Tag: values

A Peak Behind the Lens

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“Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.” – Albert Einstein

When I trekked to Everest base camp in 2001, we flew a fixed wing aircraft from Kathmandu to a dusty hilltop in the Himalayas. Then a helicopter swooped in and flew us to Lukla at about 10,000 feet of elevation. And then we trekked about 30 miles to base camp from there.

Base camp, which sits at an elevation of about 17,600 feet, was a small city with each team having a dozen or more tents around a central dining tent and communications tent.

A small section of base camp from my photos taken in 2001.

I recently watched two Everest films. The Man Who Skied Down Everest recommended by Dr. Gerald Stein. It’s a Canadian documentary filmed in 1970 and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1975. Six sherpa were killed during the expedition in a collapse of the Khumbu icefall.

The second was Everest recommended by Vicki Atkinson.  It was a Hollywood film production released in 2015 about the 1996 Everest blizzard that killed eight people.

In the 1975 film, it took a team of 800 people to support getting the supplies the expedition needed to the mountain. But there were very few other climbers on the mountain.

In the Everest film, they got to the mountain much like I did and there were so many more climbers. Teams tried to organize the summit attempts so that climbers weren’t slowed down and freezing while waiting for their turn at choke points like the Hillary Step. In that film, they attributed the change in the number of climbers to Rob Hall, the incredibly infusive and strong guide from New Zealand who died in the storm, being willing to guide amateur climbers up Everest.

In a lot of climbing circles, it’s believed the trend actually started when Dick Bass (who owned Alta ski resort in Utah) and Frank Wells (who was President of Disney) dreamed up the project to climb the tallest peak on each continent, The Seven Summits. Dick and Frank then they hired people like my friend, Phil, to guide them up the mountains.

Regardless, there is no doubt there are challenges climbing Everest today that come from overcrowding and general human behavior like selfishness, ego, and disregard for nature. It’s not hard to imagine the Everest challenges as a fitting allegory about our world overall.

Thankfully, there are also heroes in the story.

When Beck Weathers needed to be helped down the mountain, filmmaker David Breashears and climber Ed Viesturs tied him in between them and basically walked him down as far as they could. David and Ed were up there along filming an IMAX film with Jamling Norgay, the son of the Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing was the Sherpa that successfully achieved the first ascent of Everest with Edmund Hillary.

I am in awe of the filmmakers who capture this incredible climbing footage. In an interview, I heard David Breashears describe how he practiced loading the IMAX film in a special cold room. He had to do it without gloves on because a speck on that film would look enormous on an IMAX screen. Each roll of film only captured 90 seconds of footage.

Filmmakers like David Breashears and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo and Meru), do all the work to film it, manage the extra weight, and execute their creative artistry while they are also doing the hard work of climbing. When they do it well, they make it easy to forget that they are climbing too.

In 1996, when the blizzard hit, the IMAX team was at base camp. They’d seen the crowds and had decided to delay their summit bid. When they heard that people were in trouble and dying, David Breashears told rescuers they could take any of the IMAX team supplies like oxygen tanks, batteries, and food stashed on the upper mountain they needed.

After David and his team offered their supplies and helped evacuate injured climbers, they still managed to summit Everest a couple weeks later and complete their project, albeit with very heavy hearts. The resulting movie Everest (same title as the film above but released in 1998) is the highest-grossing IMAX film.

I was writing this post about the differences on Everest from these two movies when I learned that mountain-climber Lou Whittaker died at age 95. So I switched to writing the post, The Lingering Effects of One Good Person. In the process, I learned that David Breashears also died in March of natural causes. He was 68-years-old. In recent years, David Breashears started Glacier Works, a non-profit highlighting changes to Himalayan glaciers.

(featured photo is mine of Everest, the dark peak in the back)

The Lingering Effect of One Good Person

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“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.” – William Blake

I was eating dinner with Mr. D this past Wednesday night when I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures on my laptop. I have a no device rule at the table but Mr. D kept getting up to do other things during dinner. In his absence, I would flip to the next picture in the slideshow from Lou Whittaker’s obituary in the Seattle Times.

