How Learning To Ski At 40 Is Like Running A Start-Up

Fear is a highly useful motivation tool in life and for start-ups in particular. It can stop you dead in your tracks or bring with it unexpected opportunity if you are willing to overcome it.

I was recently faced with my fear of heights and it was finally time to square up with it. To be clear, it’s not just the actual heights that scare me. It’s my obsession over the consequences should something go wrong; no different than why I don’t like the concept of offshore ocean sailing at all. When things go wrong they go way wrong.

My husband has skied his entire life but for the fifteen years we’ve been together it’s the one sport that we haven’t engaged in as a couple. Full disclosure (my husband already knows): I tried to ski when I was fifteen for about an hour with an old boyfriend and it ended up being so traumatic that I simply don’t count it as an experience at all.

When the invite to spend a few nights at The Ritz-Carlton, Lake Tahoe presented itself a few weeks ago my husband gave me no option but to finally learn to ski at the youthful age of 40. There were two immediate bad ideas here. First, I don’t like the cold. After my first skiing “experience” I didn’t travel to a destination under 70 degrees for a decade. Second, I don’t ski. The last thing any 40 year old needs is a torn ACL or a dislocated hip just to learn something.

Then I learned what “apres ski”, “ski in ski out”, and “mountain spa” means The Ritz-Carlton, Lake Tahoe style. Peter has climbed in the remotest regions of Antarctica, Patagonia, and the Alps so somehow my visions of a mountain vacation got tarnished by stories of shivering dinners eaten out of space bags. All of a sudden the idea of a luxury “ski vacation” (did I just utter that oxymoron?) sounded exactly like what this athletically over-ambitious entrepreneur needed. My husband had the plane tickets booked before I could re-consider in an hour which was masterful on his part since I tried to back out at least three times later.

An entrepreneur inevitably relates everything in life to business so don’t think that I didn’t savor every minute of learning to ski on one of the great mountain resorts in North America on a perfect 60-degree blue sky spring day that I now know from my husband only comes along a few times in lifetime. But I couldn’t help realizing looking down a 9,500’ mountain that learning to ski at 40 is no different than trying to re-invent yourself in business or creating a start-up.

For what they’re worth here are the four lessons you can learn about running a start-up by learning to ski. Just make sure that you also have an après ski cocktail, house made s'mores by the fire, and a massage booked at the mountain spa when you’re done your last run. You’ll deserve it.

Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone: Fear is instinctual. But it’s most valuable lessons come from repelling it. In business, the joke around our office is that I will cold-call on anyone. The worst I will get is a “no”, and I can live with that. So why can’t I apply the same fearlessness of rejection and failure to the personal things I fear most in life? Learning to ski required me to reject fear on many levels. My husband knew I was going to try to strategically wiggle out of it all at 6:00 am when I woke up. I beat him by a half an hour with my first excuse at 5:30 am that I was suffering from an eye infection (which I was). This was one instance that I was grateful for my husband’s persistent intolerance. Three hours later I was carving groomers down the bunny slope and loving every minute of it. I didn’t fall once. It turns out skiing is no different than cold calling a prospective game-changing client if you just have the courage to do it

Find Positive And Supportive Mentors: I had my first skiing lesson with a seasoned certified instructor, Peggy Connor at Northstar California Resort. Smart leaders and managers know how to read people and harness their strengths and Peggy read me like a book. She played long to my strengths, quickly corrected my weaknesses, and never let me metaphorically ski into the woods. My loving husband was also cheerleading from the sidelines the whole time rather than an angry, jealous boyfriend. The right mentorships (and personal relationships) at the right time can make the difference between succumbing to fear or overcoming it 

Know When To Cut Your Losses: By noon I was feeling like a future Olympic giant slalom racer (my husband was ecstatic). My instructor Peggy sensed my confidence and thought I was ready for a full top to bottom mountain run on a blue cruiser. But after three hours my legs were already hurting in places that I was unaware could hurt and the biggest kicker—I looked down. I froze. My knee (conveniently) started to throb. But I was 9,000’ up on a mountain with my skis pointed straight downhill and the sun setting in front of me. That’s exactly when I knew it was time to pull the plug. I had conquered my fear. I sluiced down the rest of the mountain to the après ski champagne tasting in a toboggan behind the swarthy man on ski patrol and loved every minute of it. No torn ACLs no dislocated hips 

Know When To Recognize Success: Failure is the “F” word in the start-up world, but without it you wouldn’t know where success lies. I didn't do the bumps with my husband the first time I skied but I carved it down a ski slope at almost 9,000’ and later that night as my legs were pulsing with lactic acid I forgot that I should be proud. What distinguishes successful entrepreneurs from companies that go bankrupt is the ability and willingness to recognize and take advantage of small victories. You need a lot of them to succeed in life

Just like business, it is important to know when to call it quits. There are a lot of factors that go into being a successful business and sometimes the stars don’t align. I would rather bow out gracefully then go down in flames any day.