For most of my life, I climbed without asking why.
I am not proud of that. It is simply true. There was always a next thing. A next role, a next target, a next height that someone, somewhere, would notice. The climbing felt like its own justification. You go up because up is where everyone is looking.
It took me a long time, and the writing of a whole book, to understand what I had actually been doing all those years.
There is a line I kept returning to. You don't conquer the mountain. You conquer yourself.
When I first heard it, years ago, it sounded like the kind of thing that looks good on a poster and means very little. I understand it differently now. The mountain does not change when you climb it. It is exactly as tall, as cold, as indifferent when you reach the top as it was at the base. The only thing that changes is you. The climb is not a way of defeating the mountain. It is a way of meeting yourself, often for the first time, in conditions hard enough that you can no longer keep pretending.
That is why two people can reach the same summit and have completely different experiences of it. One arrives and feels almost nothing, because they climbed to be seen arriving. The other arrives changed, because the climb did its real work on them the whole way up.
Now the harder thing I had to admit to myself.
For a long stretch of my career, I was climbing for the applause from below. The recognition. The proof. The quiet sense that people at the base were watching me rise and saying my name. There is nothing unusual in this. Most ambition, if you are honest about it, has some of this in it. I had a great deal of it.
But applause is a strange fuel. It burns very bright and very fast, and it leaves almost nothing behind. You reach the top on it, and the silence up there can be deafening, because the thing you climbed for does not live at the summit. It lived in the eyes of the people at the bottom. And by the time you arrive, they have already turned to watch someone else begin to climb.
A real climber, I slowly came to understand, does not ascend to hear his name shouted from the base. He climbs to silence the noise within. That is a completely different engine. One is powered by what other people think of you. The other is powered by a question only you can hear, and only you can answer.
This is the quiet centre of the book I am about to put into the world. Not the achievements. The slow, late, slightly embarrassing discovery that I had been climbing for the wrong reasons for years, and that it is never too late to change the reason without changing the direction.
Because that is the part most people misunderstand. Changing why you climb does not mean climbing less. I am as ambitious now as I have ever been, possibly more. But the ambition points somewhere different. It is no longer about being seen reaching the top. It is about who I become on the way, and what is still standing in other people after I have left the room.
Now the part I am keeping for this letter, between us.
When I named the book The Next Mountain, I was not being poetic. It is the most practical thing I know about a life.
Every peak you reach reveals the next mountain you did not know existed. That sounds, at first, like a curse. You climb for years, you finally arrive, and the reward is the sight of another, higher mountain you could not see from below. I spent some time being quietly depressed by this idea before I understood it properly.
Here is what I understand now. If the summit were the end, then everything would depend on arriving, and arriving never satisfies anyone for long. But if the summit is a doorway, then the point was never to arrive at all. The point was to keep becoming someone capable of the next climb. That takes all the pressure off the peak and puts it back where it belongs, on the person you are turning into on the way up.
It also means you are never finished, and never too late. At fifty-something, with one large mountain behind me, I am not at the end of anything. I am standing in a doorway, looking at the next face, choosing it slowly and on purpose. That is not a consolation prize for getting older. It is the whole design.
So I am between mountains right now. The first climb is behind me. The next is being chosen deliberately. And the single biggest difference between this climb and the last one is that I finally know why I am doing it. Not for the noise below. For the quiet I am still trying to earn within.
If you are climbing something right now, and most people reading this are, I want to leave you with the question that took me far too long to ask myself.
Strip away everyone who is watching. Imagine that no one will ever know whether you reached the top or not. No applause at the base. No name called out. No announcement when it is done.
Would you still climb it?
If the answer is yes, you are climbing it for the right reason, and you should give it everything you have.
If the answer is no, that is worth knowing now, before you spend years reaching a summit that was never going to be quiet enough to satisfy you.
Until next week,
Avinash