YouSaid · the spoken record

Nims Purja

lines on the record: 46
first: 2022-03-11
most recent: 2022-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But I don't want to announce my plans for the future, at least not just yet. I know that alerting the world to my ideas will only bring on the doubters once more. Instead, all scheme from the shadows, because surprise can be one of the greatest tools in a soldier's armory, and quitting is not in the blood. And that is where I'll leave it to get the full story highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your pockets player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you want to gift a subscription to a friend or a co-worker, there's a link in the show notes and available at founderspodcast.com to do that as well. That is $236 books down, 1,000 ago. And I'll talk to you again soon.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To my mountaineering career, I had started extreme altitude climbing at the age of thirty. Many people might have considered that too late a time to start or worried about my lack of experience. But I wasn't falling into those traps. The boundaries for what is considered achievable have shifted, and I am able to take a lot of pride in that. The guys I've climbed with are being placed on pedestals, and rightly so. We worked as a small expedition unit in teams of three, four, or five, but we moved with the power of ten bowls and the heart of a hundred men. Most of all I realized that summoning the fourteen peaks had been a launch pad. I needed more. I have to push my limits to the max, sitting tight, waiting it out, and living the past have never been for me.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These were just some of the realizations that landed with me in the aftermath of completing Project Possible. I managed to climb the world's fourteen highest peaks, establishing a new record that many had deemed impossible. Despite my fatigue, the adventure had taught me an important lesson fear was never going to hold me back from pressing ahead with my plans. It established in me a mindset with zero doubts and zero tolerance for excuses. Shortly after I stopped celebrating my birthday. Every milestone date I realized fostered a psychology of negativity where age was a determining factor in what a person could and couldn't do. But you're too young, or oh, you're too old considered their years, it gave them a ready made excuse to step back from a challenge they might have ordinarily accepted. That philosophy certainly applies”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm bigger than my ego. I'm bigger than pain, bigger than glory, and bigger than my tears. I'm bigger than my sacrifice. I've overcome all these feelings, all these emotions, because I've lived for a bigger purpose, where me, myself, and I mean nothing. I will keep going through hell. I will keep breaking boundaries, and I will keep moving forward.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I turn over rocks in the stream, searching for crabs and prawns, and I wouldn't quit until I peered under every single one, no matter the time or effort required to finish the job. Fast forward thirty years and nothing much has changed. My spirit was still the same, only the parameters have changed. Instead of exploring a local river, I was climbing across the world's highest mountains. There on the summit I called home and told Mom what I'd done. I've done it, I shouted into the phone, and I'm okay. The line was crackling, but I could just make out her laughter. Get home safe, son, she said. I love you. And this is how he closes out the story.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he gets to the final peak, and I want to go through what he says here. And again, remember, main motivation was to make his mother proud. He says the effort felt emotionally heavy as I stepped to the peak, and it was now done. As I stood down a mountaintop in the sky, everything I had achieved up until that moment dawned on me. I had silenced the doubters by climbing the fourteen highest mountains in the world in six months and six days. I had shown what was achievable with imagination and determined spirit. I made the impossible possible mission had been a process of discovery, not only of the mountains, but personally too. By climbing the fourteen eight thousand peaks, I was trying to figure out who the hell I was. I wanted to know how far out in the distance my physical and emotional limits were. My drive was unusual. Where did that desire come from? I'm not sure, but even as a small boy.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not negotiating with myself. I wrote it down on paper. I signed it and I'm doing it. Essentially taking the thought process out. It's like, all right, I've already done the thinking. Now I just have to go through the actions because I know I'm not different from other humans in the sense that I will try to negotiate with myself and take the easier route out while I can't. Because it's on paper and I signed it. And so I'm going to go through with every single step. And Nims is saying the same thing. I said I was going to run for an hour. I run for the full hour. I said I'm doing 300 push-ups. I'm doing 300 push-ups.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has a paragraph here that also I think is important. It's important to keep the promises that you make yourself. He says, if I say that I'm going to run for an hour, I run for an hour. If I plan to do 300 push-ups in a training session, I won't quit until I've done them all. Because brushing off the effort means letting myself down, and I don't want to have to live with that, and neither should you. That's something I also learned from Kobe Bryant, because he gave, I've heard him talk about this before, where he's like, he'll set his training plan during summer for the offseason. He sets his training plan at the beginning and he writes it out, and then he signs his name. He's like, I'm making a commitment to do that. And he does that because he's like, listen, when you're going through something difficult, you're doing 4 a.m. workouts, you're training four times a day, you have the tendency. Humans have the tendency to start negotiating with myself. It's like, oh, maybe I should just do a hundred less reps. Or, oh, you know, I'll skip that and I'll take a nap or whatever the case is. And he says, nope, there's nothing to talk about.