Don Bennett is the first amputee to climb Mt. Rainier. That’s 14,410 feet on one leg and two crutches. When he was interviewed he said something that I have never forgotten.
“How did you make it to the top?” Don was asked. “One hop at a time,” was his instant reply. One hop at a time. One hop at a time. One hop at a time.
When you think about it, that’s how most extraordinary things are accomplished. As much as you might desire it, you simply cannot leap to the top of a mountain. You can only get there by taking it one step at a time-or, as in Don’s case, one hop at a time.
Yet we sometimes find ourselves simply paralyzed by the mere scale of the challenge. We are challenged to do more with less, adapt quickly to changing circumstances, innovate on the fly, deal with extreme uncertainty, and somehow still find time for our families and friends.
Sometimes it’s all just too overwhelming. But so is looking up to the top of that mountain when you are at the bottom. That’s why Don would tell himself, as he looked just one foot ahead, “Anybody can hop from here to there.” And so he did-fourteen thousand four hundred ten times.
But Don had something else in mind when he looked up at the top of that mountain. Despite what you might have heard about why people climb mountains, it’s not because they’re there.
When Don was asked why he wanted to be the first amputee to climb Mt. Rainier, he said it was because he wanted to demonstrate to other disabled people that they were capable of doing more than they might have thought they could do. Don had aspirations that went beyond individual glory and success. He was the one doing the climbing, but he was not climbing just for himself. He was climbing for an entire community. He had a vision of others doing great things.
And there’s another lesson we learned from Don that’s directly applicable to leading others to get extraordinary things done. We asked him, “What’s the most important lesson you learned from this climb?” Without hesitation, he said, “You can’t do it alone.”
[…] Success for me has come just by plodding along, one step at a time. […]