Leaders are supposed to know what skills and equipment are needed to get a job done right or to achieve a goal. If you have one but not the other—if you have the right skills but don’t have the right equipment—you’ll fail.
In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union with millions of armed soldiers and hundreds of thousands of tanks and horses—everything you need to wage a battle successfully. Um, almost. The Germans didn’t bring warm clothes or tools to maintain their equipment through the Russian winters. Once the frigid weather set in, many German soldiers suffered from severe frostbite, and their tanks and other weapons couldn’t function in the freezing temperatures. Historians have lots of theories about why the German attack on the Soviet Union failed, but most agree that one big problem was this: they didn’t pack well.
Of course the Nazi state’s blunder was a good thing for humankind, but you get the point I’m trying to make. You can put plenty of financial resources and manpower behind an effort, but if you don’t bring the proper gear, tools, or equipment, you’ll have a tough time achieving your desired outcome.
One of the scariest experiences I have ever had in the mountains, one that nearly cost me my life, was a result of simply not having the proper equipment available when I needed it.
I blame my near-death experience on poor leadership. I had been climbing for just over a year when this incident occurred. I was a decent climber for someone who was new to the sport, but I still lacked some of the judgment that climbers gain only through experience. Looking back on it now, the climbing leader’s mistakes seem blatantly obvious to me, but at the time I simply didn’t know better. I had seen others make the same mistakes many times before and nothing bad ever happened to them. They got lucky. This time, however, luck was nowhere to be found.
It was October 1999. I had decided that my fall break from graduate school would be the ideal time to attempt to scale Carstensz Pyramid—a 16,024-foot towering limestone peak, the highest peak in Australasia, and thus one of the Seven Summits.* We were on six-week terms during the academic year, and I had a week off from classes in between terms, so with the weekends on both ends that gave me nine full days—ten if I could fly out on the same day of my final exams at the end of the first term. The minimum length of time for a Carstensz expedition is ten days. That can work if everything goes as planned (which, of course, never happens).
It’s standard practice to factor in several extra days for travel delays, health issues, extra acclimatization, bad weather… let’s see… tribal warfare, ankle sprains, snakebites.… Anyway, most climbers purchase open-ended plane tickets to allow them flexibility on expeditions like this one. Problem was, I didn’t have any flexibility, because I had to be back for the start of the next term’s classes, and I also had to get there using frequent-flier miles, since I couldn’t afford to buy the plane ticket. The only ticket I could get using my airline miles departed within an hour of my last scheduled final exam, which was for my least favorite class—Derivatives. That meant I would have to race through my test in order to make my flight.
Derivatives class was hard. At least it was for me, because I didn’t have any finance background when I entered the MBA program at Duke. Truth be told, final exams in all the quantitative classes were difficult for me. What made it worse was when my classmates would say things to me like, “Business school is so boring because it’s so easy.” I’d look astonished and then try to recover: “Oh, um, yeah. I know…” Yawn. Stretch. Really? I wanted to hit them with my fancy new calculator—the one that had formulas for statistics, cash flows, depreciation business percentages, bond math, and other stuff—which I had absolutely no idea how to use. I struggled much of the time in graduate school. Many of my classmates had finance backgrounds and/or were CPAs. As a liberal arts major in college, I had never even taken a basic accounting class. I was pretty certain that when it came to the quant stuff, I was one of the dumber people in our class. I envied my classmates who generally seemed to sail through the coursework. You always knew who the smartest students in the class were because they were the suck-ups. Wait—I mean, because they were really good about participating in class. They were the ones whose hands always shot up with “pick me pick me” lightning speed whenever the professor asked a question. And they loved exam day. They were the first ones to get out of their seats, walk up to the professor’s desk, and enthusiastically hand over their finished exams as if they were delivering a Publishers Clearing House check to a family of eight who had been surviving on food stamps.
