In Search Of Excellence - Mike Horn: Conquer Your Fear and Make the Impossible, Possible | E32

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Mike Horn is a person who has redefined the boundaries of human endurance. He’s trekked to the North Pole in complete darkness, scaled four of the world’s 8,000-meter tall mountains, circled the globe not once, but twice (once on the Equator and once on the Arctic Circle), and the list goes on.And while his expeditions are often life-threatening, and despite some incredibly close calls, he’s not one to be reckless in accomplishing his goals.In this episode, Randall and Mike discuss his journey to becoming the world’s greatest modern-day explorer, covering everything from lessons learned in early childhood to his groundbreaking expeditions. They discuss how mistakes can and should be used to our benefit, viewing inspiration as a two-way street, why making peace with failure is an absolute requirement of success, how psychological attitude and mental strength determine whether we achieve excellence, where money should rank in our career goals and life, and so much more. Topics Include: - How freedom leads to creativity- Power of positive reinforcement- Investing in education- The relationship between self-discipline and motivation- Setting and achieving goals outside of our comfort zone- Ingredients to success- Understanding fear- Sports psychology- Taking ownership of our problems- Addressing environmental and ecological issuesMike Horn is globally acknowledged as the world’s greatest modern-day explorer. From swimming the Amazon River solo and unsupported to an un-motorized circumnavigation of the globe at the equator, Mike’s list of accomplishments as a solo explorer is unparalleled. In two decades, he has seen more of the Earth than possibly any other human. He walked to the north pole during the dark season (more people have been to the moon) and has scaled the world’s 8,000-meter peaks including a recent attempt to paraglide K2.For 25 years, as one of the top motivational speakers, he has inspired and educated the world by pushing the limits of human ability through a series of groundbreaking expeditions, always naturally powered and often solo. Mike also engages in mental coaching of elite sports teams. Through his coaching, Mike already contributed to the victory of several teams, including Germany’s national football team during the 2014 World Cup, the Kolkata Knight Riders cricket teams and the Mumbai Indians in India, and the Proteas in South Africa.Resources Mentioned:Mike Horn, Amazonas (1997-1998)Sponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

If we're afraid of losing our money, if you're afraid of losing your friends and your house and your car or whatever, you're not going to do extraordinary things. The will to win must overpower the fear of failure. And it's only when the will to win becomes bigger than the fear to lose in our mind that you can really go out there and achieve amazing things. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential.

It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings, and we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. My guest today is Mike Horn. Mike is recognized around the world as the greatest explorer of modern times, a person who has redefined the boundaries of human endurance. He has circumnavigated the earth a total of 27 times, climbed four mountains more than 26,250 feet high, and swam down the

Amazon for 4,350 miles for starters. In 2001, Mike became famous after completing an 18-month, 25,000-mile solo journey around the equator without any motorized transport. In 2004, he completed a two-year and three-month solo circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle, also without any motorized transportation. In 2006, along with another explorer named Bors Oslin, he followed that by becoming the first man to cross the North Pole without a dog or motorized transport, which he did during the peak of winter and permanent darkness. In February 2017, he became the first person to do a solo crossing of Antarctica, a distance of 3,200 miles, which he did in 59 days on skis and by kite. And in 2019, Mike and Borge again completed the first ever full crossing of the Atlantic,

of the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole. Mike is also one of the top motivational speakers in the world and has coached several sports teams to world championships. He is the author of six books and even has a penner I watch named after him. Mike, it's an incredible pleasure to have you on my show. Welcome to In Search of Excellence.

Thanks for the invitation, Randy. Excited to speak to you. Well, let's get going. I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helps shape our personality, our values, and the preparation for our future. You were born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Both your parents were professors and your dad was also a sports star. He played rugby, which was the national sport of South Africa. Both your parents were professors and your dad was also a sports star. He played rugby, which was the national sport of South Africa. When you were a kid, you spent very little time studying, nearly all of your time outdoors. You would climb trees, ride your bike for miles, explore nearby rivers, and go fishing with your brothers and sisters. Your parents

understood that you were a little bit different than your siblings. They gave you a lot of freedom starting when you were eight years old. You could do what you wanted, but they had one rule that you had to be home by 6 p.m. You would explore the nearby rivers and lands. And when you came home, you would share what you had done with your dad who would give you practical guidance before you ventured out again the next day. Your dad would say, try this, or maybe that works better, or don't jump in the river when it's raining because the water is going to go higher. Also, he would help you understand what was happening near you. You didn't have to tell your dad where you were going because he trusted you and that trust brought you freedom, which made you feel alive. Making people feel alive is a great thing, especially as a kid, but that was

more than 40 years ago and times have changed a lot since then where kids today are not roaming off to rivers by themselves. We're going to talk about what you did when you got your first bike and what happens when you break your parents' trust next. But before we do, can you tell us how that freedom at such a young age influenced you for the rest of your life? And can you also tell us what parents should be doing today to make their kids feel alive? Randy, it's true that the more freedom you have as a kid, the more creative you

become. And then with freedom, you have to be able to carry the consequences of the decisions that you make. And I was taught at a very early age that trust is vital in anything you do. You've got to trust the person that gives you the freedom, and the person that gives you the freedom have to trust you and your decision-making for you to be able to go out there and take the responsibility and all the consequences if things could happen or go wrong. I was given the rule that at six o'clock at night, I have to be at home. I didn't have to tell my parents where I was going. But to that rule of being home at six o'clock,

