Climb Every Mountain

Vegetarian Times, April, 1999

Quitters, campers and climbers. No, it's not the name of a new adventure travel club. It's how author Paul G. Stoltz, Ph.D., categorizes people in his motivational book, Adversity Quotient (John Wiley and Sons, 1998). Stoltz created the personality types to distinguish those who Succeed from those who let life pass them by.

Basing his thesis on a mountain-climbing conceit, he defines "quitters" as those who won't even consider the challenge of a climb; "campers" as those who rise to a point but settle for a plateau when fear or fatigue sets in; and "climbers" as those who find a drive deep within to continue upward--no matter how tough the going gets. The latter group tends to have a high "adversity quotient" (AQ), which Stoltz contends is the key to lifelong happiness. The good news is that everybody has the power to boost his or her AQ through logical cognitive techniques described in the book. One such approach is to diminish the magnitude of a problem by comparing it with the vastness of a mountain, the night sky or the ocean. The problem can't help but seem minuscule in the grander scheme of things. Start climbing.