YouSaid · the spoken record

Colin O'Brady

lines on the record: 42
first: 2017-10-29
most recent: 2017-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, absolutely. So the best way to track me down, I'm pretty active on social. I'm at Colin O'Brady, just my name, as well as our nonprofit is called Beyond 7-2, so the 7 for the summits and the two for the polls is what we named it. So beyond 72.com is the website, got a lot of information on the work that we do in schools and with kids and everything like that. So all the information is on there as well as I'm sure in the show notes you'll probably link my TED talk and various media that kind of tells a story and in different format and whatnot. So yeah, definitely please, we love hearing from people.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so for me, living by that and shifting a mindset towards the positive when facing obstacles, when facing setbacks, when facing, when setting audacious goals, that is how we get there. We set the goal. That's the North Star. I know you guys focus a lot on billionaires and the way people accumulate wealth. Those people had amazingly huge ideas that were industry shattering ideas that probably most people said, that's crazy, that's not going to work. Here's all the million reasons why. But they're like, nope. I believe in myself. And not only do I believe in myself, I'm going to wake up every day and take that one smaller step or stack that one tinier little rock. And eventually, after, you know, thousands, if not millions of rocks are stacked on top of each other, I'm going to reach the summit of, you know, whatever your amount of rest is. And so so much of that comes from having that positive mindset, believing in yourself, and really realizing that setbacks are inevitable. Obstacles are inevitable.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And setting this audacious goal. Like I was just saying, like, hey, I'm going to climb the tallest mountain in the world, and this, like, I'm not a professional mountaineer and I don't have funding, but I'm going to do it. Sounded ridiculous. But then what did I do? I said, okay, well, what can I do today to figure that, which might be kind of my computer in Google? What are the tallest seven mountains? You know, like literally the first baby steps, the same example of, great, kid, you want to race a trath one? You're in a wheelchair. You need to figure out how to take one step today. And so something that I really is a huge part of my life that I also tell others is I actually symbolically I carry around a small rock with me, which is actually a rock from the summit of Mount Everest. And the reason that I carry that around with me as a totem now is it's a daily reminder for me that even Mount Everest, even the biggest mountain in the world, ultimately can be broken down to its smallest component parts, a bunch of small rocks stacked on top of each other in a lot of ways, many steps leading to the sun.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. You know, people ask me sometimes if you go back in a time machine, would you still jump that flaming rope? And of course, I know the pain and trauma that it caused me and my family and all this sort of stuff, but I'd be lying to say that it also taught me, you know, simultaneously one of life's greatest lessons, which is resilience and perseverance and getting through hard times. Because unfortunately in life, and I hope that nobody out there goes to the exact same accident as me. But as we all go through life, we inevitably face setbacks and traumas of some kind. And really what I've realized over time is it's up to us how we're going to react to those things. In that hospital room, I could have gone down that deep, dark, downward spiral, which I wanted to, but my mother pulled me out of it and showed me another way. And what I've realized is this amazing ability that we have in our own minds to shift towards that positive mindset and keep taking steps forward one step at a time. And yeah, sometimes, I mean, I'm obviously a big believer.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Places like that and the wild unknown was just such an incredibly fortunate experience. I'm so grateful to be able to have experienced that.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's going to go through this. But it was like, yes, I get to do this. And whoa, where am I right now? And then the other place that is pretty incredible as well is actually the North Pole that stands out. I mean, hiking across literally a frozen ocean where ice is drifting underneath you is wild. Like we'd set up camp at night, go to sleep, and then we'd check our GPS in the morning. We'd either have a big smile on our face or a frown because we'd actually been drifting like, oh, great, we drifted a mile closer to the pole in the middle of the night. Or damn it, you know, we shifted the wrong way. So that's just a crazy environment with these huge icebergs essentially and big flows of ice cracking into each other. So we're actually carrying our sleds over 10 foot walls of ice where ice have kind of compacted and built. It's just like in terms of landscape, it's just one of those things that's like you can't even believe it exists until you're there. It's just a wild, wild place. And so to have the opportunity for me to experience.