Are You Good at What You're Doing?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The TED main stage is pretty intimidating. You still feel like you're performing somebody else's material. I was like, here's a collection of several thousand of like the most important people in the world all sitting here watching me do something that I'm not good at. It's funny though, because since then I've gotten much more comfortable with speaking and obviously do it quite a bit more.

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.