Illustration: María Medem for Bloomberg
What Climbing 214 Mountains Taught Me About Goals
Setting a concrete target doesn’t diminish a hobby’s pleasure; it can deepen it by forcing time, focus and follow-through.
I got the idea from a stranger in a pub.
A friend and I were finishing up a week of vacation in the remote corner of northwest England known as the Lake District. If you are of a certain age and were educated in the English-speaking world, you may remember it from high school literature class: Lakeland is where syllabus favorite William Wordsworth lived most of his life, and the landscape inspired much of his poetry. (More recently, Taylor Swift wrote a song about it called, simply, “the lakes.”)