Tapping creativity can be like climbing a mountain
In a September National Geographic article, climber Mark Jenkins tells how he and his team tried, and only barely failed, to summit Hkakabo Razi (KA-kuh-bo RAH-zee) in Myanmar. They wanted both to prove it is the highest peak in Southeast Asia by being the first to take a GPS measurement at the summit and to hike in a place that is truly remote. Hkakabo Razi took weeks of walking just to reach.
The tale of their quest brought to mind the process of a startup company, or any creative endeavor for that matter.
The team first decided on the target mountain, located in the jungles of northern Myanmar on the border of Tibet, just beyond the eastern edge of the Himalayas. They prepared for the arduous climb ahead, planning routes, amassing supplies and finding porters to help carry gear.
After a one-month trek “through dense jungle riven with plunging forges and inhabited by venomous snakes,” they reached the mountain, Jenkins wrote. It was there that he realized that what he had wished for — remoteness — “was the very thing that threatened our expedition from the beginning.”
Describing the difficult climb, Jenkins talked about two of his climbing partners, Cory Richards and Renan Ozturk: “The wind slams into me, and I desperately grip my ice axes to keep from being ripped off the mountain face…Beneath my crampons is a 5,000-foot drop…I am roped to my two companions, with nothing attaching us to the mountain. A fall here would send all three of us plummeting to our death…We are too far apart to talk. We just stand there, together but alone…”
Finally, after 39 days of getting to the mountain and clawing their way up, the team figured it was ready to reach the summit. It was not to be. The mountain's deep notches would have required another day of climbing, which at that point meant a night of clinging to the side of the mountain in the wind and risking freezing to death.
“Nothing is more damning in the mountains than hubris, yet hubris is fundamental to climbing mountains,” Jenkins wrote. So is deep trust in your partners, as he described a typical moment of climbing: “Together we traverse the first of a series of large rock spires…If one of us were to slip off the lance-like ridge, the only way to save his life would be for the next climber on the rope to quickly throw himself off the opposite side, both men praying in the millisecond of potential oblivion that the rope isn't pulled taut over a knife-sharp rock and severed.”
As I read Jenkins' words, I thought of my own creative process when I write, and of the processes I'd heard from the many entrepreneurs I'd interviewed over my journalism career.
His description of getting the right team together to identify and tackle a goal, decide how to get there and bring in expertise paralleled that of entrepreneurs and creators. So, too, did the setbacks, the stress and tension of the climb, the arguments, the achievements, the tradeoffs and the ultimate results.
The work as a team, yet the aloneness of digging deep inside oneself for ideas in areas so remote you may not have known they were there, all ring true in the creative process.
So, too, does that last desperate effort to achieve your goal even when you suspect you might not.
And finally the realization that, regardless of the outcome, all you want to do is get out alive.
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