Friday, August 9, 2013

Glen of Redfin fame what inspires me? Hey what is it for you?

What Happens When You Get to the Top





My trek to the summit of Mt. Rainier began in a town car driven from the Seattle airport late at night. I called my family until my phone was out of range, then worked in the backseat until my laptop battery died. Then my driver and I talked.
He came from Pakistan, where there were many mountains, he said, but few people who climbed them.
“Why?” he said. “Because we love our families.”“I love my family,” I said.
He gestured to the wilderness outside. “Then what are we doing here?”
It was past midnight when we arrived at the White River Campground. I was climbing with two colleagues from Redfin, Matt and Tom. Knowing that I was coming in late from a business trip, they’d set up a tent for me and gone to sleep. Our camp was identified by a green glow-stick, like the ones used at a roller rink.
Where Our Climbing BeganThe next morning, we hoisted our packs. We walked through forests, along a river, and up a snowy pass, where we practiced how to use an ice-axe to stop a fall. We clambered over craggy rocks in the shape of an ocean-liner’s prow, and down to a field of ice. This is where the hiking ended and the climbing began.
We were at an elevation reserved on airplanes for the use of approved portable electronic devices. We dug out a place for our tent, ate dinner, then tried to sleep. People returning from the summit were drinking scotch in paper cups. It was 7 p.m.
I knew I wouldn't sleep, but then woke up to the sound of everyone getting into their crampons and helmets. It had gotten cold and completely dark.
Never Dangerous, Never SafeI thought climbing would be like hiking, only steeper. It was nothing like hiking. We were roped together but had to stay apart, to avoid falling into the same crevasse. We could see only the step we were just about to take. Our head-lamps shone on the cold of the ice. No one wanted to fall. The hour itself was solemn: 3 a.m. is for emergency surgery, homesickness in foreign hotels, the beginning or end of love.
Walking all night anywhere else you’d eventually reach a flat spot, but the final slope of a mountain is unrelentingly steep. We couldn't let go of a water-bottle, axe or pack without its sliding for miles. Even sitting on the mountainside, my muscles were tensed against the grade. It was never dangerous, but it was never safe.
I learned that night how long dawn is in coming; George Orwell said it starts as the color gray but on a mountain it’s bright orange. I’d imagined many times the imperial view we’d have of the whole region but that was small and bare compared to Little Tahoma, a hulking, glaciated outcropping of Mt. Rainier as minutely detailed up close as the Star Destroyers in a George Lucas film. That mountain rose up beside us and then shrank, derelict and ghostly, as we climbed higher.
The Infinite Varieties of ExcellenceIt was in the last push to the summit that my colleagues, people I saw as ordinary throughout the week, appeared in a new light. They were exceptional climbers. It made me think of a social-studies classmate who played the saxophone at our high-school assembly so well that our teacher stopped class to shake his hand; I’d felt the same way when a guy from training, with a grace bordering on contempt, sliced through an after-work basketball game for a left-handed drive.
What surprises you about such displays are the enormous varieties of excellence – who knew he could do that? --and then the sudden conviction that all varieties must be essentially the same: in each case it is a feat of character, a supreme effort repeated so often it becomes effortless, a thing you do that becomes the way you are. It’s hard to believe that someone so good at one thing could be mediocre at anything. Maybe such people aren't.
“I Should Have Been Nicer to People”When we reached the summit, I did not feel the glow of adventure and attainment that now colors my memory of the trip. My overwhelming feeling was that we were in a place deeply hostile to all forms of life, and that we should return to life as quickly as possible; I remember thinking, “Never visit outer space.”
Having walked through wind-blasted moonscapes that are free of snow only a few weeks each year, I thought I knew what to expect up there. But what had delighted me about all those other places is the ubiquity and tenacity of life: a clutch of flowers or a busy ant seems like a miracle at 9,000 feet.
The world below Mt. Rainier became more precious. Looking down at civilization, self-contained and far removed, it seemed contingent and friable, like you could come down from the mountain and find our cities lost to an apocalypse.
I soon got altitude sickness: intense nausea and a headache. I’d felt strong the way up, but now I was weak, and would later need my friends’ help coming down. I have always been prone to melodramatic self-pity and so I was here, even though I was nowhere close to dying, and in no more danger than the other climbers slumped beside their packs.
But the clearest thought I had, as if I wouldn't have a chance to make it right, was “I should have been nicer to people.” I felt this tremendous love for the world, not just for my wife or my children, but for all the silly, vain things that people do: hoarding the cherry Jolly Ranchers at their desks, typing an ex-boyfriend’s name into the wrong Facebook box, ruing the fossilized crumbs they ate from their overturned keyboards, claiming their French is fluent, ardently apologizing for running late before browsing the web for five more minutes. It hadn't been worth it to make them miserable over a blown deadline or a botched design.
You Will Grow In LoveIn a commencement speech, George Saunders said these epiphanies of kindness come with age:
Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”
And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE.

We start out, as babies, as receptacles of love -- of infinite, almost delirious love -- and in George Saunders’s account, we end our lives, eviscerated of all other vitality by cancer and other infirmities, as beacons of love. In between, we are as hard as youth.
But coming to kindness is a matter of perspective as well as age. You can feel like an old man fast in a doctor’s office or on a mountaintop. You see life as a god might, with none of a god’s powers. And this, as any follower of Jesus will tell you, is what fills you with love.
Drive, And The Opposite of Drive
On most Seattle flights, if you sit on the right going in or on the left going out, you get a view of Mt. Rainier’s summit, an impossibly white pavilion almost level with the plane. Whenever I look up from my laptop to see it, I fall in love with the world again. But now also there is the drive you must have to make something beautiful, to make something happen, to get to the top in the first place.
Almost every CEO I know has been driven, and unable to stop being driven, and wary of the toll that drive takes on others. This toll would be unbearable -- for others, and for me too -- without an abundance of love. And this is what bothers me about the books and panels on business: they all talk a lot about drive, and very little about love, even though every endeavor requires both -- in exactly what proportions I've never been able to say.
(Photo of Little Tahoma from Mt. Rainier, courtesy of Strychnine on Flickr)
Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate brokerage. Follow him on Twitter @glennkelman.

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