Free Solo

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I was really struck when watching Free Solo with the early days of El Cap, you just said it's too scary. I wonder what led you to cross the border to saying, yeah, it's scary, but I want to go for it. Starting in 2009, I thought that it was time to free solo El Cap because it was the next obvious thing. And so I sort of harnessed that motivation to then actually work on ultimately free soloing it. Yeah, well, I didn't realize how much further down my personal journey it would actually be. It's basically six years of doing progressively bigger and harder climbs of other kinds before coming back to climbing.

In 2017, Alex Honnold did what even the world’s best rock climbers thought was impossible. He climbed to the top of El Capitan– a granite rock mountain more than 3,000 feet high– without a rope, harness, or net. His audacious feat was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo,” and it left Adam Grant with some burning questions about what we can learn from his unique approach to managing fear. In this episode of ReThinking, another podcast in the TED Audio Collective, Alex opens up about how he regulates his emotions when he’s hanging on by just a few fingers, what still scares him, and how he stays motivated to pursue ambitious goals. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/RWAG2. And for more conversations on how the world’s most interesting people think, follow ReThinking with Adam Grant wherever you're listening to this.