Melissa Arnot Reid is a mountain guide, speaker, and founder of the nonprofit organization, The Juniper Fund. She was the first American woman to summit and descent Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen and also holds the record for summiting the tallest peak in the world more times than any other western woman with a total of 6 ascents. She’s a certifiable bone crushing badass with a lot of life experience to share from her years of sacrificing for her passions.
In this episode, you’ll learn that it wasn’t the final, most strenuous 250 feet of summiting Everest that got Melissa to be the first female to summit and descent the highest peak in the world without supplemental oxygen. It was every single step since the first mountain she had ever stepped on that got her there. The key to summiting Everest is taking small steps towards your bigger goals. If you liked that metaphor, brace yourself for another 942 of them that will help you be bold, find what calls you, and dig deep to make it all happen.
In today’s episode,
- You don’t have to see the summit to make the first step. You don’t even have to know what the summit looks like.
- If you’re asking yourself if what you’re doing is your passion, then it isn’t.
- Let yourself grow and change as a person as you have new experiences and learn more about yourself. Failure is a good thing and it makes life exciting!
Enjoy!
Intention is worth two-thirds of action.
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Some Questions I Ask:
- How did you decide to get into mountaineering? [1:30]
- Did you see what the finish line of getting into mountaineering could be, or did you just start taking steps because it was fun? [5:30]
- How did people respond when you left your stable job to pursue mountaineering? [8:05]
- What was it that drove you to find success in self reliance? [11:00]
- What made you want to go as big as you possibly could go and then keep going back to do it again? [15:00]
- What is the metaphor and correlation between your curiosity and quest up mountains to entrepreneurs and creatives? [20:30]
- Did you figure out that you were an expert at climbing? [22:33]
- How did you figure out how to make money? [23:40]
- Did you easily find success being the hyphen that you are or were there struggles and mistakes made along the way? [30:07]
- How many people told you that you couldn’t climb Everest without supplemental oxygen? [32:40]
- What is like to be a woman in such a male dominated arena? [38:15]
- How do you not get paralyzed by fear when you’re hiking past people who have just died doing what you’re currently doing? [45:16]
- Do you have advice to others and how they can deal with their fear? [51:00]
- Do you have an idea of where your career is going? Where is your mastery of climbing taking you next? [54:18]
- Talk to me about teamwork in your career, nonprofit, and climbing. [66:00]
- Is leadership innate in you or have you had to craft it? What are the core characteristics in being a good leader? [72:28]
- To what degree does self evaluation and honesty play into your method? [77:17]
- To what degree do you think success is mental? [82:20]
- What’s the cognition like when you’re 240 feet from the summit of Everest with no supplemental oxygen? [86:40]
- What’s the best way for people to stay connected with you? [92:05]
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
- What it looks like to rebel against “authentically hippy” parents. [2:00]
- The challenge of balancing the importance of taking every small step, while maintaining the long term vision. [5:40]
- Why you need to surround yourself with people who will support your crazy ideas. [9:02]
- Externally validated success won’t always make you happy. [10:22]
- Melissa learned the values of hard work from her parents, who chose to sacrifice money and convention to be happy. [11:00]
- What it means to go all in. [13:00]
- How Melissa found herself at Everest for the first time. [16:00]
- The difference between Sherpas and porters. Sherpas are a group of people, porters are a group of professionals who carry supplies up mountains. [19:00]
- How curiosity and questions brought Melissa back to Everest over and over again. [19:30]
- Innovation is sometimes led by asking “why not reinvent the wheel?” [21:00]
- If you’re struggling to find your passion, perhaps it’s because you’re distracting yourself from truly feeling things. [23:46]
- If you’re asking yourself if what you’re doing is your passion, then it isn’t. [25:01]
- How to make money as a climber of Everest. [27:04]
- Melissa studied people she thought were cool to develop her blueprint for success. [27:30]
- Why you need to abandon what others think of your path. [31:13]
- It’s not easy to make decisions that are value based over validation based, but it is important. [32:00]
- If you’re going to dare to try something that hasn’t been done before, you need a strong relationship with your intuition. [35:30]
- If you’re a woman in tech or another male dominated world, Melissa’s advice is to be the very best at what you do and accept the double edged sword of being a minority. [38:30]
- Why you should be seeking opportunities to be the odd one out. [44:00]
- How Melissa deals with risk, fear, and death. [46:00]
- Life without failure would be a snooze! Embrace failure and look for the next opportunity to fail. [51:00]
- How Melissa uses the inspiration and learning of each experience to find her next adventure. [55:12]
- The harrowing story of how Melissa started her nonprofit, the Juniper Fund, and how it helps Nepali families get back on their feet after deaths in their families. [56:25]
- Even though Melissa feels so unqualified to run a nonprofit, the meaningfulness of her work is what carries her through the fear of failure. [63:22]
- Intention is worth two-thirds of action. [65:00]
- How to use the “brotherhood of the rope” to help all of your relationships thrive. There’s no such thing as thriving on your own. Every one needs help. [66:30]
- The short story of how Melissa and I met, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro together. [70:45]
- How Melissa uses empathy and optimism to be a good leader. [73:00]
- Seperate what other people think of you from what is actually the truth. [78:00]
- What it’s actually like to summit a mountain and all the things that go through your head. It’s not that glamorous. [84:10]
- When you’re 240 vertical feet from the summit of Everest without additional oxygen, it takes two hours. With oxygen, that same distance would take 15 minutes. [87:00]
- Melissa’s gratitude practice that she developed while running. [88:00]
- Check out Melissa at melissaarnot.com, as well as thejuniperfund.org to stay apprised of all the amazing things she’s up to. [92:15]
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