Last week, I wrote you about obtaining a vision. This week I'll follow up with achieving the vision. Again, all quotes are taken from an interview with Sir Edmund Hilary found on the Academy of Achievement site.
The first thing you'll need is motivation. Sir Edmund Hillary said, "I think motivation is the single most important factor in any sort of success. Physical fitness is important, technical skill is important, and maybe even the desire for money is important in some respects. But a sort of basic motivation, the desire to succeed, to stretch yourself to the utmost is the most important factor. Certainly in the field of exploration and activity, it's the thing that makes the difference between someone who does really well and someone who doesn't." I think that's true of missionaries too. Teaching skills are important, the ability to speak fluently is important, but motivation is what makes the difference.
Hillary explained the role of his motivation in this way, "But, of course, we had one problem that the modern mountaineer doesn't have. That is, this psychological barrier. We really didn't know whether it was humanly possible to reach the top of Mt. Everest. And even using oxygen as we were, if we did get to the top, we weren't at all sure whether we wouldn't drop dead or something of that nature. All the physiologists had warned us that the altitude at the summit of Everest was a very marginal altitude and might be extremely dangerous. So, one had this feeling in your mind all the time that maybe you were pushing things a bit beyond what humans were meant to do and you couldn't ignore that feeling. But, because of strong motivation, you keep plugging on and you seem to be going okay and nothing seems to be going wrong, so you persist. And we persisted, of course, and ultimately, set foot on the summit."
So what was it that drove Hillary to do what he did? Sir Edmund Hillary called it, "A very strong affection for mountaineering. I knew I could do it and enjoy it and so it grew on me." He wasn't pursuing glory. He was pursuing his passion. He simply loved what he did. I've written to you about motivation a little bit already. I've found that the best motivations are not quantifiable. Your vision might include numbers, but don't ever let those numbers motivate you. In fact, don't let your vision motivate you. The vision is not the motivation. The vision is a tool to build faith. "A very strong affection for," God, your fellow-man, and the work, should be your motivation.
Once you're motivated, you'll need a plan. On the subject of planning, Sir Edmund Hillary said, "I think, for instance, that prior planning of what you're doing, slowly and carefully working out how you're going to meet problems if they arise, can be enormously helpful. If an emergency arises, you've already thought out the type of thing that you can do and the type of decisions you can make, the type of orders you can give, and overcome that problem and get through... And I've always found you can do that by, each night, when you go to bed, just let your mind dwell on the likely things that may happen next day, and think out carefully the sort of decisions that might be necessary to make in order to have the program carried through."
Now let's say part of your vision is that you want to be obedient. If you already know how you will respond to a pressure to be disobedient, you are far more likely to succeed with your vision. You could also apply this principle in your nightly planning, personal study and companionship study. Ask yourself how an investigator might misinterpret whatever you are trying to share, what questions he or she might have, what words might you want to use in the lesson that you don't know yet or other problems that might arise. Role plays are a great way to prepare for those situations and will give you an advantage in the teaching arena.
As you form a plan, you might consider speaking with missionaries who are towards the end of their missions, or returned missionaries or your mission president or whoever else might be able to offer some counsel based on experience. Sir Edmund Hillary advised young people to do that strongly, "But, I recommend to younger people that it's foolish to start from scratch again. Older people really have a lot of experience. They have a lot of knowledge. Some of them are even quite pleasant people, and I recommend to the young ones to take advantage of all that previous experience and knowledge and understanding which older people have. Absorb it all, and then drop the old people if you'd like, and go off and do your own thing. At least you're starting with all that built-up accumulation of knowledge and understanding that's been going on for generations. I think this is a very valuable thing that young people can do. Quite often a young person who is unhappy and uncertain, can make friendships with some slightly older people with more experience and maybe learn a little bit from them and get a little bit more certain in themselves. Now I know a lot of youngsters couldn't care less about this, but that's what I would recommend to a lot of them. I actually learned a lot from older people when I was in my 20s. What little I did learn was mostly from older people, not from young ones."
Be humble. Ask others for help and absorb it. You don't have to start from scratch. You'll be far more likely to achieve your vision if you do.
Let me offer one final comment on planning. Modern climbers that have the vision of summitting Everest use four camps in addition to the base camp in order to make the climb. You might consider having an idea of about where you need to be in order to reach your end-of-the-mission goal at the six month mark,at the year mark, and at the year and a half mark. The you can see what you need to achieve monthly, weekly, and daily in order to meet your six month goals. You could really divide it up however you like, but dividing your big goal into smaller, more manageable goals is key.
Another factor in achieving a vision is adaptability, or being flexible. About his summit attempt on Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary said, "Never, at any stage, until we actually got up the rock step, was I confident that we were going to be successful. My feeling was that we would give it everything we had, but we had no surety that we were going to reach the top. In fact, I believe that if someone starts out on a challenging activity, completely confident that they're going to succeed, why bother starting? It's not much of a challenge. I think it's much better to start out on something that you're not at all sure that you can do. If you overcome and you manage to defeat the obstacles, the satisfaction is so much greater." See how visions are faith-building things? Hillary had found the balance within the ambiguity between the real and the ideal. He started off knowing he would have to be flexible.
