Erik Weihenmayer: No Barriers

Transcript

[0:00:31] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Erik Weihenmayer, author of No Barriers. Erik is the first and only blind person to summit Mount Everest. Yeah, he also solo kayaked the Grand Canyon. But this episode isn’t about all of the extreme things that Erik has done, it’s about getting unstuck. How do you get yourself out of the darkness when life has knocked you down? How do you keep your heart open when you go through something traumatic? By the end of this episode, you’ll have renewed motivation for moving forward. No matter how stuck in a rut you might feel, there is always a way out. Now, here is our conversation with Erik Weihenmayer. Erik, let’s go back to when you climbed Mount Everest. You were the first blind person to successfully summit Mount Everest and later on, somebody said to you, it was actually your expedition leader. What? Something that sort of catapulted your new book?

[0:02:07] Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah, what it was, was PV who was our amazing team leader, he helped organize the trip and offered to lead us up there. There were no paid guides or anything like that, just friends. We all became friends, we trained together, we bled together and on the way down from that climb after having stood at the summit, I got down through the ice fog which is like the most horrendous part of the climb, it’s really quite dangerous, it’s like a river of ice that collapses and tumbles down the mountain. It’s a blind person’s worst nightmare and I got safely down through that, it was the 10th time I’d crossed through the ice fall. I was safe, I was happy to be alive, I was happy to be going home and PV pulled me aside and he gave me a hug and he said “Hey, great job, your life’s about to change.” “Now,” he said, “Do me a favor? Don’t let Everest be the greatest thing you ever do.” I was thinking, at first I was like, “Really bad timing dude, that is terrible timing, you need to let me go home and rest a little bit, maybe for the next 50 years.” But the advice was great because it launched me into the next 16 years.

[0:03:20] Charlie Hoehn: That is not only an amazing accomplishment of summiting Everest but did that truly push you to set your sights even higher or are you just that type of person who does that naturally?

[0:03:37] Erik Weihenmayer: Well, PV lives that message, he went off and he boded, he rafted the entire length of the Blue Nile. Thousands of miles all the way down to the Mediterranean, he was in an iMax movie. He lives that message as well. What he was saying I think was you know, with further insight and reflection, was so brilliant because he’s like look, you know, all of us – not all of us but many of us have some successes that sprinkle throughout our lives. You know, whether you start a business and sell it maybe. Or you know, star on a sports team or a great college athlete or whatever it is and then, you know, do those successes become the funeral, the memorial to your life or do you use them as catalyst to propel you forward? How do they propel you forward? Well at the time, nobody can see into the future so you don’t know how but you have to commit to getting back into that storm of life and kind of riding that energy forward towards wherever it takes you. Yeah, you have some control over that storm of energy that you're riding but in a sense, you really don’t know where it’s taking you, you know? Sometimes it takes you to great discoveries, sometimes though, you know, you fall short and you’re disappointed. So there’s a risk in getting back into that storm but you know, I guess the other choice was like, pound my chest and be secure. And say “Hey, I did this great thing and I’m great now and I never have to do anything else again.” But that just seems like checking out, that seems like ending rather than the beginning.

[0:05:14] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it would be so boring from then on to just have that be the one thing.

[0:05:22] Erik Weihenmayer: I hate endings. No Barriers and I know I’ll talk about this later but I mean, you know, the movement that I’ve been growing. One of our elements, one of the pieces of the process of growth and change that we always point to is alchemy. How do you take endings and make them into beginnings? How do take pain and make it in to joy? How do you make lead and turn it into gold? We see people doing it over and over again and it’s really powerful and I’ve tried to live that too. Everest I think, even though it wasn’t a bad thing turning it into a good thing, it was a great thing but it could have been the end. Instead, I decided, I’d rather make this the beginning and so it’s lead to some incredible things for me and some disappointments too of course.

[0:06:08] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. Let’s talk about that alchemy. This is something I’m very personally interested in, as is everybody. When you go through something hard, something abruptly comes to an end – a journey that you thought you were on. Let’s say for instance, gosh, let’s say somebody just abruptly goes through a divorce. Basically there are two ways of reacting to that, they could feel horrible about their life or they could view it as new beginnings. Something that’s, even though it sucks and they didn’t plan for it, it could be a springboard for something better. How do they fall into that latter category? What do you tell your readers in order to make that alchemy happen?

