Show Notes

• Founding Sharda Exports
• The importance of social responsibility and sustainability
• How to own a business, rather than being owned by the business
• The love of adventure
• Lessons From Everest
  • The power of focus
  • One step at a time
  • Make friends with fear

Connect With Aditya Gupta

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/aditya.gupta.58958343
Instagram – https://instagram.com/landscapes_and_inspirations?utm_medium=copy_link 
YouTube – https://youtube.com/user/AdityaGupta1969
The Rug Republic – http://www.therugrepublic.us/

Aditya’s Book

http://7lessonsfromeverest.com/

Summary

As an accomplished athlete and Registered Dietician, Maureen Stoecklein understands the importance of solid nutrition for optimal performance. Maureen discusses her career as a firefighter, her mission as a dietician, and how you can incorporate the same nutrition strategies as professional and elite athletes.

Full Transcript

Brian:

Welcome to another episode of Life Excellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques, and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success.

Hi everyone. Thanks for tuning into Life Excellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it on social media, posting about it and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com.

I’m so excited to have Aditya Gupta on the show today. Aditya is the owner of several highly successful export retail, e-commerce and construction businesses in India. His companies employ over 5,000 people and their products are sold in 85 countries on all seven continents of the world. In addition to his business endeavors, Aditya is also a TEDx speaker, a fearless adventurer as you’ll find out, a photographer, author, designer, and world traveler. He clearly lives life to the fullest and is very passionate about setting and achieving huge audacious goals. Aditya believes in raising the bar and did that quite literally by climbing Mount Everest in 2019, at the age of 50. He documented his adventure in a beautiful coffee table book entitled Seven Lessons From Everest. This 231 page book takes readers through an immersive photo journey to the summit of Everest, and also empowers readers with profound lessons that can be applied to any challenges in business and in life. All proceeds from his book go to Child Rights and You—the acronym is CRY, a non-government organization in India that works tirelessly to ensure happier and healthier childhoods for India’s underprivileged children. Aditya also helped design Mission Everest, a virtual simulation of his summit climb. This simulation has become a highly effective tool for management training and performance transformation. Aditya has been featured in television, countless magazines and newspapers, all documenting his incredible journey up Everest. He insists that Everest is just a metaphor for any challenging goals you want to achieve and his talks leave audiences feeling charged up and inspired to climb their own versions of Mount Everest. Aditya I am so charged up for this interview. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Aditya:

Lovely to be here, Brian, thank you very much for the extremely generous introduction. I’m excited to talk to you and to talk to your listeners and to just find new people who are interested in this story. So let’s get started.

Brian:

All right. I definitely want to talk about Everest and I love the metaphor between climbing Mount Everest and achieving big goals in life, and certainly we’re going to get into that, but I have to tell you, I’m equally fascinated by your business background. So let’s go all the way back to your education and the start of Sharda Exports. Your educational background is actually in mechanical engineering. How did you shift from mechanical engineering into business and starting Sharda Exports. Tell us about that business.

Aditya:

So after engineering, I did business school. Straight after engineering, I went to the Delhi University Faculty of Management Studies, where I did business, specializing in marketing. We were fortunate that our parents had actually started a very small rug business at our family home. So we grew up seeing rugs being made around us. Our family home was a large compound because there was some other things happening out there—the cold storage and all of those things. So as soon as we finished education, choice was to go for a corporate career. I had job offers from American Express and so on, but I was more excited about following my own path. And I think one of the conversations…when me and my mom used to have these post dinner walks, long walks after dinner, and one of those conversations…our business was very, very small at that time so I was seriously considering taking a corporate job offer because I had good education and there were a lot of good offers that I had. So my mom, in that conversation, said I want you to be somebody who gives jobs, not takes jobs. So I think that was a little bit of a nudge to that 21 year old chap who said, okay, let’s take it that way. And me and my younger brother kind of took over from our parents and took over in the sense that our dad and our mom, they were like, okay, you guys do it your way because your it’s your way of working. And our way of working is different. We’re around if you need us, but they were not always standing next to us. So we had full freedom from day one, literally from day one. And I’m sure we did not disappoint them. It was good for us at that point because typically the rug manufacturer—a lot of India was traditional companies and we were modern educated folks, young kids who looked at it as a home fashion business. And we never looked at it as a rug manufacturing business. So our customer profile, our approach to business was a very different approach than a traditional drug manufacturing company out of India. And I think that helped. So over the next seven years, me and my brother grew our business a hundred times. It is still old-fashioned handmade stuff. It’s not like today’s times [where] you get funding [of] millions of dollars and you do something magical. And then two years [later] you are like 5,000 times bigger.

So these are traditional businesses with everything being proportionally required. So a hundred times means a hundred times more area, a hundred more people, and then more customers. So all of that was exciting. And then as we grew, as we understood the global market, and as our finances went on stronger, we diversified into other things. Real estate was one of them, furniture manufacturing, and export was one of them. And it’s been a very, very fun journey. And I am really thankful to my parents, to everybody else around us, to my family, to my children, my wife, and it’s been a great learning experience and an exciting journey so far. Of course, we’ve had our ups and downs like we should. I always say that if you’re not having any trouble, that means you’re underselling yourself. You’re just operating in your comfort zone. You should be having some problems in life and some problems in business because otherwise you are too much inside the boundary. So I think we’ve had our fair share and we’ve had fun.