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Preaching, hey, things are difficult, but you can do it putting out the documentary, putting out the book, like just saying, hey, you are capable, you are way more capable than you think. And I think these two sentences that he's about to say here, I truly believe that this demonstrates a fundamental understanding of human nature, that we have to struggle to be satisfied, to be happy. I don't think people that take the easy round life are actually satisfied or happy at all. Sometimes suffering, excuse me, suffering sometimes creates a weird sense of satisfaction for me. It creates a sense of pride when seeing a job through to the end.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That part was extremely important in the documentary because what happens is nobody wants to go up. He's like, All right, there's no fixed lines. We'll go set the lines. We'll prove to you that our belief is right and that you don't have anything to be afraid of. They wind up summoning K2 and because of the lines that NIMS and his team set, I think 22 other people that were in the camp were able to sum it at a time before NIM, so pre-nims, it's impossible. Let's pack up and go home. NIMS comes through with this crazy Kanye West level self-abel. He sets the lines for them. He summits because he's got like, he's not going to stop trying to accomplish project possible just because other people are negative, right? And then as a result of his work, setting the lines and instilling in their belief 22 other people were able to summit. And some of those people in the documentary had never summoned K2 before. And it was like the lifelong dream. So I also think that speaks to the positivity, like the importance of what NIMS is doing here, preaching the positive.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“when surrounded by bad energy and pessimism. And so he's in a tent with other climbers and he says, you've already been up to camp four, I said. You've only turned back because there were no fixed lines behind that, and the conditions were bad. Since then, you've had time to rest. You're strong. But it's so tough up there, said one climber. Look, brother, don't talk yourself out of it. I just climbed back-to-back mountains without sleep. In Nepal I made rescue attempts and then climbed again the next day. You guys haven't had to do that. You're in a much stronger position than I was on Everest Ard, I'm not even going to pronounce the two other mountains in Nepal. We'll lead the way and a day later you'll summit.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this scene I'm about to read to is actually in the documentary. It's really amazing. They're at K2, which has one of the most notorious reputations for people die a lot. They get to camp and a bunch of world-class mountaineers had tried to summit and then they return back because of bad weather. And so NIMS gets to a camp. There's negativity everywhere. Some people are packing up and going home and he's trying to instill in them self-belief. He says there's another pressing issue to deal with. Many of the climbers waiting nervously at base camp were rattled by fear and some of them appeared beaten already. Knowing that big-time mountaineers were unable to scale K2 was unsettling the expedition party still there. Some even wanted to go home and it didn't help that several people were noticeably freaked out after seeing an avalanche sweep away a fixed line fixeder ahead of them. I tried to lift the group's self-belief. I preferred not to prepare or operate.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I could lead and stay calm while managing potential disasters like severe altitude sickness, avalanches, and rescue operations, I never moaned when the going got tough. And then when I got to this next paragraph, I just wrote, this is the most anti-negativity person I've ever met. There were occasions when a panic call would come over the radio. Nymphs, it's snowing heavily on the mountain. It's going to be a rough climb. Rather than wallowing in negativity, I'd make a smart ass comment to lift the mood. Come on, bro. What do you think we're getting on a mountain? A bloody heat wave? And then this is just a fantastic principle you could apply to anything, something he learned from Mark Twain. He said Mark Twain once wrote that if a person's job was to eat a frog, then it was best to take care of business first thing in the morning. But if the work involved eating two frogs, it was best to eat the bigger one first. In other words, get the hardest job out of the way”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a parallel to the history of entrepreneurship is extremely clear about this, you need to control the important parts of your business. So in his case, my life is on the line. I got to control in control of that. And so it says I had enough and the lines weren't there. So grabbing our gear, we abandoned our plans, and we descended to Base Camp. I became determined to confront the international crew for having misled me. I was furious, sick and tired of people lying to others on the mountain, and this time, the bullshit had thrust my team firmly into the line of fire, so he wanted his best climber, his number two guy, almost died as a result of this. I was also annoyed with myself. I had been too trusting. When I found some of the international climbers, my anger at their phantom lines and mingmuz, says his number two guy, near death event in.