[0:06:59] Erik Weihenmayer: Well I would say that first of all, one of the ideas behind No Barriers is it’s not a motivational poster. It’s not like a nice little sound bite. It’s not like you get a divorce and you're like “Great! New beginnings” No. You’re crushed, you’re destroyed. You know, you're on the ground, you’re in a dark place and you know, when I got up – my second book, The Adversity Advantage, I teamed up with a scientist, Dr. Paul Stults. He studied this idea of adversity and resiliency and had done a lot of studies on it. They find that people that respond to adversity in a healthier way and they are able to pick themselves up and figure out a way to move forward are healthier and happier and live longer. You know, it’s not saying that you’re supposed to be some kind of silly motivational cliché where you get up and you’re just like “Yes, I love pain!” No. You know, the faster you do that and the faster you figure out where do you take the energy because behind adversity, there is a kind of energy and it underlies that adversity and so you know, that energy can crush you. You have a choice at that point, that moment is pivotal. Or you can take that energy and figure out a way to ride it forward and the examples over and over that I interacted with people that have been able to perform this kind of alchemy are just, it’s amazing, you wouldn’t even believe it. But you definitely – you know, it doesn’t immune you from pain and suffering and darkness.

[0:08:37] Charlie Hoehn: Right. I tend to think of that period where you’re going through the pain and darkness as either the winter season that leads to spring. Or part of the hero’s journey you know? There are always trials and challenges that hurt the hero and set them back, but that is part of the journey and it’s leading you still ever forward. What have been some of the examples that have really stood out to you – maybe some of them that are included in the book?

[0:09:15] Erik Weihenmayer: Obviously, No Barriers began with a lot of folks with physical disabilities and those stories are pretty abundant through the book but obviously beyond that, most of the world don’t have physical disabilities. Their challenges, their barriers are invisible. In a way, there is a prosthetic leg for somebody who loses a leg, you fit them with a prosthetic and they can move forward but you know. But a prosthetic for the brain? That’s so much more tricky. The brain is so much more mysterious. Often times, I think it’s not necessarily the physical thing but the tragedy that happens to you. It’s the trauma that gets created in the brain associated with that disappointment or that bad thing happening and that’s the real barrier. That’s the pain behind the pain. With No Barriers, you know, I’ve looked at a lot of people that have finally wrestled with that pain. There is a soldier that came to one of our programs, his mom was killed when he was a young kid, that overwhelmed his family and he got sent off to military school and then he graduated, he joined the military, he was proud to serve you know? Whatever your political ideas about the conflicts are, I mean, he was proud to be a part of something bigger than him. It made him feel important and then he gets blown up. An ID explodes and burns him over 50% of his body and he’s being sent home and now, the shame is there again. The shame of a kid who is overwhelmed by his mom’s death and this shame just comes flying back in terms of the trauma. It sends him into an absolute spiral, it sends him into car accidents and suicide attempts and alcoholism. The anniversary of his injury, he spent some of those in jail. He still had the sense of light that he had hope, he wanted to turn that darkness into something else. He doggedly pursued it, he tried a bunch of programs, he finally came to No Barriers, we went on an amazing expedition together and he worked through those issues. He worked through these No Barriers elements. He made a pledge, he actually wound up making three pledges. One of them was to get his family out of this really violent situation that they were in, which he was able to do. The second was to get off pain killers after the program, he checked himself in to rehab and he struggled through that process. The third was to climb one of our rocky mountain peaks addiction free. He’s done all those but it’s not like you know, like this traditional story of growth and change where it’s like a nice crescendo and then there’s a nice bow at the top and a nice violin music. I mean, all that’s honestly BS. No Barriers actually you know, tries to authentically look and study real people who were struggling and bleeding and flailing their way forward with setbacks. Ultimately Paul is a great example because he is living a much healthier life and happier life and he’s doing the right thing for his family but man, has it been quite a struggle for him.

