Transcriber: Nancy Reeves Reviewer: Daniel Lopez
So I distinctly remember that evening of October of 2010.
We had walked for ten days through some of
the most spectacular scenery of my entire life.
We had reached Everest Base Camp and I remember we were all in
the dining tent that evening, chit chatting and enjoying.
But one thing that struck me really hard was the moment I entered
the dining tent on the right hand side of the tent,
there was this massive poster wall,
and there were pictures of a lot of climbers who had lost their fingers,
who had lost their toes. There are dead climbers.
There are climbers who were being rescued.
And I was a little bit scared as a potential Everest aspirant.
I kind of was a little worried that what kind of marketing tactic is this?
So I sat down and I asked my expedition leader, Tim Rappel,
that why have you put this pictures on the wall?
It's almost as if you are trying to scare us not to come and climb Everest.
And his words really struck me hard at that point.
He told me, Kuntal, if you make any mistake on Everest,
if there is any failure on Everest, your picture will end up on this wall.
Keep that at the back of your mind. This is what Everest does every single year.
It kills people. It injuries people.
And this is what happens time and time and time again.
And to someone who had fallen in love with Everest
and someone who had promised himself to climb Everest,
I was curious and I asked him, Tim,
so what's the secret ingredient behind climbing Everest?
You have been putting people on top of Everest for almost more than 20 years.
What's the secret? And Tim's words struck me really, really hard.
He told me, Kuntal, to climb to the top of the world,
you need a top of the world body and you need a top of the world mind.
And back then, in October of 2010, I had neither.
And so one of the first steps that I decided
that I was going to pursue to climb Everest was I wanted to do
a mountaineering course. I quickly realized that
I did not have any skills to climb Everest,
so it made a lot of sense to get some skill.
But more than that, become a reliable mountaineer,
to become a self-reliant mountaineer, and
become a mountaineer who would be an asset to a team and not any kind of
a liability to a team. That was my complete mindset.
So I signed up for this course,
which was going to be run in the northern ice cap of
the third biggest ice sheet on the planet in the Chilean, in Chilean
Patagonia. So all of us,
we were about six students and we were going to be guided by two instructors.
We all kind of landed in Chile, and we were in this remote small town.
And then from there we were able to access the glacier.
The idea was to do crossing of the entire ice cap from one end to
the next end, and as students,
we would be doing this for the first time and while doing the entire crossing,
we would be learning a lot of skills. We would be learning how to build anchors.
You would be learning how to like dig snow caves.
You would be learning how to cook.
We would be just learning every single skill that would be required
for us to become strong mountaineers.
And this was a student run course and an instructor guided course.
So that was the whole concept. And when I had signed up for the course
there was this long laundry list of things that people had to do to qualify
to get to this course. So there were things like you have to be able to climb
3000 feet or climb while wearing a 35 cagie backpack at a certain speed,
and that you should be able to do X, you should be able to do Y.
And there was this long list of things that I had to be able to do before
I signed up for the course.
And I looked at the laundry list of things, and I said,
but I have walked Everest Base Camp, that’s a tough trek on its own.
And I am such an experienced hiker in the local mountains.
And I do these treks and I do these climbs all the time.
So I am just going to sign up irrespective,
even though they say that all this is required.
I know, you know, I am this amazing climber and amazing trekker
and this amazing fitness enthusiast.
And so I signed up for the course and I landed in Chilean Patagonia.
And I remember, it was a 42 day course.
And for the first 15 days, I struggled and I struggled and I struggled.
Every single thing became almost a life threatening experience from going
and crossing the glacier on the next site to just go and take a poop.
That was a big, big, big task for me.
It’s almost as if every day as you would go into the field and
you would be spending 12, 14, 16 hours climbing and learning skills,
I realized that every single day as I came back home,
I would kind of realize that today I was saved five times, or
today I didn’t break my leg, or
today I didn’t break my hand or today I didn’t fell into a crevasse.
Or some of the days I did fell into a crevasse and nearly died.
And every day I would come back and I would count,
search for five or six instances where I was almost going to die or
almost going to break my hands or bones and I was saved.
After 15 days, there was a point where we had an exit point and where
I could go home and I decided that it was time. I had a realization that
I had totally, totally underestimated the mountain.
I totally underestimated the difficulty of the course.
I totally underestimated the overall experience and
on the other hand, I had overestimated my own abilities, and
that was a big realization that happened to me.
I remember that evening,
for the first time in my mountaineering career.
It was a very short mountaineering career anyway. I actually ended up crying.
I cried a lot that it was a massive failure.
I had spent close to some $10,000
to sign up for the course and for the travel fees and
all those kind of things and I had actually failed.
So I went to an instructor and I said exactly this thing, exactly said the
same. I underestimated your course and I overestimated my abilities.
Now I’ve learned my lesson and I’m lucky to be alive,
because given what had happened the last 15 days, this is a pretty,
pretty big thing that I'm alive and I want to stay alive.
I want to be able to climb mountains for all my life and
it does not make sense to continue in this course.
I should not have been as arrogant when I saw
the list of things that you folks had written that I should have followed.
