Show Notes:

Mark Beaumont: Adventure happens off the bike. “Riding 100 miles a day is easy enough, but you know, where am I going to sleep? Where’s my next meal? How am I going to get by? And I was 22 years old. I was a kid. I look back now and I think, my God, I took a lot of risks, but what did I have to lose? I was a graduate with a perfectly good economics degree going, I want to go on a big adventure. I didn’t think it would become the career that it has. I just thought, why not? If I’ve only got one chance, let’s cycle around the planet.”

Colin O’Brady: The impossible is worth attempting. “People had basically started to say, this crossing is impossible. People have tried it. The math just doesn’t add up. But I was willing to try my very best. I was willing to go out there, and if I failed in 50 days, I still believed there was value in trying something this hard because I was going to learn something from it. I was going to grow something from it. Of course I was hoping to complete it and be successful — and ultimately I was — but it was far from a gimme.”

David Goggins: Belief is earned through suffering. “Hope is bullshit. Hope is not in your hands. You can’t control hope, man. But belief — belief is something you harness through hard work and dedication. It’s not about believing because your mom told you to believe in yourself. It’s belief that you know what you’re capable of because you’ve gone there several times in the dark times. That’s why I kept going back to Navy SEAL training — because I believed I could make it through the training I put myself through.”

Mat Fraser: Small gains build world champions. “No one of those habits on its own would be a noticeable difference. But you start accumulating 20, 30, 40 of them over years and they start to compound. Now they’re adding up. The best recovery tool that has ever existed is sleep. I thought, okay, not only am I going to take my sleep seriously, but how can I make it a little bit better than everyone else’s? From my bedroom setup to the warm-ups, cool-downs, food, schedule, everything — I was building the most controlled environment possible so I could train, eat, and recover without distraction. That’s how I won.”

Tim Grover: Winning isn’t civilized. “You’re either holding on to an addiction that’s holding you back, or you’re holding on to a habit you refuse to let go. There’s someone very close to you — a friend, a family member — you should have made that decision about a long time ago. But that’s when your feelings are stronger than your mind. Your mind has to be stronger than the feelings, because that’s what the dark side requires you to do. That’s what winning requires. You have to be willing to get uncivilized.”