[0:12:35] Charlie Hoehn: That’s unbelievable and amazing. It’s got to be hugely gratifying to be a part of seeing people go through this.

[0:12:44] Erik Weihenmayer: That’s why I stick with it, I mean, and I don’t mean that in any kind of goofy way but I mean, it’s so cool watching people go from that dark place to a better place right? Because they get stuck right? We all start our lives with hope and optimism and excitement and sense of adventure right? I really truly believe that. Then we go off in the world and you know, sometimes we achieve everything but often times we don’t. You know, we fall short and it’s so painful and we go, “I’m never wanting to go though that again.” Or maybe things don’t workout and there’s sort of like a sense of being jaded, you know? Jadedness, sort of pours around your brain or you just get exhausted by all the barriers that just keep bombarding you. You know, a myriad of things happen and then you wind up sometimes in these stuck places, these dark places and you never wanted to be there and you don’t know how to get out. A lot of people that come to us – they’re just lost and they don’t know how to climb their way out. We tell them, there’s no magic bullet but if you're committed to this idea of change, it’s possible and we will help you reboot. It’s really based a lot on the science that people are working on right now, this idea of neuro plasticity that even though it’s tremendously hard, the brain can – you can reboot the brain. You can repattern the brain, you can create new circuits and new ways and new approaches. You know, it’s hard work but it is possible.

[0:14:16] Charlie Hoehn: Alright Erik, I’m interested in what you're saying right? I’m a listener and I’m in a dark place. I’m committed to the idea of change. I’ve been stuck in this dark place for months now, it’s exhausting. I’m open to the idea of change and I recognize there are no magic bullets. What can I do this week to get started?

[0:14:44] Erik Weihenmayer: I think it’s looking at the map that we’re on right? Trying to figure out, what does that map look like? Trying to be discerning and looking at this process of growth and saying “Okay, what does that process look like? What are the elements along the way? What are the pieces that we have to harness and confront?” Well, like for instance, alchemy. Alchemy is a great thing. If you always have that idea of alchemy in mind – okay, this shitty thing, this bad thing has happened to me, how do I create some alchemy around this? Just knowing, it’s just knowledge, it’s just insight of understanding what that process of growth looks like. Knowing that when your brain and a part of the process sabotages you right? When your brain just wants to pull you away from this great adventure you're on and pull you away into the safe, undesirable place. Knowing that your brain – that that’s a natural thing – that’s what your brain is going to do.

[0:15:41] Charlie Hoehn: Why does it do that by the way? Just to keep us safe?

[0:15:45] Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah, I think the brain is unreliable. The brain is not really equipped sometimes for the big things that we’re doing in this world I think. I think that it so wants to keep us safe that it pulls us away from the things that we want to do. I mean, people ask me like on Everest or in the Grand Canyon, did I ever doubt myself? I just laugh and I’m like, most of the time I’m doubting myself, that’s most of life. Understanding that the brain is going to do that and then looking at what we at No Barriers call your “rope team” like examining the people in your life. Okay – are they people who are dragging you down? Or are they people who are lifting you up and making you better? Some people like Paul, he had to cut somebody out of his rope team. One of his step kids was really violent and just traumatizing his entire family. He actually had to cut that person out of his rope team and save his family. He had to make a really hard decision about his rope team. Those are the kinds of things that I think we have to be cognizant about in the process of change. What are the pieces along the way that we have to spot and we have to make sure that we really understand what those things look like. Otherwise, we’re just sort of blindly groping our way forward and there’s enough blindly groping your way forward in life. You know, you don’t want your whole life to be that because you’re never going to reach your destination.

[0:17:13] Charlie Hoehn: Right. What’s your favorite story from No Barriers?

[0:17:17] Erik Weihenmayer: My favorite story is this guy named Andy Parkin and I debated whether even putting him in the book. He was a climber, he actually loved climbing, he was a guide, he was really happy and then this fluke accident happened. He was up on a ledge and the ledge collapsed and crushed him. He never thought he would climb again. He was at a hospital, he was in a wheelchair and he had done some painting as a kid and he was laying in the hospital and was so bored and so sort of dark that he decided that maybe, you know, as a move of desperation he’d go back to some painting like when he was a kid. They would wheel him to the window and he would paint the mountains that he could see outside of his window. Over time, he started rehabbing and he would get on these cable cars and they would go up to the mountains and he would paint the mountains. He actually became a famous artist and he’s actually now begun to climb again. He doesn’t climb at the same level but he climbs mountains still, he’s rehabbed himself, he kind of – he says he painted his way back to health. I think that’s a perfect example of alchemy you know? That on the way of like – he wanted to climb again but – and he’s done that but the most important thing that came out of that journey for him was that he discovered something new. He found that he was an artist and he’s now a very famous artist in Europe. He has a huge gallery and a huge workshop near Shamani France and the critics talk about his art being brilliant. Not for the fact of pounding your chest but for the fragility of the things that he paints and sculpts. It’s just the perfect idea that how would you ever think that in the process of trying to find your way home and trying to rehab yourself, you would actually discover something brand new.

[0:20:02] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. That’s a beautiful story and if you don’t mind, I’ll share one that’s very similar. It’s not extreme like that and I think it’s important as well to recognize those little moments that aren’t as extreme because they can be equally as powerful. I played baseball for 12 years and I developed bursitis in my shoulder. I was a pitcher and in my final season as a senior in high school, I was sitting out very game, I was so bored and so frustrated because baseball’s not a fun game to watch.

[0:20:36] Erik Weihenmayer: Right.

[0:20:38] Charlie Hoehn: Every single game, it’s really fun to play. It’s boredom, I started using a video camera and taking pictures and footage of each game and that led me to getting interested in video editing which ended up being a really fun hobby. Then it turned into my first business, it landed me multiple jobs, it still makes up a sizeable portion of my income each year and I do it for fun still. That was really the first major instance of using alchemy in my own life and I mean, I became grateful that I threw out my arm.

[0:21:19] Erik Weihenmayer: Right.

[0:21:21] Charlie Hoehn: I really believe in that, I love that story.

[0:21:23] Erik Weihenmayer: Well there’s another thing, I mean, there’s another piece and it’s a hard one to describe but we really do our best to try to work with people and talk about it a little bit at No Barriers. That is the sense that even when you’re in that dark place or you know, you’re at the end of that baseball journey. You know, you have to kind of, I call it the “open heart policy” with my kids and they kind of laugh at me. But I really do think it’s trying to keep your heart open to the world and to possibilities in the future. We have a lot of people who come in to our programs and they’ve gone out and they’ve gotten hurt along the way, or stuck or fallen short as I’ve said. Now, they’re kind of doing this path of least resistance thinking, where they’re blaming and lashing out, reacting. You know, blaming the motorcycle that took – or the alcohol, or their parents or whatever it is. They really haven’t turned inward and said, you know, “What do I have inside that I want to grow? That I want to nurture, that I want to use to blaze into the world.” For me, I can speak from direct experience that when I went blind, I wasn’t ready to – for my journey to end. I tried to desperately keep my heart open and when I got this letter in braille, of a group taking blind kids rock climbing, I thought, that sounds like the craziest thing in the world but I want to say yes to that. I went rock climbing and 16 years later, I was standing on the summit of Everest.

[0:22:57] Charlie Hoehn: Was that the first time you’d done kind of – I guess rock climbing is technically considered an extreme sport but had you not been into that kind of athletic lifestyle until you went blind?

[0:23:09] Erik Weihenmayer: Well, I was always like, I loved adventure but I thought blindness would end my adventure. I was also like, kind of like the Bubble Boy in Seinfeld, if I got knocked on the head, I would lose my sight faster so as I was going blind, I wasn’t able to do anything, any contact sport, anything physical because I’d go blind faster. Once I finally went blind, my freshman year in high school, there was nothing else to lose, the worst thing had happened to me. I thought, okay, gloves are off, I can do anything I want now and so when I got that opportunity to climb – I couldn’t play basketball or baseball anymore – like you were talking about. I was really upset by that. But I wanted to keep my heart open to new ideas so yeah, rock climbing came into my life and I absolutely loved it. I sat on this ledge high up, my first climb, and blind people use echo location. You can hear the sound of vibrations, moving out through space and bouncing off of objects and coming back at you. I could hear the sound of space out over the valley and I could hear the sound of space out over the valley and I could hear the trees rustling with leaves and I just thought, “My god, this is like stunningly beautiful and this is adventure.” I wanted to keep doing that.

[0:24:31] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. Erik, how do we keep our hearts open? I mean, conceptually, knowing these things is helpful but do you have a daily practice or people that you surround yourself with that makes it easier for you?

[0:24:47] Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah, I think it’s also knowing people. I mean, knowing people that have done it and seeing the effects of it over and over. Even when I kayaked the Grand Canyon, sort of reflecting on that attitude in a different kind of way. Because when you go down a giant river with huge rapids, you have to put yourself in the state of mind that yeah, I may get crushed in this rapid. I may get flipped over, I may get stuck in a hole, I may get slammed into a rock and those are bad. Nobody wants those things to happen to them but if you start thinking, “Okay the river is a bad place.” “It’s like this monster that is going to suck me down and suck me down into nothingness and it’s like this monster that is going to be terrible.” Then right then you are creating trauma in your life and your experience. So Harlan who is my guide down the river kept saying, “You’ve got to see this journey, this river journey as a good thing. The river is a beautiful thing. It’s an incredible thing, you’ve got to trust the journey even though bad things may happen to you along the way.” But you just have to have, honestly I think it moves into a kind of spirituality. It moves into a sense of faith that you just have to have. I am not saying you have to have one religion or another but you do have to have faith that the journey is a good one.

[0:26:20] Charlie Hoehn: What’s a group that you would recommend to people to get involved with if they wanted to surround themselves with those types of people? I mean I make recommendations that people should do sports but joining an intra-murals group is not going to provide you with a group of people who view things as beautiful – a chance for change. Are there organizations you’d recommend? And you can recommend your own of course.

[0:26:49] Erik Weihenmayer: Well of course I am a little biased so I will recommend No Barriers because what’s cool about – I just left our summit. It’s our big signature event of the year and we had almost a thousand people in Squaw Creek, California in the Lake Tahoe area and you are sitting around a table at breakfast about to go off on these great adventures and there is a person struggling with obesity, there’s a person who’s had a couple of strokes, there’s a little person, there’s a CEO trying to figure out how to lead his team. There’s a family like a single dad or mom sitting next to you, there’s a blind kid who’s never been off the pavement. People like the blind kid by the way that I was sitting with, had come to the US. He was from Ethiopia and had his eyes poked out by some terrible people that wanted to put him out on the street to beg and he wound up getting into a refugee camp and winding up over here in America. Thank God for him. So you are sitting with these amazing people. And they’re all there lifting each other up right? And they are all thinking about the No Barriers life and this mindset that we’re all trying to create and when you surround yourself with those kinds of people, you are lifted up. You want to be better because of those people. You feel like you’re standing on their shoulders. So when we talk about these No Barriers elements that I was talking about earlier, that rope team is probably the most important one. Because those are the people that will pull you out of those dark places and say, “Get up again”. So that’s one of the reasons I helped create No Barriers because I wanted to create this eclectic group of people who all buy into the same notion.

[0:28:27] Charlie Hoehn: That’s great. So tell me about some of the reactions that you’ve gotten to the book, No Barriers, what have your readers taken away from your book that they’ve implemented into their life? What have been some of your favorite success stories?

[0:28:45] Erik Weihenmayer: Well I think that people have been writing me – it’s very cool to see because at the end of the book, I ask people to take their own No Barriers pledge because one of the challenges when you write a book and you’re blind, you have done some of these big adventures. And people somehow think like, “Oh gosh this guy is some kind of elite athlete or this inspirational blind guy” and I am just a normal every day person. I am over here and he’s in this other category and it becomes a barrier in itself. So No Barriers, the book that I wrote I really was trying to make this book about the reader. I wanted to write about people, real people not like the Kardashians or not these sort of celebrity type people, but actually real everyday people who were figuring this thing out – and not all of them are figuring it out by the way. Some of them actually falling short, their lives ending too soon. So I wanted people to know that the book is about them so as a result, I ask people to take a pledge and I mean people have pledged to travel again after the death of a spouse, they’ve pledged to write a book, they’ve pledge to get off of painkillers, to stop drinking, to lose weight, to stop smoking, to start a business and so that’s probably the thing that I’m most proud of is the fact that people see reflections of themselves through these characters. And they actually are committing to changes in their own lives. I mean as you and I have spoken before and as you say so eloquently like the people who are reading are the heroes of the story not necessarily me.

