Beyond Possible

That’s from a chapter called “The Unrelenting Pursuit of Excellence.”

Also known as... “The Unrelenting Pursuit of Areté and the Refusal to Accept Mediocrity.”

As I read that passage, I thought of wisdom from a couple of Navy SEALS: David Goggins and Admiral McRaven.

First, Goggins.

In Never Finished, he talks about the (primordial!) power of belief.

Here’s how he puts it: “Belief is a gritty, potent, primordial force. In the 1950s, a scientist named Dr. Curt Richter proved this when he gathered dozens of rats and dropped them in thirty-inch deep glass cylinders filled with water. The first rat paddled on the surface for a short time, then swam to the bottom, where it looked for an escape hatch. It died within two minutes. Several others followed the same pattern. Some lasted as long as fifteen minutes, but they all gave up. Richter was surprised because rats are damn good swimmers, yet in his lab, they drowned without much of a fight. So, he tweaked the test.

After he placed the next batch in their jars, Richter watched them, and right before it looked like they were about to give up, he and his techs scooped up the rats, toweled them off, and held them long enough for their heart and respiratory rates to normalize. Long enough for them to register, on a physiological scale, that they had been saved. They did this a few times before Richter placed a group of them back in those evil cylinders again to see how long they would last on their own. This time, the rats didn’t give up. They swam their natural asses off… for an average of sixty hours without any food or rest. One swam for eighty-one hours.”

Then we have Admiral McRaven.

In Make Your Bed, he echoes Nims’s and Goggins’s wisdom on hope when he says: “If I have learned anything in my time traveling around the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person, a Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela, and even a young girl from Pakistan, Malala. One person can change the world by giving people hope.”

And, in Sea Stories, he echoes Nims’s wisdom on taking it one day, or “evolution” at a time.

He tells us: “‘We must stick together!’ Steward shouted. ‘Don’t think about quitting. Don’t think about how hard it’s going to be in an hour or a day or a week.’ He paused and entered the center of the huddle. Calmly, with a look of complete confidence, he said, ‘Just take it one evolution at a time.’

One evolution at a time. One evolution at a time. These words would stick with me for the rest of my career. They summed up a philosophy for dealing with difficult times. Most BUD/S trainees dropped out because their event horizon was too far in the distance. They struggled not with the problem of the moment, but with what they perceived to be an endless series of problems, which they believed they couldn’t overcome. When you tackled just one problem, one event, or, in the vernacular of BUD/S training, one evolution at a time, then the difficult became manageable. Like many things in life, success in BUD/S didn’t always go to the strongest, the fastest, or the smartest. It went to the man who faltered, who failed, who stumbled, but who persevered, who got up and kept moving. Always moving forward, one evolution at a time.”

Spotlight on YOU... How’s YOUR hope?

See your desired future. Know you can make it a reality. Create a plan to do so.

Then take it one evolution/day a time.

Here’s to The Unrelenting Pursuit of Areté and the Refusal to Accept Mediocrity.

Close the gap. Give us all you’ve got. TODAY.

P.S. One of the most inspiring parts of the book is the fact that the most Heroic aspect of Nims’s record-breaking feats on the death peaks wasn’t actually his performance ON the mountain—it was overcoming the obstacles he faced to FINANCE the mission to even GET himself and his team to the mountain.

NO ONE believed in him—which made it REALLY hard to finance the mission. He had to mortgage his own house to get started and, even after he achieved some initial success, he STILL had to CONSTANTLY hustle to get the capital he needed to make it all happen—often securing the necessary funds for the next summit right before his team made the attempt.

This is where belief came in again.

Nims tells us: “But most of all, I had belief. When operating at sea level, I often felt as if I didn’t belong, that it wasn’t my place. But in the big mountains, I seemed unbreakable. I remembered the stories I’d heard about Muhammad Ali and how, even in his senior years as a fighter, he never considered defeat. Likewise, Usain Bolt during his gold-winning Olympic races.

At the base camp of every mountain, I tried to think the same way, never once imagining that the summit above me might be out of reach. Instead, I told myself it was there to be achieved. You’re going to make this happen, I would say. You’re the man here.

To some people, that might sound egotistical, or overly ambitious, or perhaps even dangerous. But it was never about ego; the mission was bigger than that. I wasn’t being nonchalant or dismissive of the mountain’s power. Rather, I strived to posses a supreme level of belief in my ability and what I was about to do—and that was the most powerful rocket fuel of all.”

That’s from a chapter called “Swimming to the Moon” in which Nims recounts just how many times he was told what he intended to do, and wound up successfully doing, was, quite simply, IMPOSSIBLE.

