#236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber)

What I learned from reading Beyond Possible: One Man, Fourteen Peaks, and the Mountaineering Achievement of a Lifetime by Nims Purja. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [3:36] Walking out on my career felt risky, but I was prepared to gamble everything for my ambition. [4:20] Your extremes are my normal. [12:04] Wow, this is my shit. I'd been working without much thought, operating in the flow state that athletes often describe when they set world records or win championships. I was in the zone. Brother, I thought. You're a badass at high altitude. [13:27] I was poor from the beginning. We didn't have any money, and the thought of owning a car was unimaginable. But we were a loving family, and I was a happy kid. It didn't take a lot to keep me amused. [14:57] From an early age, I believed in the power of positive thinking. [18:17] I also like the idea of being on top. [19:00] Sam Walton: Made In America (Founders #234) [19:03] I understood that to become a special forces operator, it was important to adapt to an increased workload. [19:25] One thing I don’t even have on my list is “work hard.” If you don’t know that already, or you’re not willing to do it, you probably won’t be going far enough to need my list anyway. —Sam Walton [19:44] Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger (Founders #141) [20:58] This is insane: On weekends, my daily routine involved running for hours at a time. I'd haul my ass around the streets with two or three Gurkha buddies; we operated in a relay system, where I was the only soldier prevented from taking a break. One guy would accompany me for six miles, leading me along at a strong pace. Once he completed his distance, another running partner took over, and together we'd go six more miles. This went on for hours, and left me physically and psychologically pummeled. [21:43] Emotional control was only one of the many traits I'd need to possess to become elite. [22:22] Read the first 113 pages of this book Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger (Founders #193) [24:14] I focused only on the 24 hours ahead. Today I will give 100 percent and survive, I thought at the beginning of each day. I'll worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes. [26:47] You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t start by saying, ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ If you do that every single day, soon you will have a wall. —Will Smith [28:52] I always smiled my way through the mud. [29:03] Excellence is the capacity to take pain. —Isadore Sharp (Founders #184) Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy [30:02] Dru Riley founder of Trends. VC has a 100 Rules Personal Philosophy [32:14] The glass-half-empty attitude went against everything I'd been taught in the military, where grumbling or giving up wasn't an effective strategy. If problems or challenges came my way, I was supposed to find solutions, having been trained to adapt and survive. [35:30] The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Founders #100) [43:33] I approached every day with a positive thought: I can do this. I will navigate every problem the mission can throw at me. I've already climbed the world's tallest peak. The only thing standing in my way right now is funding. Get out there and smash it. [48:48] I'd proven to everybody that it is never too late to make a massive change in your life. [53:43] The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley (Founders #233) [54:40] There were occasions when a panicked call would come over the radio: “Nims, it's snowing heavily on the mountain. It's going to be a rough climb!" Rather than wallowing in negativity, I'd make a smart-ass comment to lift the mood. "Come on, bro, what do you think we're getting on a mountain—a bloody heat wave?" [54:58] Mark Twain once wrote that if a person’s job was to eat a frog, then it was best to take care of business first thing in the morning. But if the work involved eating two frogs, it was best to eat the bigger one first. In other words: Get the hardest job out of the way. [57:57] Suffering sometimes creates a weird sense of satisfaction for me. It creates a sense of pride when seeing a job through to the end. [58:23] It is important to keep the promises you make yourself: If I say that I'm going to run for an hour, I'll run for a full hour. If I plan to do 300 push-ups in a training session, I won't quit until I've done them all-because brushing off the effort means letting myself down, and I don't want to have to live with that. And neither should you. [1:02:05] The adventure taught me an important lesson. Fear was never going to hold me back from pressing ahead with my plans. It established in me a mindset with zero doubts and zero tolerance for excuses. [1:03:12] We worked as a small expedition unit, in teams of three, four, or five, but we moved with the power of 10 bulls and the heart of a hundred men. [1:03:24] Most of all, I realized that somebody in the 14 peaks had been a launchpad. I needed more. I have to push my limits to the max, sitting tight, waiting it out and living in the past have never been for me. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

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

• 0:00David Senra?

  Fourteen mountains on Earth tower more than 8,000 meters above sea level, an altitude with a brain and body wither and die. Until recently, the world record for climbing them all stood at nearly eight years. Nepali climber Nims Persia announced that he would summit them in less than seven months. It was an audacious mission, and many were incredulous. But Nims had already sharpened his climbing skills on the brutal Himalayan peak of Everest, honing his survival skills while serving in the celebrated Gurkha and Special Boat Service units of the UK Special Forces. Even more important, he possessed the courage, resilience, and confidence to get the job done.

• 0:41David Senra?

  Today, Nims is the first man to ever summit all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter death zone peaks. He did so in six months and six days, smashing the previous record of seven years. In this spellbinding memoir, Nims reveals the man behind the climbs, explaining how his early life in Nepal and training as an elite soldier allowed him to achieve his dream. Nims explains with great candor how leadership, integrity, and collaboration drive the world's greatest climbing feats, including the first-ever winter ascent of Pakistan's K2, another mountaineering milestone, which he achieved in January 2021.

• 1:21David Senra?

  In gripping prose, he reveals how persistence, a willingness to learn, and most of all, a belief in yourself are essential to success in work and in life. Both profound and inspiring, this exhilarating book reveals what it takes to go miles beyond the possible. That is from the front cover of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Beyond Possible: One Man, Fourteen Peaks, and the Mountaineering Achievement of a Lifetime, and it was written by Nims Persia. So, real quick, before I jump back into the book, a couple of people have asked me, what's the best way to buy gift subscriptions for other people to founders? I always leave a link in the show notes on the podcast player on the Misfit feed. If you're using a podcast player, some of them don't make those links clickable, so

• 2:04David Senra?

  if that's the case, just go to founderspodcast.com, you'll see Buy a Gift Subscription, you'll see every plan, and then next to every plan it says Gift, so it's pretty easy. Okay, so let's get into the book. A few months ago, I had watched the documentary on this mission that Nims, this idea that Nims had. Hey, I'm going to climb all the fourteen peaks, and I'm going to do it in one-tenth the time of the world record. It is an amazing documentary. I was completely blown away. And so as I started doing more research on Nims, I realized he had written a book documenting his early life and this incredible mission that he calls Project Possible. And so this week, I read the book and I rewatched the documentary and took notes. So I have notes from the documentary and notes from the book. And most of the people that we, you and I, study on the podcast, every single person that you and I study on the podcast has an extreme mindset.

• 2:47David Senra?

  Normally, that extreme mindset is directed towards the very difficult task of building a successful company. In Nims's case, his extreme mindset is dedicated towards doing something that has never been done before. And his primary motivation of doing this is to prove to other people that nothing is impossible. And so one way to think about Nims is he's an evangelist for the power of self-belief and not listening to the negative people he talks about. I've heard him talk in interviews as well, that most humans are just way too negative. I want to jump right into the introduction. He's 35 years old. He's been serving in the British Special Forces, and he decides to quit his job to pursue this crazy dream. And we're going to see his mindset right here. And he's talking about this crazy idea. He says, "I wanted to try, and to do so, I quit the British military, where I had served

• 3:30David Senra?

  as a Gurkha soldier for several years before joining the Special Boat Service, which is a wing of the Special Forces. Walking out on my career felt risky, but I was prepared to gamble everything for my ambition. Fueled by my belief in myself, I treated this challenge like a military mission. I had even named my attempt Project Possible." And then we see his, he's got a gigantic personality. And if you see, you could see it in the documentary. It also comes through in every single interview, and it also comes through in the writing of the book. And you see this right here. "The title," which means Project Possible, "later came to feel like a one-fingered salute towards the people who couldn't, who wouldn't or couldn't believe in my dream. There were plenty of them. Doubters appeared everywhere." And so that's in the introduction.