This one time, I beat them to it. I was the first person to finish the exam, which was huge for me, because I was usually one of the last people sitting in the classroom racing against the clock to finish. Not today—the day of my flight to Jakarta (which was the starting point for my expedition). I got out of my chair before anyone else did, walked down to the front of the room, and proudly dropped my exam paper in front of my professor. Everyone looked up in amazement when they saw me hand in my exam—somewhat surprised that I was done first, only because I was typically fairly quiet in class, and (as everyone knows) the quiet ones usually don’t understand the lecture material. As I walked out of the classroom I paused at the door and gave my classmates a look over my shoulder like, I can’t believe you guys are still working on that test. I’m finished.
In fact, the material was so far over my head that I knew I would probably fail the exam whether I sat there for three hours or thirty hours, so I decided to cut my losses. I finished the first page of a six-page exam, left the rest of it blank, and walked out the door. Sitting there for another two hours wasn’t going to bring me any closer to solving the exam problems that were staring me down. Besides, I had a mountain to climb.
Carstensz Pyramid is located north of Australia in what was then known as Irian Jaya—the western part of Papua New Guinea. Western New Guinea was a Dutch territory until the early 1960s, when Indonesia stepped in and took control. Irian Jaya was none too happy about this as they wanted independence, so war and violence ensued as the locals organized a separatist movement in an attempt to gain freedom. The clashes have been ongoing for decades, and as of 2013 more than 150,000 people have been killed. As a result of the civil unrest and violence, the entire area was closed off to tourism for many years. But I thought to myself, Why let a little rebel activity spoil my fall break from grad school? I had a Swiss Army knife—the really big one—with the toothpick and the tweezers. And the mini magnifying glass.
While I knew it wasn’t the brightest idea to go over there by myself, I couldn’t afford to join a guided expedition—those were running about $6,000 to $8,000 at the time (the fees are more like $18,000 to $20,000 these days).
So I organized the trip on my own by corresponding with a local logistics coordinator in Indonesia named Monty, who claimed that he could arrange local transportation and guides for Carstensz Pyramid. I found Monty’s contact information on the Internet, but this was long before the days of Google or Wikipedia—back when an online search still required a lot of effort. I did quite a bit of digging, but other than an e-mail address and phone number I found basically no information about Monty and Co.—and with no Yelp or Angie’s List, I had no way of knowing how reliable or unreliable he might be. But he claimed he could arrange a permit for me so I decided to trust him. And besides, he was the only lead I had at that point, so I really had no choice.
Very few people had climbed Carstensz Pyramid, in part because it’s so hard to get to it. The peak lies deep in a densely forested jungle. On top of that, the mountain had technically been closed to climbers since 1995 due to the civil unrest in the region, so the 411 was pretty limited. Monty quoted me an initial cost of $800, which sounded pretty good. He also said that if I brought him two Suunto altimeter watches from the United States, he would knock the price down even further. Deal.
I made my plane, and sixty thousand frequent-flier miles later I arrived in Jakarta. I found my way to the hotel where I was to connect with Monty. I settled in and tried calling him—no luck. His phone rang and rang—there was no answer, and no answering machine or voice mail. But I knew Monty would contact me at some point, because I had the altimeter watches he wanted, so I wasn’t too concerned. Monty finally called and left a message at my hotel saying he would come by the following afternoon to meet with me. I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
While strolling through the hotel lobby, I ran into a few others who had also arranged trips through Monty, so at least I knew he was for real (or if he wasn’t, then I wouldn’t be the only fool who had fallen for his scam). The other people who would be heading to the mountain with me were Jaime Viñals from Guatemala, Harry Kikstra from Holland, José Mijares from Spain, and Mark Gunlogson, a guide from the adventure travel company Mountain Madness (he later became its president and owner). Mark was there with a private client, Joe Wolfgruber.
