What You Do When You Can't See

What You Do When You Can't See

Near the summit of Everest, I lost my vision. Completely.

I still had to get down.

No pause button. No waiting for conditions to improve. The mountain doesn't care about your circumstances. So I moved—blind, one step at a time—down one of the most dangerous descents on earth.

That experience taught me something I use every day:

Clarity is not a prerequisite for action.

When you can't see the path, you fall back on what you built before things got hard. Your training. Your instincts. Your fundamentals. Vision loss doesn't end movement—it changes it.

Leadership works the same way. At some point, the ground shifts. The market, the team, the plan—something stops making sense and no one has a clear line of sight forward. Most people freeze. They wait for certainty before they commit.

But certainty rarely arrives on schedule.

I didn't need to see base camp to survive. I needed to find the next foothold. Then the next. The descent happened one small commitment at a time, without guarantees, in conditions I couldn't control.

That's not recklessness. That's how you lead when clarity is unavailable—which, if you're doing anything that matters, is most of the time.

Where are you waiting for visibility that may not come? What would one honest step forward look like right now?

You don't need to see the whole mountain. You just need to move.

—
Brian Dickinson
Author. Speaker. Host of Calm in the Chaos Podcast
briandickinson.net