Lou Whittaker, a legendary mountain climber and guide, died on Sunday, March 24 at age 95. In my book, one of the most important accomplishments for a climber is to die of old age.

Lou and his twin brother, Jim, were sometimes referred to as the First Family in American Mountaineering climbing. These two incredibly tall (6’5”) and skinny kids from West Seattle climbed Rainier at age 16, and all the peaks in Washington by age 18.

Lou started Rainier Mountaineering Inc. (RMI) which was the only guiding service on Mt. Rainier for about forty years. When I first attempted Mt. Rainier in 1998, I signed up and climbed with RMI.

Jim started REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.) and was the first American to climb Everest. Jim is still living.

The Seattle Times obituary captured the brothers relationship well:

“After his brother gained international fame for becoming the first American to climb Everest in 1963, Lou Whittaker — who had declined to join the expedition — said if he had, “Fifty feet from the top, we’d have wrestled there in the snow to see who’d be the first up.”

The Seattle Times

Which isn’t to imply that Lou didn’t do the big peaks too. He climbed Denali, K2, Everest, and more. But more importantly, he trained generations of responsible and thoughtful guides.

My friend, Phil Ershler, the first American who climbed the North side of Everest, trained as a guide with RMI.

As did Ed Viesturs, another Seattle boy, who guided for RMI for many years. Also he climbed fourteen 8,000 meter peaks, the world’s highest mountains, without supplemental oxygen and starred in the IMAX film about Everest released in 1998.

I never met Lou but I’ve climbed with and encountered at least 40-50 guides from his company while spending time on Mt. Rainier. To a person, they were helpful people who wanted to teach others about climbing, respect and appreciation of the mountains, and safety. They made the mountain a safer place by participating in rescues and maintaining marked routes.

More than any other accomplishment, and Lou had many, it is that company ethic that stands out to me. There is a whole generation of guides and mountaineers that will likely die of old age because RMI taught them how to be safe and respectful in the mountains. And tens of thousands of mountaineers who know how to handle garbage, waste, and their impact in the mountains because of the lessons taught by RMI.

Lou’s amazing summit pictures celebrate the high points in life. But I thought it worth also memorializing the long effort and incredible impact one guide and leader can have.

(featured photo from Pexels)

P.S. I love telling stories about the remarkable guides that I’ve met or climbed with and the life lessons they passed along. Here are some of my favorites:

  • The time that Ed Viesturs reached the central summit on Shishapangma at 26,273 (8,008m) feet climbing alone. He looked over the 100 meter traverse to the true summit (26,335 feet) and decided it was too dangerous. He had to return eight years later to claim the summit in a safe way.
  • The story of Beck Weathers being left for dead on Everest and Ed Viesturs and filmmaker, David Breashears, giving up their own summit plans to help Beck descend the mountain.
  • My friend, guide, and amazing climber, Phil Ershler who taught me about objective versus subjective risks.
  • The lasting impact Phil had teaching me how to walk lightly in the mountains and in life.
  • How I learned from Phil about how different things look on the return trip.

A Legacy of Love

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“The one thing that we can never get enough of is love.
And the one thing that we can never give enough of is love.” – Henry Miller

When I published my book about my dad eight years ago, there was a consistent kernel of comment that I got about it from his peers that read it. It was stated or implied that they hoped they were remembered as fondly.

I’ve sat with that nugget for a long time to try to unravel what that meant. I’ve come to believe it reveals a truth about what’s important.

Let me start off with a list of the things that my dad wasn’t good at. He worked too much. He left the hard work of parenting largely to my mom. He could be sloppy with details. He was conflict averse and would turn most anything into something funny and light so as not to have to deal with it. He didn’t show his struggles or any negative emotion in a way that would make him more relatable.