There were also some climbers from Poland at the hotel who had arranged their climb through Monty. The Polish team was comprised of some of the world’s best mountaineers, including Leszek Cichy, who made history when he successfully completed the first-ever winter ascent of Mount Everest with Krzysztof Wielicki in 1980. That climb was the first winter ascent of any 8,000-meter peak, so it was epic and still stands as one of the greatest feats in mountaineering. Cichy was hoping to summit Carstensz and thus become the first Polish climber to complete the Seven Summits.
Anna Czerwin´ska was also part of the team. She is one of the world’s most accomplished female climbers, having summited multiple 8,000-meter peaks, including Everest. She also made headlines as part of the first team of women to climb the North Face of the Matterhorn in winter. She was well-known in the climbing community, and if successful on Carstensz, she would become the first Polish woman to complete the Seven Summits. A couple of the Polish team members had come off an Everest expedition four months earlier, so needless to say this group was in tip-top shape. I was in awe of my new Polish climbing companions and was eager to make conversation, but their group seemed to speak little English. And I knew even less Polish. “Krzyzewski” was about it for me.
The next day we all finally met Monty, who showed up at our hotel to update us on the situation. Unfortunately, our climbing permits had not cleared. So there I was, sitting in a hotel lobby in Jakarta trying to negotiate my way to a mountain that was right smack in the center of a region that had been plagued by violence for more than three decades.
Monty was adamant. “I’m sorry, but you cannot go climb the mountain. It is impossible. Irian Jaya is not safe, and the area surrounding the mountain has been shut down. No one can pass through there anymore.”
I, too, was adamant. “What do you mean I can’t go? I just used sixty thousand frequent-flier miles to get here!”
Monty explained that because of the civil war in the region there was no way to get to the base of the mountain. The separatist uprisings and violence had been getting progressively worse, and the death toll was climbing in recent months despite intervention from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations. And Carstensz was right smack in the middle of the rebel activity.
I looked around at the other climbers. They were as discouraged as I was. Many of them had already been waiting for weeks for the violence in the area to subside so that their permits would clear. I didn’t have weeks. I only had a few days. So there I was, sitting on the floor of the hotel lobby with nine other climbers, hoping someone had an answer. No one did. At that point it looked as if I had wasted my entire bank of frequent-flier miles as well as my fall break from graduate school. I leaned forward and put my head down on the ground and wondered how the hell I had gotten myself into this situation. Monty told us to be patient.
Then… the God of separatist movements smiled down upon us. Two days after Monty had delivered the bad news, our permits cleared. Score! But there was a footnote: we would have to wait a few days to leave for the climb. The area was still very dangerous, so we would need the Indonesian Army to escort us through the jungle, and it would take some time to organize those gentlemen.
Monty also introduced us to Rudi Nurcahyo, a local Indonesian guide who would be taking us to the mountain. Rudi had a warm smile and a pleasant demeanor. He spoke pretty decent English and was himself an Everest veteran from the 1997 Indonesian Everest Expedition. I noticed Rudi’s handshake felt a little odd, and when I looked down I saw that he had no fingers on his right hand (he was missing one on his left, too). Turns out he’d lost them to frostbite on Aconcagua in 1992. Within the first five minutes of meeting Rudi I could tell two things: (1) he was probably going to be a pretty good guide, and (2) he probably sucked at Rock-Paper-Scissors.
I was ecstatic. We were going to the mountain. But wait… not so fast. One more barrier shot up in front of us. The Indonesian presidential elections had just taken place, and now there was chaos in Jakarta. Thousands of people were protesting the election results. So now it wasn’t just Irian Jaya that was a mess; Jakarta was a mess, too. There were literally riots in the streets. Local businesses shut down as shop owners boarded up their windows to thwart vandals and looters. The violence escalated to the point where the airport was under siege, and no planes were landing or taking off, so our flight to Irian Jaya was delayed again. My timing for this trip could not have been worse.