there was, you should get back home in the way that you left home. Don't come back home with injuries. Don't come back home with injuries. Don't come back home with broken legs or bleeding everywhere. Try and stay intact. And that, I think, was really important for me because I was an active child that loved the outdoors. That gave me, first of all, the possibility to head off in any direction that I wanted to go and not only discover new land, but discover new people. And the more people you discover, the better you understand the surrounding because local people know their local spot better than

anybody else. And that's where I started learning from local people along the way, asking them questions. Where is the most interesting place to go? The rivers, the caves, the trees, the mountains allowed me to be able to discover the value of people and then their knowledge locally and what they knew and could do better than I could. So that then became a little bit like a reservoir of information that I used knowledge of other people to enrich my life as a kid. And when six o'clock arrived, I was at home because it was such an interesting life as a kid that you could go out and discover other people and other places. But at the same time, you learn something. And the moment you enrich your life with knowledge that you wouldn't get at home or at school, that's where you want to abide to that one rule that would keep on giving you the

freedom to go out there and explore. So you had all this freedom. When your parents gave you your first bike when you were eight years old, you decided you wanted to visit your uncle and cousins, not the uncle who lives seven and a half miles away, which didn't interest you. You wanted to visit your uncle who lived on a farm nearly 190 miles away. You did, in fact, tell your dad you were going to visit your uncle, but you didn't tell him which one because you were afraid that he would say no. Can you tell us what happened next? And in search of excellence, how important is it to take responsibility and admit when you do something wrong rather than wait and get caught, which is something a lot of people do, regardless of your age and regardless

if we're talking about our personal lives or our professional lives? I think that we're afraid of the consequences of mistakes. When you get taught to be able to take the consequences of your mistakes as a process of learning, it becomes an important educational tool. So I wanted to go and visit my cousins that were 300 kilometers away or 170 miles, like you said, away. And I knew that maybe my father wouldn't allow me to do it because even in my small mind, it was a far distance to travel. That's why I only told him half the truth. I didn't lie to him. I wanted him to inform him that I was going to visit my cousins, but I didn't specify if it was the cousins that were seven miles away or the cousins that were 170 miles away. And like that, I didn't lie to him. But at the end of the day, he knew

that I never told him where I was going. So the moment that I give him information, it's most probably because I was thinking of going to the cousins that lived far away. I knew that it was going to take me more than one day to get there and it was going to take me the weekend. So I jumped on my bike. I took a couple of pieces of bread and dry rusks from home. And then I head off with a small little legs and small little wings trying to cycle as far as I could. Six o'clock arrived. My father knew I wasn't at home. So he called his brother and said, listen, was Mike there today? And he said, no, he wasn't.

And he knew that I was trying to head to the cousins that live three days cycle away. And when he arrived, he used the therapy of silence. So he was always open to discussions. And that's a very important educative tool that we can use in the education that we can give our kids today. When I arrived back home at six o'clock, my father was there. At six o'clock, I could speak to my father. It was my time with him.

He never asked me where I was or what I did. I always wanted to share what I did with him. That opened the communication channels to a better understanding and a better relationship between father and son or mother and son. By that way, for him to be there to give me the time to listen to me, he could educate me. And it's not in the way that we think education means telling people what to do constantly. It's simply made that, okay, I give you my time, and then you listen to what I have to say, if I think you can do things better. And the moment that that information comes to you, and you've got something that you can try out by

crossing a river, like you said, if the river changes color, it means it's raining somewhere and you might have a freak wave coming down this river. So watch for floating wood, for river color changes. And that is a good indication of what's happening in that river. So that's information that he gave me. As a kid, I never knew that if the color of the water was going to change, it meant a drain somewhere or there was a thunderstorm. So his way of teaching me was with methods that I could use in what I love doing. So when he arrived, he didn't speak to me. What was the most important thing for me in life

is to be able to speak to my father, to share my experiences, to listen to what he thought was a better way or a more efficient way of doing things. When he told me that I should get in the car and I'm not allowed to sit in the front seat anymore, I should sit in the back seat, I knew that, wow, something was terribly wrong. And on the drive back home, there was silence. And arriving back home, he said, listen, just go to your room and think a little bit on

what you did. So I went into my room and I thought, and I could hear my brothers and sisters running around the house and my father playing with them and my mother there. We were all a happy family and I was excluded from that. So there's a moment that I couldn't take it anymore. And I got out of my room and I walked to him and I asked him, why didn't he punish me? Why didn't he shout at me? Or why didn't he become angry? And he said, Mike, because I didn't do anything wrong. You did something wrong. And it's for you to explain to me why you did things wrong. It's not for me to punish what you did because I don't

know what your thought process behind it was. So I understood punishment by the way that I explained it to him that I was afraid that he would say no. And I was afraid that he wouldn't allow me to go. And I really wanted to go. And then he took the whole situation and said, listen, why didn't you just come to me and explain to me the reason why you wanted to do it clearly, not hide it, and we could have worked it out together. And that is a lot of educational information

in that small little sentence. Let's do things together. Meaning that if you are a person that likes going out there and taking risks in whatever, if it's in your job or if it's in finance or if it's in science or in exploration or sport, shared information, working together with people that can help you and guide you to be able to take less risks and make the chance of getting to your goals and your objectives easier, then you can't make mistakes because you surround yourself with the best. And that is what I took out of that situation.

And two weeks later, we got on the bikes together and we spent the weekend completely. My father was tired of cycling and he was tired of his son just wanting to cycle and to go out to these places. Maybe he never really wanted to go, but he was accompanying me, meaning that the time that was so valuable to him, he shared with me in making my dreams come true, not his dreams, my dreams. His reason was education. Mine was to be able to dream as a kid and to make these dreams come true and while we're cycling on our way to to the cousins that lived on the farm where I used to love riding horses and counting sheep and going out with my dog he said to me something that really became a little bit the mantra of my life. And he said, you know, Mike, I like the way

you dream because you dream big. You look at solutions. And if your dreams don't scare you, your whole life, you're dreaming too small. And from that little kid being on that bike at eight years old to a 56-year-old adult today, I still dream in the same way because my father told me that no matter how old you are, if you dream big and your dreams don't scare you, then they're not big enough. Your dad used to go running every morning at six o'clock. And when you're eight years old, again, you started going with him. You were always behind him and he never slowed his pace to make it easier for you to keep up. The only option for you was to run faster. When you hit the point where you couldn't keep up, you would draw a line on the pavement. The next day,

you would try to beat that line. That's where your obsession with making goals started. One day, your dad asked you if you knew why he woke up every morning to go running. You replied that it was because he wanted to add value to his rugby team and to deserve his spot on the team. He replied that that was true, but there was a much bigger reason. What was that reason and how does it apply to all of us? I think that in life, I had one fear as a kid that somebody else was trying to do more than I could. And if you've got that fear as a kid to say that I want to deserve my place in the team or in the science class or in the environmental club

or whatever you're doing, if you're willing to do a little bit more, then you're going to deserve your place. My father woke up to go training because he played rugby and he wanted to deserve his place in a really well-established team. I always thought that if I could do a little bit more than my friends, I would run faster, play better, and improve my skills as a human being. That was one thing. But when I told my father that I thought he woke up every morning at six

o'clock to go running because he wanted to add value to his team, he wanted to deserve his place, he said to me, Mike, there's got to be something more than just adding value and deserving your place. There's got to be a reason beyond just what you think is superficial success. That kind of was a curveball that he threw at me. What could motivate a person more than what we think is success visually that other people see from you? And he said to me that, you know, when I hear your little steps behind me, and I know that you want to beat that line that you drew on the pavement, and I know you want to go further than that.

And that's the reason why you're running behind me. It inspires me. That's the key word that I thought was beyond any goal that we can set in our life, is how can we inspire others that would go beyond the goals that they've actually set or inspire them to get off their backsides, to go out there and make that first step into adventure, even though it might be dangerous, it might be risky. We all need inspiration. And I was the one that inspired my father to wake up every morning to go running. And I thought he was the inspiration behind me.

So inspiration is something that kind of goes two ways. The more you inspire people, the more you get inspired. And we must never think that we don't inspire other people. You don't need to be a superstar or an amazing, wealthy person to be inspirational. You just got to be who you are. And the moment that you can inspire your family, you can inspire your kids, and you can inspire the colleagues that actually work with you, that is when you really start adding value to the life of others and yourself. You mentioned goals.

We all have goals. Most people I know casually talk about their goals. It's more like I have a goal and I'll work hard to get there and hope I do get there. In search of excellence, how important is it to write our goals down, focus on them, make a specific plan on how to achieve them, and hold ourselves accountable to them? I think that, Randy, a lot of times in life, we kind of underestimate what we can really do. Whatever you can write down on paper will be too small. that if there's a process of understanding and you're living in the moment present and not always see the past better than it was in the future, worse than what it will be, then you're not going

to have a goal written on a paper that is really adapted to your capabilities. So I believe that if you have 5% to 10% of the answers of the unknown when you write down your goals, that is when you know enough to before they set out to reach their goals will never leave home. They will stay at home because it's impossible to get 100% of all the answers. So if I have 5% or 10% of my answers and of the questions that I have of reaching certain goals. I set out there to go and reach them. And everything that I've done in my life, I found the answers of the other questions on my journey towards that goal. And those answers are lived experiences. Those answers sometimes makes the goal more approachable. And if you need the answers before, you're never going to leave home. That's why I believe that if you've got a solid base, and that's what's important in education, if you teach your kids to have a solid base and then you give them wings to fly, they can head off anywhere.

And if they burn their wings, they can always come back to the base because it's solid. It's there for them. So you don't need 100% of all the answers before you leave. You need just to know that you have a base and that the intentions behind what you want to do is solid. Let's go back to your dad, who is your hero. And I want to talk about his rugby career. For listeners and viewers who don't know, there's a lot of people in the U.S. watching this. Rugby is a close contact team sport that originated in the first half of the 19th century, where players run and pass an oval-shaped football on a rectangular field called a pitch

that has eight-shaped goalposts at both ends. Rugby fields are between 103 and 109 yards in length and 75 and 77 yards in width, and each team has 15 players. Similar to an NFL ball, a rugby ball is 11 inches long but has a flatter end compared to the pointy end of a football. A rugby ball weighs a pound and an NFL ball weighs a few ounces less. It's a very rough sport. Unlike NFL players, rugby players don't wear helmets and don't have any padding or protective gear. And even though it's not mainstream sport in the United States, it is extremely popular around the world. It has 405 million fans and 10 million players in 221 countries. And the last World Cup,

which was held in Japan in 2019, had 857 million viewers, making it the fifth most watched sporting event in the world that year. Your dad played rugby for the South African national team, which was known as the Springboks, which at the time was the best rugby team in the world. In your dad's last game, they played the New Zealand national rugby team. Your dad scored the game-winning goal. After the game, you went into the locker room with him. And while you were sitting there looking at him, all of his teammates came up to him and told him that he had been an example to them during the entire time he played. He was always the first at training, always the last to leave, always listening to their problems, always there supporting them when they needed it the most,

