can enable anyone to live without limits.
I’m going to explore how damaging fear can actually be to the individual and everyone around them if it’s not contained. Living in fear is corrosive. It creates negativity that spreads throughout a whole life and actually changes the way you perceive reality. Just as it did twenty years ago on Snowdon for the lad just above me who became terrified and suddenly saw the mountain as one huge death trap, fear makes the entire world seem threatening, dangerous and populated by aggressors. This is why living in fear creates a victim mindset – a mindset that’s spreading like wildfire in today’s society, creating a generation of men and women who seem motivated only to stamp their feet and hope that everyone else will take responsibility for them.
I’ll then take a deep look into the three kinds of fear: fear of suffering, fear of failure and fear of conflict. I’ll explain how exactly the same fear underlies all of these – the fear that you’re not good enough. If you can learn to harness this one – and you can – there will be absolutely no stopping you.
If you’ve read my previous book, you’ll already be familiar with the finer details of my life. After the death of my beloved father, I endured a tough childhood in France with a new stepfather and a mother who forbade any of her children to mourn. I joined the army at seventeen, crashed out at twenty-one, went through a dark period of alcohol abuse, steroid abuse and street violence before finding direction, structure and passion in the Marines, with whom I served a tour of duty in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and then as an elite operator in the Special Boat Service for four years. When I returned to civvy street in 2011, an altercation with a police officer led me to prison, where I served four months of a fourteen-month sentence for assault. After my release I worked in a variety of jobs that can be very loosely bracketed under the term ‘security’. And then I received the call from that posh man from the TV.
But, as I said, if you’ve read First Man In you’ll know all this already. The pages you hold in your hands now contain a very different piece of work. That book was my story. This book is my soul.
CHAPTER 3
2 April 2017. Qatar Airways Flight 648 from Doha to Tribhuvan International Airport in the Kathmandu Valley. Two hours and twelve minutes until we’d land. A stranger to the left of me, a stranger to the right of me. Perfect. I loved flying alone. The stress of everyday life just melted away, with the white noise of the engines making me feel like I was back in the womb, safe and warm, but with a smiling stewardess bringing me cold cans of beer. I was determined to enjoy the solitude and anonymity while I could. But it wouldn’t last long. Because, since I’d cleared this trip with Emilie six months ago, there had been a significant change of plan.
It had happened during a meeting with a TV executive, a couple of weeks after that morning in the kitchen. I’d arrived to discuss the filming of the next two series of SAS: Who Dares Wins, which were going to be filmed somewhere in South America.
‘We’re going to need you guys for a good six weeks,’ said the commissioning editor. ‘It may even be a couple of months. I guess it depends on how much preparation needs doing and the extent to which you want to get involved in the fine details this time, Ant.’
‘I’ll want to be involved from the beginning, as always,’ I said, reaching for my phone and its calendar app so I could check my dates. ‘But I can’t do anything April, May time because I’m away.’
‘For the whole two months?’ he asked.
‘Yes, mate,’ I said. ‘I’m going up Everest.’
He looked at me with an uncomfortable combination of alarm and insult. What was the matter with him?
‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I thought we were thinking later in the year for SAS anyway.’
‘Yeah, yeah, sure. It was just, I was wondering – who’s covering that, then? Everest?’
It took me a moment to realise what he was thinking.
‘What, filming it?’ I said. ‘Nobody’s covering it. It’s just a personal thing. I’m not doing a show about it.’
With that, his discomfort melted into glee.
‘Well, we should get someone out there with you.’
‘Mate, I appreciate the thought, but I don’t know about this one,’ I said. ‘It’s kind of a holiday for me. I don’t want it to turn into some big production. I just want to keep it small. Me and the mountain.’
‘Oh, but we can keep it small,’ he said. ‘That’s no problem. That’s easy. We’ll strap a fucking GoPro on your hat and send one other dude up there with you.’
‘What, up Everest?’ I said. ‘You can find a cameraman who can keep up, all the way to the summit?’
‘I think I can,’ he said. ‘In fact, I know I can. Ed Wardle. He’s been up there like three times or something.’
‘To the summit?’
‘To the summit. You’d like him. Scottish. He filmed something that was a bit similar to Mutiny a few years back. Shackleton’s journey. Ernest Shackleton. Is that right? I think that’s right. Ernest Shackleton. They went across the Southern Ocean in a little lifeboat using period gear. Proper hardcore. They were living off bowls of, like, cold fat.’
‘How far did they go?’ I asked.
‘Um, can’t remember. Something like 800 miles, I think.’
I looked down at my phone and began tapping at the volume buttons distractedly. ‘800 miles?’ I said. ‘He wants to try 4,000 miles.’
‘Think about it, Ant. Tell me you’ll think about it.’
‘Yeah, I will,’ I said. ‘I definitely will.’
I definitely wouldn’t. This wasn’t what I wanted at all. Part of the attraction of Mount Everest was that there were no rules up on the mountain. I could do what the hell I wanted, take as many risks as I needed to give me that edge I was seeking and generally get into as much trouble as I liked. Having a film crew there, even if it was just one guy, would ruin all that. I wanted to do this thing dangerously. I wasn’t going to take the easy route. Other people just didn’t understand my level of resilience. They didn’t know what I was capable of or what I’d experienced, and I didn’t want to be lumbered with well-meaning people, fussing about me, telling me what I could and couldn’t do.
In the run-up to Mutiny there had been endless pressure from Channel 4 and the production company to do things as sensibly as possible. They’d called all the shots on Health and Safety. I was determined that the trip across the Pacific would be absolutely authentic and fought them all the way on the endless restrictions they kept trying to force upon us. But there was only so much I could do. We ended up making small modifications to the boat and we had nine people compared with the eighteen that went on the original voyage along with Captain Bligh. We were as near as we could be to keeping it real, but I’d have preferred to have kept the things that they removed. The thought of all this nonsense happening to my Everest adventure was not a welcome one.
But then a few weeks passed. And I thought about it. And I kept on going back to the fact that there were five numerals, a comma and