• 4:15David Senra?

  If you go to the actual first page, the page before the table of contents, you see that he's unapologetically extreme. He just has a very short sentence on this one page. He says, "Your extremes are my normal."

• 4:30David Senra?

  And so not only is Nims' project considered by most people impossible, he has a high likelihood of dying while attempting to do this. The history of mountaineering achievements is full of people dying attempting to do things that have never been done before at altitudes in the death zone. And so he talks about death a lot. And I just want to point out, so he's talking, he's on his first mountain, the very beginning of this project. And so he says, "As I planted my boots in the shifting snow, I told myself that death was going to come for me at some point, maybe on a mountain during Project Possible, maybe in old age, decades down the line, but not today. Not today. But when? And would I finish what I started?"

• 5:13David Senra?

  And so he's about to tell us about his early life, growing up in Nepal in poverty. But he's talking about, it's like, why am I, and I don't even know if he really has the answer. He's like, "I've been inspired to attempt climbing all of the 14 of the world's biggest peaks. I'm doing it way faster. People think that's impossible." And really, this paragraph I'm about to read to you, this to me is the main message of the book. He is trying to convince the reader, he's trying to convince the people that hear his story, that watch his documentary, to possess what I would call Kanye West levels of self-belief. And this is why. But why? These were some of the most inhospitable places on the planet. A challenge of that magnitude, with a deadline for only half a year or so, might have sounded like madness to most people. But for me, it was an opportunity to prove to the world that everything, anything, and

• 5:58David Senra?

  he italized anything, that everything, anything was possible if you dedicated your heart and mind to a plan. And so even after he completed this, what many people deemed impossible, people said, oh, they started to make excuses, oh, he's from Nepal, that's the land of the 8,000ers. He grew up acclimated to high climates. He's like, no, that's not true, high altitude, rather. He's like, "I grew up in a flat part of Nepal. It was extremely hot. It was more of a jungle-like environment." And the fact was, he never even tried to attempt to scale a mountain until he was 29 years old. So he says real succinctly, "My family was poor." And so at the age of 29, he winds up finding a wise, older mentor that helps accelerate

• 6:43David Senra?

  his learning. So there is just so many parallels between, again, I feel what Nims is doing in the book is no different than the entrepreneurs in the past that we studied. They all wind up finding, whether through books or through actually meeting people, wise, older mentors that help accelerate their learning. And so he's going to be under the tutelage of a famous Nepali mountaineer. This is in 2012. This guy was going to wind up dying two years later in an avalanche in Everest, unfortunately. So it says, "I took my first steps towards the highest point on Earth in December 2012." He decides his first mountain he's going to climb is going to be Everest. "I was 29 years old. I'd been connected with the famous Nepali mountaineer Dorje Kotri." There's no way I'm pronouncing that correctly, by the way.

• 7:25David Senra?

  And so it says, "The work was slow but steady, and under Dorje's tutelage, I pulled on a pair of crampons for the very first time." So Nims tells his mentor, he's like, "Hey, I want to climb Everest." And he's like, "No, you're not going to do that. That is a very technical mountain. You need to start on, there's a nearby peak, I think it's pronounced Lobush." And as he's climbing this mountain with his mentor, he describes what it's like being new at something. He says, "Each step caused me to pause and overthink. At times, I would experience a surge of fear. At others, falling to my death seemed like a real possibility. But after wasting..." And he's slowly learning. You can't think like this when you're on a mountain. "But after wasting so much energy on stress, I eventually located the confidence to stride

• 8:10David Senra?

  forward purposefully, and my anxiety faded." And so even when he's relatively inexperienced, he's got a gigantic ego, a field of self-belief. He's been almost, I would almost consider like torturing himself. I'll go through like the, he's had at this point decades of putting himself under intense physical pressure. And so he's doing the same thing on the mountain, and he's realizing, "This is a gigantic mistake. My ego is outstripping my ability here." And, you know, that obviously can be deadly on a mountain. So he says, "The mountains were delivering their first major lesson. Never burn yourself out unnecessarily. From then on, I vowed never to waste vital energy. I would work hard only when I needed to." So when they would get to like a, there's, usually you don't go straight from the base camp to the summit.

• 8:55David Senra?

  There's usually camp, maybe one camp, one, camp two, camp three, stuff like that. And so you're supposed to rest there, acclimate, and then continue on. So he'd get to a camp, and then he'd try to like prove himself to the other people. And he'd like push up another like 100 or 200 meters just to show he can, and then come back down. And by doing that, he wound up destroying himself physically. And so he's attempting to climb a very high mountain. This is before Project Possible. I'm going to obviously get to when, I'll tell you when the project actually starts. And so, right now, what they're doing, he's attempting to climb a very high peak with other Nepali, like Sherpas and experienced mountaineers. And so, they're having to do this thing called trail blazing, where they're taking turns plowing paths through really deep snow. And this is the first time that he realizes he's really good at climbing and dealing with the physical demands.

• 9:40David Senra?

  And so, if you watch the documentary, and I think this podcast is going to be a good companion for the documentary, because I'm really focused on like his mindset and the takeaways we can learn from NIMs that we can apply to our, like, our work and our domains, as opposed to the actual description of the climbing. I think the documentary just does a way better job than I would be able to do on audio. So, there's a scene in the documentary, he's at the high altitude, I think it's called the High Altitude Centre, it's in London, and they're testing his, like, how does his body respond to a lack of oxygen? And so, they're putting him on, they're simulating, hey, you're having to cycle really fast on a bike, I think it was at like 6,000 meters, so, a really high altitude. And a ton of like world-class Olympic-level cyclists have gone to this institute and

• 10:24David Senra?

  done the same test that NIMs is doing in the documentary. Only a handful of them are able to even last 90 seconds before they have to quit. NIMs does three minutes easily. And so, the guy administering the test says in the documentary, he's like, "I have never, ever seen somebody have better results than NIMs." This guy is essentially superhuman. And so, the first indication for NIMs himself, that he actually might be really skilled at this, at mountaineering and climbing and performing at high altitudes, is occurring right here in the book. So, it says, "NIMs, the snow is so deep. If you have the energy and can help up front, please do." So, what would happen is, you have somebody trail blazing, they're blazing the trail, maybe they can last, you know, a couple minutes, however long it's going to be, and then

• 11:06David Senra?

  once they're physically tired, they move to the back of the line, and the next person comes up, and they keep doing this till the trail is done, right? So, it says, "Encouraged, I soon took the lead and drove forward. My legs felt like pistons as I pumped my feet in and out of the powder." And this is also a scene, very similar to this, is in the movie. It's remarkable how deep the snow is, and they're just like, almost like crab-walking up a mountain. It's insane. "The effort was huge, but by regarding every step forward as significant progress and part of a greater team effort, I was able to move steadily." So, I'm going to pause before I move on. A double underline in that section. Let's turn that into a maxim that we can remember easily. "Regard every forward step as significant progress and part of a greater team effort."

• 11:51David Senra?