Brian:

Your journey is incredible. And we could really talk the whole time about business—you’re involved in so many businesses and that side fascinates me. And actually, even as we get into Everest, I’m going to ask more questions about how you balance those, but let’s stick on business for a short time. So you grew Sharda Exports and you talked about the magnitude of that growth, and you talked about some other businesses that you’ve gotten into. And in learning about you, I read that over the last ten years you’ve branched into many other endeavors. You mentioned a couple of them—the commercial building construction projects, the retail business with the Furniture Republic, but you also started an e-commerce website. And interestingly even got into some  seemingly unrelated businesses like futures and options trading, financial investing. My question is how are you able to manage so many businesses?

Aditya:

I think I am lucky to have a good team and a good management system in our core business, which is manufacturing and export. And I, as a founder of that business and as a person individually, I like to not keep on doing the same thing. So if there is enough stability in what has been established, then it’s fun to move on to something related. I try and avoid taking monumental risks. I believe a little bit in that piggy bank model of wealth creation and wealth generation. So as I said, we are little…a generation before the funding and literally when we did our education, there was almost no email and hardly any of those things. So we still have that good merger of conservative on our side and then very modern on the market side. So our exposure in terms of global travel, global brands, I think the future is in option and financial investing. Naturally, as you generate new wealth, create a wealth portfolio, it is important to be able to pay attention to that. And it’s not that you’re so busy running your businesses that you don’t even pay attention to the result of those businesses, which in our case, in privately held companies, naturally is some kind of wealth creation. And that has to be managed well and has to help us grow further. And also, I like to distribute them into two, three different boxes. So some boxes give us the security and some boxes, more risk money. So it’s a little bit of a conservative approach, but works well for us so far.

Brian:

It’s interesting to me that you tell me you’re risk averse yet you’re involved in futures and options trading and you climb Mount Everest. How do you…

Aditya:

I did not say [cross talk] I said balancing. I did not say I’m risk averse, but what I meant was that I don’t want to take a $500 million project, in which case it becomes a larger number than I should be entering into a single project. So I love risks to the extent that I feel is manageable. As far as Everest I am a firm believer that life and death—I’m not so much of a fatalistic chap, but I do believe that life and death is, a little bit, on your destiny. And I have seen enough examples of that from my personal life, where the healthiest of people pass away for no reason and the most unhealthy lifestyle people still continue to do whatever they do and nothing happens to them. So Everest, et cetera, is for me…I am a believer that if my days are numbered, then so are they. And business, I try to divide the risk into different baskets. So individually I may take a risky basket, but that will still be manageable in my overall scheme of things. So if you’re about a hundred and you have 2,500 risk and over, then that’s okay. But if I will take a risk of 500 while being a hundred, then that would be the kind of risk I will not take, but that does not mean I will do boring things.

Brian:

Clearly not. And we’ll get into one of those non boring adventures in a couple of minutes. Aditya, you wrote that environmental and social responsibility has been in your organization’s DNA before it really became a buzzword. Can you share more about that and how that is woven—pun unintended—woven throughout your organization and why social responsibility and sustainability is so important to you?

Aditya:

I’ll tell you what, this is a part of my education while being a global business person. And as I said to you in the beginning, because we were a modern company running as a home fashion business we had a different customer profile when we got into the business in early nineties. So while typically most of the exporters would sell to wholesale companies who would then sell to retailers across the globe, our customer base tended to be brands and nice important brands and retail folks around the world. So with them the exposure was a lot around audit and that whole culture of being environmentally conscious. I think I am biased from my global business exposure and global travels because we were meeting and interacting with a different profile of people as compared to a typical industry situation. So that was partly it, partly because of our A-class education and just the reading and a part of our family…our family has been a little conscious, especially socially and on the philanthropy side. The environmental consciousness came more around my engineering background and the business school and the traveling and the working with the important brands in the world who kind of made our consciousness to a level where we realize that it’s actually profitable to align with those causes. We never looked upon it as a cost of doing business or some sort of a liability to be fulfilled, but there were advantages and I think we’ve always benefited for them. Firstly, directly because a lot of customers appreciate that about us. And we work with the most important brands in the world, across markets. And indirectly because our work environment, our internal…I think an important phrase to me is the stories that you tell yourself about yourself. They matter a lot in life. And if my story to myself is that I am doing business ethically, I’m doing the right things for my people, I’m doing the right thing for my environment. I think that gives me a more positive frame of mind with which I view the world and view my business enterprise. So I think between these two factors, we’ve had that experience right from the mid nineties. And we are pretty much the first company who started doing a lot of recycled products starting from sweaters and jeans and ties and all kinds of things. So we had that advantage of being innovative while being creative as well as very, very, fashion oriented, but being out of the box. So our company in the trade has always been known for its creativity. 

Brian:

How does that permeate throughout the organization? So I can see that this is clearly an organizational value for you. How does it play out on a day-to-day basis or year in, year out basis? Not just at the management level, but also throughout your organization. Is this something that you talk about? And obviously you’re living that value. So I’m just curious about how that plays out.

Aditya:

For me, it’s important to measure outcomes. It’s important to measure these things. It’s not only important to talk about something. Unless it’s measured, acknowledged, and rewarded things don’t really permeate into practice. So we have in our company an elaborate system of incentives and those systems, for example all our waste materials that we can sell for a recycling purpose, that money is put back into facilities for staff. So whether it’s a new machine in the lunch room or some extra stuff happening, purely for the comfort and convenience of staff. Let’s say if I’m selling $50,000 worth of stuff from the factory, which instead of being just thrown away, it gets collected, segregated. So there is an effort involved in that and we’ve kept that quantification mentality to a fairly detailed level where everybody naturally not only can see this is happening, but the benefits of that are coming directly or indirectly to the larger group. It’s not only coming to me as an owner. Besides that, obviously, because we go through so many audits and we have so many certifications, like we are a Global Recycling Standard Certified Company, we are ISO, we are environment [inaudible] because of the branding and because of the way we like to do business that is also included. So therefore, a lot of that data and all of those practices are a part of these audits. And then these benefits, which we share with our people through innovative ideas and through schemes of how to do things…for example, all our savings on diesel and electricity, ten percent of that savings goes back to the teams that manage it. And every year we’ve been saving six figure dollar sums. And it’s surprising that how—this is our third year running—every year we still have a lot more saving to be done. Now that wouldn’t be possible if there was no incentive link, because I’m not walking around all our factories, switching off lights and fans, but somebody is. Somebody is made aware of that and is rewarded for that effort. On the one hand it’s cost saving, on the other hand, it’s environmental support. So these are the kinds of examples.

