In 1923, when asked by a New York Times reporter, “why do you want to climb Mount Everest,” George Leigh Mallory famously said, “because it is there.”
He continued, “Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose, of man’s desire to conquer the universe.”
At 29,029 feet above sea level, Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth. In 1923, no human had yet reached its summit.
John F. Kennedy in 1962 gave his famous “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech to a crowd of 40,000 at Rice University in Texas. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win”
The last stanza in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” reads,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
One of my favorite quotes is from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once said, “a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”
Examples of extraordinary humans driven to do extraordinary things riddle our history.
As the late George Mallory said, the reason we choose to do challenging things is instinctive; it is because the challenge is there. We decide to do these things not because they are easy, like JFK said, but because they are hard.
Doing the work we are meant to do, work which others are not doing, will challenge our resolve, but we will grow. And that, as Robert Frost said, will make all the difference.
We are all meant to do great work; work which will be hard. But greatness comes from facing challenges. Some days, it will seem impossible. And that’s how you will know it is worth doing.
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Ok, that’s all for today. Good luck out there!
#CreateSomethingGreat