  Going back to the book. "My thighs and calves ached with the strain, but my lungs were light." This is exactly what they were testing at the high altitude center. "The fatigue that hindered other climbers at altitude didn't seem to be striking me down. When I turned to see how far I'd come, I was shocked to see the rest of my climbing party. They were like little black dots below. Wow, this is my shit, I thought. I'd been working..." And he's talking about he's in a flow state. "I'd been working without much thought, operating in the flow state that athletes often describe when they set world records or win championships. I was in the zone." And then we see an instance or an example of his positive self-talk that he feels is so important, not only for himself, but for anybody trying to achieve something difficult,

• 12:35David Senra?

  which I obviously agree with him based on the 240 books I've read. It's very, I don't think I could think of one entrepreneur that we've studied that did not have, did not possess extreme levels of self-belief. "Brother," I thought, "you're badass at high altitude." He's saying that to himself. And so now he goes more into his childhood. He says, "As a kid, I wanted to be one of two things. My first option, I wanted to serve as a Gurkha soldier like my dad. Gurkha soldiers were legendary, and their motto was 'Better to die than to be a coward.'" And so he's telling us about growing up in poverty, in poverty, developing an extreme mindset and then an intense desire to want to help other people. "My second career ambition was to be a government official. I wanted to be Nepal's version of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to

• 13:20David Senra?

  the poor. Even as a child, I understood the people around me had very little, and poverty rates were incredibly high. I was poor from the beginning. We didn't have any money, and the thought of owning a car was unimaginable. But we were a loving family, and I was a happy kid. It did not take me, it did not take a lot to keep me amused." And he talks about part of his insane work ethic was inspired by his mom. "My mom started working on a village farm for money, and at least one of the kids was strapped to her back in a cloth." So not only did his mom have to engage in extremely hard labor to make money, she has to do it while carrying one of her kids on her back the entire day. A lot of my work ethic came from my mother. She had a huge influence on me.

• 14:05David Senra?

  He's her youngest son. He calls himself a mama's boy. In the documentary, he's trying to do this and achieve this as she's dying. She's extremely sick. She's in and out of the hospital. So he's really motivated to move as quickly as possible because he wants to see his mother. He considered it his greatest life achievement up to that point. And he wanted to get it done before his mother passed away. His mother passes away about a few months to a year after his successful completion of the mission. He's got a great point here that you have a huge advantage if you can thrive on the bare minimum. From an early age, I learned it was fairly easy for me to thrive on the bare minimum. This might explain how I was later able to live so much of my life in the chaos of combat, when he's fighting in Afghanistan and other places, or in a tent pinned to the side of a mountain.

• 14:50David Senra?

  And this is something repeated over and over again. I've moved ahead a few pages here. Really, the way I would describe Nims is he's saying, like, I'm an evangelist for a positive mental attitude. From an early age, I believed in the power of positive thinking. So he's a teenager. He is trying to train himself because his life goal is like, I gotta become a Gurkha. And we're gonna see him fail at his life goal. And he's like, alright, no problem. I'm just gonna try again. And then if I fail, it's fine. I'll just keep coming and coming and coming. You're not gonna stop me. I soon learned that with relentless self-belief, anything was possible. I would need every ounce of it to get accepted into the Gurkhas. So he goes through this rigorous training program. There's a ton of people that are attempting it at the same time. And they only take 25, I think.

• 15:35David Senra?

  So he says, I'm skipping over large parts. He says, I failed. They ranked me 26th place on the final candidate list, and only 25 individuals were accepted. So he's like, I was down for a day or two. That's fine. I overcame my disappointment, and I was successful on my second attempt a year later. And so he's still really young. He gets into like some of the physical, these extreme physical tests that he has to put himself through because of his goals going into Gurkha and then later the Special Forces of the UK military. And says, one of the better-known tests, and there's an actual video of this in the documentary, it's pretty crazy. One of the better-known tests in the Gurkha Central Selection Phase was the DOKO Race, in which applicants were ordered to carry I think it's called Doko. It's essentially a bamboo basket. So you're carrying a bamboo basket on your head that's filled with 65 pounds of sand.

• 16:20David Senra?

  So it looks like it's like a basket with a huge strap. And the strap is around like your head and neck. If I had to guess, you're carrying most of the weight on your head, neck, and upper back. That's what it looks like to me. So we have to carry a bamboo on our head, each filled with 65 pounds of sand. And I had to complete an uphill circuit of three miles in less than 48 minutes. And one thing I learned from Charlie Munger, he says, if you want an advantage, you have to do things that other people are not doing. And we're going to see how insane Nims's mindset was, even when he was a kid. He's 16 years old. He's preparing for this. And so what he does is like, okay, I need an advantage. He's sneaking out in the middle of the night to put in more work. So he says, I'd previously taken an unorthodox approach to race preparation at school

• 17:05David Senra?

  and would often sneak away at 4:00 a.m. to run through the nearby streets. Then he'd come home, right? So he says, then when the sun came up, I crept back to bed before anyone noticed. So he'd go out, everybody else is sleeping. He's not like this prep school for Gurkhas or like a training program for people that want to get into it. And so everybody else was sleeping. He sneaks out, does extra work, comes back, and then acts like that never happened. So he just wakes up with everybody else. They're all brushing their teeth together. And then they go off and they do the work and the prep for the day. And so this extra work is going to wind up paying off. He's going to succeed. He says, "From there, the assessments were a blur of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, sprints, cross-country runs, and beep tests. I passed everything. After years of training, education, rejection, and unrelenting effort,

• 17:49David Senra?

  my dream was finally coming true." So growing up, he had one dream. I'm going to be a Gurkha. Winds up never obviously serving as like a political person, politician in Nepal. And the thing about Nims is it's just impossible for him to settle. So he's like, oh, I got my life dream. So what's the next life dream? So he winds up serving, I think, six years in the Gurkha. And they tell him about, why don't you go to? He finds that there's another level above that. And that is the UK Special Forces Selection. So he says, "I love being a soldier, but I also like the idea of being on top." And the special forces were the elite. My application to join the UK Special Forces selection, the intense six-month-long trial that separated those with the guts to join the group from those without, was accepted in 2008.

• 18:33David Senra?

  After six proud years with the Gurkhas, I was moving on. My moment to join the military elite had arrived. So up until this point, he had gone through, okay, this is the, well, it's required to be a Gurkha. This is all the extra stuff I did to make sure I would succeed and beat the other people that are going after the same thing that I'm going after. He's gonna do the exact same thing when he's trying to join the UK Special Forces. And I'm gonna read this sentence to you, and it just reminds me of something we just learned a few weeks ago when I reread Sam Walton's autobiography. And he says, "I understood that to become a Special Forces operator, it was important to adapt myself to an increased workload." One of my favorite things that Sam said in his book at the very end, he's like, here's like, I think he had like 10 ideas that he repeated over and over again.

• 19:18David Senra?

  And he tried to distill them down into like one line or say we could remember is like how his approach to company building. And I love what he said, because Sam is also, was also unapologetically extreme. He says, "One thing I don't even have on my list is work hard. If you don't know that already, or you're not willing to do it, you probably won't be, you probably won't be going far enough to lean my list anyway." And so Nims is gonna demonstrate that he knew that already. He's gonna do something, I saw, I've seen what he's about to do here. Arnold Schwarzenegger did the same thing in his autobiography. When he was, he was forced to, or not forced, I guess, I think, pretty sure every single Austrian male at that time in history had to serve in the military. So when he was in the military, when Arnold was in the military, he would complete like the required training, the military training and physical training they put you through,

• 20:01David Senra?

  and then his own program after that. Again, like, there's so many, there's a lot of what the way Nims approaches his craft is the way Arnold did and Michael Jordan. These are the two people that I've studied extensively that, that really jump out. It's like, oh, these are, they're the same people. They just happen to be born in different places at different times in the world, and they're going after different goals, but their mindset is very, very similar. And so this is Nims' approach. "To prepare myself physically, I pushed myself hard. While based at the Gurkha barracks, I'd work through my military commitments during the day, but when 5:00 PM arrived, I'd rush back to the house to shovel down a small dinner before heading to the gym for a 70-mile bike session." Combat swimming was a major part of SBS training.

• 20:43David Senra?

  So that's the branch of special forces that he's trying to join. But because I wasn't exactly adept in the water, after cycling, I dove in the pool and swam as many kilometers as my body could handle. I rarely made it to bed before midnight. On weekends, my daily routine involved running for hours at a time. I'd haul my ass around the streets with two or three Gurkha brothers, buddies. This is insane what he's about to do here. We operated in a relay system where I was the only person prevented from taking a break. One guy would accompany me for six miles, leading me along at a strong pace. Once he completed his distance, another running partner took over and together we'd go six more miles.

• 21:24David Senra?

  This went on for hours and left me physically and psychologically pummeled. Getting out of bed in the middle of the night with rain hammering outside was demoralizing, but I pushed through. When snow arrived, I resisted temptation to hit snooze. And I double underline this section, this is, I double underline this sentence, this is so important. Emotional control was only one of the many traits I needed to possess to become elite. Nims is picking up on exactly what, if you study how people, like people that do extreme physical tests of endurance, they'll tell you over and over again, the mind gives up, gives up way before the body does.

• 22:06David Senra?

  It is a psychological warfare that you're engaged in just as much as you are in the physical, testing the physical endurances of your body. And he goes more into the importance of just having 100% mental dedication to a goal. And this is why I really try to convince people to read The Education of a Bodybuilder. It's the book I did back on episode number 193. It is not, it's, it's, the way I think about it is a short autobiography written by Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was 30. The book is called The Education of a Bodybuilder. It is not a book about bodybuilding. It is a book about being 100% mentally committed to achieving a goal. And so we're gonna see that here. The self, this self-inflicted program was the toughest challenge in my life to this point.

• 22:51David Senra?

  Every step of the way, I fought against the doubt of others, but none of them grasped how dedicated I'd become, or how my mindset would fuel incredible feats in the years ahead. I had hope, and hope was my God. So that is something he repeats over and over again. He has an entire chapter named that, "Hope, Hope Is God." This is what he means by that. More than anything, I had faith in myself. When I was a kid, becoming a Gurkha was my hope. It was my God. He's saying that you're, it's like your North Star. You're, you have a goal, your single, your, your single-minded purpose in your life. And so that's what he, he means by that. It was my God. Joining the military elite six years later was my next hope. That became my God, too. And I needed to believe in it. So that is, that is why he's using the, the word God. Because you're, you, the, the goal that you have in front of yourself, what you want to achieve with your life,

• 23:36David Senra?

  you put that as like a North Star, you focus on it, and you have to believe in it, just like a religious person would believe in God. Okay? So it's becoming an SBS operator was a cause, and I get, was my cause, and I gave everything to it. When I finally made it to selection in 2009, every day of the six months was a test of physical and emotional will. So he's talking about the physical winnowing out process that all special forces have. The most famous being like Hell Week with the, if you grew up in America, with what like the US Navy SEALs have to go through. And the training has very little to do with what, what you'll actually experience in combat. What they're trying to do is just get rid of the people that will quit.

• 24:14David Senra?

  And so he talks about his mindset on how to get through this very difficult process that most people quit in, and it's genius. Determined not to let the pressure get to me, I didn't let myself worry about the succession of tests that were lined up over the following weeks. Right? Doesn't matter. Why am I stressing myself out about something that happens three weeks? I have to get to today. I focused only on the 24 hours ahead. "Today, I will give 100% and survive," I thought at the beginning of each day. "Today, I will give 100% and survive." I'll worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes. I held back nothing, kept nothing in reserve because I knew that anything less than my full effort would result in failure.

• 24:59David Senra?

  So a great illustration of why it's so important to just focus on the task that's immediately in front of you and focus on today, worry about tomorrow when it comes. One of my favorite stories, the way to remember this concept, is actually told by Will Smith. And so there's many variations of the Will Smith brick story, but I'm going to read you one variation here. It's just a few sentences, but I think it's really important. "It was a hot summer day in 1980, and Will Smith and his brother Harry were standing wide-eyed with their mouths open in confusion. Where a wall once stood in front of their father's shop was now a hole, a hole that the boy's father had made himself for reasons that weren't made clear." So this is a lesson that Will Smith's father put him through when he was a boy that he never forgot.

• 25:44David Senra?

  And if you study Will Smith, Will Smith is also one of these, like, he's got this, like, he's almost got this psychopathic level of drive that's very common in a lot of founders. So they not, he had a wall there, his father purposely destroyed part of the wall. "Build me a wall," their old man instructed. Will deemed it impossible. His brother thought it was impossible, too. How could either of them build a wall at their age? Still, the two wouldn't argue with their father and did what was asked of them. Each day after school, the boys went to their father's shop and laid bricks, one brick after the other, with a surprising level of perfectionism neither would have expected.

• 26:24David Senra?

  After 18 months, the brothers laid their final brick, the wall, their wall, was done. And what a sight she was. As the boys marveled at their work, their father walked out of the shop and joined them. The three of them stood in silence for a moment before the boy's father's, excuse me, before the boy's father turned to both of his sons and said, "Now, don't you ever tell me you can't do something again." And so this is Will, a quote from Will later on in his life describing that, about the message behind what his father was trying to tell him. You don't set out to build a wall. You don't start by saying, "I'm gonna build the biggest, baddest wall that's ever been built." You don't start there. You say, "I'm gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid."

• 27:10David Senra?

  If you do that every single day, soon, you'll have a wall. And so we go back to NIMs, that's exactly the mindset he has. "Today, I will give 100% and I will survive. I will worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes." And that's important, because one day, he's about to tell us, like, you have to go and do this speed march over a bunch of hills that's almost 18 miles. That sucks, but the very next day, you have to do 37 miles while loaded with a backpack. So if you're worried, like, you have to focus. There's no point in me worrying about getting through 37 miles with 80 pounds on my back. Like, that's gonna suck, right? But if I can't get over the speed hill march for 18 miles, what's the point? "The following morning was set to be brutal. The hill's phase was a speed march over 18 miles. This was then followed by the infamous final march,

• 27:55David Senra?

  a test of endurance over more than 37 miles while shouldering a loaded backpack with a weight of 80 pounds." And so he gets to the final test, and he says, "Settling into the familiar sensation of pain, instilled in me by those heavy training sessions for the Doku race, I charged forward." That was many, many years earlier in the story. "I learned that the selection process wasn't about discovering soldiers made of iron. Instead, they were looking for people who were flexible and able to mold themselves into any situation." When I got to that sentence, I jotted down in the margin, "That's founder mentality." "They're looking for people who are flexible and able to mold themselves into any situation."

• 28:39David Senra?

  "I crossed the finish line as the fastest recruit of the day. In the face of my toughest challenge yet, I didn't crack. I had bent and flexed. I was malleable." A few paragraphs later, he has this great maxim I hope to never forget. "I always smiled my way through the mud." And then the maxim that has resonated more than I think anything else I've learned through doing all the research for this podcast comes from the founder of Four Seasons. Something I repeat to myself over and over again, almost like my own mantra when I'm going through times where I want to quit, whether it's working out, whether it's doing something difficult, whatever it is. And I just love what, his name's Izzy Sharp. He said, "Excellence is the capacity to take pain. Excellence is the capacity to take pain." We're seeing that again here.

• 29:22David Senra?

  "While a few of the guys around me suffered, some of them even thought something was wrong with me. I noticed camouflaged faces in my unit staring back at me in disbelief." Remember, he just said, "I smiled through the mud." "Fucking hell, Nims," whispered one of them. "I'm hanging out on these patrols piss wet, and you're enjoying it." "Excellence is the capacity to take pain. It was their job to crush my spirit. Mine was to fight on to the very end. It became official. I was a member of the Special Boat Service. I had met my God." So then Nims talks about the importance of having like a personal code, a way to like guide your life. There's an entrepreneur, he's also been a longtime subscriber to Founders. His name's Drew Riley.

• 30:06David Senra?

