The summer of 1999, we went on holiday to Spain to visit my cousin Penny, who runs a horse farm in Andalucia. It is a beautiful, wild part of the cou… - Bear Grylls

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

Just under the South Summit I could make out the shape where Rob Hall lay. He had died up here some twenty-four months earlier.
His body, half covered in drift-snow, remained unchanged. Frozen in time. A stark reminder that those who survive the mountain do so because she allows you to.
But when she turns, she really turns.
And the further into her grasp you are, the greater the danger.
Right now, we were about as far into her grasp as it was possible to venture.
And I knew it.
Rob’s last words to his wife, Jan, had been: “Please don’t worry too much.”
They are desperate words from a mountaineer who bravely understood he was going to die.
I tried to shake his memory from my oxygen-starved brain. But I couldn’t.
Just get going, Bear. Get this done, then get down.

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.