Three Business lessons that I have learnt from Climbing
I have been climbing for 6 months now and yesterday I finished my lead course. After I got back home and while doing my monthly journaling I was pondering how has climbing helped me be a better version of myself and On another note, what business lessons can I learn from it.
The art of rock climbing has taught me 3 important business lessons.
- Collaboration: We humans are a species of collaboration. We would have achieved nothing if we chose not to collaborate. In Rock Climbing, Your life depends on your partner, Your belayer. If at any moment your belayer loses focus or makes a mistake you will fall from 40-60 meters, good enough to kill you. It has not just deepened my relationship with my friends whom I climb with but it has also taught me to believe not just in myself but in others too. It has taught me to enable the abilities of others so they can push you to achieve more. Our problem is that we think about collaboration too narrowly: as a value to cultivate but not a skill to teach. We need to start Listening attentively and Practice Empathy if we have to collaborate sustainably. When I am climbing, I often tend to forget that unlike Maths the shortest path is not the best path. Without the help of my climbing partner, this will be a mammoth task. The belayer not only helps you with the moves but also protects you if you have gotten too far from the rope or if you have got the rope behind your leg. Both of them can cause fatal injuries. Without collaboration and partnership, you can never be a successful climber. In an organisation, In successful collaborations, each person assumes that everyone else involved, regardless of background or title, is smart, caring, and fully invested.
- Creativity: In climbing, without creativity, it's impossible to view the bigger picture, My leadership coach explained to me the necessity of having a vision is creative in itself. In business, Innovation can't be a reality with Creativity. Creativity involves transforming your ideas, imagination, and dreams into reality. You take that approach before you climb a route so you can visualise it. To be successful, an innovation process must deliver three things: superior solutions, lower risks and costs of change, and employee buy-in. Now Design thinking gets the closest, in my opinion, to deliver innovation accurately and effectively. Design thinking takes an approach of Identifying hidden needs by having the innovator live the customer’s experience. This is now directly related to Compassion or maybe you can say derived from Compassion. Taking a liner approach in Business not only gives you amicable returns but also makes you a top of mind brand. Without Creativity and the execution of Creativity, An organisation can't innovate at a faster pace. In climbing, it's about the pace too. If you go too slow you will get tired and won't be able to complete the climb. By involving customers and other stakeholders in the definition of the problem and the development of solutions same like climber and belayer, design thinking garners a broad commitment to change. And by supplying a structure to the innovation process, design thinking helps innovators collaborate and agree on what is essential to the outcome at every phase.
3. Faliure: As a young generation we get too attached to what we have decided for ourselves or we overthink it to the degree that we end up failing at it. Now, I have started to treat my failures as experiments. One of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time, Jeff Bezos says, If you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments, And if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time if they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.” Now, we all know how Thomas Edison invented the light bulb after failing multiple times and How Genghis Khan, the emperor failed several times in his conquest. My grandfather told me the stories of Genghis Khan and Edison the first time I tested failure and tho it has always been hard to get up from a failure, It’s always has been about the learning in that process. When I climb, I always have these routes or grades that I cannot do in the first go, No matter how hard I try I just cannot go around getting it right. There was this climb, a 21 grade, I couldn’t get around the 4th move which was a crimp ( the shittiest hold ever), Even after my mate’s motivation and countless words of support and affirmation I couldn’t get it done for 3 days. I started to then study it, read about the hold and how to climb it, watch videos and boom on the 4th day, I could climb the grade in one go. I learnt that day that If you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn. Treating my failure at climbing as an experiment and then finding the right formula to succeed at it was a soulful exercise. When you climb, You give up multiple times, it feels as if your brain (responsible for the useless overthinking) asks you to back out and somewhere on this journey I read this quote - The Mountains we climb are not just mountains of rock and ice but the Mountains of our Mind and it has humbled me to fail again and again so I can win again and again. Be like the warriors of Genghis Khan, who believed that to regularly do what is hard but important when it feels most uncomfortable is how warriors are born. Fail often and Fail Hard. The more we fail the more we innovate and the better product enhancement we can do or come up with a better architecture to solve a customer’s problem.
Stay Creative, Collaborate More and Fail Often.
Amit