Brian:

So awareness and visibility are obviously very big. And then I love how you transfer the benefit of that back to the stakeholders, the people who are responsible for turning off the lights or other environmentally friendly…

Aditya:

We take that into a lot of detail, into different aspects of our business. And I think partly that is the reason…you asked me in the beginning, how can you manage so many different things? I think if the incentives that I have as an owner and as the people have as associates, if they’re aligned, then I have to monitor much less number of things. Otherwise you can keep saying things, you can give monitoring and how much watch can you keep? That has to be an incentive, which is aligned. And then people just take care of it without having to all the time look into it or look over somebody’s shoulders for every little thing. So I can concentrate on either diversification, on new projects, or even some adventures. I can take off for a couple of weeks and I’m very comfortable mentally that I know things will be fine.

Brian:

How do you describe your leadership style? So you’re managing by numbers if you’re measuring things. And so that’s one aspect of it, but talk about other things that you do to lead effectively in your organization.

Aditya:

I would say that it is an amalgamation of two or three different styles because there are very different kinds of audiences that I have to manage. So on the worker level, we are in the handmade product business, so there are craftsmen, people who are not so educated. That is where you have to be a little bit of a senior family figure. So we have a lot of policy oriented things. For example, anybody who’s worked in our company for more than three years can, at any time, take a loan for four months of their salary without any…they just have to put in a little note and they can take the money. So that saves them because some of these people are not so well versed at the banking system. And if they go to the unorganized lending system in India, people could be paying 5% per month as financing costs. So there are these things which we do at the worker and labor level where they feel a part. So we pay for the children, the education, we pay for a lot of different activities. Like for example, with COVID last year, we had everybody, even those people who are contractors and outside folks, we bought health insurance for everybody. We took care of everybody to make sure that if somebody had any issues, money was on the [inaudible]. So that is a little bit of a family situation where it’s not so policy driven, but very personal. There are people who have literally come the whole journey with me, people who I know for 30 years and they’re still making rugs for us. Maybe they were workers and now they became supervisors. So some of those people I know by name. I may not know somebody who joined us two years ago, but I definitely know everybody who was 20 years ago in the company. So that is that part of it.

Then there is the senior folks who are our leaders, team leaders. So they are…most of our team leaders are more than 15 years with the company. So that makes a huge difference to the amount of trust that we have. So that’s where the numbers and the incentive models come in. And then there is the middle part where the junior management people who come and go, they work for a couple of years, so that is where we keep a lot more policy-driven and systems-driven approach to various things. And we have a detailed model of, as I said, variable pace, up to 30% of salary can be earned as bonuses on a monthly basis. So to that extent, there is an elaborate system of numbers and incentives, but over and above, depending on the need of the situation, we can have an approach which can be family oriented or sometimes also a little disciplinarian. And because things have to be sometimes just put in perspective, we are in the export business, there is very little tolerance for not meeting our deadlines or our quality standards or anything else. So we operate in an environment which is different. Our market environment is very different from our immediate environment in India and especially in our business, which is a smaller town in India. So things can be a little more flexible out here, but on our customer side, there is very little flexibility in terms of the standards and expectations. So we have got to manage that dichotomy. And I think we do it well by a system of incentives and where required, also pressures.

Brian:

Well, it sounds like you do it very well. And I love to hear about it. Like I said, I we could just have this podcast be entirely about your businesses and maybe [cross talk]

Aditya:

I’m writing a book about it. I am writing another book, which is about managing small businesses, because I feel that a lot of the content in business school—and I went to business school and so many of my friends, even my children are studying. Both my kids were in UCLA, they’ve graduated from UCLA. A lot of that is for large corporates or sometimes very startup kind of things. But regular businesses, between that $10 million, $200 million level, there’s very little content, which has come from practical people who are running those businesses. Either they’re a professor or folks who are whoever-whoever from the corporate world. So I thought that there should be some content for practices which have worked for us. So that is my other book in the working. And I think sometime next year I should be out with it, which is purely done to help people because I get this a lot—how do you manage different things and you still have a life outside of your work? And I am the most available of my friends to go out for a trip or a movie or a holiday. I’m the most available person. I never say I’m too busy for that because to me that is part of the joys of life and if my businesses don’t allow me time to enjoy what really means much to me, then in some ways I think I don’t own the businesses, the businesses then begin to own me. And I don’t like that feeling.

Brian:

And you know that’s all too common. So your book will be very well received and very helpful because it’s easy to say the things that you’re saying, it’s quite another thing to actually live that, as you know, and I’m sure you have lots of friends and you see examples around the world of people who are chained to their business rather than setting the business up so that they can do exciting things like climb Everest. So we look forward to that book.

