In this short motivational video, the speaker addresses his team from Fort Lauderdale, recounting a recent IMAX screening of the documentary The Dawn Wall that he selected for the group. He describes the climbers’ six‑year effort to free‑climb the Dawn Wall on El Capitan, emphasizing that their ascent was broken into a series of 33 "pitches"—short, incremental sections of the climb. Using this climbing narrative as a metaphor, he proposes a weekly challenge: treat each workday as a single pitch. Each morning, team members should articulate their "pitch" (the day's primary goal), identify the actions needed for success, and at day’s end reflect on the outcome. The speaker encourages focusing on the present pitch rather than the entire mountain, fostering incremental progress and daily wins. He invites feedback and wishes the team an awesome day.
Chapters
Good morning everyone. Here is your Yes and Challenge for the week of December 7th, 2020. December 7th, holy cow. Holy, holy cow. All right, so I'm down here in Fort Lauderdale with the, with the national team still. And so 2 days ago we rented out an IMAX theater down here in Fort Lauderdale and we took the team to watch a screening of a movie. I was in charge of picking the movie. That's a lot of pressure to put on a guy. And so I ended up picking the documentary The Dawn Wall. The Dawn Wall. It's now the 3rd time that I've seen it. It was an amazing choice. I got good props for that. But it's an amazing documentary about this climber, Tommy— I can't remember his last name— one of the top rock climbers in the world. It's his story of adversity, which is crazy. Such an amazing story of adversity, as well as a buddy movie, a relationship movie about him and this other guy completing this climb that's never been done before, which in essence was they were climbing a face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. The face of it, which is called the Dawn Wall, which is the first side that the sun shines on every morning, and it was a A swath of the mountain that had never been climbed before for free climbers. Free climbers had never been able to climb it before. So they spent 6 years, 6 years mapping it out, thousands of attempts, living on the wall for months at a time. And they finally traversed over a 20-day period and made this journey. But the cool thing is, is that The journey up the wall, the mountain, was a series of pitches, a pitch. So a pitch is, it's a series of pitches atop, and a pitch is the distance when you kind of like, you tether yourself in, and then the pitch is the extension of the end of that pitch. And so their way up, I think it was like a series of 33 pitches to get to the top. And so day by day, they're just— maybe they get 1 or 2 pitches a day, and there was oftentimes where they didn't get any pitches in because they're trying over and over and over again. But I loved thinking about climbing a mountain, scaling a mountain, like running a marathon. You don't do it all at once. In a marathon, you do it 1 mile at a time. Well, climbing a mountain like that, you do it 1 pitch at a time. And so if we looked at our day from this, from a standpoint of A day is a pitch. So what do we need to do today? What do I need to focus on today? How do I need to show up today? And can I just focus on today instead of thinking about the other 32 pitches it's going to take to get to the top? Can I just focus on what I need to do today? Win today. Win this pitch. Win this moment. And let tomorrow's pitch and Wednesday's pitch and Thursday's pitch and Friday's pitch take care of itself when we get there. So that's your challenge for this week. What is your pitch today? What do you need to do to get it done? Do it. Give me some feedback. Tomorrow you have a new pitch, or maybe it's Monday's pitch, you're still working at it, whatever it is. So your Yes and Challenge for this week is, is to take each day one pitch at a time. A, articulate your pitch in the morning. B, what do you need to do to be successful? C, what happened? And reflect on it at the end of the day. That's your Yes and Challenge, everybody. Let me know how it goes. Have an awesome day.
