Mark AgnewBuild a resilient workforce by helping them love the process, says motivational adventure speaker Mark Agnew
What should have been peak humiliation turned into a lesson about resilience, loving the process and becoming a record setting adventurer. It is fundamental to my signature keynote Find Your Polar Bear, and I deliver it to clients across the globe as a motivational adventure speaker.
On the first night of our 103-day expedition through the Arctic, my teammates and I were humbled by the ice pack. It shifted with us on the wrong side and trapped us offshore. 🧊
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We took 14 hours to get back to the place we started. We’d been trapped, I’d fallen through a hole in the ice, and one of us fell into the water as we climbed across another bit of ice into our boats.
⏱️ 14 hours of life-and-death struggle. Zero miles. I should have had my tail between my legs. Instead, my teammate Eileen turned to West, Jeff and me and shouted: "WE ARE EXPLORERS!"
We dived into a hug, exhilarated and bonded by our shared experience. 💪
I realised I’d become too obsessed with the outcome — the world firsts, the records, the destination. I’d forgotten what really mattered to me — the adventure itself. That day we’d seen whales 🐋, incredible ice-scapes ❄️, polar bear footprints 🐾 and more. All those experiences surpassed the prospect of simply finishing the expedition. Those 14 hours were the most fun I’d had in ages.
✨ The joy of striving is better than arriving.
The irony was, the moment I focused on the adventure and let go of the outcome, the outcome became more inevitable. Of course I would go tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that — because I would enjoy it. And as a simple byproduct, I’d get closer to the end anyway.
🚀 When you love to strive, you always arrive.
At work, in life, in the Arctic — if you love the process, you’ll stick to the process and reach your goals. Even if you have a setback or failure, you’ll come back for more because you enjoy it. When you only love the outcome, the process becomes a necessary evil between you and your goal. You may experience success, but sooner or later you become burnt out, miserable, and you’ll stop coming back for more. 💭