The authorities were telling people to stay off the streets. But I was going stir-crazy and was getting hungry and was sick of the hotel’s food. There was actually a Sizzler down the street and it was calling my name—loud enough for me to hear it over the screaming protesters who had flooded the city’s public spaces. I peered out the window of my hotel room. People were yelling and turning over cars and smashing windows and setting things on fire. But I wasn’t scared. I had been to Oakland Raiders games (and had survived). I finally decided I had to venture out to get something to eat.
I left the hotel and made the several-block journey down the street to the Sizzler on foot and without incident. I was absolutely elated to be inside an American franchise restaurant. There was something familiar about it (menu boards with pictures of food that I actually recognized), which brightened my mood. I wanted to spend as much time there as I could, because there was nowhere else to go other than back to the hotel room. I chewed every bite of my steak about fifty times to make it last (well, and because it was so rubbery that it was the only way I could get it down).
Then, as I was on the forty-seventh chew of my third-to-last bite of steak, the noises outside began getting louder. It was the protesters. They were obviously getting closer and closer. The manager of the Sizzler ran to the front of the restaurant in a panic and closed some iron gates across the front doors and windows in an attempt to safeguard the restaurant. I was locked inside as the protesters rallied in the streets. I heard screaming, yelling, and gunfire. My thought was this: if you are going to get locked inside a building, it’s best to do so in a place that has an all-you-can-eat dessert bar. After polishing off about twelve sundaes, I decided to brave the streets of Jakarta and venture back toward my hotel.
Back safe and sound in the hotel, I now had to face the fact that the delays of the past few days had put my climb in jeopardy. I didn’t have that much time left to get to the mountain, climb it, and get back to North Carolina in time for the start of classes. I was on a partial scholarship, and I was worried that if I didn’t register on time for the next term, I might lose my financial aid. The problem now was that even if we were to leave immediately for Irian Jaya, I would only have two days to get to base camp and climb. I had the option of getting my money refunded and heading back for classes, or getting on a plane to Irian Jaya and trying to do the climb in forty-eight hours. Bear in mind that the schedule normally allotted six days for the actual climb, to allow for acclimatization and weather (the rest of the time on the ten-day schedule was designated for air travel).
I thought about cutting my losses and going home, but that thought quickly vanished. I knew there was no way I was going to go home without getting to that mountain. I decided to see how far I could go in two days.
Well, with the help of the Indonesian Army we were finally able to fly to Irian Jaya and start our trek through the jungle. The walk to the base of Carstensz Pyramid was like something out of a movie. I found it all fascinating. First we had to pass through the Grasberg mine—the largest gold mine in the world. The mine is majority-owned by Freeport-McMoRan. It’s also the subject of considerable controversy, including allegations that the firm has engaged in human rights abuses and that its mining operations have inflicted enormous environmental damage. After we made our way through the mine we entered the dense jungle, where we experienced torrential downpours and met people the likes of whom I had never seen.
The region is home to hundreds of different tribes—but the majority of the people we passed during the trek were from the Dani tribe. Rudi explained that most of them had never seen white people before, so as we passed by their groups I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not it would be appropriate to reach out and shake their hands. I was, however, 100 percent sure that whatever the local custom might call for (and said local custom was a mystery to me), I wasn’t going to reach out and shake anyone’s koteka (that’s a penis gourd, a spectacularly showy device worn by the Dani tribesmen for reasons that are obscure to me).
We eventually made it to base camp. What’s more, we did it without a single murder or kidnapping or riot along the way. I felt pretty good upon arrival at 14,000 feet, although I knew going from sea level to 16,000 feet in two days would be no picnic. While I had been to much higher altitudes, I had never ascended that fast. Even on nontechnical climbs like Mount Kilimanjaro, you start at 6,600 feet and you typically never gain more than 3,300 to 3,900 feet of elevation in a day. This was a whole different deal, though, as it would be a fast ascent that required basic rock-climbing skills at altitude. But I figured I was ready. Game on. The plan was to spend the next day at base camp, and then head up the mountain the following morning at zero dark thirty.
