A Boomer Role Model Who Succeeded by Not Making It to the Top

One thing that troubles me about Generation Jones--the late portion of the baby boom, of which I am a member--is our collective tendency to be single-mindedly obsessed with success. It may have started when we were kids and had the Vince Lombardi ethic--"Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing"--inscribed upon our frontal lobes by sports coaches and even well-meaning parents. As newbie adults in the 1980s, we easily morphed into Yuppies obsessed with climbing over our peers to get that six-figure salary and the corner office. We became the Zero-Sum Generation that needed somebody else to lose so that we could win. Even our recreational pursuits had to center around winning. We had to ski the toughest slope at Vail or be at the top of the squash ladder at our racquet club, or it wasn't worth doing.

Since then, fortunately, a lot of us have come to see the fallacy of such self-defeating thinking. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the polarized, intractable, the other-side-is-the-devil state of political paralysis that grips our nation, we all haven't yet grasped the uplifting notion that there is a way to solve problems so that everyone wins.

But at least we do have a Generation Jones role model for this new paradigm: Greg Mortenson, pictured above. He is the mountain climber-turned-developing world social entrepreneur who is the subject of the 2006 nonfiction book Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time and its 2009 sequel, Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, In Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As Three Cups of Tea recounts in such a captivating fashion, Mortenson was formed from a different mold than most of us Jonesers. He was born in Minnesota in 1957 but spent much of his youth in Africa with his humanitarian parents who founded a teaching hospital and a school in Tanzania. He came back to the United States, joined the Army, earned a nursing degree in college and then worked in hospitals to subsidize his newfound passion for mountain climbing. In 1993, he set out on a quest for a superlative achievement: climbing Pakistan's K-2 in an attempt to leave a memento from his dead sister, Christa, at the summit.

But Mortenson didn't quite make it to the top and nearly destroyed himself in the process. After a chieftain in a Pakistani village named Korphe nursed him back to health, the humbled climber decided to overcome the agony of defeat by taking on a second, less glamorous but even more daunting challenge: erecting a school for the village's children.

As Mortenson said in a National Public Radio interview in 2009:

To me, though, the most interesting part of the story is how Mortenson discovered that in order to get the school built, he had to learn to respect and trust the people he was trying to help. He raised money and bought materials to build a school and returned to Korphe, only to have the village's people tell him that what they really needed first was a bridge. After he reluctantly went home and raised the funds for that project, he returned to find that the village's people hadn't yet started on construction of the school because they'd decided to cut their own stones rather than spend Mortenson's funds on stonecutters from other villages, whom they considered lazy and corrupt exploiters. Mortenson was angry and upset. As he told a village leader, he wanted the children to have a place to study indoors before the weather turned cold. The man's response: The villagers had waited 600 years for a school, so they could endure one more winter. They wanted to do things their way.

Once the construction began, Mortenson felt driven, in typically competitive Joneser fashion, to complete the project as quickly as possible, and pushed the villagers as hard as he could. Finally, his wise local counselor took him to a mountain vista to have a word.

Mortenson swallowed his pride and accepted that advice, and the school ultimately was completed. And strengthened by his hard-won wisdom about how to work with others, he went on to build numerous other schools in that part of the world, as well. It's easy to read Three Cups of Tea as a manual on how to win others' trust, but there's another equally important message, which is that you have to learn to trust others. That's the only way for everybody to succeed.

Interestingly, as this Tonic.com article notes, Mortenson's books are on the reading lists of past and present U.S. military leaders in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here's hoping that they're as successful with Mortenson's philosophy as he has been.

*Image courtesy Central Asia Institute.