[0:30:32] Charlie Hoehn: Truth, very true. Erik what is the rest of this year look like for you, what are you going to be doing with No Barriers?

[0:30:43] Erik Weihenmayer: Well we’re trying to grow this thing bigger and bigger. Next October we’re going to New York City. We have a lot of our events in nature, beautiful mountain settings and river settings and we decided to take a big bold leap and go to New York City to Manhattan next October not a few months from now but a year from now. That will help us to get in people’s faces with this message because cities are the thought leaders and epicenter of a lot of culture and media and things like that. So if we want this idea to be a mainstream idea, we’re going to try to bring it to cities. So that’s one of our big commitments with No Barriers this year. For me personally, I am training right now for a big rock climb. The Alps have these beautiful north faces. There are big rocks and ice faces and one of them is called the Pesbidia, it’s between Italy and Switzerland and I am going to go climb that in August with a friend of mine. It’s a three thousand foot vertical face. It will take us a few days to get to the base and then a long day to climb it and then another day to get down. So I’m training hard right now, doing a lot of pull ups and a lot of climbing.

[0:31:48] Charlie Hoehn: Good man. If you have to give a one sentence review, like you might see on Amazon, of Mount Everest. What would that be?

[0:31:59] Erik Weihenmayer: Mount Everest reflects the world. It’s the ugliest parts of humanity and the greatest parts of humanity. It’s the selfish parts of humanity and the most courageous parts of humanity, all packed into the mountain.

[0:32:11] Charlie Hoehn: I mean like one sentence. If somebody is thinking about should I go do Mount Everest. What would you say to them?

[0:32:22] Erik Weihenmayer: I mean I couldn’t tell – from that one thing I could not give them advice because you have to train and you have to prepare and I trained half of my life for these high mountains. And so if somebody was like – I have people call me up and say, “I want to climb Mount Everest” and I’m like, “Well what other mountains have you climbed?” and they’d say, “Well none” and I’m like, “Well you’re insane.” So I’d be a dangerous guide to give a sentence for people unless I knew exactly where they were in terms of their story.

[0:32:57] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I mean my favorite part about authors like yourself is that I don’t have to go do what you did. I just could read about it and experience it.

[0:33:08] Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah and my journey has been some extreme adventures but the message of No Barriers in the book is not anything extreme, you know? I love the stories where people just say, “Hey look I want to walk down a set of stairs again. I hurt my leg really bad and I can’t walk down a set of stairs without clutching onto the railing.” We’ll work on these cool tools like these cool trekking poles and bam, they are walking down a set of stairs and that’s their Everest of the day. It’s not necessarily about extreme stuff. Again, it’s another one of those barriers.

[0:33:46] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s a really good point I think that people can take away from this is No Barriers – diving into it is not going to be just knuckling extreme sports. It’s something all of us could benefit from no matter what the circumstances, no matter where you’re stuck or what your darkness is, there is a way out.

[0:34:13] Erik Weihenmayer: Yeah and when people do our physical journeys, we’ll usually climb a mountain or raft in a river. We’ve had many people that say the physical piece of the climb is the easiest part. So some of the adventures that I pledge to going and climbing a mountain that’s been, in a way, easier than some of the other far out pledges that I made through my No Barriers experience. I made a pledge to cook for my family once a week and that was a real challenge. You know, cutting up vegetables and not being able to see and I learned how to use a grill. I’m 48 years old, I never learned to cook hamburgers and a couple of weeks ago, my friend taught me how to grill burgers. Walking into the kitchen with a grill full of hamburgers, I was really proud. I was probably as proud as I was when I get to the top of a mountain.

[0:35:10] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. Tell me more about that experience like is cooking kind of one of the last realms for you that you’ve wanted to learn? Or was it just as a personal challenge to yourself to learn that?

