Why Your "EB" Counts More Than Your IQ or EQ

You see, EB, or Expedition Behavior, is a term from mountain guiding, and it has to do with how good a person you are to have along on a hard trip.

You might be an elite climber in a swanky urban rock gym, able to look great and pump plastic with the best of them, but if you can't carry your own weight (literally), pitch tents in sketchy places, make food for your campmates, stay warm and dry, and keep upbeat late at night, off route, in driving wind and sleet...

Well, you might end up being a liability rather than an asset, despite your fancy scaling skills.

And that's something that I've been noticing more and more lately. As we consider wild and wooly futures, and start sizing up potential members of our own expeditions, you've got to be sure to ask:

What's this person's EB really like?

Because at least in my world, there's way more high IQ clever people holding forth on what might be done (almost always involving some impossibly grandiose effort to remake the world via blockchain, metaverses, NFTs, or civilization re-design), than those demonstrating humble capability in doing what needs to get done.

The simply skilled, doers, builders, makers, diggers, healers and growers. Unafraid to roll up their sleeves and get cracking, with a song in their hearts, or a whistle on their lips (last part optional, but a super nice bonus to make long slogs not quite so sloggy).

Or on the other side of the spectrum, you might encounter folks with nominally high EQ, that are all about sharing feelings, ensuring safety and communicating process––at first glance, they seem like they'd be great to have along. But they often end up fragile, easily triggered, and knocked off center themselves. People who consistently cannot see the forest for the trees of our shared predicaments, and can only see the world through their own, self-centered "trauma informed" lens.

So high IQ folks tend not to want to come down from the 100k' view, where everything is pristine and abstract so they never have to wrestle with the rubber-meets-road parts of life.

While high EQ folks tend to do the exact opposite: they are unwilling or unable to pick their heads up from studying their own shoelaces, mapping their own personal journeys, and lobbying for what feels best for them, instead of jumping in, grabbing an oar, and getting rowing with the rest of us.

They like to imagine that if we can all sit in a circle and have our feelings heard that somehow our hard objectives will miraculously achieve themselves on their own. But quite often their addiction to process swamps their commitment to results.

Needless to say, neither high IQ or high EQ translates directly into high EB––and in the pinch, that's the only metric that's really gonna matter. How well you can keep your head up, your heart open and your feet moving when we find ourselves in consequential terrain.

Jamie