(Picture: Our team of helpful and caring sherpas (at base camp))

Many people may be afraid to dream big.  They are reluctant to hope for too much because they do not want to be disappointed.  As a result, they settled for the mundane.

It doesn’t have to be so.   Even if you suspect that you do not have the talent or resources to accomplish your goals, or your wildest dreams, you don’t have to give them up.  You just need to change your strategy.  Instead of working alone, be part of a team.  Teams are incredible things.  No task is too great, no accomplishment too grand, no dream too far-fetched for a team.  It takes teamwork to make a dream work!

Teams come in all shapes and sizes.  If you are married, you and your spouse are a team, if you are employed, you and your colleagues are a team.  The question is not about whether will you participate in something that involves others, I’ll ask will your involvement with others be successful?

Mountain climbing is not for the faint hearted because the world’s highest peaks are some of the most inhospitable places on earth.  Everest is remote.  At 8850m, the altitude incapacitates all and the weather is ruthlessly unforgiving.  Only someone who has climbed a great mountain knows what it takes to make it to the top.

Tenzing Norgay, the first sherpa to arrive at the summit of Everest in 1953 was quoted: “You do not climb a mountain like Everest by trying to race ahead on your own, or by competing with your comrades.  You do it slowly and carefully, by unselfish teamwork.  Certainly I wanted to reach the top myself; it was the thing I had dreamed of all my life.  But if the lot fell to some one else I would take it like a man, and not a crybaby.  For that is the mountain way.” Ullman, James Ramsey. Man of Everest: The Autobiography of Tenzing. London: George G. Harrap and Co., Ltd., 1955, 178.

Could Tenzing Norgay & Edmund Hillary have made it alone? Could they have made it without a great team? The answers are no.  Because it takes teamwork to make the dream work.  If you want to climb a great mountain, you cannot do it alone!

I have came across a quote, I copied it (do not know who quoted it):

“One person seeking glory doesn’t accomplish much.  Success is the result of people pulling together to meet common goals”

Glad that I am with a great team.  Cho Oyu was a great success, and the team had a good strategy, good team manager, good team doctor, and a great sherpa team!  I am many steps closer to my dream…