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. You know, two things come to mind when you ask that question. I have this video clip of myself. Again, I filmed a lot of this myself, so I reflect on some of these video clips that I have. But there's this moment when I actually step off the plane in Antarctica, and it's the moment where my first expedition is beginning. And I just am so blown away by the landscape as I'm looking around. It's just like another planet, just white. I described it before. It's like standing inside the belly of a ping-pong ball. Like it's just this surreal environment as you look around it. And it was this amazing feeling of, oh, I actually get to do this now because I had been working so hard in the planning and convincing people to support this project and the sort of like I said, the entrepreneurial spirit behind building this whole campaign that it was this great moment of like, oh, and that sounds crazy that the first step, it's like there's all this ridiculousness in front of me. And of course, I know it's like the pain and trauma that's going to like happen and the hardship.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so unlike what I said coming from the North Pole to Everest, where I was coming from sea level to Everest, which was really challenging, the one benefit certainly was that I was pre-acclimatized. So the altitude on Denali wasn't, it's crazy to say that 20,000 feet doesn't seem like that high, but when you've just been at 29,000 feet, you're like, oh, that's like nothing. That's like a whole mountain shorter than that. And fortunately for me, Tucker had actually been over on Denali about a week ahead of time, not thinking that we were going to have to go as fast as we pushed, but thinking, oh, Colin's going to come acclimatize. I should probably get my body acclimatized a little bit ahead of him. So he was actually in position to be able to move quick as well, which is a testament to just also, like I said, all the things in the background with Jenna and various other people supporting this with the logistics because the planning and things really paid off in the end or something like this.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That in business and whatnot, but it's always this moment of you know, I was thinking to myself in kind of this mantra of This must be what it takes to do something extraordinary is to have to push through these perceived obstacles. But of course, in the mountains, your margin for error with your health and your body, life and death in a lot of ways is very slight. So you're always kind of checking in like, am I doing something too risky or not? And in this case, I think we are pushing just right on the edge of that envelope. And it turned out well for us. And I'm proud of the accomplishment. But it didn't come easy. And there's a video clip of me arriving to the summit of Denali the moment I actually have set these two records that I've been working multiple years for ultimately at this point, but 139 days straight. And you would think it would be like this joyous smile on my face. But it's just kind of this look of like utter like fatigue, exhaustion, and like frost bit. And I'm not actually frostbitten, but like snow coming off. I don't know. I'm just, I'm out of it. And I had stood on the summit of Everest just six and a half days before that. So it was a crazy week in my life.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, you guys bailing off this mountain? We heard this storm is going to last like 10 days. Like, yeah, we're thinking about bailing out of here as well. And we're like, no, we're going for the summit. And the guy's like, get back. No one's climbing today. Like, this is ridiculous. But we're like, we're just going to see how it goes. And so literally we climb 15 minutes, Chuck Tucker and I check in. How are your fingers? How are your toes? How you feeling? I'm good. Want to go another 15 minutes another 15 minutes, another half hour. You can see where this is going. An hour turns into two, turns into three, and we find ourselves on the summit of Denali. And it meant that I set not one, but I was just a day ahead of setting the second world record. So came home a two-time world record holder. And no one on the entire mountain of Denali, no one else climbed at all that day. So not a single person even moved from their camp. And we went up and summered and came back down in a pretty intense windstorm. But I don't know. It's always interesting when you're up there. You talk about managing risk.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I said that Tucker, can you climb for 15 minutes? And he was like, bro, I'm here for you, man. If you want to go and see if you can make it, like, let's go. So we put all our gear and we were leaving camp. And there's a couple other random tents from other climbers. That guy on Zips' tent and looks at his head and he goes,”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like I said, it normally is climbed in about three weeks, and even that, it's got only about a 30% success rate, even people that spend three plus weeks on the mountain because the weather's so bad. It's a really challenging mountain to climb. And unlike Everest or some of these other mountains, there's no porters or Sherpas. You really have to be self-sufficient completely on the mountain. And I ended up summoning it in three days. But the craziest thing was the day before we were supposed to go for the summit, we were climbing from way lower down the mountain. So usually there's a couple camps that you keep going higher, but we were having to skip those camps. Me and Tucker might climbing partner. And then a huge storm rolled in, like massive, massive storm rolled in. We're talking about 60, 70 mile per hour winds that night. And we're still, you know, best case scenario, 12 hours below the summit. So we decided to say to Tucker, you know, again, this is a powerful lesson for me, which I love this Henry Ford quote. Some people say it was Confucius Henry Ford. I don't know, but it's he who says he can and he who says he can't are both US.