Shouting from my shed

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Every day is a school day

I am often struck by how many skills I need to learn in this “job”. The era of learning how to light a stove or keep a sleeping bag dry is long gone.
Now I am running my own business there are so many new things to get my head around. Accounting, marketing, web design, budgeting, innovating… Every day is a school day.
Andy Kirkpatrick wrote an interesting piece about this. He was famously useless at school, but has done pretty well for himself since through a thirst to learn new stuff.

Waiting for the weather to get cold again, I’mve spent the last two days finishing images and diagrams for the upcoming peg book; clicking away in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, along with Indesign, not to mention fiddling with the book’s web page (requiring a DaVinci Code’esk dabbling into html, CSS and Jquery). In between Mac nerdyness I’mve also been fiddling with my rack, setting up a new Jetboil so I can hang it, sewing up a new alpine/scottish winter check rig (designed to reduce axe lanyard/rope tangles, and put the rack where I can see it), and dissembling a sleeping bag and rebuilding it for gnarly alpine camping.

Why am I telling you this? Well it occurred to me how many skills you learn as a climber that go far beyond climbing.

Someone asked me the other day what I was good at, and after thinking I answered “being creative”. After a pause they said “and what else?”. I couldn’t think of anything else, so they replied “what about climbing?” I told them that I lumped climbing in with everything else; writing, photography, design, as just being another creative outlet. For me planning a climb is just the same as planning to do a speaking tour, or design a poster; it’s an all consuming project to create something that excites me.

I love the creative skills I’mve learn as a climber, skills that sustain me and have given me a job way above my pay scale or education. These skills creep up on you; like Rab Carrington making sleeping bags in his loft to pay for trips, or Galen Rowel taking snaps to fund his climbing, or Alastair Lee making climbing films. Before you know it, the other thing you do, is what you are.

To begin with it comes down to money, exploiting your talent to pay your climbing bills. You learn to write, take photos and speak, three things I was crap at when I started, but which got easier the more I tried (non are a talent – they’re simply a skill to learn).

As these skills developed you end up needing new ones – well you do if you don’t have the money to pay others to do it. Writing for magazines mean I went from hand scribbled diagrams on scraps of paper, to Adobe Illustrator, a program that’s about as easy to learn as advanced quantum psychics. Next came Photoshop, slowly trying to make bad photos good, and good photos better.

In the end some of these things start to eclipse even climbing, either by accident or design, with weeks spent traveling talking about climbing rather than doing it, days spent designing other peoples talks about their adventures rather than planning your own.

But if climbing is a school, then I think for me and many others it’s been the best school we could ever have gone to.

So next time some tells you to get a proper job and forget climbing dreams, just tell them you’re in further education.

Off course the trick is never to graduate!

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