always there to give them the right answers to problems for which they didn't know the answers. You were just a kid, but you thought if you could live a life where people talked about you like that, then you had succeeded. When your dad's teammates left and your dad was sitting there alone with you, you looked at your dad in the eyes. You were just a little boy and you told him that you wanted to have the same career as him and told him, I want to be like you. What did he say to you? And in search of excellence, how important is it to have role models? And when we have one, does that mean we should do everything that they do? Randy, I think that we all need examples more than role models. Role models sometimes becomes an obsession to be like others. And if we have an example of success, then those examples

leads to a better life. So meaning that if you like something from somebody, it doesn't matter who, why can you not take what you like from each person that you meet and add it to your life, add it to your life personally. And then if you like something from someone, not necessarily a role model, then he's added value to your life. And you add value by taking what you really love from that person. And I think my father, when he understood that I was so inspired by him, that I looked at him as somebody I wanted to be like, he understood that he didn't want me to be exactly like him. And he explained it to me in this way. When I said, I want to be like you, I want the people to say the same things about me one day than what they just told you.

I want them to say that you've always been an example. I want them to say that, yes, you were first at the training. You were last to leave. You were there to give them help and assistance when needed. And then he said, Mike, unfortunately, you can't be me. And it took a couple of seconds for me to understand that, wow, I can't be him. And I was so disappointed when he told me that. It actually was a shock to my system. And then a couple of seconds later, he said, you know, you've got to understand that we're all unique individuals.

And the best person to be and the easiest person to be is yourself. That's the easiest person to be is yourself. That's the easiest person to be. Don't use the others as inspiration and take from them what's valuable for you and add it to your life. But do not try and be like anybody that you know and anybody that inspires you. Because the easiest life you can live is just to be who you are. And then he added something that kind of just exploded in my head. And what he added was that, you know, I can see that your life will be much bigger than mine will ever be. And all I needed to do is believe what he said. And the moment you can believe somebody that inspires you, it gives you confidence in life. So at the same time, you as a person, no matter where you are or what you do, we need confidence in ourselves to be able to go out there and believe in what

we want to do. And we know that it's a belief in something and believing is not factual. Believing is just an idea that we have that we believe in something might happen. But at the end of the day, that belief turns into an action. If the person that inspires you tells you your life can be bigger, if you don't believe it or will not. So why not believe it? Someone told me that the foremost important words in the human language are, I believe in you. And when I heard that, the bell rang in my head. And it's one thing to have positive reinforcement for your kids. I have five kids. I have two younger kids, so they won't quite get what that means. But I have two 20-year-old twin girls and an 18-year-old

son. I tell them all the time. And I think it really does motivate them to hear that from their dad. Randy, 100%, there's no better compliment that you can give to your kid. And re-engage in that belief towards you and your education and behind discipline, behind structure, behind everything that we want to set up for them to be the best version of themselves. And that is just believing your kid. Your dad taught you many things, but two important keys in life. The first is to educate and inform yourself. We've talked about that a little bit. And the second is to be inspired, which we just talked about, to work hard and believe in yourself. Can you talk about a little more of each of these

separately? And a lot of people don't have a dad like yours. Where should people go to get inspiration if they didn't get it and don't get it from their parents or from anybody else? And they're still not inspired today. I think that inspiration is an overall topic that we can find today more than before. We're speaking about education and the way if I, when I asked my father a question that he couldn't answer, he would tell me to go and speak to my mother because she knows more about how to make babies, for example, because she's the one that carries the babies. So I asked my father,

how do you make babies and stuff like that? He said, oh, maybe better ask your mother because she carries the baby in her tummy. But I said, no, how does the baby actually get there? She said, no, go and speak to your mother. She'll tell you. And then I went to my mother and my mother, she was busy cooking and I was with her in the kitchen. I said, how do you make a baby? How does a baby grow and stuff like that? And then she said, you know, it's a living with us. And he took me to the library and he got the books out. And then he said, that's a penis, that's a vagina, and this is how it works. So it was education from a generation that was much older than my father and my mother, but that is where wisdom comes from. Because when you look at an older person, there's got to be something that he did right to be able to become old and to be successful at what he did. So that's where it's important as well for

somebody that doesn't have fathers and doesn't have mothers to be able to go to an older generation as well that have the time to share a little bit of their knowledge and there's a lot of old people sometimes I just went to old age homes and some amazing war veterans could speak to me about I wanted to go to the South African Special Forces, fight in Angola to protect people. And speaking to veterans, because my father didn't do it and he couldn't inform me and couldn't inspire me by that, became my inspiration. So there's no excuse for education. There's information ready to be found everywhere. But we have access to so much today on the internet, on Google, on the social media platforms. Rather go to people, real people that can look you in the eyes and give you the information.

And don't always look and believe all the videos that you can see and find online. So that is basically how I was educated through having access to the library and then to different generations of people. Two asides on this. First, I think there's no more important investment you can make in yourself than education. And the second thing I want to mention, there's actually a book that was popular in the US. I don't know if it was in South Africa. That's titled, Where Do Babies Come From? I remember my dad showing me this book. And I thought to myself, this is very odd. And I was embarrassed. And frankly, I think I was six years old, and I still didn't quite get it and I didn't ask any questions. I learned later on from someone in I think the fourth grade who really explained it to me in

great detail. I guess his grandfather had explained it more to him than my dad did to me. Randy, exactly. That's where information comes from. Education can be from your mate that sits next to you in class or a senior at school or a junior at school. We all live in a different environment and have different sources of education. So if we only find our education from one source, we're limiting our capabilities. That's why a curious, somebody that's curious, that wants to find more information, he's wandering and playing the field. He wants to get the most information possible and then decide what's good for him and what's not good for him.

