Solo is a generous word
There's a particular kind of achievement that gets called solitary. A solo transatlantic race. A solo circumnavigation. The first ascent of a mountain, one name attached to the summit. That word, solo, does a lot of work in those stories. Most of it isn't quite true.
Behind every solo sailor racing for a record, there's a shore team, watching the weather, radioing through at three in the morning when a call has to be made in the next ten minutes. There are sponsors who believed in someone before that belief had any proof behind it. Coaches who spent years building a technique the sailor barely notices anymore, because it's become instinct. Somebody funded the boat. Somebody else fixed it when it broke, at a dock, in the middle of the night, so the record attempt could still go ahead the next morning. None of that shows up in the word solo. All of it is the reason the word even works.
You see the same shape wherever we put someone on a pedestal. The entrepreneur behind the company everyone now recognizes. The musician whose name sits alone on the album cover. Whoever reaches whatever counts as the summit in their field. There's no denying the talent, the character, or the sheer will it takes to get anywhere near that kind of peak, not everyone has it, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. But the summit was never reached in solitary. Someone believed in that person before the world did. Someone taught them something they've built everything else on top of. Someone was there at three in the morning, in whatever form that takes outside of sailing, exactly when it mattered.
When I was building yachts, someone with a marketing background once told me the good news and the bad news about the brand, both in the same sentence. Everything is built around you. And the bad news, everything is built around you. That's how it looked from the outside, from clients, from people following the company in the press or on social media, one name on the surface, standing where the light hit. It was true, as far as it went. But it was only the surface. Underneath it was a mountain of people who'd actually put me there, people from every direction, advising me, pointing me somewhere I hadn't thought to look, handing me an insight I'd never have found on my own. There's only so much one person can do alone. I'd surrounded myself with people without fully realizing it at the time, and without them, there simply is no surface to stand on.
That's why I think who you surround yourself with matters more than almost anything else you control. Not people who agree with you for comfort. People who actually share the dream, or at least respect it enough to help build it properly, whose values line up closely enough with yours that the hard calls get made the same way you'd make them yourself.
Nobody reaches the top of anything entirely alone. The ones who make it look that way just chose their people well, long before they ever started climbing.
