JDV On Air is a vodcast on leadership, risk and the people who take it on. Host Johan de Villiers talks to entrepreneurs and adventurers about what they’ve learnt the hard way. He then breaks it down for Currency readers into lessons for business leaders.
In this interview, Mandy Ramsden, the first South African woman to climb the Seven Summits (the highest mountain peaks on each of the seven traditional continents), talks about articled clerks, acclimatisation rotations and the choice everybody told her to make.
Articles in 1987, the summit in 2010
Johannesburg, 1987. Mandy Ramsden started her articles at Deloitte & Touche as one of two junior clerks, in a profession that was then overwhelmingly male. She spent a great deal of that career as the only woman in the room. Early on she pushed for a maternity leave policy where there wasn’t one, because she meant to have children and nobody else was going to campaign for it.
Twenty-three years later, on May 22 2010, she stood on the summit of Everest: the first South African woman to climb the highest mountain on all seven continents, and the first African woman too.
It began the year she suddenly found herself single, when a friend took her up Kilimanjaro and she came down remembering what being awake felt like. Elbrus and Aconcagua followed fast, three mountains inside nine months. Carstensz Pyramid in 2007, Denali in 2008, Vinson Massif in 2009. Then Everest, with the odds worked out in advance by a single mother of four.
She sat across from me in the studio recently, and what stopped me was not the mountains. It was her CV. Standard Bank corporate finance from 1999, then Standard Bank real estate investments until 2010. Every one of the seven peaks was climbed by a woman with a desk in Joburg to come back to. She never quit. She is a principal at Questco today, still doing JSE deals.
The trade she refused
There is a voice that runs the case for choosing, and it always sounds reasonable. “Choose,” it says, in your own handwriting, from the middle of your own diary. “You can be a serious person or you can be an interesting one. Nobody gets both, and the ones who say they do inherited the money.”
What she did instead is what you do to a Landy before a long trip. You do not rip out the starter battery to run the fridge. You fit a second battery, isolated behind a solenoid and charged off the same alternator, so it does both jobs off one engine and neither of them strands you at 3am. That is not a compromise between driving and camping. It is the only arrangement in which both of them work.
The mountain taught her the method. Nobody walks up Everest. You climb through the Khumbu Icefall to camp 1 and come back down. Up to camp 2, back down. Up to camp 3 at about 7,300m, then down to base camp to eat and sleep, because capacity for the top is built only by going high and coming home, over and over, for weeks. Rotations. Her working life ran on the same pattern. Up the mountain, back to the desk. Higher, back to the desk.
I should own up here. I have three of her seven: Kilimanjaro in 2004, Aconcagua in 2012, Elbrus in 2013. Three summits in nine years. She did three in nine months, with four children and a deal sheet. In 2010 I was on Everest too. I got as far as the Khumbu Icefall, which is a trek and not a summit, took the photograph and came home.
Where the second life goes wrong
The trouble with an argument like this is how fast it turns into permission. Two lives are not two hobbies. Both of Ramsden’s halves are done properly: she is a CA who has spent a working lifetime inside JSE corporate finance, and she climbed with professional outfits after years of training. If your second life is a Saturday intention and a subscription, you have one life and an expense.
There is a price the inspirational version never prints, either. Everest costs a fortune, takes months away from home and kills people most seasons, and she said plainly that she weighed that as a parent before she went. A bigger life sold to you with no number attached is something else.
So if you are good at a desk that quietly bores you and you are waiting for the year you can afford to leave it, her answer is that the year is not coming and you do not need it. Start the other thing on a Saturday and keep the desk. If what you want is the resignation letter and the applause in the corridor, she has nothing for you. She never gave anything up.
That desk in Joburg is still there. Different building, same profession, a set of JSE circulars waiting on it on a Tuesday morning, more or less the work she was training to do in 1987. The articles were never the thing she had to escape. They were the thing that got her up.
Listen to Episode 12 on your preferred platform:
De Villiers is the author of Overlanding Through the Boardroom: Using Adventure Principles for Success in Business, published by Rockhopper Books.
