Achar Ke Vichar – Quitting takes a lot of courage
Dr. Sriharsha A Achar
Founder - S A A H A S / Former CHRO / Life Coach / Inspirational Speaker & Story Teller / HR Advisor /Advisory Board Member / Certified Independent Director
Achar Ke Vichar – Quitting takes a lot of courage
On May 22, 2019, Mount Everest saw a traffic jam as 300 mountaineers made it to the summit that day, creating a traffic jam, a picture of which went viral the next day.
German alpinist, David Gottler, was not among those who summited. He was just 200 meters away from the peak when he turned back. David was also among the lucky ones, as that spring, the Everest climb saw 21 mountaineers die while attempting to scale the world’s highest peak – the highest number to die so far!
Why did he turn back despite being an experienced climber who had already conquered five of the 14 different 8000 m peaks on Earth, reaching the summits of Gasherbrum II (8035m), Broad Peak (8051m), Dhaulagiri (8167m), Lhotse (8516m) and Makalu (8481m), as well as ascending to 8200m on K2 (8611m)?
He took a crucial decision. That day that the risks were way too much to attempt to summit despite being so close.
His experience told him that the crowd trying to reach the peak would make him wait for his turn which could prove fatal as above 26,000 feet you are in the death zone when there isn’t enough oxygen for humans to breathe. The summit of Mount Everest is 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) high, an elevation at which each breath contains only one-third of the oxygen found at sea level. And David was a purist who was climbing without supplemental oxygen.
At only 200 meters from the peak David took perhaps the most sensible and courageous decision of his life – to give up the climb and come down. He didn’t win the mountain that day, but he won over his ego. Only a man without an ego can decide when to give up and when to clench your teeth and push on regardless.
All our lives we have been constantly told by motivational speakers and others, never to give up and yet here was an experienced mountaineer who simply says that making it to the peak is not all that matters, when even the less experienced ones were summiting that day.
There were many who went up that day, but in the process exhausted their oxygen supplies while waiting for the queue of other mountaineers to clear up before they could summit. Some of them ran out of oxygen on the way down and died.
The true climbers respect the mountains and as Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to set foot on Mount Everest said; Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain. There are climbers who climb to enjoy the view and not always to plant a flag on the peak.
Sometimes in our lives it is more important on how we enjoy living than how “successful” we are in the eyes of others or even ourselves.
Quitting takes a lot of courage and sometimes only the wise can give up even when success seems so near.
They always ask themselves: What is the cost of winning? Is it worth to scale the summit?
#acharkevichar
AVP, Group Head of Medical Operations & Planning @ Tata Trust
4 年Agreed sir. Another way in which I see it is the increased variability in this situation. If we see statistically then variability is allowed within an acceptable range eg x+-10,where q0 is d variability from the mean. Here there has been an increase in variability in the ascent time because of the long ques.so as a result the ascent time was much more than the usual time.And as a result the variability increased which made it impossible for few of the mountaineers to manage using their internal homeostatic mechanism and they died. So in life people should know how much variability they can manage using their own efforts.
Head Of Operations Pan India Apollo Home Care
4 年Good insights sir !!
Director - Head of DB Investment Services India
4 年This is tremendous Sir. So much enlightenment one can get out of this post. Eye opener and what compels for a lot of introspection is "Sometimes in our lives it is more important on how we enjoy living than how “successful” we are in the eyes of others or even ourselves"...... Many thanks for sharing.
Human Resources Professional
4 年Excellent one