 I've spent my entire adult life climbing and skiing really big mountains all over the world. Failure, in my line of work, can often mean life or death. But when the risk and the suffering, the frozen toes, actually pay off, the depth of appreciation for the success is great. And why is that? It's because I've experienced the opposite in failure. Only through struggling and frustration, shame, and heartbreak can I appreciate what it's like to come out the other side. I've learned that there are many fortunes to be found in failure. I've been doing this for 25 years. But there are three that really stand out to me. The first is that failure frees us from perfection. The second, failure, especially in my line of work, forces us to face our own mortality. And mortality teaches us gratitude and gratitude is the foundation for real joy. Three, failure means you have the courage to step out of your box and try something unknown to you. This creates character and empathy by exposing vulnerability. Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened. Ambition, inspired, and success achieved. Helen Keller. So I grew up the youngest of three kids. You can't have a slideshow without having like the dirty child photo over here. My mom sewed all of our clothes when I was growing up and matching outfits, which was torture for my brother. I grew up comfortable. I always had food on the table. I had great friends. I had great grades and I knew my family loved me. My first failure that I vividly recall was losing our state championship basketball game. So I've been playing with the same team my entire life. We were awesome. We were undefeated, yet we lost. It was heartbreaking, but it did set my life on its present path by freeing me from my own perceptions of perfection. I'd failed, but I wasn't struck down by lightning. How many of you guys have felt like, oh my God, if I fail, I'm never going to be able to look at myself in the mirror again. Life went on despite my worst fear being realized. Now take into account that at 17, if losing a basketball, was my worst fear, then I obviously needed to get some more perspective. I graduated university with a degree in the sciences, but you can see I put a ski photo up here versus something that had anything to do with studying. I tell my parents now that I had a second major in skiing. So needless to say, I tucked away my biology degree and I moved to Chamonix, France. I was supposed to be there for a season and I ended up living there for six years. Eventually I got an opportunity with the North Face to get a paid job to go to India as a ski mountaineer. So for me to get paid to ski, I didn't even know that existed. So I went to this interview and they assumed that I knew how to winter camp. I was familiar with helicopters. I'd spent time at altitude. I just nodded my head, smiled. Two weeks later I was in the Indian Himalayas and of course it was the first time I'd ever been in a helicopter, the first time I'd ever been winter camping and the first time that I'd ever been at altitude. And while the trip wasn't a success in that we stood on the top of the mountain, I thought it was an incredible success because well I didn't die for starters and I didn't kill anybody, but it inspired a passion in me. I finally found myself in the arena. I was the one whose face was marred. I saw the potential for triumph through sweat and blood and I felt like I was finally daring greatly. So from that point I went on a barrage of expeditions to say the least. I was beyond passionate. I was obsessed. I ran with wild camels in Mongolia. I saw the strength and passion of an eagle hunter. I learned that a compa Tibetan warrior when he sticks his tongue out at you, he's not making a face. He's actually just saying hello. Who knew? Did anybody else know that? I scared myself a lot. Clinging to ice and snow deep in the Arctic Circle. Ocean bound in a very small schooner across the Scotia Sea. I went skiing with the loaded rifle over my shoulder in case we needed to scare off polar bears and I hung out with penguins, hundreds of thousands of penguins. And while they smell absolutely awful, I could have sat on that rock forever. I found a new community beyond my childhood friends and teammates. I learned that the value in trust and the necessity of being able to rely on a team when the road gets rocky. I also learned that a 3 a.m. alpine start, has anybody had a 3 a.m. alpine start? Yes, there's a couple in here. It's really hard and it's really uncomfortable but it's almost always worth it. So coinciding with my expeditions, I spent 10 years working as a heli ski guide. I also got married and I had two little boys. They're a little older than this now. But despite all my travels, my biggest failure happened in my own backyard until I arrived in Colorado. So not long after the birth of my second son, I went back to work. My first day back at work. I showed up to guide a group of skiers in the mountains in my backyard. This part, this story is a little harder to tell, so bear with me. At the end of our second run, we had a tricky exit to get back to the helicopter. We had a river crossing. So I sent the rest of the group ahead to sort of break in the track and I stayed behind with my most timid skier. As she crossed the river, she lost her balance and she fell backward into this stream. Her head was forced under an undercut rock by the pressure of the flowing water and within a minute she drowned. So all my life, I've associated God or identified God, if you will, with Mother Nature. I think that's because as a child, I spent so much more of my time in the wilderness than I did in a church. So Mother Nature is my best friend, my sanctuary, and she'd stripped me of my sense of control and my pride. All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Steve Jobs is talking about his own mortality and in that mortality he found gratitude. What if we