Mount Everest and 'Reflected Glory'

He had climbed 28,000 feet over several weeks. Now, he had just 900 more to go.

But as the clouds swept through the Southeast Ridge of Mount Everest, Dr. Ken Kamler could no longer even see his feet when he looked down.

He faced an agonizing choice: continue on and attempt a summit or turn back before it might be too late.

“You’ve been planning this expedition for a year. You’ve been on the mountain for almost three months now. You’re putting everything into getting to the summit,” he said.

The questions raced through his mind.

Could he live with himself if he didn’t try? What would his friends and family back in New York think? Was a push for the top really that dangerous?

Twenty-six years later, Kamler has absolutely no regrets about his choice to turn back and said the dilemma was a critical snapshot into a concept called reflected glory.

Reflected glory is when people make decisions based not on themselves or their circumstances but on how they feel others will view them.

Go for the top so you can have an amazing story to share with your family. Don’t turn back because your friends might mock you. Do something just so those you know can celebrate you.

Kamler didn’t succumb to any of these pressures, but he said so many of our choices are based on thoughts like these.

So he created a ground rule.

“If you know no one’s ever going to find out you did this, but you want to do it anyway, then it’s a real goal,” he recently told Annie Duke on the Decision Education podcast. “Then it’s something you’re doing for yourself, that you deeply believe in and feel it’s important to sacrifice for.”

The question he asks himself is one we should consider as well when we’re presented these excruciating situations.

When Kamler arrived home, he said he was shocked by the reactions of his loved ones.

“Virtually everybody said to me that they were proud of me for having the ability to be 900 feet from the top and make the right decision to come back down,” he said.

It’s a critical lesson.

The best choice we can make in the moment isn’t always to push on, risk it, “take a chance” or consider how others might react.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to put ourselves first.