You Get To Decide This Is Rock Bottom

When I was 23 I got fat and found myself questioning my life while huffing and puffing on the side of a volcano in Northern California.

Not like FAT-fat, but fat enough that everything I liked doing in my life was harder.

I actually vividly remember a moment I was walking with a colleague down the hall in my big biotech campus in the Silicon Valley.

We were talking about running because he was training for the Big Sur Marathon later that year.

We walked past this body fat scanner that HR had put in the hallway I guess as part of some health campaign

So he jumped on it and checked his scan and it was somewhere around the low 20 percents.

I didn’t, not because I was concerned about my weight but because I was confident mine wasn’t that high.

I didn’t need to.

I said something like

“Yeah I’m good, I’m probably somewhere around 15% right now”

To which my colleague visibly laughed.

He was a really intelligent physicist from Eastern Europe so his laugh was a strange mixture of like a deep jovial belly laugh mixed with that classic Eastern European almost sinister honesty

I thought…

What the fuck?

This actually broke through the wall of the perception I had created of my life in that moment, which as substantially more positive in my mind than it actually was in that moment.

For a long time at that point I was an athlete.

I played high level soccer in high school, had a body fat scan entering college that read +/-6%, completed two half Ironmans, and maintained a pretty serious level of performance with my health.

What did this chubby shithead know about my health that I didn’t?

In the moment, if I had to guess, I was realistically probably around 23-24% body fat.

I was in complete disillusionment about the current status of my health.

I was LYING to myself about one of my most central core values.

But… not intentionally.

If I had seriously looked and collected the data I probably could have deduced it:

My surfing? Shit

My focus? Shit

My relationship? Actually not shit, that was a fun relationship, but I was insecure for sure about my physique

And that leads me to why I picked up the pen to write this…

My capacity to climb mountains? Shit.

I had woken up for easily half a decade at that point thinking I could wake up on any given day and do just about anything my body wanted to do.

Run a marathon? Let me get my shoes

Climb a mountain? Let me find my crampons

Etc.

So this aforementioned colleague and I and one other in my engineering research group decide to go climb Mount Shasta later that month.

For those of you who don’t know Mount Shasta is a potentially active volcano (dormant the past 3,000+ years) in Northern California.

It’s a little over 14,000 feet with active glaciers and generally speaking real risk (people don’t die often, but occasionally).

As far as mountaineering is concerned, it’s a pretty small feat, it’s not impressive by any means…

But it’s a beautiful, steep, and iconic mountain.

The three of us set off on Friday at 3 from work in the Bay Area to the little town of Dunsmuir which is just outside of the town (and mountain) Shasta.

I had, at this point, not climbed this mountain, I was just a bit delusional about my body’s capacity in this moment.

That night, because even though I wasn’t in the best shape of my life, the two of them certainly still believed I was going to smoke them up the mountain the next two days, decided to make sure I had my fair share of cheap bear in this shitty dive.

And I, at 23, did not have strong boundaries around alcohol.

I wasn’t a partier or big drinker, but I certainly allowed myself to have enough on a regular basis that it contributed to the layer of blubber lying around my stomach at the time.

Just another symptom of my misaligned life in the moment.

I was still in the stage of my life where I didn’t believe that I was capable of having negative consequences from doing quite literally the exact same things that led to negative consequences for other people later in life.

Eat burgers a bit too often? Yeah, but I’m still healthy it’s fine.

A couple beers with colleagues after work? Yeah, that’s completely normal, I’m healthy and have a good job, it’s fine.

Starting to wake up and get to work later and later? I’m still smart and have potential, it’s fine.

Etc. etc.

And to be fair to myself, I was fine.

I was in a good job and doing fine at it, my health was, by medical standards, fine, my routines and punctuality were fine, you get the point.

Life was in fact fine.

So, if my goal in life was just to have an okay, fine life, then by all means I was crushing it.

Fortunately my goal in life was never to have an okay life, it was to have a fucking incredible one, and by that standard I wasn’t even shooting on the right goal.

It’s like when you hook a drive while playing golf onto the wrong fairway and think “Oh, yeah but that’s fine, I can still get it there”

And obviously, you don’t because it wasn’t fine, it was pretty shit, and you’re coping, and you triple bogey.

I digress – we’re drinking some shitty beers playing this silly hoop game on the back wall where you swing a hoop onto this little hook on the wall.

It’s dim, probably 12:30AM, and I’m supposed to be climbing a mountain the next day, but instead I’m buzzed, bloated, blubbery, and not by any means ready for that challenge.

In reflection, this was a literally case study for the exact type of person that gets hurt climbing mountains.

You quite literally could not write a better description of the most endangered person on a mountain:

Young, male, overweight, hungover, bloated, overconfident, underprepared.

Like, that description has WARNING signs flashing in bright red.

I will hand it to myself, I’ve got resilience and I have quite a bit of experience in the wilderness.

So slogging along up the bottom of the mountain to our campsite, I managed to keep up for the most part.

But I was STRUGGLING.

I was absolutely NOT thriving.

I was in pain, I was out of breath, and I was recognizing that I was lying to myself.

There was no chance I was making it up that mountain the next day.

We parked ourselves on an epic ridge line, dug into the snow, placed our tents at around 10,000 feet, and hunkered down for a storm that was supposed to blow through that night.

And even though I knew I wasn’t living up to my potential in that moment, it was epic.

Constant 30mph winds and much, much stronger gusts ripping the top of our tent back and forth.

