The Mountain Tops, the Necessary Valleys and the Depths of Stupidity

Want to understand your life better?

Identify the ups and downs — the personal, professional and family ups and downs, and graph them.

You’ll gain valuable insights. You’ll be more self aware. You’ll make better decisions as you move forward.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. — Peter Drucker

What gets measured gets improved. — Peter Drucker

At the approximate mid-point of my career (depending upon the number of my days), I did a “Halftime Drill” — part of Bob Buford’s book, you guessed it, “Halftime”. In this drill you answer key questions about where you’ve come from to help tee up where you want to go next.

Here is one of those questions:

Draw a line that describes the ups and downs of your life. Or draw 3 lines, one for personal life, one for family life, and one for work life. Where do the intersect? Where do they diverge?

Here is how decided to approach it.

Rather than just the ups and downs, I decided to include two forms of “downs” and came up with the following:

1. The “ups”. Or the Mountain Tops. Those positive events or seasons you remember being on top of the world. On cloud 9. Life was good!
2. The “downs” (type 1). Those times things were not going so well, but what I call the Necessary Valleys. Situations or seasons or events that were not of your choosing. Or something you chose to go through even though that was really hard. Things you had to go through to grow. A loss. A challenging but stretching situation. The consequences of someone else’s type 2 downs. You get the idea.
3. The other “downs” (type 2). The Depths of Stupidity. Those things you had to go through because of your own foolish choices. Your “Doh” moments…

I drew 2 vertical lines in my notebook and started listing them in 3 columns based on the above categories and then notated each one as either personal, family, or professional in different colors.

Then I plotted them in different colors on graph paper using the 3 points above as scale on the y-axis and based on the approximate date or mid point of a season.

Finally I connected the dots.

Do this and you’ll have a way of visualizing the good, bad, and ugly “monuments” of your life.

How you respond to honest inventory of success or failure, the highs and lows (and either form of “downs”), is the key to whether you grow or stagnate.

“You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships every day. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.”
— Epicurus

Scroll back up in this article and look at the epic picture of Monument Valley above and use that image to remember …

Often you’ll experience those incredible highs, but mostly you’re going to be down in the necessary valleys.

In retrospect, even the valleys will seem pretty awesome; but, most importantly, don’t be that fool who stays too long on the mountain top as an inevitable storm rolls in and — Zapppp! — you just set yourself up for the depths of stupidity. Learn from your mistakes, and better learn from other’s mistakes and avoid them all together. And remember Everest’s top is in the “death zone”.

In other words, pause, reflect regularly, celebrate the wins, but get back to work!

Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.
— Milton Erickson

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