It’s ‘Everest Season’ — Here Are Six Tips for Meeting Your Own Everest Goal

To mountaineers, April and May are traditionally the months of the year known as Everest Season. It’s after the harshest part of winter has passed and before the summer monsoons begin, so it’s the most ideal conditions for climbers to attempt to reach the summit.

Preparing to climb Mount Everest is a challenging, time-consuming ordeal. When I summited in 2013, it was after years of preparation, intense training, and incremental steps toward the lofty goal of reaching the peak. It’s the same kind of hard work and dedication that’s required to meet any aspirational goal in your personal or professional life.

This is why many people call bold and audacious goals “Everest Goals”. Each of us has our own Everest goal that we aspire to in life. Even if you don’t want to reach the peak of the world’s tallest mountain, there is something in your life that you think about, dream about, and wonder if you will ever have the courage to take on.

Everest goals have one defining characteristic: The goal is so bold and so daring that achieving it is valuable in and of itself, not as a means to obtain another end.

Most goals are in pursuit of something else (“I’m going to eat healthier this month so I can lose weight”). In contrast, the value of an Everest goal is the goal itself (“I’m going to summit Mount Everest so I can summit Mount Everest”).

Everest goals are personal to us and limited only by our imagination and courage to be bold and dare greatly. Maybe for you it is to run your first marathon or write a novel. Maybe it is to become fluent in another language. Maybe you want to become the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon. Whatever it is, the simple pursuit of your Everest goal inspires you, and achieving it is reward enough.

Of course, pursuing an Everest goal is difficult, risky, and rarely goes according to plan. In honor of the brave mountaineers who are currently on Mt. Everest in pursuit of their own Everest goal, over the next several weeks, I will share with you tips on how to achieve your own Everest goals in life.

These tips are based on decades of research looking into the high-performance habits of athletes, executives, and artists — as well as my own experiences in preparing for, training for, and climbing to new heights.

Tip #1: Know Your Why!

The first thing that’s important to establish as you begin to make your own Everest goal is why you want to accomplish this bold and audacious goal in the first place. Everest goals require almost limitless effort and commitment. There will be ups and downs and twists and turns. To persist in the face of doubt and uncertainty, you must have a deep understanding of your motivation to achieve the goal.

In mountaineering circles, there is a quote by David McCollough Jr. that I love:

“Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world.”

When I first read this quote, I knew I had found my “why”. I have no desire to be a famous Everest climber, or to claim that I have “conquered” something like the tallest mountain in the world. Rather, I am acutely aware that life is short, and in the time I have, I want to experience the world. I want to see and test the limits of human possibility, in particular my own possibilities. I want to experience the sheer joy of being part of a team that accomplishes something special. And I want to see the world in ways that few people get the opportunity to see. For me, this was the “why” behind my Everest goal.

Psychologists have long studied the power of intrinsic motivation, or the natural inclination within ourselves to seek mastery and exploration in ways that become a source of pure enjoyment and vitality. Indeed, some of my academic heroes such as Edward Deci, Mark Lepper, Richard Ryan and Adam Grant have all enlightened us on the power of motivations that come from within ourselves, and how these intrinsic motivations are much more instrumental in achieving difficult tasks than extrinsic motivators such as recognition or compensation.

Drawing on their work and my own research with high-performing individuals, I want to highlight several tips for discovering and knowing your why.

Challenge

We are naturally drawn to challenges that allow us to peer into the limits of human possibility, and in particular challenges that stretch us personally. Coming face-to-face with a challenge and discovering in yourself the courage to move forward despite the risks is a great source of intrinsic motivation. It is the spirit of exploration!

Challenge was at the heart of my personal WHY when the idea to climb Mt. Everest first came up. I wanted to climb the tallest mountain in the world, in part, just to see if I could. The number of people who successfully reach the summit each year is very small, and there was no guarantee that after all of my preparation and training, that I would actually make it.

