three to five companies that took a similar path. If there are local companies that have climbed similar mountains in your area, invite the founder to lunch. If the founder is different from the current CEO, schedule a lunch with the CEO as well and ask them to share their experience.
2 Habit 2: Begin with End in Mind. (n.d.). Retrieved September 07, 2020, from www.franklincovey.com/the-7-habits/habit-2.html.
A fate much worse than blindness is having sight without the vision to see.
In the last chapter, we identified three potential mountain ranges worthy of your climbing endeavors: the Lifestyle Range, the Buy or Be Bought Range, and the IPO Range. Each has its own challenges and requires different equipment, routes, and strategies to make it to the top. And within each of these ranges, there is a mountain specifically your own. It is a specific peak made just for you. Now that you know that you can climb to new heights, it’s time to pick the peak by creating a plan that is more than just a hope, dream, or vision.
You’ve moved past the swamp and the exhausting task of alligator wrestling, you take a deep breath and turn your gaze upward; there, in the distance, are the majestic and inspiring peaks awaiting your ascent. They are your dreams; your yet-to-be-realized potential and the manifestation of where you want to be in the days and years to come. You start trekking toward your chosen mountain range, and now it’s time to choose your specific mountain peak.
While writing this book, I had the opportunity to climb the largest freestanding mountain in the world—Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa. In many ways, business is like this monumental challenge. It will be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done, but it will also be exhilarating. There will be several routes to the top and you will have many people join the expedition, including guides, fellow adventurers, and porters. There will be health checks along the way and when you reach the top, the experience will change you. But before you can make the summit, you have to identify which mountain you want to start climbing in the first place—a mountain that will represent you and your business evolving into something truly grand.
Not Just a Mountain, But a Path
For example, there are about twenty named routes on Mt. Everest (although 97 percent of climbers end up choosing one of two).3 The two most popular routes, the South Col and the Northeast Ridge, each comes with pluses and minuses. South Col has a beautiful trek to base camp, easy access to villages, the potential for helicopter rescue, and a slightly warmer, less windy climb. But there’s icefall instability, crowds, and longer exposure and night summiting times. The Northeast Ridge is less crowded, has a drivable base camp, is easier to climb to the mid-level camps, and has a shorter summit at night. But the temperatures are colder, it’s windier, the camps are at higher elevations, there are more loose rocks, and there’s no opportunity for a helicopter rescue.4 Just as Everest mountaineers must weigh the pros and cons of the various routes available, so too must the entrepreneur not only pick the mountain of their dreams, but pay attention to the costs and benefits of the route they intend to take.
Some years ago, I was on the top floor in an all-glass office with a large iconic motorcycle parked in the lobby. One of the most debonair, well-dressed investors I’ve ever met, James Clarke, sat across from me. He had just made an investment of over $100 million into a company he knew with certain confidence would succeed. I was lucky to have him as a board member for one of my companies. We were talking about the direction the company would take and what the end goal could be. I shared a number that I felt was quite lofty and asked, “But is that big enough?”
He looked back at me and replied, “In our companies we don’t dream big; we dream huge.” Everything James touches seems to turn to gold and, in that moment, I began to understand why—he chooses to play in the major leagues instead of the neighborhood ballpark. He has massive vision.
One of the first pitfalls most entrepreneurs make is not having a vision of where their company is going. The second is not dreaming big enough. Every one of us gets to choose our path and how we spend our time. If I asked you how many hours Elon Musk (world’s most innovative man), Bill Gates (world’s most philanthropic man), Marissa Mayer (first female CEO of Yahoo) have in their respective days, what would you say? The answer is the same: twenty-four. All of us have been blessed with twenty-four hours every day. As Gandalf the wizard said in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Will you spend your twenty-four hours climbing a small mountain? Will you climb a huge mountain? Will you blast off beyond the mountains and send people to Mars? Elon Musk made a choice to be an entrepreneur, and he made the choice to send humans far into space. Think about that…Elon Musk is going to Mars. Now that’s dreaming huge.
What is your potential? What is the company’s potential? It’s time to unleash yourself and dream big, because you get to decide how big your company is going to be. Now, you may think there are things outside of your control and you can’t determine the future. For now, take a leap of faith, because Overcoming Pitfall 4 will help get you past those fears. I love the words of the great Wayne Gretzky, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” What goal will you put your twenty-four hours toward?
Dreams are about vision; goals are about action. Execution is what sets apart those who achieve their goals and those who stay dreamers. The route to success is through daily action on a predetermined plan.
You may dream of climbing the mountain, but without effective goal setting, you’ll never make it all the way to the top. Remember that goals are:5
•Only achievable if they have been articulated first.
•42 percent more likely to be achieved if you write them down.
•Stronger if accompanied by a commitment to action.
•More likely to be achieved if the goal setter is accountable to others.
•Kept on track through a cadence of regular updates.
•More than just an easy win; they need to be significant.
•Better realized if they focus on the process, not just the outcome.
•More powerful if framed positively versus negatively.
•Subject to setbacks, so prepare for it and make learning part of the plan.
Remember that you get to choose your direction, your peak, and your route. You can choose the million-dollar peak, or the fifty-million-dollar peak. You can pick the harder bushwhacking route or the trail which has been trod before. You can choose to climb the mountain in three, five, seven, or ten days. In my Africa mountaineering experience, we chose the five-day path called the Marangu route. It is one of the faster routes, has huts instead of camps, and has some of the best views along the forty-four-mile round trip. We could have chosen a slower route to help us acclimate easier and make the trip a little more enjoyable, but we believed we could make this journey, and so we embarked. Your journey is up to you. There are many routes up the mountain, and each has its own benefits: some are shorter distance but tougher climbing, some take longer but are easier on the body. The beauty is you get to choose the route that’s best for you, and this chapter will show you how.
AMBITION transforms into a GOAL when paired with