Saying Yes Before You're Ready
By Eric Momanyi's own account, climbing Mt Kilimanjaro was never on his agenda. At 5,895 metres above sea level, it was not a goal he had mapped out. He simply, as he describes it, found himself saying yes — and that single decision became the structuring force for everything that followed. What is psychologically revealing here is the sequence he identifies: commitment first, serious preparation second. The decision, in his telling, is not the outcome of readiness; it is the cause of it.
This is a meaningfully different model from the conventional view of goal-setting, where preparation precedes commitment. Momanyi argues — at least implicitly — that many people wait to feel ready before they decide. His experience suggests the reverse: decide, and readiness follows.
Weather as a Leadership Variable
Before a single step was taken on the mountain, the climb was nearly cancelled. According to Momanyi, moisture advection from the Congo rainforest drove heavy rains, severe flooding, and significant snowfall across Kilimanjaro. The summit was blanketed in fresh snow for days. The group waited.
Momanyi describes those waiting days as among the most psychologically demanding of the entire experience — a counterintuitive claim given what came after. His framing is instructive: when the body is trained and the mind is set, enforced stillness becomes its own ordeal. The lesson he draws is that learning to remain patient without losing momentum is a distinct and transferable skill. He names the boardroom explicitly. Leaders who can hold focus without forcing premature action — who can treat uncertainty as a variable to manage rather than a reason to retreat — are, in his view, exercising the same capacity the mountain demands.
The Mathematics of Altitude
The climb itself, as Momanyi recounts it, unfolded across four days covering a total of 53 kilometres. The summit push began at midnight from Kibo Base Camp at 4,700 metres elevation. After an overnight climb under strong winds, blowing snow, and near-zero visibility, Momanyi and his group reached Uhuru Peak — Africa's highest point — at 8:15 a.m.
He deliberately resists romanticising it. "Your lungs are doing mathematics your brain cannot follow," he writes, in one of the more precise descriptions of altitude stress available from a non-specialist. The internal negotiation he describes — between the part of him that said yes and the part that wanted to stop — is where the psychology becomes most legible. High-stakes decisions, physical or strategic, always produce this internal split. The question is which voice has been trained to win.
Learning to be patient without losing momentum is a skill that belongs as much in a boardroom as it does on a mountain.
Thirty Minutes at the Top
The group spent approximately 30 minutes at the summit. Freezing temperatures made every moment, as Momanyi puts it, a negotiation between celebration and survival. Then they descended.
This is where his framing sharpens into something genuinely useful for leadership analysis. The summit, he argues, is not the story. It is a 30-minute data point inside a four-day system. The preparation, the waiting, the overnight climb, the discipline resurfaced from childhood Scout camps — that is the story. Leaders who fixate on peak moments — the announcement, the closing, the launch — risk misunderstanding where the real work happens and what it actually requires.
What the Mountain Reveals About the Mind
Momanyi's account is not adventure writing dressed in business language. It is a coherent argument about the architecture of commitment: decide first, let preparation follow, treat delay as training, and resist the temptation to make the destination the meaning. Whether in a boardroom or on a mountain, the variables change. The discipline, he suggests, does not.