I’ve faced a lot of fears in my life but none that reach the altitude or thin air that Alison Levine has experienced.
An American mountaineer, speaker, and consultant, Levine’s message centers on something I think about often: Clarity of purpose matters more than certainty of outcome.
When she led the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, she didn’t know how the climb would unfold. No one does—not on a mountain like that. What she carried instead was a clear sense of why she was moving and where she intended to go. The outcome stayed uncertain the whole way up. The intent never did.
That distinction underscores how I think about leadership. We tend to treat good decisions as the ones that turn out well. But a decision made with clear purpose can still lead somewhere hard, and a decision made with false certainty can still fail. The mountain doesn’t care how confident you were at base camp.
What a challenge rewards is a leader who keeps moving with purpose even when the outcome is still unknown.
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Levine also argues that resilience isn’t a single heroic moment. It’s built one decision at a time. Every step higher on a mountain is its own small decision, made with the same intent as the one before it and the one after it.
Many would argue that commercial pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s famous emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009 is remembered as one instance of brilliance under pressure. By his own account, that moment wasn’t the source of resilience; it was the payoff of resilience built up over time. He’d spent close to three decades flying routine flights, running the same checklists, making the same unremarkable calls that no passenger ever noticed.
None of those uneventful flights made the news, but they built the judgment he drew on in the 208 seconds he had to decide what to do after a flock of Canada geese collided with and disabled both engines.
I’ve made plenty of decisions without knowing how they’d turn out. Most leaders have. What I’ve learned is that the leaders worth following aren’t the ones who always guess right. They’re the ones who stay clear about their purpose when the outcome is still in question and who keep making the next decision instead of waiting for certainty that isn’t coming.
Levine never knew exactly what Everest would throw at her and fellow climbers, but she knew why she was climbing. That’s the part worth carrying down off the mountain and into whatever room you’re leading.