I didn’t sleep at all the following night—which, as I’ve mentioned, is pretty normal just before a summit attempt like this. You know you have to get up before dawn to get ready to leave, so you toss and turn and look at your watch every ten minutes to make sure you haven’t slept through the alarm. I didn’t have to worry about sleeping through my watch alarm; not only did the sound of the nonstop torrential downpour keep me awake, but I also couldn’t seem to get warm in my sleeping bag, which was weird because my bag was rated for twenty below, and it couldn’t have been colder than forty degrees. I sat up and felt around the tent for my headlamp—and at that point I realized there was a leak in the tent and everything was completely soaked: my sleeping bag, my fleece jacket and fleece pants (which I had been using as a pillow). Pretty much everything I had with me was wet. This is the kind of thing you might laugh about if you were sharing a tent with someone, but somehow it’s never quite as funny when you are solo and there is no one to commiserate with.
So what else could go wrong? Well, for starters, aliens invaded my stomach. I started feeling pains right after dinner, and they got progressively worse. I lay there in my tent praying the pains would stop. No dice. I had taken a bunch of Imodium, but whatever was in my gut just laughed and mainlined it. I couldn’t keep anything inside me. There was no way I could climb. I couldn’t even stand up at that point.
At about 2:00 a.m. everyone rolled out of their tents and got ready to head up. I could see their headlamps shining outside my tent, and I felt disappointment seeping into my tent along with the rain. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I told the group to go ahead and that I would be behind them by just a few minutes, although I knew realistically it would be much longer than that. Rudi (the only English-speaking local with our group) took off with the Polish team and the other climbers, but before he went he asked one of the army soldiers, Eres, to wait behind and climb with me when I was ready to head out. Eres was also eager to head up the mountain, and I’m guessing he wasn’t thrilled that he had been asked to split from the rest of the group (safety in numbers). But he was incredibly gracious about the whole thing—or at least he had a gracious look on his face. He didn’t speak any English, so who really knows apart from Eres himself?
Meanwhile, I still couldn’t seem to keep any food or liquids inside me. I knew I needed to head out soon if I was going to go at all. This was the only window I had to try to go up, since I had to be back down the next day in order to hike out in time to catch my flight home. But my stomach didn’t seem to want to cooperate.
Here I feel the need to point out that an upset stomach (what a euphemism that is) is no fun when you’re lying around your house in sweatpants and have a clean toilet and running water nearby. But when you are in the middle of a jungle… well, let’s just say it’s even more of a bummer. Then add four layers of clothing and a climbing harness and fingers that are not exactly nimble in the cold temperatures, and you’ve got a “challenging situation.” Nightmare. Yeah. Total nightmare. Even water sent my stomach into a Cirque du Soleil routine.
So, instead of the normal superhydration and carbo-loading mode that climbers go into prior to a summit bid, I decided not eat or drink anything (including water) for the next several hours. And while my normal routine on most climbs is to stop every hour to drink and eat something, I knew that this time such fueling stops were not going to be an option. If I wanted to climb this mountain, I’d have to climb it on empty. I had climbed when my body had been calorie depleted in the past, and I had a good idea of how far I could push it. I knew that if or when I hit the wall, I would need to turn around. I would make that call when the time came, if it came. But for now, I wanted to at least try.…
The next eighteen hours were, to put it mildly, full of surprises. Let’s start with the fact that I didn’t anticipate the summit bid taking eighteen hours. I knew I would be low on energy and would move slowly as a result, and that I would need to stop frequently to “take care of business.” But I figured the climb would take me ten hours at most. Carstensz Pyramid is the only one of the Seven Summits that requires rock-climbing skills, but much of the route has fixed lines, which means climbers can ascend and descend efficiently. And while I was comfortable with the climbing, I had not anticipated the shoddy (by which I mean scary-looking) anchors and the ropes that were often too fat to fit through my gear. Standard ascending and descending gear (with fancy names such as jumars or ascenders or ATCs or figure 8s) were no good on many of the ropes. I managed to make a friction knot (called a Prusik knot) out of some nylon cord to help me ascend the steeper pitches, but it was still sketchy.
