‘There’s a new mountain movie on Netflix,’ K said this past Tuesday evening. What!? I stopped in my tracks, found it, and plopped down on the couch right then to watch it with her. It’s called 14 Peaks and tells the story of Nepali alpinist Nimsdai ‘Nims’ Purja. It’s really good. So good in fact, I added it to my random list of 31 things that do and do not have to do with leadership. This film definitely has to do with leadership.
Through his narration, he talks about it often, and about being a leader. Feel free for judging me because, of everything he mentioned, this is the thing that stood out:
‘Sometimes you feel like you’re f*cked. But when you say you are actually f*cked, you’re only like, what, forty-five percent f*cked.’
In the scene, he’s talking to a group of climbers at basecamp who had just been defeated by K2. It was a heated moment and he was attempting to rally them back up the mountain. Also, it didn’t sound like he was asking that last sentence in the form of a question. He was making a statement.
The reason this stood out to me was (1) when I’m in a situation where I’m frustrated I tend to lose sight of the possibility there’s still likely a solution and (2) I can think of a lot of those kinds of situations. Thanks Nims for that little tidbit, as well as for showing the world through your leadership that the impossible might just be possible.