  His company's trends.vc. And he's got what I think is one of the smartest things I've ever seen. So he's, I'll link this in the show notes. It's 100 Rules, A Personal Philosophy. And it says, "I began journaling," and these are Drew, Drew's words. "I began journaling in 2013. A few years later, I started collecting rules that I read every morning. Each rule points to a personal story." And these are reminders. And then he's got this great gif from one of the greatest TV shows of all time, The Wire, and one of the greatest fictional characters of all time, Omar. If you've seen The Wire, you know exactly who that is. And the gif is Omar saying, "A man's got to have a code." And so I think this idea of like collecting these short maxims, these short one-liners,

• 30:49David Senra?

  maybe, and he's got a little description to each one, and then reading it every morning. That's brilliant. And so Nim says here, "I had a code, bravery above all else. There was no other way for me to live." So we're still at the point in his life, he's got a day job, like an extremely intense day job. He's serving in the special forces. He's gonna go on a three-week break from deployment, and he's fighting in Afghanistan. He had been shot. He was on a rooftop, providing cover fire. A sniper tries to take a shot at his neck, and he winds up having the butt of the gun on the neck, and so he hits the butt of the gun. So that sniper winds up hitting his gun, knocking him off the roof, and then wind up saving his life, because obviously if the gun butt wasn't there, he would've been shot to the neck, most likely died.

• 31:33David Senra?

  And so there's also, the reason I'm telling you all this, because this gives you an insight of who this person is. Like, you have this extreme intense job, and you have a three-week break, and what do you decide to do on your three-week break? You know, you gonna go vacation, sit on the beach? No, he's gonna try to climb Everest. And he wants to try to climb Everest quickly and by himself. And so he says, he gets to the base camp, and he says, "That's a lot of stuff. Are you here..." There's another climber there. "That's a lot of stuff. Are you here for the trekking? Because you're too late to climb Everest in time." "No, I'm here for the climb," Nim said. "And I'll make it in time. I have to." There was a pause. "What? Where's the rest of your team, then?" "I'm doing it solo." There was a snort of disbelief. Someone else laughed. "You're fucking kidding."

• 32:14David Senra?

  I shook my head and shrugged it off. The glass, half-empty attitude went against everything I'd been taught in the military, where grumbling or giving up was not an effective strategy. If problems or challenges came my way, I was supposed to find solutions, having been trained to adapt and survive. I picked up my gear and tried my best to forget the snarky comments, knowing that glooming thinking was both destructive and contagious. That is such an important insight. "No, no jokes, brother. I'm fucking doing this," I said. "My plan for making it to the summit in such a limited window was to do everything more quickly than was recommended without wasting too much energy." And so one of the benefits, I think, of reading this book, and it's a very, like,

• 32:58David Senra?

  you could read the book rather quickly. I'm astounded how many, because like real simple language, real short sentences, so it's an easy read, how many paragraphs or highlights I have. But one of the benefits is, again, going back to this idea of like constant psychological warfare. So we go back to Mark Andreessen's famous quote about, like, he hits, like, building the emotional states that you go in between when you're building a company, and he nails it. He's like, when you're building a startup, you only feel two emotions, euphoria and terror. And then he says, I feel, he added something on to the end, he's like, I've noticed a lack of sleep enhances both. And so I think the warning there for future founders, right, is it's inevitable. You're gonna feel, when things are going great, you're gonna feel like the best you've ever, like, you're superhuman,

• 33:40David Senra?

  the best feeling in the world. And when things are bad, you're gonna be, you know, scared, tempted to give up, whatever the case is. And so I'm just, I just wanna pull out just one example of this, there's many examples in the book, of him just having to constantly engage in this psychological warfare. He is halfway between camp one and camp two. You're supposed to be climbing this over many, many weeks. He's trying to do this super fast. And the reason you do it over many weeks is so you can get acclimated as you continue to go up the mountain, you get acclimated to the higher and higher elevation. And so he is halfway between camp one and camp two, and he's on the brink of collapse. And so he's trying to find extra energy to keep going. And so he's, we'll just pick up this story right here. And so he's making a video recording for his wife. "I rummaged

• 34:24David Senra?

  in my pockets and I found my phone. I recorded a brief video message. Look, baby, I'm struggling massively, but as always, I'm gonna make this happen. I didn't send it. I only wanted to capture the moment. Then I worked on course correcting. Let's do this. After taking a few deep breaths, my heart felt full again. Before long, I located an extra reserve of strength, my internal pep talk jolting me from a doomy headspace."

• 34:51David Senra?

  And then a short while later, he gets reminded that this is a life or death situation. This is not a joke. This is not a game. He winds up developing hape. So it says, and this just happens when you're not acclimated to the altitude. I was developing a high altitude pulmonary edema, hape. And so the only, I just heard him talk about this. The only cure for this is to get down the mountain fast. So he says, it was an accumulation of fluid in the lungs and a nasty condition in which the chest wheezes and heaves. The skin turns blue and the heart pounds like a kick drum. And so one thing I learned from reading the biography of Warren Buffett, one of my favorite ideas that he learned from his father is like, do you have an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard?

• 35:37David Senra?

  Like, what dictates what you're doing in life? Is it because you've come, you're capable of independent thinking and say, hey, this is the life I want to live, the path I want to take? Or that's what his dad, that's what he learned. Warren Buffett's hero was his dad. And he's like, my dad had, he's like a poster child for inner scorecard behavior. Meanwhile, his mom, who he had a very terrible relationship with, was outer scorecard. She was worried about the thought. She, her actions were influenced by what will other people think? And Warren realized, like, you can't live your life like that. You're destined to be unhappy. And this is NIM's demonstrating, in my opinion, inner scorecard behavior. I'm jumping over, I've moved massive, skipped over massive parts in the book. He's climbing these mountains, but he's also saving people's lives. This is still before Project Possible. And so he winds up saving this woman's life.

• 36:22David Senra?

  Her name is Seema. And so it's in the aftermath of Seema's solo rescue, I learned a serious lesson by using oxygen during my expedition. So him and his team would use oxygen. They use it for Project Possible. It's bought, like, you'll see it in the documentary if you watch it. Their faces are covered, very, almost look like they're flying like fighter jets. And this is looked down upon by some people in the mountaineering community. So the people that, like, the first person to ever scale the 14 peaks, who's also in the documentary, his name is Reinhold Messner. He did it over like 15 years or something because he didn't use oxygen at all. But he thinks, he's like, He thought what Nims was doing was fantastic. He didn't understand why so many people were criticizing him. But anyways, underscore card behavior.

• 37:07David Senra?

  So it says, "By using oxygen during my expedition, I'd been able to save her. Without it, the chances of summoning the energy for a rescue would have been slim. For that reason, from now on, when I was climbing above the higher camps on the 8,000ers, those 14 peaks, I would be climbing with bottled air, even though some mountaineers didn't consider it the purest form of high-altitude climbing. Who cares? Nobody could dictate to me why or how I climb the mountains, just as I didn't have the right to dictate that to others." So again, really, that note is just, this is just underscore card behavior. He saw the results of other people's thinking, said, "Okay, well, that's fine for you, but I don't agree with it. I'll choose to go with the results of my own thinking."

• 37:52David Senra?

  One sentence here, and then a quote from Arnold that this reminded me of. "I seem to have unusual drive compared to many climbers." One of my favorite quotes from Arnold's autobiography, the one he wrote when he was older, when he was like 70 years old. I save this on my phone. "There was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go in my life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence was like kryptonite to me." Repetition is persuasive. I talk about that over and over again. Nims repeats a lot of these principles over and over again. This is one of them. "My role on military operations was to get the job done, no questions asked." So he doesn't care about your excuses. He says, "Listen, you set an objective, and it's binary. You either succeed or you fail. But if you fail, they'll say, 'Oh, this happened for X, Y, and Z.' I don't care.

• 38:37David Senra?