When asked about failure he said, "Well, it sounds arrogant, but I can't remember having all that many failures in major things that I set out to do. Sometimes objectives almost changed during the course of something you were attempting to do. You would decide that a more important objective was such-and-such a thing, rather than what you had initially set out to do." He didn't fail very often because he was willing to be flexible and adapt his vision as necessary.
Adapting your vision isn't necessarily a cheap excuse to cheat your way out of doing something hard. It could be a sign of maturity. Hillary said, "I've moved from being a child who dreamed a lot and read a lot of books about adventure, to actually getting involved in things like mountaineering, and then becoming a reasonably competent mountaineer and going off to the Himalayas, doing a lot of climbing, and going off on expeditions to the Antarctic and that sort of active adventurer stage. Then I, more or less as I got older, I moved into a period where I was more involved in organizing, raising funds and leading expeditions... As I got somewhat older, again I became increasingly interested particularly in the people of the Himalayas. I built up very close friendships with them and I became concerned about the things that they wanted: schooling and hospitals and things of that nature. This carried on for quite a while. Perhaps in more recent years, certainly in the last 15 years or so, I've also become very much involved in environmental matters. So I would say now that my major interests are in people and in the environment."
Was the vision of his later years to help the poor and preserve the environment inferior to his former vision to reach the highest peak of the world? Of course not. To the contrary. He simply adapted his vision as he matured. You'll do a lot of maturing on your mission. Every missionary does. Your vision will likely mature with you. Let it. When you get to that point, don't cling to the vision of your younger missionary self because you feel that it is somehow less honorable to adapt it. "Clinging" is a dangerous thing. After all, it was the people that clung to the iron rod which reached the tree of life, partook of the fruit, "and after they had partaken of the fruit of the tree... did cast their eyes about as if they were ashamed," ("The Danger of Clinging to the Rod," 1 Nephi 8:25).
As Sir Edmund Hillary said, "be that sort of person that enjoy[s] making out plans, but... also enjoy changing plans."
"But, I recommend to younger people that it's foolish to start from scratch again. Older people really have a lot of experience. They have a lot of knowledge. Some of them are even quite pleasant people, and I recommend to the young ones to take advantage of all that previous experience and knowledge and understanding which older people have. Absorb it all, and then drop the old people if you'd like, and go off and do your own thing. At least you're starting with all that built-up accumulation of knowledge and understanding that's been going on for generations. I think this is a very valuable thing that young people can do. Quite often a young person who is unhappy and uncertain, can make friendships with some slightly older people with more experience and maybe learn a little bit from them and get a little bit more certain in themselves. Now I know a lot of youngsters couldn't care less about this, but that's what I would recommend to a lot of them. I actually learned a lot from older people when I was in my 20s. What little I did learn was mostly from older people, not from young ones."
The final lesson I would like to share about Sir Hillary is the principle of perseverance. He said, "I never climbed up anything one step at a time. You read so much about how, at extreme altitudes, you take one step and then you stop and pant and puff for a while, and then take one more step. I don't ever remember doing that. You're much slower in higher altitudes because of the lack of oxygen, but I used to keep moving pretty steadily most of the time and I didn't have to stop too often for panting and puffing." He went on to say, "My mind concentrates rather firmly on the job in hand. Certainly, on Everest for instance, we were using oxygen and I was constantly doing mental arithmetic, checking the pressure of the oxygen bottles. I had to convert that pressure over to the number of liters of oxygen that remained in the bottle, and then work out how many hours or minutes of activity we still had left. So constantly, we were dealing with the problems of the slopes and soft snow and crevasses that we have to deal with, but at the same time, constantly ticking over in my mind was the usage of oxygen and how much time we had to get there and get down again." Keep moving steadily towards your goal and concentrate on the job at hand. As we learn from D&C 63:47, "He that is faithful and endureth shall overcome the world."
Now, there is only one thing left to cover. Satisfaction. And Sir Edmund Hillary should certainly know a great deal about that. Just look at the view.
On the subject of satisfaction, Sir Edmund Hillary said, "It doesn't matter what field you're in. You could be in education, science or business [or on an LDS mission]. Almost anything has its moments where you have to overcome considerable challenges, and if you're able to overcome those challenges, you get a great sense of satisfaction. And I would say a businessman who's been able to achieve a successful deal of some sort, would probably feel a very similar sort of reaction to someone who's just managed to get to the top of a mountain. You've overcome problems. You may not have been frightened to death, but you've overcome problems and difficulties and you've achieved success and you certainly feel pretty happy about it. I think the element of danger which is present in things like mountaineering and sailing around the world and all those type of things, does add a tremendous amount to the challenge. There's simply no question that if you're doing something that has the possibility that you may make a mistake or something may go wrong and you'll come to a rather sticky end, this I think, does add something, really, to the whole challenge. You really feel you're doing something exciting and perhaps a little desperate, and if you're successful, it certainly gives you that little bit more satisfaction."
I probably missed a couple, but I bolded all those you's because I want you to feel like the quote is directed to you.
Sir Hillary said that he felt a great deal of satisfaction and excitement after summitting the mountain, and especially after returning to camp safely, and I am sure he did. He had good reason to. But I am also sure his satisfaction could not compare to the spiritual confirmation felt by many a young man, upon honorably completing his mission, that God is smiling down upon him and saying, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant," (Matthew 25:21)
I love you Luke! You have a lot to look forward to. Keep on working hard.
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