529 Stay True to Yourself and Conquer Any Obstacle with Kyle Maynard

"That light inside of you needs to be shared." - Kyle Maynard If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at http://lewishowes.com/529 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 529 with New York Times bestselling author and extreme athlete, Kyle Maynard. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:35Lewis Howes?

  Maya Angelou said it best, "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated." In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it. I am so excited about our guest today. It's from my good friend Kyle Maynard. And for those who don't know who Kyle is, he was born without arms and legs, but he lives without excuses. And even though he doesn't have, you know, these limbs to be able to hold on to things and walk and run, he still climbs mountains, he still cage fights, he still plays football, wrestles.

• 1:16Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't hold him back from living an incredibly amazing life. And I wanted to share his keynote that he gave a year ago at the first Summit of Greatness. All right, guys, make sure to take a screenshot of this, tag me on Instagram story, on Twitter, on Facebook. Let me know that you're watching this or listening to this right now. And share with me the biggest takeaway you have from this episode. Tag me over on Instagram. I try to reply to everyone if I can on your Instagram story. So without further ado, let me introduce to you the one, the only Kyle Maynard.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I'm so grateful for you. I'm grateful for you being here. You create this experience. It's not just speakers you hear. It's the energy, the attitude, the environment, your passion, your drive, your mission. I've been feeling it from the back of the room, feeling it in the conversations that I've had. I'm so grateful for that.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Because I have needed that awakening in my life.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  And I'll share with you, I'm gonna share with you guys a story that I've never, never shared before. Parts of it, you know, kind of leading up a little bit about my life and experiences and to, to where I've been now. But, truthfully,

• 2:39Speaker 01

  you know, and I connected so much to what DJ Ira just shared because I've realized, and I've known this for a while, but I, I started speaking when I was 18 years old. In my first speech a month before I graduated high school. Scared out of my mind. And I couldn't use a lectern, right, to like everybody else because I mean, you just, they'd hear like this voice and not actually see anything. And so, I would hide a note card under my leg for my notes. And so, I would like, it was a note card, a little, I would like have to like lift my leg to go and like look at where I was in my story. And I hated it at first because it was so hard, it was so scary, right?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  After a while, I'm close to probably a thousand events now. And I'm still incredibly, incredibly grateful for it, but I've also realized that

• 3:33Speaker 01

  I've stayed for, stayed safe there, stayed what's comfortable. I can go in front of a crowd now of 10,000 and not have my heart rate elevated. And, you know, that's not always, that's not a great thing, right? Because I think that that nervousness sometimes cues us to believe that like we're doing something that's outside the comfort zone, as I already talked about, going into the unknown. And so, the reason why I say that like this experience made me so thankful, so grateful, it really got me to think. I've been thinking and sort of ruminating on these ideas of what is that like next chapter, that next thing, but you know, so much of it had to do with like, what can I contribute to you? My message, really, to most of the groups that I work with, whether it's a company