  Did you succeed? Yes or no? It is completely binary. You set an objective, and then you don't stop until you achieve that objective." That is the mindset that Nims uses in life. So a friend of mine was running, was reading the book at the same time as I was, and he was a little ahead of me, and he texted me this, and I was like, he's like, "This guy ran to Kathmandu in 18 hours, which is normally a six-day hike. He stopped only to drink beer and whiskey." And I said, this is perfect. I'm using it for the podcast. So I'm going to read this section to you. This is what my, this section my friend was at. And really, like, it was fascinating because we've realized, like, why is he doing this? He's like, I do this to discover, to know what I am truly capable of. And there's another quote that I save on my phone. I need to organize this like Drew did into like one place.

• 39:22David Senra?

  Because I just randomly look at these things, but this idea to have like 100 life philosophies and read it every day is a really interesting idea. So it says, "This was important as the effort was a moment of self-discovery about what I could truly achieve if I threw all my physical and psychological resources at a bold expedition idea." So it says, "I left," I don't know how to pronounce any of these mountain names, by the way. "I left Makula's base camp 24 hours later, brutally hungover and charged to the peak, all 8,485 meters of it in one hit." That is not normal. Like I said before, most people's like, you have at least two or three stops, sometimes four and more. Like, that is insane that he just, and he's doing it hungover. What the hell is going on here? "I led from the front," how many times have you and I talked about this on the podcast?

• 40:07David Senra?

  "I led from my front with my small team until I reached the top. This itself was an achievement. Nobody had yet climbed Makula that season, and it's because of the poor weather conditions. Once I made it back to the base camp in one piece, I discovered our helicopter ride back to this other base had been canceled due to poor weather. I promptly took on one of the hardest treks in Nepal, on foot with my Sherpa team. We ran at speed all the way to Kathmandu, completing a six-day journey in 18 hours, stopping only to drink beer and whiskey. I had broken two world records by climbing Everest and Loess in 10 hours and 15 minutes, and then topping Everest, Loess, and Makula in five days. I was also the first person to climb Everest twice, and then Loess and Makula," again,

• 40:50David Senra?

  most likely pronouncing them, "in the same season, and I didn't feel done." And so when I got to this section, it made me think of this note I took. I was listening to, there's this company that's like Spartan Races. They also have a podcast and so they, they interview like extreme athletes and stuff. And so they were interviewing this guy named Rich Roll, who I guess runs long distances. And he said something that was very interesting. This is many years ago and I kept it on my phone since then. He says, "I'm not a fan of moderation. I'm attracted to extremes. What do you want your life experience to be? Do you want to be exceptional? Do you want to push the boundaries of your capabilities? Do you want to walk, or do you want to walk around in a fog, butting up against your potential, but never actually, but never actualizing it? Then knock yourself out. Be moderate. I'm not interested in that."

• 41:33David Senra?

  So then he's 35 when he decides he's going to climb all 14 peaks. The, what I just read you actually occurred before he quits the military and does Project Possible. So he realized, "Hey, I just did these three. Why don't I try to do all eight?" So this is really, I mean, he talks about death a lot in the book and this gives you his mindset, that he'd rather die doing something he loved that, and that was potentially obviously dangerous, but extreme, than holding on and just living like, you know, going out meekly from old age, being unable to care for himself. "I was comfortable with the idea of saying goodbye in my 30s. Hanging on until the age of 80-something, when I might be unable to look after myself,

• 42:14David Senra?

  held little appeal. I preferred to leave while going full tilt." And so here's another crazy decision. He cannot do both Project Possible and serve in the Special Forces. And so he's going to leave a big amount of money on the table. "My other big concern about resigning from the Special Forces was my pension. It was a life-changing chunk of money, and to claim it, I only had to serve a few more years. Quitting now meant giving up a lot, which was a worry and a financial stress that I'd have to manage down the line." At this point, he's sending, he's in the Special Forces still. He's spending a large chunk of his money that he gets and sending it back to take care of his elderly mom and dad. "My superiors argued that by resigning, I'd lose out on financial security that would excite most people in the real world, except I wasn't most people

• 42:58David Senra?

  and I had a different take on the real world. I was raised a poor kid in Nepal. If I had to, living out of a tent for the rest of my life would be no problem at all." And so he quits, has no money, winds up going to remortgage his house. He's never used social media in his life up until this point. He basically has this like, "I need to, to do something impossible and I also need like fundraising." And so he's going around to different companies. He like wrote Richard Branson a letter, all these people. He's and he winds up starting the, the, the, um, the project when he only had 15% of the funding. And he's like, he was having such a hard time raising money. And so he realizes, well, if I start doing things quicker than anybody else has ever done, I'll get attention that way and then I'll get more money. Um, and then this is just his mindset at the very beginning.

• 43:43David Senra?

  Again, I told you over and over again, he believes in positive affirmations. I approached every day with a positive thought. I can do this. I will navigate every problem the mission can throw at me. I've already climbed the world's tallest peak. The only thing standing in my way right now is funding. Get out there and smash it. So it goes into detail, the constant rejections, waking up at 4:00 AM every morning, doing social media, writing emails, getting, uh, doing fundraising meetings, giving speeches. And really I just want to pull out one sentence for you. It says, "To instill faith in others. It was critical that I maintain faith in myself, but at times it was bloody hard work." My note is first you believe and then you work on making other people share your belief.

• 44:27David Senra?

  Your belief comes first and then you spread it to other people. And to demonstrate his belief, this is what he does. He pulls a Walt Disney. We saw Walt Disney do this exact same thing when people wouldn't lend him the money to do the projects he wanted. "I remortgaged my house." So I'm skipping ahead a little bit in the project. Again, I think watching the movies is gonna be a better, like, if you're actually interested in, in seeing this. I'm trying to pull out the principles that I think are useful. So the note of myself here is he realizes the importance of morale and not pushing through and, and pushing your people past the point where they break. You don't want to do that. And really the note here is this is, this is the same for building a company. And he says, "I understood the importance of climbing quickly, but the growing unity within the Project Possible team was also important.

• 45:10David Senra?

  I had learned that organizing an expedition party was the same as organizing a group of soldiers in war. They needed purpose and incentive, but food and downtime were vital too. Without periods of rest and recovery, individuals or the whole team had increased, had, would have an increased likelihood of failure." So he's already going fast, he's already, uh, summited a few mountains. The morale's low, so he's like, "I gotta fix this right now." "So I announced to the guys that we were withdrawing from the mountain to regroup together. A little drinking and dancing were in order and we rode four by fours for a week, uh, for a week and we partied. The group's spirit was lifted and our brief period of rest and recuperation paid off."

• 45:51David Senra?

  More psychological warfare that he's engaged in. The trick was to present a psychological reframing of what was sure to be a painful experience. This emotional switch helped us eat up the meters, meaning eat up the meters as they go up the mountain. But physically, we were suffering. So there's a number of examples as he's attempting to summit these mountains. And this happens over and over again. He's forced to try to save other people that had either left behind by their other, you know, because it's kind of like a every man for himself in some degree on these mountains. So if you get yourself in a painful, in a bad position, especially if your climbing party doesn't have oxygen, a lot of times they just, you're just left there to die. And Nims didn't believe in ever leaving somebody behind.

• 46:34David Senra?

