Entrepreneurship Is The Test Of The Master Mountain Climber
Defeat, Triumphs, And Perseverance
Over Thanksgiving, I was able to read a bit as well as watch more shows and movies than usual. In between catching up on Westworld and football, I watched Meru — a 2015 documentary film about climbing the Shark’s Fin route on Mount Meru. The cringe-worthy moments throughout the film mirrored my personal experiences as an entrepreneur. Mountain climbing and entrepreneurship are analogous to one another.
Mount Meru is a mountain located in the Indian Himalayas and is 21,850 ft high. The mountain has three peaks: southern (21,850 ft), central (20,700 ft), and northern (21,160 ft). Although shorter in height than the other peaks, the central peak, is viewed as the most treacherous of the three. In particular, the Shark’s Fin route up the central peak is hazardous because it presents hidden or unpredictable dangers. The Shark’s Fin itself is essentially a 1,500 sheet of smooth rock. It’s precisely this danger that Meru has deterred mountain climbers from successfully climbing time and time again — until 2011.
“You can’t just be a good ice climber. You can’t just be good at altitude. You can’t just be a good rock climber. It’s defeated so many good climbers and maybe will defeat everybody for all time. Meru isn’t Everest. On Everest you can hire Sherpas to take most of the risks. This is a whole different kind of climbing.” — Jon Krakauer, the bestselling author of Into Thin Air
Although the historic climb was completed in 2011, it began much earlier with an experienced team of climbers. In 2008, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk arrived in India to conquer Meru and things didn’t go as planned. As the official website explains:
What was meant to be a seven-day trip with the equivalent amount of food became a 20-day odyssey in sub-zero temperatures, thanks to the setback of a massive storm that showered the mountain with at least 10 feet of snow. Like everyone before them, their journey was not a successful one. But they had reached further than anyone else, beaten back just 100 meters below the elusive summit.
Heartbroken and defeated, Anker, Chin and Ozturk returned to their everyday lives, swearing never to attempt the journey again. But they faced sudden physical and emotional challenges back home, too, challenges only exacerbated by the siren song of Meru, one that Anker perhaps heard the loudest. By September 2011, Anker had convinced his two lifelong friends to undertake the Shark’s Fin once more, under even more extraordinary circumstances than the first time around.
The failed attempt in 2008 is probably more integral to their story than actually accomplishing the climb years later in 2011. Between both ascents, the team dealt with life-threatening injuries, rehabilitation, loss, and fear. Meru’s human aspects to failure provided a lens into the personal lives of the team members. When we hear of startups calling it quits we rarely hear how it’s impacted the rest of the team and what they undergo before returning to the mountain— sometimes never again. There’s a scene when the team is facing 90% of mountain left above them and Conrad Anker completes Jimmy Chin’s sentence, with a sense of doubt in his voice, “the center of the universe is unattainable.” But when this is all you know and all you want to do, you’ll inevitably find a way to achieve the impossible.
“The idea of not climbing was too much to imagine.” — Jimmy Chin
Climbing may be the vehicle for this story, but the themes are transferable to entrepreneurship in a number of ways such as:
- Choosing the right partners
- Making calculated risks
- Technical skill
- Conducting extensive research
- Trust
- Deflationary economics
- Responsibility for others
- Obsession
Meru is an incredible story of defeat, triumphs, and perseverance. The climbers, much like entrepreneurs, had the willingness to assume all the risks and potential rewards by undertaking a new venture. Like business, life is not linear. There are time delays and unpredictability. I encourage every entrepreneur to watch Meru today.
View the official trailer of the film below:
