INTRODUCTION
Far and away the number one question I receive with regard to the adventures and world records I have undertaken is “Why?” Why do you do them? Why do you put yourself through that? What do you get out of these adventures that keeps you going back, pushing boundaries, and testing your limits?
For the first few years of adventuring and training, I didn’t have an answer to this question. After some years had gone by and I matured in my ability to process my adventures, I formulated a partial answer. While I couldn’t say exactly why I continued to challenge the limits of this world, I had become distinctly aware that whatever it was that I was receiving out there, I was unable to replicate it in my everyday life back home. Not that I have an unhappy home life. I am happily married, with a robust social network and plenty to do. I am never bored and never tired.
It was only recently that I was finally able to answer this one seemingly simple and often repeated question as to why I participate in life the way that I do. Adventure and adversity in this world have taught me, and continue to reiterate to me, one salient lesson that I am desperate to be reminded of: life is too long.
That statement counters the age-old wisdom you were no doubt brought up with—I certainly was. We’ve been told and are convinced that life is short. Life is too short. But in the world of adventure I’ve learned that those words have done us a disservice.
Life is not short. It’s long, really long. It’s so long, in fact, that this idea is what keeps us from achieving the goals we want for ourselves. You put off learning the piano because you just started that new career and you’ll get to it once the madness slows down. You wanted to ask out that girl you saw at the coffee shop. But the timing didn’t feel right, and you see her in there at least a few times a week; you’ll summon the courage next week. You wanted to lose weight, that 10 pounds that’s now become 20, but you haven’t found that friend who will become your workout partner, and trainers are too expensive. You haven’t spoken to your father in years. You can no longer remember what the fight with him was over—maybe it was a series of little things that just became too much. You have a longing to correct it, but you know it will be difficult.
But what have you noticed? Very few people play the piano. That girl has started coming to the coffee shop with someone else. That 20 pounds is looking more like 25. And you’ve heard your father is in the hospital. You didn’t even know he was sick, and you feel the distance for reconciliation is now too great.
What we’ve all fallen victim to, in one area or another, is giving time too much credit. If you really believed that life is short, you’d be playing the piano by now, you’d be talking to that girl, you’d have patched things up with your dad. But what you really believe is that life is long and that you will always have more time.
That is the reason I push myself to cross endless oceans, trudge through sweltering deserts, and climb mountains of granite. Because life is long, we actually have plenty of time, and I’m afraid that I’ll use this as an excuse to live a very ordinary life. I’m afraid that this complacency will take ahold of me like a cancer, and my days will become weeks, my weeks will become seasons, my seasons will become years, and my years will become my life.
Not everyone feels this pressure. Not everyone looks at their life as a mission. But there’s a name for people who do. We call them leaders.
This book tells the story of how I built and led one exceptional team and the impossible result we were able to achieve. You will find lessons, and those lessons lead to a process—the process by which I became the type of leader that people were willing to risk not just their careers but their lives to follow.
What I did is interesting, but how I did it is what really matters. I can’t teach people how to row or trek or run at my level, but I can teach people how to lead.
There is a difference between teams that succeed and teams that exceed the expectations put upon them. This book is not about building and leading a team that gets the job done. It’s about building and leading a team that does what others say cannot be done and then sustaining that high performance over time.
The question I get the most is why?, but after reading this book the question you will ask the most is how?
How did you lead a team like that? How did you achieve such an incredible result? How did you hang in there when things went from hard to brutal?