1996 Mount Everest Disaster: The Courage to Speak Up

The 10th of May, 1996 is arguably the most infamous day in the history of the world’s tallest mountain. Eight of the 34 climbers on Mount Everest that day died after being caught in a blizzard while attempting to descend from the summit. There have been countless recollections from survivors, and the events of that day was even made into a Hollywood film in 2015, starring Keira Knightley and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Although it is almost impossible to know exactly what happened on Everest on that fateful day, there is some indication that the strict dominance hierarchies stopped the flow of information that could have preserved the safety of the mountaineering group.

The dominance dynamics of the Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness teams that were summitting that day were steep. Rob Hall and Scott Fischer were the leaders of their respective teams and were world-class mountaineers who had summitted Everest in the past. The teams were also composed of subordinate guides, and then the clients themselves who were paying tens of thousands of dollars to be there. Subordinate guides found it difficult to speak up to the leader, and the relatively unskilled clients were even more fearful of sharing their own ideas to the team.

On the day of the final ascent Rob Hall even delivered a speech demanding that the group listen to him and forbade any dissension. Any disagreements would discussed after they got off the hill.

By 2.30pm that day, Neil Beidleman, a junior guide in the Mountain Madness team, felt a growing anxiety as he stood on the summit. The turnaround time of 2pm laid out by the team leaders had come and gone, and most of the group were still yet to reach the summit. Because Beidleman’s high altitude experience was relatively limited, he didn’t say anything to his superiors, mistakenly trusting that they had everything under control. To this day, this is a decision he regrets.

Meanwhile, Martin Adams, a client from the Mountain Madness team, noticed something rather peculiar. From his point of view, he saw dark wispy clouds below, creeping closer to where he was. As a commercial pilot, he knew they were thunderheads, and knew a storm was imminent. He knew they needed to “get the fuck out of there”. But he didn’t say anything. It’s hardly surprising, as the guides had indoctrinated the clients to just follow their orders for the whole expedition up to that point. It was another chance missed.

A few moments later, Jon Krakauer – an author and adventurer who was tasked with writing up the expedition for Outside magazine – stopped at the South Summit on his descent to replenish his supplementary oxygen from bottles that were deliberately stashed there. Andy Harris was stationed there as a guide, sorting through some of the bottles. Harris was adamant that the bottles were empty. But Krakauer knew he was wrong, took a fresh bottle and carried on descending the mountain to safety. It was likely that Harris’ regulator had become clogged with ice, meaning the bottles had tested empty, even though they were full. But Krakauer didn’t tell Harris that he knew the bottles were full, leaving Harris oblivious to the reality of the situation, and still thinking that the bottles were empty. Even though the level of mountaineering skill between the two of them was similar, on this expedition Krakauer was categorized as a lowly client, and Harris an invincible guide.

At 4.41 pm, Hall radioed base to say that he and Doug Hansen were in trouble on the Hillary Step shortly after summitting, and desperately needed oxygen. Hansen, 46, felt that 1996 was his last chance. He had failed to summit Everest the year before with Hall, and likely pleaded his guide to allow him to summit even though he was struggling and it was already much after the designated turnaround time.

Harris radioed back to Hall saying there wasn’t any oxygen at the South Summit. If Krakauer had corrected Harris just moments before, Hall could have descended to the South Summit, grabbed some oxygen bottles and headed back up to help Doug Hansen. Instead, Hall and Hansen were stuck in the Death Zone in the middle of a blizzard. Harris eventually ended up attempting to climb back up to the Hillary Step to help. All three of them died.

The 1996 Mount Everest disaster was a fatal lesson in how dominance hierarchies can severely limit the flow of information within teams. Although the stakes might not be as high, where can you see that a too-steep dominance hierarchy is limiting the quality of ideas and communication from subordinates?

Side story: Just a few years after the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, I was an eight-year-old boy playing with my siblings and cousins outside my home. My parents were inside with my aunt and uncle. We were having a rare family gathering, and a big dinner was cooking in the kitchen. At one point, I looked up from where I was and saw smoke billowing out of the kitchen window. My house was on fire! But I didn’t say anything. I was a shy child, that was even shier when I had family visiting. Gladly, my aunt noticed when she came outside to see how we were doing, and ran back inside alert my parents to put the fire out.

Have you ever failed to speak up? Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear any stories!

How the CIA’s Collective Blindness Led to 9/11

On 11th September 2001, the deadliest terrorist attack of human history occurred as two passenger planes were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center in New York. Two other passenger planes were hijacked – one ended up crashing into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and the other crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers courageously banded together to thwart the hijackers.

