Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Mount Everest and Contingent Goal Setting
Sometimes, I find it useful set goals that are contingent upon other goals.
What I mean by that is that if I am unsure if I can develop the capacity to achieve a larger goal, I’ll set an interim one that will give me an idea of if I can develop the capacity to hit the larger one. There’s no use in having a goal of $10M in the bank, if you can’t get $10k in there.
In January, the morning of this (and before I found out about his death), I decided I wanted to do the same thing…ascend Everest, and two other difficult peaks in the world. The reality is that, other than rock climbing, I hadn’t intensely training for anything since playing hockey in high school…almost 10 years ago.
So, what I did is I set an aggressive goal, with an aggressive time frame, to ride my fixed-gear, brakeless bike a full 20 miles in an hour. I chose this because it would force me to exercise my legs in a similar way as mountaineering, and it would force me to develop my lungs - which I hadn’t taken care of with 8 years of heavy smoking (I quit last April).
Today, I hit that goal. More than three weeks ahead of schedule. (it sucked) (and I did it on 3 hours of sleep and after 3 hours of climbing/weight lifting last night…more on that later.)
The point is: If I had only focused on the larger goal, I probably wouldn’t have progressed nearly as quickly. Sometimes, making a larger goal contingent upon a smaller goal (rather than the smaller goal merely being an interim milestone) forces you to perform at a faster rate.
As a personal note, if you know anyone who has ascended Everest, K2, Kilamanjaro, or done any similar alpine mountaineering/climbing (ie: Patagonia, Africa, etc), if it would be possible to arrange some sort of meeting/communication that would be awesome. As much as informal education is a wonderful thing, there are some things that just can’t compare to the experience.
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