Meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same: "If—" by Rudyard Kipling

Sometimes you read a poem on a carbon removal podcast and it's goofy. Sometimes you read a poem and people start writing you wanting to share their own favorites...

Matt Schmitt, CEO and co-founder of Structure Climate (a company I formally advise), was inspired by the recent Emily Swaddle episode where we spoke about poems that mean a lot to us. He wrote me immediately to read a poem of his own and share what it means to him and his labor in carbon dioxide removal.

The poem is "If—" by Rudyard Kipling, from circa 1895.

Matt zooms in on two lines that have stayed with him: the bit about meeting with triumph and disaster and treating those two impostors just the same, and the closing image of filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run.

Listen in to hear more about why Matt loves that triumph and disaster are both capitalized; why "treat" is the perfect verb—carrying both the everyday sense and the older sense of negotiating a treaty; why the unforgiving minute is unforgiving (it doesn't care whether you think it is sixty seconds or not, the minute is sixty seconds); why the map is always wrong when the map and the ground disagree, and what that has to do with how we navigate physical, social, and spiritual terrain; and why sharing poetry on a carbon removal podcast feels right even when it's hard to articulate exactly how it ties in...

As Matt puts it, we often think what we measure is important not because it's important but because we can measure it. And that doesn't always leave a lot of room for the beauty and spirit we need to do the things we can measure.

If you have a poem you'd like to read on the show, drop me a line.

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"If—" by Rudyard Kipling

The Wikipedia article about the poem

393: Emily's Language Chat: Storytelling, Silliness, & Surviving the Climate Space—w/ Emily Swaddle, The Carbon Removal Show

Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle—The 2026 Horror of W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"

The beautiful uncut hair of graves—Walt Whitman on the Equality of Death

The universal cannibalism of the sea vs. one insular Tahiti—My favorite chapter of Moby-Dick