How to Set & Achieve Massive Goals | Alex Honnold

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Big goals grow out of constant small ones

  Honnold sees his free solo of El Capitan as the outgrowth of always having small goals rather than as a single moonshot. He keeps a running to-do list for today and this week, and a climbing journal logging every route, grade and time since about 2005–06. Do something a little new or harder most days, and after 20 years big things 'just happen'.

• 02

  Size each goal to the time you actually have

  With kids and travel, he won't start a project at a cliff he can visit only three days a season. Instead he picks a small, novel challenge, like a specific combination of routes he hadn't linked. On the day he described, it was 86°F and muggy and he failed at the very top, and he still counted it as a reason to try his hardest that day.

• 03

  Free Solo balanced intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

  Climbing has always been intrinsically motivated for him; he'd want to climb El Cap even if no one else existed. As a professional, film and career incentives add extrinsic pull. He constantly separates the two because, in free soloing especially, you don't want outside pressure pushing you into something you aren't prepared for.

• 04

  The El Cap route was learned in thirds

  He memorized every move of the hardest third, knew the medium third as familiar 'motifs', and didn't stress the easiest third, parts of which a non-climber could manage. He spent months a year for several years on the wall and climbed it in spring, when the west face stays shaded until about 11 a.m. to noon, starting around 4 a.m. for roughly eight hours of shade. Despite a muggy morning, on the day 'everything was perfect'.

• 05

  Free-solo risk is misjudged from the outside

  Not every slip is fatal: in many places a foot can slip while your hands stay locked, and the skill is knowing which moments allow no error. Even roped trad climbers are effectively soloing until they place their first piece of gear. His preferred statistic: no one has died pushing the cutting edge. The few soloists who died soloing were on easy terrain, and most well-known ones died wingsuiting, BASE jumping, in a rogue wave or in car crashes.

• 06

  Fear is domain-specific and trainable

  News programs scanned his brain and suggested his amygdala was unusual. He points out that the fMRI showed standardized photos (a gun, a light socket) that wouldn't scare anyone, and that a real snake in the scanner would have. Speaking in front of a class once mortified him; after years of keynotes it's calm. Huberman agreed that this is proof his threat circuits work normally, tuned by repetition.

• 07

  Effort beats optimization

  Climb several days a week, try your absolute hardest each time, and you'll get very good with or without recovery gadgets. Many climbers of past decades got by on cigarettes, coffee and beer. His recovery now is the basics: eat reasonably well, sleep enough, and push his three-year-old on the swings.

• 08

  Mortality as motivation

  His father died of a sudden heart attack at 55 while running through an airport when Alex was 19, around the time both grandfathers died. His father had a 'risk-free', relatively sedentary life. The lesson: 'either way you're going to die', so do things you're proud of. Huberman named the non-lethal risk of grinding through a job you dislike and losing vitality you can't get back.

• 09

  Climbing is a lifelong sport

  Unlike ball sports, where missing the team ends your playing career, climbers keep climbing, teaching and doing meaningful routes for decades. He has many fit friends in their 50s and 60s, and his childhood hero Peter Croft did some of his hardest-graded solos in recent years in his late 50s or 60s.