After the devastating events – which resulted in 2,977 fatalities and over 25,000 injured – an inquest blamed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for not seeing the warning signs that now seemed so obvious in hindsight.

Firstly, Osama Bin Laden had declared war on the United States as early as 1996, and reiterated this in 1998. Murmurings of airplanes being used as weapons had been circulating for around a decade. Al Qaeda was becoming more violent and gaining power in other areas of the world. An FBI analyst had even sent an email to colleagues warning that Bin Laden had been funding students to go to civil aviation colleges in the US. The students had been asking about flight patterns around New York, and how cockpit doors worked.

Historically, the CIA were notorious for hiring very similar types of people – white, male, middle or upper class, Protestant. Through the decades leading up to 9/11, homosexuals had been banned from working for the CIA and African-Americans were very rarely hired. The CIA even had lawsuits filed against them for discriminating against women. A Muslim CIA employee was just a pipe dream.

The CIA explained that they were hiring the best people – the best people just happened to be white males of a certain type. They argued that the best relay sprint teams simply choose the fastest runners, no matter their skin color, race or religion. It turns out that the way the tests and interviews were designed actually made it harder for more eccentric types of people to score well in the hiring process. The phenomenon is known as homophily, where people are more attracted to others that are similar to themselves.

So what’s wrong with hiring an extremely skilled team that are very similar in background? It’s because demographic diversity such as social class, religion, level of education etc. often leads to cognitive diversity. Cognitive diversity is how wide-ranging the level of ideas and thoughts are in a group. The more wide-ranging the ideas are in a group, the fewer the blind spots and the likelier complex problems will be solved through a larger ‘collective brain’.

The lack of understanding from the CIA about Islam in the lead up to 9/11 is there for all to see. When Bin Laden released videos from a cave in Afghanistan wearing a simple robe and a beard down to his chest, he was not taken seriously whatsoever. To the Western world, he was the essence of backwardness.

In reality, Bin Laden was modelling the Prophet Mohammad, who had visions of the Koran in a mountain cave. Bin Laden fasted on the same days that Mohammad fasted, copied the same postures and struck up imagery that resonated with the Islamic world. He recited poetry, considered to be holy by Muslims. Bin Laden was conjuring up supporters at an alarming rate.

The homogeneity of the CIA gave them gigantic blind spots that would have been brought to light had they focused on more diverse recruitment, in particular of Muslims. The CIA have since began diversifying their workforce.

Until I read this story, I didn’t see the importance of diversity in the workplace. It was in fact a blind spot of my own. Reading Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed gave me a new compelling insight that shows how important cognitive diversity is in many different applications.

Born to Run: Could Running Shoes Be Causing Injuries?

Born to Run is an epic true story of Christopher McDougall’s journey deep into the dangerous Copper Canyon of Chihuahua in Mexico where he finds a mystical tribe of men called the Tarahumara. Also known as the Raramuri – translated as “The Running Men” – the tribe are known for their incredible running endurance. These people have the ability to cover more than 200 miles over two days as they travel from settlement to settlement.

In this captivating story, McDougall meets Caballo Blanco aka Micah True, a man with a mysterious past who lives alongside the Tarahumara. It’s Caballo’s dream to put on an epic race in the Copper Canyon, pitting the world’s greatest ultrarunners against the Tarahumara on their home turf.

It’s an exhilarating and sometimes hilarious read that combines travel writing with sport science.

McDougall’s adventure actually began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? Statistics show that the runners in the world today are almost certain to injure themselves on an annual basis. Has it always been this way? If not, why not? And how do the Tarahumara manage to run so much without getting injured? Are humans born to run?

Born to Run explains that the human body has anatomical features present in running animals like Achilles tendons, large gluteal muscles, and foot arches.

Along with the Tarahumara, tribes in Africa are known to partake in what’s termed as persistence hunting. They literally chase an animal for hours on end until the animal eventually collapses from heat exhaustion. And they do all this without the use of modern footwear, wearing basic homemade sandals.

McDougall explains that the mass promotion of jogging in the 1970s by Nike and their subsequent sales in cushioned running shoes led runners to adapt their running technique by landing on their bony heel instead of their thick pad of midfoot fat. With scientists arguing that the heel is meant only for standing and not running, it could be that the shock of repetitive heel-striking is the reason for most modern-day running injuries.

A long time ago after multiple running injuries, I decided that running wasn’t fun enough to get injured for. With the current popularity of minimalist/barefoot shoes, it could be worth investing in a pair and giving it another go. Especially if we are in fact born to run.

