The Mountain Never Ends: Grinding and Thinking Long Term

I’m a member of Radigan Carter’s excellent Fortress group and there are always great learnings and recommendations that really make me question my views and opinions. Radigan pulled a quote from prominent investor Eric Peters that was powerful. So powerful, I had to share it here.

“Anecdote (Jan 2011): Pretty much everything I learned about climbing mountains, I learned from Vincent Ravanel. He’s a 7th generation high altitude mountain guide from Argentiere, France. From father to son, the Ravanel’s passed a simple mantra: “The Mountain never ends.” And like most things profound, it touches on something universal and fundamental. Because climbing mountains, physical and metaphorical, is what Man does, and has always done, and will always do. 

Vincent would calmly whisper that mantra high on the rock and ice when we faced a challenge, a fork, a decision. It served to humble us both, remind us to pace ourselves, and to only press for the summit if conditions and timing were optimal. And it also served to inspire, to capture in a sentence our ambition to tackle something so large and enduring. You see, to bag a tough peak and return intact, of course you need skill/strength/tenacity, but you also need the right temperature/weather/visibility and a measure of good luck. Combine all those well, find the opening, push like hell, and bang – success. 

But fight the elements, force it, press your luck, and, well, you know the result. So, I take a deep breath, and look up, a new quarter looms and above that, a new year, a new decade, a new century, even a new millennium. 

And on these first steps of this ambitious climb, I remind myself of the importance of patience and humility, optimal conditions and timing, and a little good luck. But mostly, I tell myself to listen carefully, at those tough and lonely points that surely lay ahead, for the Ravanel whisper, “The Mountain never ends.”

What a beautiful passage. An analogy of investing. Even more an analogy of life. A mountain to me means problems, pain and challenges in life. A life without mountains aka problems & challenges is not a true or real life. There is always another mountain to climb.