could have that gratitude by learning from our own failure, that gratitude and that joy instead of really recognizing gratitude only when our time is limited. So not long after the accident, I went to Mount Everest on a National Geographic expedition. My children were two and four at the time. They're amazing little boys. But I was still wallowing in the huge shadow of this accident. I was at rock bottom. I remember very well, not sleeping for nearly two years. I kind of thought that by climbing the tallest mountain in the world, I hoped to stretch my soul so thin through suffering that I might somehow understand Mother Nature again and simultaneously forgive myself. So there's no escaping mortality on Everest. Believe it or not, the very day we left to go for our own summit attempt, seven people perished that day. Because of the long lines on Everest, they were stuck in a storm and died due to exposure. Their oxygen tanks ran out and altitude illness kicked in. So five days later, our own team, our entire team, stood on the summit. But it didn't feel like the success I'd imagined that it would. And not only because of the bodies along the way, but because it's such a well-trodden path up Mount Everest, which seems crazy, but there are ropes the entire way. And those ropes eliminate that need and that reliance on a partner. You can do it all by yourself. The lines of people also forced me to climb in a way that was incredibly unnatural and foreign to me. So of course, to counter that, my partner and I just decided to keep climbing, keep walking. And the next dawn, we found ourselves on top of Lote, which is the fourth highest mountain in the world. And you can actually see the summit of Mount Everest just right behind the National Geographic flag. And we were the only ones up there. And it was incredible. The silence was palpable. We realized, you know, eventually what we'd accomplished. We spent nearly 48 hours in the death zone, as David said. I'd been living off Pringles and top ramen for days because that was all my stomach could handle. I can't even look at Pringles when I go home now. And I talked to Mother Nature. Having not slept for 50 hours, I had long conversations with Mother Nature because I was pretty much absolutely hallucinating the entire time. But what I did finally realize was that I felt gratitude, gratitude for being in this place and for being able to see the curvature of the earth with my own eyes. Gratitude for two beautiful children and just gratitude for simply being alive. I was back and I was better for all the experience that had led me to this particular moment. So when I got home, I decided to apply for a National Geographic grant to go and climb this really remote peak in Myanmar called Hikakaba Razi. Has anybody ever heard of Hikakaba Razi? Exactly. It took two years to plan this expedition. And as a team of six, we decided that we were going to take a very old-fashioned approach to this trip by climbing, by doing our whole trip over land. So we went about a thousand miles over land by plane, not by plane, by train, bus, boat, and motorcycles. And then, like it almost sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth, but then we walked for 150 miles just to get to base camp. What we didn't realize was that the hardest part of the trip was still ahead of us. We just come out of the jungle with snakes, spiders, the worst leeches I've ever come across, walking across crazy bridges built by just strings of bamboo. And we get to this environment where we think we're going to be comfortable, but instead we just got crushed. Along the way we had been extorted by military outposts of a lot of our rice rations, and so we were very short on food. From base camp the climbing was so circuitous and difficult that essentially our team dynamics collapsed under the pressure. We were so remote that even the smallest mistake would have some of the most dire consequences. In the end we failed the summit, and more importantly we failed as a team. And I took the brunt of that failure on my shoulders because it was my idea and I was the team leader. So my vulnerabilities had really been laid to bear on this two-month trip, and I struggled with the mantra of shame in my head. I don't know if any of you have ever heard this over and over in your head, but the you're not good enough, you don't belong here. I came home suffering from PTSD, and it took me months to wade through the fog in my brain. It was pretty much the closest I'd ever come to quitting climbing. Yet somehow I never wished that we hadn't tried. So I have a lot of quotes. I actually put quotes in my journals before I go on these expeditions, and then when times get really tough, like really tough, I'll read them and I'll be like, oh I'm not actually failing, I'm just gaining empathy. Or I'm learning gratitude. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency. Not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little. And not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities. So since Myanmar, I've been on several big expeditions with renewed focus. I look back at the struggles I faced in Myanmar, and it motivates me to be better and stronger. I've now found a new voice through my experiences and know that there's a story to tell about my relationship with Mother Nature. I see that as my biggest challenge moving forward. I personally have gained so much from Mother Nature. Gratitude, empathy, compassion, that I am afraid that our biggest failure as humankind could be in failing Mother Nature. There's a very, very fine line, like a paper screen or even a cell membrane. Between life and death, success and failure, risk and complacency. And I work every day to remember that and to be thankful for all the lessons I've learned along this path. You never conquer a mountain, you just stand on the top a few moments, then the wind blows your footprints away. Thanks.