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I know better not than to not listen to her. So I put my boots back on. I walk back down the mountain. It sounds like”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm on the summit of EPP. What are you talking about? That's the other side of the world. And then Ali normally takes three weeks to climb. What are you talking about? And at this point, I was about two months ahead of schedule for the Explorers Grand Slam. But I had a shot at setting the seven summits record, which is the mountains exclusive of the polls, even though I had been to the polls in that same period of time. And so I'm competitive and intrigued. I'm like, well, okay, fine. Humor me for a second. What's that going to be involved in that? She goes, well, put your boots back on right now. Climb all the way back down to base camp, which is at 17,000 feet. So another 9,000 feet below where I am through like huge crevass fields and all this sort of stuff. There's going to be a helicopter waiting that I have arranged. It's going to take you to Kathmandu, but you don't have enough time to stay in a hotel in Katmendu, take a shower and thing. It's going to take you straight to the airport. And there's an evening flight that's going to take you to buy Seattle to Anchorage. And by the time you get to Anchorage, you'll have about three days to climb to Nali best case scenario. But if you do it, you'll set not one but two world records. What do you think? And I was just like, uh...”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coming down the mountain, you know, like I said, I try to sum it twice, then I finally get the summit. I'm coming back down. I've got one last mountain to climb to finish the world record. And I get back to my tent at 26,000 feet where most people stop, sleep at night, and then climb you climbing back down over the next couple of days, pull up my satellite phone, call Jenna, tell her the news, and she's kind of been, I mean, she's been a huge part of the success of this project working all the logistics and craziness in the background. I'm just climbing the mountains, but there's a million moving parts you can probably imagine a project like this. And she says, so Colin, how you feeling? I'm like, yeah, I'm feeling good. I'm exhausted. I'm so happy I'm back in my 10. I'm exhausted. I did it. But yeah, she says, well, I need you to put your boots back on right now. And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? She's like, I need you to put your boots back on because it just so happens if you can get to the summit of Denali in the next week, you can set not one, but two world records. And I'm like.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fall off this thing. Yeah, it literally, it's crazy. The last little stretch is called the Corners Traverse and the Hillary Step was a famous feature on the mountain. You're looking down either side of you. It's like, you know, a mild drop off on either side and you're walking on this tiny little balance beam of snow essentially across the street.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was more or less by myself. So, there was no one that was consistently with me throughout this entire project. I did bring in a couple people for key sort of moments. So for example, on Denali, my last mountain, an old friend of mine by the name of Tucker Cunningham came and joined me for that stretch of the journey. He's a great climber and we're good friends. So he was there when I actually finished the project. In Everest, I climbed with a Sherpa who I'd met climbing in Nepal before. So it was his seventh summit of Everest when we made the summit. And so he's a great strong climbing partner. And then on the polls, I went with one of the top polar explorers from the United States with me there. But then a couple of them, I was completely by myself, completely alone and out there. So it was a little bit of a mix of everything. And then my fiance, Jenna, was really running the show behind the scenes back home. So with all the stuff we were doing with our nonprofit and various things.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it literally instantly turns into ice like ice fireworks in the air, which creates for some really cool photos actually, but it's wild to feel that. But that said, just because I've been on the Everest Summit Ridge, hiking up a mountain in Vermont that is super steep and muddy in the middle of the night and lonely at times, it's not like I'm like, oh, like that's nothing to me. I'm just like the supermad now, you know? Like, so that is all a valid challenge. And I'm putting an incredible part of the journey as well.