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Mike Horn: Conquer Your Fear and Make the Impossible, Possible | E32 · In Search Of Excellence

• 0:00
  Mike Horn: If we're afraid of losing our money, if you're afraid of losing your friends and your house and your car or whatever, you're not going to do extraordinary things, the will to win must overpower the fear of failure. And it's only when the world to win becomes bigger than the fear to lose in our mind that you can really go out there and achieve amazing things.
• 0:29
  Randall Kaplan: Welcome to a Search of Excellence which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be to learn, educate and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential.
• 0:37
  Randall Kaplan: It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all faced on our way there. Achieving Excellence is our goal and it's never easy to do we all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings. And we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. My guest today is Mike horn. Mike is recognized around the world as the greatest explorer of modern times a person who has redefined the boundaries of human endurance. He has circumnavigated the earth a total of 27 times, climb for mountains more than 26,250 feet high and swam down the Amazon for 4350 miles. For starters. In 2001. Mike became famous after completing an 18 Month 25,000 mile solo journey around the equator without any motorized transport in 2004. He completed a two year and three months solo circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle, also without any motorized transportation in 2006, along with another explorer named boars, Oslon. He found that by becoming the first man to cross the North Pole without a dog or motorized transport, which he did during the peak of winter and permanent darkness. In February 2017, he became the first person to a solo crossing of Antarctica, a distance of 3200 miles, which he did in 59 days, on skis and by kites. And in 2019, Mike and board J again completed the first ever full crossing of the Atlantic of the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole. Mike is also one of the top motivational speakers in the world and his coach several sports teams to World Championships. He is the author of six books and even has a Penner I watched named after him. Mike, it's an incredible pleasure to have you on my show.
• 2:22
  Randall Kaplan: Welcome to In Search of Excellence.
• 2:26
  Mike Horn: No thanks for the invitation, Randy excited to speak to you. Well, let's
• 2:30
  Randall Kaplan: get going. I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helped shape our personality or values in the preparation for our future. You were born in Johannesburg, South Africa, both your parents were professors and your dad was also a sports star.
• 2:45
  Randall Kaplan: He played rugby, which was the national sport of South Africa.
• 2:48
  Randall Kaplan: When you were a kid, you spend very little time studying nearly all of your time outdoors, you would climb trees, ride your bike for miles, explore nearby rivers and go fishing with your brothers and sisters. Your parents understood that you were a little bit different than your siblings, they gave you a lot of freedom. Starting when you were eight years old, you could do what you want it but they had one rule that you had to be home by 6pm, you would explore the nearby rivers and lands and when you came home, you would share what you had done with your dad who would give you practical guidance. Before you ventured out again, the next day you your dad would say try this. Or maybe that works better, don't jump in the river when it's raining, because the waters going to go higher. Also, he would help you understand what was happening near you. You didn't have to tell you that where you're going because he trusted you. And that trust brought you freedom which made you feel alive. Making people feel alive is a great thing, especially as a kid. But that was more than 40 years ago and times have changed a lot since then, where kids today are not roaming off to rivers by themselves. We're going to talk about what you did when you got your first bike and what happens when you break your parents trust next. But before we do, can you tell us how that freedom at such a young age influenced you for the rest of your life?
• 3:56
  Randall Kaplan: And can you also tell us what parents should be doing today to make their kids feel alive?
• 4:01
  Mike Horn: Randy, it's sure that the more freedom you have as a kid, the more creative you become. And then with freedom, you have to be able to carry the consequences of the decisions that you make. And I was taught at a very early age that trust is vital in anything you do.
• 4:19
  Mike Horn: You've got to trust the person that gives you the freedom and the person that gives you the freedom have to trust you and your decision making for you to be able to go out there and take the responsibility and all the consequences. If things could happen or go wrong. I was given the rule that at six o'clock at night, I have to be at home. I didn't have to tell my parents where I was going. But to that rule of being home at six o'clock there was you should get back home in the way that you left out, don't come back home with injuries don't come back home, with broken legs or bleeding everywhere, try and stay intact. And that I think was really important for me because I was an active child that loved the outdoors. That gave me first of all the possibility to head off in any direction that I wanted to go.
• 5:27
  Mike Horn: And not only discover new land, but discover new people. And the more people you discover, the better you understand the surrounding because local people know the local spot better than anybody else. And that's why I started learning from local people. Along the way, asking them questions, way is the most interesting place to go. The rivers, the caves, the trees, the mountains, allowed me to be able to discover the value of people. And then they knowledge locally, and what they knew and could do better than I could. So that then became a little bit like a reservoir of information, that I use knowledge of other people to enrich my life as a kid. And when six o'clock arrived, I was at home because it was such an interesting life as a kid, that you could go out and discover other people and other places. But at the same time, you learn something and the moment you enrich your life, with knowledge that you wouldn't get at home or at school. That's where you want to abide to that one rule that would keep on giving you the freedom to go out there and explore.
• 6:49
  Randall Kaplan: So you had all this freedom. When your parents gave you your first bike, when you're eight years old, you decided you wanted to visit your uncle and cousins, not the uncle who lives seven and a half miles away, which didn't interest you, you wanted to visit your uncle who lived on a farm nearly 190 miles away. You did in fact, tell your dad, you're going to visit your uncle, but you didn't tell them? Which one because you're afraid that he would say no. Can you tell us what happened next and In Search of Excellence, how important is it to take responsibility and admit when you do something wrong rather than wait and get caught, which is something a lot of people do, regardless of your age. And regardless, if we're talking about our personal lives or our professional lives,
• 7:28
  Mike Horn: I think that we are afraid of the consequences of mistakes. When you get taught to be able to take the consequences of your mistakes. As a process of learning, it becomes in an important educational tool. So I wanted to go and visit my cousins that were 300 kilometres away, or 170 Miles like you said away. And I knew that maybe my father wouldn't allow me to do it. Because even in my small mind, it was a far distance to travel. That's why I only told him half the truth. I didn't lie to him. I wanted him to inform him that I was going to visit my cousins. But I didn't specify if it was the cousins that were seven miles away, or the cousins that were 170 miles away. And like that I didn't lie to him.
