You are wonderfully and powerfully made. In other words: it is no accident you are good at certain things!
We can’t always choose our circumstances but we can choose how we respond to what life throws at us, and there is power when we realize our ability to alter our destiny.
There was another whole bunch of hopefuls. They would diminish down at a startling rate. We had seen it happen before.This time, though, we were there as the old hands. And it helped.We knew what to e...
The day after our wedding, we flew off on honeymoon. I had recklessly waited until two days before our wedding to book the holiday, in the hope that I would get some great last-minute deal somewhere.A...
Our wedding took place on a blustery midwinter day. The fifteenth of January 2000. Yet the sun shone through the clouds brightly. Shara’s father, Brian, who so sadly was suffering with multiple sclero...
It was like climbing a mountain of waist-deep molasses while giving someone a fireman’s carry, who, for good measure, was also trying to force a pair of frozen socks into your mouth. Nice.
I was also really fortunate at Eton to have had a fantastic housemaster, and so much of people’s experience of Eton rests on whether they had a housemaster who rocked or bombed.I got lucky.The relatio...
Finally, finally, I was thrown into this tiny, dark cell. It all went quiet. But I instantly noticed the warmth. And I could just make out the shape of the room under the crack in my blindfold.I waite...
But just as I was about to burst into tears, my dad would then start to applaud me.Applaud the fall?But why?Dad wanted me to understand that I could only become a horseman if I had fallen off a horse...
We were eighteen thousand vertical feet above sea level, in the mouth of Everest’s killer jaws. I noticed my hand was shaking as I fumbled with the ropes through thick mittens.It was pure fatigue.An h...
Trying often comes before failure. Endeavour more often leads to success.But they are just words, I hear you say. Why does it matter whether we say ‘try’ or ‘endeavour’?It matters, believe me.
Through all these times and formative young years, Lara, my sister, was a rock to me. My mother had suffered three miscarriages after having Lara, and eight years on she was convinced that she wasn’t...
The summer of 1999, we went on holiday to Spain to visit my cousin Penny, who runs a horse farm in Andalucia. It is a beautiful, wild part of the country.Shara would ride out early each day in the hil...
Pretty soon after returning from Everest, I was asked to give a lecture on the Everest expedition to my local sailing club in the Isle of Wight.It would be the first of many lectures that I would even...
In every potential sponsor’s eyes, I was a nobody. And soon I had notched up more rejection letters than is healthy for any one man to receive.
In 1996 the disasters on the mountain had robbed Neil of the chance to go above camp four. Two years on he was here again--only this time the summit was within his reach.He felt strong and waited anxi...
Eventually, at 7:22 A.M. on the morning of May 26, 1998, with tears still pouring down my frozen cheeks, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me in.As if she now considered me some...
It isn’t clouded by ego or others’ opinions - those fickle things live in the conscious mind. Your instinct has a clearer purpose: to help you.Listen to it. Learn to recognize it. Acknowledge it when...
In every potential sponsor’s eyes, I was a nobody. And soon I had notched up more rejection letters than is healthy for any one man to receive.I tried to think of an entrepreneur and adventurer that I...
As we pulled up at the big school gates, I saw tears rolling down my dad’s face. I felt confused as to what part of nature or love thought this was a good idea. My instinct certainly didn’t; but what...