• 4:18Speaker 01

  or a school, would be this No Excuses message. And it's a powerful one, because we all make excuses. I wrote a book called No Excuses, and yet, I mean, there's still laundry list of excuses that I go and make, that you make, that Louis makes, that anybody in the world makes, right? It never ends. But truthfully, for people that aren't exposed to this world of personal development, that can even be a really intense dose to start with. But it's, you guys, you guys get that. You're here, you realize that you are a creator in your life. And so now I know it's, you know, what can I go and share that would, especially, you know, when Louis goes and gives me the honor of giving this closing keynote, what would resonate? And I knew to trust the process, right?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  To trust that that would emerge. And it was amazing how it really emerged last night in a conversation I was having with Antoine and some of his dance crew. And, yeah, the, an excuse that I made was I wasn't getting up to go and do the dancing at 6:00 a.m., so. There's one. But I was having this conversation with Antoine and his dance crew, and in particular, a new friend, Taylor. And so she, we were, she was 17 years old, and she was like talking about things like mentors. And I was like, at 17 years old? I had no idea what a mentor was. I told her, I was like, like Mentos? Is that what you mean? Like, no idea what those words mean.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And, but she's sort of, you know, having this conversation and like not knowing where that path goes. Is it schools, other things? I hope she's okay with me sharing this story. I don't, I don't really know. But, so.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Anyway, so we're talking about this and Antoine, I think, you know, trying to sort of help her, said, "You shouldn't say, 'I don't know so much,' right?" I was like, "Actually, I thought about this." And it was like, my core philosophy was around the idea of "I don't know." My whole life, my whole journey up to this point has been around this concept of not knowing. Because it is truly the second that you know something, that you put a limit and a boundary around it. And it is only by not knowing that you can truly have this sort of true discovery of what's possible, what's available to you.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Otherwise, I mean, our world is a world of trying to seek knowing and certainty. And not knowing is really where all, I think, so many of the answers lie, because that's where all the discoveries lie. And it's a 3,000-year-old philosophy. It was shared in the Apanishads. Have you ever heard of that? It was the ancient yogis, you know, through movement would go and write these practices down. It's now the formation of what became Hinduism. But really, at the time, they didn't know what they were kind of doing. They're just using these movements to go and create an idea of this internal self-awareness. And one of the things that they said is, they talk about Atman, the soul, the self, and Brahman, like, sort of like, the ultimate, you know, the ultimate sort of god, basically, right?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  The universe, whatever, what have you. And it was sort of this process of discovery. But with the Atman, with the Brahman, they say that it is unknown to those who know it. And it is only known to those who don't know it. Which is sort of a riddle, but if you think about it, how many of you have had that thought in here? Maybe you don't know what's gonna happen after this.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  I would venture to say, you're in the right frame of mind if that's you. Be open to it, not knowing, embrace it. And what happens with that is an amazing journey unfolds if we accept it. One of the greatest, two of the greatest influences of my life, Emerson and Joseph Campbell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Campbell. So they, there is these two defining quotes that I sort of like have always tried to live my life by. Emerson said, "Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." And Campbell said, he said, you know, so I think about that, I'm like, okay, where, okay, if I'm not going where the path may lead, if I am going where there is no path to leave

• 8:32Speaker 01

  a trail, where do I go? What's my true north? What is my sense of direction? And Campbell said, "Follow your bliss. Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there are previously only walls." And the thing is, what Campbell sort of discovered, I'm sure some of you are familiar with his work, but he really, he looked at all of these different traditions throughout the world. He looked in, you know, in the deep jungles of Africa, in these tribal tales that were told, in Siberia, in the, you know, the tales of the people told there, in these mythological tales, in these creation stories, in these different things. He looked at the modern, you know, the sort of, the bigger religions in the world.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  He looked at, you know, in the Incas and, you know, Greek mythology, all of these stories, whether it's The Little Mermaid or Star Wars, they hold this sort of similar structure. It's a hero's journey. And all of you are on it at some point. We're all on our own grand hero's journey, whether we even acknowledge it or not, it's a human story. And it really begins with the idea that like you start out in the ordinary world. Everybody's got their own ordinary world, and at some point you hear this call to adventure, a call to something greater. But the common theme is every hero refuses that call at first. You refuse that call until you hit a point where you cross the threshold and you start on your journey, you start on your path. And that's when the tests, the trials, allies, enemies show up. You know, you can imagine like the Rocky montage here, right?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  And so...

• 10:02Speaker 01

  At a certain point, and this is the central theme of what I wanted to go and say here is, not knowing, that is going into the unknown. And it can be scary. Not knowing, because we give up so many things. We give up our sense of security, we give up our sense of self, our own identities, what we're identified with. We go into the unknown to go and discover things. And what happens there is that is the magic, that is the juice of where all this lies. And there is this central theme that you've heard throughout the weekend, that at some point, all these speakers have really shared this idea of being broken. And Lewis, physically, in his story, was one of being physically broken to go and create this.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  All of us, in different ways, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, in these different ways. Campbell calls it "the innermost cave", and almost when the hero faces death. So, my mom and dad, when I was born, my story really begins with them. They had no idea I was going to be born with a disability. I was born in 86, so the ultrasound technology was a lot different then. And they were really young. My dad was 22 years old when I was born in the Army. Mom, she's 25, she was working as a temp secretary. So they were young, first kid. Moms were going as secretary, dad was getting out of the Army about three weeks after I was born.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  I was born at Walter Reed Army Medical, where now all, many of our amputees that have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan come home to go and do their rehabilitation. And born there at first, it was very confusing, it was a confusing, you know, hard, emotionally, just like tumultuous time for them. They didn't necessarily know, I mean, you imagine, you know, I don't have any kids of my own, I have a baby niece now, and I can only imagine, you know, what they went through, sort of, not having any idea, it was before the days of Google, where you could go and type in the name of something and go and figure out that other people have lived a successful life, so there's a lot of fear there. And...