• 8:22
  Mike Horn: But at the end of the day, he knew that I never told him where I was going. So the moment that I give him information. It's most probably because I was thinking of going to the cousins that lived far away. I knew that it was going to take me more than one day to get there and it was going to take me the weekend. So I jumped on my bike.
• 8:46
  Mike Horn: I took a couple of pieces of bread and dry rusks from home.
• 8:51
  Mike Horn: And then I head off with a small little legs and small little wins, trying to cycle as far as I could. Six o'clock arrived. My father knew I wasn't at home. So he called his brother and said, Listen, was Mike there today?
• 9:04
  Mike Horn: And he said no, he wasn't. And he knew that I was trying to hate to the cousins that live three days cycle away. And when he arrived, he used the therapy of silence. So he was always open to discussions. And that's a very important educative tool that we can use in the education that we can give our kids today.
• 9:28
  Mike Horn: When I arrived back home. At six o'clock, my father was there. At six o'clock I could speak to my father, it was my time with him.
• 9:36
  Mike Horn: He never asked me where I was or what I did. I always wanted to share what I did with him. That opened the communication channels to a better understanding and a better relationship between father and son or mother and son. By that way, for him to be there to give Give me the time to listen to me, it could educate me. And it's not in the way that we think education means telling people what to do constantly.
• 10:08
  Mike Horn: It's simply made that, okay, I give you my time. And then you listen to what I have to say, if I think you can do things better, and the moment that that information comes to you, and you've got something that you can try out, by crossing a river, like you said, if the river changes color, that means it's raining somewhere. And you might have a freak wave coming down this river. So watch for floating wood, for river color changes. And that is a good indication of what's happening in that river. So that's information that he gave me, as a kid, I never knew that if the color of the water was going to change, it meant a drain somewhere or there was a thunderstorm. So his way of teaching me was with methods that I could use in what I love doing. So when you arrived, you didn't speak to me, what was the most important thing for me in life, is to be able to speak to my father to share my experiences to listen to what he thought was a better way, or a more efficient way of doing things. When he told me that I should get in a car, and I'm not allowed to sit in the front seat anymore, I should sit in the back seat. I knew that wow, something was terribly wrong.
• 11:31
  Mike Horn: And on the drive back home, there was silence. And arriving back home. He said, listen, just go to your room. And think a little bit on what you did. So I went into my room. And I thought, and I could hear my brothers and sisters running around the house and my father playing with them and my mother there. We've all their happy family. And I was excluded from that. So there's a moment that I couldn't take it anymore. And I got out of my room. And I walked to him. And I asked him, Why didn't he punish me? Why didn't he shouted me? Or why didn't he become angry? And he said, Mike, because I didn't do anything wrong. You did something wrong.
• 12:16
  Mike Horn: And it's for you to explain to me why you did things wrong.
• 12:21
  Mike Horn: It's not for me to punish what you did, because I don't know what your thought process behind that was. So I understood punishment, by the way that I explained it to him that I was afraid that he would say no. And I was afraid that he wouldn't allow me to go. And I really wanted to go. And then he took the whole situation and said, Listen, why didn't you just come to me, and explain to me the reason why you wanted to do it, clearly not hide it. And we could have worked it out together. And that is a lot of educational information in that small little sentence, let's do things together. Meaning that if you are a person that likes going out there and taking risks in whatever if it's in your job, or if it's in finance, or if it's in science, or in exploration or sport, shared information, working together with people that can help you and guide you to be able to take less risks and make the chance of getting to your goals and your objectives easier, then you can't make mistakes, because you surround yourself with the bass.
• 13:40
  Mike Horn: And that is what I took out of that that situation. And two weeks later, we got on the bikes together. And we spent the weekend completely my father was tired of cycling and he was tired of his son just wanting to cycle and go out and do these places. Maybe he never really wanted to go. But he was accompanying me, meaning that the time that was so valuable to him, is shared with me in making my dreams come true. Not his dreams. My dreams. He's the reason was education. Mine was to be able to dream as a kid, and to make these dreams come true. And while we cycling on our way to see the cousins that lived on the farm where I used to love driving horses and counting sheep and going out because my dog, he said to me something that really became a little bit the mantra of my life. And he said you know, Mike, I like the way you dream.
• 14:46
  Mike Horn: Because you dream big. You look at solutions. And if your dreams don't scare you, your whole life. Your dream being too small. And from that little kid being on that bike at eight years old, to a 56 year old adult today, I still dream in the same way. Because my father told me that no matter how old you all, if you dream big, and your dreams don't scare you, then they're not big enough.
• 16:17
  Mike Horn: Your dad
• 16:17
  Randall Kaplan: used to go running every morning at six o'clock. And when you're eight years old, again, you started going with them, you're always behind them, and you never slowed his pace to make it easier for you to keep up. The only option for you was to run faster. When you hit the point where you couldn't keep up, you would draw a line on the pavement the next day, you would try to beat that line. That's where your obsession with making goals started. One day, your dad asked you if you knew why he woke up every morning to go running. And you replied that it was because he wanted to add value to his rugby team and to deserve his spot on the team. He replied that that was true. But there's a much bigger reason.
• 16:54
  Randall Kaplan: What was that reason? And how does it apply to all of us?
