Mountain Climber, author, Songwriter

HOW TO BE A TRAILBLAZER OTHERS WILL WANT TO FOLLOW (650 words) 

BY DANIEL STIH

Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen. How can there be an adventure if you use a guidebook to arrange everything beforehand? - Richard Aldington 

A trailblazer uses fear to their advantage.  

Fear is healthy. It’s telling you to pause and think things through. Fear by itself should not stop from moving ahead. Always be thinking about options and analyzing how to do something better or different. There’s something to be said for laying awake at night thinking. Fear should cause you to ask: 

Is what I’m doing good enough? 
I didn’t do that. Should I have? 
What is my competitor thinking and doing? 

A trailblazer is a flexible dreamweaver.  

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware - Martin Buber 

A trailblazer is flexible and adapts. He or she can think on their feet, improvise, and change the script as needed. If you are too sure of yourself your approach might be, “Well this is what’s going to work.” You might start to do it and not think twice. And then the curve ball hits. In business, you can have the greatest plan but the market and customers may not agree with it. They do their own thing. 

Few things that end the way you think they will when you get started. Every journey requires tweaking along the way. On a climbing journey I often need to take a different path to finish what I start. I still get to the top. If I had said from the start. this is the way I am going and I’m not going to deviate, I might fail. I could die. 

In business, read the customer (the mountain). Discern when someone is not interested in your pitch, and change your path as needed. Don’t be stuck on what you have prepared. Don’t go down a path the customer is not interested. Weave a path that gets the customer to follow you, where you want to take them. Be willing to change the script as you move along. 

It’s a constant weaving. It’s not just: this is the script, this is what we’re going to stick to. Be prepared before going in, understand as you go in, that you are going to have to deviate from the script. Like following a map on the mountain, the customer may not agree with your expectations when you get there. You may have thought you we going to go straight up, but find you need to make a left turn first. Be willing to improvise and adapt. Expect to have do these things from the moment you get started.  

A trailblazer commits and keeps going.  

The difference between people that succeed and fail is that the people who succeed not only understand they will encounter challenges, they expect to have them. When they get to a bump or an obstacle, it’s expected. They already knew how to make the decision and how to continue before they got started.  

My water filter clogged after I had been on the climb for two days. My choice was to turn around or drink water from a green pool with frogs swimming in it. I recalled environmentalists say frogs are sensitive to pollution - if you want to tell if the water is polluted see if there are any frogs. If it’s good enough for frogs, I thought, it’s good enough for me. When I found that water my attitude was, well this is what I signed up for. It’s not ideal. But to get to my objective (the top of the mountain) this is what I’m going to have to do. It’s not in my plan, and I don’t like it, but it’s what I’m going to have to do to be successful.The water tasted fishy. I drank it for a week as I finished my climb.