What This Injured Mountain Climber Taught Me About Productivity
If a Person Apply This Hack, they’ll be a superstar
I am fond of watching shows like I shouldn’t be alive in nature channels (My wife doesn’t understand why I like the gory details of survival). These are docuseries on Netflix that tells stories about a man from a wrecked boat. He’s drifting into the sea and miraculously still manages to survive.
Or a climber at Utah’s beautiful canyons, pinned down by a huge boulder, cut his pinned elbow (it’s just like cutting the wing of a a whole chicken from the grocery, you use a knife to cut through the flesh, bones and cartilages, as he described it).
In another episode, a father and daughter duo lost in the the Australian Outback, with no water but still rescued in the brink of death.
But one thing that stuck in my mind was this mountain climber who have a broken back injury, was left by his friends to die because they thought he will not survive.
What struck me most was his will to reach base camp, even when he was just crawling with painful broken lower back. How did he survive?
With only wrist watch and an ax, he decided to use this tool to crawl himself. Here’s his deal: he will time 20 minutes and crawl to a specific spot in the icy mountain in order to survive.
And he did.
Apparently, this hack was used by some of the most successful people in the world. Later, I’ll show how I did this hack in meditation and exercise.
Meanwhile, I’ll throw in a story about a rookie salesperson who was hired in an investment bank. Fresh from college, the guy was task to sell investment packages. Each morning, this guy will put 20 marbles on one jar and an empty one next to it. He settles, then start cold calling prospective clients. For every call, he will transfer one marble to the empty jar, until all of the marbles were moved to the other jar.
In two years, this top sales person catapulted himself to managerial position and earning 6–7 figure in the end.
What was the secret? We know that it was mostly due to his hard work, but there’s more.
Don’t Break The Chain.
The famed comedian Jerry Suinfield was well known to write jokes everyday. His technicique was to write everyday for a year, and every time he does it, whether he likes it or not during that particular day, he will just write. Each day, he will mark the date with an x after writing a joke.
This technique is the same as that of the injured mountain climber.
Honestly, when I was writing this piece, I set my phone alarm clock to just write for 20 minutes, and will post this to medium. I do this every week (instead of every day).
I taught my kid to do this.
He likes to play basketball, and I told him, in order for him to go all the way to the NBA, dribble for 2 minutes everyday, and don’t break the chain. I told him that 2 minutes everyday, will equal to 10 hours of dribbling when the year ends. And by the way, he uses a slippery gloves with weights on it (Brand is Powerhandz) while dribbling, so the workout is challenging and will improve his ball handling skills and improve his speed.
So what makes this hack very effective? It’s because of the constant feedback. The feedback comes from 20 minutes that you need to do one thing, or the x mark in the calendar, or the marbles on the jar. Feedbacks are like coaches yelling at you, don’t stop, you got traction already, don’t ever stop!
The beauty of our technologies today is that with our smart phone, we can program an app to tell us on our progress. And that’s basically what I’ve done with mediation, reading the Bible and not breaking my streak of 10-k steps.