• 16:57
  Mike Horn: I think that in life, I had one fear as a kid that somebody else was trying to do more than I could. And if you've got that fear as a kid to say that I want to deserve my place in the team, or in the science class, or in the environmental club, or whatever you doing, if you're willing to do a little bit more, then you're going to deserve your place. My father woke up to go training because he played rugby, and he wanted to deserve his place in a really well established team. I always thought that if I could do a little bit more than my friends, I would run faster, play better, and improve my skills as a human being. That was one thing. But when I told my father that I thought he woke up every morning at six o'clock to go running because he wanted to add value to his team. He wanted to deserve his place. He said to me, Mike, there's got to be something more than just adding value and deserving your place.
• 18:00
  Mike Horn: There's got to be a reason beyond just what you think is superficial success. That kind of was a curveball that he threw at me, what could motivate a person more than what we think is success visually, that other people see from you. And he said to me, that you know, when I hear your little steps behind me, and I know that you want to beat that line that you drew on the pavement, and I know you want to go further than that.
• 18:37
  Mike Horn: And that's the reason why you running behind me. It inspires me. That's the key word that I thought was beyond any goal that we can set in our life is how can we inspire others that would go beyond the goals that they've actually said, or inspire them to get off their backsides to go out there and make that first step into adventure, even though it might be dangerous, it might be risky, we all need inspiration. And I was the one that inspired my father to wake up every morning to go running.
• 19:19
  Mike Horn: And I thought he was the inspiration behind me. So inspiration is something that kind of goes two ways. The more you inspire people, the more you get inspired. And we must never think that we don't inspire other people. You don't need to be a superstar or an amazing wealthy person to be inspirational. You just got to be who you are. And the moment that you can inspire your family, you can inspire your kids, and you can inspire the colleagues that actually work with you. That is when you really start adding value to the life of others and yourself. You mentioned
• 20:02
  Randall Kaplan: goals. We all have goals when most people I know casually talk about their goals as far as like I have a goal and I'll work hard to get there and hope I do get there in Search of Excellence. How important is it to write our goals down, focus on them, make a specific plan on how to achieve them and hold ourselves accountable to
• 20:21
  Mike Horn: them. I think that Randy a lot of times in life, we kind of underestimate what we can really do. Whatever you can write down on paper will be too small. I believe that if there is a process of understanding and you living in the moment present, and not always see the past better than it was in the future worse than that what what it will be then you're not going to have a goal written on a paper that is really adapted to your capabilities. So I believe that if you have five to 10% of the answers of the unknown, when you write down your goals, that is when you know enough to be able to want to reach them.
• 21:08
  Mike Horn: Those you will need 100% of the answers to all the questions before they set out to reach their goals will never leave home, they will stay at home, because it's impossible to get 100% of all the answers. So if I have five or 10% of my answers, and of the questions that I have of reaching certain goals, I set out there to go and reach them.
• 21:35
  Mike Horn: And everything that I've done in my life, I found the answers of the other questions on my journey towards that goal. And those answers or loved experiences, those answers sometimes makes the goal more approachable. And if you need the answers before, you never gonna leave home. That's why I believe that if you've got a solid base, and that's what's important in education, if you teach your kids to have a solid base, and then you give them wings to fly, they can head off anyway. And if they burn their wings, they can always come back to the base because it's solid, it's there for them. So you don't need 100% Of all the answers before you leave. You need just to know that you have a base and that the intentions behind what you want to do a solid.
• 22:35
  Randall Kaplan: Let's go back to your dad, who is your hero and I want to talk about his rugby career for listeners and viewers who don't know there's a lot of people in the US watching this rugby is a close context team sport that originated in the first half of the 19 century where players run and pass an oval shaped football on a rectangular field called a pitch and as h shaped goalposts at both ends, rugby fields are between 103 and 109 yards in length, and 75 and 77 yards in width and each team has 15 players. Similar to an NFL ball a rugby ball is 11 inches long but has a flatter and compared to the pointy end of a football.
• 23:08
  Randall Kaplan: rugby ball weighs a pound an NFL ball weighs a few ounces less.
• 23:12
  Randall Kaplan: It's a very rough sport on like NFL players rugby players don't wear helmets and don't have any padding or protective gear. And even though it's not mainstream sport in the United States, it is extremely popular around the world that has 405 million fans, and 10 million players and 220 countries in 221 countries in the last World Cup, which was held in Japan in 2019 had 857 million viewers, making it the fifth most watched sporting event in the world that year.
• 23:43
  Randall Kaplan: Your dad played rugby for the South African national team, which was known as the Springboks, which at the time was the best rugby team in the world. Your dad's last game, they played the New Zealand national rugby team, your dad scored the game winning goal.
• 23:54
  Randall Kaplan: After the game, you went into the locker room with him. And while you were sitting there looking at him, all of his teammates came up to him and told him that he had been an example to them during the entire time he played. He was always the first at training, always the last to leave, always listening to their problems always there supporting them when they needed the most.
• 24:14
  Randall Kaplan: Always there to give them the right answers to problems for which they didn't know the answers. You were just a kid.
• 24:19
  Randall Kaplan: But you thought if you could live a life where people talked about you like that, then you had succeeded, where your dad's teammates laughed, and your dad was sitting there alone with you. You looked at your dad in the eyes, you're just a little boy. And you told him that you wanted to have the same career as him and told him I want to be like you. What did he say to you? And In Search of Excellence? How important is it to have role models? And when we have one does that mean we should do everything that they do?
• 24:44
  Mike Horn: Randy, I think that we all need examples more than role models, role models sometimes becomes an obsession to be like others. And if we have an example of success, then those examples leads to a better life. So meaning that if you like something from somebody, that doesn't matter who why can you not take what you like from each person that you meet, and add it to your life, add it to your life personally. And then if you like something from someone, not necessarily a role model, then he's added value to your life and you add value by taking what you really love from that person. And I think my father, when he understood that I was so inspired by him that I looked at him as somebody I wanted to be like, he understood that it wasn't it didn't want me to be He's exactly like him, and explained that to me, in this way, when I said, I want to be like you, I want the people to say the same things about me one day than what they just told you. I want them to say that you've always been an example, I want them to say that, yes, you were first, at the training, you were last to leave you were there to give them help and assistance when needed. And then he said, Mike, unfortunately, you can't be me. And that took a couple of seconds, for me to understand that, wow, I can't be him. And I was so disappointed when he told me that it actually was a shock to my system. And then a couple of seconds later, he said, you know, you've got to understand that we are all unique individuals. And the best person to be and the easiest person to be is yourself. That's the easiest person to be. Don't use the others as inspiration, and take from them what's valuable for you, and add it to your life. But do not try and be like anybody that you know, and anybody that inspires you.
