Nims Purja

The American writer 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.

All the people who couldn’t grasp the potential of my dream were demoralizing, but it made me more determined. Once the mission kicked off, I’d prove them all wrong with my actions.

Friends laughed whenever I talked about Project Possible; fellow operators mocked me. That was fair enough; the goal was supposed to be tough, improbable even. But only because nobody had achieved anything quite like it before.

Suffering sometimes creates a weird sense of satisfaction for me. The psychological power of always giving 100 percent, where simply knowing I am delivering my all, is enough to drive me on a little bit further: It creates a sense of pride when seeing a job through to the end.

I understood the fine line between bravery and stupidity; negative situations didn’t upend me, and I attacked everything with positive thinking. Those traits had the potential to turn me into a high-altitude machine.

I was out of control now, and the two rules I’d set for myself on expeditions were being pressure tested. One: Hope is God. Two: The little things count the most on big mountains.

So my default before any climb was pitched was somewhere in the middle: neither fearful nor overly relaxed. But my aim was always to be aggressive: Whenever I attack a mountain, I attack 100 percent.

If I say I’m going to run for an hour, I’ll run for a full 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.