Earlier this month, Samantha Larson (age 18) reached the summit of Mt. Everest, becoming the youngest person to have scaled the "seven summits"--the highest mountain on each of the continents.
Her first summit experience was Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa when she was 12 years old--and apparently, she was hooked.
Check out her web site at http://www.samanthalarson.com/index.html.
She's got a a pretty amazing level of focus and determination--not to mention pluck--for anyone, let alone someone so young. I wonder if that's something you're born with, or if you pick it up somewhere along the way.
I know a few people--very few--with that kind of focus. One of them is Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and mission specialist who's training for a long duration flight on the International Space Station. Here's a link to Mike's NASA biography: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/barratt-mr.html.
I don't have that kind of focus or pluck. (BTW, isn't "pluck" a really great word?) My kind of focus is the kind that enables me to write a blog post a few times a week on top of all the TV I've got to watch. Sometimes I just don't think I'll be able to get it all done.
Oh well, I guess there's a reason that there's all kinds of folks in the world. It would be so dull if we were all like Samantha Larson or Mike Barratt--everybody would be all fulfilled and high-achieving and stuff, and nobody would want to stay home and do the laundry. Then there'd be heck to pay.
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