What Denali Taught Me about Surrender
I spent most of my life believing it had to be hard to be valuable.
If I wasn't grinding, pushing, struggling, it didn't count. That was the deal I made with myself when I was ten: work harder than everyone else, prove your worth through suffering, never let up. I carried that belief into adulthood and built companies on top of it. I led teams from that place. I measured the quality of a day by how exhausted I felt when it was over. On the outside it looked like ambition. On the inside it was a kid trying to outrun an early story about worthiness.
Years later, I found myself on Denali at eighteen thousand feet with a storm building and a decision to make. There’s a certain silence that only exists at that altitude—a stillness that strips everything down to the truth. I was lying in the tent, listening to the wind beginning to rise, and something in me cracked open. I realized I’d been rowing upstream my whole life, gripping the oars so tightly my knuckles were white, taking pride in being the guy who could row harder than anyone else.
“I realized I’d been rowing upstream since I was a kid.”
But the mountain was teaching me something I hadn't considered: strength doesn’t always mean pushing. Sometimes it means letting go.
We turned around before the storm hit and headed down the mountain. It wasn’t failure. It was clarity. It was the first time I understood that surrender isn’t what happens when you run out of strength—it’s what happens when you finally tell the truth.
“Sometimes letting go is the strongest choice you can make.”
In vision quest work, we call this phase Severance. It’s the moment a story that once defined you stops leading your life. Most of us are carrying stories we never chose—stories about worthiness, success, strength, and how hard we need to work to prove ourselves.
“Severance isn’t losing yourself. It’s finding what was there all along.”
Severance is the peeling away of the version of you that was built for survival so the real one can step forward. And that’s exactly what happened on the mountain. Something deeper turned over. I saw clearly that the struggle I kept reenacting wasn’t required. The mountain showed me the power of surrender, the clarity that arrives when everything else falls away, the truth that’s been waiting underneath the noise all along.
“The mountain showed me the power of surrender—the truth that waits beneath the noise.”
So I’ll ask you what I had to ask myself: What story are you ready to let go of? Not the one you think you should release—the one that’s actually running your life. The one that’s exhausted. The one that’s done.
No CTA here. No funnel. Just the real question: What story is ending in your life, and what truth is beginning?