But he had one major thing he did right consistently – he loved people. He managed his own neuroses, opinions, and worries in a way that made him open to love others. He’d say that it was following the example of Jesus to love, accept, and welcome others that allowed him to do that. He believed that was Jesus was the way, the truth and the life, but he also believed that it wasn’t the only truth. He came to appreciate any practice or belief in something bigger than ourselves.

On his birthday about four months after he died, I posted a tribute to him on Facebook based on the Maya Angelou quote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.“. An acquaintance from high school with responded with a comment like, “Not everyone had a dad like that.”

Right. I was incredibly lucky to have a dad that was so effusively warm and whose face lit up every time he saw me. I think he had an advantage as a pastor in that it was part of his profession to practice meeting, accepting and loving people. His resume virtues and his eulogy virtues were aligned, to borrow a phrase from David Brooks.

But I think we all have the opportunity to prioritize supporting and encouraging others in a healthy and boundaried way, and love people the best we can. I suspect it might be the key to how fondly we are remembered. The ultimate paradox is that we give love in order to be loved.

My book about my journey to find what fueled my dad’s indelible spark and twinkle can be found on Amazon: Finding My Father’s Faith.

The Dog Ate My Homework

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“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.” – Mahatma Gandhi

The other night our puppy ate Miss O’s homework. Such a cliché but truly, it happened. It was something she’d brought home finished, so it wasn’t like she had to turn it in. But when she saw the remnants of the paper in Cooper’s dog bed, this homework became the best thing she’d ever done.

Miss O was so angry. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my generally happy kid this angry. She wanted to hit and kick the dog. Someone had to pay for ruining her beautiful work product.

Had it been the beginning of the day, I’m not sure she would have lost it to the degree that she did. But it was the end of the day, and tolerance was down across the family.

So, I stopped her from beating the dog and felt a huge surge of anger in myself as well. Something along the lines of, “How dare you want to hit the dog for ruining things without understanding how many things of mine YOU have destroyed! And do I hit you for that? NO!!!”

Three things strike me about this.

  1. How transferrable anger is
  2. That life is defined by these moments, not just the ones where we are all happy
  3. How much energy it takes to transmute anger into something expressed but not acted upon

Scenes like this make me think about psychologist and author, Jonathan Haidt’s, metaphor of the elephant and the rider. We think our minds are in control but as the rider atop the elephant of our feelings, it’s just an illusion. Or, in this case, it takes a lot of effort for the rider to turn the elephant away from rampaging down a path.

I’ve wondered why we are designed like this but as I see this play out close up with my family, I’m struck by the possibility that how we traverse the gulf between emotion and action is in part driven by our values. We start the groove the reactions and they become at least slightly easier.

That is to say, as we train the dog, we train ourselves.

When we’d all calmed down, I told Miss O that beating a dog doesn’t make it so that it won’t eat your homework, it just makes it a mean or fearful creature. And I suspect that it makes us a little meaner or more fearful when we do the same. So, we lost a piece of homework but learned a little bit of a lesson. Probably a fair trade.

There’s no doubt that I got my values from my parents. For more on my discovery about my dad’s source of the always present glint in his eye, I’ve written a book, Finding My Father’s Faith. For a bit about the courage I learned from my dad, please see my post on Heart of the Matter: The Courage to Not Be Divisive

(featured photo is a photo of Miss O and Cooper in a calmer moment)

Written In the Stars

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“Don’t worry about the darkness for that is when stars shine the brightest.” – Napoleon Hill

Last weekend we were up on Whidbey Island at a beautiful place on Mutiny Bay. At 3am I woke up as documented in my The Whispers of My Failures post and none of my usual tricks helped me go back to sleep.

So I walked to the window and the sky was so beautiful, clear and filled with stars. It was a breathtaking view of which I never see when I’m in the city (nor do I usually look). Instead of going back to bed, I threw on some warm clothes and got my kids out of bed.