I moved along the route slowly. I was making decent time, although I was several hours behind the rest of the group. When I was about two-thirds of the way to the top, my new climbing buddies loomed into sight on their way back down from the summit. I high-fived them as they passed me (this was back in ’99, so the fist bump wasn’t around yet) and plastered a fake smile on my face and acted as if I felt okay. But I didn’t. Due to my GI troubles I was really too weak to be climbing at altitude. A voice in my head suggested that I turn back right there and descend with them because it would be safer for me to be with a group in case anything went wrong—but the voice wasn’t loud enough or maybe it was in broken English or something, because I didn’t bother to listen. I continued to climb, with Eres right behind me. I reached the summit after about ten hours of climbing. Eres and I took a few photos at the top and then began the journey back down. I was so excited to be at the top, but I reminded myself that (say it with me) the summit was merely the halfway point of my climb. I still needed to get back down.
At this point, the clouds closed in and it started to snow. Then my Raynaud’s decided to kick in, so the nerves in my fingers and toes clamped down on the blood vessels, cutting off my circulation. My hands were now numb to the point where I had very little dexterity. No worries: l’d brought two sets of hand warmers and had only used one on the way up. I busted out the second one and waited for it to warm up so that I could regain the use of my hands. I waited. And waited. And waited. It never warmed up. It was defective.
Mistake #1: I didn’t bring enough sets of hand warmers. My fingers turned completely white and I couldn’t move them, which made it really hard to work the ropes and other gear that I needed to descend the exposed parts of the route. Every pitch was scary. Every single one.
It was now getting late and I was losing the sun. My prescription sunglasses were now too dark to wear at this point.
Mistake #2: leaving my regular prescription glasses behind. I didn’t bring my regular glasses because it was light out when I started the ascent, and I was sure I would be off the mountain loooooong before nightfall. Alas, I had greatly misjudged the amount of time it would take me to get to the summit and back. Now, in the growing darkness, I couldn’t really see the route ahead of me. And actually, once the sun completely disappeared, I could not even see the ground in front of me.
I was moving very slowly now. More than fifteen hours of climbing had burned through whatever calories I hadn’t expelled from my body, so I had no energy. I couldn’t move my fingers. I couldn’t see very well. I was freezing, and it was getting colder as night descended on the peak. Many parts of the descent were totally exposed and unprotected. You fall, you go all the way down. Hundreds of feet. Maybe a thousand. I didn’t know. I couldn’t see where the lower ledges were. I dug through my backpack to get my headlamp, which I actually did bring (even though I did not expect to be climbing in the dark), because it never leaves the top section of my backpack. It’s always in there. That, and toilet paper. I learned early in my climbing career (which at that time spanned about a year) to always, always keep a headlamp with me.
I strapped the headlamp onto my climbing helmet and flipped the switch on. Nothing. No worries—I had a spare battery. So I swapped bad for good… and still nothing. It wasn’t a bad battery; it was a burned-out bulb. And I didn’t have another one of those with me—which was, of course, Mistake #3.
Now I really couldn’t see anything. Eres was right there with me on the descent, but his headlamp wasn’t all that great (although it was better than no headlamp). I got down on my butt and scooted across many of the ridges, because I could not see where I was stepping and the route was so damn steep. I don’t think I have ever been so scared. Truly scared, to the point that I could barely breathe. I slammed my knees against rocks a couple of times, and eventually I smacked into something hard with just about every other part of my body. I was too tired to scream obscenities (or anything at all) and too dehydrated to cry. A kind of numbness set in. I tried to just focus on my next step. I tried to concentrate on breathing normally. I would have given anything to be back at base camp, in the comfort of the kitchen tent with the other climbers and our army escorts, downing some hot tea and a plate of chicken feet.