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this is another example of a lot of his problems stemming from other people. In a lot of cases, Nims and his team are the ones actually setting the fixed lines for the climbers that follow. And in some cases, people had beat him there and they had posted. So this one climbing group that got there before him had posted saying, hey, we set the lines. It's fine. And so NIMS and his team go up there expecting the lines to be there and it winds up not being there and it puts them in extremely dangerous position, especially when there's like this huge snowstorm moving through. And this is my guess. I guess I could tell you this before I read this to you. This is my guest why his team is self-sufficient. They would set their own lines, they would carry their own equipment. They didn't need nor want assistance from other people. This is talked about in the documentary. And I think reason this is because he's constantly disappointed by the effort and the lies of other humans.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your life. So you can Google and you see all when people pass away and die in the mountain. Usually their bodies are left there. It's just too difficult to get them down there. And he's using, like, he's passing people that have died and he's using their fate as like a warning to himself. There's also a number of unpleasant reminders of the harsh and unforgiving nature at life of High Altitude. I pass at least three corpses along the way. The most unsettling being a man and a bright yellow summit suit. His jaw set askew and a grin. I kept thinking of that man in the bright yellow suit. That could be you if you don't take care, brother. I still had plenty of hard work to do. And something I think that'd be effective and useful for us to do is like to study dead company. So if you have any book recommendations, you know, usually we study people, they're massively successful. And I have done a few examples of people like, I think one or two that come to mind that are like...”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But why? I felt betrayed. People are nasty, man, I thought. The mountain showed me the truth about who and what I really was on both the climb up and on the way down, as I'd worked to keep our small unit alive. I could hold my head high, but the painful reality of people I once respected within the community was also revealed, mountaineers sleeping in their tents as a man died on the line above them. The people who had claimed over and over that help was on its way. Their truth would be impossible to escape. Then he goes back to that he has an intense desire to inspire other people. He says I climb my first mountain in 2012, and not seven years later, I was on my way to working through all 14,800 meter peaks in seven months. I'd proven to everybody that it is never too late to make a massive change.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest problems throughout this entire expedition were always other people when you figure the biggest problem would be the mountain, right? So he's trying to save this Indian climber named Biplap. It says Biplap was deteriorating. Then as we resumed our trudge, I noticed something different about his body as we lowered him. Foot by foot over rock and ice. His pained groans had stopped. The instinctive muscular spasms that braced against our every movement were gone. BPAP, Bip Biplap, was dead. Desperately I checked his vitals. Please don't let all this work have been for nothing, I sighed, but he had no pulse. Biplap wasn't breathing. I even poked him in the eyes, the one action that usually triggers a response in a seriously injured person, but there was no reaction. I'm sorry, brother. We did everything we could, I said sadly, pulling his hood down around his eyes. I looked angrily at the lights of camp four. The suggestion that help was on the way had been bullshit, and every request for assistance had been ignored.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a number of examples as he's attempting to summit these mountains. And this happens over and over again. He's forced to try to save other people that had either left behind by their other, you know, because it's kind of like every man for himself in some degree on these mountains. So if you get yourself in a bad position, especially if you're climbing party doesn't have oxygen, a lot of times you're just left there to die. And NIMS didn't believe in ever leaving somebody behind. So he'd put himself many times throughout the project, he put himself way closer to death because his refusal to leave a person behind even if that and these people are not in his climbing party and so he's having to save two people at night on a mountain camp four which is right before the summit he keeps rating like hey need help bring people up here we're bringing these people down bring us oxygen and they keep raiding to him yeah yeah we're coming we're coming we're coming like 40 times or 100 times i forgot how many it was a lot and i'm really reading this section to you because his”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morale's low, so he's like, I gotta fix this right now. So I announced to the guys that we were withdrawing from the mountain to regroup together. A little drinking and dancing were in order. And we rode four by fours for a week and we partied. The group's spirit was lifted and our brief period of rest and recuperation paid off. More psychological warfare that he's engaged in, the trick was to present a psychological reframing of what was sure to be a painful experience. This emotional switch helped us eat up the meters, meaning eat up the meters as they go up the mountain, but physically we were suffering.