Legendary climber Reinhold Messner lost his toes on Nanga Parbat in 1970.
Not all of them – just enough. Enough that technical rock climbing, the discipline he’d mastered, became impossible. His brother Günther died on that mountain. Messner barely made it down alive, frostbitten and broken.
Most people would have called it quits. Hung up the boots. Found a “real job.”
Messner did the opposite.
Unable to rock climb, he pivoted to alpine climbing – big mountains, high altitude, pure suffering. And then he did something nobody thought possible: He climbed all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks on Earth. Without supplemental oxygen. The first person ever to do it.
No oxygen tanks. No shortcuts. Just lungs, legs, and an unbreakable will.
In Werner Herzog’s 1984 documentary The Dark Glow of the Mountains, Messner stands across from the legendary director and drops this bomb:
“I don’t have a normal profession. I never learned one thing that I could say I master. I’ve done a lot of things. I can make a living doing many things. That’s all I need. I can finance my expeditions by selling mountain climbing byproducts. I don’t need anything else. I’m very glad today that I don’t have a profession. I think having one means the end of any kind of creative activity.”
Read that last line again.
”I think having one means the end of any kind of creative activity.”
This is heresy in a world that worships specialization. We’re told from childhood: Pick a lane. Get good at one thing. Build a career. Climb the ladder. Retire with a pension and a plaque.
But Messner understood something most of us miss: A profession is a cage disguised as security.
It’s not that professions are inherently bad. They’re not. They provide structure, income, identity. But they also calcify. They narrow your vision. They turn you into a specialist in one thing and an amateur at everything else. And worst of all, they make you risk-averse. You stop experimenting. You stop exploring. You stop creating.
Because you have too much to lose.
Messner didn’t have that problem. He cobbled together a living from lectures, books, photographs, films – “mountain climbing byproducts,” as he called them. He wasn’t a professional climber in the traditional sense. He was a creator who climbed. And that freedom – that refusal to be boxed in – allowed him to do what no one else could.
Now, let’s be brutally honest here: Not everyone can afford to live like Messner.
If you’re drowning in debt, supporting a family, or living paycheck to paycheck, the luxury of rejecting a profession isn’t really on the table. Messner’s philosophy requires a baseline of freedom, financial, social, or circumstantial, that not everyone has.
But if you do have that privilege, even a sliver of it, you’re wasting it if you don’t use it.
You don’t need to be the best in the world at one thing. You need to be good enough at several things that, when combined, create something unique. Something only you can do. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where creativity lives.
You’d be forgiven if you thought the title of this post was a typo. Or some weird, butchered Russian word. Or, as a friend of mine, who recently introduced me to the term, said: “I always thought it was some kind of Yiddish thing…”
YCDBSOYA is an acronym. You can get it on tie pins from the 1950s. It stands for “You Can’t Do Business Sitting On Your A$$”.
Before we had productivity apps, life hacks, and 12-step frameworks for success, we had this. A simple, powerful, and slightly abrasive kick in the pants. A reminder that creation, innovation, and success are not passive activities. They are contact sports.
And we are back… I mentioned this a few weeks ago – time to unveil the new, updated, better, bigger, bolder GYSHIDO manifesto! And I need your help (read to the end…)
As a quick reminder: GYSHIDO (which, of course, stands for “Getting Your Shit Done”), a term originally coined by Will Butler and introduced to me by Daniel Epstein from the amazing Unreasonable Group, started out as a single webpage with seven little principles a dozen years ago. Since then, it has grown into a global movement – the original manifesto was translated into seventeen languages by our community, people have made videos enacting the principles, a university in Germany has created a course teaching the principles to …
Walt Disney went bankrupt. At just 20 years old, Walt’s first company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, brought together some of the most talented animators in the world, laid the groundwork for the creation of Mickey Mouse – and was a financial disaster. Before the company went out of business just two short years later, cash was so tight that Walt lived in his office and survived on cold beans from a can and bathed at Union Station because he couldn’t afford hot water. He even resorted to catching mice in his office – one of which inspired Mickey Mouse.
Have you ever noticed how some songs sound loud but strangely lifeless? That’s not just your imagination – it’s the result of over-compression, a trick sound engineers use to make music louder, but at a cost to both quality and, surprisingly, your ears. Compression “squishes” music: loud parts become quieter, quiet parts louder, making everything sound equally loud. This boosts punchiness on small speakers, but strips away nuance and, as new research suggests, may even harm your hearing.
It’s been a hot minute since we last spoke. I didn’t disappear; I just got busy… Busy with radical✦, my advisory firm, busy with building out our bi-weekly Briefing (which you absolutely should subscribe to – two times a week you will get our latest research and insights on the future of technology and business), our free resources (check it out – we make a bunch of our best tools available for free for you), and busy with working on GYSHIDO. Yes, GYSHIDO – the brutally honest, no-BS productivity movement we launched some dozen years ago.
On a sunny, cloudless day in the summer of 2012, I found myself sitting in one of the classically uncomfortable seats at Denver International Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to depart. At 6 feet 4 inches (or 1.96 meters), I am, by most measures, tall. I am also fairly skinny – back in 2012, while training for a series of ultramarathon races, my body fat was down to around 5%, and I weighed around 165 lbs / 75 kilograms. This means that when I encounter people who are as tall as I am, they tend to be heavier – think basketball players, rather than super tall, skinny runners.
There once was a startup. The founders, plagued by a problem they encountered in their own lives, went out into the world to seek a solution. They spoke to countless others who shared their plight, listening intently to their woes and wishes.
With determination in their hearts and fire in their eyes, they returned to their humble garage and began to craft a magical device. Day and night they toiled, fueled by the stories of those they’d met. Their creation grew more wondrous with each passing moon, for it was born from the very essence of the people’s needs.
Dee Hock, the founder of VISA (the world’s largest credit card payment system), was one of the eminent thinkers in management and organizational theory. As a lifelong student of Hock, his work and insights, I came across the following — which I thought about summarizing in my own words but realized that it’s too good to be butchered by me.
On Leadership:
“I used to have sessions with my employees once a week. Anyone could come, and we’d talk about anything on their minds. They always wanted to talk about management. ‘How do you do it?’ ‘What’s the best way?’ So I would ask them, ‘What is the single most fundamental responsibility of a manager?’
There is a fantastic story told by bodybuilding legend Arnold Schwarzenegger:
I’ll always remember the first time someone asked me questions in the gym. It was about their legs. They said they couldn’t grow, and they wanted to know which exercises to add to their routine to hit the thighs. First, I said, “Let’s see your squat.” And they said, “My squats are fantastic. I can squat 405.” They got the weight on their back and lowered it approximately 2 inches, and came back up. That’s when I learned that people have a habit of looking for the next big thing when they haven’t spent any time mastering the simple thing in front of them.
