I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where there are the best rock climbing venues and the best climbers in the world. When I was only a teenager, my stepfather signed me up for rock climbing training, and I muttered ungrateful, "I'd rather study." As a result, after the first day of class, I knew I had found the love of my life

For me, rock climbing is the ultimate classroom, where you can find inspiration from all aspects of life, including enterprises, management, leadership and scientific research. This kind of practice usually doesn't give people who make mistakes a second chance-death ends all learning. But I was lucky enough to survive my mistakes, and I learned important enlightenment which is very useful for my life and work.

Lesson one

Insist on climbing, preferring to lag behind rather than fail: how to succeed without breaking down?

My friend Matt and I stopped at the corner of the mountain road, and a magnificent rock stood in front of us: a smooth, slightly protruding silver-white granite wall with a thin crack the size of a fingertip passing through it.

"You see, that's why I call this route a crystal ball." Matt pointed to a quartzite handle about 50 feet away from us above the rock wall, the size of a baseball.

We threw the rope up and I started climbing, hoping to see a climb. The first climb means that I successfully climbed for the first time without any route information, and I didn't fall down once. The first climber has only one chance. If he screws up and falls on the rope, he can no longer be called the first climber.

Ten feet away from the crystal ball, my feet became unstable and I kicked off many pebbles. I clenched my thumb and hooked my hands on a raised rock wall. There is only one thought in my heart: "I wish I could reduce the weight of my fingers a little more …" The excitement of climbing for the first time increased my pressure. I hold on to every rock point too tightly, just like a runner is too nervous and sprints too fast.

"Take a deep breath, Jim, you need to relax," Matt's voice calmed me down a little.

I slowly relaxed my fingers and adjusted my breathing, but my mind was still spinning. "If I make a mistake, I will never have a chance ... but even if this step is right, I'm still not sure that I have enough strength to climb into the crystal ball ... If I can't get there, I can't hang the rope into the next protection point to fix it ... How far should I fall ..."

In hesitation, time is running out.

"Okay, Matt, I'm leaving."

Pull your right hand horizontally and move your left foot to the wall. Shit, I should grab the wall with my left hand. I move my body to the left, trying to catch any protruding rock wall or stone so that my right hand can move up quickly, and then grab the wall with my left hand. I put my right finger on a downward rock angle, but it is difficult to pull sideways at this angle. At present, my chances of success are less than 20%: if I continue to act, I will fall, and it will be thirty feet; Even if you can really climb up, the higher you climb, the deeper you fall without the protection of another rock bolt.

"get down!" I yelled at Matt.

"no!" He shouted, "You only have three moves left to reach the crystal ball. You must do it! " "

"get down!" I shouted again.

After that, I let go and fell down the rope with good control. I hung on the rope for about ten minutes, gradually regained my strength, and then swung to the rock wall. This time I grabbed every grip and climbed to the top of the mountain smoothly.

This is certainly not the first climb. Although later that day, I challenged the route again, climbed from below and reached the top in one breath, but no matter how successful I was this time, I knew I had failed. Not in action, but in mentality. Because, at the moment when I should go all out, I let go and gave up. As a matter of fact, I chose to fail rather than fall.

Failure and depravity. The difference between the two is extremely subtle, but significant. When you fall, although you can't reach the top of the mountain, you never give up. Falling is when your people fall, and failure is when your heart has given up.

Climbing down means that you have tried your best to climb up-even if the probability of success is less than 20%, 10%, or even 5%. You are not reserved, use up every bit of your mind and physical strength, and you will never make excuses for yourself. Even if there is more fear, pain, nausea and uncertainty, you still ask yourself to behave 100%.

Falling is when your people fall, and failure is when your heart has given up.

To the onlookers, failure and falling look the same (both falling from the air), but the internal experience of falling is completely different from failure.

Only when we choose to fall, not fail, will we find our true limits. Yes, I have less than 20% chance to climb into the crystal ball, but because I chose to give up, I am never sure what the actual result will be. Maybe I can use other skills, maybe I still have the strength to do another set of moves, or, as I later discovered, the next grip is actually very easy.

That's the hard part. During the first climb (or life), you don't know whether the grip will be hard or easy next time. It is this ambiguity that makes it difficult to get involved.

One of my life mentors, designer SaraLittleTurnbull, once gave me a wall with a famous saying in her 1992 speech at the Industrial Design Foundation: "If you don't work hard, you won't know where the limit is."

If you don't work hard, you don't know where the limit is.

More than 80-year-old Demble is the founder of the "Change Process Laboratory" in stanford graduate school of business. She is famous as a design consultant for Coca-Cola, Corning, Pfizer, 3M and Volvo Cars, and is described as "the secret weapon of CEO's product design and development".