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes into detail, the constant rejections, waking up at 4 a.m. every morning, doing social media, writing emails, doing fundraising meetings, giving speeches. And really, I just want to pull out one sentence for you. It says to instill faith in others. It was critical that I maintain faith in myself. But at times it was bloody hard work. My note is, first you believe, and then you work on making other people share your belief. Your belief comes first, and then you spread it to other people. To demonstrate his belief, this is what he does he pulls a Walt Disney. We saw Walt Disney do this exact same thing when people wouldn't lend him the money to do the projects he wanted. I remortged my house.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of money on the table. My other big concern about resigning from the special forces was my pension. It was a life changing chunk of money. And to claim it, I only had to serve a few more years. Quitting now meant giving up a lot, which was a worry and a financial stress I'd have to manage down the line at this point he's in the special forces still, he's spending a large chunk of his money that he gets and sending it back to take care of his elderly mom and dad. My superiors argue that by resigning, I'd lose out on financial security that would excite most people in the real world. Except I wasn't most people and I had a different take on the real world. I was raised a poor kid in Nepal. If I had to, living out of a tent for the rest of my life would be no problem at all. And so he quits, has no money, winds up going to remortgage his house, he's never used social media in his life up until this point. He basically has his like, I need to do something impossible, and I also need fundraising. And so he's going around to different companies.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's 35 when he decides he's going to climb all 14 peaks. What I just read you actually occurred before he quits the military and does Project Possible. So he realized, hey, I just did these three. Why don't I try to do all eight? So this is really, I mean, he talks about death a lot in the book, and this gives you his mindset that he'd rather die doing something he loved and that was potentially obviously dangerous but extreme than holding on and just living going out meekly from old age being unable to care for himself. I was comfortable with the idea of saying goodbye in my 30s, hanging on until the age of 80 something, when I might be unable to look after myself held little appeal. I preferred to leave while going full tilt. And so here's another crazy decision. He cannot do both project possible and serve in the social forces. And so he's going to leave a big amount of time.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Claiming Everest and Lost in 10 hours and 15 minutes, and then topping Everest, Lost and Makola in five days. I was also the first person to climb Everest twice, and then Lotz and Makala, again, most likely pronouncing them, in the same season. And I didn't feel done.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makula's base camp 24 hours later, brutally hung over and charged to the peak all 8,485 meters of it in one hit. That is not normal. Like I said before, most people is like, you have at least two or three stops, sometimes four and more. Like, that is insane that he just, no, I want, and he's doing it homeover. What the hell is going on here? I led from the front, how many times have you and I talked about this on the podcast? I led from my front with my small team until I reached the top. This itself was an achievement. Nobody had yet climbed Makala that season. And it's because of the poor weather conditions. Once I made it back to the base camp in One Piece, I discovered our helicopter ride back to this other base had been canceled due to poor weather. I promptly took on one of the hardest treks in Nepal on foot with my Sherpa team. We ran at speed all the way to Kathmandu, completing a six-day journey in 18 hours, stopping only to drink beer and whiskey. I had broken two world records by”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I save this on my phone. There was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go in my life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence was like kryptonite to me. Repetition is persuasive, I talk about that over and over again. NIMS repeats a lot of these principles over and over again. This is one of them. My role on military operations was to get the job done. No questions asked. So he doesn't care about your excuses. He says, listen, you set an objective and it's binary. You either succeed or you fail. But if you fail, don't say, oh, this happened for X, Y, and Z. I don't care. Did you succeed? Yes or no? It is completely binary. You set an objective and then you don't stop until you achieve that objective. That is the mindset that NAMS uses in life.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the 8000ers, those 14 peaks, I would be climbing with bottled air, even though some mountaineers didn't consider it the purest form of high-altitude climbing. Who cares? Nobody could dictate to me why or how I climb the mountains, just as I didn't have the right to dictate that to others. So again, I really note this is just inner scorecard behavior. He saw the results of other people's thinking and said, okay, well, that's fine for you, but I don't agree with it. I'll choose to go with the results of my own thinking. One sentence here, and then a quote from Arnold that this reminded me of, I seem to have unusual drive compared to many climbers. One of my favorite quotes.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grumbling or giving up was not an effective strategy. If problems are challenges came my way, I was supposed to find solutions. Having been trained to adapt and survive. I picked up my gear and tried my best to forget the snarky comments, knowing that glooming thinking was both destructive and contagious. That is such an important insight. No, no jokes, brother. I'm fucking doing this, I said. My plan for making it to the summit in such a limited window was to do everything more quickly than was recommended without wasting too much energy.