I slept like a happy baby and the colleague the unintentionally called me out on my weight weeks before lay next to me, I think terrified.

When I woke up in the morning he said “wow, you slept well”

I responded, “and you?”

“Still waiting to fall asleep”

I made an espresso as I warmed my freezing leather hiking boots and planned, not to hike up this mountain, but how I would make sure we would not continue and instead thought subconsciously at what I could say to create doubt that we should do it.

“Yeah that storm really hasn’t full gone yet, it might not be safe”

That was a good one, instilling doubt in the safety of returning from an adventure is a short cut to ending it.

It was partially true, too.

It wasn’t “we need to stop now” weather, but more like “yeah it’s concerning we should keep an eye on it” weather.

And who knows, maybe they felt the same way, but regardless, I influenced the trip to stop.

So we did.

We walked up a bit further then started our descent.

Drove to a restaurant and had, you guessed it, a burger and a beer.

I was embarrassed.

I was happy that I was on this adventure, because I was born to adventure, but I was sad that I had allowed myself to slip comfortably and unknowingly into a body that wasn’t prepared to adventure.

I was not on the right track in life.

I was in danger.

And actually, looking back, I was in more danger than I realized.

Not from that mountain, but in life.

Because I was comfortable and my life LOOKED GOOD from the outside.

I was saving good money, dating, contributing to real science patents, pursuing medical school, blah blah fucking blah.

So not only was I on the wrong path, I was deluded by comfort that I was on the right one.

And it required some outright failures like this little expedition on Mount Shasta to show me that.

I had a conversation with a gentleman who was I believe 5 years sober at the point from drugs and alcohol and he was talking about his addictions and said something that has always stuck with me:

Rock bottom is where you stop digging.

And fortunately for me, even not having heard this insight, I decided that this moment would be my rock bottom.

I decided around that time on Mount Shasta that my rock bottom would be right there.

I didn’t need to gain another 20 lbs from shitty work lunches and happy hour drinking.

I didn’t need to become unhappy and pursue a dependent relationship like so many people do to fill the sad void they’ve opened in their life from a lack of pursuing their goals.

I didn’t need to completely let my life slip away in order to determine that I was at rock bottom.

And that was one of the greatest gifts I ever gave myself.

Was to allow myself to say, “My life is fine and comfortable right now, I have made some mistakes but they aren’t yet the type that will affect me for the rest of my life, but you know what? It isn’t what I want to be, I don’t want to make mistakes that will in fact change my life for the worst, and it’s not going where I want it to go, and that is enough to ask for help and to do things differently.”

And I’m not going to go about my entire life story here, but I do want to fast forward several years later.

And we’re fast forwarding through a hell of a lot of personal work, a lot of adventure, travel, the publishing of my first book, new work and homes, etc. like quite a bit.

I came back to Shasta.

And I climbed up it.

Not with doubt.

Not even huffing and puffing.

I climbed it slowly and methodically and with a smile on my face as the stars slowly faded into the light of a pink purple orange horizon as I took each step the slowly slid back in the scree.

I took a picture of my friend smiling supping his can of Foster’s beer he brought up the night before in his sleeping bag, me without, not because I don’t drink at all, but because I have boundaries and standards that I abide by.

I stood on top of Shasta in my father’s hiking boots with my grandfathers ice-axe.

As I’ve said before, this mountain isn’t the tallest in the world, it’s not even that dangerous, but it was symbolic to me.

I decided that not being able to climb it due to my own lifestyle and life choices was my rock bottom.

And I changed my life such that my sole goal on this planet was to align my actions and my life with my values.

It forced me to be honest with myself on a daily basis, not just every couple years.

I changed the standards that I hold myself to.

I changed the boundaries I must enforce in order to hold myself to this standards.

This changed my behaviors.

It required me to change the way I reach out for support, to ask for help, both from others but from myself.

It built the foundation of what I have now, which is a life of adventure.

Adventure doesn’t mean large expeditions and worldwide travels, by the way,

It means choosing to live your life in the way you want to and to take risks that are aligned with your values, even if they contrast with what the people and world around you deem safe.

To write and speak this story is an adventure for me.

To build my business is an adventure for me.

To rewrite my life in the direction I want regardless of the thoughts or comments of others is an adventure for me.

My life is an adventure.

And I love that.

I want your life to feel like an adventure, too.

I want you to know that you have permission to decide when things are incorrect in your life.

You don’t need a large, atrocious error in your life or to fall off track for a decade in order to determine your life is worth living.

Because I’ll let you in on a secret, even if you have gotten to that point, and it’s okay if you have, that still won’t be the moment you decide to change…

Unless you decide it is.

The decision to change your life for the better can never come from circumstances

It can only come from your own personal decision.

So if you are anywhere on that spectrum.

Maybe you are WAY off track,

Maybe you’re not sure if you are or not,

Maybe you’re actually doing quite well… but you know you’ve gotten too comfortable and distracted and that it’s preventing you from really reaching toward your potential.

Maybe you’re doing absolutely excellent, but something still feels a bit off (yes, you can be doing what appears to be fantastic but still feel misaligned, I know and work with individuals with quite literally more money than they could ever need who wake up unhappy because they have no space to pursue their real dreams)

If you allow for it, your Mount Shasta moment can be right now.

And if you decide for it to be, then weeks, months, or years from now, after you have done the work to change, you will stand on the top of whatever summit it is that you wanted to climb, too.

And you’ll look down at the horizon and think

“This is just the fucking beginning.”