She told me that some of her best design ideas were born at the moment when she was about to fail, but she refused to give up.

Of course, most of the designs that were about to fail eventually failed. But occasionally, because she refused to give up, she pushed herself to a completely different new realm, and extraordinary creativity was born. "This is a breakthrough," she said. "You must go to the brink of failure and motivate yourself to stick to it, and you will walk out of a different realm."

Studying the excellent enterprises in these years has made me understand how the best * * * instinctively understands this truth. For example, Smith, CEO of Kimberly Clark, is facing "backward vs" in order to help the company leap forward. Failure ",made a key decision.

Smith knows that the best opportunity for Kimberly's transformation is in the field of consumer paper. In order to show his determination that the kettle will never turn back, he decided to sell all the traditional industrial paper mills, and then put the money into consumer paper to face the great enemies such as Scott and Baojian. Wall Street laughed at him, and the financial media didn't think highly of him, but Kimberly eventually turned over and became a global leader in consumer paper.

Smith knows very well that the only way to succeed is to go all out, rather than give up.

Now I see life as a series of choices of falling or failing. Just like the first climb, the next grip of life is often vague and difficult to distinguish. This ambiguity makes us shrink back, unable to go all out, so we give up and let go in our hearts. We would rather control the local decline than continue to climb at the risk of falling deeper. But whether you start a new business, publish a new book or try a new design, falling down rarely means destruction. Most importantly, the only way to find your true limit is to fall bravely, not fail.

I am forty-five years old, and the pull-ups for grasping stones are not as powerful as when I was twenty years old. However, over the years, I have deeply realized that the loss of physical strength can be supplemented by the growth of mental strength. So I continued to walk between into the badlands and the cliffs, looking for a chance to fall.

I even redefined the condition of "success"-I don't have to climb to the top, what matters is whether I devote myself wholeheartedly. On a recent rock climbing trip, I didn't successfully complete the top attack of any route, but it was one of the most successful experiences of rock climbing, because I bravely climbed up and insisted on climbing down every time I tried. I had a good time on my way home. On that day, my mind was strong, not as weak as most days. Because climbing is not to conquer rocks, but to conquer ourselves. This is why we should dare to climb and fall.

Rock climbing is not conquering rocks, but conquering ourselves.

Lesson 2

Distinguish between probability and consequence: how to understand the real risk, success and life-saving.

But sometimes, it's not a hero, but stupidity that makes you climb up and down.

1975 In the summer, a young climber named David Bouwisy took a fancy to a beautiful rock on the cliff in the southern mountainous area of Bode, which had never been climbed before. There have been no good climbers in this area for many years. The main reason is not the difficulty, but the lack of natural protection points on the rock wall.

Bouwisi couldn't see any cracks that could be stuffed into the fixed rock wedge. I saw that the cliff first rose vertically about five stories high, covered with gravel and acute angles, and then retreated slightly into a rock wall of 85 degrees, which seemed to have a big grasping point.

Bouvici began to climb, with ropes hanging from his body and a small amount of rock wedges. Climbing 50 feet, he was horrified to find that the rock wall above was actually more difficult to climb than below, and there were almost no cracks in the rock wedge. After thousands of years of rain erosion and polishing, the rock surface is smooth and flat, and even the grasping point can not find the angle of force. Once he falls, he will fall from a height of 60 feet and fall on a pile of boulders scattered on the ground, and die on the spot.

Is this situation dangerous?

That depends on how you define "danger". It's not dangerous for Bouwisi. Of course, the consequences of falling are serious, but the possibility of his falling is almost zero. Because bovis is a rock climbing genius at the peak, this route is like a puzzle he wants to solve, but it is not particularly difficult.

If Bouvici had let the possibility of falling off a cliff ferment in his mind, he might have died long ago, but he didn't, because he could distinguish the possibility of falling off a cliff from the consequences of falling off a cliff, and climbed to the top of the mountain with focused accuracy, and successfully created a new route, which is called "thrilling journey".

The principle of distinguishing probability from consequence applies not only to rock climbing, but also to work, life and enterprises. 1994, Intel first discovered the floating-point arithmetic unit of Pentium chip. Due to the small flaws in design, there is a little mistake in the division operation, which is equivalent to the division error of ordinary spreadsheet users every 27000 years.

Such a small error probability makes Intel's * * * ignore the costly consequences. A professor of mathematics really encountered a mistake when he was calculating a complicated problem. The matter spread quickly on the Internet, which attracted the attention of the media. At that time, Intel CEO Grove described in the book Ten Times that his company was chased by CNN, ridiculed by financial media and even shocked by dissatisfied customers. One morning, Grove saw the terrible newspaper headline: "IBM decided to stop selling all Pentium computers."

