Alex Honnold is a renowned rock-climber most famous for his penchant for ‘free-soloing’, the art of ascending huge peaks without safety equipment. Honnold’s exploits were the focus of the 2018 documentary, Free Solo. The film follows Honnold as he prepares to climb El Capitan, an enormous rock formation located in California’s Yosemite National Park.
In a previous article, I described how avoiding anxiety-provoking situations can not only prevent growth but also exacerbate weaknesses. Honnold’s story is fascinating, in-part, because unlike the typical ‘anxious avoider’, his aversion to strangers actually facilitated his growth—albeit in unintended ways.
People ask me all the time how I got into free soloing. But I don’t think they quite believe me when I give an honest answer. The truth is that when I started climbing outdoors, I was too shy to go up to strangers at a crag and ask if they’d like to rope up with me.
I first started climbing at age ten at an indoor gym in my hometown of Sacramento, California, but I did very little outdoors before the age of nineteen. I was so antisocial and tweaky that I was actually afraid to talk to strangers. Though I was already climbing 5.13, I would never have gotten up the nerve to approach other guys at a crag like Lover’s Leap near Lake Tahoe and ask if I could rope up with them.
So I just started soloing.
– Alex Honnold1
Ironically, then, Honnold’s shyness encouraged him to perform physical feats most people would consider terrifying when compared with approaching strangers (or almost anything else).
Honnold’s story reminds us that not all unintended consequences are of the negative variety.