  So he'd put himself, and many, many times throughout the project, he put himself way closer to death because his refusal to, to leave a person behind, even if that, and these people are not in his climbing party. And so he's having to save two people at night on a mountain. Camp Four, which is right before the summit, he keeps radioing, he's like, hey, need help? Bring people up here. We're bringing these people down. Bring us oxygen. And they keep radioing to him, yeah, yeah, we're coming, we're coming, we're coming, like 40 times or 100 times, I forgot how many, it was a lot. And I'm really reading this section to you because his biggest problems throughout this entire expedition were always other people. When you figure the biggest problem would be the mountain, right? So that he's trying to save this Indian climber named Biplap. It says Biplap was deteriorating. Then as we resumed our trudge, I noticed something different about his body as we

• 47:19David Senra?

  lowered him. Foot by foot over rock and ice. His pain groans had stopped. The instinctive muscular spasms that braced against our every movement were gone. Biplap was dead. Desperately, I checked his vitals. Please don't let all this work have been for nothing, I sighed. But he had no pulse. Biplap wasn't breathing. I even poked him in the eyes, the one action that usually triggers a response in a seriously injured person. But there was no reaction. I'm sorry, brother. We did everything we could, I said sadly, pulling his hood down around his eyes. I looked angrily at the lights of Camp Four. The suggestion that help was on the way had been bullshit, and every request for assistance had been ignored. But why? I felt betrayed. People are nasty, man, I thought.

• 48:04David Senra?

  The mountain showed me the truth about who and what I really was, on both the climb up and on the way down, as I'd worked to keep our small, small unit alive. I could hold my head high, but the painful reality of people I once respected within the community was also revealed. Mountaineers sleeping in their tents as a man died on the line above them. The people who had claimed over and over that help was on its way. Their truth would be impossible to escape. Then he goes back to that he has an intense desire to inspire other people. He says, "I climbed my first mountain in 2012, and not seven years later, I was on my way to working through all fourteen thousand, eight thousand meter peaks in seven months.

• 48:49David Senra?

  I'd proven to everybody that it is never too late to make a massive change in your life." So you can Google and you see all like the, the, when people pass away and die on the mountain, usually their bodies are left there. It's just too difficult to get them down there. And um, he's using, like, he's passing people that have died and he's using their fate as like a warning to himself. "There's also a number of unpleasant reminders of the harsh and unforgiving nature at the, at life of high altitude. I passed at least three corpses along the way. The most unsettling being a man in a bright yellow summit suit. His jaw set askew in a grin. I kept thinking of that man in the bright yellow suit. That could be you if you don't take care, brother. I still had plenty of hard work to do."

• 49:34David Senra?

  And something I think that'd be effective and useful for us to do is like to study dead companies. So if you have any book recommendations, you know, usually we study people that are massively successful. But, and I have done a few examples of people like, I think one or two that come to mind uh, that are like examples of what to avoid. But if you do have any book recommendations of like dead companies or massive mistakes made by entrepreneurs or investors or anything, please send them my way. So at this point in the story, he's submitted all the peaks that he needs to in Nepal. So now he's got to go to Pakistan and he's got to plan for other potentially deadly astronomicalities. This is unbelievable. I didn't know about this. I read the book. And so he's going to Pakistan and he says, "An attack from the Taliban forces was a very real concern during the months building up to Project Possible.

• 50:17David Senra?

  The backstory to this issue began on June 22, 2013. That day, 16 Taliban fighters, dressed in paramilitary uniforms and wielding AK-47s and knives, moved into a base camp, dragging 12 climbers from their tents and tying them up with rope. Everyone's passports were confiscated. Photos were taken of each captured climber. Their group was then led to a field outside the camp and executed. Only one man escaped, a Chinese mountaineer named Zhang Jingzuan, who managed to free himself from his binds as the shooting began. With rounds ricocheting around him as he fled, Zhang escaped into the dark barefoot. The poor bloke was dressed only in his thermal underwear, and he hid behind a rock until he felt it safe enough to crawl back to his tent,

• 51:02David Senra?

  rummaging around for a satellite phone and some warm clothes. Around him, 11 people, friends and colleagues, had been massacred. He moved fast, calling authorities for help. Later that morning, a military helicopter hovered above base camp and he was rescued." And so this is another example of a lot of his problems stemming from other people. In a lot of cases, Nims and his team are the ones actually setting the fixed lines for the climbers that follow. And in some cases, people had beat him there and they had posted, so this one climbing group that got there before him, had posted saying, "Hey, we set the lines. It's fine." And so Nims and his team go up there, expecting the lines to be there, and it winds up not being there,

• 51:43David Senra?

  and it puts them in an extremely dangerous position, especially when there's like this huge snowstorm moving through. And this is where, this is my guess, before, I guess I could tell you this before I read this to you. This is my guess why his team is self-sufficient. Like, they would set their own lines, they would carry their own equipment. They didn't need, they didn't need nor want assistance from other people. This is talked about in the documentary. And I think reason of this is because he just, he's constantly disappointed by the effort and the lies of other humans. And this really is a parallel to like, the history of entrepreneurship is extremely clear about this. Like, you need to control the important parts of your business. So, in his case, like, my life is on the line, I gotta control. Like, if my life's on the line, I gotta be the one in control of that. And so it says, "I had enough and the lines weren't there.

• 52:28David Senra?

  So grabbing our gear, we abandoned our plans and we descended to base camp. I became determined to confront the international crew for having misled me. I was furious, sick and tired of people lying to others on the mountain. And this time, the bullshit had thrust my team firmly into the line of fire." So he, one of, his best climber, his like, number two guy, almost died as a result of this. "I was also annoyed with myself. I had been too trusting. When I found some of the international climbers, my anger at their phantom lines and Mingmaz," says his number two guy, "near-death event intensified. I stormed into their tent. 'Why did you fucking lie?' I shouted. 'Why did you say you fixed the lines when you hadn't? I nearly lost my, my most capable guy because of you.' To my surprise, they made no attempt to bluff their way out of it. 'Nims, we're sorry.

• 53:13David Senra?

  The lines are partly fixed. We put the word out on Twitter, but maybe it wasn't detailed enough. We didn't expect you guys to be looking at it too.' I shook my head. They'd made the post to impress their sponsors and followers on social media." And then he has a paragraph, he talks about like, not only is it extremely difficult what he's doing, but the fact that he's gotta organize the team, do the fundraising, do the social media, do everything that's, that's happening. And they're filming a lot of this while this is going on. And it made me think of what Reid Hoffman said in the, the book I covered a few weeks ago, The Founders, about the early history of PayPal. And he, he discovered, or Reid identified something that's, that's one of, it's also, it may speak to how like, how difficult it is to, to do a startup, but also one of the benefits.

• 53:58David Senra?

  And so Reid Hoffman says, "The cadence of learning at a startup? Fucking intense." And we see this is exactly what Nims is going through and trying to accomplish what he's trying to accomplish something difficult as well. "Project Possible was teaching me lesson after lesson, both on and off the mountain. At sea level, I was developing my skills as a fundraiser, one-man PR machine, environmental campaigner, and political mover. Above 8,000 meters, I'd learned more about my true capabilities under pressure, where I could lead and stay calm while managing potential disasters like severe altitude sickness, avalanches, and rescue operations. I never moaned when the going got tough." And then when I got to this next paragraph, I just wrote, "This is the most anti-negative person I've ever met." "There were occasions when a panic call would come over the radio.

• 54:43David Senra?

  'Nims, it's snowing heavily on the mountain. It's gonna be a rough climb.' Rather than wallowing in negativity, I'd make a smart-ass comment to lift the mood. 'Come on, bro. What do you think we're getting on a mountain? A bloody heatwave?'" And then this is just a fantastic principle that you could apply to anything, something he learned from Mark Twain. He said, "Mark Twain once wrote that if a person's job was to eat a frog, then it was best to take care of business first thing in the morning. But if the work involved eating two frogs, it was best to eat the bigger one first. In other words, get the hardest job out of the way." And so this is this scene I'm about to read to you is actually in the documentary. It's it's really amazing.

• 55:24David Senra?

