Oscar-winning filmmaker Jimmy Chin tells the story of the class 4 avalanche that hit while he was juggling two film shoots, his first commercial and a Himalayan expedition in a single week, and explains why saying yes to everything taught him that you can't always power through.
I was curious if there's a a mistake in your life that uh in business that we could all learn from.
I was not necessarily at the beginning of my career, maybe earlier in my career and things were firing. As a professional athlete, I had been asked by, you know, not one but two kind of big name professional athletes to be a part of their film.
Mhm.
And it was all kind of intersecting in this one week. They were both world class, top tier, big name snowboarders and I was a skier. So it was it was even more kind of pressure because this is the first time either of them had a a skier in their films.
Mhm.
So I was filming with the two of them, each for different productions. I had just landed my first broadcast commercial where I was the director, producer, and I was talent.
Mhm. Mhm.
And at the end of that week, I was leaving to go climb and ski one of the the most difficult lines in the Himalayas. All of these things were kind of coming together simultaneously and I just said, I'm just going to do them all. I'm going to make it happen. And it was on one of those shoots that I got caught in the avalanche that you mentioned earlier.
And what's interesting about that avalanche is that we had already skied the most difficult aspect of it, and we were kind of going out in more, you know, benign terrain. And I let my guard down. I made one or two kind of like, not great decisions, but mainly because I I I wasn't paying attention because I had so many things going on. And there's a couple lessons in there. I mean, one of them being that most mistakes actually in the mountains and people often die in situations that aren't, you know, the most extreme part of an expedition or a day out in the mountains. It's it's it's it's like that idea of like most car accidents happen within a few miles of your house.
Few miles of your house. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, right? You're you're familiar, you're not paying attention, you're like, I'm in a safe place. I'm just gonna it it it's very similar to that. So there's that.
It felt like the universe was like, whoa, hold on. And that avalanche happened and, you know, it was this, it was this, the size and scale of an avalanche that people don't really survive. It was a class four avalanche, just meaning it's really, really big. People die in class one avalanches, so. And that was that idea that I could just keep piling it on.
Mhm.
And that there was no limit, that I could just power through anything. And you can't.
You can't outlast that problem.
You do have limits. Yeah. Yeah. You do have limits and no, I learned a lot from that.