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of hitting his gun, knocking him off the roof, and I wind up saving his life because obviously if the gunboat wasn't there, he would have been shot their neck and most likely died. And so this also, the reason I'm telling you all is because this gives you an insight of who this person is. You have this extreme intense job and then you have a three-week break and when you decide to do on your three-week break, you know, you're going to go vacation set on a beach? No, he's going to try to climb Everest and he wants to try to climb Everest quickly and by himself. And so says he gets to the base camp and he says, that's a lot of stuff. There's another climber there. That's a lot of stuff. Are you here for the trekking? Because you're too late to climb Everest in time. No, I'm here for the climb, Nim said. And I'll make it in time. I have to. There was a pause. What? Where's the rest of your team then? I'm doing it solo. There was a snort of disbelief. Someone else laughed. You're fucking kidding. I shook my head and shrugged it off. The glass half empty attitude went against everything I'd been taught in the military.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excellence is the capacity to take pain. It was their job to crush my spirit, mine was to fight on to the very end. It became official, I was a member of the Special Boat Service, I had met my God. So then NIMS talks about the importance of having a personal code, a way to guide your life. There's an entrepreneur, he's also been a longtime subscriber to founder. His name's Drew Riley. His company's trends.vc. And he's got what I think is one of the smartest things I've ever seen. So I'll link this in the show notes. It's 100 rules, a personal philosophy. And it says, I began journaling. These are Drewsworth. I began journaling in 2013. A few years later, I started collecting rules that I read every morning. Each rule points to a”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Determine not to let the pressure get to me, I didn't let myself worry about the succession of tests that were lined up over the following weeks, right? Doesn't matter. Why am I stressing myself about something that happens three weeks? I have to get to today. I focused only on the 24 hours ahead. Today I will give 100% and survive. I thought at the beginning of each day. Today I will give 100% and survive. I'll worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes. I held back nothing, kept nothing in reserve because I knew that anything less than my full effort would result in failure. So a great illustration of why it's so important to just focus on the task that's immediate in front of you and focus on today, worry about tomorrow when it comes. One of my favorite stories, the way to remember this concept, was actually told by Will Smith. And so there's many variations of the Will Smith bricks story, but I'm going to read you one variation here.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was a kid becoming a Gurkha was my hope. It was my God. He's saying that you're, it's like you're a North Star. You have a goal, you're a single-minded purpose in your life. And so that's what he means by it. It was my God, joining the military elite six years later was my next hope. That became my God, too. And I needed to believe in it. So that is why he's using the word God because the goal that you have in front of yourself, what are you going to achieve with your life? You put that as like a North Star, you focus on it, and you have to believe in it just like a religious person would believe in God, okay? So it's becoming an SPS operator was a cause. And was my cause, and I gave everything to it. When I finally made it to selection in 2009, every day of the six months was a test of physical and emotional will. So he's talking about the physical winnowing out process that all special forces have, the most famous being like Hell Week with if you grew up in America with the U.S.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depth in the water after cycling I dove in the pool and swam as many kilometers as my body could handle. I rarely made it to bed before midnight. On weekends my daily routine involved running for hours at a time. I had hauled my ass around the streets with two or three gurkha buddies. This is insane what he's about to do here. We operate in a relay system where I was the only person prevented from taking a break. One guy would accompany me for six miles, leading me along at a strong pace. Once he completed his distance, another running partner took over and together we'd go six more miles. This went on for hours and left me physically and psychologically pummeled. Getting out of bed in the middle of the night with rain hammering outside was demoralizing, but I pushed through. When snow arrived, I resisted temptation to hit snooze, and I double underlined the section.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's the next life dream? So he winds up serving, I think, six years in the Gurkha, and they tell him about why don't you go to, he finds that there's another level above that, and that is a UK Special Forces selection. So he says, I love being a soldier, but I also like the idea of being on top. And the special forces were the elite. My application to join the UK Special Forces Selection, the intense six-month long trial that separated those with the guts to join the group from those without was accepted in 2008, after six proud years with the Gurkhas, I was moving on, my moment to join the military elite had arrived. So up until this point, he had gone through, okay, this is what's required to be a Gurkha, this is all the extra stuff I did to make sure I would succeed and beat the other people that are going after the same thing that I'm going after. He's going to do the exact same thing when he's trying to join the UK specials forces. And I'm going to read this sentence to you, and it just reminds me something we just learned.