Aditya, let’s shift our conversation now to Everest. We’re not going to totally move away from family and life in business, but we’ll integrate that. And let’s focus on this Everest adventure. The Everest climb takes about 50 days. I think you were about 43 days on the mountain, and it has a statistical casualty rate of 4%. I read that in 2019, the year that you did the climb, Mount Everest claimed 12 lives. It takes a year of rigorous preparation. You did all of this at the age of 50 while running, like we were talking about, people intensive businesses that require tremendous time, energy, and attention. So you get to the mountain, you get to Everest and you witness a plane crash even before you start the climb. As you’re climbing, you encounter dead bodies along the way, and were drained physically, psychologically, and emotionally. You quite literally defied the odds and on a few occasions, even defied death. So the obvious first question is why? You have a beautiful family. I spoke with your son. I’ve seen pictures. You have a blessed life. You have great businesses. Why risk all of that for something like an Everest climb?

Aditya:

Well, it’s very hard to explain that to somebody who is not in the same love affair. So I would not even want to try to do that. But I would say that I have been in love with adventure and outdoors right from college. Our engineering college had a club called the Marlin Explorers Club. My very first mountain trip was in 1987 as a 17 year old a boy. And since then, I really got hooked to the outdoors and adventures. I am most charged and most thankful for life when I am out there in nature and wilderness. Gradually mountains became one of those things. I did a mountaineering course in 1991, 1992. So Mount Everest becomes that final frontier of this love in terms of just what you…so if you are a good swimmer or something you want an Olympic medal, or at least you want to aspire for one. And fortunately climbing Mount Everest is not as hard as getting an Olympic medal. So I think I manage the mountain.

Brian:

I don’t know about that! [Laughter]

Aditya:

I can tell you about that. And in fact, one of those things—if you were able to read through my book—that’s one of those things I’ve said in the book that it was…my goal was to prove what ordinary people like me can do when they decide to do it. And Everest for me, the first attempt I made was in 2014. And that year, the very first night of the climb, an avalanche claimed 16 lives on the Khumbu Icefall. That year was an aborted season on Everest because after that, all the people who died were Sherpas, and then the Sherpas went on strike because they could not agree with the Nepalese government about compensation, et cetera. We were there for a month, but we had to come back even without starting the actual climb ahead of base camp. So 2019, I turned 50 and I knew that I’m not getting any more young and any more fit to try this. I said okay, let’s give it one more shot. But in the meantime, I’ve been doing adventures every year. So a big, serious adventure is a non-negotiable part of my annual calendar. If I’m lucky, sometimes I’m able to do more than one, but one I would definitely like to put in a calendar in advance and that’s it. And then typically it gets done. Unfortunately after Everest, we’ve been stuck with the pandemic and we’ve not been able to take any extraordinary journeys outside of India. We ended up having a good time, I’m paying more attention to India in that case.

Brian:

What was that like in 2014? So there’s a parallel between your preparation for the climb. And as I said, and you agreed, that it’s about a year lead time to this adventure. And so you go through that entire preparation, you’re gearing up physically. You’re certainly gearing up mentally and emotionally for that. And then you get to the mountain and, by the way, what a tragic incident. And so I know lives are lost, but I’m not sure…that’s probably unparalleled, the number of lives that were lost in that avalanche—that’s tragic. But as a I heard you describe that I was thinking about, you referenced the Olympians and we talked about that a little bit before the show, but I thought about the Olympic athletes who were preparing for Tokyo in 2020 and then had that put off. What is that like to gear up for something that big, again, not just the physical preparation, but the mental and emotional preparation only to have that suspended. And for you, it wasn’t suspended for a year like it has been for the Olympic athletes. In fact, it was five years before you got back to the mountain.

Aditya:

And I was not even sure whether I would get back because I was, to be honest with you, I was a little disappointed. I felt that the abortion of that season that year was not necessary. It is a little bit of a complex dynamic between operators and Sherpas and the Nepalese government. See another day, these agencies are running a business and everybody has to pay a hundred percent upfront and nobody’s getting any refunds from there no matter what happens. So you got hundreds of people who paid millions of these dollars. And if you decide to cancel the season, you can just get away with it. I think that is what was one of the driving factors, because there’s no accountability as such. And most of the people will never really go back. Initially, I was also quite disappointed to be honest, because I felt that there wasn’t enough a sense of, should I say, responsibility, should I say accountability, should I say sensitivity? I am not kidding you, Brian. There were people who had sold their homes to go and climb Everest. So Everest climbing is basically, first of all, you want to be mad enough to climb it. You already asked me the reason—I couldn’t give you one. Then you have to have a life which will let you go for about two months out of incommunicado, practically. Now there’s a lot more satellite phones and stuff like that, but let’s say, it’s hard. Then you have to be able to do something which is financially significantly expensive for an activity like this. So you’re talking about $60-70,000 for an Everest climb, which is basically a leisure activity, which can even risk your life. So most of the people who are there are not exactly wealthy people, because again, if you look at stereotypes, business folks, and some of the very wealthy folks, are not quite into activities like this, there are a few, but not usually. So a lot of people have taken loans. A lot of people have sold property. A lot of people have somehow managed to get money from friends and relatives and family. And still, you just send them back home for…if you are on the Everest, it’s like you are expecting every year. Yes, it was a big accident and a big tragedy. But personally, I didn’t think it warranted cancellation of the season because the climbers had not even started. So it was more of a political situation and it worked for them financially. So it was done. Yes, I was disappointed, but then there was only one Mount Everest. And if you want to do it, there is no other way—you have to go through this. And there is no…you can have your ideas and feelings about it, but you’ve got to focus on the main objective. I was lucky that I could give it one more try. And this time I was successful.

Brian:

As you said, you were successful in 2019. The Everest expedition required, as I mentioned before, tremendous physical, mental, and emotional preparation. How did you prepare for that? Walk us through what that year looked like leading up to it, and circling back to the business part of it, you answered this a little bit, but how did you balance the other demands of your life—your family, and your businesses—for the year leading up to the climb? And I guess you did that twice, right? Because you did it in ‘14 and then you went through that same exercise again in 2019.

