When you look at a difficult project, what do you see?

Do you see the possibilities and begin to deliberately navigate your way through? Do you try, get frustrated, and give up? Or do you decide it’s impossible and just walk away?

How many attempts do you give a problem? How long will you fight for what you want? When do you know it’s time to try a different approach or move on?

How well do you bounce back when you fail?

Answering these questions can be difficult, because it depends. It depends on the difficulty of the project, on how much it excites you, and it depends on how well you know yourself.

Rock climbers have a lot of experience with these sorts of questions as a result of constantly testing their limits. Climbers view hard projects as exciting challenges. And for reasons inherent in the process, they are capable of breaking down seemingly impossible challenges into achievable goals.

For years I have talked about writing on this topic for climbers, but while I was working on my MBA I saw that our discipline, attitude, practice, and principles went far beyond the world of climbing. It’s here in The Art of Dogging that I will break down the process of sport climbing into short lessons that can be used to overcome any problem, challenge, obstacle, or project that you may have in business, in life, or in climbing.

If you feel you can learn something here, I look forward to sharing the process and mindset of the project sport climber with you in The Art of Dogging.