I walked up Snowdon last week.
It was a great experience, made even better by the glorious sunshine and pleasant breeze that meant there was zero need for my expensively acquired waterproof trousers.
It was my friend Claire and I that made the trip happen – we’ve been wanting to get up there for years, and with Claire’s surname being Snowdon, it’s always felt like it was meant to be, so this year we gathered a 14-strong group together and made it happen.
Spoiler alert, we made it!
But when I said I “walked” up Snowdon, I actually meant “scramble and climb”.
We opted for the Pyg track route, which I’d been assured by everyone who’d been up Snowdon would be fine, problem-free and ‘easy’ as long as the weather holds.
Easy? No.
Hard work? Yes.
Living as I do in Goring on Thames, there weren’t exactly plentiful opportunities to practice for this kind of terrain.
And having signed up, bought the gear, there was definitely an “Oh sh*t” moment, standing at the bottom of the path looking up.
And even then I was being told, “Oh it starts gently”.
I was really starting to feel that I didn’t really understand the English language after all, as my definitions of easy and gentle seemed miles away from other peoples’.
And once we got up to the stile to cross over to the other side of the mountain, the enormity and difficulty of the terrain hit me.
This was NOT what I had signed up for.
All the things people had said about the difficulty seem to have been criminally misleading, to put it mildly.
It looked daunting and painful (if not then, in the following days recovering from it), and I was questioning whether the view from the top would even be worth it.
Which is a bit like running your own business.
When you take the initial step, everyone tells you it will be better than working for “the man”.
It will be easy. You have control over your work, when you work, all the money is yours.
It is only once you get started that you realise how much of a business mountain there is to climb.
Some people never get past the stage of the “mountain stiles”, a quarter of the way up the mountain.
They either stay there, before it gets really painful, or go back down and get a real job. The potential pain is too much for them.
But others keep going, one foot after the other, climbing, scrambling up the path, trying not to sprain their ankles, trying to breathe.
And when you get to the top you have time to appreciate the view and business life suddenly becomes that bit easier because you have put the effort in early on.
So, if you are struggling a bit with your business mountain, keep doing the “one foot after the other, and again, and again, and again” until you get to where you can appreciate the view and it becomes easier.
Everyone’s mountain is a different size, just keep going until you have climbed yours!