Wild: Lessons from Cheryl Strayed’s Memoir

Wild is the 2012 memoir of the American author Cheryl Strayed. It detailed her journey of self-discovery as she took a 1,100 mile solo-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995, starting in the Mojave Desert in California and finishing at the Bridge of Gods in Washington.

Since then Strayed has been portrayed in a film adaptation by Reese Witherspoon in 2014.

I read the book over a couple of days as I sat in my family home in UK. The memoir is incredibly vulnerable, truthful and poetic. Cheryl’s story is a moving one, and at times tragic.

Strayed was only 22-years-old when her non-smoking mother was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. Her mother’s rapid decline in health and subsequent death dispersed her family, and Strayed ended her marriage after engaging in affairs with multiple men. Her previous motivation and her will to look after herself slowly ebbed away, and she started using heroin with a new lover named Joe.

It was only after stumbling on a Pacific Crest Trail guidebook in a store that she decided to go on this epic and dangerous journey of self-discovery. To her credit, she bought the guidebook, slowly saved up to buy all her hiking gear, and navigated the wilderness (with the extensive help of strangers) to finally reach her destination after over three months of walking.

One of the most memorable scenes in the book is when Strayed decided that she has to put down Lady, her dead mother’s frail old horse. Her stepfather had stopped taking responsibility of the horses and had remarried and moved his new wife’s children into the house where Strayed had grown up just a few years before.

She was too broke to have a vet give an lethal injection, as she had spent all her money on equipment to hike the PCT. So after some advice, she decided that best way would be to shoot Lady in the head. After leading Lady out to the perimeter of the farm, she found the courage to pull the trigger. But Lady didn’t die right away. Lady writhed in pain and the solemn, sad eyes of the horse stared at Strayed as she was shot another two times and died slowly. It was tragic.

The biggest lesson I took from Strayed’s memoir was to make me think of the responsibilities of having a death in the family. Strayed’s brother, sister and stepfather all shirked responsibility after her mother’s death, and it was too much for Strayed to handle by herself.

Strayed lost her marriage, had an abortion, took drugs and hiked the PCT; and even though she had the will to find a way through those struggles and eventually fulfil her dream of being a writer with a loving family, I am sure that others in the same downward spiral would have perished.

Wild is as much a cautionary tale as it is an uplifting journey of self-discovery.

The Intelligent Investor: Insights From Benjamin Graham

“Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I recently read The Intelligent Investor by the legendary value investor Benjamin Graham. Known as the most complete guide to investing ever written, his wisdom has stood the test of time. His legacy lives on not only in this book, but in his students such as the mighty Warren Buffett.

The book is extensive and can be tough to digest at times, but it was well worth reading and I learned a lot.

One of the key lessons I learned is that you cannot sensibly become an enterprising investor unless you are willing to read a company’s annual report. An enterprising investor is one that picks specific stocks and buys them for a price that they deem is good value. The only way they can do that reliably is by perusing through several years’ worth of annual reports with a fine-toothed comb, looking for information to judge whether the company is undervalued or overvalued in the stock market. Even then they could still be wrong and end up losing money.

The good news is that I can become what’s termed a “defensive investor”. It doesn’t sound nearly as cool, and there’s no longer the possibility of bragging to your friends about picking winning stocks, but it is much less risky and takes much less time. Defensive investors usually buy a combination of low-cost index funds (groups of stocks that follow the entire market such as The Dow Jones Industrial Index or the Standard & Poors 500 Index) and bonds from governments and companies.

I was 15 years old the first time I was introduced to the idea of the stock market in my Statistics class in school. We were asked to go on the Internet and pretend we were investing in some stocks. I looked on the Dow Jones list and I remember just choosing the companies that had the green numbers next to them – the stock price was going up. If a stock price was going up, I could sell the stock a week later and win the competition of getting the highest profit in my class. But I was in for a shock.

The next week, I logged back in to find that not only had I not got the highest profit in the class, I had lost money! Unfortunately this is the reality for many wannabe traders who don’t do their homework.

That formative experience gave me a couple of conclusions – The stock market doesn’t extrapolate well, and I don’t understand the stock market. But there’s no shame in that, very few people do. No person on Earth knows what the market will do next.

One of the biggest lessons in The Intelligent Investor is the importance of not losing money. It takes a lot more time to recoup losses than it does to increase the investment by the same amount. People that lost 90%+ of their money when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 still would not have been able to break-even over 20 years since. So how can you be in the market as a defensive investor but lose as little as possible?

Graham recommends a combination of bonds and index funds in a 50-50 split. If the investor is feeling bullish (optimistic) about the market, he can go up to a maximum of 75% index funds. If he is feeling bearish (pessimistic), he can increase the bonds proportion up to 75% instead. The diversification of the bonds and having shares in all the companies in an index such as the S & P 500 will shelter the investor from undue losses.

