Three hundred feet. That’s how far Conrad Anker was from the summit of Mount Meru, on the Himalayan peak’s Shark’s Fin route, when he looked at a troubled attempt and said no. When Jimmy Chin later told a Navy SEAL unit about Meru, his 2015 film of the climb, military leader Bill King skipped the obvious question about the courage it took to summit. He wanted to know how Anker found the discipline to turn around.
That question leads off the Journal’s tour of Rules to Live By, the new book from Chin, 52, the Oscar-winning filmmaker and elite climber, which Ellen Gamerman walks through in this weekend’s Review. Chin talked with 10 people who have built unusual lives — Yo-Yo Ma, Kelly Slater, Lynsey Addario and Alex Honnold among them. In an interview, he draws a line between real risk and perceived risk, especially when things get extreme. Fear, in his view, is a survival tool that can turn into a trap. The skill is knowing which one you’re facing.
Burn the boats — but pay off the cards first
Anker’s call anchors the first of five rules the Journal pulls from the book: “Be more badass, less dumbass.” A voice in Chin’s head insisted this was the moment — the years of training, all the climbers who’d failed before them. Anker said no, and Chin trusted him; the team summited the Shark’s Fin on a later try. King’s own rule is borrowed from Cortés, who wrecked his ships so his men couldn’t retreat. King did his own version before he signed up for SEAL training: the commercial photographer sold off his camera gear, used the money to wipe out his card debt and left himself no plan B. Chin isn’t a purist about it. Whether you should leave yourself no way back depends on the circumstances, he notes, and his own climbing has advanced by falling, learning and trying again.
Then there’s Kris Tompkins, the former Patagonia chief executive, whose husband, North Face founder Doug Tompkins, died of hypothermia in a 2015 kayaking accident. Afterward she asked herself the worst-case question and then actually weighed the answer. The Journal files her story under a principle from the book worth pinning to the fridge: “Hope is a muscle. Give it exercise.”
Our read
This is an Investments/Risk (IN04) lesson wearing crampons, with a Behavioral edge. Planners split risk in two. Risk tolerance is how much swing you can stomach; risk capacity is how much loss your plan can absorb before a goal is gone. The voice in Chin’s head near the top was tolerance turned all the way up. Anker was capacity — the cold read that the margin isn’t there today, however badly you want it. The money mistakes that hurt most often aren’t failures of nerve. They’re failures to turn around: the concentrated stock you’ve come this far with, the losing bet you won’t cut because selling feels like quitting.
And don’t skip King’s garage sale. Before the biggest leap of his life, he cleared his card balances, and paying off high-rate card debt is one of the most dependable returns in personal finance. Burn the boats if you must — though Chin himself says that depends on the situation, and for most families, clearing the debt while keeping a cash cushion beats selling the fallback. Just don’t launch a career change, a business or a sabbatical with a balance riding along. Decide where your turnaround point is — the loss your plan can take, not the one your gut swears it can — while you’re still at base camp. That conversation is short in calm weather and brutal at altitude.