• 27:14
  Mike Horn: Because the easiest life you can live is just to be who you are.
• 27:21
  Mike Horn: And then he added something that kind of just exploded in my head. And what he added was that, you know, I can see that your life will be much bigger than mine will ever be. And all I needed to do is believe what he said. And the moment you can believe somebody that inspires you, and gives you confidence in life. So at the same time, you as a person, no matter where you are or what you do, we need confidence in ourselves to be able to go out there and believe in what we want to do. And we know that it's a belief in something and believing is not factual believing it's just an idea that we have that we believe in, something might happen. But at the end of the day, that belief turns into an action. If the person that inspires you tells you your life can be bigger, if you don't believe it, or the will not. So why not believe it?
• 28:28
  Randall Kaplan: Someone told me that the four most important words in the human language are I believe in you. And when I heard that the bell rang in my head. And it's one thing to have positive reinforcement for your kids, I have five kids, I have two younger kids. So they won't quite get what that means. But I have 220 year old twin girls and a 18 year old son, I tell them all the time. And I think it really does motivate them to hear that from their dad,
• 28:53
  Mike Horn: Randy Andrew percent, there's no better compliment that you you can give to your kid and reengage in that belief towards you and your education, and behind discipline behind structure behind everything that we want to set up for them to be the best version of themselves.
• 29:13
  Mike Horn: And that is just believing your kid.
• 29:18
  Randall Kaplan: Your dad taught you many things, but two important keys in life. The first is to educate and inform yourself. We've talked about that a little bit. And the second is to be inspired, which we just talked about to work hard and belief in yourself. Can you talk about a little more of the each of these separately, and a lot of people don't have a dad like yours? Where should people go to get inspiration if they didn't get it? And don't get it from their parents or from anybody else? And they're still not inspired today?
• 29:46
  Mike Horn: I think that inspiration is some is the overall topic that we can find today, more than than before we speaking about education and the way if I when I asked my father a question that he couldn't answer you would tell me to go and speak to my mother because she knows more about how to make babies, for example, because she's the one that carries the baby. So I asked my father, how do you make babies and stuff like that? He said, Oh, maybe better ask your mother because she carries the baby in my tummy. But I said Now how does the baby actually get there? Go and speak to your mother. She'll tell you. And then I went to my mother and my mother. She was busy cooking and I was with her in the kitchen. I said how do you make a baby out? Why does how does the baby grow and stuff like that? And then she said, you know it's a little bit difficult. I think you've got to speak to your grandfather. And I went to my grave Father, and yeah, at that stage, he was still, they were still living by with us. And he took me to the library. And he got the books out. And then he said, That's a penis, that's a vagina. And this is how it works. So it was education from a generation that was much older than my father and my mother. But that is where wisdom comes from. Because when you look at an older person, there's got to be somebody something that he did either dry, to be able to become old and to be successful at what he did. So that's where it's important as well, for somebody that doesn't have fathers and doesn't have mothers to be able to go to an older generation as well, that have the time to share a little bit of their knowledge. And there's a lot of old people, sometimes I just went to old age homes, and some amazing war veterans could speak to me about, I wanted to go to the South African special forces fight in Angola to protect people, and speaking to veterans, because my father didn't do it. And he couldn't informing couldn't inspire me by that became my inspiration. So there's no excuse for education, there's information ready to be found everywhere. But we have access to so much today on the internet on Google on the social media platforms, rather go to people, real people that can look you in the eyes and give you the information. And don't always look and believe all the videos that you can see and find online. So that is basically how I was educated through having access to the library, and then to different generations of people
• 32:46
  Randall Kaplan: to asides on this. First, I think there's no more important investment you can make in yourself in education. And the second thing I want to I want to mention actually, a book was popular in the US, I don't know, if it wasn't South Africa, that's titled, where do babies come from? I remember my dad showing me this book. And I thought to myself, this is very odd. And I was embarrassed. And I, frankly, I think I was six years old. And I still didn't quite get it. And I didn't ask any questions I learned later on from someone in in I think the fourth grade who really explained it to me in great detail, I guess his grandfather had explained it more to him than my dad did to me.
• 33:28
  Mike Horn: Randy exactly, that's that's where information comes from education can be from your mind that sits next to you in class or a senior at school or junior at school, we all live in a different environment, and have different sources of education. So if we only find our education from one source, we limiting our capabilities.
• 33:53
  Mike Horn: That's why a curious somebody that's curious that wants to find more information. He's wandering and playing the field, he wants to get the most information possible, and then decide what's good for him and what's not good for him. But imagine you can become curious in education. And you don't always listen to that same boring professor that you don't really like, but the subject interests you. There's so many ways of education, that you can find the right person to educate the subject that you're interested, if you don't connect to your professor or to your teacher.
• 34:34
  Randall Kaplan: Like your dad, you played rugby, and in your teenage years, your dream was to go to the Olympics. But that wasn't possible because South Africans were not allowed to participate due to its apartheid government. South Africa did have compulsory military service and when you were 17, you were selected to join the South African Special Forces. You were chosen from a pool of 4000 young men, a group that was whittled down to 400. And then to 40. You were sent to Nambia and then to Angola where you fought Russian communist insurgents who are crossing the South African borders. You weren't sitting in tanks, you were fighting guerrilla warfare in close combat, setting up landmines and other explosive tracking the Russians are gathering intelligence behind enemy lines.