In March 2020 the stock market dropped significantly and the market value of my investments dropped several thousand dollars. With a global pandemic looming and plenty of uncertainty, I took most of my invested money out of the market. I had turned an “unrealized” paper loss into a “realized” loss. This turned out to be a big mistake, as I missed the gains I could have had on the subsequent recovery of the market to an even higher level than before.

The biggest lesson I learned from that experience is that my risk tolerance wasn’t as high as I thought it was, and it had changed over the years as my investment fund got larger. I had sensed this in the back of my mind for months on end, but I didn’t do anything about it because the market was steadily going up at the time.

Another lesson was that the more often I check my investments, the worse decisions I will make. I use a robo-investing app that rebalances my portfolio and gives me the option to automate my contributions to my fund, so there’s no real reason I should be logging in if I don’t need to. Checking investments frequently is the equivalent to appraising your house all the time, even if you don’t plan to ever sell it.

Another important thing to consider is how much money do I need in savings before I put money into investments instead? Money in savings accounts will track the rate of inflation at best, and at worst it could be losing value if inflation rates happen to be high. Over the long-term, money invested will beat the rate of inflation and will be worth more when you eventually decide to use it. This doesn’t mean that all spare money should go into investments. If you are saving for a deposit on a house, it’s better off in a savings account. Emergency funds (12-24 months of expenses) should also be in savings in case of a loss of job or a sudden large expense.

One insight The Intelligent Investor brought to me was that everyone that invests is obsessed with beating the market. But what’s actually important is asking: “Do I have enough money for my life goals?” It can be so easy to get lost in the numbers and forget what you’re actually wanting in life.

Since starting to use a robo-investing app over the last couple of years, I have noticed that it is way more fun to save and invest. Even if (or should I say when?) I end up losing a significant proportion of my portfolio again, I can be grateful in years to come that I took the conscious decision to take responsibility of my finances.

Power Hour: The Importance of the First 60 Minutes Everyday

Power Hour is a book by Adrienne Herbert, a modern fitness ambassador who also hosts the weekly Power Hour podcast. From her writing it seems that she is a highly motivated, organized and productive individual. In her book she writes that the birth of the “Power Hour” was in 2017 when she accepted an invitation to run a marathon for the first time after already having a packed schedule of other commitments. The only way she could find the time to train was to wake up earlier and to go on training runs as soon as she woke up.

Herbert explains that it doesn’t make a huge difference whether the power hour is before the crack of dawn or towards the end of the morning, as long as it’s the first hour upon waking. This is the hour that should be assigned a task that will propel us forward in some way. It could be doing a work out, journaling, or writing the book we’ve always wanted to. It could even be a combination of things.

Although the book is very basic in terms of the level of its ideas, it is very effective in getting the reader to think about whether their current habits are working for or against them, and how to change them if they need changing. There’s actionable exercises in the book to reconsider purpose and to dream up goals.

If you knew this was your last year what would you start doing right now?

It asks thoughtful daily questions like “Who would love to hear from me today?” and “How can I have more fun today?” It also invites us to define our goals, and then think of potential blockers in the path towards them.

The beauty of the power hour is that the new habit we choose is anchored to a task that we do every single day – waking up. What’s more, we end up finishing a task that is important to our wellness and long-term future before we have even considered breakfast! Doing something that we know is good for us so early sets us up perfectly to make good choices for the rest of the day.

Sometimes a book like this is the perfect medicine when we find ourselves snoozing the alarm everyday because of the lack of motivation and clarity in which direction to go in life.

The Four Agreements: Always Do Your Best

I remember in 2014, when I first became successful.

I was reading The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters, the same book Ronnie O’Sullivan studied before he won back-to-back World Snooker Championships in 2012 and 2013. Steve Peters defined success as “doing the best you can do at that specific time”. My paradigm of success was decimated, and a new empowering worldview replaced it.

If success is doing the best we can do given the circumstances, success is controllable and achievable. Instead of success being something in the far future, success can be achieved from moment to moment in the small decisions and actions we take. Success isn’t reserved for the elite, it can be practiced by the masses.

Doing the best we can do in each moment leads to progress. It forces us to leave our comfort zone, and over time our best increases in capacity. We begin to snooze your alarm a little less often, until eventually we wake up on cue every day a minute before our alarm is due to sound. We gradually lift more and more weight in the gym until one day we look in the mirror and notice we are a Herculean specimen. We stop lying so much. Our short fuses get longer. We become nicer to be around.