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, I love the essence of this 290-29 challenge that we all did together, and I loved how Jesse set the tone for it beginning the event by saying, hey, this isn't a race. This is you against you. And although me going 17 laps in a row and you going over the course of the weekend, to me, like both of those achievements are just as valid and just as incredible. And to me, that's why I love to do these things with groups of people, because it's not about, oh, I did it better than you or I did it faster. I'm stronger or this. I'm also human, man. Like, it was cold for me up there in the middle of the night Vermont because like I'm not wearing a down suit like I'm wearing up on Everest. But like the cold there in the South Pole was insane. I show a photo of this in my TED Talk and you may have seen it where I say, you know, I didn't know what minus 40 felt like until I got out to the South Pole because I'd never been somewhere that cold. And the best way I can describe it to people is I took a cup of boiling water and I threw it into the”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the rules, and again, I didn't create these rules, but the rules sort of governing this record state that you have to travel by your own human power at least one degree of latitude. So I crossed the last, what's called known as the last degree of latitude to reach both the north and south poles, which is roughly 69 nautical miles. And so completely self-sufficiently. So you're walking, I was using cross-country skis with skins, what's flat ground, and you're dragging about 150 pound sled behind you, which has all your food, all your fuel, tent, stove, you know, all that kind of stuff day by day through the polar region. So that all die.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the average temperature on the summit day, I think, was somewhere around minus 20 or minus 30 ambient temperature, but with wind, it was as much as minus 50 minus 60 degree wind chill. And when you're moving that slow, obviously it's very hard to keep your body warm as well as when you're not getting oxygen in there. So that really is one of the biggest challenges is keeping your body warm, which is, of course, why you hear about a lot of people losing fingers and toes or getting frostbite and whatnot. So for me, as successful as it would have been to climb Mount Everest, you know, success really looked like coming back from this project with all my fingers, all my toes. I know what it's like to be physically hindered after my burn accident and certainly didn't want to have that happen again. But it's intense and about a several people, not people who are climbing with, but several people who climbed on to the summit the same day I did were evacuated the next day because of severe frostbite injuries because it was actually quite a windy and cold.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Friend of mine come meet me, but not like guide it or anything like that. And we went up there and we actually got caught in a huge storm above the death zone. And had to retreat into our tents and spend a full night out in a really brutal, scary set of circumstances and then retreat back down the mountain. And so when I actually eventually did make it to the summit a few days later, it was on my second attempt and having to fight not just the physical fatigue of having been near the summit having to retreat, but the emotional trauma of like, oh my God, I've seen how bad this can go up here. And if you read, you know, I'm sure some people have read Indithinair, John Crocow, or other books about Everest, the death zone, as well as Camp 4, the South Call, like this is a historic place infamous for a lot of lives have been lost there. And so knowing that background and then seeing the power of Mother Nature, what it actually feels like to be out there. And so I'm like, oh, this is the place I've read about where people die. Like, it was a very intense environment to be in and just, like I said, each step you're earning it all.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, before I got to Everest, I had actually already been going for over 100 days just before to begin the Everest expedition. And from the altitude perspective, your body acclimatizes to higher altitude, of course, over time. And so I had been on previous high altitude mountains. However, the expedition that fell right before Everest just due to timing and weather and whatnot was the North Pole, which of course is sea ice floating in the middle of the ocean, like as close, like as sea level. You're literally walking around a frozen ocean. So I came from a month at the North Pole at sea level, not a climatized at all. I was the last person to arrive to Everest Base Camp about a month behind schedule for the normal summit window. And rather than having the customary eight weeks to climb, but I only had three, including all the climatization. So by the time I got up on the Evers Summit Ridge, it was brutal. And my first trip up actually into the death zone at 26,000 feet. I was climbing with just myself and a Sherpa by the name of Pasang Bodhi. I did most of this project, either climbing completely alone or I would have a”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I joke around that on the summit day, and I was using supplementary oxygen on the summit day, but anything above 26,000 feet is known as the death zone, which is aptly named