Three Life Lessons I Uncovered While Skiing

I recently found myself on a week-long ski trip with friends in Whistler, Canada.

This posed numerous challenges for me:

• Having grown up on the East Coast, Whistler’s two mountains were each more impressively large than any mountain I had ever skied down.
• I had never before skied for longer than a weekend. The idea of skiing for seven days seemed fun enough in theory, but I had somehow neglected to consider the stamina involved in making this kind of trip.
• Oh, and it had been 2+ years since my last time up a chairlift.

Everything turned out okay – I am not writing these words from a hospital bed. But I paint this picture to illustrate that this particular week would demand that I jump through numerous hurdles (thankfully, metaphorically) and come out unscathed. I learned a variety of lessons about surviving on the mountain (e.g. banana bread makes for good fuel). But I was also pleasantly surprised to learn a few lessons that were applicable to the world outside of skiing.

Allow me to explain.

#1 – You have to commit to a choice before you can reap the benefits of failure.

I agree with advice that ‘falling down’ in life is more than okay... it can bestow fantastic insight and help us grow and develop into truer, stronger selves (thanks Conan).

But a caveat should be placed on this. The benefits of failure can only be obtained if we truly commit to the choice we make. I say this after experience with making choices half-heartedly, exerting little effort in the follow-through, and winding up beaten but also lost as a result.

Often on my ski trip, I was stuck between making the decision to stay with my friend group and try to go down more challenging runs… or to break away from them and go down an easier run that would bring me elsewhere. I ended up agreeing to go down multiple runs that my naked eye would have otherwise warned me away from.

“Committing” to a choice means putting all effort, skills, resources, etc. toward incorporating that choice into your life and hoping for success.

On this trip, it meant focusing on trying to get down the harder runs in one piece without whining, complaining, or waving a white flag of defeat and calling for a rescue snowmobile. As a result, falls were instructive because I could reflect and learn about what was wrong about my technique, with the effect of improving over time (or at least knowing exactly why those runs were not for me). If I hadn’t put my mind toward trying to get down the run, I would not have been able to tease apart “real intelligence” gained in failure from the notion of just not trying hard enough.

#2 – It is hard to take an intelligent risk when choice categories are broadly defined.

A key element of the values that my company espouses is to “take intelligent risks.” But I often found myself unable to understand the risks at Whistler due to a lack of knowledge about the various trails and what it entailed to ride them.

(For those unfamiliar...Whistler’s ski resort has categories that indicate general difficulty. A “green circle” indicates the easiest runs, a “blue square” indicates intermediate runs, and a “black diamond” indicates the most challenging, advanced runs.  Two black diamonds, or “double black diamond,” are ratings reserved for the most extremely challenging runs.)

The issue I was facing was that “blue” runs at Whistler/Blackcomb incorporated such a wide span of difficulty levels that I often felt uneasy about making the choice to go down a blue run. Eventually, fear had set in; by the end of the trip, I split from my group to ski down green runs.

What could I have done differently? More research. My experience as a skier entailed relying on the simple rating system. The trouble was… I had never encountered the size and scale of a resort like Whistler, where 3-4 categories are inevitably broad for a system of many, many trails.

When faced with a risk and poorly defined categories, I am now more aware that I must be vigilant about gathering information and creating more ‘informed’ categories that might be more narrowly defined.

#3 – Surround yourself with people better than you, but you might not see the benefits until you are alone.

 
While I was forced to part with my friends for long periods during the week, the “alone time” actually did have some benefit.

When I was with them (and they skied more gracefully), I never felt like I had improved myself.

However, once I was skiing by myself, I began to focus more inwardly on my increasing sense of comfort with speed, abrupt turning, and fewer breaks. My time with friends – all better than I was – had its intended effect, but I did not fully realize it until I was in a new environment entirely.

I’ve heard the advice many times to surround myself with people better than me in some way, in order to accelerate my growth and development. And I don’t think a change of environment is required to be able to see these benefits.

But if you find yourself stuck partway down this path, I’d suggest a change of environment purely to get you out of comparing yourself to the same people every day.


Who says vacation time isn’t valuable? This ski trip not only strengthened friendships and created beautiful memories (and pictures for social networks)… but it also reinforced some lessons that I could apply to life elsewhere.