LAS VEGAS – Polar explorer, endurance athlete, and storyteller Ben Saunders has done things no other human has done, in some of cruelest parts of our planet. You might think his story is one of continually blazing triumph, but it's not. And that's what makes it great.
Saunders, who described himself as "an expert in dragging things around in cold places" where, ironically, "there is no real estate," addressed the Zillow Group Premier Agent® Forum on Friday, and shared with the mainstage audience his vivid experience of living the cliché that life is not about the destination, but rather the journey.
Through it all, the hardest thing to overcome wasn't the starvation, the hypothermia or the polar bears. Rather, it was his own self-doubt.
"Self-belief is one of the most important ingredients to success," Saunders said. "More than any physical part of me, the bit of me that I have stretched beyond limit is my sense of self-belief."
And that self-belief is like a muscle. It can get stronger or weaker over time, depending on how it is tested (or not).
Of course, you can test yourself in many ways - by expanding your business, for example. You don't have to do it by pushing yourself to cover the distance of 70 marathons back-to-back in the coldest place on earth, as Saunders did last year when he and his journey partner Tarka L’Herpiniere became the first people to travel on foot to the South Pole and back.
Saunders had previously reached the North Pole on foot, dragging hundreds of pounds of supplies and overcoming a terrifying early failure to reach the goal. "In some ways, every expedition has been a failure, but through each failure I have managed to raise the bar in my particular endeavor," he said.
The South Pole journey that Saunders completed had been too much for legendary explorers Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton. And though it was completed in a time with much better technology, resisting the assistance that technology could offer posed its own challenge.
"It made our suffering entirely optional," Saunders said. "Unlike Shackleton and Scott, we could call for someone to get us at any time."
But through that struggle of eating 6,000 calories a day and burning 9,000 while dreaming of cheeseburgers in unimaginable cold, Saunders experienced moments of absolute magic and joy.
And that joy can be yours, if you don't listen to the naysayers.
"No one else is the authority on your potential," Saunders said. "You are the one who decides what you're capable of."