because literally the human body above that altitude, even with supplementary oxygen, can't survive for very long at all. You're actually slowly dying physiologically as you're up there. And I joke is if you're taking one step every 15 seconds or even one step every 30 seconds, you're using bolt on the summer ridge of Everest. Like you're flying past people. A lot of people are taking one step and collecting themselves for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, just to take another step. I mean, that's how literally. I mean, I know it sounds ridiculous to say, and I had that described to me before, was up there. And then I got there and I was like, yeah, people weren't exaggerating. Like, it's crazy. So it's a really intense. And for me, so I was, Everest actually came eighth out of the 9 expedition.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This project off, so there was a year, a year and a half in the planning before I even took the first step, but I began the project in January of 2016 in Antarctica and rolled on for 139 days straight from there with many ups and downs, which I could tell many stories about, but that would be a whole other day's worth of podcasts. But finished on Denali 139 days later, having set actually two New World records for the Explorers Grand Slam as well as the speed record for the seven summits.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're crazy. Who are you? You're not a professional mountaineer. Why do you think you can do this? And in 2014, there was a bad avalanche on Everest that unfortunately killed 16 Sherpas. And then 2015, there was a huge earthquake in Nepal that devastated the entire country. So no one had actually even climbed Everest in 2014 or 2015. And this was 2016 when I was trying to do this. And people were saying, wait a second. So no one's even climbed one of those mountains in 2014-15. You're saying you think you're going to climb Everest as well as eight other peaks back to back. You're like, yeah, I don't really think we could support that. Doesn't seem like a high probability that that's going to work out. But there was just this, you know, like I said, full heart, dedicated passion to I'm going to figure this out some way, somehow how to pull.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the record time that I was trying to break was 197 days. And, you know, skipping forward to the beginning, I didn't know how much faster I could do it. I thought that I had a shot at it. And of course, there's a great entrepreneurial detour that we could take here, which is I set myself this goal, but I had no funding. I needed half a million dollars just to pull off this project. That's me not making, I wasn't trying to make any money, just like the hard cost of doing this project cost that. I had no financial support. That's certainly not a check that I can write. I'm a kid that grew up painting houses and like pretty blue-collar background in that way. So there's not a check that I could write. I also have never found a nonprofit. I've never run a media campaign. I've never done any of these things. But it was like, I have this idea. I have this goal. And then there was a growth mindset of being like, okay, great. Well, now let's figure it out. And, you know, the first 150 people that I probably asked to support me financially or anyways were like.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit self serving. Like, I was winning or losing on the race course, but didn't have this larger purpose. So I was really excited to push my body in a credibly intense way, but also have sort of a larger meeting baked into the entire fabric of the project”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This person to ever complete the Explorer's Grand Slam, and I'll break down what that means in a second, which means to climb the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents as well as complete expeditions to both the north and south pole, and about fewer than 50 people in history have ever completed the entire Grand Slam. Most so have done so in five or ten years, you know, climbing an Everest or a Denali and coming back and training for the next one next year. Now, I was aiming to do it the fastest. So basically all nine of those expeditions without any stopping, without any breaks in between, climbing one mountain, coming down, flying to the next. And then the largest larger purpose was I coined a name called Beyond 72, which is the name of my nonprofit, which was all focused around inspiring kids to get outside, move their bodies, set goals, live active and healthy lives, and so built that into the fabric of this project and using the media to leverage sort of a positive impact in the community, which is where triathlon at that time kind of felt a”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for me, for the next five or six years, I competed as a professional trilete, which was an incredible period of my life. Like I said, it was living out my boyhood fantasy of being a professional athlete was amazing. A huge pivot from what I thought was going to be the career in finance through my 20s. And I ended up racing in 25 countries, six different continents, living all over the world, having my fair share of success on the racecourse, as of course, setbacks. It's not like I won every race I ever competed in, but I had some great success as a professional athlete. And interestingly enough, coming off a win in 2014 at a Half Iron event, I just had this kind of overcome moment of like, this has been an amazing chapter. And although I had sponsorship to continue me into the future of Trathlon racing, I felt like I want to do something bigger. I'm ready to set my next huge, audacious goal with a combined purpose of doing something greater than myself. So I set myself the goal to become the world record holder of the fastest.