But imagine you can become curious in education and you don't always listen to that same boring professor that you don't really like. But the subject interests you. There's so many ways of education that you can find the right person to educate the subject that you're interested if you don't connect to your professor or to your teacher. Like your dad, you played rugby. And in your teenage years, your dream was to go to the Olympics, but that wasn't possible because South Africans were not allowed to participate due to its apartheid government. South Africa did have compulsory military service. And when you were 17, you were selected to join the South African Special Forces. You were chosen from a pool of 4,000 young men, a group that was whittled down to 400

and then to 40. You were sent to Nambia and then to Angola, where you fought Russian communist insurgents who were crossing the South African borders. You weren't sitting in tanks. You were fighting guerrilla warfare in close combat, setting up landmines and other explosives, tracking the Russians and gathering intelligence behind enemy lines. This was your first time in your life that you witnessed death. We're going to talk a lot more later in the podcast about the incredible danger of what you do for a living and some specifics of your expeditions.

But before we do, can you tell us how spending time in the Army and witnessing death influenced your future? And what are the two kinds of people you learned about when you were in the army? It was quite interesting, Randy, when I was chosen to go to the special forces, and that's more or less at the same time that my father got cancer and passed away. So when he asked me why I wanted to join the special forces. He wanted to understand the reason behind why I wanted to go out there and fight the war. And I said, because I think that I can make a difference. I can save lives. I can be the one that not only engage into an action, but I can avoid the action. I can avoid a disaster because he taught me how to look at things. And that was quite important. And maybe a story we could share a little bit later that he asked me one day to look at a wall and tell me what I see just looking at a wall.

And the way that he taught me how to look at things, I started applying in my life to the age of 18 years old when he got cancer and eventually passed away. So the fact that I became a special force soldier that went out into Angola to fight Russian insurgents that were infiltrating into South Africa to get to the uranium that we had, for me, at that stage, I thought, wow, I've got to fight this war. I've got to be able not to die at a very young age. And when I told my father that

I think I can make the difference and that he educated me in a way to outsmart others maybe. He said to me, Mike, the only way you can survive the war is if you don't fight it. Don't go and fight the war because you'll die. Go out there with the mentality to survive the war and then you'll make right decisions. Not meaning you won't possibly be killed or you won't have to take the life of others in some or other situation, but think about survival. Don't think about fighting. And when I came back from Angola and I was one of very few that was left alive, it was most probably because I thought of surviving the war while I was fighting it, while the others were only thinking of fighting the war to win it. That's not the same mentality. You spent two years in the army, and when you got out, you went to Stellenbosch University in

Western Cape, South Africa, where you studied human movement, injuries, and science. You got a degree in marketing, all of which you credit with giving you a sense of the psychology of competition. When you graduated, you then got a job working for your uncle's food import and export business. You devised a very clever way to take advantage of the cold winter frost that would often destroy the cabbages grown in South Africa. You would buy cabbages from farmers and keep them in a massive cooler until the frost arrived, and then sell them to supermarkets on the promise they would keep buying from you even after the weather thawed. You made a fortune, and in your early 20s, you became a millionaire. And similar to most people, becoming a millionaire and making a lot of money was a big

turning point in your life. Money that could buy you a nice house and a nice car and a lot of other things, and which could support a family one day. But the turning point for you didn't turn out to be what you thought it would. Instead, the turning point was when you realized what you thought you wanted in life was not really what you wanted. Can you tell us why? And tell us about the party you threw in England, Switzerland, and Israel, and going to the airport to start a new life with two t-shirts, two pair of shorts, $50 in your pocket, and enough to pay for a standby plane ticket. And in search of excellence, where should money rank in our career goals and in life?

Randy, being brought up in South Africa, both my parents being professors at universities and colleges, obviously gave me a good education. And I knew that the moment that you educate yourself well, you can make a success. And we all measure success with the success of both of my parents. So we weren't extremely wealthy. We weren't living a life that was in five-star hotels, in private jets, sport cars, and that. We had an ordinary life, but a life that allowed us to be able to go on holiday together as a family, a life that allowed us to have enough food, and to be able to have a quality of life that a certain amount of money allows you to have. And I believe that it would always be good to have a little bit more.

So when I studied and I did my post-grad studies and I kept on doing my honors degree and I went into the company with my uncle, I thought that, wow, this is an opportunity on the biggest fresh produce market in the Southern hemisphere to capture a gap in the Southern Hemisphere to capture a gap in the market with cabbage. You know that hundreds and thousands of tons of cabbage gets eaten a day in Africa. Cabbage is staple food for 80% of the world. And South Africa producing so much cabbage obviously became massive amount of produce being put on the market. And when you have so much produce, the price drops because the demand could be less than the produce that you have available. Supply and demand, simple. There was oversupply and the demand was normal. And I decided to

stop the supply and to keep the demand as normal. Looked at the weather and saw that the best time to do it is when they have that black frost, when the cabbage actually freezes, and that happens once or twice or three times a year in South Africa. So every day we produce and we cut cabbage. And I asked the farmers to trust me, and I offered them double the price that the market was offering to them. So all the farmers in South Africa send their cabbage to a central market, like the stock exchange. That is where your price gets determined with the amount of cabbage that you have. But we're speaking about hundreds and thousands of tons of cabbage. So one cabbage could be $1. Oversupply, the cabbage price drops to $50. And you've got to get rid of it because tomorrow

there's the next amount of cabbage arriving on the market. So what I did was I asked the farmers to let the cabbage rot on the fields, not cut it, for two days, and then send all the cabbage to me that I would store in massive cooling rooms where trains would come in and offload the cabbage. So I would starve the market from cabbage and create a demand. And that's what happened. I basically, right timing, the black frost came in, no cabbage had produced. I had all the cabbage in my cooling rooms and that's how I created the demand. And when I made a lot of money, I all of a sudden realized that, wow, I don't need anymore. Why must I wake up to go and work?