Spoiler alert: Eres and I made it back to base camp. It was late in the evening. I was drenched. (It was pouring rain lower down the mountain—too much rain even for my Gore-Tex jacket—and I had ripped the seat of my waterproof pants on the way down, so all of my layers were soaked through.) I was freezing, since my body did not have enough energy to generate any warmth, and my fingers and toes were completely numb. My head and my knees were throbbing. I was hungry and severely dehydrated—thanks to my GI issues, it had now been more than twenty-four hours since I’d had any food or water. I was grateful that it was dark so that no one could see the pathetic state I was in as I stumbled into base camp. I fell into my tent and tried to sleep, but I was so cold I couldn’t stop shaking for hours.
The next morning I awoke to voices outside my tent. I opened the zipper and emerged from my little nylon house. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but the Polish climbers were standing there looking at my torn-up pants, which were laid across the rocks next to my tent. They were smiling and chuckling as they picked up my pants to assess the damage. They even took a picture of them as I held them up. I could tell by the looks on their faces that they figured out that my climb was “eventful.” They shook my hand and patted me on the back. It wasn’t a winter ascent of Everest, but it was epic, and I appreciated that they appreciated this fact.
Harry, José, Mark, and Jaime came over to my tent and gave me hugs. Rudi was busy cooking breakfast, but I’m sure he would have given me a thumbs-up if he had been there (and had a thumb). We all sat down together in the kitchen tent, and I began to tell them my story, although the various bruises covering my body could have told the story without my words. I had made it to the summit and back, but I knew I could have easily not made it back, and it was genuinely frightening to contemplate that fact.
I barely made it home to North Carolina in time for the first day of classes for the new term. I hadn’t read any of the course material, so I was completely unprepared. When the professors asked questions I would raise my hand, pretending as if I had the answer, and then when they called on me I would go into a seemingly uncontrollable coughing fit and frantically clutch my throat and pretend as if I suddenly couldn’t talk. I looked around at my classmates with that rueful I so wish I could answer this one and share my knowledge with all of you, but sadly, I am unable to speak look on my (pathetic) face.
While I did come back in one piece, my Gore-Tex pants—the most expensive clothing item I owned—were completely trashed. They were covered in mud, and the entire seat was ripped out. I couldn’t afford a new pair, because I had already run through my budget paying off Monty and the Indonesian Army. The ridiculous thing is that if I had just brought my glasses and a spare headlamp bulb the morning I left for the summit, I wouldn’t have ruined a $250 pair of pants! But I hadn’t, so now I needed a new pair.
Then I remembered—I was pretty sure that North Face products carried a lifetime warranty. I checked their website and confirmed that they will repair or replace their products if there are defects in material or workmanship. The warranty stated: “Even after extended use, we’ll repair the product without charge, or replace it at our discretion.” Good enough. I marched my mud-covered pants with the ripped-out *ss to the North Face store. I walked up to the first salesperson I saw and sheepishly said, “Uh, I need to return some pants because they have a defect.” The guy asked, “What kind of defect?” “They have a hole in them,” I answered. “So I need to swap them for a pair that doesn’t have any holes.”
I then held up what was left of my black Gore-Tex pants, which were caked in dried mud and had multiple rips and tears. The guy looked at me and gave my pants the once-over and said, “Are those our pants?” Of course he didn’t recognize them as North Face pants because they didn’t look anything like they did when I originally bought them. Hell, they were barely recognizable as pants.
I couldn’t look him in the face. I stared at the ground and mumbled, “Yes. They are your pants—these are most definitely North Face pants. I bought them in this store last year and, uh… I would like to return them because there is a big hole in them—riiiiiiiight… here!” I pointed to the gaping hole where the backside of the pants used to be.
He looked at me, looked at the pants, looked back at me again—square in the eye—and squinted as he spoke while trying to keep a straight face. “Yeah… but that doesn’t really look like a manufacturing defect.” I looked up at him with my best clueless facial expression as if he were speaking a foreign language. He continued. “That damage looks like it was man-made.”