• 35:16
  Randall Kaplan: This was your first time in your life that you witnessed death.
• 35:19
  Randall Kaplan: We're going to talk a lot more later in the podcast about the incredible danger of what you do for living some specifics of your expeditions. But before we do you tell us how spending time in the army and witnessing death influenced your future? And what are the two kinds of people you learned about when you were in the army?
• 35:38
  Mike Horn: That was quite interesting. Randy when I when I was chosen to go to the Special Forces and that's more or less at the same time that my father got cancer and passed away. So when He asked me why I wanted to join the Special Forces. He wants you to understand the reason behind why I want you to go out there and fight the war.
• 36:03
  Mike Horn: And I said, because I think that I can make a difference, I can save lives, I can be the one that not only engage into an action, but I can avoid that action, I can avoid a disaster, because he taught me how to look at things. And that was quite important. And maybe a story we could could share a little bit later that he asked me one day to look at a wall and tell me what he what I see just looking at a wall. And the way that he taught me how to look at things.
• 36:47
  Mike Horn: I started applying in my life to the age of 18 years old when he got cancer and eventually passed away. So the fact that I became a Special Forces soldier that went out into Angola, to fight Russian insurgents that were infiltrating into South Africa, to get to the uranium that we had, for me, at that stage, I thought, wow, I've got to fight this war. I've got to be able not to die at a very young age.
• 37:22
  Mike Horn: And when I told my father that, I think I can make the difference, and that he educated me in a way to outsmart others.
• 37:31
  Mike Horn: Maybe he said to me, Mike, the only way you can survive the war, is if you don't fight it, don't go and fight the war, because you'll die. Go out there with the mentality to survive the war. And then you will make right decisions, not meaning you won't possibly be killed, or you won't have to take the life of others in several other situation, but think about survival, don't think about fighting. And when I came back from Angola, and I was one of the very few that was left alive. It was most probably because I thought of surviving surviving the war. While I was fighting it, while the others were only thinking of fighting the war to win it. That's not the same mentality.
• 38:27
  Randall Kaplan: You spent two years in the Army. And when you got out, you went to Stellenbosch University in Western Cape South Africa, where you studied human movement, injuries and science. I got a degree in marketing, all of which you credit with giving you a sense of the psychology of competition when you graduated that you then got a job working for your uncle's food, import and export business, you devise a very clever way to take advantage of the cold winter frost, I would often destroy the cabbages grown in South Africa, you would buy cabbages from farmers and keep them in a massive cooler until a frost arrived, and then sell them to supermarkets on the promise they would keep buying from you. Even after the weather thought you made a fortune and in your early 20s, you became a millionaire.
• 39:06
  Randall Kaplan: And similar to most people becoming a millionaire, making a lot of money was a big turning point in your life, money that could buy you a nice house and a nice car and a lot of other things which could support a family one day. But the turning point for you didn't turn out to be what you thought it would instead, the turning point was when you realize what you thought you wanted in life was not really what you wanted. Can you tell us why and tell us about the party through and England, Switzerland and Israel and going to the airport to start a new life with two T shirts, two pair of shorts $50 in your pocket, and enough to pay for a standby plane ticket.
• 39:43
  Randall Kaplan: And In Search of Excellence?
• 39:47
  Randall Kaplan: Where should money rank in our career goals and in life?
• 39:51
  Mike Horn: Randy being brought up in South Africa, both my parents being professors that at universities and colleges, obviously gave me a good education. And I knew that the moment that you educate yourself, well, you can make a success. And we all measure success with the amount of money we make. And that is usually by the car, you drive in the house that you love clothes, you're wearing your friends surrounding you that already as a young kid, I had around me because of more or less the success of both of my parents. So we weren't extremely wealthy. We weren't living a life that was in five star hotels and private jets, sport cars and that we had an ordinary life but A life that allowed us to be able to go on holiday together as a family, a life that allowed us to have enough food, and to be able to have a quality of life that a certain amount of money allows you to have. And I believe that it would always be good to have a little bit more. So when I studied and I did my post grad studies and, and I kept on doing my honours degree, and I went into the company with my uncle, I thought that wow, this is an opportunity on the biggest fresh produce market in the southern hemisphere to capture a gap in the market with cabbage, you know that hundreds and 1000s of tons of cabbage gets eaten a day in Africa, cabbage staple food for 80% of the world. And South Africa producing so much cabbage obviously became massive amount of produce being put on the market. And when you have so much produce, the price drops, because the demand could be less than the produce that you have available. Supply and demand.
• 42:11
  Mike Horn: Simple. There was our supply.
• 42:16
  Mike Horn: And the demand was normal. And I decided to stop the supply. And to keep the demand as normal.
• 42:24
  Mike Horn: looked at the way that and so that the best time to do it is when they have that black frost when the cabbage actually freezes. And that happens once or twice or three times a year in South Africa. So every day, we produce a wicked cabbage and I let the I asked the farmers to trust me, and I offered them double the price that the market was offering to them. So all the farmers in South Africa send the cabbage to a central market like the stock exchange. That is where your price gets determined with the amount of cabbage that you have. But we speaking about hundreds and 1000s of tonnes of cabbage. So one cabbage could be$1. Over supply the cabbage price drops to $50. And you've got to get rid of it because tomorrow there is a next amount of cabbage arriving on the market. So what I did was I asked the farmers to let the cabbage rot on the fields, not cut it for two days, and then send all the cabbage to be that I would store in massive cooling rooms where trains would come in and offload the cabbage. So I would starve the market from cabbage and created demand. And that's what happened. I basically right timing, the black frost came in no cabbages produced I had all the cabbage in my cooling rooms. And that's how I created the demand. And when I made a lot of money, I all of a sudden realized that, wow, I don't need any more. Why must I wake up to go and work.