Aditya:

Let me start with the family, because both my mom and my wife and my kids would have a veto power on ideas like this. So if any of those four or five people, my parents or my wife or two of my children would have said that you are not even not going to do this, I might have just canceled. But me and my wife are together and call it. So she knows me from that time that this is a part of who I am. And she’s always, always been very, very supportive. In fact, in 2014, both my children, they were young teenagers. And they went with me up to base camp to see me off. And this time also, one of those lessons in the book also is not about ignoring the risks. It’s about making friends with those fears and preparing for them and dealing with it head on, instead of hoping that they’ll not happen to you. So I had documented a lot of stuff. I made a detailed will document. I had an open conversation with both my children and my wife about what to do in case I’m not able to return from there. So this was not something that you want to shove under the rug so that if something was to go wrong, then suddenly they don’t know what to do. There was an acknowledgment of what it is. And because, as I said, my belief is that life and death are a little bit of a destiny issue, which does not mean we start jumping off the roofs. But, by and large, you can die in a road accident, in a plane crash, in whatever else—so many things can go wrong. So I can’t be restrained too much about doing things which mean enough to me. So that was the family part. The easiest part of the preparation I would say is the physical part of it, Brian, because there is a cause and effect relationship. It’s very scientific. You put in the exercise, you take care of your nutrition and you do that with discipline and you’ll get the reserve. There is not so much of a gray area there if you are honest about what needs to be done. So that I consider to be the easiest part of it. And then the trickiest part, which is also the most important part while you are in the middle of the climb, is the mental preparation and that tenacity of purpose, that will, on the one hand, keep you determined. And on the other hand also be wise enough and agile enough to turn around if that is the need which is very obvious. And I think in my assessment, a lot of people who lose their lives, unfortunately, are people who fail to make that decision at the right moment. They push the envelope too hard. Yes, there are accidents. But today, by and large, a lot of people die more out of exhaustion and out of just not being able to cope up with something that they’re deliberately trying to do. You don’t really fall off the mountain or something. Of course, you can fall into a crevasse or get killed in an avalanche and it can happen. But a lot of the stories are people who die basically because they over-do themselves. So on the one hand, you have to be very, very determined to do this, because if you are easily discouraged when you would probably turn around five times a week, but if you are on the other hand arrogant about it or overly gung ho about it and not willing to take no for an answer, then you can run into extreme trouble out of which there is no more return. So I think that mental preparation…and my experience says that that is not something that you can do in a year. That is not something that you can do by talking to a spiritual guru or reading some books or looking at some videos. So that is a part of your chemistry—the person that you are, and largely a part of the reserve of what your life has been. So the smaller adventure, when you say you have to be experienced to go to Mount Everest, I think that experience is mostly because you should be able to understand what is the limit of your body, what is the limit of your mind? How do you react to certain situations? And as I said, the stories that you tell yourself about yourself. So if you have a lot of stories of adventures, and there are things where you were quite close to your mortality, and you kind of made it, that gives you an optimistic outlook, or several expeditions and several experiences where you say, okay, what things can go wrong and then they work out themselves. You just have to stick to the purpose. So that’s not something which can just be created out of thin air. That has to be a part of your experiences and your mental framework. So therefore [there are] these three parts of the preparation. Something is in works [inaudible], but obviously your friends and have to be in and family has to be aligned to the purpose.

About the business part, again, as I said, we do have a lot of systems in place, but I think every owner, every founder has this delusion about how important they are to the business. And the Mount Everest expedition was one of those things which helped me get out of that delusion to some extent. I was gone for 60 days, practically incommunicado. And I came back and I said to my people, you all did such a wonderful job. Everything is in place. Everything is going well, you don’t really need me around that much. So I actually cut down some of my engagement from the business after that, because sometimes you have to leave your hands off the handle and you see you are balancing okay. Sometimes you don’t do that because the circumstances never present themselves. But this was a very, very good thing.

Brian:

I know sometimes leaders leave and undertake—whether it’s a vacation or an adventure, like the one that you were on and they come back and find that the business was running better than ever. And that’s a little bit of a mixed blessing, right? For you it’s wonderful and it means that the systems and processes that you’ve set up work. And for some people, they feel a little threatened by that because they realize that they aren’t as important to the business as maybe they thought they were, or maybe other people thought they were.

Aditya:

I think my personal experience out of that, Brian, was that when people know that they really, really are responsible for it, and the guy on top is no longer around, nobody’s watching, there’s nobody who will catch the ball if they drop the ball, I think they just become better than usual. So when I’m around the same people maybe a little more forgiving off circumstances because they know somebody is going to manage and things are in place in terms of just the monitoring systems. But I think everybody becomes more responsible in their own way when they know that somebody is actually going and trying to climb Everest. So that’s a little bit of their own contribution to my climb by taking such good care of their responsibility, that I don’t need to worry about it while I’m there. I don’t need to worry about it immediately upon my return. I think there’s a difference between you going for a holiday to Europe versus going to climb Mount Everest. I think people take it differently. And I have seen that difference very often, and I am blessed to have that kind of team. And also to have that experienced that, how these two kinds of differences of absence, how they work.

Brian:

It’s interesting that you talked about the contribution that people in your organization have made to the climb through just how you described it. Is that something that you articulated to them? Have you spoken about that?