I should have followed that list and I should have come out better prepared.
I should have done justice to my journey.
I should have set myself up for success better and I did not do that and I
quit the course. I quitted the course. I stayed alive. I learned my lesson.
And this was one of the first biggest failures of my mountaineering journey.
But this failure taught me one very important thing that in
some of the most crucial journeys of your life
you want to overprepare, overprepare, overprepare.
And since then, that has always been my mindset.
For the last decade or so, for every climb that I go on, I am hyper prepared.
I am. I put in 150% of what I have,
and that is what I also did for about five years in
the run up to my Everest journey and
I remember signing up for an Everest climb in 2014 and I was super ready
super strong. Unfortunately, on my attempt in 2014
17 shepherd guides ended up dying and my expedition was cancelled.
So I had to turn around and I had to come back home.
I cannot presume to say, yes, the
biggest dream of my life came kind of crumbling down in front of me,
but I was like, I am alive. The mountain is still there.
I can go back again if I want and that is what I did.
I went back to climb that mountain in 2015, and
this time things were going great.
But on 25th April, we were hit by a massive earthquake, a 7.9
magnitude earthquake, one of the largest to hit Nepal in a century.
And we were in the middle of that.
That earthquake ended up inducing a massive avalanche and
I still remember when I was standing and
there were these people in front of me they were all running towards Everest.
And that’s when I realized that the avalanche was behind me
and so I turned around and I saw that from the left of the sky to the right of
the sky, like, you know, you see this background.
This entire background was just filled with snow and ice.
It was almost like a massive tsunami of snow and
ice that was coming towards me and
in that moment, I did not think that I was going to die.
I was actually very certain that I was going to die.
But we miraculously escaped death.
Unfortunately, 10,000 people in Nepal lost their lives and
more than 21 people died at the base camp. More than 100 were badly injured.
Gruesome injuries like people breaking their bones,
people breaking a lot of things and it didn’t make sense to climb the mountain.
And so we canceled expedition and we turned around and we came back home
the next day. Came back home and I had gone twice and had failed twice.
Again, the most important learning for me was that I am alive.
And this time I actually dodged death and came back, miraculously escaped.
And from that day on, Joisher realized that all that this life that I have is
a bonus, is a second chance, and that I can’t be wasting this life away,
that this dream of mine, that this passion of mine,
that standing on top of the world, that I cannot give up on it now.
That I have to pursue it, that I had to go back again and
I had to reach the top. Yes, I failed, yes, I failed two times.
But if I give up, regrets for the rest of the life are only going to be mine,
no one else’s. So I decided that I was going back again in 2016
and climb the mountain again. And in 2016 I tasted success.
On 19th May 2016, at 9:30 a.m. in the morning,
I was standing on the very top of Mount Everest.
I still remember there was this tear that was flowing down my eyes,
and by the time it reached here, it was already frozen.
It was -40 degrees Celsius. It was cold. I was exhausted. I was miserable.
But hey, I had achieved the biggest dream of my life.
And one of the big reasons why I achieved this dream is because
I did not give up on my dream, is because I kept trying.
But this also kind of brings me to a realization that in the last
so many years of my journey, I have seen that failure is inevitable.
100% it is going to happen.
But in today's hyperconnected and social media driven world,
I have also repeatedly experienced that failure is glorified to quite an extent.
At the same time I have seen
so many of my friends, so many of my co-climbers,
so many of my idle mountaineers get frostbitten on their fingers and toes,
which means that their toes and fingers would be amputated.
I have seen them get brain injuries. I have seen them get lung injuries.
I have seen them have hallucinations on the mountain and seen them die on
the mountain. Failure on the mountain can be fatal and
people can lose their lives. And that is not something that we want.
And which is why I think that glorifying failure is not what we should be doing.
Instead we should be focusing on normalizing failure.
I truly believe that failure is okay.
That failing is okay, that making mistakes is okay.
The important thing is that we learn from these mistakes. We become better.
We become stronger. We become fitter.
We become a much, much, much better version of ourselves.
And then go and try again and again and again.
I think we need to ensure that we don't give up on dreaming,
that we don't give up on our dreams,
that we don’t give up chasing all our dreams from fear of failure.
I have not seen a single, successful person in my life till today who has not
failed. At the same time, all of those people,
they have only succeeded because they have learned from their failures.
And that is one of the biggest kind of takeaways
for me from my entire journey is that failing is okay.
You can't be afraid of failure.
If you are going to do something new, if you are going to try something very,
very different. There is a good chance that you may fail.
But the important thing is that you learn from your failure
and that you always become a better version of yourself
so that you set yourself up for that success, right?
Once you know that you have failed, once you know that you have made a mistake,
you know that you can do or you can go
and succeed at that by doing something differently,
by going and doing something more smartly, by giving yourself the skill,
by giving yourself the fitness.
The important thing in this overall indirect experience that
I have taken away is you cannot give up on your dream
and that you need to keep chasing a dream until you get to the top.
While keeping at the back of your mind that if you don’t get to the top,
it is not the end of the world. There are always more and more and more Everests.
Both physical and metaphorical to always be climbing in life. Thank you so much.