Today's blog was written by David Goad who facilitated the discussion with Bear Grylls on July 29th.
I love the show Man vs Wild.
The extreme host, Bear Grylls, gets dropped into some desert, jungle or icy mountain range in each episode and shows us on video that survival is not pretty. This includes squeezing moisture from elephant dung, swimming in a peat bog and climbing trees with your shoelaces.
I had the privilege of meeting Bear via WebEx. (Yep - that's him in the photo via web cam in his house.)
I was in my office in California connected to his small town in Wales and I asked him questions submitted by nearly 2000 viewers from around the world.
Yes, I have a cool job.
It felt like a private conversation as he shared photos and his personal story of motivation, from a long hospital stay with a broken back to the top of Mount Everest.
As I scrolled through the audience questions, I was struck by the specificity – what do you eat for breakfast, what’s the single best tool you need to survive, what motivational phrase do you say to yourself each morning… and what do live scorpions really taste like?
Bear took it up a level with his answers, essentially saying that achieving extraordinary heights in your life is not about a single tip or technique, it’s about guiding principles - keep moving forward, make decisions and never quit. He said loud and clear that if you master the “never quit” part, every other little detail will fall into place.
Think about what motivates you on your journey.
What are your guiding principles? What do you believe you can really achieve? If you can muster the willpower to take on an extreme challenge in your life (and not quit in the middle), it is extremely satisfying. Your new level of self-belief also clears the way for many smaller everyday miracles to happen.
Bear put it this way, “Rewards don’t always go to the strongest or fittest or cleverest. Rewards go to the bold few who understand what it means to go after a dream and never quit. Never… ever…quit.”
Watch a free replay of this event.
David Goad is a Cisco Marketeer, and is changing the world one blogpost at a time. He climbed Yosemite’s Half Dome, which is not quite as high as Mount Everest. Check out his personal blog Short Stories with a Point and read his post-event blog about Guy Kawasaki.
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