Start With A Win - Polar Ben and His History-Making Expeditions

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Our guest on this episode of Start With A Win is Ben Saunders, a polar explorer and motivational speaker who has excellent nuggets of wisdom for listeners on the show. Growing up in a rural area of the UK, Ben spent much of his childhood outside, learning about the world around him and struggling to sit still in school. After high school, Ben worked with John Ridgway, who had rowed across the Atlantic in a wooden boat in 93 days, and was inspired by Ridgway’s fortitude and accomplishments. Ben decided to stay beyond his gap year to teach at Ridgway’s adventure school, where he also spent a lot of time reading about adventurers.In 2001, Ben and his friend spent 59 days skiing to the North Pole, but they were unprepared and didn’t complete their goal. A few weeks later, Ben got a bill in the mail for his portion of the trip expenses – close to $50,000 – and he decided to plan a second trip and fundraise for the trip and cover his debts. This trip was a success and his first solo venture. In 2004, he completed his solo trip from Russia to the North Pole, and then in 2014, Ben and his partner completed the 1800-mile journey to the South Pole, retracing the steps of Scott in 1912.Through all of Ben’s experiences, he has learned that self-belief is essential to overcoming challenges. This human quality must essentially develop because confidence follows courage. Ben says that either you are winning or you are learning, and no experience is a waste. He also discusses the importance of being intentional. Be intentional about how you are focusing your time and energy, not dwelling on things that are outside of your control. To that end, Ben jumped into entrepreneurship in 2020, creating Scroll Bands that help people be aware of the time they are spending on their phones.Connect with Ben:https://scrollband.com/password https://bensaunders.com/https://twitter.com/polarben?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthorhttps://www.ted.com/speakers/ben_saunders Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. Coming to you from Denver, Colorado, Adam Conto, CEO here with Start With A Win. With me in the virtual studio is producer Mark. I'm also a virtual producer. Hello, Adam. Virtual producer. Welcome to Start With A Win. Hey, you know, it makes it real, Mark.

That's right. That's awesome. I'm doing so good, Adam. So good. Hey, Mark. How do you like the cold? You know, I am not... I'm indifferent indifferent to it i don't hate the cold you know i know some people that are just like ah the cold i hate it i want to go to but i there is something about a crisp cool you know maybe like morning when your nose

is freezing and and uh your snot's you, turning into ice that sometimes that feels kind of good. You know, I think our next guest has had that happen before. Um, I mean, and I'm talking about not just like a little bit of cold. I'm spending, I'm talking about spending two decades leading polar expeditions here. So, uh, uh, I want to welcome to the show one of three people in history to ski solo to both the North and South poles and has the world record for the longest ever polar journey on foot. Uh, Ben Saunders, how you doing Ben? I'm very well. Thank you, Adam. Uh, no, no frozen snot today. I'm pretty, pretty comfortable. I think with the heating on, actually, if I don't lose too many macho points for, uh, for admitting that. Excellent. Wow. I mean, Ben, I mean, you are, uh, I, I love where your head is at here. I mean, Ben, I mean, you are, I love where your head is at here. I mean,

you're fascinated with the polar regions and the human endeavor in this part of the world. You're driven by the desire to educate people, inspire people, live adventurously, things like that. So you want to tell us a little bit about yourself. You're a very interesting individual. Oh, gosh. Well, yeah, I still struggle. I've been doing this more than two decades. I still struggle to describe what I do concisely. I'm normally introduced as a polar explorer, which clearly is a ludicrous job title. I've not discovered any new poles. There's a North Pole and a South Pole, that's it. So if I'm asked, I normally say that I lead polar expeditions, which is slightly confusing. It makes it sound like I take people on trips,

which I do not do. Some of them, as you just said, have been entirely on my own for weeks, weeks at a time. So yeah, I'm still, still struggling, um, long distance skier, maybe. There you go. So this is, this is really you think about the whole process itself of going to one of the poles, there's a lot that goes into this to begin with. And I'm speaking from a very uneducated position. However, I will share this. My sister, Katie spent six years on and off at the South pole. So, um, I mean, she's like one of the longest serving women down there when it comes to that. But, uh, and the stories I heard were fascinating, but she was, she had a place to live. I mean, you were like, you know, you were like trekking your way across the planet here. Yeah. I mean, I'm in a, I'm in a tent.