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of myself as some like superhuman genetic freak or something like that, I'm a regular guy you met me. Like I'm like highly normal build. I think that really it's about mindset. I think that in that moment I was forced to choose a measurable goal and move forward and I went into that with my whole heart and my whole soul to overcome this obstacle. And I believe as humans we have this untapped potential with inside of all of us reservoirs of it that we can unlock when we choose the positive mindset, which is certainly been something that I absolutely preach, but that it was just, that's how I learned it in such an intense environment. I hope that not everyone has to learn it that way, but it was a valuable lesson that has carried me forwards in many things in my life.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's absolutely wild. And it was certainly, you know, in a lot of ways it changed my life. I became a professional athlete right after that, quit my job and got some support of actually some of the guys on the financial industry there, particularly a guy by the name of Brian Gelber, who was my first sponsor, moved to Australia, became for training as a professional athlete, which was kind of always a lifelong dream of mine. But yeah, no, it was crazy. But really what it made me realize was, and it's become a larger theme, as I'm sure we'll get into with other things I've done in my life, was this moment of facing this extreme obstacle and realizing that in this moment it would have been so easy for me to give up. Like I wanted to give up. I wanted to say, my life's over, there's nothing I do that doctors are right. I'll never walk again. I'll be hobbling around the rest of my life. And I'm so grateful for my mother and what she was able to instill in me in that moment and realizing moving forward, it's like, look, I don't think.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I trained with Chicago Trathlon as best I could learning how to walk again. And I showed up to compete. I finished the race, which was, this was 18 months after my accident, certainly a joyous moment for me. And there was one last surprise in store, which is I didn't just finish the race, but I actually won the entire Chicago triathlon beating about four or five thousand other participants on the day in my first ever race. a very surreal moment to say the least.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moment in my life, my mom said, Great, great kid, you've got this big triathlon goal. Well, today you need to figure out how to take one step. And she actually took a chair from our kitchen table, placed it one step in front of my wheelchair, and said, figure out today how to get out of your wheelchair and take one step into that chair. And although it might sound tinier or insignificant, but having the courage to take that first step turned into the next day the chair was five steps away, the next day it was ten. And as tried as it might sound, literally step by step, I got a little bit stronger up until the sort of punchline of this chapter of my life is I arrived 18 months later to compete in the Chicago triathlon because I had taken a job in commodities trading in Chicago trying to get my life kind of back on track.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Point in the future, which actually looping back to the 29029, the event itself is amazing, but I think what we found of the people on the mountain is having that goal, having that linear pursuit. There's just something powerful about that, whether that's business, sports, art, it doesn't matter in this case for me, it was sports. So I said, hey, I want to one day complete a triathlon. So I'd been a swimmer in college, as I mentioned, but I'd never biked or run competitively. And certainly looking down at my legs, it seemed pretty unrealistic to do any of those activities ever again. And I said, you know, an able-bodied person would be able to swim and bike and run and finish a traffic on. So for the next 18 months, that was my goal. Literally, you know, three months in a Thai hospital, flown back to Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, still hadn't taken a single step, carried on and off the plane, placed in a wheelchair when I got home, and really learned how to walk one step at a time, again, enter my mother. I mentioned this a little bit in the TED Talk I recently gave, it's important.