Don Miguel Ruiz, the author of The Four Agreements, explains that doing our best makes us action-takers, and it makes us happy. Most importantly, if we can do our best to keep the other three agreements (be impeccable with our word, not to take things personally, not to make assumptions), we will live a beautiful life.

The Four Agreements: Don’t Make Assumptions

The biggest assumptions humans make is that other people see the world how we see it, believe the things we believe, and feel the things we feel. It’s this shortsightedness and lack of understanding that creates arguments, divorces, and wars.

What if, instead of assuming people know what we want, we told them what we wanted instead? And if we don’t know what we want, how do we expect others to know?!

There’s nothing wrong with asking clarifying questions. When I’m in a sales setting I need to find out what people want as soon as I can, and as clearly as I can. Only then can I suggest a solution that will work the best for them. When I assume that they want everything that I’m talking about, the prospects will actually end up being uncomfortable with telling me what they really want, and the communication breaks down.

The Four Agreements: Don’t Take Anything Personally

In three years of working in door-to-door sales, I realized that there is no way of lasting as long as I have without starting to believe that rejection is not personal.

When I first started in the job I would finish work with no sales and beat myself up for the rest of the evening about it. Everyone said no to me because I sucked at speaking, I sucked at listening, and I sucked at sales. Although this was almost certainly true, it was massively disempowering and my confidence levels were in freefall.

I eventually started getting a few sales and gradually started improving. Fast forward to my attitude today and it is completely transformed. If someone says no to my offering now, I just tell myself that they didn’t want it. Of course it’s a lot easier to say that now, knowing that I have sold close to 300 security systems.

The consequence of having this present attitude is that it’s stress-free. I know who I am and I’m secure in myself. Instead of coming home with the world on my shoulders, I just know that I will put the work in and I’ll get what I get. I’ll make hay while the sun is shining, and just place one foot in front of the other when results aren’t so good. But things will come good.

Taking things personally comes from the need to be accepted, the lack of self-identification and self-confidence. Occasionally, I will knock on someone’s door that will yell expletives, and be physically and verbally threatening. I stay calm, excuse myself from the situation and carry on to the next door. I know it’s not personal. Have they slept? How is their mental health? Is he or she just a terrible person? Whatever the answers are, none of it has anything to do with me. They’ve done what they’ve done because of them.

Say if someone lies to you. You get offended, and it ruins your day, or even your week. But that person probably lies to everyone, including themselves. It’s just part of their character. They’re the common denominator. So who’s really going to suffer in the end?

To take something personally is an imbalance of self-importance. It’s likely that if the same thing happened to someone else, they wouldn’t care the slightest bit (or at least not as much). The fact that it’s happened to them magnifies and exacerbates the situation.

To take something personally is to choose suffering over peace. Next time you encounter a choice to take something personally or not, which will you choose?

The Four Agreements: Be Impeccable With Your Word

The Four Agreements is a book of wisdom from a modern-day Toltec named Don Miguel Ruiz. Toltecs are an ancient tribe from Southern Mexico known for their knowledge and wisdom. Ruiz summarizes the Toltec philosophy through four agreements.

Ruiz says the first agreement – Be impeccable with your word – is the most important and most difficult one to honor.

Language is one of the most powerful tools that determines the course of our lives. Words have the power to create love and share joy, or spread hate and lie about others. Without using our word impeccably it would be extremely difficult to live a life of fulfilment.

An example of the extent that word can be used for evil is the rise of Nazism and the suffering caused by the word of just one man.

A seed is sown when someone first tells a child that they are ugly, stupid, or useless. From that point on, the child looks for evidence to defend this newly formed agreement. If they get something wrong in class it reinforces the belief that they’re stupid. If they anger their parent it reinforces the belief that they are useless.

Luckily these spells can be broken by evidence to the contrary, although it is arguably more difficult to break the spell than reinforce it. That’s why we live in a world where self-confidence, self-esteem and self-love are becoming harder and harder to preserve. The language that’s being used in our environment is the problem.

Gossip is something that occurs so often in normal life. We always want to talk about other people. But gossip is harmful, even if the person we are gossiping about never finds out. It spreads a negative energy and plants new negative beliefs in others. One way that I catch myself gossiping is by asking myself if I would say the same thing about the person I am talking about if they were present in the conversation too.

Even though it wasn’t mentioned in the book I also took this rule to mean: “Do what you say you’re going to do.” I believe that the more extensively a person can turn their words into action, the more fulfilled their life will end up being. Doing what you say on a consistent basis will build trust in yourself, and others will trust you too because you can be relied upon. The discipline and strength required will create the self-confidence, self-esteem and self-love that is a prerequisite for a good life.

Be impeccable with your word.