My guide in the Adirondacks was a 23 year old named Jonathan. No one was more shocked than I was. He had grown up in Ohio and discovered a passion for photography in high school. His family used to vacation in the Adirondacks every summer and he started climbing mountains to take pictures. He discovered he loved it and decided to do it full time. For the past five years, this is all he does. When I asked him if he had climbed all the 46 High Peaks, he laughed. “I’ve climbed them all at least five times, if not more,” he told me. “People talk about saving for retirement so they can finally live the life they love. How do they know they’ll make it that long? They could get hit by a bus or the world could end next year. Why not do what you love NOW?” Being in the mountains meant I was already in a self reflective state and all of this hit hard. I remembered the meme of the man spending his all life running after money, accumulating more and then more. And then at the end, when he finally had a suitcase full of money, he realized he had reached the end of his life. I asked Jonathan if he had gone to college. “I spent one year in a Bible college and then I dropped out,” he told me. He had no resume that would mean anything to me or any of my peers. But in the years we had spent sitting behind computers or studying in school, working on our minds, he had been climbing every mountain he could, day or night, in rain, sleet, or snow. He had been following his own curriculum, developing his mind and his body. In the end, I may have ended up in the top 1% of data storytellers in the world, while he was in the top 1% of mountaineers. I had spent years making rich and powerful companies even richer and more powerful. He had spent years climbing mountains. How can we know we are making the right decisions when the options are so endless and when the paths we choose become all consuming so easily, making it so hard to even pause and evaluate where we ended up, where we are heading, and where we wanted to go all along?
