At the end of the summer of ’92, my cousin Luke and I decided to ride our bikes to Mt. St. Helens. We were going to find a path to the top even if we were the first people to do so.
I can still remember the decision point. We were sitting on the porch at my house talking about Mt. St. Helens for some reason. It came up from time to time because hey, there she was, brooding on the northern horizon our entire lives. Just as she had been since flea-bitten Lewis and Clark first strolled down the Columbia, and millennia before that.
Well, not JUST as she always had been. On May 18, 1980, she’d had a bit of work done.
Luke is about four years younger than me. As with all of the men in my family, he’s more pragmatic, aggressive, and therefore more successful. (All I got from the gene pool was the good looks and humility.) From the time we were kids, Luke was able to tap into some otherworldly energy source that would they would definitely try to drug out of him nowadays. We’d call it A.D.D.
Back then, as today, it was his fire.
Luke probably came up with the Big Idea first. When he proposed it, I no doubt waffled and came up with all the reasons it couldn’t be done. He persisted, likely for hours, until we were finally packing up some gear and supplies to strap to our bikes. In a move that would be unthinkable nowadays, we got permission from our parents to ride all the way up to the volcano on narrow, two-lane roads used by stoned loggers.
We rode like outlaw bikers on our 10-speeds toward the volcano.
Luke had called me up the other day with a new business idea. We got to talking about this and that and then he asked me about what I was working on. I gave him the overview but I mentioned all the reasons why it was a slog.
“Excuses,” he said flatly.
I forgot who I was talking to, and I doubled down. “No - I really have to do these things before I can do the other things.”
“What happened to you?” He said. “You were going to be elite. You were the big idea guy. Now all I hear is bitching.”
And so it went. Brutally. But lovingly. As man cousins do.
It made me think about that Mt. St. Helens adventure. We had gone from Big Idea to execution in 12 hours, tops. Now, as an adult, everything gets pass through an internal committee first. That committee has one job and one job only: To avoid risk. To maximize the chances of success and minimize the risk of failure. Unfortunately, we spend far more time thinking only of all the ways we will fail. The bigger the vision, the bigger the risk, the more resistance. Hell, we churchy types even excel at making a moral argument for avoiding certain big visions. “It’s pride.” “It’s vanity.”
It’s cowardice.
We also excel at putting all kinds of prudent excuses in front of the effort to simply do the thing. The reasons. Oh, the reasons…
“It’s not the right time.”
“It costs too much.”
“What would mom say?”
“I’ll have to ask my wife for permission…”
Or maybe we wistfully let it go for a more stable opportunity. It’s safer. More practical.
My favorite excuse of choice? Elaborate task management systems.
I should show you my Trello app. It has multiple boards with multiple lists filled with multiple tasks. Tasks? No, call them wishes. It’s automated so that when I add a date to a card, it puts it in my “Weekly Action Board.” On the due date, it automatically moves tasks to my “Today’s Action List.”
It’s efficient.
It’s organized.
It’s impossible to finish all the tasks.
The psychic gravity of these tasks is a daily drain on my soul. I go round and round about the usefulness of them; about whether I’m just not the kind of guy who can discipline himself to stick to a project management system, or if I’m just being lazy.
The emerging conclusion: I just need to focus on the one, important thing and let the other stuff fall by the wayside until I’ve accomplished what I think is most important, or, the harsh verdict of reality rules that I can’t do it. Or that maybe I shouldn’t…
I was listening to Tim Stoddart’s Copyblogger podcast last night on a late-night drive from Tulsa to OKC. He interviewed Charles Miller, a successful copywriter and digital entrepreneur. Charles shared his discipline and routine, which boils down to a few simple things, as successful enterprises always seem to do:
Block out the time to do The Thing
Do The Thing.
Eliminate all distractions, especially digital distractions
He said, regarding how he has always muted his phone’s notifications, “My phone hasn’t made a sound in ten years.”
That’s it. Why do we make it so hard?
We never did make it all the way to Mt. St. Helens. It was, by definition, all uphill, after all. And not to go too deep into it, but let me tell you something about denim shorts, bike seats, sweat and friction: it does awful, painful things to places you don’t want to injure that take several days to heal. Also, if your diet consists of Safeway’s “Texas Donuts” and Pepsi, your performance will be sub-Lance Armstrongian.
We came across a campground about halfway to the volcano. Looking at Google Maps today, I would bet it’s the one at Saddle Dam Park.
We made an effort to set up the tent and resolved to conquer the mountain the next day, but it didn’t take long. I found a payphone and called my mom. She picked us up just as the last of the sun melted into the mountains. For some reason I’ve always remembered that sunset.
It would be more than ten years later before I finally made it to the summit of Mt. St. Helens. I drove to the southern side of the mountain. I knew there were roads that went right up to the visitor’s center, and you could probably walk a leisurely trail to the rim of the she-beast, but I wanted to climb and, yes, conquer.
I did it, and it was sufficiently arduous to get a story out of it (maybe for another time…) I almost gave up during the top third leg of the climb - that was the ash zone, which, because pumice contains a lot of glass, reflects the sunlight above and behind you back into your face from the front. The fact that I don’t have skin cancer yet is a miracle. It was like hiking Mons Huygens on the moon.
It’s not cold on the moon, by the way.
Still, I made it. I have a picture in a trunk in some state somewhere. I wish I’d gotten a picture of the other volcano-conquerers that day. There were probably a dozen people up there. One of them - no joke - was an elderly lady using a walker. They’d all taken the leisurely trail from the visitor’s center.
That’s another stupid habit of mine - doing it differently than everyone else. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s social anxiety. I don’t know. I just know that if the crowd is going that way…maaaaaybe I’ll find another way. This impulse has most definitely not served me well. I now have almost almost five decades of data telling me that going solo is not an “optimum success vector.”
Nonetheless, another mountain looms ahead, like an enormous Philistine standing amidst the broken forms of all who have come before.
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I’m convicted.
Embrace your irresponsible inner child, Father. (But, you know...responsibly.)