered in snow in the winter. The total distance of the trail from the parking lot to the summit is six miles and the elevation gain is more than 7,000 feet (that’s a lot of gain in six miles). A good portion of the route is steep enough to require an ice axe and crampons. Winds on the peak can exceed 100 miles per hour. All in all, Shasta is great conditioning for a serious expedition. Climbing it was certainly much better than anything I could do in a gym.
Training for hours on a StairMaster indoors is incredibly helpful if you’re planning to, oh, I don’t know, climb a lot of stairs in your temperature-controlled office building—but it won’t do squat for you if you’re planning to climb an 8,000-meter peak.* If you want to do well on a climb, it’s important to simulate the conditions you’re going to face on the mountain. That means you have to get outside, strap a heavy pack on your back, grab your ice axe, and go fight your way up some big hills in snow, high winds, and cold temperatures.
Mount Shasta was an ideal training ground for me. I would drive up there in the early evening, get there by 11:00 p.m., start the climb around 11:30 p.m., and go from the parking lot to the summit and back in one straight shot—which usually took me ten to twelve hours (depending on how much weight I was carrying). The physical training was right on target. But climbing Shasta also gave me something else—the psychological training that comes with pushing yourself through an entire night with no sleep and knowing you can run on fumes, powered by nothing more than adrenaline and maybe a power gel or two.
Climbing through the night with no sleep is something you frequently do on expeditions. Sometimes you don’t sleep because you feel sick from the altitude. Sometimes you don’t sleep because the winds are howling all night. Sometimes you don’t sleep because your tent mate is snoring like hell. But often you don’t sleep because you are starting your climb at 2:00 a.m. (perhaps even earlier). Teams start climbing well before sunup; the route is safer when it’s frozen, because there is less chance of crevasses opening up or avalanches being triggered or rocks falling with enough momentum to kill you. So even if you lay down in your tent at 9:00 p.m., all you do is toss and turn and stress out about oversleeping.
To be an effective leader, it’s important that you condition yourself for the times when sleep is not an option. And there will be such times, because that is the nature of changing environments, where the unexpected lies around the corner. When you’ve got a tight deadline, or you’ve made a commitment to deliver something, you make good on that commitment even if it means staying up all night to make it happen. It’s also highly possible that you may face a crisis situation that calls for round-the-clock attention. It’s usually the stress of not sleeping that works against people more than the sleep deprivation itself, so that’s why it’s great to learn you can go a night without getting any z’s and still perform the next day. Sure, you perform better with sleep, but if you “practice” sleep deprivation, then you won’t stress out when you actually experience it. So you can either be stressed and sleep deprived, or just sleep deprived. Take your pick.
You don’t ever want to fail because you were too tired. It’s just not a good excuse. You have to find that voice inside your head that tells you that you can keep going, and that’s when your adrenaline kicks in. Warning: the adrenaline thing may not happen when you’re sitting in your office waiting for your 4:00 p.m. meeting to go over the financials from last quarter, so there are times when a cup of coffee might be warranted. I also highly recommend perfecting the art of the power nap. Go out to your car or close the door to your office, and sleep for twenty minutes. Dr. Jonathan Friedman, director of the Texas Brain and Spine Institute, claims that “emerging scientific evidence suggests that naps—even very short ones—significantly enhance cognitive function.” There you have it.
I know there will be someone who will read this and tell me that the idea of practicing sleep deprivation contradicts what the American Academy of [insert your favorite medical specialty here] states in some white paper or journal article about how to stay healthy and perform well. I get it—I’m not arguing that. I am simply telling you what works for me. Take it or leave it. Yes, I’ve read many of the scientific studies about sleep deprivation affecting performance and judgment, and I am aware that researchers have found that a prolonged period of sleep deprivation has the same cognitive effects as a 0.10 blood alcohol level,* which is above the legal limit for driving in every state in America.
But you’re not operating a motor vehicle on Everest, and this book isn’t about how to live to be a hundred. It’s about how to do what you need to do when your team is relying on you. As a leader, if you are stressed out about something as minor as being tired, your team will also feel stressed out. I’m not saying it’s good for you not to sleep. I am just saying that in extreme situations you will need to function when sleep deprived. So don’t let the fact that you haven’t slept before a tough day on the trail (or in the office) create unnecessary anxiety. Just push through it. It’s a short-term thing. It’s temporary.
In addition to conditioning myself for sleep deprivation, Mount Shasta also allowed me to do what I call caloric deprivation training. I practiced climbing while dehydrated and calorie deprived. I purposely did not drink enough or eat enough during the twelve-hour push so that I would know what it felt like to have to climb in that kind of physical condition. Of course I kept plenty of water and food in my backpack in case I truly needed it. But I wanted to practice climbing when I was running on empty so that my body and my mind would know what that felt like, and I wouldn’t feel uneasy about it if I were in that situation on Everest.