Aditya:

Oh, yes. Yes. In fact, we are going for our offsite—we do off-sites every six months. We’ve not been able to do it in the pandemic. So we are going day after tomorrow for the next three nights to a wildlife sanctuary. So when I came back, I did a private show or talk for my people. And every single day we have acknowledged how they have made this possible. I could not have done it if I did not have the freedom, I couldn’t be irresponsible towards everything—thousands of people live off this, my family lives off this. And customers, while they appreciate what I do and my experiences and my adventures, but that cannot be at the cost of running a responsible business. I’m responsible for a shipment. I’m responsible for their businesses too. So they will not appreciate if my adventures and my travels mean that my work is faltering because that is not a substitute. So naturally I have definitely articulated that. And what I was going to say, the Seven Lessons From Everest has become a very, very useful tool. And we are going to now implement this in a more formal way because we analyze different goals and objectives that we have. And then we map it over the Seven Lessons and see which one is missing. Why are we not achieving what we wanted to achieve? And over and over again, no matter what the circumstances are, we can very clearly map it out to say, okay, we are not doing well on this aspect of one of the Seven Lessons. And therefore, if we can fix this one, we begin to get reserves. So that management tool is really working. And we are going to be implementing in a lot more formal way involving the consultant in the business who takes this over a nine month intervention by mapping actual goals over the metrics of the Seven Lessons, and then seeing which goal is not fully in place because of missing out on which of the lessons. So Everest is a part of not only my life, but also a part of our businesses in a way in which it’s just there, it’s like the air around us. Because I think it is something which is helping us to not only feel excited, but actually analyze objectively and put our finger down to actual task lists and actual actionables because that’s where the rubber meets the road. Without boiling it down to actual things to be done within a certain time frame you can’t really make a difference if you keep talking about it.

Brian:

I Love that you’ve incorporated the climb and your book and the Seven Lessons throughout your organization. And I’m sure you’ve done it in your family and those around you. That’s actually a great segue into the book. So let’s talk about your book. I have it right here. It’s Seven Lessons From Everest Expedition:  Learnings For Life In Business. And I have to tell you Aditya, this is the most amazing photo essay book, coffee table book that I’ve ever read. It was captivating. 251 pages, over 300, I think 350 photos contained in the book. It really truly made me feel like I was climbing Everest with you, of course without the hypothermia and the oxygen deprivation. But what I love about the book is that in addition to memorializing your experience on Everest, which you did a fantastic job of, it will be part of your legacy for a very long time, because of the pictures that you’ve taken, because of the way you described your journey, but you took it a step further and you explained how Mount Everest is really a metaphor for any serious challenge or project one takes up in life. And as you referenced, you talk about seven lessons that Everest taught you about life and about business. So let’s jump in if we could, to a couple of those lessons. I’d like to hear more about them. One lesson is the power of focus and Aditya you wrote that Everest taught you two kinds of focus are needed:  a general one for broad direction and a specific one for every step of the way. Why are these important and why is it harmful to lack either one, either on the Everest climb or also in life?

Aditya:

So what happens out there and in life in general, whenever we’re trying to achieve something, which is difficult enough or dangerous enough or challenging enough, there are the both negatives and positives around us. So when we are, for example, climbing over the ladders, over a crevasse, or very, very tricky places—six inches wide, vertical drop on one side, 500 feet into the crevice or something. If you look into the dangerous parts and the negatives, then you always will have a situation which either freezes you or discourages you. Whereas if we can focus only on where we can put our foot and move, then it’s not that complicated because there is the six inches. You don’t need six feet to place a foot, you only need six inches, but if you’re looking for six feet, then that’s a problem. That focus of being so focused on the opportunity that the negatives and the downside, you’re almost blind to them, that they fail to discourage you. They fail to push you back. So that is a general focus.

If I’m there to climb Mount Everest and if I’m not putting that in some context, then I will have to understand that I am there to climb something or do something as huge as climbing the Everest. And I can’t be complaining about small things. You can’t be complaining about your food getting into the ice, that you fall off and you get hurt or something else going wrong—you have a cough. If that is not in perspective, I think the sensitivity to what you consider as a problem changes. So that is one important aspect for the big picture and the next step, obviously…so I’ll tell you a story. The first time people go through the Khumbu Icefall, which is right in the beginning after the base camp, about 15% people actually give up on the expedition. 15% of the people actually just turn around. They decide to quit. About 50 people decide to quit after one trip to Camp One and back because some of them get sick. Some of them decide this is too dangerous, et cetera. And I think there is that whole sense of not making friends with that fear of dying or fear of not succeeding, and two, not having the focus on…again, if I’m going through these very treacherous sparks, and I’m constantly calculating the dangers of it and constantly worrying about what can happen to me if I fall off or what can happen to me if I slip, then naturally that will completely weigh me down in a very different way. If my focus on the next step is on the place, I can place my foot and go and not look into the crevice and not look down the wall, I think I should be okay. So that focus actually determines how we react to a situation because the mountain is the same. 50 people go back the other 200 carry on. Why? And they’re all prepared. They’ve done the physical preparation, they’ve paid their money. Nobody just lands up at Everest. I mean, contrary to popular belief it’s…well, it is so-called tourism in the death zone. However, I have been there twice and I met a lot of people and I don’t think there was anybody who was so casual about it that they didn’t know what they’re getting into. However, as I’ve said, in other talks, knowing the part and walking the part are two different things. You may know and you may have seen videos, et cetera. And that’s where your experience and your mental stability and your mental tenacity comes in. So focus determines how we react to situations. If I’m going to be focused on the dangers and all the problems, then I think it can be hard to process so much negativity and still carry on. So that’s what I mean by those two kinds of focuses.