Finally, Intel was forced to spend $475 million to remedy this situation, which is equivalent to the company's R&D budget for half a year or Pentium's advertising expenditure for five years.

Correctly distinguishing between probability and consequence is the key to the success of entrepreneurs. When I was teaching in stanford graduate school of business, many students could not grasp the differences, which limited their choices. A student came to my office and said, "I really want to start a business, but the risk of starting a business is too great. I'd better go to work at IBM."

"What will happen if you try your best to start your own business and unfortunately fail?"

"I may still look for a job," she thought.

"Is it difficult for you to find a job?"

"It won't be too difficult."

"So for you, the worst result of starting a business is nothing more than going back to the original point: getting ready to go out and look for a job."

For Stanford MBA graduates, starting their own business is like climbing a sports route covered with rock nails. The probability of success is low, but the consequences of falling are even less: the rope on the rock nail will support her. Therefore, she decided to go all out to overcome all difficulties and later successfully set up her own business.

The point is that we must clearly distinguish the difference between probability and consequence before we can act correctly. Climb a dangerous route (or walk in a life situation that can destroy individuals and careers), unless you have no choice, avoid letting yourself climb down. Climbing a well-held sports route (such as the crystal ball route or my student's business plan), you might as well accept this difficult challenge and go all out in the face of a 5% chance of success, preferring to lag behind rather than give up.

Lesson 3

Mountain climbing in the future (not now): how to succeed by changing your mentality

1978, I fell in love with a rock climbing route called Genesis. That's the Golden Canyon in Colorado, a smooth red cliff, which is 100 feet high. No one has ever climbed here by hand (free climbing, climbing the route with hands, feet and natural rock points without any external force).

One day, I watched the strong Craig challenge Genesis from the east coast. He climbed up a flat, forward-leaning rock wall first, and then suddenly jumped up. His hand touched the rock wall above, stayed for a second, and then let go. The whole person fell 25 feet before being supported by the rope. Prague continued to try ten or twenty times and finally gave up. "I just can't catch it for long," he said. That year, before I went back to school for my junior year, I decided to climb, but I still couldn't find a grasping point that even failed in Prague.

Back to school, I strengthened my practice and put a needle in my coat pocket, which was specially used to puncture the blisters worn by my fingers. But no matter how hard I exercise, I still fail. Although I am strong, I am psychologically frightened by the record that no one can climb this route with his bare hands. I must change my mood.

When I was studying the history of rock climbing, I found a rule: any route that was considered "impossible to succeed" by a certain generation of climbers usually became "not so difficult" after two generations. So, I decided to play a psychological trick with myself. I know I can't be the most talented, strongest and bravest climber, but maybe I can be the most futuristic climber.

I did a little thinking experiment, pushed back the time to fifteen years later, and then asked myself, "What would rock climbers think of Genesis in the 1990s?" The answer is clear enough. In the 1990s, top climbers often chose Genesis as their first warm-up exercise, and then challenged other more difficult routes. Secondary climbers will also find Genesis challenging, but not too difficult to climb.

So, I decided to pretend to be 1994, bought a small calendar and changed all the years and dates. When I walked into the canyon, I imagined what people in the 1990s would think of the route of Genesis. With psychological changes, I finally climbed up, which surprised many people.

The practice of changing mentality is especially suitable for entrepreneurs and enterprises full of future vision. Its key is to draw lessons from the past, grasp the basic situation from history, and then predict what these situations mean to future generations.

Steve Jobs of Apple Computer Company visited the PARC Research Center in 1979, and saw that piles of computers used some pointing and pressing devices, and the contents on the screen were actually printed. This kind of operation interface is very common today, but at that time, no commercial computer had this ability.

Jobs saw at a glance that these innovations would become hot technologies in the future, and he boldly imagined how humans would use computers in the next ten to twenty years. Unable to wait for the world to change slowly, he decided to act according to the changed world first, and launched the Macintosh computer in 1984. Because he changed his mind, Jobs was able to go into the future and develop the next generation of computers.

This is the most important revelation of rock climbing-the biggest obstacle is not the rock, but the people's heart.

We can't go all out, even if we fall behind, because we have given up in our hearts. We can't take risks because we confuse the possibility with the consequence.

And our biggest failure is to let today's mentality hinder our creativity and ability. All kinds of restrictions in our eyes today will become a springboard for future generations to challenge greater limits. So, why not join the future now and skip the present restrictions?

Breakthroughs usually do not come from changes in practice, but because we have changed the way we think about practice. This is the most difficult climbing test in life.

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