So, I mean, how did you, how did you end up, you know, convincing yourself, this was a cool thing to do. You wanted to go, Hey, I'm going to go risk life and limb and get to the North pole and the South pole. I mean, take us behind the, what what caused this this thought on this unusual path in life because this is fascinating to me it is it's it's hard to it's hard to pinpoint looking back i mean i was you know as a boy i was i was very lucky i have a younger brother you know we grew up in um kind of rural southwest uk so we were able to be outdoors a lot as kids um i you know i lived in london for 20 years so i appreciate a lot as kids. I lived in London for 20 years, so I appreciate a lot of young people

do not have the opportunities to be outside as much as I was. And I was definitely one of those kids that did not respond well to being told to sit still in a room with the windows closed and don't say anything for an hour, just listen and remember what you've been told because it's important for some reason.

I didn't learn well that way so i didn't i didn't struggle at school i wasn't i i wasn't you know dyslexic or anything but i i equally i wasn't particularly motivated like for me the cool stuff happened outdoors and i learned best i discovered by by trying stuff like engaging with stuff kind of doing things rather than being told about things. So always love the outdoors. Yeah, I was in the Boy Scouts. I'm not quite sure where the screw came completely loose, but I blame it mostly on a guy called John Ridgway, who is extraordinary.

He's 82 now. I saw him, my wife and I saw him last year. I worked for him for a year in my late teens for what should have been in the UK we'd call it a gap year kind of between school and university and I'm 43 now I'm still on that gap year I never made it to you know four more higher education um it's been a lot of school of school of life since then school of hard knocks um school of cold knocks maybe um but John was uh back in 1966 um he and another brit with a cool name

called che blithe john and che blithe were the first people to row across the atlantic in a wooden boat from boston to ireland 93 days open wooden boat you know two benches two sets of oars um he was in the british army at the time special forces. He used to, he boxed for great Britain. He sailed around the world three times. So to the teenage me, he was this larger than life superhero. And, um, and I applied for a job to work for him. So back then he had, uh, he called it an adventure school and it was a, a kind of outward bound center on steroids, really extraordinary place right up in the Scottish Highlands, quite remote, um, as remote as it gets

in the UK, but pretty remote. So I spent a year there, you know, leading teams outdoors, climbing, you know, hiking, kayaking, sailing. And if I wasn't outdoors, which was every day, I was reading books or eating or sleeping or hanging out with my fellow instructors. There was no internet back then in the 90s. So I. So, um, so I, I read loads and the books, you know, in John's extraordinary adventure exploration library, the ones that really caught my attention were the polar exploration. Like to me, that just seemed like without leaving the atmosphere, that was about as extreme as it, as it, as it got. Um, so that's where, yeah, that's where it started. And then the first expedition was 2001, 23 years old.

And where did you go on the first expedition? Yeah, well, we didn't get there. So the two of us, a guy called Penn Haddo, Penn with a P, that was his nickname, Penn and Ben, and the Polar Men, one radio station called us in the UK. We were trying to get to the North Pole, geographic North Pole from Russia. So straight line distance, about 600 miles. We thought it'd take about eight weeks. And the interesting thing about the North Pole is that it's in the middle of the sea, the middle of the Arctic Ocean. And it's a big bit of sea. It's 5.4 million square miles. So about the same. I think it's about one and a half times the size of the united states so it's in the sea and i've met yeah i've met well-educated adults with degrees who think the north pole is in a forest clearing in lapland somewhere with like a you know santa

claus log cabin and and are surprised when i say no no it's in it's in the middle of 5.4 million square miles of ocean so if you are daft enough to try and walk to the North Pole, as we tried to that year, you're traveling over the sea. You're walking over the semi-frozen, floating crust of pack ice on the sea. So there are no maps. We were out there for 59 days, so eight weeks. No maps because the terrain is always changing. It's floating, drifting around um breaking up

refreezing it's it's the natural habitat of the polar bear that's where they hunt on the pack so we're we're armed you know for self-defense um so it was not not somewhere that has a great deal to recommend it again for a for a for a nice camping trip but um it was and we didn't make it we got two-thirds of the way there so there. So my first big expedition was a failure in many senses. And I never imagined then this would become a career. I just thought this was a one-off opportunity to do this trip a lifetime. And I was convinced we would pull it off. I was 23.

I was going to be the youngest in history. I'd come back to this world record and presumably book deals and Hollywood book deals and, you know, Hollywood agents waiting for the airport. And none of that happened. Oh, wow. So, OK, you learned a lot of lessons on that one, obviously. And you're thinking to yourself, I want to go try this again. I mean, did you go after the North Pole the second time or to the South Pole at that point? Yeah, North Pole again.

So I guess the first decade of my career was really focused purely on the Arctic, mostly North Pole, Arctic Ocean, and a few trips in Greenland. In some ways, it was, you know, of my 12 major expeditions, the first couple were almost a kind of Ponzi scheme, because I came back from this failed attempt to reach the North Pole in 2001, 23 years old. My parents are divorced. So my mom was renting this like tiny house. So I was kind of camping out with her, living out of bag. I broke up with my girlfriend, didn't have a job, didn't have any money, didn't have any qualifications, didn't have a degree. Like I spent about a fortnight lying on a sofa, just watching crappy daytime TV,

just gazing into the abyss of self-pity. And then I got a letter from a lawyer basically saying, look, Buster, here's your bill for the remaining half of the cost. Because Penn and I had agreed we'd split the cost 50-50. And these are complicated, logistically complex things to organize. And I guess we'd racked up a bit more time than we thought you know hiring helicopters in russia and that kind of thing so i opened this letter and it was basically a bill for it was it was it seared into my brain 34 615 pounds so about 50 000 and i i had zero dollars in in the bank so i remember thinking oh wow like this is either going to take me like a decade to pay off this debt or like what if I did another expedition?

Like what if I plan? Maybe I could kind of roll that into the budget and just try and raise more sponsorship. And that's that's how it started. Well, all right. So the second expedition, did you did you find that to be a success or? Yeah, there was a there was a little mini one in 2003 so just two weeks ago but that was on the article so i basically flew right out there's this very odd they actually haven't been able to open it for the last two or three years in a row but there's

there's a russian operated airstrip for about three weeks of the year on the sea ice they try and find a big enough bit of ice that you can land aircraft on it's all pretty sketchy um and i i basically just about raised enough money to fly out to that to that point and then normally people um do what's called the last degree so you ski the last degree of latitude 60 nautical miles so it takes about a week most people do it with a guide helicopter from the north pole back to this airstrip and fly home again so you're done in 10 days and you could say you've skied to north pole it's really just the last bit so i figured out that if i skied from this airstrip to fly home again so you're done in 10 days and you could say you've skied to North Pole it's really just the last bit so I figured out if I skied from this airstrip to the pole and then skied back again that would be cheaper because I didn't need the helicopter

so so it was kind of two weeks 120 miles give or take um so uh looking back a relatively easy trip but it was my first first solo expedition and I was you know 25. That feels really young to me now, looking back to me hanging out on the Arctic Ocean for a fortnight, dodging polar bears on my own. That was a fundamental trip because I felt the first trip, 2001, 59 days, for almost all of that journey just felt utterly out of my depth. I thought I knew what I was letting myself in for. I'd had a brief army career. I was at Sandhurst, which is the equivalent of West Point in the US.

I'd left before I was commissioned, but I'd been training in Norway with the army. I'd slept in a snow hole. I was, you know, already then had run marathons. I was lifting weights. I thought I was super fit, thought I was pretty hard. And yeah, the day that we landed for that first expedition, marathons i was lifting weights i thought i was super fit thought i was pretty hard and yeah the

day that we landed for that first expedition it dropped by helicopter at our start point um the ambient air temperature was minus 48 degrees centigrade so i guess that's probably negative 50 something fahrenheit and that's that's before windchill so and it's just like a different universe different planet nothing could have prepared me. So the first trip, I was just in shock for most of it at how challenging this was. Second trip, 2003, I kind of started to figure it out. And then I went back the next year, 2004, and did a really big trip. So solo from the Russian coastline, basically, to the North Pole.

So that was 72 days on my own. Wow. So you learned a days on my own. Wow. So you learned a lot of lessons in these, and you kept expanding your capabilities, expanding your, I don't want to say your courage, but what you felt were your abilities to succeed here and overcoming challenges easier. I mean, what were you thinking by this point?

Because there's a lot of people that listen to this and they're like, all right, I've got some challenges that I need to overcome in my life. What lessons can you give to them from your first several expeditions? It's interesting that you shied away from the wet expanding courage, but I think looking back, that's exactly what happened. I think the, I think the biggest ingredient in the success that I've had in two decades, and I've raised the bar in this field eventually. I've gone from complete amateur, totally clueless, to doing something unprecedented. I still have the world record on the wall in my downstairs bathroom.

So I still hold that. So I think the biggest ingredient in that success has been self-belief. And I don't mean arrogance or self-importance or conceit or ego, but I do mean the belief in my own capacity to do things, my own capacity to my own sense of agency. And my theory, possibly a half-baked theory, is that self-belief is this kind of essential human quality that we all have it we're all born with it to some degree or another um genetically or where where that comes from in in the chemistry in our heads but i think it's a bit like fitness a bit like strength or endurance it's it's a it's a uh a sort of plastic malleable quality um that responds to stimulus so you can make it stronger and I think the big lesson for me has been the importance of continually acting without confidence like acting without

certainty and I think a lot of people perhaps make the mistake of thinking well I'm not going to start until I'm confident until until I know. But confidence only ever follows courage. You can't learn to swim by reading a book about swimming. At some point, you have to try it. And the same holds true for almost any worthwhile endeavor in life, I think. So that's been the big lesson for me. And I should say, I'm not talking about being reckless, because for the last 20 years, I've, I'm convinced I've spent more time in Excel spreadsheets than I have on skis. Like there's a huge amount of groundwork and preparation and planning and training that goes into these, into these big

experiences. But I am talking about the ability to take risks and, and, you know, calculate risks and to trust in your own capacity to deal with whatever happens. What's the lovely Nelson Mandela line? Either winning or learning. That's it. I love that. And I want to break this down a little bit more because you talk about the limiting beliefs, and there's always going to be a limiting belief there, some sort of a self-limiting belief or self-belief that you're capable of overcoming. And those are emotional rationalizations a lot of times. And then you build in your spreadsheet where you're trying to go, okay, am I prepared to handle this? Am I mitigating that risk? So one of your expeditions was to follow Scott's adventure at the South Pole. And so the story

behind that is Scott and Amundsen are in a race to see who can make it to the South Pole first. And without getting into the details of it for the listeners, I mean, there's essentially two people going after this. One has a different plan than the other. One, Scott, dies along the way. And you're like, oh, I'm going to go on that path, is my understanding. You're like, oh, hey, this dude died doing this. Let's go try that again. So I mean, how do you, you know, I'm sure you put a spreadsheet to that, but how do you not kill yourself then? Yeah, good question. So you're absolutely right, Adam. So there was essentially, this is back in you're absolutely right adam so so there was essentially this is back in like 1911 1912 there was what turned out to be a race to to to for the first

person ever to reach the south pole and find out what was there and this you know back then this must have been like flying to mars you know these these these guys were sailing away from home for three years at a time with no communication no no hope of being rescued, and no idea really what lay beyond the horizon. Some people back then thought that there might be another ocean in the middle of Antarctica. They knew it was vast. It's the size of China and India put together, a huge continent. But nobody knew what was in the middle. So, yeah, Norwegian team got there first, led by Roald Amundsen.

Crucially, they used dogs and dogsleds and they were pretty brutal they started with 53 dogs finished with 11 shooting dogs feeding the dogs to the other dogs scott's team on foot um that's the big difference so so it intrigued me so scott's men he had his part of team of five um they all died on the return journey trying to get back to the coast of ant. And it's an 1,800-mile round trip. So it's a long, long old trek. And the last three of Scott's team to die in March 1912, including Scott himself, had covered nearly 1,600 miles on foot,

which is a record that stood until my teammate Taka and I finished our journey in 2014, when we finally finished that journey for the first time so to me for years it seemed extraordinary that the high watermark of of you know sheer human endeavor endurance in the toughest place on the planet that that bar was set so high a century ago that no one had surpassed it it was as if the marathon record or the iron man triathlon record had been set in 1912 by somebody, you know, smoking a pipe and wearing a sort of, you know, like a woolen sweater or something. And despite a century's worth of innovation, advance, you know, knowledge, no one had raised that bar. No one had finished this journey.

No one had gone further than that. It was extraordinary. Because when you look at these black and white photos, like I often point out that they didn't have zippers on their jackets because they hadn't been invented yet. They didn't have, you know, vacuum floss to keep hot drinks warm during that because they hadn't been invented yet. So let alone all the stuff that I have, you know, GPS, satellite phones, solar panels, lithium batteries, synthetic materials. My sledge is made of carbon fiber and Kevlar. The runners are matched to the exact width of my ski tracks. We've got all of this knowledge. How come no one had finished this journey? So that's what we set out to do. So what did you have to overcome? Because at some point, you have to give yourself the courage and the knowledge combined in order to know that, okay, I'm not going out there to

kill myself and my partner here. I mean, when did you guys look at each other and say, okay, we're ready? I mean, what did it take to get to that point? Yeah, it's fascinating because everything gets busier and busier and busier up until the start point. I said to someone recently, it felt like i was training for the olympics and project managing the build of the stadium at the same time there's just all this stuff going on and i had 12 people working full-time it was i'd inadvertently become the ceo of this weird business where i was also the product i was the thing that we were shipping you know for our sponsors you know partners um so it's this this just kind of crescendo of of activity and all this stuff and logistics getting people and gear everything down to down to south america flying into antarctica and then there's always with every

expedition there is a a moment like cliff edge moment where you can no longer prepare anymore you know you are stepping into your ski bindings, putting on the sledge harness, and you've done everything you can do. And that's always a fascinating moment and pretty terrifying most of the time. It suddenly sinks in like, oh, hang on. Why did I think this was a good idea? And I had, at the start of that journey,

we set off from exactly the same point as Captain Scott, you know, just over a century before us because his wooden hut is still there. Still, you know, still standing deep frozen. So we were able to look around the hut. And I had like the ultimate bout of imposter syndrome. Just thinking, hang on a minute. This is the journey that defeated shackleton killed scott they're two of the biggest brand names in my world two of the biggest icons no one else has attempted this none of my none of my kind of contemporary heroes no one's attempted this in 100 years

why is that why didn't i pay more attention to all of the experts that were saying that this could not be done it's just it's just no one's ever walked that far. Um, it's impossible. You're trying to drag everything, you know, Scott, Amundsen, they both had support teams, you know, pre-positioning these depots, caches of food and things. So yeah, it kind of hit me on day one, the, the, uh, yeah, the, the sort of severity, the weight of what I'd let myself in for. How, when did you know that, okay, we're going to make this? I mean, because there had to be, you talk about the imposter syndrome and that self-doubt and, you know, am I the wrong person to be here doing the wrong thing type mentality? And so many of our listeners, I mean,

the reality is imposter syndrome is human nature. We're all subject to it, but at some point the switch goes on and you think, we got this. We can do this. I mean, was there a moment like that in this? Or was it, oh my gosh, I hope we get there until the last day? Yeah, it's a really difficult question to answer because I think throughout the expedition, I always had this belief that we were going to figure it out somehow. We'd do it somehow. I would have been foolish starting if I didn't have some degree of passion

to do this thing and belief that we'd figured out the way to do it. But in other ways, there was uncertainty almost up until the finish line because you're trying to do something, we were trying to do something that's never been done before in an environment where so many crucial factors and variables are completely outside our control. So this is another big lesson, I think. It was really around focus and where you're investing your time and your energy, not just physically but mentally and emotionally and um it's an environment that can be very frightening can be frustrating can be infuriating uh if the winds if you've got a headwind poor visibility very low temperatures um we sometimes get really poor

surface just for some reason i i think it's in very low temperatures there's more friction um so rather than things getting more slippery like once it gets in very low temperatures there's more friction um so rather than things getting more slippery like once it gets like below negative 40 there's actually more friction because you don't get if you go ice skating there's a layer of water between the skate and the ice that's how you glide around but if you try to ice skate at negative 45 you just stick to the ice so the same would happen with our sledges so so all of this frustration and the whole thing really was was almost an exercise in efficiency it was it was the time calories you know physical energy and distance um and trying to get the maximum distance that we could for the energy that we had so we we

learned very quickly talk and my teammate and I, we learned very quickly that investing energy in getting angry at the weather or getting scared about the crevasse field we could see on the horizon, that was a waste of energy. That was just going to detract from our chance of success. So I guess control the controllables is maybe the kind of one-line takeaway there. Be very careful where you're investing your time and energy. And, yeah, the last year, we've all been sat in front of screens. Your screen, if it's connected to the internet, will happily feed you 24 hours a day worth of stuff that will make you angry or afraid or, you know, whatever that you can't do anything about. So, yeah, be careful how you invest your energy and your time. There's some huge lessons there, Ben,

and thank you for sharing those to us. I mean, when you look at people's challenges that they face every day, and you're right, most of the fears and the overwhelm that is created for us is created for us and shows up on our little device here that we're stuck to. And you've actually been attacking that problem itself, is my understanding.

Yeah, I accidentally started a business end of last year. So they're not on sale yet, but they will be soon. Tell us about that real quick. Yeah, so this was, I read a piece in the New York Times about smartphone addiction. And it was one of the tech editors had realized he was spending like 35 hours a week screen time on his phone.

Didn't think that was healthy. Found a psychologist to help him out and wrote this up as an article for New York Times. And the first intervention she suggested was putting an elastic band, a rubber band around the phone and swapping the lock screen for blank screen with three questions, which were what for? Why now? What else i what else could you be doing with your time so i read this i went for a run it was december in the uk it was kind of cold and wet and dark and went for a long run i was thinking about what i'd read and um i thought people spend a lot of money on their phones and um and they spend a lot of money on cases for the phones and like a rubber band was just a bit you know what if someone made a band maybe someone does already you know surely someone's figured this out but what if someone made a band to go on the phone so came back home did some

googling couldn't find anything like it so oh i better do this so um so this this is a scroll band this is actually one of the one of the latest prototypes so it is literally just a silicon band that goes around your around your phone um really as a as a as a speed bump, you know, just to stop you reaching for your phone unconsciously and, you know, flicking through social media or checking your email again or whatever it is. So this one, well, I put it on back to front, but I can show you. This one says live with intention. It probably doesn't show up on my camera, but they've got little messages on them because

I thought we could put the message on the band rather than on the lock screen of the phone. So that's a fun, another sort of adventure, really, starting a business with a great friend of mine called Simon who's helping out. So, yeah, it's called ScrollBand. ScrollBand.com coming very soon. Right on. It's a great idea. It doesn't take something huge to make a huge difference in somebody's life. It could be something as small as a reminder of those little micro efforts, the micro commitments, and just touching that. I read an article,

people scroll the height of the Empire State Building every day. Wow. Which I think is, you know, that's crazy. Yeah. I mean, the statistics are deeply alarming. And I'm as guilty as any other human being, you know, in the UK or the US of spending too much time on my phone. And I'm also aware that, you know, the businesses behind these, particularly social media networks, are investing so much money in the algorithms that know exactly how to hook us in and keep us scrolling. So, yeah, I thought there should be some simple physical just reminder that your time is the most precious thing you have. Like the average lifetime is less than 700,000 hours.

That's it you know if you were told you had a bank account with 700 grand of it and you could never pay in to this account oh and by the way you're probably halfway through it already um and you can spend some of this sleep uh you've not much so i just i remember thinking about it years ago and just becoming i actually went too far i just became obsessed by productivity i was like ah ah, no, I can't, I can't see my friends. I can't go to the movies. I can't do it because I've got so much I want to do with my life. And oh man, there's not much time left.

So there's, for sure, there's a, there's a, there's a, you know, a sweet spot, a balance to, to, you know, to, to find there. But, um, I think, um, and I'm not, I love tech. I'm a huge geek. I absolutely love having this much computing power in my pocket and the ability to access information. And ironically, this is a business I can run from a phone. So I don't want to give that up. But I'm also aware that these things can be thieves of our time if we're not mindful. Completely agree. And correction on that number. It's 300 feet a day. So the Statue of Liberty, the height of the Statue of Liberty is the length that people scroll. Yeah, 300 feet, though. That's a lot of thumb exercise.

You're crawling 300 feet with your thumb, for crying out loud. But it's a great job on inventing that product there. That's really cool. I encourage everybody to check that out. And Ben, you've shared a lot of ways that you overcome the challenges in life, how you've taken some major polar expeditions and set world records and even stopped us from diverting our attention too much to our phone. But I have a question for you that we ask everybody on this show. And that is, Ben, how do you start your day with a win? Oh, wow.

Yeah, good question. I actually, I've tried and failed for many years to become a regular meditator. So I wish I could say, oh, I get it. I literally, I have a mat here and a cushion. I have the gear. I wish I could say, oh, I meditate. But that's not true um i start my day actually i i go go downstairs and make a coffee like that's my

my day starts with some caffeine um and then you go and then i and then i we have a we have a dog um she's she's giving me 12 this year she's getting arthritic it's a little bit sad but um and i take the dog out into the garden we're lucky enough i bought a house in the country a couple years ago and um and one of my favorite things is just go in the garden and just take the dog out and just actually not i don't take my phone out there my wife's normally still asleep i i kind of became an early riser last year for the first time in my in my entire life um i for years i was definitely a night owl i did the work late um but uh yeah 2020 started getting up early so i'm really enjoying that and um yeah get outside and just and just yeah i guess in a strange way it is almost meditation just try not to think about anything just and just

appreciating where we live and looking at the trees and the plants and birdsong in the morning so yeah just just a few moments of trying to be present before I then launch into my giant list for the day in my inbox. Awesome. Ben Saunders, thank you so much for being on Start With A Win. Polar Expedition world record holder and adventurer. It's such an honor to have you on here and thanks for all you do. Thank you, Adam. Cheers. And thank you so much for listening to

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