Episode #39
TFBIP | Ep 39 - Two-Time World Record Mountaineer Jenn Drummond on Failure, Pivots & the "Somedays"
One day from the summit of K2 — three weeks on the mountain, a teammate just killed in an avalanche — Jenn Drummond turned around and walked down. "I don't want to teach my kids peaks over people." That decision cost her the entire climb: the money, the training, the window, all of it back to zero, on a mountain she says kills a quarter of the people who attempt it. She went back and finished it. Jenn Drummond holds two world records and had never slept in a tent before any of this started. She's a mom of seven who moved to Utah at 35 with seven kids under the age of eight and two thousand miles between her and everyone she knew. What set the whole thing in motion was a car accident she says she shouldn't have survived — and the realization that came with it, that she'd been building a life on external validation instead of internal. In this episode she and the guys get into what she's learned from mountains that transfers directly to building a business: why you climb a big peak multiple times before you ever summit it, why every step back down feels like failure and isn't, and why winning means coming home alive — which is also the question to ask before you launch anything. She explains the "grump dump," a journal where she writes down every failure and leaves blank lines underneath, then goes back months later to ask whether it was a failure or a pivot. Plus: landing on a Denali glacier with five people, 650 pounds of gear, and no porters allowed. Getting stranded in Russia when a missile closed the airfield and no American card would work. And the "somedays" list she's building a company around — because her grandma died, her dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and a friend got cancer with a mountain still on his list.
