This quote (with a beautiful picture) was hanging as a poster in my old flat.
I see a lot of learnings and deep ideas in it and it answers two important questions for me.

Why should I set goals? (the mountain)

Why should I test my limits? (a mountain that scares me a bit)

I have to admit I do not climb mountains. I am a bit scared of heights (a fear I plan on tackling in the future).
I believe we all have mountains in our lives. They might not be the physical mountain, but the marathon you plan to run, the relationship you want to have or your overall mission. They might be small and they might be tall.

Two mountains I tried to climb in the past changed me a lot and started an amazing journey of self-discovery.

In 2014 I became the Vice President (VP) of Marketing for my student organization in a team of six.
I had two goals in that year.

1. I wanted to learn to delegate and trust my team members. (Which back then was a big deal for me, because my past experiences taught me to do most of the work myself to make it great.)

2. We as a team set an ambitious goal for our student organization. Nobody had aimed that high before.

The first half of the year I pushed myself to my limits and did most of the work in my department myself. My members had no idea what to do, and I did not have the patience to teach them.
The rest of the executive team seemed to do they work. More and more we started to have disagreements, and it was more and more obvious that we were not able to reach our mountain top.
After half a year we discovered that one of the departments was more “talk than walk” and we had to close the department and let the VP go. Our Human Resources VP did his own things and was not aligned with anyone. We started to fight internally and at one point we agreed with him that it was better that he would leave the team as well.
So we were down to a team of four in the executive team.
Next, to this, I was burned out, my numbers were great, but since I did the work and did not communicate and strategized with my executive body colleagues the work in the marketing department was for nothing.
Besides all of that the spirit in the whole organization was very low because we did not teach others and where depressed that we did not reach our mountain top.
At this point, we hit rock bottom, and we almost all wanted to quit. Two-thirds of our members quit.
I realized I had forgotten my mountain I planned to climb and solely focused on our team.
We realized the way we worked did not enable us to reach the mountain top.

What did we do? We changed.

We changed the way we worked. We changed the way we communicated. We changed the way we led.

I never lose, I win or I learn.

– Nelson Mandela

We learned what paths did not work and which might. We taught our members what we learned from our failure.
I became a teacher and the leader I inspired to be for that year.

Did we reach the Mountain top at the end? No.

But we enabled the next generation to reach it, and they did. And now in 2017, they are climbing even higher mountains.

We became the individuals who could climb that mountain. Our whole organization became the kind of individuals and now continue to reach higher and grow even more.

Without having picked these two mountains to climb, I would have had no clear direction. Without making them a challenge, we would not have reached our limits and would not have learned.
We failed in the year, and I failed for half a year, but because having the mountain in mind we and I realized that our behaviors and habits did not enable us to climb these mountains.

It is not about reaching the goal; it is about who you become to reach your goal.