Ok folks, we’re back with Part 2 of the interview with Dave MacLeod. If you haven’t already checked out Part 1, please do so here.
We continue this conversation with a bit on climbing, and Dave’s sense of pride (or lack thereof) in both his climbing and career achievements. We also talk about the future — Dave’s ideas for business and perhaps what life looks like in an eventual retirement.
I’m admittedly very fascinated with the life and work of those who don’t follow the typical 9-5 working life.
So, along those lines, I asked Dave for an outline of a typical schedule or day in the life. You’ll hear nothing about commuting, requesting vacation time, or dealing with office politics.
Is this sort of life structure a key element of realizing our potential?
But I imagine it’s not all peaches and cream either. We all know that the days of climbing hard can’t last indefinitely, so I was very curious to hear Dave’s long-term thoughts on life and business down the road.
Absence of curiosity exposes you to outdated or mistaken consensus from ‘authorities’ of one sort or another.
Dave MacLeod
Dave MacLeod: Pride in Work and Climbing
CC: Are you prouder of your work or your climbing achievements?
Dave: I can’t really answer that. They are heavily intertwined.
I’m not sure I really am proud of anything in particular, at least not consciously. But maybe a more useful answer is that I only care about climbing achievements not yet realised.
Climbs I’ve done in the past are only important to me as a link to the great days I spent being in those places, often with friends. But I must admit they are not important to me as athletic achievements, because they are in the past.
My other work, especially writing about training, is a little different. The messages I get from climbers and others who have read my books, blog etc are most heartening. It’s clear those efforts have made a genuine difference and may continue to be useful in the future.
Every message is a reminder to write more.
New Business Ideas
Training Camps
Dave: Aside from writing books, I have considered running week-long training camps at my wall at home.
People travel from mainland Europe to my single day sessions and many climbers come back year after year. In a day I can dump a huge amount of information about training for climbing on people. That’s fine, but I’m aware that there is a key learning element that is missing from this format.
A lot of climbers are primarily held back by not really knowing how to try hard. Maximum application in sport is a trainable skill like any other. So, although climbers give as much as they feel they can–given their current level–with the right exposure, they can find another gear. I think that spending extended time with professional athletes, all training together, is perhaps the only way to improve this aspect. Or at least an effective way.
YouTube Videos
I’m also keen on making more videos on YouTube. I’ve started doing that lately and the response has blown me away. I’ve tried to keep my videos firmly focused on passing on useful information rather than wasting anybody’s time, even on casual entertainment. I can see that is going somewhere, but I’m not sure where yet. I can just see that it has value.
Mr CC: These videos are excellent. You should watch them. Here’s a brand new one on resolving 20 years of depression.
An Eventual Retirement?
Dave: I don’t really want to retire as such. I’m already doing what I would be in a retirement. So you could either say I’m already retired, or I have no desire to retire.
My only goals are to have freedom to climb where and when I want, and to work on interesting ideas in a manner that suits me and to have time for my family. So nothing really needs to change. I don’t have any debts so I only really need to keep myself in steak and eggs and keep my car running.
To be honest, the only ‘work’ I really worry about is what western corporate culture tries to impose on us.
I’ve definitely reached the point of rebellion against social media for example. We are sold as a product by Facebook (and others) to advertisers, with no recompense. The platform is geared to get us addicted on uploading mountains of our personal data for hours every day. The benefit we get back has become far too poor, relative to the costs to our time. If you are obsessively minimalist about how you use these platforms, it feels like you’ve retired!
On Work/Life Balance
CC: Can you give me a sense of “a day in the life?” Where do you fit in your climbing/training and work, as well as being a family man?
Dave: I live with my wife Claire and 8-year-old daughter Freida. Freida obviously has her school routine. If I’m not out on the hill, after school she will sometimes join me in the wall for a play session. Sometimes I’m training, sometimes just playing with her. I try to get fairly regular days out with her at the weekend. Swimming, camping, occasionally climbing or something else she wants to do.
Macro Yearly Structure
Dave: We try to get some longer family holidays. Last summer we spent five weeks in Switzerland. I bouldered every other day for half the day, which was plenty on the things I was trying!
Other times of the year I’m pretty busy. There may be stretches of a month or two where I’m working far more and have less time left over for family. I usually can keep up training just fine because my wall is in my house, and its really well set up to have focused and efficient training sessions.
If busy work periods exceed about six weeks in length, I start to go a bit mad. I’ll often end up stepping up a gear and really working very hard to see them off. And I’ll almost always follow these busy times up with a few months of essentially no work and just free climbing, study or whatever I want.
