The Projecting Strategy Most Climbers Never Learn
In climbing, we can always try again.
And we do, spending season after season on our hardest projects. Getting on, falling off, and getting back on again. It’s this kind of constant dance with failure that makes climbing special. But it’s also this opportunity to constantly dance that creates our strange relationship with failure.
We don’t fail. We try again.
To truly fail in climbing, we have to quit.
You felt a way when you heard that word. It has a negative connotation no matter who you are or how healthy your relationship is with failure.
We don’t like to quit. We don’t want to be thought of as quitters.
We don’t like to consider what quitting might cost us.
In this video, I’m going to tell you why climbers should be quitting more. Not only that, but I’ll explain how you can decide when quitting is the right answer, and when you should hold steady.
Let’s get into it.
In 2016, in a large-scale study, people who were facing a tough decision were asked to flip a digital coin, with one side saying “stick” and one side saying “change,” and to then follow that advice. Over 20,000 people participated, many contemplating major decisions.
As you might guess, at the two-month mark, many of the people told to change hadn’t followed through, but by the six-month mark, most of those people had decided that they actually did need the change. The most surprising result of the study was that the people who followed through with the advice to change were happier, felt they had made the correct decision, and said they’d do it again, as opposed to the people told to stick with their status quo.
Why?
Because if they were willing to flip a digital coin and take random advice in the first place, they were ready for that change.
They just weren’t ready to admit it.
Like I said earlier, in climbing, we can always try again. Sure, we fall off and we don’t send. But there is no finality to that. It’s not a true failure because we get to try again. To fail, we have to quit, and we hate that. We don’t even like to consider what quitting might cost us.
But I have a better question for you:
What is not quitting costing you? What is sticking to it, trying that same project again and again, costing you?
See, whenever you spend your time on something, it is costing you some other opportunity – what economists call “opportunity cost.”
Time you could be with family or working on some other route. Time you could be in the gym getting stronger or searching for new boulders. Or a million other things.
What if that other opportunity – the one that you’re missing – is worth more to you than the thing you’re doing? What if you’re ready to flip a digital coin?
Doesn’t matter.
As climbers, we just don’t like to quit. But we should.
I had to.
See, I had this goal to send 100 routes 5.13 and harder by my 50th birthday. Last summer I realized that my time was winding down. I still had several 5.13’s to do, and at the pace I was keeping, there was no way I was going to make it.
Because I hadn’t been quitting soon enough.
I drew things out, not wanting to walk away. But this was a race. I didn’t have the luxury of enough time. So, as I was closing in on the goal, but the deadline was closing in faster on me, I set what professional poker player Annie Duke calls “kill criteria.”
Annie Duke noticed something:
People would get trapped in the “sunk cost fallacy”: believing that because they had already spent something – time, energy, or money – they had to keep going.
They would only look to see what past them had invested and wouldn’t ask which choice was better for current or future them. Her answer to stay out of this conundrum herself, as she knew that in the heat of the moment, her emotions would influence her decisions?
Kill criteria – she created a list of criteria that when met, meant she would fold her hand right then and there.
So I did the same with my projects:
If at any time I felt like injury was a distinct possibility on a route…
I folded.
If I hadn’t done all of the moves, and repeated them, by the first attempt of session three…
I folded.
If I regressed on a route in two consecutive sessions, and I couldn’t pinpoint something like not getting any sleep or unusually high stress (which rarely crept up two sessions in a row)…
I folded.
If there was a low-percentage move but I could do the remainder of the route, I would give three or four honest efforts. If no send…
I folded.
If I just couldn’t get conditions and partners to line up after two or three attempts to do so…
I folded.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen a growing trend among climbers to create lists of the links needed to send a project, something I’ve often championed.
These lists have the potential to accelerate our progression even more if we take the simple step of transforming them into kill criteria by adding something Annie Duke calls “states and dates,” essentially saying,
“I need to be in this state by this date, or I quit.”
Notice in my kill criteria, I give these dates as the number of sessions: “I need to be at this point in the project by this session, or I quit.” Without this defining factor, these projects could still drag on far too long.
As it got down to the final few days before my birthday and I was still two routes short, I tightened my kill criteria even more. Because I had this kill criteria in place, I was able to zero in on the things I could get done, and I reached my goal on the morning of my 50th birthday.
And now, in true climber fashion, I can go back to some of those things I quit on… But with different kill criteria, of course.
This video is adapted from my new book, Adapt: Lessons Learned Climbing 100 5.13’s.
Check it out if you’re interested in hearing the story of that big goal, the hurdles along the way, and what I learned from it.
EXPLORE FURTHER
You might enjoy these related articles, episodes, and other resources:
Adapt: Lessons Learned Climbing 100 5.13’s
Climb Your Project Sooner | The Art of Execution
The Most Important Skill for Climbing 5.13
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