It's not really after having the house that I wanted and bought the first car that I really wanted that I thought that now was happy. I felt empty. I felt that this was the end of life instead of the beginning of my life. And that's when I had the massive party. And my sister was a lawyer. And I said, prepare contracts for me that I'm inviting all my friends from the military, from the university, from school,

and all my friends are going to leave with either my house, my car, my bike, my motorbike, my kayaks, everything I had. And I packed a little bag of two t-shirts and two shorts. And by the end of the weekend after that party, I had nothing left. Nothing belonged to me but the bag that I had in my hand, money for a standby ticket, and 50 Swiss francs or Swiss euro in cash. And I wanted to start a new life. And that's when I went to the airport. But South Africans were boycotted at that stage. Apartheid was an issue.

Nelson Mandela was still in prison and we couldn't travel to places around the world and that is just where I went to the airport and without visas, we could travel to Israel, England and Switzerland. I didn't want to go to England. I didn't really want to go to Israel at that stage but the first plane was to Tel Aviv. I didn't really want to go to Israel at that stage. But the first plane

was to Tel Aviv. I got on the standby list, but didn't get onto the plane because the plane was full. The second plane left to Zurich. I had one spot on that plane, paid for my ticket, arrived in Zurich, and that's where I live today. So you moved to Zurich, and shortly after you got there, you worked as a farmhand, a river keeper, a barman, a woodcutter, and a gray picker. Then you hitchhiked to a small town in the Swiss Alps, worked in a hostel, taught yourself how to ski so you could earn money as an instructor. But you quickly tired of that and became an instructor for an outdoor company that offered extreme activities, including hydro speed. A lot of people in the U.S. don't know what that is. It means jumping into fast-flowing whitewater and being carried along

at high speeds while buoyed by a small boat. Canyoning, which means rappelling, rafting, and waterfall jumping. And abseiling, which means descending down near vertical rock faces. After a year there, you left for a paragliding and rafting expedition in the Peruvian Andes with your first extreme mission. And while you were paragliding around Machu Picchu, you crashed and ended up in the hospital for a month. But that didn't stop you. When you got out of the hospital, you returned to Switzerland and were invited to join the

Sector No Limit sports team, where you started taking part in big overseas adventures. Your next feat was descending down the Mount Blank Glacier, which is 9,000 feet tall, on a bodyboard. That was followed by descending down by descending by Delta plane from a 22,000 foot high mountain. That was followed by riverboarding through the Colca Canyon, which is 6,000 feet deep and one of the world's deepest canyons. And that was followed by riverboarding down a 22-meter high waterfall at the Pecuraro River in Costa Rica, which was a record for the highest descent down a waterfall, which you said was the ballsiest thing you've ever done. Before we talk about what came next, I want to go back to when you were lying in the hospital.

You had a lot to think about, take inventory and think about your future. At this point, many people would have said, all right, this was fun. I got ahead of myself and it's time to stop doing crazy things. You had the opposite reaction and it was another turning point in your life. Can you tell us why it was the turning point in your life? And can you tell us the difference in mindsets between those who would have stopped paragliding and those like you who say, I don't care that I almost died and was in the hospital for a month, and that I'm going to continue to do dangerous things that can kill me. It's really true that when you look at it, what I do from the outside, you might think that it's extremely dangerous. But the moment you make

a mistake, you've got to learn from it. And we don't often learn from our mistakes. And I don't understand that we allow people to make two or three or four times the same mistake. Where's the learning in the fact that a mistake we all can make, but there's something that you've got to get out of that mistake that's going to help you not to make further mistakes. So you've got to understand how our mind works. And I'll explain it very briefly that the will to win must overpower the fear of failure or the fear to lose. And it's only when the will to win becomes bigger than the fear to lose in our mind, that you can really go out there and achieve amazing things. If we're afraid of losing our money, if you're afraid of losing your friends and your house and your car or whatever, you're going to live a happy life and you're going to

succeed, but you're not going to do extraordinary things. And extraordinary things, once you've started doing them, it becomes like a little bit of an addiction. And I was addicted to what I was doing. I loved every second of that stress, of that unknown, of that engagement. And the moment that I can engage with my word and I follow what I say, that's when I said that, okay, yes, I broke my legs. I ended up in hospitals, but I survived. So now I'm richer, I'm stronger in knowledge and experience, and that I paid for. That's experience lived. And if I shy away from that now, then I'm a failure. That's got to be used to enhance my decision-making,

to help me to climb higher mountains quicker, to fly from the highest mountains that I did in South America, the Huascaran, to descend the highest waterfalls done with a boogie board. It's because I lived the experiences. I broke my knee. I ended up in hospital. I paid cash for my engagement. But that engagement that I did was because my will to win was bigger than my fear of losing. If you're afraid of losing or afraid of failure, you're not going to engage into something where you are going to go beyond your comfort zone to really win. And that's a mindset that we can apply in anything that we do today.

The fact that you can really go out there and continue doing what you love doing and not seeing all these little obstacles as total failures and changing the course of your life. Just adapt the course of your life to whatever happens to you. And I've sailed 27 times around the world. If the wind changes and the storms come in, I'm ready for them. I just adapt my sails. I lower the surface. I'm still going into the storm, but I'm doing it more wisely. Don't run away from problems. Run towards them. And the moment you run towards them, you come with enough knowledge and experience to overcome them.