I quite like this contrast. I enjoy busy work periods but only for a few weeks. And obviously I enjoy times of being really focused on climbing projects as well. If I have good conditions for a project and I’m super motivated, I’ll happily ignore all other work and completely focus on it.
The Daily Breakdown
Dave: So in a typical day I’m either getting up and going off climbing in the mountains for the whole day, or I’ll be at home that day. If at home, I get up at 7:00 AM to get Freida off to school. She leaves at 8:00, and then I usually spend the whole morning reading scientific research. After that I’ll do some other work such as edit a film, some writing or some admin. The admin work often slips. I tend to do that in chunks, maybe every couple of months. Otherwise it just gets in the way of the fun work.
Sometime between 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM I’ll go out to the wall and train. My most common session length is probably about 2.5 hours in total. But if I’m rested it can be nearly double that at times, with some tea breaks.
In the late evening I’ll usually do some more work, such as watching a physiology lecture, or some ‘brain dead’ film editing tasks. I generally head to bed between 10:00 PM and 11:30 PM.
I usually have one month-long climbing trip abroad every year, and several week-long trips in many corners of the UK. But the vast bulk of my climbing is single-day trips — I have such variety of climbing within a 2-hour radius of my house.
Dave MacLeod’s Five Tips on Balancing Career and Climbing
CC: In line with your recent Vlog, what are your top suggestions for balancing an obsessive climbing lifestyle and a career? Are the two mutually exclusive for most?
Dave: Reject the ‘standard’ way of doing things, unless it makes sense to do otherwise. A good chunk of the pillars of the western lifestyle are performance killers – standard work routines, email, social media, the western diet, devices, noise, etc. The more of it you can just reject outright, the easier it is to climb hard and have a productive career. (Mr. CC: Here’s my take on what I’m doing to reduce digital clutter in my life.)
Where you do use the tools of the western lifestyle, approach them with a view to gaming the system, not being gamed by it.
Don’t compromise on sleep. With good sleep, you can do so much more with less work time, less training time, and enjoy much more of it as well.
Live near good climbing. Cities are awful places for climbers. They are impoverished of crags, wild spaces, natural light, natural dark, quiet and many other things that foster good climbing performance.
Build a home wall. No matter how modest it is, there is no substitute for small holds to pull on which are never more than a few metres away.
Applying Climbing Lessons to Life Outside Sport
Dave: Learning technique in sport, practicing science, and succeeding in business are all about curiosity in my view. Being curious about how something works and why it works. Absence of curiosity exposes you to outdated or mistaken consensus from ‘authorities’ of one sort or another.
Moreover, understanding why something works so often allows you to adapt your insights into a related field. Sport performance spans a range of disciplines and many of them are relatively poorly understood. The curious approach can be seriously useful for gaining an advantage over your previous best, or in the business context, over competitors.
To Be Unreasonable, or to Be Balanced?
CC: What personality traits or habits do you exhibit that may seem annoying or odd to others, but you feel are a key to your success?
Dave: In the previous post I mentioned that I’ve thought about how to define an athlete. Another definition I’ve heard being given to various athletes, including myself, is ‘an unreasonable bastard’. I do think that athletes generally can be unreasonable, unwilling to compromise, take anything at face value. Athletes are also generally good at sustaining a state of discomfort, uncertainty or impatience for extended periods. These attributes can be totally critical for doing well in sport.
The hard bit is to channel these character traits effectively into areas of life where they help. We also must recognise where other areas of life would benefit from a different approach, or at least some sort of balance.
Balance is often thought of very positively in our discourse across many fields. This is fine. But unfortunately, it is also conflated with the concept of moderation, which seems to be very popular in our culture. Moderation is not the same as balance, and I think individuals who understand the difference are at an advantage in sport and other fields.
Parting Thoughts
Ok guys, I hope you’ve enjoyed this 2-part interview series with Dave MacLeod.
Consider for a moment the superficial garbage that fills the feeds of many athletes’ social media pages. Comparatively, Dave’s content is an oasis in a desert of useless clutter, and I’m very grateful for what he does for the climbing community. I’m frankly still a bit shocked that he agreed to give little ole’ Mr. CC a chance, and with such solid content. This is as easy as they come for me!
Please spend some high-value screen time on more of Dave’s content below. You’ll probably be a better person for it.
Dave MacLeod website: www.davemacleod.com
Dave’s YouTube Channel
Dave MacLeod on Instagram
Dave MacLeod on Twitter
Dave’s essential books:
Remember, the best laid plans mean nothing if you can’t take action today. Have questions? Need some feedback? Hit us up on the Contact page.
Thanks guys, see you next week.
Note: all photos are the property of Dave MacLeod and are used with permission.