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just being like, I want to give up. Like, my life is over, you know, I don't, you know, just the darkest phase that I can ever remember in my life. And then enter my mother, who really is a part of hero of this story for sure. She flew over to Thailand and sat by my bedside. And I certainly know now that she was just as afraid as I was being a parent and seeing her kid in this way. But she's always been someone that's instilled of dreaming big, setting goals, looking forward to the future, you know, working towards things. And I have a lot of things I've achieved my life have been kind of because of her ethos. And she was unrelenting in that in this hospital. When the doctor's saying you're never walking again, she came in smiling being like, Colin, let's set a goal. Let's look towards the future. What do you want to do when you get out of here? And I literally was looking at her like, mom, you're stop trying to cheer me up. Like, let's not, let's call this what this is. This is devastating. And she really just kept in on me and kind of forced me to pick something, some anchor.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just devastation, right? Complete devastation. And like you said, I think that no matter what phase of life you're in, just having this type of thing happen to you is horrible. But of course, I'm 22 years old, kind of thinking I'm embarking on the next chapter of adulthood in my life. I'd been a lifelong athlete. I was a swimmer in college, which was what kind of got me to be able to go to a university like that after a lot of hard work as a kid. And, you know, here I am, sort of my what I think is my whole life in front of me. And all of a sudden, boom, this accident happens and to make matters worse. The doctors are coming in every day and they're saying like, hey kid, you're pretty much not going to walk again normally after this with how badly your legs are burned, with the ligament damage, the scar tissue over the ankles and knees. You'll be lucky to kind of be hobbling around. And so just being told that was just a devastating diagnosis, to say the least. And the physical pain makes with that emotional trauma, makes with being a million miles from home was just overtaking me. And honestly, I can just remember sitting in that hospital bed.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My life without a doubt, but not before about 25% of my body was severely burned predominantly my legs and feet. And I was in the middle of a tiny little island in the Gulf of Thailand. So the ambulance was a moped ride down a dirt path. The hospital was a one-room shack and they couldn't really move me until they finally moved me in the back of a pickup truck and a little boat to what they called the better hospital. And the better hospital I underwent eight surgeries, eight days in a row where I'd come out from the hospital or the surgery room and there'd literally be a cat running around my bed and across my chest in the ICU. So kind of paints a picture of the worst place one would want to end up certainly with this kind of injury where infection can honestly kill you.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instead of, I was actually a house painter in the summers all growing up, so I was consistently sucking away a couple thousand dollars each summer with this idea when I graduate from college, I want to take a trip around the world. Nothing, I mean, I didn't certainly have the money to do anything fancy, but just, you know, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and living in hostels and hitchhiking around and just kind of spreading my wings a little bit. Amazing trip up until when I found myself on a beach in rural Thailand. And for those of you who have been to Thailand, you might know this, but fire dancing and things like that are somewhat common. And of course, because I was 22 years old and seemingly invincible at the time, I thought that jumping a flaming jump rope sounded like a great idea. So I participated in that activity, which changed my life, honestly, an instant. The rope wrapped around my legs, splashed excess kerosene in my body, lit me on fire completely to my neck. And I was able to jump into the ocean to extinguish the flames, which certainly saved.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt. Keep going. No, no, no. So, yeah, so long before all this climbing and crazy things that I've done in the last 10 years, taking it back to the sort of origin story for me was I had just graduated from college, thought I was going to be a finance guy. So I had an econ degree and kind of grabbed a surfboard and a backpack and thought I wanted to see a little bit of the world I'd be.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so long before you and I ended up in a car in the middle of the night on Stratton Vermont trying to climb it all through the night, which I I did stay up through the night and finish out the 17th one around 5 45 a.m. or something like that was a long night to say the least.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why can't I? Why can't I do something incredible in my life? And it doesn't have to be some but not Everest. You find your own version of Incredible. And that's my takeaway from Colin. He entered this field late in life. He wasn't trained at birth to do what he did. And I don't want to ruin his story. He figured out late and became the best in the world. And it just gives everybody hope as you go through your own journey of like, well, again, it's not too late. It's not too late to be the best in the world at something. And I think your audience will really enjoy him. I know they will.”
2017-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TIP162: Atlanta Hawks Owner Jesse Itzler, Mt. Everest, & Colin O'Brady (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT