After Honnold climbed to the top of Taipei 101: What ordinary people should learn is not to be brave, but to master a blueprint for action
Alex Honnold really reached the top. I believe everyone is happy for him and even feels proud; but what is more worthy of our review is not the 91 minutes, but - how did he turn a seemingly impossible dangerous situation into a prosperous road?
▲ The key to climbing is not willpower, but a set of careful blueprints
That scene is actually very strange: you clearly know that it is an extreme challenge, but you also know that it is not a person’s impulsive impulse. News footage only gives you 91 minutes, but behind those 91 minutes are longer preparations, more detailed risk control, and more complete route design. What you see is the climb to the top, but what you don’t see is that he has already broken down the impossible into a series of small steps that can be completed, and finally he is qualified to stand on the dome of Taipei 101 and wave to the world.
So, if you ask me: How do ordinary people climb their own inner Taipei 101? What I want to break first is a common misunderstanding: We think climbing relies on willpower, but what really gets people up is often a set of careful blueprints. Willpower is like adrenaline, which burns; routes are like engineering diagrams, which accumulate. When you turn your inner Taipei 101 into a blueprint, you don’t have to rely on blood every day to move forward, you just have to follow it and you’ll get there.
We think climbing relies on willpower, but what can really send people up is often a set of careful blueprints.
Next, let’s talk about: How to break down the Taipei 101 in your mind, which seems very high, scary, and easy to give up, into a broad road that you can really walk on.
The first key: reduce the dimensionality of your own Taipei 101 from a dream to an acceptable project
The reason most people get stuck is not because they don’t work hard, but because the goal is too abstract or filled with emotion instead of work. For example, when you say you want to become stronger, want to transform, want to build your personal brand, want to finish writing a thesis, or want to make a product that can be sold… These sentences are very sincere, but they have a common fatal flaw: they are beautiful, but they may not be clear enough, and if they cannot be quantified, they will naturally be difficult to implement.
You can try a very realistic translation, which I call “deliverable definition”. Now, you just need to ask yourself this: Facing the Taipei 101 in your heart, if you really reach the top in 90 days, what evidence will you produce to let a stranger admit that you have completed it?
If you did reach the summit after 90 days, what evidence would you give that would make a stranger admit that you accomplished it?
Please note that the point of this sentence is not that you feel better, but that you can achieve results. For example, if you say you want to publish a book, the evidence is not that I really want to write or that I am good at writing, but that I have already submitted a 30,000-word first draft, completed the chapter structure, and received feedback from 10 readers.” You said you want to change jobs after the Lunar New Year. The point is not that I have watched a lot of online classes, but that I have created 3 portfolios, completed 20 interview exercises, and let 30 people know that I am looking for opportunities. If you say you want to monetize, the evidence is not that I have worked very hard to manage self-media, but that I have already made a product prototype, held a briefing, accumulated a list of 50 people, and completed the first batch of deliveries.
When you define goals in terms of deliverables, you’ll notice something important: that Taipei 101 starts to become clear and concrete. It is no longer an abstract level, but a project that can be scheduled and accepted week by week.
This concept is consistent with the systematic thinking I mentioned in Build your “unbeatable system”: Live truly competitive in the AI era - only by breaking down goals into executable systems can you continue to move forward.
The second key: you don’t have to rush to the 101st floor in one breath, you have to take a breath every 10 floors
We often think that we have to work hard to get to the top, so we plan with a sprint mentality, but in the end we can only end up in collapse. Looking at Honnold’s demonstration, now we all know that real masters don’t play like this. Masters know how to adjust the rhythm and drive themselves forward in sections: each section must be able to stop, supplement, and adjust before continuing.
▲ Divide the goal into manageable paragraphs, each paragraph can be stopped, supplemented, and adjusted
So, whatever is your Taipei 101? It can be broken down into 10 levels of tasks. This method seems simple, but its power lies in: You don’t have to ask yourself every day, when will I succeed? You just need to ask: “What level am I on now?” As long as you focus on the stretch of road in front of you, your anxiety will naturally decrease, and your sense of control will naturally increase.
Let me give you an example. 90 days is both long and short. Not only can you write a book, but you can also create a sellable product. But I also know that many friends are stuck here, because they think of it as “I want to write a best-selling book” or “I want to make a very powerful online course.” As a result, they are always collecting information, always changing the framework, and always waiting for inspiration. However, if you break it down into floors, things are completely different.
For the first 10 levels, you don’t need to create content, you just need to understand: you need to concrete the audience’s pain points. You interview ten people, you sort out thirty conversations and messages, and you want to find their recurring troubles and tones. What you do is not a product, but a collection of corpus. This step is very critical because it will make all your subsequent decisions more stable.
Levels 11 to 20, you start to assemble: you condense the pain points into a proposition, write a one-page proposal, and draw your three to five core modules. At this time, you still don’t need to write a lot, you just need to be able to make a stranger understand: “What do you want to help me solve? How do you solve it? Why should I believe you?”
From level 21 to level 30, you start to make an MVP: not a complete version, but a prototype that can be tried out. You make a teaching material, a template, and a demonstration case, and then use it to give a trial lecture to collect everyone’s feedback. You will be surprised to find that the content that you originally thought was important may not be what the audience cares about the most; and the details that you originally thought did not need to be mentioned are actually the parts that they want to be taken away with most.
On levels 31 to 60, what you do is not fantasy, but correction: you organize the most frequently asked questions into FAQs, and turn feedback into the next version. Then you start to complete the deliverables, such as: examples, processes, checklists, templates and teaching guides. You are not writing a set of powerful things, you are writing a set of things that others can actually do. You see, that’s the difference!
In the last 61 to 80 levels, you enter the sales mechanism: sales page, closing script, list magnet.
From level 81 to 100, you enter the first batch of delivery, such as: accepting the first batch of students, real delivery, real problem solving, and real collection of cases.
The real 101st floor is the last step: you write the entire climbing process into a replicable story - not an inspirational story, but for everyone to compare before and after: how did you do it, what did you do, what did you change, and what results did you produce?
You see, the core of this whole journey is not to encourage you to work harder, but to be more acceptable. Having said that, maybe this is a climbing method that an ordinary person can complete.
The third key: Don’t leave yourself to willpower, what you have to do is risk management
The most common mistake many people make is to treat climbing as psychological warfare: they think that they just need to be more persistent, more self-disciplined, and push themselves harder. But mature climbing is actually engineering: what you have to do is not to push harder, but to manage risks better.
I highly recommend you do an exercise that only takes 15 minutes but will save you for 90 days: Pre-mortem. This term sounds a bit scary, that is, don’t ask me how to succeed, but first ask how I will die?
“Pre-mortem” is a decision-making technique proposed by psychologist Gary Klein. It means that before starting a project, it is assumed that the project will fail in the future, and the team reversely analyzes the reasons for the failure to prevent risks. This method breaks blind optimism and identifies potential key technology, communication or resource problems through “imagining death”, which can significantly reduce risks and improve the ability to correctly predict future results.
Suppose you failed after 90 days, where would you most likely die? Often the answers are very human and consistent. You may die because your time is chopped up, and you are busy every day but there is no fixed climbing period; you may die because your progress is not visible, and you have done a lot but have no output; you may die because of perfectionism, never feeling good enough so you never dare to deliver.
When you write out the causes of death, you can design guardrails for each cause of death. The guardrails here are not chicken soup for the soul, but hard rules. For example, the time guard: three fixed climbing sessions per week, 90 minutes each, which cannot be misappropriated like going to the gym. For example, the progress guardrail: a demonstrable result must be handed in every week, no matter how small it is. For example, Perfect Guardrail: You force yourself to hand in the 60-point version first, and then use feedback to push it to 80 points.
The essence of guardrails is: so that you don’t have to rely on what you want to do every day, but rely on the system to push you up.
The essence of guardrails is that you don’t have to rely on what you want to do every day, but rely on the system to push you up. Once you have guardrails, your emotional ups and downs no longer determine whether you can move forward.
This also echoes the point I mentioned in The Beauty and Sorrow of PM: A Survival Guide for Product Managers in the AI Era - systematic risk management can get you to the end better than pure enthusiasm.
The fourth key: Fear is not the enemy, it is a dashboard
Looking up at the Taipei 101 within us, it’s inevitable to encounter fear. Honestly, you can’t live without one. The real difference is: How do you view fear? Some people regard it as an enemy, so they fight with themselves every day; some people regard it as a signal, so they adjust the system every day.
I want to give you a very practical translation: fear is not meant to be eliminated, it is meant to be understood.
If you are afraid of being laughed at, it actually means that you have given up the right to evaluate to the outside world. If you are afraid that what you hand over is not good enough, it actually means that you regard perfection as a starting point. If you are afraid that you will not be rewarded for your actions, it actually means that you have not designed a feedback loop. You don’t know if you are going in the right direction, so you can only use anxiety to fill the uncertainty.
So what you need is not more encouragement but to plug fear back into your system. The simplest thing to do is: do a feedback loop once a week. You find one person to look at your results and collect three questions and one suggestion. You’ll find: When you have feedback every week, you don’t need to torture yourself with imagination. You can also make a public commitment once a week, even if it’s just a record, or a letter to yourself: Where did I accomplish this week, and what will I deliver next week. Finally, you do a small victory check: instead of listing what you still owe, list what did you accomplish this week?
People’s motivation is not generated by being whipped, but by seeing themselves moving forward.
In other words, people’s motivation is not generated by being whipped, but by seeing themselves moving forward.
When you turn fear into an observable and adjustable signal, it can no longer dominate you.
Conclusion: Climbing to the top is not about achieving it, it is about becoming a person who can accomplish it.
When Honnold reached the top, what shocked the world most was not the height of 508 meters, but the completion of his identity. He didn’t suddenly become that person. He used training, choices, and route corrections to build himself into someone who could accomplish it.
It is true that each of us has a Taipei 101 in our heart: it may be a paper, a book, a product, a transformation, or a dream that you dare not touch but always think about.
Thank you for seeing this. I want to say: You don’t have to be brave every day, as long as you can return to your own route every day.
You don’t have to be brave every day, you just need to be able to return to your own route every day.
When you can define deliverables, tear down floors, build guardrails, and collect feedback, your summit plan is no longer an emotional gamble but an acceptable project. You will slowly discover that you are not waiting for the day when you will suddenly stop being afraid, but you are using a method to enable you to move forward even if you are afraid. If you are interested in the complete story of Alex Honnold’s climb of Taipei 101, you can refer to my other article: Five career lessons from Honnold’s climb of Taipei 101: The blueprint for success learned from free climbing champions.
Further reading:
- Build your “unbeatable system”: Live truly competitive in the AI era
- Five career lessons from Honnold climbing Taipei 101: The blueprint for success learned from free climbing champions
- The Beauty and Sorrow of PM: Product Manager Survival Guide in the AI Era
External resources:
- Alex Honnold - Wikipedia
- Pre-mortem - Wikipedia
- Tim Ferriss: Why you should define your fears instead of your goals - TED