The reality is that most people will find themselves climbing in a state of dehydration and caloric deprivation many times during an expedition. There will be times when you need water or calories and you can’t get them. And it sucks when you pull a candy bar out of your pocket after keeping it warm for seven hours so that you can bite into it without losing a tooth, only to have it slip out of your gloved hand and sail down the snowy slopes of the mountain. And it’s a huge bummer to not be able to drink from your water bottle because it’s frozen solid, even though it was in an insulated bottle holder that the guy at the gear store swore would keep it from turning to ice. You need to know what it feels like to have to push yourself through discomfort so that you can keep going during those most intense and demanding climbing days.
Once you’ve been there—in that place of feeling like you’ve got nothing left, and you’ve pressed right on through it—you know you can do it again and you aren’t worried about it. Climbing big peaks involves pushing yourself to the point where you feel like you just cannot take one more step.… And you might say to yourself, Ohhhhh maaaaann… I don’t think I can do this. There is no way I can keep going.… But then you do take one more step… and then one more after that. And one more. You go past the point where you think you can go. Then the next time you get to that same point where you think you cannot go one more step, you say to yourself, Okay, I have been here before—where I felt like I was at my limit, and I kept going. I did it before, so I can do it again. And you take the step. And then you take more of them. And no matter how uncomfortable it gets, you suck it up and you keep going, because it isn’t about you. It’s about the people around you. You got that? In the end, you train hard for them. You do it for your team.
Training isn’t always fun. It can feel monotonous and sometimes it can feel lonely. That’s why I also recommend finding good training partners. Not just because having company can make it more fun, but because it’ll help improve your skills. It’s always preferable to train with people who can withstand the elements and who will push you to do the same. You want to get out on the route with people who are better and stronger than you are; you yourself can become better and stronger by observing others who are more experienced and more skilled. If you spend your time training with people who are slower and less proficient, you aren’t going to personally improve. Identify folks who are going to push you and make you push yourself, and spend as much time as you can observing their technique and absorbing information from them. If you’re training to be a surgeon, you assist more seasoned surgeons during their procedures in the operating room before you have a go at a live patient yourself. If you’re a basketball player, you get out on the court and practice with players who challenge you on every possession before you play in a big game. If you surround yourself with talented people and you’re willing to learn from them, your skills will improve and you will get better.
Whether you’re trying to become a better climber or a stronger leader or both, one of the best things you can do for yourself is find mentors and spend time learning from them. One of my mentors is Vern Tejas, who has completed the Seven Summits ten times and has climbed Mount McKinley fifty-two times (including the first successful winter solo climb of McKinley in 1988). He’s a legend on that mountain. So when I decided I wanted to climb Mount McKinley in 2000, who do you think I chose to climb with? Yep—Vern. I knew he could teach me things that others could not. He is one of the best leaders you could ever ask for. He’s a great teacher and mentor, and he makes it clear that he doesn’t succeed unless you succeed.
Don’t wait for mentors to come to you. Seek them out. Pick people whom you respect and admire, and ask them if you can observe what they do and work alongside them. And don’t just look for people who are senior to you. Find ambitious people who are junior to you, as you will learn a lot from them as well. This is one way you prepare to lead—by studying, by observing, and by engaging the right mentors.
Another person who taught me a tremendous amount about leadership is Michael Horst, whom I met on Everest in 2010. At age thirty-two he was one of the younger guides on the mountain, yet his leadership style was that of a seasoned veteran, which made him someone I wanted to learn from. Michael was guiding a private climb but was on our permit, so he shared our camps and logistics support. In addition to focusing on the climber who had hired him, he was constantly assisting others. He was always offering to help people carry their gear when they were exhausted, lending people his warmer gloves and clothing when they were cold, and showing up with a packet of energy gel when he saw someone bonking. (As in “hitting the wall.” I know you Brits use the term to describe something else, and that is not what I’m referencing here, so stop smirking.)
One day on my way to Camp 2, I stopped at the lip of a crevasse because it looked too wide for me to jump over. As I stood there silently cursing my short legs, Michael saw my hesitation and came over to me, reached out his hand, and said, “Come on, we’ll jump it together.” And we did. Michael Horst worked hard to ensure everyone else’s success, and that’s something we should all emulate. When you see someone who’s nervous about making a huge leap—reach out.