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then he'd come home, right? She says, Then when the sun came up, I crept back to bed before anyone noticed. So he'd go out, everybody else is sleeping. He's at this prep school for Gurkhas or a training program for people that want to get into it. And so everybody else was sleeping. He sneaks out, does extra work, comes back, and then acts like that never happened. So he just wakes up with everybody else. They're all brushing their teeth together, and then they go off and they do the work and the prep for the day. And so this extra work is going to wind up paying off. He's going to succeed. He says, from there, the assessments were a blur of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, sprints, cross-country runs, and beep tests. I passed everything. After years of training, education, rejection, and unrelenting effort, my dream was finally coming true. So growing up, he had one dream. I'm going to be a Gurkha. Winds up never obviously serving as like a political politician in Nepal. And the thing about NIMS is it's just impossible for him to settle. So he's like, oh, I got my life dreams.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's called Doko. It's essentially a bamboo basket. So you're carrying a bamboo basket on your head that's filled with 65 pounds of sand. So it looks like a basket with a huge strap and the strap is around like your head and neck. If I had to guess, you're carrying most of the weight on your head, neck, and upper back. That's what it looks like to me. We have to carry a bamboo on our head, each filled with 65 pounds of sand. And I had to complete an uphill circuit of three miles in less than 48 minutes. And one thing I learned from Charlie Munger, he says, if you want an advantage, you have to do things that other people are not doing. And we're going to see how insane NIMS's mindset was, even when he was a kid. He's 16 years old. He's preparing for this. And so what he does is like, okay, I need an advantage. He's sneaking out in the middle of the night to put in more work. So he says, I'd previously taken an unorthodox approach to race preparation at school and would often sneak away at 4 a.m. to run through the nearby streets.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he says, I'm skipping over large parts. He says, I failed. They ranked me 26th place on the final candidate list and only 25 individuals were accepted. So he's like, I was down for a day or two. That's fine. I overcame my disappointment and I was successful on my second attempt a year later. And so he's still really young. He gets into some of the physical, these extreme physical tests that he has to put himself through because of his goals going into Gurkha and then later the special forces of the UK military and says one of the better known tests, and there's an actual video of this in the documentary. It's pretty crazy. One of the better known tests in the Gurkha Central Selection phase was the Doko race in which applicants were ordered to carry”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's a teenager. He is trying to train himself because his life goal is like, I got to become a Gurkha. And we're going to see him fail at his life goal. And he's like, all right, no problem. I'm just going to try again. And then if I fail, it's fine. I'll just keep coming and coming and coming. You're not going to stop me. I soon learned that with relentless self-belief, anything was possible. I would need every ounce of it to get accepted into the Gurkhas. So he goes through this rigorous training program. There's a ton of people that are doing it.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's trying to do this and achieve this as she's dying. She's extremely sick. She's in and out of the hospital. So he's really motivated to move as quickly as possible because he wants to see his mother. He considered it his greatest life achievement up until that point. And he wanted to get it done before his mother passed away. His mother passes away about a few months to a year after his successful completion of the mission. He's got a great point here that you have a huge advantage if you can thrive on the bare minimum. From an early age, I learned it was fairly easy for me to thrive on the bare minimum. This might explain how I was later able to live so much of my life in the chaos of combat when he's fighting in Afghanistan and other places are in a tent pinned to the side of a mountain. And this is something repeated over and over again. I've moved ahead a few pages here. The way I would describe NIMS is he's saying like, I'm an evangelist for a positive mental attitude from an early age, I believed in the power of positive thinking.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to help other people. My second career ambition was to be a government official. I wanted to be Nepal's version of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Even as a child, I understood the people around me had very little, and poverty rates were incredibly high. I was poor from the beginning. We didn't have any money, and the thought of owning a car was unimaginable, but we were a loving family and I was a happy kid. It did not take a lot to keep me amused. And he talks about part of his insane work ethic was inspired by his mom. My mom started working on a village farm for money, and at least one of the kids was strapped to her back in a cloth. So not only did his mom have to engage in extremely hard labor to make money, she has to do it while carrying one of her kids on her back the entire day. A lot of my work ethic came from my mother. She had a huge influence on me. He's her youngest son, he calls himself a mama's boy in the documentary.