Solo on Table Mountain, Solo Anywhere: The Art of Less

The Art of Less

It is with some reticence that I admit a few old photographs of me have recently been unearthed. Moreover they have been appropriated for commercial display! But on closer inspection I was not distressed. In fact I was quite proud to find that my interest in minimal footwear was indeed something that coincided with an intellectual theme that had revealed itself many years earlier in my somewhat aberrant activities.

As I have grown older I have become more sensitive to the excess of modem consumptive living and I have become especially distressed at the fact that as a society we compulsively tie our happiness to acquisition. This is what we're taught from a young age. The lessons are not overt. But they are nevertheless explicitly implicit and very compelling! We learn that "things make us happy" and a good life is one in which we pursue and accumulate stuff. Material things. Within this philosophy there is no doubt in my mind that minimalist running is about more than simply getting thin shoes. It is an intellectual and emotional pursuit. It's a questioning of the status quo. My earlier climbing activities also, I am pleased, amply demonstrate my rejection of stuff and my embrace of "LESS".


There is a fallacy in the pursuit of material gain and I'm pleased to claim that at a personal level I have managed, maybe only subconsciously at first, to beat down a different path looking for alternatives.


As a society we are increasingly and tragically ME focused. This obsession with self is so perfectly manifested in the ACQUIRE mentality. Everything that we gather around us serves to reinforce a ME culture. STUFF is about ME and nothing more. The supremacy of SELF! But indeed in the midst of this stuff-fest there are real lessons that we fail to recognise, and this is the tragedy of our condition. I will give an example. A parable.

"Look at the night sky. Look at the stars. There is a wonder of light travelling an incomprehensible distance to reach our vision and radiate in the night sky. We look at the stars and wonder where they are and what they are like. But many of the stars that we see are no longer stars. They have long since burnt out. And still, even after the death of the star, its light travels outward through space for a time that we cannot grasp.We see shining lights in the sky while the stars have long since gone. And this is much like the claimed radiance of our modern society. It has emerged through time as a "pinnacle of civilization" and we see the brilliance of our own talents reflected all around us. But like the light from ancient stars, we stand on the shoulders of countless generations that went before us. We are the sum of all our forebears. This is why our self-actualising, self-focused mode of living is so sad, because at a societal level we underplay and even ignore the effort, resource, talent and greatness of those that walked before us. Our drive for material excess says very clearly that it's all about ME and worse still it rewards the ME focus. We need to recover our genetic memory. We need to learn to communicate from the heart. We need to see ourselves in the context of ancient wisdom. The little splash of "colour" we think we are adding to the big canvas may indeed be very dull. While our technological prowess and self-absorption runs ahead relentlessly, we forego real talent and wisdom.

We need to display compassion for nature. We need to build families. We need to build societies. We need to embrace real friendship. We need to uncover real challenges. We need to test our resolve. We need to to rediscover humour and health. We need to learn to dream. We need to value space ..and we need to grow in wisdom."


The London based company, Watershed Entrepreneurs has as it's mission, the identification and nurturing of independent, creative and entrepreneurial thought. They want to do it in a way that benefits not only us but also those that are yet to walk this way. They want to do it in a way that is measured beyond mere balance sheet gains. And this is why I am deeply pleased to be sharing in their advocacy.

Minimalism doesn't stop at your feet. It needs to overwhelm your soul. It is more than being tough and strong. It is about art and the wisdom of subtraction. Happiness, if you haven't discovered yet, is a subtractive condition.

More at some future point!

Below is the article from Simon Middleton, director at Watershed Entrepreneurs:

Defining Entrepreneurial Success

A recurring litany when referring to entrepreneurs is the high failure rate. Try to define ‘what it takes’ to make a success of an innovative idea and you will find an array of hypothetical models of attributes, psychological profiles and traits, as well as ‘motherhood and apple-pie comments’ about what makes for a successful entrepreneur.

Yet how often is a rigorous de-risking process emphasised? Successful investors will tell you that they invest in the people (rather than the product or service) so we assume that they invest well in the process of assessment. There remains a high failure rate nevertheless, and this a question mark  around the topic of ‘rigour’. Is there a solution? Yes, we know there is.

Watershed uses as an analogy one of our colleagues who, 32 years ago, did a solo ‘fingers and toes’ traverse of the front face of Table Mountain, Cape Town. At the time, Andrew was 18 years old. He currently runs a successful business in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Prior to making this traverse Andrew had thoroughly researched, practiced and managed all the elements that might destabilize him. He had gone through the most rigorous de-risking process before he ventured. He worked it out for himself.

The life-giving differentiator on this occasion was how to provide his mind with the emotional ecology that ensured he was focused on the process and not on the absence of supporting equipment. To focus on the negative in this challenge creates fear which, in pure physiological terms, would be disastrous. The risk of failure was always there, but the percentage had been profoundly lowered by his rigorous attention to detail; skill, external climbing conditions, physical and mental preparedness.

This level of de-risking is based on orthodox competency insight that has been around in both theory and application since the 1940s.

The saying ‘Past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour’ means using insights into human behaviour that work off this simple psychological truth. Take the case of Andrew. We know for a fact that in terms of a successful climber behaviour, he demonstrated capability more than the ordinary. Failure would have ended his life. He is not average. Rather he is exceptional, and it is this level of performance that holds our interest.

We know that if we interviewed Andrew and a sample of climbers who achieved similar levels of excellence, we would be able to derive a statistically validated behavioural profile. This would show us the levels of coping behaviour (or competence) needed by someone to replicate his success.

Using experience taken from the commercial world of competency profiling, we could predict a high level of performance success where we recruited a mountaineer with a similar behavioural profile.

In fact, the level of predictability is sufficiently compelling to suggest that a savvy business leader would insist that all the strategic roles (the ones that ensure the sustainable execution of the strategy at all levels within the system) are subjected to this discipline. It is precisely this insight that can identify and de-risk the successful entrepreneur.

It would be fair to say that most consultants will talk a good game when it comes to this technology. The result, generally, is a usual “mish-mash” of approaches which are next to useless in predicting and ensuring high performance. However, there are a few who really understand the power and criticality of this discipline.

Creating an Entrepreneurial Competency Profile means identifying, in detail, the coping behaviour used by successful entrepreneurs. Deconstructing this into levels of granularity can take days to evaluate and codify, but results in a robust profile of an entrepreneur.

The value of the resulting insight is that within very high levels of predictability - upwards of  70% - one can predict whether a person is likely to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Intriguingly, it is possible to gather sufficient insight at an early age – before 20 years old – whether there is an “entrepreneurial predisposition”. Being in a position to make a comprehensive comment on the competency levels an individual is, for executing the required tasks expected of an entrepreneur, of enormous significance to an investor.

We know there are three distinct phases that arc over the commercialization process. Each one requires a distinctive set of necessary behaviours. The value of this insight is the capacity to identify which phases will challenge the entrepreneur the most and where an investor needs to potentially find additional people to augment the competency set of the entrepreneur.

Creating an ecosystem in which an entrepreneurial idea thrives starts with de-risking the people involved and ensuring that a sustainable team of people is brought together. The innovative idea or invention itself is secondary to the human capacity to execute it.

Simon Middleton
3 Oct 2013