This sense of challenge and the uncertainty that goes with it was very motivating to me, especially during those long days of training or the moments on the mountain when faced with unexpected illness or bad weather. Each new challenge is just part of it, and if you can find it in yourself to embrace the challenge, you begin to find your motivation and persistence getting stronger, not weaker, even when the obstacles or setbacks come your way.

So, when you think about your own aspirations, what is the challenge you seek and most importantly why? Can you embrace the challenge and find the motivation within it?

Curiosity

People are intrinsically drawn to things they do not know or understand, and your own curiosities can create a strong pull to understand something, explore a new domain, or develop a new skill. Your WHY may simply be a curiosity and desire to explore, and if you can find it in yourself to embrace your curiosities and allow yourself to explore, you may find a new level of motivation that you did not know you had.

I’m a student of leadership and teamwork. My own research and teaching is rooted in a curiosity about how people lead and how teams work, especially in high-risk and uncertain environments. Of course, in my day job as Dean of the Michigan Ross School of Business and as a professor, my focus is on leadership and teamwork in organizations.

That said, this innate curiosity was at the heart of my decision to get into mountaineering in the first place, and certainly a strong source of motivation for climbing Mt. Everest. Imagine linking a team of strangers together with a rope, and then asking them to work together to climb the tallest and one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. How does this team of strangers come to trust each other? How will this team communicate effectively? How will team members weigh their own personal goals with the goals of the team? How will team members help each other when something unexpected happens? These are all questions -- curiosities -- that motivated me to join up with a team to climb Mt. Everest.

Curiosity can kill a cat, but it can also be central part of your WHY! What about your own Everest goal stokes your internal sense of curiosity? Can you find that one question that can only be answered by accomplishing your Everest goal?

Control

There is a natural tendency among humans to want to exercise control over our environments and have agency over the choices we make. All of us desire control in one way or another, and research shows that the greater our autonomy and control, the greater our motivation.

In my case, I wanted to climb Mt. Everest, in part, because it would test my own sense of control. The weather and conditions on the mountain are unpredictable. Your team members have their own motivations, fears and anxieties, and their own desires for control. There are many other people on the mountain who you have no control over. I was motivated to see if I could focus my own desire for control on the things I truly could control, and somehow block out those things I could not control.

If you know anything about Mt. Everest, you know about the Khumbu icefall, where ladders crisscross over, under, and around a series of crevasses. In 2013, climbers had to navigate 27 different ladders.

Words cannot fully explain the depths of these crevasses, but let’s just say that some of them seemingly have no bottom. Across each crevasse rests a ladder -- or in some cases, two or three ladders tied together. Your job is to walk across these ladders and get to the other side of the crevasse. In this moment, there are many things you cannot control. You cannot control if the ladders are tied together strong enough to hold you. You cannot control if the anchors keeping the ladders stable will hold as you are walking across. But you can control yourself.

You can control your own fears, and you can focus those fears in ways that elevate your performance.

Crossing these ladders was scary, but in that moment, you learn to focus only on what you can control. Still to this day, I dream about each rung on the ladders, but it is only through pictures that I remember the depths of the crevasses. I simply did not see the bottom even though I was looking directly into it because my focus was on the ladder. We all desire control, but in a world filled with uncertainty and complexity, we cannot control all aspects of life.

When thinking about your WHY, stay focused on what you can control and let go of the things you cannot. Where in your Everest Goal can you practice agency, make your own choices, and determine your own fate. By focusing on your own sense of control, you can discover the internal motivation you will need to take the next step.

Speaking of the next step — in my next post, I’m going to share tips 2 and 3 for meeting your Everest goals. These tips will focus on how to taking those first steps toward your own summit.

In the meantime, spend a few minutes this week writing down the reasons WHY you want to accomplish an Everest goal of your own. Try asking yourself WHY at least several times to get at the true source of motivation that is driving you.