I wrapped them in blankets and helped them slip outside to sit on the break wall and look at the stars. Miss O saw two shooting stars, the Big Dipper and Orion’s belt right away. I pointed out the Milky Way galaxy and the Seven Sisters (Pleiades) and then Mr D asked what the noise was. It was a cruise ship all lit up (see featured photo) and heading south to dock in port in Seattle at sunrise. Then as we turned to go back inside, a second cruise ship steamed by.

I told the story of what I’d done to my mom when she came over for dinner this week, and she said, “You are a good mom. I would have never done that.”

Then she added, “But it’s stuff like that they’ll remember.”

I’m not claiming any parental award for this star gazing outing though. All I did was let my God voice outweigh my practical voice. I listened to that inner whisper that asked, “When will this night come again?”

It took a little work but my kids went back to sleep. As I settled back into bed I felt the full circle realization of the majority of why I try (and sometimes fail) these days – for these beautiful little lives that I’m responsible for. And for them to know beauty – like of the night sky.

Somehow, waking them up at 3am was the perfect cure for aligning me with what I value most. No surprise because when I honor that small God voice inside it usually does reward me with that alignment to what matters most.

As I fell back asleep, I did so with a little piece of the world’s beauty in my heart and proof of my most enduring efforts sleeping next door.

At the Core

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“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” – Henry Ford

Last weekend we drove about 15 minutes down to Shilshole Bay on Puget Sound to see a dock where sea lions like to congregate. It was packed with sea lions – usually a dozen on the dock and I counted a least a dozen more swimming in the water.

Every once in a while, a sea lion would launch itself out of the water in an attempt to land on the dock. The new weight would make the dock roll one way or the other causing all the sea lions to bark. But there was one sea lion in the center who was doing most of the work to keep the dock level. It would lift its head high and shift its weight this way or that to stabilize the dock again.

It made me think of how impactful what is at the center is. As I was pondering what was at my core, Life, in that beautiful way that sometimes happens, delivered the answers to the question I’d just uncovered. In this case it was through the latest the Unlocking Us podcast about living into our values. In it, Brené Brown had an exercise to determine our core values.

Her research shows that when in a tight spot, most people call on their one or two go-to values. So on her site, there is a pdf of about 120 values. Her recommended approach was to circle the ones that called to you and then distill them to the two values that encompass what is central for you. It may change over time but this exercise was to identify what is key for right now.

Doing the exercise, I came up with faith and usefulness. Faith, which for me encapsulates confidence, courage, adventure, integrity, spirituality, openness, love, optimism and gratitude. Usefulness I thought did a good job of rolling up my other values of reliability, learning, kindness, growth, family, and independence,.

Over the years I’ve done a lot of work to strengthen my physical core. It has enabled me to carry heavy loads up mountains and I feel it most now when I hoist my toddler onto my shoulders. But thinking about my core values, faith and usefulness, I realize that they are what I go to again and again to power me when I have to dig deep. Like with the sea lions, when I am living into my values, they are the center that brings me back to level when the world is rocking.

The Verdict

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“Integrity is the ability to listen to a place inside oneself that doesn’t change, even though the life that carries it may change.” – Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man

Elizabeth Holmes, the tech entrepreneur and founder of Theranos whose trial has fascinated me for the last 4 months, was found guilty on 4 counts of fraud and conspiracy for lying to investors and not guilty on 4 counts. The jury was hung on 3 counts.

As I’ve written about this, I realized that it’s triggered my past experiences with money in tech and the question of how to develop character when people are throwing money at you. Listening to the jury’s decision, I don’t disagree with their findings but I’m flooded with empathy for her.

That’s probably because I can relate in a very small way to her experiences. The specific incident I’m thinking of was in 2007 when my two business partners (one of whom was my husband) and I were buying a small office building for our little company of 19 people to use as an office.

On the Friday before the closing, the bank realized that we all had one more paper to sign – a personal guarantee of the bank loan. It had to be received by Monday and my husband and the other business partner were traveling to a client’s wine tasting weekend. My husband wanted me to forge our other business partner’s signature on the document. The other business partner wanted me to forge his signature on the document. Neither of them wanted to be bothered to find a FedEx office from which to overnight the document in question.

