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Mike Horn has rightly been referred to as one of the greatest living human beings, thanks to his myriad achievements in solo exploration. And yet, he carries his accolades as lightly as the equipment he packs for his exploration adventures. Which means, pared down to the absolute essentials.
You don’t want to be carrying excess baggage when you’re on foot, without motorised transport and your destination is the North Pole. What he does, however, bear with much more seriousness, is the responsibility of his role as an ambassador and de facto spokesperson for the fragility of planet earth’s environment.
Born and raised in Johannesburg, Horn’s early childhood was marked by plenty of outside play, a habit he took with him into his university studies, where he studied human movement science.
After an early career in this field, the call of the wild prompted him to give away his possessions and begin a series of increasingly ambitious personal adventures.
His bold solo journeys have seen him widely acknowledged as the greatest modern-day explorer, and his passion for drawing attention to the plight of earth’s natural habitats has become a life calling. He has swum the Amazon River solo, circumnavigated the globe without motorised transportation and found time to visit both of the earth’s magnetic poles.
Along with inspiring the next generation of explorers through his Young Explorers Programme, Mike Horn is a sought-after speaker, a published author, television presenter and Panerai watches brand ambassador.
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Born and raised in Johannesburg, Horn’s early childhood was marked by plenty of outside play, a habit he took with him into his university studies, where he studied human movement science
Do you think that a hunger for adventure and new challenges is something that’s innate in all humans? Do you think we suppress it by the way we live today?
I think it’s suppressed by the way we educate our kids, because it’s about keeping them safe. The environment that we live in has changed a lot even since the 1970s and it is true that society puts a lot of pressure on us to be ‘successful’. But the way that we see success could be different from measuring it with the house that you live in, the car that you’re driving or in the social group that you’re hanging out with. And for me, it was never about any of that. Success to me is about that feeling, to be actually happy and excited about doing what I do.
How can we bring a sense of adventure back into our mindsets?
I wanted to make history in the world of exploration, by crossing the South Pole and the North Pole. If I wasn’t going to do it, somebody else was going to do it. And we all have that in us, but we have fear instilled in us as kids that we have to be careful; ‘don’t walk close to the cliff… you’re going to fall.’
You don’t give people the creativity to be able to go and make mistakes. I’ve never met anybody strong that had an easy life. The more difficult your life becomes, the more errors you make, the bolder your character becomes.
Extreme physical endurance is a huge part of the challenging expeditions that you undertake. What allows you to endure in this way, and what lessons can we take about the human capacity to thrive and endure despite great challenges?
It’s about the parameters that you set yourself, that you want to set yourself in your life. I never wanted to sleep with a pillow because I wanted to be comfortable sleeping without a pillow. I never wanted to take a hot shower. I felt that that cold shower was something that I could make myself get used to.
And the more things you do, the further you run, the more you broaden the parameters of your life, it becomes easier to adapt to different and more extreme conditions and situations. So if you never step out of your comfort zone, you don’t know what you’re capable of doing until you actually get forced to be able to open up those parameters that you think should be your comfort zone, and you go into the unknown. But that comes along with fear and fear is something that, that dominates people’s lives.
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Fear is something that stops many of us achieving, it is a primal response that in so many situations in modern life, is unwarranted. How do we overcome it?
I think I get afraid quite easily, but fear has become a home for me. Fear is something that I accept because it’s what keeps me alive. And if you’re afraid of being afraid, you are going to stay in the ‘known’ your whole life. What is more important than fear is that doubt. You know, if fear gets associated with doubt and uncertainty, you become paralysed, you don’t want to make decisions.
So the moment that fear gets associated to doubt that’s when you get lost. I love fear, but I never doubt my capabilities. The expedition crossing the North Pole, it’s minus 40 degrees outside during an expedition that’s going to last 430 days. I’m not going to be in a comfort zone at all. It’s an expedition where I can be eaten by a polar bear, the ice can break, and I can fall into the ocean and never come up again. I can freeze to death.
So why do I go, if I will sit in that tent need to be motivating myself? And we believe, wrongly, as a society, that motivation is something that we need, but motivation is something invented by the same people who always say you should think positive.
Motivation means you are de-motivated! So in life, I’m not motivated to get out of that tent and go into extreme conditions for months on end, I’m disciplined. And discipline is something we can all apply in our lives. The moment you know that you should do something, but you don’t want to do – that’s when you need discipline.