[0:35:23] Erik Weihenmayer: Climbing can feel selfish. You are away from your family and so I wanted to have a pledge that connected me and serve my family. So cooking was something that I thought was about serving my kids, about showing my wife and my kids how much I love them. I would put myself in a vulnerable situation and I would cook and I would chop carrots with these big knives like a millimeter away from my fingers.

[0:35:53] Charlie Hoehn: That’s beautiful man. Really, that is fantastic. That’s been my favorite part of this podcast maybe. If you were going to write a follow up book, what would you choose? Would it be something along those lines more toward the connection?

[0:36:11] Erik Weihenmayer: You know what I try to do with No Barriers was write about real people. I think I would probably even go further and really try to focus like get myself totally out of the equation, just write about these No Barriers people. I really think it’s a message that America especially needs right now. We have a lot of folks that come into our organization with PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress and I think in a way the country is experiencing a little PTSD right now. We are doing what our people do, we start lashing out and we’re blaming the world and we’re not focused on what we need to focus on. So we climbed this peak last summer and with about a 100 people and they’re all different abilities and different barriers that people are struggling with but one of them was a physical disability. It was this kid called Cole Rogers. He was born with a very rare bone and muscle disease and he was very limited in his movement. We equipped him with this incredible technology called an Action Track Chair. It is a giant tank tread with seat and a joystick and electric motor and he was cranking his way up the mountain and he got about 150 yards from the summit and of course the technology died. The battery died so I said, “Hey we’ll just carry you up to the top” and he said, “Absolutely not.” And he gets out of his chair and he starts crawling his way towards the summit and about 45 minutes later, after leaving some blood and skin on the Tundra, he’s lying on the summit and we’re speechless. I thought if America focused on that like, “Screw that. I am not going to be carried. I’m going to tap into what I had here and I’m going to crawl my way to the top.” I thought that’s what we need to be focusing on. That would solve so many of our problems if we just focused on those kinds of people and then took parts of those people and adopted it into our own character.

[0:38:18] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. Erik what is a parting piece of advice that you have for aspiring authors or people who have a message that they want to share along these lines?

[0:38:33] Erik Weihenmayer: Well for authors and people who are trying to share a message. I mean I think we all have a great message so I think it doesn’t – I think we focus too much on social media and all that kind of stuff, if they have a great community they’re trying to grow and they are trying to share a positive message and they’re out in the current trying to live their lives, they’re not stuck in these bad places. They feel happy, they feel fulfilled and I think that’s good enough. I don’t think everyone needs to be like a motivational speaker to get the job done. In No Barriers one of the primary messages was simply: don’t live in a prison. So many of us live in a prison. We wind up getting stuck in those prisons and we never figure out how to get out. Don’t live inside of those prisons. It’s scary as hell to try to climb your way out of those prisons but it’s also even worse to just sit in there and listen to life go by. So I am not saying there’s one kind of thing that is better than another. I am just saying do not succumb to those prisons.

[0:39:46] Charlie Hoehn: Agreed. What is the way for listeners to connect with you, follow you [0:39:52.2 inaudible].

[0:39:54] Erik Weihenmayer: Well folks can learn about my work through touchthetop.com. They can learn about No Barriers through nobarriersusa.org. So everybody knows somebody maybe struggling or somebody – we have a whole youth division, we have a veterans division, we have a women’s division. We try to work with all kinds of people. We have kids in the foster care system. So if you know somebody who would benefit from this kind of experience then definitely send them our way. Get involved, back to the book I mean honestly, I didn’t even really want to write a book. It’s much more fun to be out there climbing and kayaking. But I hope that the book becomes one of the seeds that people can point to when they think about this idea. So hopefully, it progresses that idea for the movement that we are trying to build.

[0:40:43] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. That was great Erik. I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show.

[0:40:48] Erik Weihenmayer: Cool Charlie, thank you very much.

[0:40:56] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Erik Weihenmayer for being on the show. You can buy his book, No Barriers on amazon.com. What pledge will you make to yourself this month? Let us know by leaving a review on iTunes or by sending us a comment at Facebook.com/authorhour. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.