LEARNING FROM YOUNG LEADERS : Question 3

And when I asked the cadets assembled in Eisenhower Hall, “How many of you have failed at something here at West Point?” well, four thousand hands went up. “How many experienced some profound sense of inadequacy?” Four thousand hands went up. Let me see a show of hands in this room. How many, some time in your life, have felt a profound sense of inadequacy relative to what you faced?

{Laughter}

Yes. How can you reframe the entire experience as you are not failing; you are growing?

So, did Tommy ever succeed on the Dawn Wall? Two thousand eight hundred and one days after that day in May when he asked whether a BHAG has to be achievable, Tommy stood on the top, having succeeded on the Dawn Wall. But that’s not the really impressive part of the story. There are thirty pitches on the climb. After he had climbed the hardest middle pitches—pitches 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20—he stood on a thing called Wino Tower. There are one thousand feet to go, and those of us who knew Tommy knew that those last one thousand feet would not be hard for him, that he could push to the top in one go, grab the glory, the hardest climb in history with the whole world watching.

And it’s January, cool enough to grab those little holds, but that comes with a risk, which is that if you get a snowstorm, it could wipe out the ascent because you get the snow on top, which then melts into ice sheets, which then break off like windowpanes of guillotines that come slicing down at you. Horrifying. So, every day that goes by is a risk that it could still come to an end. And there was a problem. Tommy’s partner, Kevin Jorgeson, was stuck back down at pitch 15. You have a choice. Do you push to the top, grab the summit, achieve the BHAG? Or do you do what Tommy did? Tommy went back down, risked the extra day, stayed on the wall, and committed himself to getting Kevin through the climb. And coached him and stayed with him and belayed him through 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20; and they summited together as a team.

{Applause}