All right, let's talk about some of your expeditions. And we're going to start with your first major one, the one that first made you famous. It was 1997, and you're 31 years old. And at this point, you had the idea, which supposedly came from a five Swiss franc bet with a friend, in which even you called crazy, to go to South America and swim and riverboard 7,000 kilometers or 4,350 miles down the Amazon River, which involves lying on your stomach on something that resembles a boogie board.

You spent two years preparing for the trip, which included spending a year with the Brazilian Army Special Forces to learn how to survive in the Amazon jungle. And when you preparing for the trip, which included spending a year with the Brazilian Army Special Forces to learn how to survive in the Amazon jungle. When you left for your trip, you only had your HydroSpeed, which was your special boogie board, a pair of fins, a wetsuit, and a bag with the bare essentials that included medicine, paper, SOS beacons, a fishing net, and a machete. You started your trip by walking 375 miles with all of your equipment from the Pacific Ocean to the Peruvian Andes, where the river begins. 600 miles into your drip, you broke your knee, plunging over some rapids, and you stayed on the shore for four days without moving too much, bandaged up your knee, and then got back in the water for the remaining 3,700 miles to go. After breaking your knee, your next challenge was to find food. You were

surviving mainly on fish. You would save time and energy by staying on land for two or three days to find food and then stay in the water for six or seven days. You slept, ate, and swam in the water and at one point stayed in the water for 10 days because the middle of the river is where the strongest forward current was and because it's also the safest. On your journey, you met an Inca tribe called the Ucayali region of Peru that imprisoned you and thought you were a child killing devil who had to be killed. You speak Spanish. Actually, you speak seven languages. And fortunately, there was a translator in the tribe who managed to convince them that killing a devil was unnecessary because if they killed you, you would become two devils. And if they tried to cut off your head, there would be three devils. And therefore, you were immortal and that they

couldn't kill you. When the tribesmen searched your bag, they found your SOS beacon. And one of the tribesmen accidentally activated the SOS signal. And you told them that if they killed you, men would come from the sky by helicopter. Three hours later, the helicopter did come and it caused panic among the Incas. You were free, but you knew that the expedition would be us what happened and how you managed to survive and continue on when you couldn't see for five days and the message that you were going to send to your wife, Kathy, at the time, but never were able to?

Randy, it was an epic adventure to imagine that you can basically swim down the Amazon on a boogie board and live 100% from nature, meaning that I didn't take any food. I only instructed myself on how to find food, what I could eat, what could kill me to be able to know how to survive. So I armed myself. I didn't take money. I took knowledge. So after the South African Special Forces, I joined the Brazilian Special Forces. They actually trained Americans before they went to Vietnam. I did an exchange program for them and they gave me a pile of books about that high, but on everything that I could eat, everything that I couldn't eat, all the snakes that could kill me, all the snakes that couldn't kill me. And I quickly understood that there was just so much knowledge. I needed to know so much of the jungle to be able to really survive, to be able

to understand what I could eat and what I couldn't eat, what could kill me and what couldn't kill me. And I started looking at the books on snakes, and I'm not a fond lover of snakes, especially the poisonous ones or the venomous ones. And I kind of started looking and paging through the snakes, comparing a lot of the snakes to be able to identify the ones that's poisonous and the others that wouldn't be poisonous, the difference in between them. And I realized that, well, there was confusion. And I started tearing out the pages of the snakes that couldn't kill me. Why should I know a snake can't kill me? So all the information only gets focused on what could stop you, what snake can kill you,

what you can eat. I didn't want to know what I cannot eat. I cannot eat it. It's not important to me. And a pile of books that was about three foot high became a couple of inches high. And that's what I knew. If I didn't identify something, I didn't involve in it. I didn't get involved in it because it was a snake that couldn't kill me. And then I knew that in the jungle, in the Amazon, especially in South America, everything a monkey eats, you can eat. If a monkey sits on top of the tree and he eats a green leaf, climb up the tree and eat the green

leaf. Don't eat the yellow one because he's not eating the yellow leaves. He's eating the green ones and he won't eat poison. He knows better than you. So what monkey do, you do. And that's basically how I survived. So if the monkeys didn't eat, then I didn't know what to eat unless I identified something that I could eat. And if the monkey sits on top of the tree and he doesn't eat, you can always eat the monkey because you can catch the monkey. And that's the difference in between human beings, being able to open up so much of the information that gets lost, unnecessary information that we get every day that is not important, that overwhelms our life, that occupies our mind with stuff that we should never know about or not worry about. That's how we pollute our life that occupies our mind with stuff that we should never know about or not worry about.

That's how we pollute our life. So I focused on what I could do and everything the monkey eat, you can eat. A snake, the snake. I wanted to carry on through the jungle quicker and faster to be able to spend less time in the jungle and that would allow me to take less risks. So I started walking at night. Hacking my way through the jungle with my machete, I accidentally touched a snake that was living between head height and chest height behind leaves, and it bit me.

It felt painful, but because I was injured and cut and bruised everywhere, it was just another little injury. A couple of feet further, it felt like I drank a bottle of whiskey. The whole world started turning, and I said, whoa, this is crazy. I've been bitten by something. I started looking with my headlamp to try and find a bite. And I saw two little holes in my little finger. So actually, the hand that I held the machete to cut the branch, it was in front of me. The snake was behind the branch and I couldn't see it. It bit me.