I felt immense pressure to do it. The two of them, my husband and our other partner had made many business and personnel decisions that I didn’t agree with and I thought I could insulate myself by just focusing on my part of the business. But this was over the top. I held my ground after repeated phone calls and texts and refused to do it. There was no way I was going to forge a signature on a personal guarantee for a bank loan.

Two years later after the market crashed in 2008 and real estate prices dropped significantly so that the valuation of the building was under water, the bank put the loan into a special assets group. We had never missed a payment (and thankfully never did) but they felt the loan deserved additional scrutiny. Fortunately, my business partners had eventually figured out how to FedEx the personal guarantee document so it was on file.

By this time both the business partnership and my marriage had fallen apart so I was the one handling all the details. To say I was so relieved I didn’t forge that signature is an understatement. I shepherded the building through those tough years until we could sell it for what we bought it for and gratefully walked away.

But all this happened when I was almost 40-years-old and had almost 20 years of business experience both working for others and for myself. I doubted myself. I felt the huge pressure. I thought it would have been so much easier to not have the values I was raised with. I’m not so sure I would have been able to hold out to what these guys said was “business as usual” had I been in my 20’s like Elizabeth Holmes.

We don’t often get to see what we are able to avoid when we don’t do something risky. In this case I did and now with the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, I’m reminded of it again. If it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do, don’t do it. It doesn’t matter if someone tells you it’s how it’s done or makes it seem like how sophisticated and experienced people act. Thanks for raising me with these values, Mom and Dad!

(featured photo by Pexels)

Know Your Audience

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“Integrity is the ability to listen to a place inside oneself that doesn’t change, even though the life that carries it may change.” – Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man

My 6-year-old daughter asked me yesterday if stealing was bad. I told her it was always wrong and then tried to illustrate it with the example of us going to the store to buy groceries and then coming out and finding our car was stolen. How would we feel? Would that be okay? She countered, “But then we could just walk home.”

I agreed with her resourcefulness and then tried another example. “What if someone stole our Halloween decorations we just put up this weekend?” “That”, she emphatically agreed, “would be so, so bad! You can’t just go around taking other people’s Halloween decorations!”

Which reminded me that while our values don’t change, stories need to be tailored to the audience. 😊

High-Tech Drama

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“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain

I’ve been listening to The DropOut podcast about the trial of Elizabeth Holmes that is starting this week and it’s got me hooked. Elizabeth Holmes is the woman who dropped out of Stanford after one year and started Theranos, a company she said would revolutionize the blood testing industry because with just one drop of blood they could analyze for up to 200 factors. She raised billions of dollars of investor money, signed a huge deal with Walgreens, was on the cover of Fortune magazine, and lived a 5 star lifestyle. The technology never worked. Now she’s standing trial for 12 counts of fraud and facing 20 years in prison. She maintains her innocence saying this is the resistance you meet when you try to change the world.

This is not the uplifting, inspiring content that I usually listen to but I find it so reminiscent of my early career in tech that I can’t helped be taken in by the characters. When I graduated from college with my electrical engineering degree, I spent a lot of time working on projects as a consultant at Microsoft in its early days. They were growing so fast they gobbled up engineers. The narcissistic, massive egos, show-off-smart, bullying personalities they describe at Theranos remind me of some of the people I worked with back then.

Microsoft revolutionized the idea of giving stock to employees and they did it at all levels of the company so when the company did well, everyone made money. It was a big change from the old days when the engineers were paid a salary and when a company was successful, it was usually the sales people and the executives that got rich. At Microsoft in those early days when the stock went up so fast, everyone was getting rich. I remember working at a trade show with a Microsoft employee who just sat and watched the stock ticker all day so that they could calculate what “they made” during that day.