Brian:

And related to that, I think, is one step at a time and you’ve hit on a huge goal set. So I am a huge proponent of goal setting. I’m writing a book about goal setting. It’s ingrained throughout the fabric of my life. This is such a powerful concept in goal setting, this idea of breaking really big goals into smaller steps. And you talked about the six inches, taking that next step. So there’s focus required, but it’s also breaking it down. You don’t have to think about the summit. You just need to think about the next step and then the next step and then the next step. Share with us please, why this is so important in climbing Everest and also in life, and why it’s crucial, especially in climbing Everest, to keep moving forward. So, as you said, people do turn and go back, but in order to achieve the goal, you have to keep moving forward, right? There is no turning back.

Aditya:

I would say two things. When you say one step at a time, again you can break that into two parts. One is the 50 day journey. One step at a time is going to Camp One, coming back, all your rotation and all your acclimatization and all of those things. But finally it comes down to the summit night. You’ve done everything. Now you’re at Camp Four and tonight is summit night. Another lesson, which I’ll just connect here, which is to say scale should not scare you, right? So the scale of Mount Everest, and if you see the pictures in my book, even on the last night, you’ve been walking towards the mountain for the last 40 days. And the first time you see it as a speck in the sky, almost like…obviously it’s at an altitude where planes are flying and you walk and you walk and you walk and you get there. And still on the last night, Brian, it’s in your face, it’s gargantuan. And now there are no more camps. There is no more going to the next camp and camping. There is to go up to the summit and come back. I personally took 24 hours on my last trip. So 6:30 PM on the 21st of May, we left Camp Four. I reached the summit at 7:30 AM in the morning, 13 hours. And on the return, it took me 11 hours to come back—nonstop. There is no place to rest or eat or sleep or whatever. So how does that work? That’s not…that cannot be a physical thing. I am no extraordinary…some ultra marathon runner who can run for 200 miles. And climbing 24 hours mountaineering in minus 35 Celsius after having not really slept or eaten and 40 days of living that high altitude mountain life, you’re already at the end of everything that your body can actually offer. But I think if you keep on, not always thinking about how much is left and you just put your head down—and I’ve experienced myself…one of those things was that you just…every foot we were climbing we were counting between five and seven deep breaths and not looking as to how much is left, but mostly, okay, we just keep going and keep going and we keep going.

Another thing that I want to share with your listeners, and again, you will relate it so much to other experiences in life. And that’s why I say Everest is a metaphor. Let’s say we have to boost something from zero to a hundred percent. I believe that the first 20-30% is easy because you have the energy of starting up and you’re all gung ho and you’re all excited and so on. Somewhere around the 30-40% mark you begin to get tired. You begin to experience your first difficulties, things go wrong. When it goes wrong in a team or a leader or your health or something else, that’s when you begin to go with the irony of giving up or turning around or why this is not a good idea and so on. So that stage of a goal between 40% to 80% is the hardest when you have to retain your commitment to the goal because at that stage the finish line looks far away and the difficulties look very big. And once you are at the 80% mark, then you almost are excited about having…you’re quite close to the finish line so you kind of push through, even though you’re exhausted physically, but mentally something tells you that now you’re too close to give up. So between that 40-80 is that whole one step at a time story. Because if you keep on processing all the time as to how much time…after I have climbed six hours into the night, if I kept on thinking that I am kind of exhausted within six hours, another eight hours to go only to the top. And then the game is not finished when you reach the top, the game is finished when you come back to camp. So reaching the summit of Mount Everest is only half the job done, actually, because your loved ones don’t care if you reach the summit, what they really care about is whether you got back home. So reaching the top of Mount Everest—they want you to reach—but that’s not the main idea, their main idea that night is that they want you back and you have to get back [inaudible].

Brian:

Aren’t there more casualties going down the mountain than there are going up?

Aditya:

Yes, a lot of them are mostly going down. That’s again, as I said earlier, because of exhaustion, because of mistakes, because of inability to process the information, because you are completely spent or you run out of something or you make a wrong decision because of lack of oxygen you’re not processing the decision-making. People have unclipped themselves from the rope and walked off the mountain.

Brian:

Is part of that…relaxation might not be the right word, but so you’ve gotten to the summit and is there the mistaken impression that that’s the hardest part? And so people become just a little bit complacent or a little bit relaxed, does that contribute to it?

Aditya:

I think that is a possibility, although the situation is quite tough out there. And personally I find it hard to fathom how somebody would think about that kind of thing, because it’s very obvious that you’re not home. And it’s very obvious that in fact, the very tricky parts are sometimes much harder on the way down, because what happens is on the way up, you have the equipment which locks you into the rope. So there’s a sprocket wheel and you push it up and then it locks in and then you keep on pulling. But when you are going down, there is no locking mechanism, so you have to spend your energy and hold on to your foot holds and your hand  should be holding the rope so tight that you just don’t give in to gravity. And in many places you are really making a very, very steep [descent]. So climbing taking a step up three feet up, you’re holding onto the rope and you climb yourself. But if you’re going three feet down in one step at 29,000 feet or 28,000 feet exhausted there is a momentum that the body has. So if you just jump and you’ve stepped down from the table, it’s very hard to just stop right there where you step down, because the momentum is carrying you forward, but there is no place to go forward. You’re on a vertical climb. So some of those things can go wrong. And energy obviously is very, very precious, but most important is the mental balance. And I think some of those people who, unless it’s an accident, it is about not turning around at the right time. It’s just about going way over what your body and mind was willing to deal with. But there is this phrase called the summit fever. It’s a very commonly known phrase on Everest. It’s called the summit fever and people are cautioned against it because they don’t want to be so wedded to the idea of reaching the top that you completely miss assessing the ground reality, what your body’s telling you. So that summit fever can be a cause of a lot of accidents because you just overdo it.