Now we know that, okay, wow, it's quite poisonous because I can feel the effect. And now I've got to be able to slow down my heart rate. Now I've got to keep the wound lower than my heart. Now I've got to put myself in a situation that I can feed and eat myself without increasing my heart rate, meaning that I know what to do what is right. And usually if a snake actually bites you, that means that it couldn't get out of your way. The cobra, yes, it attacks you. The cobra will come towards you, but you will see it coming. But all the other snakes would defend itself. And actually when you get bitten by a snake, it means that it's digesting food. It's there. It doesn't want to move. It's digesting. It's slow. And when it uses a venom to kill its

prey so it can eat it, it means that that period of time that it's actually digesting, it's got very little venom, not enough venom to kill you because he used it to kill his prey. And that is when you have to cut off the head of the snake about two inches behind the head, look into the stomach if the snake has eaten something. And if you can identify the snake, you know how to treat the bite. And all those things are things that we have to educate ourselves with. So I was lying in my hammock. I felt all the feeling in my face disappeared. I started going like half blind. And then I knew that I couldn't fall asleep. I should fight this. This is a mental fight.

Now, if I want to survive, the only way that I could communicate to Kathy was via a black box, like the airplanes would have. And there's 16 pre-coded messages. These messages have a certain frequency. So if I would send a frequency up to the satellite, the frequency would travel 40,000 kilometers up into the air, captured by a satellite, then get sent 40,000 kilometers back to Toulouse in France to the space agency, and then via fax back home to where I live in Switzerland. So my wife would get the message if she was lucky 10 seconds later. There's 16 pre-coded messages, like I said, message one, all okay. Message 16, I'm dying.

After the third day, I felt that, wow, I'm not going to survive. And I turned the frequency to message 16. Before I send the message, lost consciousness. And I think that's actually what saved my life. Because if I would send that message, I would accept that death was the way out. But because it was never sent, subconsciously, I needed to stay alive because my wife never got that message that I was going to die. 171 days, 7 hours and 45 minutes after you started, you arrived on the Atlantic Ocean and knew you had made it when you tasted the salt water of the ocean. For all of you who want to see this, it's online in a video. Really awesome to see.

You had made it, an incredible feat, and accomplished an incredible goal, something that nobody else in the world had ever done. And at the age of 38, you had your entire career in front of you. We're going to talk about the importance of dreams and reasons why we do things in a minute. But before we do, can you tell us what you were feeling when you saw the Atlantic Ocean in front of you and what you felt as you were swimming towards it and then actually crossed it? And in search of excellence, how important is it for us to set aggressive goals for ourselves, goals that are out of our comfort zone, not a little out of our comfort zones, but way out of our comfort zones. And how does our mental health factor into our success?

Randy, we dream too small in life. We think things are not possible because we get told that it's not possible to do. Imagine people telling you it's possible to do it, then you kind of say, well, if he thinks I can do it, then I must be able to do it. It's sure that you've got, there's a difference in being motivated to do something and sometimes or not motivated. And sometimes we rely too much on motivation. Motivation to me is a lot of BS. I don't believe in positive thinking and motivation because when I'm in the Amazon River, I'm not motivated to get out of my hammock, to jump into the river and swim into the mouth of the Amazon that's nearly 225 miles wide. You're in a river, and in this river, there's an island bigger than Switzerland. Nobody in his right mind will ever

be motivated to do that. So what makes me actually do it? And I think that question is important to ask because if you need to motivate yourself, you should not do it because you need to motivate yourself. I believe that there's discipline in life. And the moment you apply self-discipline, that's when discipline makes you wake up. Discipline gets you into the river. Discipline makes you wake up. Discipline gets you into the river. Discipline makes you take those risks. And the moment you do it, that's when you start becoming motivated. And that motivation that's ignited by the discipline that you apply in your life actually makes the difference. You can't do something extraordinary if you only rely on motivation. There's got to be a deeper,

more concrete discipline that you apply in everyday life. You are successful because you applied a discipline in your life. Your kids are well-educated because there's a discipline in life and behind that discipline, the motivation starts. So the Amazon River, like I said, is 321 kilometers wide. I'm in this middle of this river, and I do not know if I'm in the Atlantic Ocean or in the Amazon River. The Amazon River actually pushes back the Atlantic ocean more than 80 kilometers. It's about 38 or 40 miles that the power of the river, there's 20% of the fresh water on the planet that actually pours out of the mouth of the Amazon and it pushes back the Atlantic ocean. The only way that I knew that I was going to stop

or that I was in the Atlantic Ocean was by tasting the water. So it was fresh water. And every day for a period of more than one week, I tasted the water and I thought I was going to get into the Atlantic Ocean. Because it's tidal, you move forward and you move backwards with the tide and that slowed me down quite a lot. And you're there with your flippers and you're swimming as much as you can to be able to get into the Atlantic Ocean. And the day I tasted that water turned salt, to me, was most probably one of the greatest memories that I had as an explorer,

simply because it was something that was denied from me, or it was kept away from me for so long, and I really wanted to taste it. And I was not sure that it was really salt that I was tasting or only my mind playing games with me. So I swam another day further into the Atlantic Ocean and then set off my beacon for the satellites to capture my position to prove that I was in the middle of the Amazon River, already in the Atlantic Ocean. And then it took me more than a week to swim to the side of the river. So it's an epic story. One man alone in the ocean, completely on this little boogie board, living on a space that's three feet in diameter. And luckily with the tides rising and dropping, I could then return that on the tide

that I swam out with and use the tides in acceleration with my flippers to get back to the side of the river. And that's when the idea of the next expedition started. you