Note: What he was trying to do was pretty insane.

To put it in perspective, there are 14 mountain peaks in the world that are over 8,000 meters. Less than 50 people have EVER ascended all of them. And, the previous fastest time to summit all 14 peaks was seven years. Nims said he was going to do it in SEVEN MONTHS.

Let that sink in for a moment.

As per that Red Bull article after which this chapter was named, doing that, according to the best thinkers in the world, was impossible—like “Swimming to the Moon.”

Nims’s response? Perfect. Watch me do it.

Cue: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

(I’ve recited that in my head thousands of times. Always in Steve Jobs’s voice.)

John Eliot also comes to mind.

In Overachievement, he tells us: “History, though, shows us that the people who end up changing the world—the great political, social, scientific, technological, artistic, even sports revolutionaries—are always nuts, until they’re right, and then they’re geniuses.”

Orison Sweet Marden said something similar.

In An Iron Will, he tells us: “History furnishes thousands of examples of men who have seized occasions to accomplish results deemed impossible by those less resolute.”

Important note: It wasn’t just raw personal ambition that fueled Nims’s Heroic quest. Like all true heroes, he was driven by something MUCH bigger than himself.

As per William Damon’s wisdom on Noble Purpose and Angela Duckworth’s wisdom on how to cultivate Grit, he had a purpose bigger than himself. He was committed to making his team proud, making his Gurkha and SBS warrior brothers proud, and making his nation and fellow Nepali sherpas proud.

LOVE was his secret weapon.

That’s from that same chapter on “Swimming to the Moon.”

How did Nims cultivate the CONFIDENCE that he could do what he said he would do?

Simple.

He EARNED that trust in himself by DOING WHAT HE SAID HE WOULD DO.

Over and over and over and over and over again and again and again.

He FORGED his ANTIFRAGILE CONFIDENCE by doing what he said he would do—ESPECIALLY when he didn’t *feel* like doing it.

Recall that the word confidence comes from the Latin verb confidere, from con- (expressing intensive force) + fidere ‘trust.’

Confidence = INTENSE (!) TRUST.

In ourselves. In our abilities. In the fact that we’ve put in the work to EARN that trust.

How do you earn trust in ANY relationship?

Simple. You do what you say you will do.

Or... As The Leadership Challenge guys put it...

You DWYSYWD.

Spotlight on YOU...

Do YOU do what you say you will do?

Pay attention.

Every time you *don’t* do what you say you will do, you erode your trust in yourself.

Close the gap. Forge antifragile confidence.

Go summit the moment-to-moment micro mountains so you’re ready for the death peaks.

DWYSYWD.

Today.

That’s from a chapter called “Through the Storm” in which we follow Nims up one of the 14 peaks and experience the stress of his quest.

Nims could be a case study in Kelly McGonigal’s great book The Upside of Stress.

She defines stress as “what arises when something you care about is at stake.”

That’s basically what Nims told himself as he was “scared because this means something.”

McGonigal also tells us that it’s how we INTERPRET that stress and whether we see it as a THREAT or a CHALLENGE that will determine how we respond to it.

Then there’s this passage in which McGonigal tells us: “Everyone has an Everest. Whether it’s a climb you choose, or a circumstance you find yourself in, you’re in the middle of an important journey. Can you imagine a climber scaling the wall of ice at Everest’s Lhotse Face and saying, ‘This is such a hassle”? Or spending the first night in the mountain’s ‘death zone’ and thinking, ‘I don’t need this stress”? The climber knows the context of his stress. It has personal meaning to him; he has chosen it. You are most liable to feel like a victim of the stress in your life when you forget the context the stress is unfolding in. ‘Just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest’ is a way to remember the paradox of stress. The most meaningful challenges in your life will come with a few dark nights.

The biggest problem with trying to avoid stress is how it changes the way we view our lives, and ourselves. Anything in life that causes stress starts to look like a problem. If you experience stress at work, you think there’s something wrong with your job. If you experience stress in your marriage, you think there’s something wrong with your relationship. If you experience stress as a parent, you think there’s something wrong with your parenting (or your kids). If trying to make a change is stressful, you think there’s something wrong with your goal.”

>> “Just another cold, dark night on Everest.”

That’s what someone said to McGonigal as she was struggling late one night working on her dissertation—doubting whether she had what it took to get it done.

You’re not going to find Nims complaining about conditions on Everest. It’s all about the context of meaning we create for ourselves as we face OUR Everest.

All that begs the question...

How are you responding to YOUR stress?

Here’s to saying BRING IT ON as we forge the antifragile confidence we need to joyfully scale our personal Everests!