Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - The Climb That Changed Everything | Motivational Speech About Choosing Hard Things

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

What if the real weight holding you back isn’t physical, it’s mental?In this deeply personal journey, Eddie Pinero takes on a 35-pound ruck up Camelback Mountain - not for the sake of fitness, but to reframe the role of discomfort in our lives.This isn’t just a hike. It’s a metaphor for life: the base, the climb, the summit, the descent.If you’re facing uncertainty, pain, or fear of what lies ahead, this video is your reminder that growth isn’t accidental.You don’t wait for the storm.You train in the rain. Find your mountain. Pack the weight. Start the climb. Filmed on location: Camelback Mountain, Phoenix, AZ Narrated by: Eddie Pinero Subscribe for weekly motivational speeches: youtube.com/yourworldwithin

What if the heaviest weight was not on your back? It's not what you carry. It's what's in your mind. So imagine with me the idea of manufacturing discomfort in your life, creating chaos in your world, intentionally, on purpose, so that when the chaos is over, you have a greater appreciation for the baseline, for normalcy. Well, that's what this metaphor is about, right?

I'm going to talk about a very simple ruck up Camelback Mountain in Phoenix. Ruck being, for those who don't know, basically putting on a backpack with weight in it. So I'm carrying in the video component to this, 35 pounds, 30 pound weighted slate with some water and just stuff like that. And the idea is it makes the climb harder. But there's a reason for that, a very important reason for that. And I'm going to break it down for you in four pieces. I think this is a really cool metaphor. Translates one to one to facing adversity in life,

facing our most difficult moments. The four pieces here is going to be the beginning, showing up at the mountain, pulling the car in the parking lot, putting the backpack on, and looking up from the base to the summit, soaking in everything that's ahead. The next one is the ascent.

The climb, the actual duress. Then we have the summit. When you're up top, you can look down, you can see how far you've come, reflect back on how you've changed. And then the descent where you go down the mountain, which sure has its own set of problems, but you're a different person. And you're taking all that wisdom and beauty with you back down to every day. So without further ado, let's get into it, the beginning. You show up, park the car, get out, put the weighted backpack on.

And it always feels heaviest at first. You have those thoughts, the self-doubt. One, why am I doing this? It feels kind of unnecessary. And two, can I do this? You know, Camelback, it's not one of the hardest hikes in the world, but it's straight up. It's a lot of scrambling.

It's tough on the knees and lower back. And you have to be in relative shape to do it well. And so this actually, to wait has you thinking, is it even possible? Right? And I think that's a normal thing to contemplate. But here's what I took solace in. The idea that this is not a burden that I carry by accident.

I wasn't dropped there at the base of that mountain. Me showing up was a promise to myself. It's a promise that I'm not going to run from hard things. that I'm going to climb the mountain on purpose because the man that I want to become is created during the climb and lives at the top. This is the building of self. That's how you build character.

That's how you evolve. Placing yourself in those moments. There's a metaphor about a butterfly in a cocoon. And the idea is this butterfly has been in the cocoon for X number of weeks or months, and the butterfly is ready to emerge. And it starts pushing through the cocoon, right? Now fully developed, it's got wings, it's the whole thing, trying to get out and enter the world. But it's struggling.

It's struggling initially to get out of the cocoon, and a passerby looks at it, sees it, and thinks, oh man, that poor butterfly, why don't I just give it a hand? And so he walks up and he kind of tears open the cocoon to allow the butterfly to emerge. Thinks he does his good deed for the day, helps the butterfly leave, and moves on, goes about his day. The issue is the butterfly needed that fight in that struggle getting out of the cocoon to establish its strength, to grow So now what's happened because it was given this free pass is the butterfly is now immersed in a world in which he is not capable of navigating. He has not fought for anything. He hasn't built the strength or the endurance.

And ultimately, the butterfly dies. And that's essentially what this rock is, right? It's an intentional emergence from the cocoon of normalcy, we'll say, where, you know, manufacturing that difficulty is a way, is a method to build strength. It's the only way to grow. It's the only way to reach your potential, to be prepared for the ebbs and flows of life,

the curveballs, the chaos. Are you putting yourself in position to conquer that? Just like that butterfly, struggle is essential for growth. Next phase, the ascent, the climb up. Arthur C. Clark said, the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. That's what this is about. Focusing on the moment, on the challenge at your feet, moving beyond the pain of the now,

because you're going to feel tired. Your knees are going to be uncomfortable. Your lower back is going to hurt. This is scrambling straight up, you know, a pretty tough hike. So what do you do about it? That is the ultimate question. There's a really, what I think is relatable story about a man who's handed a 1,000 piece puzzle

with no picture on the box. And at first, the pieces are overwhelming. He has no idea what he's building. But he starts with the edges. One small corner at a time, and slowly the patterns emerge. He realizes he doesn't. doesn't need to, you know, fill the whole picture to begin.

He just needs to start. And it perfectly fits the ascent because when you're looking up at the finish line or the summit, it feels too much. It feels greater than you're capable of doing. And it is. You cannot leap from the base of the mountain to the top. But what you can do is focus step by step and think about nothing more. That is the beauty and the secret.

to accomplishing incredible things. You focus on the ground at your feet in that moment. And then what happens is as time passes, you look back, you see your growth. And you'll see that on this journey, right? This little adventure on a Tuesday afternoon, the checkpoints where every so often I stop and I turn around and the view just gets better.

And I think I've done that. Through the chaos, despite the discomfort, With this burden on my back, I've done that by not thinking more, but by thinking less. One step at a time. Next phase, the summit. All those steps, one, turned into 100, turned into a thousand, turned into multiple thousands of steps. And now you are standing at the coveted summit.

Helen Keller has a beautiful quote. She says, although the world is full of suffering, it's also full of the overcoming of it. Life is yin and yang, and it's interesting to understand that beauty means nothing without its inverse. Joy means nothing without its inverse. We need night to get day. You need pain and suffering in moments of. weakness to understand strength. And when you're standing at the top of your mountain,

whether literal or metaphorical, that makes more sense than ever before. Because you forged a new reality through the depths of hell. You found meaning in what seemed like little inconsequential steps forward. There's an idea of that. that in a pitch black room, one person by just lighting a small lamp can entirely change the

perspective. Nothing in the room changes or shifts, but suddenly, because of this lamp, everyone sees more clearly. There's been a perspective shift. And in my mind, that's what the summit is. It's that lamp. It's that given clarity and insight to something that was already there, just hidden in the dark. And you look back down to a normalcy that's going to be forever changed now. And this is, you know, again, there are times where I'm speaking on this,

this one particular climb, and it may seem trivial, and in many ways, some of it is. But this is more than just a mountain, right? This is everyday life. You know more now. You know you're capable of things now that you maybe weren't sure of at the base of that mountain.

Now there's 100% proof in my mind I can put on 30, 35 pounds and fly up that mountain. And probably faster the next time and the next time and the next time. I know that I'm someone who can step into chaos and overcome it. People follow through on who they believe themselves to be. And my self-belief just expanded throughout that little experiment. It is a rewriting of self, a rescripting of the world and your place in it. these things matter. They matter because how you look at yourself is everything.

The world will not believe it until you do. In what you did by ascending that mountain and intentionally making the climb more difficult is change that self-narrative. Last phase, the descent. So as I make my way down the mountain, the weight feels lighter. Not because it's any less, but because I am more. And I thought a cool tie in here. This actually goes back to my college days of, you know, jumping into Odysseus.

He's the hero of Homer's Odyssey, which is essentially a Greek epic begins after the Trojan War. And Odysseus is just trying to get home, right? He's not seeking fame or treasure or conquest, just trying to get home. But what should be straightforward turns into like this 10-year chaotic, you know, epic with, you know, trials. He's tested all the time, mind, body, spirit, patience, identity, you name it. He faces monsters, you know, tempests sent by God, seductive distractions from sirens and goddesses, heartbreaking loss, all of it. But each trial forces Odysseus to shed old versions of himself. He has to become more cunning instead of just relying on brute strength.

He relies on humility instead of pride. Endurance instead of raw force. The trip, the journey, the chaos, the pain, the discomfort pushes and incentivizes recreation. And I think that the tie-in is incredible because when he gets home and he does, you know, his body's changed, but his mind is sharpened. His heart is different. And home is now different to Odysseus, but not because home changed because he did. And so this little exercise of now stepping back to the base of the mountain after the descent, taking the backpack off, how light you feel.

And most of us don't walk around with backpacks on all the time, heavy backpacks, myself included. But I'll tell you what, I appreciated it. For the first time, maybe ever, it was, you know, I was incredibly grateful to be moving around just as I am with no extra weight. There was a gratitude. There was an appreciation. There was a sense of pride.

And all self-created. The magic here is not, I'm so special. Look at me. The magic is that there's nothing particularly special about doing something like this. We all can. It's low-hanging fruit. It's there for every single one of us

to grab in our own lives. And again, rucking is just one metaphor. If you don't want to ruck, beautiful. Replace rucking with X, Y, or Z. But you have so much to teach yourself that's just untapped. You just have to, when you look at the base, look up and understand the adventure,

understand the components, understand that, one, at the beginning, it'll feel intimidating, but know that you're worthy. Number two, on the as you're climbing up, understand that it's going to be intimidating, it's going to hurt. And when you look at the thing in totality, it feels like too much. But you don't have to accomplish it.

In totality, you accomplish it one step at a time. You can do that. Understand that at the summit, you're going to feel and understand things that you could never have if you didn't put yourself in that situation. The person you want to be, you can be, is at the top. And understand, during the dissent, coming back, you're bringing a world of understanding back down to reality that didn't exist before.

You're taking all that back down to regular life and it will be different not because regular life changed but because you changed. So I encourage you to find your rucksack, find your mountain, make the climb and allow yourself to redefine in your world what's possible.