• 44:08
  Mike Horn: It's not really after having the house that I wanted and bought the first car that I really wanted that I thought that now I was happy. I felt empty. I felt that this was the end of life instead of the beginning of my life. And that's when I had that massive party. And my sister was was a lawyer. And I said prepare contracts for me that I'm inviting all my friends from the military, from the University from school. And all my friends are going to leave with either my house, my car, my bike, my motorbike, my kayaks, everything I had. And I packed a little bag of two t shirts and two shorts.
• 44:49
  Mike Horn: And by the end of the weekend after that party, I had nothing left. Nothing belonged to me.
• 44:58
  Mike Horn: But the bag that I had in my hand, money for standby ticket and 50 Swiss francs, or stress, euros in cash. And I wanted to start a new life. And that's when I went to the airport. But South Africans were boycotted at that stage. Apartheid was an issue. Nelson Mandela was still in prison. And we couldn't travel to places around the world. And that is just where I went to the airport. And without visas, we could travel to Israel, England, and Switzerland. I didn't want to go to England. I didn't really want to go to Israel at that stage.
• 45:36
  Mike Horn: But the first plane was to Tel Aviv. I got on the standby list, but didn't get onto the plane because the plane was full. The second plane left to Zurich. I had one spot on that plane paid for my ticket arrived in Zurich and that's where I live today.
• 45:54
  Randall Kaplan: So you move to Zurich, and shortly after you got there you work as a firm hand or River Keeper, a bar man, a wood cutter and a grape picker, then you hitchhike to a small town in the Swiss Alps, worked in a hostel, taught yourself how to ski so you could earn money as an instructor, but you quickly tired of that and became an instructor for an outdoor company that offered extreme activities including hydrospeed. A lot of people in the US don't know what that is.
• 46:18
  Randall Kaplan: It means jumping into fast flowing Whitewater, and being carried along at high speeds while buoyed by a small boat, canyoning which means rappelling rafting and waterfall jumping in app sailing, which means descending down near vertical rock faces. After a year there you left for a paragliding and rafting expedition in the Peruvian Andes. That was your first extreme mission. And while you were paragliding around Machu Picchu, you crashed and ended up in the hospital for a month. But that didn't stop you.
• 46:43
  Randall Kaplan: When you got out of the hospital, you returned to Switzerland, and were invited to join the sector. No Limit sports team where you started taking part in big overseas adventures.
• 46:52
  Randall Kaplan: Your next feat was descending down the Mount blanc glacier, which is 9000 feet tall, on a bodyboard that was followed by descending down by descending by delta plane from a 22,000 foot high mountain that was followed by river board into the Colca Canyon, which is 6000 feet deep, but one of the world's deepest canyons, and that was followed by river boarding down a 22 meter high waterfall at the baker River in Costa Rica, which was a record for the highest descend down a waterfall, was you said was the buzziest thing you've ever done? Before we talk about what came next I want to go back to when you were lying in the hospital, you had a lot to think about. Take inventory and think about your future. At this point. Many people would have said, All right, this was fun. I got ahead of myself at this time to stop doing crazy things. You had the opposite reaction, and it was another turning point in your life. Can you tell us why it was the turning point in your life and you tell us the difference in mindset between those who would have stopped paragliding. And those like you who say I don't care that I almost died and was in the hospital for a month. And then I'm going to continue to do dangerous things that can kill me. It's really
• 48:05
  Mike Horn: true that when you look at it, what I do from the outside, you might think that it's extremely dangerous. But the moment you make a mistake, you've got to learn from it. And we don't often learn from our mistakes. And I don't understand that we allow people to make two or three or four times the same mistake with the learning in the fact that a mistake we all can make. But there's something that you've got to that you've got to get out of that mistake that's going to help you not to make further mistakes. So you've got to understand our mind work. And I'll explain that very briefly that the world to win must overpower the fear of failure or the fear to lose. And it's only when the world to win becomes bigger than the fear to lose in our mind that you can really go out there and achieve amazing things. If we're afraid of losing our money. If you're afraid of losing your friends and your house and your car or whatever, you're going to live a happy life and you're going to succeed but you're not going to do extraordinary things. And extraordinary things. Once you've stopped doing them. You it becomes like a little bit of an addiction. And I was addicted to what I was doing. I loved every second of that stress of that unknown, or that engagement. And the moment that I can engage with my word. And I follow what I say. That's when I said that, okay, yes, I broke my legs. I ended up in hospitals, but I survived. So now I'm richer. I'm stronger in knowledge and experience, and that I paid for that experience loved. And if I shy away from that now, then I'm a failure.
• 50:00
  Mike Horn: That's got to be used to enhance my decision making to help me to climb higher mountains quicker to fly from the highest mountains that I did in South America, the West Chiron to descend the highest waterfalls done with the boogie board. It's because I lived experiences. I broke my knee. I ended up in hospital. I paid cash for my engagement. But that engagement that I did was because my will to win was bigger than my fear of losing. If you are afraid of losing or afraid of failure, you not going to engage into something where you are going to go beyond your comfort zone to really win. And that's a mindset that we can apply Live in anything that we do today, the fact that you can really go out there and continue doing what you love doing, and not seeing all these little obstacles as total failures and changing the course of your life. Just adapt the course of your life, to whatever happens to you. And I've sailed 27 times around the world. If the wind changes, and the storms come in, I'm ready for them. I just adapt my sails.
• 51:25
  Mike Horn: I lower the surface, I'm still going into the storm, but I'm doing it more wisely. Don't run away from problems run towards them. And the moment you run towards them, you come with enough knowledge and experience to overcome them.
• 51:42
  Randall Kaplan: All right, let's talk about some of your expeditions. And we're going to start with your first major one, the one that first made you famous. It was 1997. And you're 31 years old. And at this point, you had the idea, which supposedly came from a Swiss five Swiss franc bet with a friend, in which even you called crazy to go to South America and swim in river board. 7000 kilometers are 4350 miles down the Amazon River, which involves lying on your stomach on something that resembles a boogie board. You spent two years preparing for the trip, which included spending a year with a Brazilian Army Special Forces to learn how to survive in the Amazon jungle. And when you left for your trip, you only had your hydrospeed which is your special boogie board, a pair of fins a wetsuit and a bag with the bare essentials and included medicine paper SOS beacons, a fishing net and a machete. You started your trip by walking through under 75 miles with all of your equipment from the Pacific Ocean to the Peruvian Andes where the river begins 600 miles into your drip, you broke your knee, punching over some rapids and you stayed on the shore for four days without moving too much bandage up your knee and that got back in the water for the remaining 3700 miles to go. After breaking your new your next challenge was to find food you were surviving mainly on fish has save time and energy by staying on land for two or three days to find food and then stay in the water for six or seven days. You slept eight and swam in the water and at one point stayed in the water for 10 days. Because the middle of the river is where the strongest Ford current was and because it's also the safest. On your journey, you met an Inca drive called the Guca YALI region of Peru that imprisoned you and thought you were a child killing devil who had to be killed. You speak Spanish, actually, you speak seven languages. And fortunately, there was a translator in the tribe who managed to convince them that killing a devil was unnecessary because if they killed you, you would become two devils. And if they tried to cut off your head, there would be three devils and therefore you are immortal and that they couldn't kill you. When the tribesmen searched your bag, they found your SOS beacon and one of the tribesmen accidentally activated the SOS signal. And you told them that if they killed you men would come from the sky by helicopter.
• 53:50
  Randall Kaplan: Three hours later, the helicopter did come and cause panic among the Incas, you are free, but you knew that the expedition would be canceled if the helicopter found you because you were in a forbidden red zone, because there were drug traffickers based there. So what did you do your turn off the beacon and hidden continued your adventure you ventured up, you ventured out and then met up with a snake that didn't like you very much. Can you tell us what happened and how you managed to survive and continue on when you couldn't see for five days and the message that you were going to send to your wife Kathy at the time, but never were able to
• 54:25
  Mike Horn: Randi out, it was an epic adventure to imagine that you can can basically swim down the Amazon on a boogie board and live 100% from nature, meaning that I didn't take any food. I only instructed myself on how to find food, what I could eat, what could kill me to be able to know how to survive. So I armed myself, I didn't take money. I took knowledge. So after the South African Special Forces, I joined the Brazilian Special Forces they actually trained Americans before they went to Vietnam. And the special forces in my now set six. I did an exchange program for them and they gave me a pile of books about that I put on everything that I could eat everything that I couldn't eat all the snakes that could kill me all the snakes that couldn't kill me.
• 55:22
  Mike Horn: And I quickly understood that there was just so much knowledge. I needed to know so much of the jungle to be able to really survive, to be able to understand what I could eat and what I couldn't eat. What could kill me and what couldn't kill me. And I started looking at the books on snakes and I'm no not not a fun lover of snakes, especially the poisonous ones or the venomous ones and and I kind of do started looking and paging through the snakes comparing a lot of these of the snakes to be able to identify the ones that's poisonous, and the others, that wouldn't be poisonous, the difference in between them. And I realized that while there was confusion, and I started tearing out the pages of the snakes that couldn't kill me, why should I know a snake can't kill me. So all the information, only it's focused on what could stop you what snake can kill you what you can eat, I didn't want to know what I cannot eat, I cannot eat it, it's not important to me.
• 56:34
  Mike Horn: And a pile of books that was about three foot high became a couple of inches high. And that's what I knew. If I didn't identify something I didn't involve in it. I didn't get involved in it because it was a snake snake that couldn't kill me. And then I knew that in the jungle, in the Amazon, especially in South America, everything a monkey eat, you can eat. If a monkey sits on top of the tree and he eats a green leaf, climb up the tree and eat the green leaf don't eat the yellow one. Because he's not eating the yellow leaves. He's eating the green ones, and he won't eat poison. He knows better than you. So what monkey do you do. And that's basically how I survived. So if the monkeys didn't eat, then I didn't know what to eat, unless identified something that I could eat. And if the monkey sits on top of the tree, and he doesn't eat, you can always eat the monkey, because you can catch the monkey. And that's the difference in between human beings. Being able to open up so much of the information that gets lost unnecessary information that we get every day that is not important that overwhelms our life that occupies our mind with stuff that we should never know about or not worry about that spare we pollute our life. So I focused on what I could do. And everything that monkey eat, you can eat a snake, the snake, I wanted to carry on through the jungle quicker and faster to be able to spend less time in the jungle. And that would allow me to take less risks. So I started walking at night, making my way through the jungle with my machete. I accidentally touch a snake that was living between head height and chase tied behind leaves. And it bugged me.
• 58:33
  Mike Horn: That felt painful. But because I was injured and cut and bruised everywhere, it was just another little injury. Couple of feet further, it felt like I drank a bottle of whiskey, the whole world started turning and I said whoa, this is crazy. I've been bitten by something. And I started looking with my head lamp and to try and find a bite.
• 58:54
  Mike Horn: And I saw two little holes in my little finger. So actually the hand that I held the machete to cut the branch it was in front of me. The snake was behind the branch and I couldn't I couldn't see it. And it bugged me. Now we know that, okay, well, it's quite poisonous because I can feel the effect. And now I've got to be able to slow down my heart rate. Now I've got to keep the wound lower than my heart.
• 59:26
  Mike Horn: Now I've got to put myself in a situation that I can feed and eat myself without increasing my heart rate. Meaning that I know what to do what is right. And usually if a snake actually bites you, that means that it couldn't get out of your way.
• 59:44
  Mike Horn: The Cobra Yes at attacks you, the Cobra will come towards you, but you will see it coming. But all the other snakes will defend itself. And actually when you get bitten by a snake and it means that it's digesting food, it's there. It doesn't want to move, it's digesting it slowly.
• 1:00:01
  Mike Horn: And when it uses venom to kill its prey, so it can eat it. It means that that period of time that it's actually digesting, it's got very little venom, not enough venom to kill you because he used it to kill his prey. And that is when you have to cut off the head of the steak about two inches behind the head to look into the stomach if the snake has eaten something and if you can identify the snake you know how to treat the bite. And all those things are things that we have to educate ourselves with.
• 1:00:40
  Mike Horn: So I was lying in my hammock, I felt to all i All the feeling in my face disappeared. I started going like half blind. And then I knew that I couldn't fall asleep, I should fight this, this is a mental fight. Now, if I want to survive, the only way that I could communicate to Kathy was via a black box like the aeroplanes would would have, and they 16 pre coded messages, these messages have a circuit certain frequency. So if I would send a frequency up to the satellite, the frequency would travel 40,000 kilometres up into the air, captured by a satellite then get sent 40,000 kilometres back to Toulouse in France, to the space agency, and then via fax back home, to where I live in Switzerland. So my wife would get the message. If she was lucky. 10 seconds later, they 16 pre coded messages, like I said, message one all okay, message 16, I'm dying. After the third day, I felt that while I'm not going to survive, and I turned the frequency to message 16 Before I sent a message, lost consciousness. And I think that's actually what saved my life. Because if I would send that message, I would accept that this was the way out. But because it was never sent.
• 1:02:18
  Mike Horn: Subconsciously, I needed to stay alive. Because my wife never got that message. And I was gonna die.
• 1:02:26
  Randall Kaplan: 171 days, seven hours and 45 minutes after you started, you arrived on the Atlantic Ocean, and you had made it when you tasted the saltwater of the ocean. For all of you who want to see this that's online, in a video really awesome to see, you had made it an incredible feat and accomplished an incredible goal, something that nobody else in the world had ever done. And at the age of 38, you had your entire career in front of you. We're going to talk about the importance of dreams and reasons why we do things in a minute. But before we do, you tell us what you were feeling when you saw the Atlantic Ocean in front of you, and what you felt as you were swimming towards it and then actually crossed it. And In Search of Excellence, how important is it for us to set aggressive goals for ourselves goals that are out of our comfort zone? Not a little out of our comfort zones, but way out of our comfort zones? And how does our mental health factor into our success?
• 1:03:23
  Mike Horn: Already, we dream too small in life, we think things are not possible because we get told that it's not possible to do imagine people telling you it's possible to do it, then you kind of say, Wow, if he thinks I can do it, then I must be able to do it. It's sure that you've got there's a difference in being motivated to do something, and sometimes are not motivated.
• 1:03:54
  Mike Horn: And sometimes we rely too much on motivation. Motivation, to me is a lot of BS. I don't believe in positive thinking and motivation. Because when I'm in the Amazon River, I'm not motivated to get out of my hammock to jump into the river and swim into the mouth of the Amazon. That's nearly 225 miles wide. You in a river. And in this river there is the island bigger than Switzerland. Nobody in his right mind will ever be motivated to do that. So what makes me actually do it. And I think that question is important to us. Because if you need to motivate yourself, you should not do it. Because you need to motivate yourself. I believe that there is discipline in life. And the moment you apply self discipline. That's when discipline makes you wake up.
• 1:04:51
  Mike Horn: Discipline gets you into the rubber. Discipline makes you take those risks. And the moment you do it. That's when you start becoming motivated. And that motivation that's ignited by the discipline that you play in play in your life actually makes a difference. You can't do something extraordinary. If you only rely on motivation. There's got to be a deeper, more concrete discipline that you apply in everyday life. You are successful because you applied a discipline in your life. Your kids are well educated because there is a discipline in life.
• 1:05:31
  Mike Horn: And behind that discipline, the motivation starts. So the Amazon River, like I said, it's 321 kilometres wide. I'm in this middle of this river. And I do not know if I'm in that atlantic ocean or in the Amazon Over the Amazon River actually pushes back the Atlantic Ocean more than 80 kilometers, it's about 38 or 40 miles, that the power of the river, there's 20% of the fresh water on the planet that actually pours out of the mouth of the Amazon and pushes back the Atlantic Ocean. The only way that I knew that I was going to stop, or that I was in the Atlantic Ocean was by tasting the water. So it was fresh water. And every day for a period of more than one week, I tasted the water. And I thought I was going to get into that Atlantic Ocean, because it's titled, you move forward and you move backwards with the tide.
• 1:06:38
  Mike Horn: And that slowed me down quite a lot. And you there with your flippers, and you've swimming as much as you can to be able to get into the Atlantic Ocean. And the day I tasted that water turn salt, to me, was most probably one of the greatest memories that I had as an explorer simply because it was something that was denied from me, it was kept away from me for so long. And I really wanted to taste it. And I was not sure that it was really salt that I was tasting, or only my mind playing games with me.
• 1:07:19
  Mike Horn: So I swim another day, further into the Atlantic Ocean, and then set off my beak and for the satellites to capture my position to prove that I was in the middle of the Amazon River already in the Atlantic Ocean.
• 1:07:33
  Mike Horn: And then it took me more than a week to swim to the side of the river. So it's an epic story.
• 1:07:44
  Mike Horn: One man alone in our ocean, completely on this little boogie board, living on a space that's three feet in diameter. And luckily, with the tides rising and dropping, I could then return that on the tide that I swam out with and use the tides in acceleration with my flippers to get back to the side of the river. And that's when the idea of the next expedition started.
• 1:08:21
  Randall Kaplan: Thanks for listening to part one of my amazing conversation with Mike horn, the greatest explorer of modern times. Be sure to tune in next week for part two of my awesome conversation with Mike