It made their employees very loyal and very proud but created a lot of arrogance and petty behavior.  I observed people who met with resistance to an idea and would throw a fit announcing that “they were going to retire.” Usually it was someone that was in their mid-30’s. <eye-roll> Once I working on a tech conference where we were practicing the keynote speech and a MS executive didn’t like the version of the script he was given. He shamed and bullied the person who had stayed up all night working on the recent revisions in such a loud and vocal way that it made me physically feel ill just to watch.

I probably learned more about human behavior, leadership and integrity in those days than all the rest of my career combined. I don’t work with those types of clients any more and other than the lessons that I’m grateful to have gleaned, I don’t miss those days. My 6-year-old daughter said something about someone in the news the other day – “Well, they are famous so they must be good.” We had to take a minute to talk about how character and values don’t necessarily come with fame and fortune.

In the coming months we’ll find out whether the jury will hold Elizabeth Holmes accountable for the billions of dollars she lost or whether that’s the price of doing business. In the years since Theranos went defunct in 2018, she’s started a relationship with a man from a wealthy hotelier family and they had a baby born just 6 weeks before the trial started. However it turns out, listening to the details as they are presented, being reminded of my days watching the power of money makes me so grateful for my life now in the slow lane where I earn my living with no drama attached.

Minding My Own Business

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“If what you believe does not impact how you behave than what you believe is not important.” – Shaykh Yassir Fazaga

This year I’m celebrating having my own business for 20 years. It’s hard to unpack all that means to me but my business was there before I got married and carried me through when I got divorced. It gave me the flexibility to trek to Everest Base Camp for 3 1/2 weeks when I was single and has given me the time and money to have kids as a single woman now. It’s held different structures like when I had business partners and employees and like now when I am a sole proprietor with subcontractors. There have been ups and downs that seemed so huge that they’d swallow me at the time but now in hindsight are now just good stories. While many of the things I’ve learned are specific to my company’s focus which is to provide consulting to businesses about how they can better implement computer collaboration like document sharing and approval processes, the three most key lessons are life lessons:

  • Always pay everyone else, including the government, before you pay yourself. I remember the first payment I got 20 years ago was for $5,000 and it seemed like so much money that I went out and bought a tile saw so I could tile the floor of my home office. But once I paid the state and city taxes, my start up costs and legal fees, my take home was about $1,200. I could still afford the tile saw but I learned not to look at any payment as my money. Instead I pay my expenses often before the client remits payment so that when I look at the bank account, I know how much I can pay myself.
  • Finish your projects and create relationships, and your reputation will take care of much of your marketing. After my business partner told me of my now ex-husband’s infidelities and it became clear we needed to all go our separate ways, I was left maintaining a small office building that we all still owned together. It was after the financial crisis of 2008 so the building was worth less than the mortgage and we couldn’t sell it. So I went to the local SBA office to talk with someone about how to restructure the loan. He gave me a series of things I had to do, accounting, legal and structural and told me if I did, we could restructure them. It took me five months of hard work and when I made an appointment with him and returned, he said, “Wow, you came back. Not many people do.” Which made me cry. And I also was able to reshape the loan to work until I could sell the building. That same tenacity in finishing projects and maintaining my reputation through all circumstances has worked to give me repeat business and referrals that have made the business easier to run over time.
  • Have faith. Every year at this time, my business slows down in late summer because people are on vacation. It doesn’t matter that it’s different customers on one year versus the next, it always happens. And I always worry. So the third lesson is have faith. I think of it like the story of Manna in the Bible. Enough manna would fall each day to feed the Israelites when they were in the desert. But they couldn’t store it from one day to the next. They had to have faith it would come again the next day.
    So I spend August doing my part – honing my skills and reaching out to people and sooner or later my pipeline fills and the business continues. Like with all problems, worrying only drains the energy out of what needs to be done so I’ve learned take a deep breath, focus on faith and keep working.

I’ve heard the phrase “it’s not personal, it’s business” many times. It seems often right before someone is unkind or unfair to someone else. I’m guessing whoever coined that phrase didn’t run a small business for 20 years because at some point it becomes indistinguishable. But when your values are infused in your business, it can be a beautiful thing.