第三十讲：攀岩感悟（3）

高德思：还有一点可以直接在攀岩和工作间相互借鉴的就是训练。训练打结、系绳索和其他环节，甚至团队精神也需要训练，因为这都是与你性命攸关的。

吉姆·柯林斯：实际上，我想攀岩最经常给我的启示应该还有两个。一个当然就是坚持训练，做好准备工作，我的朋友总是笑我准备过了头。但我觉得过头一点也没事儿，毕竟石头不长眼，小心为上嘛。训练时一定要注意到最微小的细节。当年为了庆祝我50岁生日，我们打算到约塞米蒂国家公园里去爬船长峰，这段路线要求我们在黑暗中爬很长时间，还要互相交换绳端。所以，我们为此必须刻苦练习打结，打好了拆，拆了再打，无数次地反复练习，觉也没得睡。不能出一丝差错，因为一旦注意力不集中，就会犯错。所以你随时都要小心翼翼，坚持训练。

为了充分准备，我在家弄了一个攀岩训练房。有一天晚上，我妻子出来找我，发现训练房里一片漆黑，不见人影。吉姆，你在哪儿？然后她发现在攀爬墙上有一盏探头灯，原来是我关了灯，在黑暗中练习攀岩。练习，就是把更换支点、准备下降、移动等一切必须的动作在黑暗中练上无数遍。这样等到攀岩的那天，一切就能如行云流水一般顺畅。还有，团队行动时你也需要训练，什么时候该走，什么时候该停都有一定之规。 当然，有意思的是，攀岩过程中你仍然可以充分发挥你的创造力，毕竟每块石头都不一样，你需要发挥创造力才能想到如何爬上去。

Thomas D. Gorman: I would have thought that another directly applicable set between climbing and your work is discipline. The discipline of tying the knots, the discipline of rigging the ropes and the various other connections. But, even the discipline of teamwork, because your life depends on it.

Jim Collins: Actually, there are sort of I guess, two other things that relate to the concepts that show up a lot in the climbing. One really is the discipline and it's the discipline of, of course there's training, preparation, and my friends always laugh because I like to be over prepared, but that's ok, Because the rock can be bigger than me. The discipline to really focus on some very specific details. When we were doing the climbs in Yosemite for my 50th birthday on El Capitan, we were going to do a lot of the pitches in the dark and we were also going to switch ends of the rope. So, just the practice of tying your knot in and out, without making a single mistake over and over again, sleep deprived, it's not regimentation, because if it's mindlessly regimented, you'll make a mistake. It has to be very mindful. And mindful in the sense of constant discipline.

So in preparation, I have a rock climbing gym at home. And my wife came out one night and the lights were off and I'm out there, where's Jim? Then she noticed there's a headlamp out in the climb field and I had turned off all the lights and I'm in the climbing gym, climbing in the dark, inside. Practicing, you know, switching in and out of anchors, practicing setting up rappels, practicing doing moves, practicing everything I need to do, hundreds of times, in the dark, over and over again. So that, when the day comes, it's really like clock work. It's really like clock work, and there's discipline in the way you operate as a team. There's discipline when you don't go, when you do go. And of course, the interesting thing is, there's also an enormously creative activity Because you have to...every piece of rock is different and you may need a lot of creativity to figure out how to get up it.

Jim Collins: Now, there's one thing that when we talked about the BHAGs,( big, hairy, audacious goals,) and climbing, if you choose really good BHAGs, and I think this is what BHAGs do. A really good BHAG has to be something that in the end you ultimately achieve. If you don't achieve it, you've let yourself down, so you don't want to just pick BHAGs for the sake of having them. On the other hand, if they're easy to achieve, they're not BHAGs. So what a BHAG does is put you right on the edge of incredible discomfort. A true BHAG is one that's achievable, but only if you have to change yourself a lot, to achieve it.

And in climbing that is if you pick a goal that is on that edge, where you actually have to go through a journey of despair. I don't know if I'll actually ever get up to this and then you finally do, and it will change you. Either your behavior, your philosophy, or you evolve inside your brain. For me personally, the hardest short climb I ever did was 25 moves in 5 years of work. And I would go through these journeys of despair and everything would be perfect. The conditions would be perfect, the temperature would be perfect, I was rested, I had the route completely wired, every single move. I'd climb perfectly and I'd still fall. And I would think, I'll never get up this climb and I would just completely despair. Well, what had to happen was I had to learn something new, which was your cumulative failure becomes like a backpack, and every failure is a rock, put into that backpack.

Pretty soon after three or four years of failing on this climb, trying your hardest, that backpack is really heavy and you're carrying these cumulative failures, cumulative despair in your pack. So, if you're carrying it when you go on your climb, you're not going to make it. So, I had to learn this whole kind of mental thing of being able to take the backpack off with all of the rocks of failure and put it on the ground and be able to then come out to climb, there are four years of cumulative failure on this climb. But, I have to wipe those away and climb at it fresh. I would have never acquired that capability had I not had to try for five years to do a route that when I finally did it, only took five minutes. That's the power of the journey of the BHAG. It's a journey.