Bear Grylls Quotes

Adventure should be 80 percent 'I think this is manageable,' but it's good to have that last 20 percent where you're right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone.

In every potential sponsor’s eyes, I was a nobody. And soon I had notched up more rejection letters than is healthy for any one man to receive.
I tried to think of an entrepreneur and adventurer that I admired, and I kept coming back to Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin.
I wrote to him once, then I wrote once more. In all, I sent twenty-three letters.
No response.
Right, I thought, I’ll find out where he lives and take my proposal there myself.
So I did precisely that, and at 8:00 P.M. one cold evening, I rang his very large doorbell. A voice answered the intercom, and I mumbled my pitch into the speakerphone.
A housekeeper’s voice told me to leave the proposal — and get lost.
It’s not clear quite what happened next: I assume that whoever had answered the intercom meant just to switch it off, but instead they pressed the switch that opened the front door.
The buzzing sound seemed to last forever — but it was probably only a second or two.
In that time I didn’t have time to think, I just reacted…and instinctively nudged the door open.
Suddenly I found myself standing in the middle of Sir Richard Branson’s substantial, marble-floored entrance hall.
“Uh, hello!” I hollered into the empty hall. “Sorry, but you seem to have buzzed the door open,” I apologized to the emptiness.
The next thing I knew, the housekeeper came flying down the stairs, shouting at me to leave.
I duly dropped the proposal and scarpered.
The next day, I sent around some flowers, apologizing for the intrusion and asking the great man to take a look at my proposal. I added that I was sure, in his own early days, he would probably have done the same thing.
I never got a reply to that one, either.

At this point, my greatest enemy was myself. Self-doubt can be crushing, and sometimes it is hard to see outside the black bubble.

Hey! Monkey! Over here!’ one of the tourists called. The reverent atmosphere burst like a balloon. The orang-utan paused and looked back at them. Her face was long and grave, as if wondering how anyone could be such an idiot. Then she turned away again and disappeared into the trees. ‘Hah!’ The man clapped his hands, very pleased with himself. Then: ‘What?’ as he noticed the expressions on some of the faces around him. ‘I made her look, didn’t I? We travel for three hours in a hot bus, you want to see something at the other end!

Life rewards the dogged, not the qualified.

Through all these times and formative young years, Lara, my sister, was a rock to me. My mother had suffered three miscarriages after having Lara, and eight years on she was convinced that she wasn’t going to be able to have more children. But Mum got pregnant, and she tells me she spent nine months in bed to make sure she didn’t miscarry.
It worked. Mum saved me.
The end result, though, was that she was probably pleased to get me out, and that Lara finally got herself a precious baby brother; or in effect, her own baby. So Lara ended up doing everything for me, and I adored her for it.
While Mum was a busy working mother, helping my father in his constituency duties and beyond, Lara became my surrogate mum. She fed me almost every supper I ate — from when I was a baby up to about five years old. She changed my nappies, she taught me to speak, then to walk (which, with so much attention from her, of course happened ridiculously early). She taught me how to get dressed and to brush my teeth.
In essence, she got me to do all the things that either she had been too scared to do herself or that just simply intrigued her, such as eating raw bacon or riding a tricycle down a steep hill with no brakes.
I was the best rag doll of a baby brother that she could have ever dreamt of.

positive word of warning, though: you might find that once you start eating more of the healthy stuff, your body will no longer like it when you eat the bad stuff.

These made Trucker and me look back on the summer Selection days as quite balmy and pleasant! It is strange how accustomed you become to hardship, and how what once seemed horrific can soon become mundane.

Dreams, though, are cheap, and the real task comes when you start putting in place the steps needed to make those dreams a reality.

So that is how we came to be standing in a sparse room, in a nondescript building in the barracks at SAS HQ — just a handful out of all those who had started out so many months earlier.
We shuffled around impatiently. We were ready.
Ready, finally, to get badged as SAS soldiers.
The colonel of the regiment walked in, dressed casually in lightweight camo trousers, shirt, beret, and blue SAS belt.
He smiled at us.
“Well done, lads. Hard work, isn’t it?”
We smiled back.
“You should be proud today. But remember: this is only the beginning. The real hard work starts now, when you return to your squadron. Many are called, few are chosen. Live up to that.” He paused.
“And from now on for the rest of your life remember this: you are part of the SAS family. You’ve earned that. And it is the finest family in the world. But what makes our work here extraordinary is that everyone here goes that little bit extra. When everyone else gives up, we give more. That is what sets us apart.”
It is a speech I have never forgotten.

During my time at Eton, I led regular nighttime adventures, and word spread. I even thought about charging to take people on trips.
I remember one where we tried to cross the whole town of Eton in the old sewers. I had found an old grill under a bridge that led into these four-foot-high old brick pipes, running under the streets.
It took a little nerve to probe into these in the pitch black with no idea where the hell they were leading you; and they stank.
I took a pack of playing cards and a flashlight, and I would jam cards into the brickwork every ten paces to mark my way. Eventually I found a manhole cover that lifted up, and it brought us out in the little lane right outside the headmaster’s private house.
I loved that. “All crap flows from here,” I remember us joking at that time.

Look at the stories of people who have changed the world - they have so often started with little, but they distinguished themselves by how they approached life, opportunity, relationships and struggle. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi. You name them. The list is huge but the common qualities are small.

Resourcefulness and a determination to survive the ‘lemons’ are invariably at the heart of these successes.

The secret to a life well lived is taking the resources around us - the people we know, the possessions we own, the skills we’ve acquired - and combining them in such a way that they add up to something greater than their constituent parts.

That’s the lemonade bit.

So often in the wild I have felt totally beaten, but I have kept going, kept trying to think smart, be resourceful, positive, energetic - despite the fatigue - and it has always made a critical difference.

We can’t always choose our circumstances but we can choose how we respond to what life throws at us, and there is power when we realize our ability to alter our destiny.

A life in the wild has taught me not to fear the unexpected, but to embrace it. In fact, I have learnt that those curve balls from left-field are very often the making of us.

Sometimes an ember is all we need.

If you risk nothing you gain nothing

You are wonderfully and powerfully made. In other words: it is no accident you are good at certain things!