I went straight to my best I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about look and then seamlessly transitioned to my shocked beyond belief that you would say that expression. “Huh? Man-made? Nope. No way. This damage was definitely not man-made.” I tried to sound even more convincing.
He looked a little puzzled. “Really, you are telling me that the damage to these Gore-Tex pants—or what used to be a pair of pants—wasn’t man-made?!?!?” His eyes were enough to call me out. I knew his bullsh*t meter was registering off the charts.
But God, I needed him to give me a new pair of pants. “No. It wasn’t. I swear!” I looked him in the eye for the first time and confidently announced, “It was woman-made.”
He smiled and said, “I gotta hear the story.”
He must have liked it, because he gave me a new pair of pants.
Carstensz Pyramid isn’t a superhigh or a superhard peak, but I still got my *ss handed to me. Many incredibly skilled climbers have died on much lower mountains because they didn’t have the proper equipment. It’s easy to think, Oh, I won’t need that, or It’s too much of a hassle to carry the extra weight, or I bet someone else will bring one of those, so I’ll leave mine behind. If and when those thoughts arrive, I strongly urge you to think again.
People tend to let mistakes slide when the errors are made by someone who is new to a job or a pursuit or even a project. But the “I didn’t know any better” excuse doesn’t work for people in leadership positions. As a leader, it’s your job, even when new to a particular role, to know what you need in order to achieve a particular goal. That means doing the research, putting in the preparation time, and showing up with the right stuff. What’s the right stuff? It’s whatever you need to get the job done on time and in a way that allows you to stand tall and be proud of your results.
When I set out to climb Carstensz Pyramid I was willing to do whatever it took to get to the summit. I had blown a final exam, burned through all of my frequent-flier miles, survived violent political protests and rebel uprisings, trekked through a jungle with the Indonesian Army, and made it to the base of a remote and rarely climbed mountain with some of the world’s most accomplished climbers… and then almost blew my chances of coming back from the expedition in one piece because some pieces of important gear got left back at base camp. Someone screwed up, and I place 100 percent of the blame on the expedition leader—and that leader was me. You are always your own designated leader. You may or may not have someone with an official leadership title with you on a climb or on the job, but you are always responsible for your own preparation, your performance, and your outcomes.
One last thing: if you think you can’t afford all the gear you need, ask yourself if you can afford to not have it. You can bet that your competitors are investing in the best and most advanced technology available; you need to do the same. Don’t put yourself or your team at a disadvantage because you didn’t bother to get the proper equipment. Sure, there is something charming about old-school—but while the mountaineers in the 1800s looked dapper as they climbed in their tweed suits and leather hobnailed boots, it’s much better to be climbing in lightweight, weatherproof clothing and insulated boots with crampons in the twenty-first century.
I know some folks who didn’t have the best equipment on their first expedition to Everest and didn’t make it to the top. On their second attempt they invested in better gear—including newer, lighter oxygen tanks, which allowed them to move faster on summit day and enabled them to tag the top.
There are always going to be ways to get whatever it is you need at a price you can afford, if you are willing to put some time into looking. When I started climbing, eBay didn’t exist, but I was able to borrow some items that I needed (and didn’t have) from friends. What really saved me was finding a secondhand store in Seattle that had a pair of extra-small down pants that I knew would fit me and were one-sixth the price of a new pair.
There is no excuse for not having the proper equipment. “I can’t afford it” isn’t a good reason. What you can’t afford is to show up for duty unprepared and without the right gear. Think of a football player showing up for a game without a helmet. Or a boxer stepping into the ring without his gloves. Or a golfer showing up without clubs. Leaders need tools, too—the tools to survive, the tools to thrive, and the tools to help the people around them achieve their goals.
By the way, I failed my Derivatives exam—which didn’t surprise me, since I left five-sixths of the exam blank. Somehow I still managed to pass the class. Barely. I received a warning letter from the associate dean informing me that if it happened again I could be placed on academic probation. So was it worth it? You bet.