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Early on, though, they tried to seek mentors and people that maybe had a similar condition as what I was born with, and they didn't even really know what caused it. And they still, to this day, don't have any idea. And they stopped looking for answers, though, realized it didn't matter. It was what it was. And they made a decision that they weren't, you know, the most important decision in my life, that they were not going to go and treat me any different from any other kid. And in doing so, it's easy to go and say, but it's really, can be difficult in practice. Because even something as simple as, you know, like, having me learn how to go and eat by myself. I used a prosthetic spoon to go and eat at first, and I could use that spoon to go and scoop up food.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  But a lot of times, we would forget it at home. We'd go out to a friend's house or a restaurant and not have it there. My mom or my grandma would go and feed me. And my dad had to tell me, he's like, "Look, you guys have got to stop." Like, he has to go and learn how to do this on his own. And there's going to come that time where he's not going to want mom and dad, like, just, or mom and grandma hanging out behind him, like, feeding him, like, senior prom date, like, "Oh, here's a bite, Kyle." So... They had to let me fail, a lot. Dropping it, like, a thousand times. I don't really have any memory of this experience, but they let me go through those failures and eventually just go and figure it out.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  And that spoon is kind of, really, a small metaphor for what my entire life has been now, where it's, it is, you know, now, in a day-to-day, um, you know, there's not really that many adaptations or things that are different. For instance, like, you know, use a pretty typical, normal iPhone, all of that. You know, um, drive a fairly minimally adapted vehicle. It's an Acura NDX. It's just got lifted pedals, extended pedals. It's a normal steering wheel, grab the steering wheel with my arm, and sometimes I've thoroughly freaked out my friends answering my iPhone and driving. But...

• 14:28Speaker 01

  That's always a fun time.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  The...

• 14:36Speaker 01

  In my apartment, you wouldn't really find that many different things. There's not really any adaptations. The only real difference from your apartment is, I put the silverware on the bottom drawer, which is very confusing for people trying to find it sometimes.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  It's... Things are pretty normal there, pretty typical.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  It could have turned out way different, though. I know that. I know that, given the exact same circumstance, if they had made a different choice and treated me as if I were disabled, I would have seen myself that way. The circumstances in our life do not define us. The circumstances that we're given, the challenges that we're going to given, it is so much, so much more of how we go and handle those things, what we go and do with it. And they literally pulled the ultimate Jedi mind trick on me, and it was like, "You're not disabled." I believe that. It was not... I didn't identify with that. I didn't even know the name of the condition until I was like, I read about it, that a guy wrote this story for me in Men's Journal and called it something. I was like, "Whoa, that's cool." I didn't know. And because it was like, they knew that the power of language

• 15:49Speaker 01

  and that they didn't want me to go in and identify with that thing. Because again, it's like that limitation, that constraint. But they didn't know how it would go and work out. So again, coming back to this idea of leaning into that unknown, they don't... You don't always know, right? And none of us in this room, in this day and age, and in any time in history, we have no idea what could go and happen to us in the future. We have no idea what could go and happen to the economy. We have no idea what could go and happen with terrorism. I mean, there's some really hard stuff in the world, right? But at the same time, it's how we go and deal with it. And you guys are awake enough to be able to go and be that, those leaders out in the world to help other people deal with the same thing, which is why it is so important that you do it.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  That you don't hold yourself back. But in that moment, invariably, you will have to face that cave. And you will probably have to face it time and time again. Whether that comes in a divorce, whether that comes in, you know, in a physical injury or disease, or cancer, or whatever it is. There are people in this room right now invariably that are facing things way harder than anything that I could imagine, because 99.9% of the biggest disabilities are ones that you can't see. Everyone on this planet has a disability. You can't, but I can't necessarily look at you and see yours. In some ways, now at this stage in my life, it's a big advantage for me to have like an outward-facing challenge.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I didn't always see it that way, though, and I think that as a kid, I used to beg and plead and pray, and I think that one of the bigger moments of facing this cave occurred to me at 10 years old. Eight to 10, I really started to become more self-aware of my disability. Wondering questions like, am I really gonna have to live at home with mom and dad forever? Are they gonna have to take care of me? Am I ever gonna have a job? 95% of this was like, am I ever gonna have a girlfriend? Am I ever gonna have like someone like a woman that would see me as equal? And I remember really becoming aware of this and struggling with this. And getting to a point where I was ready to just almost give up on my life.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Not want to live. 10, it's crazy, but there are 10-year-olds out there today that are thinking about that decision. And so...

• 18:17Speaker 01

  For me, the one big moment that made a difference here was I brought a flyer home from school and told my mom that I wanted to go and play football. And my mom and dad, my dad was kind of the dreamer, my mom was more the realist in the family, so my dad's like, "Awesome, cool." And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm gonna be the quarterback," you know? And my mom's like, "You know, you might be the water boy on the team, they'll find a place for you." And I'm like, "No, Mom, spiral touchdowns." Like, that's... And so, I came to the tryouts and the practice, and I ended up, like, my mom, I convinced her to call the coach and just see what he said. Came to the tryouts and I was, um, ended up, they asked me if I wanted to do the 40-yard

• 18:58Speaker 01

  dash in my wheelchair, or how I was gonna go and do it, and I just jumped out of my chair, lined up with the other kids, and, you know, coach blows whistle, "Take off," like bear crawl sprint, like, fast as I can. My shirt flew off over my head. So, we're doing shuttle runs back and forth and all these things, and I'm thinking, like, after that performance, they're definitely making me the quarterback, so I chose number eight to wear on my jersey. And, I'm, first day of practice, they told me to go and line up as a nose guard. I had no idea what that meant, but, defensive line, offensive line, defensive line, I'm right there in the middle, you know, lined up right across from the guy that's gonna go and snap the ball between his legs. I didn't know what was gonna happen when he did. He didn't know either, come to find out.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  So, he snapped the ball, and it was my teammate, practice scrimmage game, he just stood straight up. So I thought, "That was my chance." I just dove under his legs and took my helmet and knocked it in the quarterback's legs, knocked him over, got the sack, first play. So... I came home...

• 20:09Speaker 01

  I came home, I remember after that, my dad is out of town on a business trip, and him being that dreamer, I call him up, super excited, "Made this act for a play, you're not gonna believe it." I was like, "I'm really good at this stuff, come to find out." Like, "I'm pretty sure I'm going, like, I'm not, I'm done with youth football, I'm going straight to the NFL." And, the...

• 20:32Speaker 01

  It was amazing for his process. So that was a practice game, but the first real game that I went and played in,

• 20:40Speaker 01

  I was really nervous, and my coach pulled me out of the warm-up, and he had a conversation with the other coach, and they're talking before this game, and the other coach tells him, and I understand now completely why he said this, but he said, "You know, you're letting this disabled kid play football on your team." He said, "Don't worry, I'm not gonna be cheap when you put him in the game, so I won't call any plays that run the ball anywhere near him, I'll just run the ball to the outsides." My coach was a pretty intense guy, Tom Shy was his name. He brings me over, out of the warm-up, and he tells other coaches, "Tell Kyle the same story you just told me." And he does, and he says, "I dare you to test him." Points him at him, "I dare you to test him." And, well, I'm a little bit more nervous now.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  And at the time, too, the running back on the other team, I mean, this kid was like, I was 11 years old, like 60 pounds, this kid's like 6'2", beard, biceps.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  He comes crashing through the hole on this very first play.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  I grabbed, like, the way I'd tackle people is I'd smash it into their legs as hard as I could, my helmet, and grab hold of their legs and just held on for dear life. And I brought it, we brought him down.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  That...

• 22:02Speaker 01

  That series of events, though, was my first dose of having purpose and contribution. And, you know, finding my why, right? At 11 years old. The... The reason why in that riddle that, you know, that Atman, the Brahman, it's unknown to those who know it, is because we can't have, like, we can't think about two things at once. We can't have, like, two experiences at once, right? And so, if we're fully in flow, in the moment, we're there. And it's only when we think about that we're there that we lose it. But those type of moments, in that making that tackle, was my first experience where it became one. And all of a sudden,

• 22:46Speaker 01

  it started loosening the grip on that doubt and that fear. And other things started happening, right? So, you know, don't have time to share all of these stories and I kind of want to get to the story that I haven't shared yet. But I was a wrestler. Long story short, I lost every match for a year and a half. Ended up, though, winning my... beating my first kid. My dad basically tricked me into sticking around and he said, "Look, everybody loses every match their first year in wrestling." And he said, "I didn't win the match my first year either." He said, "But when you sign up your second season, you'll win because you'll find somebody who was there first season and you'll beat them."

