Peak Performance

The Myth of Risk: What Alex Honnold’s El Capitan Climb Teaches Us About Mastery

To the casual onlooker, Alex Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan in 2017 looked like the ultimate act of risk-taking, a man climbing 3,000 feet of vertical granite without a rope. The kind of feat you watch through your fingers, heart pounding, wondering why anyone would take such a gamble.

But here’s the truth: Alex Honnold is not a reckless thrill-seeker. In fact, he is deeply risk-averse. His ascent of El Cap was not a leap into the unknown, it was the culmination of years of preparation so meticulous that, by the time he stepped onto the rock without a rope, he was operating well within his comfort zone.

This distinction matters, in climbing, in leadership, and in any field where high performance is required.

Honnold’s first major free solo, Half Dome in 2008, was a success in the headlines but not in his own mind. Though he reached the top without incident, he knew he’d taken an unscouted variation, doubted himself mid-climb, and “got away with something.” It left him dissatisfied. He didn’t want to be lucky; he wanted to be great.

El Cap was different. For almost a decade, he imagined the climb and dismissed it as impossible. Then, over the course of two dedicated seasons, he prepared for it with the precision of an engineer. He knew every sequence of moves, thousands of them, by heart. He rehearsed them with a rope until they felt automatic. He visualised the feel of each hold, the placement of each foot, the exact motion of the “karate kick” in the crux Boulder Problem. He stretched every night for a year to make that one move possible. He even removed loose rocks from the wall to eliminate hazards.

By the time he started the climb on June 3, 2017, he had stripped away every element of uncertainty. The moves were so ingrained that he could execute them without hesitation. What to the world looked like a brush with death was, for him, a controlled performance, an expression of mastery, not a roll of the dice.

This is what hyper-preparation does. It makes the extraordinary feel ordinary. It removes doubt before it has the chance to grow into fear. It transforms something that appears impossible into something that is, in the moment, entirely comfortable.

The lesson for leaders is clear: True mastery doesn’t come from taking blind risks. It comes from preparation so deep that your “high-stakes moment” is simply the natural extension of your training. It comes from building a culture where repetition, rehearsal, and refinement are valued as much as, if not more than, the final performance.

When you see someone make the difficult look easy, you’re not seeing the risk they took. You’re seeing the thousands of hours they invested to make it feel safe. And that’s where real progress happens, in the invisible work, long before the world is watching.

In organisational life, this mindset is the antidote to reckless decision-making. High-functioning teams don’t succeed by gambling on big, bold moves, they succeed by preparing so thoroughly that what looks bold from the outside feels routine on the inside. Leaders can create this by embedding a culture of deliberate practice, scenario planning, and continuous skill refinement. When every member of the team has rehearsed their “crux moves” until they are second nature, they can step into high-pressure situations with the calm precision of Honnold on El Capitan. The goal isn’t to remove challenge, it’s to ensure that, when the challenge arrives, your people are already moving in a space they know intimately. That is when the seemingly impossible becomes possible.