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd been working without much thought operating in the flow state that athletes often describe when they set world records or win championships. I was in the zone. And then we see an instance or an example of his positive self-talk that he feels is so important. Not only for himself, but for anybody trying to achieve something difficult, which I obviously agree with him based on the 240 books I've read, I don't think I could think of one entrepreneur that we've studied that did not possess extreme levels of self-belief. Brother, I thought, you're badass at high altitude. He's saying that to himself. And so now he goes more into his childhood. He says, as a kid, I wanted to be one of two things. My first option, I wanted to serve as a Gurkha soldier like my dad. Gurkha soldiers were legendary, and their motto was better to die than to be a coward. And so he's telling us about growing up in property, developing an extreme mindset and then an intense desire to”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remarkable how deep the snow is, and they're just like almost like crab walking up a mountain. It's insane. The effort was huge, but by regarding every step forward as significant progress and part of a greater team effort, I was able to move steadily. So I want to pause before I move on, I double underline that section. Let's turn that into a maximum that we can remember easily. Regard every forward step as significant progress and part of a greater team effort. Going back to the book, my thighs and calves ached with the strain, but my lungs were light. That's exactly what they were testing at the high altitude center. The fatigue that hindered other climbers at altitude didn't seem to be striking me down. When I turned to see how far I'd come, I was shocked to see the rest of my climbing party. They were like little black dots below. Wow, this is my shit, I thought. I'd been working, and he's talking about he's in a flow state.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At others falling But after wasting these, he's slowly learning. You can't think like this when you're on the mountain. But after wasting so much energy on stress, I eventually located the confidence to stride forward purposefully and my anxiety faded. And so even when he's relatively inexperienced, he's got a gigantic. He's fueled of self-belief. He's been almost, I would almost consider like torturing himself. I'll go through at this point decades of putting himself under intense physical pressure. And so he's doing the same thing on the mountain and he's realizing this is a gigantic mistake. My ego is out stripping my ability here. And that obviously can be deadly on a mountain. So he says the mountains were delivering their first major lesson. Never burn yourself out unnecessarily. From then on, I vowed never to waste vital energy. I would work hard only when I needed to. So when they would get to like a, there's usually you don't go straight from the base camp to the summit. There's usually camp maybe want camp one, camp two.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was going to wind up dying two years later in an avalanche in Everest, unfortunately. So it says I took my first steps towards the highest point on Earth in December 2012. He decides his first mountain he's going to climb is going to be Everest. I was 29 years old. I had been connected with the famous Nepali mountaineer Dorjekatri. There's no way I'm pronouncing that correctly by the way. It says, as the work was slow but steady, and under Dorje's tutelage, I pulled on a pair of crampons for the very first time. So Nims tells his mentor, he's like, hey, I want to climb Everest. And he's like, no, you're not going to do that. That is a very technical mountain. You need to start on, there's a nearby peak. I think it's pronounced Lobuch. Loboche. And as he's climbing this mountain with his mentor, he describes what it's like being new at something. He says, each step caused me to pause and overthink. At times, I would experience a surge of”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so even after he completed this, what many people deemed impossible, people said, oh, they started making excuses. Oh, he's from Nepal. That's the land of the 8,000ers. He grew up acclimated to high climates. He's like, no, that's not true, high altitude rather. He's like, I grew up in a flat part of Nepal. It was extremely hot. It was more of like a jungle-like environment. And the fact was he never even tried to attempt to scale a mountain until he was 29 years old. So he says real succinctly, my family was poor. And so at the age of 29, he winds up finding a wise older mentor that helps accelerate his learning. So there is just so many parallels between, again, I feel what Nims is doing in the book is no different than the entrepreneurs in the past that we study. They all wind up finding whether through books or through actually meeting people wise older mentors that help accelerate their learning. And so he's going to be under the tutelage of a famous Nepali mountaineer. This is in 2012. This guy.”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything for my ambition, fueled by my belief in myself, I treated this challenge like a military mission. I had even named my attempt possible, and then we see he's got a gigantic personality, and if you see it, you can see it in the documentary. It also comes through in every single interview, and it also comes through in the writing of the book, and you see this right here. The title, which means project possible, later came to feel like a one-fingered salute towards the people who couldn't who wouldn't or couldn't believe in my dream. There were plenty of them. Doubters appeared everywhere. And so that's in the introduction. If you go to the actual first page, the page before the table of contents, you see that he's unapologetically extreme. He just has a very short sentence on this one page. He says your extremes are my normal”
2022-03-11 · Founders · #236 Nims Purja (Mountain Climber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source