• 23:30Speaker 01

  I... Funny thing was too, when I was interviewing my dad's dad, my grandpa, for my book. He was 19 when I wrote the book, so wrestling was kind of the main theme of it. And just my experience in life, my family stories and things like that. But the, um... I was interviewing my grandpa for my... about my dad's experience. I was like, "What was it like for my dad when he lost all those matches that he told me about? Did he want to quit too?" And I found out that whole story was a complete lie. And I've literally based my entire life off that lie.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  But I started winning, and all of a sudden, I started winning a lot. Senior year of high school, I won 36 varsity matches. I beat the state champ from Alabama, state champion from Louisiana, went to the Nationals, placed top 12 in the nation in my weight class. It was my first exposure of doing big media stuff, and HBO, Real Sports, and there became this sort of debate of whether or not, at that point, I was unfairly advantaged over everybody that wrestled. Which was an interesting transition, I just say they weren't around for the...

• 24:37Speaker 01

  But there was some merit to it, I understood. I mean, it became focused on the weightlifting, became really strong. Learned how to use my mind, different things. It was in the weight room, went from I could only lift like 5 pounds on each arm. When I started, I would strap a cuff around my arm, and then chains and ropes and stuff, and lift weights. My favorite lift was off my back, doing a modified bench press, butterfly press. Anyway, it was, um, started with like 5, 10 pounds, and progressed. Ended up doing my best ever lift in 2009, when I was training to do an MMA fight, and lifted 420 pounds. So, it was...

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Not necessarily, as I was sharing with Jen last night, not something I recommend doing because I couldn't move my left arm for like a week after that, and that created some problems when I was trying to like get up, to like go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. So, had a lot of these experiences, right, of over and over again, these different things, whether it was even emotionally, the biggest thing of dealing with a disability when I was a kid, was just learning how to go and reach out and shake somebody else's hand. Everybody that I met here, you guys have known, when I met you for the first time, I reach out and I go and shake your hand. It's a lesson that my grandma taught me, in the grocery stores. She was my biggest teacher, ever, and we would go up and down the aisles of the grocery store.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  And Grandma Betty, and we, um, you know, we'd practice, like, somebody was standing in the aisle of the grocery store, um, they became like our target. And she would push the cart up next to him, and she'd say, "Hi, my name's Betty," and then, "This is my grandson," and I'd say, "Hi, my name's Kyle." I'd be 4, 5 years old, I'd reach out and I'd shake their hand. And she told me, she said, "When people hear your voice, and they see your face, and they shake your hand, they'll completely forget about the disability."

• 26:31Speaker 01

  And it's become, it's become true, in a sense. We, she also told me too, she said, I would ask her grandma, like, "Why did this happen?" And she said, "Kyle, I don't believe God makes mistakes. You were born the way that you were for a reason, and someday you'll be able to find that out." And, so, life, in a certain sense, in a roundabout way, is kind of becoming a discovery of that, right? But it's the same discovery that you are on, because I don't think that, I, I hope that you don't believe that there's any difference between me, or you, and your ability to go and impact the world, that you have everything inside of you to go and do the same, to go and reach people on a profound level. And that, that light inside of you needs to be shared.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And I know, and I get, that there's sometimes that fear of sharing that truth, and sharing what that is. It's so critical in the world today, that we need that. Again, getting to the story that I haven't shared, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and that was pretty cool, and I actually thought after that, I'm never climbing another mountain again. They say, though, the best mountaineers have the shortest memory, because every trip sucks. But it's amazing, and it's beautiful, it's just like 95% it sucks. And that 5% is awesome. So, what happened, you know, I started focusing on other things. I ended up, I moved out to San Diego, I pursued, you know, I was still speaking a lot, pursued, I trained and fought in the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championships for a couple of years,

