Ada Tsang became the fastest woman to climb Mount Everest, beating the previous record. She shares her powerful learnings. ...
Normally people take five days to climb Everest, stopping to rest between stages. I speed-climb it, which means climbing without stopping – just get to the top and get down.
Your age, your gender, your background – none of that needs to stop you. I was a high school teacher in Hong Kong who had grown up in rural China with a single mother. I was 45 when I broke the world record. I climbed Everest in 25 hours and 50 minutes – the previous record was 39 hours and six minutes.
How did I do it? By improving day by day, and by finding a very strong team that will never abandon you. There’s no perfect member, but there is a perfect team. At the same time, you alone are responsible for your success. I always climb with a team, but I make the final ascent by myself.
My mountain climbing career started when I challenged my students to set themselves a goal and work hard to reach it. They challenged me back: 'You can climb Everest.' I took on the challenge because I wanted to walk with them.
My mountain climbing career started when I challenged my students to set themselves a goal and work hard to reach it. They challenged me back: “You can climb Everest.” I took on the challenge because I wanted to walk with them. I was curious. I wanted to know at what point I would give up.
The first two years were full of failure. I was fit – I was a basketball coach, and a team captain in tennis, athletics, all the sports. I learned two things very quickly. One: I can’t blame external factors when things don’t go well. I need to look inside myself. Two: My strength is my blind spot. I’m failing because I am not strong enough and I am not fast enough. That was difficult to admit.
I took every opportunity I could to train. For seven years I got no rest. I did rock climbing, ice climbing, kayaking, cycling. I did a 3,400 km cycle ride in the high mountains. I was still working full-time as a teacher, so I was continually exhausted, and often in physical pain. While a lot of people try to avoid pain, it’s necessary for resilience. We all need pain to get stronger. It’s important, however, that you don’t turn the pain into suffering. Whenever I am in great pain I go to sleep, and I always wake up feeling strong and energetic again.
In 2014, my first attempt, there was a terrible avalanche, in which 16 sherpas were killed and five of my teammates. I nearly died as well. I got edema, my body swelled up, and I stayed in the snow for 13 hours. I was rescued by helicopter – they found me alive in my sleeping bag among the dead bodies. I had a lot of surgery. I had lost my memory and didn’t know what had happened. But I wanted to be able to tell my students to keep moving and not to give up.
During my second attempt, in 2015, an earthquake hit base camp, killing at least 45 people. The Nepalese government closed the mountain to climbers.
After a disaster like that, you must decide whether to keep going or not. I never make decisions when I am not strong physically. After six months, I had returned to top physical strength but was still not mentally recovered. I had learned a very hard lesson: Survival of the fittest. The mountain will not be gentle to you because you are a woman, or older. That’s when I realized that I couldn’t think of myself as a woman, even when I was the only woman on the team. I had to be as strong as the sherpas. Everyone had to be equal.
From that point, I entered every sports competition I could find. I also tried to grab all the strongest men around me to be my teammates. I knew “If I’m not hard on myself, the mountain can be very scary.” And I kept going because I had made a commitment to my students.
In 2017, I successfully ascended Everest, and becoming the first Hong Kong woman to summit, there was the prospect of gaining sponsorship. But I did not want to have to put energy into anything other than climbing the mountain. I wanted to take responsibility for my own dream.
The reactions to my summit attempts varied greatly. I learned that you can be doing the same thing and sometimes people will praise you as an angel and other times they will judge you as evil. You must filter out all the noise. I knew I was doing the right thing. It’s you who has the power to decide.
My 2014 attempt had made headline news everywhere. I was praised as the greatest teacher in Hong Kong and won awards. After my second attempt, in 2015, no one cared. When I told people I was going to try again, I got a completely different reaction: Ada, you’re being selfish. My principal said I would have to quit my job.
I told my mum, “Maybe I’m going to fail again.” She said: “Don’t worry. You must finish this lesson first.” Thank God, that third time I made it to the summit.
“How can you jump from one challenge to another? Really, it’s simple: Keep moving forward. Life is an unclimbed peak.”Ada Tsang
If you prepare yourself to achieve greatly you also must prepare to fail big. On that third attempt, we reached 8,750m easily, in 20 hours. Everything had gone smoothly. But at that altitude, you can never predict what may happen. There was a horrible snowstorm, which scared my team. All the tents got full of snow.
By the time we were at 8,000m, I knew a new world record was within my grasp, but I didn’t hesitate. I told my team: Let’s just get down. I never make decisions when I’m under pressure. A minor mistake on the mountain can cost a life. I knew deep in my heart I would return the next year.
We returned to base camp. I went to my tent and slept and ate. After two days, I’d totally recovered. My sherpas were very weak after 50 hours on the mountain, but after three days the weather report told us there would be two days of good weather, and I knew that was good enough for me. We tried again. This time, we made it.
In 2022 I moved from teaching into the business world, where I train leaders in the pursuit of excellence. How can you jump from one challenge to another? Really, it’s simple: Keep moving forward. Life is an unclimbed peak.
This article is inspired by a keynote session at IMD’s signature Orchestrating Winning Performance program, Singapore (2024), which brings together executives from diverse sectors and geographies for a week of intense learning and sharing with IMD faculty and business experts.
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