  It's they're at K2, which is which has one of the most notorious reputations, people die a lot. They get to camp and a bunch of world-class mountaineers had tried a summit and then they were turned back because of bad weather. And so Nims gets to a camp, there's negativity everywhere, some people are packing up and going home, and he's trying to instill in them self-belief. He says, "There was another pressing issue to deal with. Many of the climbers waiting nervously at base camp were rattled by fear and some of them appeared beaten already. Knowing that big-time mountaineers were unable to scale K2 was unsettling the expedition party still there. Some even wanted to go home, and it didn't help that several people were noticeably freaked out after seeing an avalanche sweep away a fixed a line fixer ahead of them.

• 56:09David Senra?

  I tried to lift the group's self-belief. I preferred not to prepare or operate when surrounded by bad energy and pessimism." And so he's in a tent with other climbers and he says, "You've already been up to Camp Four," I said. "You've only turned back because there were no fixed lines behind that and the conditions were bad. Since then, you've had time to rest. You're strong." "But it's so tough up there," said one climber. "Look, brother, don't talk yourself out of it. I just climbed back-to-back mountains without sleep. In Nepal, I made rescue attempts and then climbed again the next day. You guys haven't had to do that. You're in a much stronger position than I was on Everest or Durl... Durl or, I'm not even gonna pronounce, the two other mountains in Nepal. We'll lead the way and a day later, you'll summit."

• 56:52David Senra?

  And that part was extremely important in the documentary because what happens is nobody wants to go up. He's like, "All right, there's no fixed lines. We'll go set the lines. We'll prove to you that you're, that our belief is right and that you don't have anything to be afraid of." They went up summing K2 and because of the lines that Nims and his team set, I think 22 other people that were in the camp were able to summit. At a time before Nims, so pre-Nims, it's impossible. Let's pack up and go home. Nims comes through with this crazy Kanye West-level self-belief. He sets the lines for them. He summits because he's got, like, he's not gonna stop trying to accomplish Project Possible just because other people are negative, right? And then as a result of his work, setting the lines and instilling in their belief,

• 57:35David Senra?

  22 other people were able to summit. And some of those people in the documentary had never summited K2 before and it was like a lifelong dream. So I also think that speaks to the positivity, like, the importance of what Nims is doing here. Preaching the positivity, preaching, "Hey, things are difficult, but you can do it." Putting out the documentary, putting out the book, like, just saying, "Hey, you are capable. You are way more capable than you think." And I think these two sentences that he's about to say here, just, I truly believe that this demonstrates a fundamental understanding of human nature, that we have to struggle to be satisfied, to be happy. I don't think people that take the easy route in life are actually satisfied or happy at all. "Suffering sometimes creates a weird sense of satisfaction for me.

• 58:17David Senra?

  It creates a sense of pride when seeing a job through to the end." And he has a paragraph here that also I think is important. It's important to keep the promises that you make yourself. He says, "If I say that I'm gonna run for an hour, I run for an hour. If I plan to do 300 pushups in a training session, I won't quit until I've done them all. Because brushing off the effort means letting myself down, and I don't want to have to live with that, and neither should you." That's something I also learned from Kobe Bryant, because he gave, I've heard him talk about this before, where he like, he'll set his training plan, like during summer for the offseason. He sets his training plan at the beginning, and he writes it out, and then he signs his name. He's like, "I'm making a commitment to do that." And he does that because he's like, "Listen, when you're going through something difficult,

• 59:02David Senra?

  you're doing, you know, 4 a.m. workouts, you're training four times a day, you have the tendency, humans have the tendency to start negotiating with myself. It's like, "Oh, maybe I should just, you know, ooh, I'll just do, you know, 100 less reps." Or, "Oh, you know, I'll skip that, and I'll take a nap," or whatever the case is. And he says, "Nope, there's nothing to talk about. I'm not, I am not negotiating with myself. I wrote it down on paper, I signed it, and I'm doing it." Essentially, taking the thought process out. It's like, "All right, I've already done the thinking, now I just have to go through the actions." Because I know I'm not different from other humans in the sense that I will have, I'll try to negotiate with myself and take the easier route out. Well, I can't, because it's on paper and I signed it, and so I'm going to go through with every single step. And Nim's is saying the same thing. "I said I was gonna run for an hour, I run for the full hour.

• 59:44David Senra?

  I said I'm doing 300 pushups, I'm doing 300 pushups." And so he gets through the final peak, and I want to go through what he says here. And again, remember, he, main motivation was to make his mother proud. He says, "The effort felt emotionally heavy as I stepped to the peak, and it was now done. As I stood on a mountaintop in the sky, everything I achieved up until that moment dawned on me. I had silenced the doubters by climbing the 14 highest mountains in the world in six months and six days. I had shown what was achievable with imagination and determined spirit. I made the impossible possible. The mission had been a process of discovery, not only of the mountains, but personally too. By climbing the 14, 8,000 peaks, I was trying to figure out who the hell I was.

• 1:00:29David Senra?

  I wanted to know how far out in the distance my physical and emotional limits were."

• 1:00:36David Senra?

  My drive was unusual. Where did that desire come from? I'm not sure. But even as a small boy, I'd turn over rocks in the stream, searching for crabs and prawns. And I wouldn't quit until I peered under every single one, no matter the time or effort required to finish the job. Fast forward thirty years, and nothing much has changed. My spirit was still the same, only the parameters have changed. Instead of exploring a local river, I was climbing across the world's highest mountains. There, on the summit, I called home and told mom what I'd done. "I've done it!" I shouted into the phone. "And I'm okay." The line was crackling, but I could just make out her laughter.

• 1:01:19David Senra?

  "Get home safe, son," she said. "I love you." And this is how he closes out the story. "I'm bigger than my ego. I'm bigger than pain, bigger than glory, and bigger than my tears. I'm bigger than my sacrifice. I've overcome all these feelings, all these emotions, because I've lived for a bigger purpose, where me, myself, and I mean nothing. I will keep going through hell. I will keep breaking boundaries. And I will keep moving forward." These were just some of the realizations that landed with me in the aftermath of completing Project Possible. I managed to climb the world's fourteen highest peaks, establishing a new record that many

• 1:02:03David Senra?

  had deemed impossible. Despite my fatigue, the adventure had taught me an important lesson: Fear was never going to hold me back from pressing ahead with my plans. It established in me a mindset with zero doubts and zero tolerance for excuses. Shortly after, I stopped celebrating my birthday. Every milestone date, I realized, fostered a psychology of negativity, where age was a determining factor in what a person could and couldn't do. "But you're too young," or "Oh, you're too old." Whenever people considered their years, it gave them a ready-made excuse to step back from a challenge they might have ordinarily accepted.

• 1:02:46David Senra?

  That philosophy certainly applied to my mountaineering career. I had started extreme altitude climbing at the age of thirty. Many people might have considered that too late a time to start, or worried about my lack of experience. But I wasn't falling into those traps. The boundaries for what is considered achievable have shifted, and I am able to take a lot of pride in that. The guys I've climbed with are being placed on pedestals, and rightly so. We worked as a small expedition unit, in teams of three, four, or five. But we moved with the power of ten bulls and the heart of a hundred men. Most of all, I realized that summiting the fourteen peaks had been a launchpad. I needed more.

• 1:03:31David Senra?

  I have to push my limits to the max. Sitting tight, waiting it out, and living in the past have never been for me. But I don't want to announce my plans for the future, at least not just yet. I know that alerting the world to my ideas will only bring on the doubters once more. Instead, all scheme from the shadows. Because surprise can be one of the greatest tools in a soldier's armory. And quitting is not in the blood.

• 1:04:01David Senra?

  And that is where I'll leave it. To get the full story, highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you want to gift a subscription to a friend or a coworker, there's a link in the show notes and available at founderspodcast.com to do that as well. That is two hundred and thirty-six books down, one thousand to go, and I'll talk to you again soon. Giving up is not in the blood, sir. It's not in the blood.