• 27:58Speaker 01

  I got to go and train with some of the top team, one of the top teams in the world, one of my heroes. And, and it, I ended up, I fought this last year in the World Championships, and I trained my butt off every day, it was like five hours training a day. And I'd done really well the year before, I ended up making it to the quarterfinals of the World Championships, and I lost by a split decision, like referee decision. And it was like, if I had won that, then I would have medaled in the Worlds. And so, I trained and trained and trained, and this is it. And like, but at the same time, I was taking on a lot of stuff. I was thinking about merging my existing brand, my, my, my, basically me, like, I'm handed, with like a bigger training company, couple.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  I was, I was sort of looking at two different of larger training and development companies, sort of hitching that star to a wagon. You know, and, and looking at these different things and working like forty hours a week on a top of like training out, like, you know, forty, fifty, sixty hours a week, some weeks. I was speaking still full time and training. It was like so focused. And it was over the course of this time, my grandma, Grandma Betty, was battling a grade four gliobastoma, brain tumor. And so I would go home to Atlanta in between every possible second I could have, and I would go and sit by her hospital bed as she was dying. And she passed, it was, uh, my birthday is March twenty-fourth, and she passed, um, she lost her powers to go and speak.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  My mom was saying, she's, you know, she doesn't want to go on your birthday, like that. We were so tight. And, uh, so, she passed March twenty-seventh. The Jiu-Jitsu Worlds were in May, and I just buried myself even more in the training. And, um, I did, I fought, I lost in the first round by an advantage. It was ten minutes, it's over. I spent the next ten days on the couch. It was just like all this grief sort of came in, back in. And, um, my buddy knew that I was in a rough spot, and he convinced me to go to, with him to Sweden.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Went to Sweden for like three weeks. I just kept traveling after that, I just kept wandering, different places.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  You know, Santa Cruz for a while was just kind of just going wherever I kind of felt I was just wandering, just lost. I quit posting on social media, I quit like connecting with, I quit calling people back, I quit texting people back. Just really became very insular there. I did note a lot more things. I started, frankly, it was just more like short-term hedonism and pleasures, like seeking like sex, or like, you know, like, parties, or whatever sort of like was that whimsical thing that I could go and pursue. And I knew that like, and I just kind of quit, like erased everything else, because I realized too, it was like, I don't want to spend my life in a conference room. I don't want to do that. Why am I trying to merge with one of these like training, these huge training companies? Like, that's

• 30:57Speaker 01

  not what my life is for. I just gave it up, and in a great way, it was a great sort of experience and discovery. But I went through this process, and I was like, I have to have like my awakening. And so that became why I decided to go and take on Mount Aconcagua. So it's the highest peak in South America. I knew that I needed this thing. I didn't know why, but again, Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss. I knew that I could go back to that, I could trust that. I could go to the mountains, I could go and find what I needed to go and find. And this amazing journey kind of unfolded that led me there. We showed up, had an epic failure up in a smaller peak, a 9,000-foot peak up in Mount Shuckson in

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Washington State, but then it was like, yeah, it came, it was like, really bad. It was terrible, gnarly blister on my leg, and I'm like, I'm about to go and take on a mountain that's nearly 23,000 feet. And I just got my butt kicked by this 9,000-foot one. And we show up to the mountain, and all of a sudden, like, there had been, we didn't even really publicize it. I didn't really want to make it like a media spectacle, it was not my intention. And all of a sudden, like, because we had to get the permits, and kind of had to go and explain, well, there's this guy with a disability that kind of wants to climb this thing. Then, they started to go in, and the Argentinian government was like, well, actually, we have this initiative that we just started, that we'd like you to be the first honorary

• 32:20Speaker 01

  member of. And we are opening, like, all of our parks, finding ways to go and make them more accessible to people with disabilities.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Wow, that's pretty cool. And we were gonna go to the office to meet one of their ministers of tourism. On the way to the office, we're walking there. And there's this guy that's an amputee and he was had to pan out to peg. And he said, "Maestro." I didn't know what that meant. And my guide said, "Do you know what that means?" I said, "No." He said, "It means master." Like, "Whoa." And we show up to the mountain. We get there. And actually, at first, we felt really strong. Had some rough days going into it.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  But, you know, it was like, I got there, I'm feeling strong, we're going along. And I came, I was pretty crushed on this, this like, fourth day, though. It was this, we had to climb these like, these penitentes, these ice peaks, these ice pillars, right? And the big ones, you try to go around. The small ones, you go over top. And I had these special crampons made for my arms and my feet. And just going through this. And it's like this six, seven hour day and just totally depleted. This boulder about the size of a watermelon ended up going by my head at like, 50 miles an hour. And all of these warning signs, I'm like, "Why am I here? This is crazy. This is stupid. This is not a good idea." I couldn't get my heart rate down that night. My resting heart rate was about 140 beats per minute.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  And that was the last night I could have gotten a helicopter evac. And I was like, "At this point, I'm considering, I'm so close to waking up my guide Kevin, sleeping next to me." And I was like, "Cause I don't want to be here anymore. And I will pay any amount of money, I don't care, take it all. Because if I'm dead, then what's it matter?" But I had pictures of Grandma Betty. Started looking at him. And, you know, it was like, "I can do this." So we rested the next day, I kind of expressed where I was. Then came back and actually, we felt really strong. Cruising, we're making really good time, really good pace. We get to, we ended up, we're on the mountain for 17 total days. But our day before the summit was like my strongest day. And I'm nearly 21,000 feet high.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Higher than all of these other surrounding peaks. It was breathtakingly beautiful. And I basically get to a point where it was like, this is our summit day and we've got to make, we have to make it by this time window, otherwise we're not gonna go and make it. And I found out that day that basically, there was a guy in the group ahead of us that had just passed, had died due to the altitude. Again, he's like, it was called, the spot, no joke, called the cave. The summit day, 6:00 AM, wake up, brutal hike, and I get to the cave. I literally, it just like, I was so depleted, it was about noon. Six hours in, and I've got another thousand feet to go.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  The hardest part left of the climb, it's, there was these, the scree, the loose rock was sliding. Sometimes I'd take five or six steps and just slide back, and just grinding to come up, and just sliding more, and just getting so angry and frustrated. I got to the cave and my body just went into full shutdown mode. I couldn't stop shivering. I couldn't eat anything. I tried to eat like half of a Cliff bar, my body immediately started like rejecting it, and like, I started like, felt like, throw it up. And, like, now, the day before though, my guide too, he had pulled out this snack that I hadn't gotten since my grandma had given it to me like 15 years before. It was this little vanilla wafer bar.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I kept thinking about this, I was like, I can't stop. And thinking about that guy who said that, the maestro comment, I thought, this is like, I'm so close you can see the summit, I'm not gonna stop. You know, my thousand feet up this ice wall, my gear's breaking, my crampons broke, all these things are going wrong, and it was just continuing to go. And this mantra I kept repeating in my mind, that's my go-to mantra. My friend Richard Mackwoods is a Navy SEAL, he said, "Not dead, can't quit." Just striking into the ice, it was like, "Not dead, can't quit." And I'd ask myself, "Are you dead?" It's like, I knew if I heard that voice back, and I wasn't.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  And, sometimes I didn't know.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  My guide, 2 o'clock, he tells me if we don't hit the summit by 4pm, you have to turn back. I don't care if you're 100 feet away. It's too dangerous. Just inside, it was like, everything to go that last 100, that last 100, 200 feet, crossing through this ridge line and ended up hitting the summit at 4:15pm. And it was everything I could imagine. It was breathtakingly beautiful. The summit was like, about the size of the stage. So, at that point, I mean, I had to pee. I actually had to take all my clothes off to pee. And I was like, probably the highest naked person in the world.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  That's a record I care about.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  And we came back down, got to have this amazing press conference, and two other climbers, I'll never forget, hugging this girl who was also an amputee. She hugged me so tight, I thought I gave good hugs, and she like, blew me away. And she's going to go and climb the mountain next year. It's...

• 38:05Speaker 01

  But in that moment, in that cave, I don't know, you know, I've gone over my time a bit. You, I hope, it's not even maybe something that you're facing right now, but maybe it happens 5 years, 10 years, 20 years from now, whatever your cave is. Like, you have, in those moments, like, when I say find your why, like, it's, I don't mean like, the things you can go and put into words. It's inside of you, and things that are, like, you cannot put into words. And it will propel you forward. You just have to find it inside of you. Those are those make or break moments. And you all are too important to this world to not go out there and pursue that why. So, thank you for you, thank you for this experience, thank you for helping wake me up.

• 38:50Lewis Howes?

  I hope you guys enjoyed this one. I love Kyle and his message and everything he stands for and what he's overcome. So make sure to share this with your friends. LewisHowes.com/529. Send out a tweet with the link. Post it on your Facebook page. Tag me on your Instagram story and use the swipe up link to share this out there. Again, LewisHowes.com/529. And let me know what you thought about this. Let me know your most inspiring takeaway from this and share with me. I want to have a conversation with you over on social media more, so let me know your thoughts. And as Maya Angelou put it, "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated." In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats so you can know who you are,

• 39:34Lewis Howes?

  what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it. I love you guys, and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.