Finding your own right stuff, I chose a mountain.
by John Van Dyke
Chuck Yeager, legendary test pilot that inspired Tom Wolfe’s book “The right stuff” and established that as part of the American vocabulary, has passed. He raised the bar for many.
Our heroes, the individuals who achieve some outsized accomplishments that most of us could never achieve. Many of these individuals are held as examples of leadership beyond their particular achievement, others mostly for the accomplishment. On some level heroes inspire us, to see what is possible as humans, for society, and maybe for ourselves.
With the passing of generations, our idea of heroes is perhaps changing with a generation raised on code and computers. There was a time when Chuck Yeager’s amazing flight breaking the sound barrier was a national and international story. When Lou Whittaker’s first American expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest was a source of American pride. When we put the first man on the moon. We read of adventurers who crossed the Arctic solo, and legendary expeditions such as Earnest Shackleton’s amazing sailing of the Endurance in Antartica. A story of unparalleled leadership and survival.
Today, there are many that think of Mark Zuckerberg as a hero. Many of the early tech icons are held as heroes, and leaders to emulate. Perhaps for making money, lots of it. Not all of us are going to become the next tech billionaire. Nor are we going to break a new threshold in space flight. Today we have a culture of influencers, those people who earned a spot through actual accomplishment, or by being adept at creating a presence through social media. It is today’s therapy. Helping us achieve, cope, navigate our work and personal lives.
Doing something out of your comfort zone, that you can actually achieve, is so rewarding. There are so many ways to challenge yourself, personally, physically, and with amazing rewards. It is finding your own right stuff.
I personally needed something beyond my work. I had achieved a level of success and satisfaction in my work that was beyond my early expectations. I also knew it was time to exit. I needed something that was challenging and personal, as a bridge. I decided to climb mountains. People climb mountains everyday, it is nothing so special, unless you are suddenly caught in a weather shift at 13,000 feet and the temperature drops 30 degrees and you cannot see more than 6 feet in front of you as the snow starts falling hard and there are crevasses on the left and a drop off on the right. You are not alone, you are roped with three others. Tied together for safety in case someone falls into a crevasse. Time for a quick meeting, survey the situation, discus options, and decide what is best. What time is it. How much daylight remains. Is this going to pass quickly. What do we have for navigation. Can we survive if we bivouac here. These are all team decisions, myself and two others defer to the more experienced fourth member to weigh our options. I forgot to mention there is also lightening associated with this weather. We decide that because it is early in the day and this may be a passing storm, we will bivouac in one tent, take off our metal crampons and make a pile of them with our ice axes away from our tent, brew some tea and stay as warm as we can for a few hours until this passes. When it did two hours later, we dug ourselves out, hightailed it down, and called it live for another day. We were less than 2,000 feet from the summit. This was Mt. Rainier in Washington State.
I went on to climb most of the Cascade Mountains, the Grand Teton in Wyoming, and Mt. Vinson in Antartica, which was a true remote expedition pulling sleds and heavy packs. I found many books to read and like many things, there are heroes with amazing stories of survival, adventure and discovery. For me, there were a few more brushes with hard decisions and near bad outcomes, I had to find my right stuff more than once. Everything else after that is easy.