Brian:

Unfortunately, we don’t have time to talk about all seven lessons, but if you have just a few more minutes Aditya, if we could talk about one more and it’s make friends with fear, and you actually referenced that you spoke about it a little bit. But in your book, you wrote that it doesn’t matter if you’re totally exhausted, dehydrated, freezing, hypoxic, hungry, or anything worse, you must remain super alert and in top performance mode or you’ll pay with your life. That sounds terrifying. Help us to understand. And I have to say, as you’re describing, going down the mountain, my palms were sweating just a little bit just thinking about it, but help us to understand what that was like, that terrifying feeling, the multiple times, I’m sure, over the 43 days that you had those feelings and how you overcame the fear that you certainly must’ve felt.

Aditya:

Yes, I have to share this. And I’m glad you picked this lesson as the one to talk about. Because when I started talking about my journey, nearly every talk, regardless whether the audience was a corporate group or school kids or a club or whatever else [asks] were you not afraid, were you’re not scared of all of this? You go through the slide show, you go through the videos and then like, are you crazy to be doing this and just voluntarily. So the answer is very simple. According to me, the risks are basically divided into two baskets, the known risk and the unknown risk. So the unknown risks aren’t covered in the lesson, which is called “expect to deal with the unexpected” because those things you cannot plan for. Things will happen—oxygen ran out, my guide ran away, other things happen. We’re not talking about that. The known risks are the ones which are well documented, commonly occurring things which go wrong on Everest. So running out of oxygen, getting frostbite, getting altitude sickness, getting this thing called Khumbu cough, things like that. Those are the preparations, which I think when I say making friends with fear. When I’m friendly with somebody, I’m okay to meet them. I’m happy to sit close to them and have a conversation with them. When I want to avoid somebody if I’m not friendly with somebody, I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to deal with them. I am saying that the fears in a very large and complex project—in this case it was Everest but it could be anything—if I’m going to take an inventory of those fears and those threats and tell myself that these are my friends and I am okay to meet with them, I am okay to spend time with them because I cannot really avoid them. They are a known part of the challenge. So I think that when those things happen—they may or may not happen—but if they happen, then we are not panicking. Then we are focused. Then we already have a preparation. And we already know. So I was very scared, for instance, on the final night about getting frostbite and I’d spoken to senior mountaineers on base camp about what steps can I take and how can I avoid that? And Brian, in our team, there were four of us. One guy was very fit, but unfortunately he couldn’t go beyond Camp Four because he had pulmonary edema issues. So he had to return from Camp Four. And the other two of my colleagues, both of them got frostbite. They were hospitalized in Katmandu upon return. And I was fortunate enough to return in good shape, but I also had very specific steps that I was taking to avoid frostbite. I had prepared for that fear of getting a frostbite to the extent that one of my mittens I actually loaned to my Sherpa because he was really important. So my right hand was without the main mitten and I was still kind of warm. I had a glove and I had warm clothing but I didn’t have the big thick wool mitten.

So the example I’m giving you is if I’m willing to acknowledge the risks and the fears, it’s not about not being afraid of them. It is being comfortable with being afraid, comfortable with encountering them. And then having a plan of action in place. Now, when the plan of action doesn’t work or something unexpected happens, that’s when the next lesson ticks in, which is expect to deal with the unexpected. So our main guide, who has climbed Everest seven times, he was the main reason why we felt safe being on Everest. He just disappeared the final night of the climb. On Camp Four the final night of the climb we went without him. We went only with a junior Sherpa because he [our main guide] went with somebody else because of some financial things [that] happened between them. But imagine the main guide disappeared. And on my way back, last six hours, my personal Sherpa also disappeared. He just walked off and I just came back alone—last six hours with the last half bottle of oxygen and some water. So unexpected things will happen.

That’s that lesson, but making friends with fear of expected risk is a thing which can help us to stay on course to understand and expect certain things and then deal with them. So that is my lesson. And if you can see how many parallels there are to business projects, to other life projects, you can’t be hoping that nothing will go wrong. Of course things will go wrong. And if you’re not afraid of anything, then I think you probably will not prepare so well. Fear is a good thing if it is helping us in robust preparation.

Brian:

That’s a great lesson, Aditya. You maintain that everyone has their own Mount Everest that they were put on earth to climb. What final advice do you have for our listeners and viewers about discovering their Everest and then applying your lessons from Everest to achieve their goals?

Aditya:

Well I don’t think I’m qualified to give too much advice, but I would just say, do it. Like I said, one of the goals and motivations for me to do this out there was to prove what ordinary people can do. And I am about as ordinary as it gets in terms of climbing the Everest. And if I can climb Mount Everest, I really believe anybody can do anything that they decide to do. And of course the lessons kick in and the first one, which we didn’t talk about it, the preparation plus passion. So passion and preparation come together and then you can perform anything. So the first advice is to go for it, basically don’t dilly dally. If the 50 year old overweight chap can climb Mount Everest, anybody can do anything. And so that is my only advice—do it. And then if you really decide to do it, I think everything else begins to fall in place.

Brian:

I appreciate that. I’ve been so encouraged by our conversation today. So inspired to…I’m not sure I’m inspired enough to go out and sign up to climb Mount Everest, but I’ll certainly keep these thoughts and these lessons in our conversation in mind as I pursue my own big dog goals. And I think our listeners and viewers will too. Thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been great getting to know you and I hope we can have another conversation again soon.

Aditya:

It has been my pleasure too, Brian, thank you very much for having me.

Brian:

And to our listeners and viewers. If you are as captivated as I’ve been about Aditya’s story, then please visit his website at 7LessonsFromEverest. That’s the number seven, Lessons From Everest, where you can learn more about his great adventure on Mount Everest and most importantly, it’s the place where you can grab one or more copies of his book and support the NGO in India, CRY. Thanks for listening to Life Excellence and until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.