What We Can Learn About Book Coaching From Mount Everest (Part 1)
Some lessons from the top of the world
I recently began reading a book called Everest, Inc: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World by Will Cockrell. The book was sitting on our kitchen island because my husband purchased it for my 86-year-old dad — who promptly devoured it, declared it an excellent read, and gave it back in case we wanted to read it, too.
My dad has more than a passing interest in this story. He was not an alpine mountain climber, but he was a professor or environmental studies and an early pioneer in the Grand Canyon. He was running that river and many other rivers of the American West in the days before anyone was running commercial trips. Throughout his river rafting career, he rowed the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon 40 times on mostly private trips — the last time in his 80’s. His assessment of the Everest book is that the bittersweet story of the commercialization of wilderness felt very familiar.
The book stared up at me while I ate breakfast every day, taunting me. I kept looking at the title: Everest, Inc.
Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull is one of my favorite books about the creative process. It’s a story of how Pixar was able to build a system and a business around storytelling, which is a philosophy that led me to believe that book writing is a skill that can be taught, which is a belief that led me to launch the book coach certification program at Author Accelerator.
I’ve always loved the title of the Catmull book because of the inherent tension in it (incorporating creativity? what? why? how?), and the Everest book had the same tension but about a very different thing (incorporating a wild place? what? why? how?) It was inevitable that I would open the book — and when I did, I became enthralled and couldn’t stop.
My dad’s copy of Everest Inc. is now peppered with Post-In note flags and dog-eared pages — meaning I have claimed this copy as my own. This is one of a handful of books that have been instrumental in my clarifying exactly what book coaching is all about (you can read about the others here) — and for sure the most unexpected. I was moved by the skillfull storytelling, the life-and-death realities of mountain climbing, and the intentional way the Everest guides talk about their skills, their training, and the reason they do what they do.
I’m going to share some of the lessons I took away from this book over the next few posts.
Lesson 1: No one is going to die writing a book
Book writers feel deeply about their work. They are propelled by huge motivating forces that have to do with deep human connection and the primal urge to be heard. Like a mountain climber, they may or may not succeed (see Lesson #2), but no one is going to die trying.
I thought it was important to start with this takeaway from Everest, Inc. because it’s part of the reason I found the story so compelling. Book coaches feel the weight of responsibility for being let into someone else’s creative vision, but our clients are not depending on us to stay alive.
It kind of puts things into perspective.
I hear so many book coaches worry that they aren’t good enough or skilled enough or authoritative enough or experienced enough to do the work they want to do, attract the kinds of writers they want to work with, or price their services where they know they should. The fear is that we will harm our client’s work, ruin our reputation, or be revealed as a fraud.
Respect for other people’s ideas and creative processes is paramount in the work we do, but it’s helpful to remember that no one is going to die.
Lesson 2: The measure of success in book writing is variable
On Everest, there is one, achingly tangile goal: summiting and coming back alive. You either do or you don’t, end of story.
The impact of this binary success metric on the Everest guides is obviously enormous. Cockerell writes:
“More often than not, guiding is a thankless pursuit. When clients don’t make the summit, their top three excuses tend to be `shitty guide, shitty guide, and shitty guide.’ … Other, more likely, considerations for not making the top, such as `I didn’t train enough,’ ‘The weather is unpredictable,” and “We used all our strength and resources to save someone’s life and we had nothing left for a second attempt,” typically fall much lower down the list than `it was my guide’s fault.’” ( p 97)
There is a fascinating discussion in the book about a guide’s responsibility and culpability when things go wrong up in the death zone (the altitude above which oxygen becomes so scarce that a human body only has a certain amount of time before it begins to shut down). Does the guide stay with a client who is refusing to listen to their directive to turn around? What if staying puts their own life at risk? Do they ever leave a client behind who is clearly not going to make it in order to save themselves?
The knowledge, training, and infrastructure support needed to make good decisions is part of the reason that Western guides were able to dominate the industry for so long; in recent years, the Sherpa people have had access to the knowledge, training, and infrastructure support that have allowed them to deliver acceptable outcomes (meaning enough people summit without dying) on their own expeditions with their own companies.
But no matter who is climbing or guiding, the success metric when climbing Everest is fixed: summit and live.
As I was absorbing all this truth, I kept thinking of the many reasons that people write books. The most talked-about success metrics — such as landing an agent and a book deal, being published by a Big 5 publisher, making enough money to quit your day job, or hitting a bestseller list — are just some of the things some writers say they want — and usually, when pressed, they will admit that these successes are a stand-in for other, deeper desires.
These deeper desires include:
To create for the joy of it
To learn the art of it
To challenge themselves to accomplish a difficult intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial task
To prove to others that they can do it
To spend quality time in their own mind thinking about what they think, believe, and imagine
To shut out the noise of the world
To participate as a creator in a process that has fed or saved or redeemed them as a reader
To tell a story they are burning to tell
To share an idea they are burning to share
To communicate a mission or message
To educate
To inspire
To influence
To entertain
To become well-known in their field
To make enough money to be considered a pro
To make enough of an impact to get to do it again
Achieving any of these outcomes with a book could mean it was a success, depending on the writer and their goals.
Someone coming to the website of an Everest summit expedition doesn’t have to discuss with the expedition leaders what they want (although there are other conversations they have to have related to mental and physical fitness, which I’ll talk about later.)
Someone coming to the website of a book coach does need to be prepared to discuss what success looks like. A good coach will be ready for that conversation, and for talking about how they can add value to the process, by making it faster, smoother, less isolating, more enjoyable, or more likely to result in the desired outcome.
Lesson 3: The low odds of success are part of the appeal of doing it
People have always been drawn to climb tall mountains for the challenge and the thrill. When asked why he was so committed to climbing Everest, British climber George Mallory famously answered, “Because it’s there.”
Cockerell explores the motivation of the people who make pilgrimages to climb the tallest peak in the world — a time-intensive, costly, and hugely risky endeavor. After a chapter recounting the deadly season on Everest captured in Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book, Into Thin Air, he concludes that the risk of climbing Everest is central to the appeal. He writes:
“The specter of death is not a deterrent — it’s what makes many people want to climb Everest in the first place.” (p. 146)
I highlighted that line because it struck me that there is something of this sentiment in the people who write books, too. For us, the line might be:
The specter of failure is not a deterrent — it’s what makes many people want to write books in the first place.
As we’ve just seen, the definition of success and failure is variable, but the point is that writing a book — finishing it, finishing it well, and getting it out into the world and into readers’ hands — is not easy.
Parts of that process have become easier in recent years (anyone can publish anything with a few clicks of a few buttons and AI may be changing the creative process for writers who choose to use it ), but writing a good book is always going to be hard and is always, therefore, going to be something people want to do.
This is the first of two posts in a series of lessons inspired by the book Everest, Inc: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World by Will Cockrell. You can read Part 2 HERE.
This book has been on my TBR list since it first came out this year. Now you've pushed it to the top! Love the connection (and contrast) between guiding and coaching, thanks for exploring it!