I took every photo I could at the top of Mont Blanc. Every single one came back looking like a nice mountain. That's a little like saying the Pacific Ocean looked like a lot of water. Accurate. Completely useless. So, I put the phone away and just stood there.
The Void Was the Point
There's something about that altitude, 12,500 feet above Chamonix, that your brain keeps trying to make sense of and can't. I could see skiers below me. Except they weren't skiers. They were dots. And below them was an entire town full of people living full, complicated, beautiful lives that I had zero insight into from up there. I couldn't see their problems. I couldn't see mine either. I'll be honest with you: I brought a fair amount of work stress on that trip. The kind that follows you across time zones and sits down at the table whether you invited it or not. Up on that mountain, it didn't disappear. But it did something almost better. It found its actual size.
Someone's Ingenuity Got Me There
People used to die trying to reach the summit of Mont Blanc. In the 1700s, it required months of preparation and a real willingness to accept fatal consequences, the kind of undertaking that cost everything. I, on the other hand, took a cable car, wore a light jacket, and had a coffee on the way up. That contrast didn't make the experience feel cheap at all. If anything, it made it feel like a responsibility. Generations of engineering ingenuity handed me access to a perspective that used to be completely unthinkable, and the least I could do was actually receive it.
What Happened When I Got Back
That evening, I opened my laptop. Which sounds like the opposite of the whole point, but stay with me. Something had loosened. The problems on my screen, the ones that had been sitting there feeling enormous and urgent and load-bearing, looked different after a day of staring at mountains so high the weather didn't even reach them.
"The problems hadn't changed. But I had stopped treating them like summits that required survival gear to approach. They were just problems. And that's a completely different category of thing."
I spent the evening building automations, writing scripts, and actually solving things. Not because the work got easier, but because I got bigger.
What Perspective Actually Is
And I don't mean the inspirational poster version. The real version. Real perspective isn't telling yourself your problems aren't important. It's having a reference point large enough that your problems can find their true proportion without you having to argue them into it. Mont Blanc has been exactly that size since before anyone had problems worth stressing about. There's something almost rude about how little it cares about your Q2.
You Can Do This on Purpose
Here's what I've been thinking about since I got home. You don't need a cable car in the Alps to get this reset. There are smaller versions. A long drive with nothing on. An hour somewhere new. A conversation with someone whose life looks nothing like yours. A game in a packed stadium. The mechanism is the same: find something bigger than your current frame and let it do its work. The thing is, we tend to do the opposite when we're stressed. We zoom in. We fixate on the specific problem, the specific person, the specific quarter. And the more we zoom in, the larger it gets. Until it fills the whole screen and we've lost any sense of what's actually behind it.
The Photo You Can't Take
I still scroll through every photo from that day, hoping one of them captured it. None of them do. They look like a nice mountain. What they can't show is what it felt like to be genuinely, physically small and to discover that small felt like relief. That the void wasn't frightening. It was generous. That I came down lighter than I went up, and not because I left anything behind. Some experiences are just bigger than the frame. Those are the ones worth going looking for. What's the last thing that made you feel small in the best possible way?
Let's Build Something Bigger Together
At StringCan Interactive, we help marketing leaders step back, find the bigger picture, and build strategies that actually move the needle. If you're ready to stop zooming in on the wrong things and start making real progress, let's talk. Partner with StringCan Interactive and let's find your bigger frame together.