We can learn a lot about leadership from studying other people’s good habits and success stories. We can also learn a lot from paying attention to other people’s missteps. The race to the South Pole is one of the all-time historic journeys that has always intrigued me, because of the leadership lessons that can be learned from it. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen led a five-man team to the South Pole on December 14, 1911, marking the first time human beings reached that desolate spot. While these adventurous Norwegians were making their way across the icy continent, a British team led by Robert F. Scott was attempting to beat the Norwegians to the Pole. Scott and his men got there thirty-four days after Amundsen’s team, and they found the Norwegian flag already flapping in the wind. By this time the British group was starving, exhausted, and, needless to say, totally heartbroken and shocked to discover that the Norwegians had won the race. But here’s the most tragic part of the story: Scott’s men perished on the return trip—just eleven miles from a supply depot of food and gear that could have saved their lives. Their bodies were not discovered until the following summer.
Why did they lose the race? And why did they die? For starters, Scott’s men hadn’t trained adequately on skis prior to the trip and therefore were not strong enough skiers to be efficient on the Antarctic ice. In contrast, Amundsen’s men were proficient skiers and could move swiftly. But not only were Scott’s men physically unprepared for the challenge, they also suffered setbacks along the journey because they relied mostly on ponies and manpower to haul all of their gear and supplies. The ponies didn’t do well on the Antarctic terrain. Their hooves punched through the ice, and they became weak and ill; eventually, all died of exhaustion or had to be destroyed. Scott’s team also brought along a few motorized sledges, but those failed in the cold, and the person who really knew most about how they operated was not with them, so no one really understood the equipment or how to fix it when it broke down. They had some dogs with them, but not nearly enough. Amundsen’s team had more than twice as many dogs as Scott’s team had, and his men were much more experienced dog handlers and mushers, which worked to his advantage. Basically, lack of skill and lack of knowledge led to the demise of Scott’s team on their ill-fated journey. In other words, they weren’t prepared.
Of course even if you’re ultra-prepared, unfortunate events can still occur, and often they happen at the most inopportune times. One of the most important keys to successful performance, whether inside your team’s cluster of cubicles or inside the emergency snow shelter you’ve just built, is empowering everyone on the team to think and act like a leader. That means helping them hone their skills, working with them to increase their knowledge, and encouraging them to think on their own and make critical decisions without always requiring your input. If something does happen to the designated leader, the team must be able to carry on. Like I said at the beginning of this book, leadership is not solely the responsibility of C-level executives or a management team within an organization. It is not just the job of mountain guides, coaches, team owners, or team captains. In extreme environments, each of us must feel responsible for those around us and should constantly consider how our actions—or inaction—affect others.
Designated leaders need to cultivate leadership skills in each team member by giving others the confidence, the tools, the freedom, and the accountability that empowers each person to take on more responsibility and to make critical decisions when the path ahead may not be clear-cut—especially if the designated leader is no longer able to do the job. What happens when a leader is injured or for some reason is unable to continue to lead? Does the whole team just throw up their arms and say, “Okay, now we’re really screwed”? Let’s hope not.
Millions of Americans are familiar with the 1996 Everest disaster. Someone could write an entire book about what went wrong (oh, wait—thanks, Jon Krakauer!). Among other things, once the team leaders were no longer around during that deadly storm high up on Mount Everest, no one else really knew what to do. They knew how to take direction from a leader, but they didn’t know how to lead. They didn’t know how to react when the situation didn’t follow what was outlined ahead of time in the playbook. People were lost. So were lives.
You need to develop a strong team by allowing others to lead. Empower others to take on responsibility and to make critical decisions regardless of tenure or experience level. This not only helps to develop leadership skills in others, but it also makes your job easier because others are sharing more of the workload.
For example, in 2008 I was part of an international team of polar explorers that reached the South Pole on skis after a six-week ski traverse across west Antarctica (more on that in chapter 6). We had to cover nearly six hundred miles of frozen terrain on skis while hauling all our gear and supplies in sleds that were harnessed to our waists. We couldn’t afford any mistakes, as rescues are very difficult to orchestrate in Antarctica—perhaps the harshest environment known to man. Rescues on the ice can take days, weeks, sometimes months—and our team had to be prepared to survive on its own.
One of the factors that led to our success was that our leader, Eric Philips, had everyone on the team take turns leading the group and navigating the icy terrain. We routinely traded off the position in the front of the line and navigated by our shadows, by compass, and by GPS. It was daunting and empowering, and we all became more adept because of the exercise. If something had happened to Eric, I felt comfortable that our team would not have perished on the ice.
Good leaders understand it’s their duty to develop leadership skills in others by routinely asking team members to step into roles of greater responsibility so that they grow as leaders themselves. Doing so not only makes the whole team more effective, but it also prepares the team for worst-case scenarios, which in extreme environments are not all that uncommon.