You Vs the World: The Bear Grylls Guide to Never Giving Up

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His less-trodden path led to disaster. “The first time I put myself up for 21 SAS selection, I failed. It was devastating because I’d given so much and dropped out of university for it and I’d burnt all these bridges. I was like, ‘Here we go!’ – and suddenly you’re left with nothing. If I’d listened to certain voices, I would have given up. Why put myself through it all again? Why risk another failure? Why not choose an easier path?” He tried again and passed. “That was the turning point in my life. Dealing with failure has been the key to any success in my life.” The wild, he says, is a better teacher than any of the ones he had at Eton. “I wish I’d been taught the stuff that really matters. What I struggled with is that schools celebrate traditional heroes, whether sporty, academic or good-looking. Schools in general – Eton, American ones, state schools – celebrate these things and therefore teach you nothing about the real world, where rewards go to the resilient. You don’t need muscles or good looks.” Over the years our friends have gone, ‘Wow, are you OK with your kids doing that?’ But I don’t think we empower our children when we try to strip risk from their lives. What we do is make their risk-management muscle weak. You’ve got to teach them how to have good instinct – when to push, when to hold, when to just have a little feel. These are all key skills for life. BEAR GRYLLS OBE, has become one of the world’s most recognised faces of survival and outdoor adventure.

It’s something that’s in all of us. We’ve just got to make the decision to break it out every single day and use it as much as we can,” writes Bear in You Vs The World, reminding people to be kind to one another whenever possible and how kindness makes us all better. Hopefully, somehow, the world will emerge a kinder, humbler and more unified place. But in the way, there’s a lot of pain. A storm’s always going to come, and you’ve got to hold tight to those around you. That’s the key lesson from this time. You’ve got to adapt, use ingenuity – and know that the storm won’t last for ever.” Bear spent time as a soldier in the SAS, honing his survival skills. After his military career he became one of the youngest climbers ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest. His Emmy Award-nominated Man vs. Wild TV series grew to be one of the most-watched shows on the planet, reaching an estimated 1.2 billion viewers. Since then he has gone on to host more extreme adventure TV shows across more global networks than anyone else in the world, including six seasons of the global hit TV show Running Wild with Bear Grylls. The show has included notable personalities including; President Obama, Prime Minister Modi and Julia Roberts, to name a few.I think you always naturally worry about your kids and want them to learn from your mistakes, but generally I would say I’ve learned more from them than they’ve probably learned from me,” says Bear, who has just launched The Bear Grylls Adventure, an activity centre in Birmingham, where teens are encourage to have a go at everything from axe throwing to shark diving. We all know that children today have to deal with a lot of pressures from many different directions. They have challenges ahead of them too and as adults we can sometimes easily forget we were in their position once too, with a world of challenge ahead and not too many ideas as to how we were going to cope with it. Today there is help for young people, often in the form of a book which gives them a good excuse to have less screen time, to have some time to chill and read, discover, enjoy. Bear Grylls is Chief Scout, he is also a great author putting pen to paper for books that will help to guide young people into new mindsets. You Vs the World published by DK is no exception. I always like that quote that says, ‘you never want to arrive at the end of your life in a perfectly preserved body’. That’s a waste. You want to come skidding in sideways, covered in scars, beaten up and screaming, ‘Yahoo! What a ride!’” he laughs.

Bear’s favorite motto is ‘never give up’, and he often talks about how he had dreamed of climbing Mount Everest since was a child, but his parachute accident nearly ended that dream. He says that never giving up on his dream was how he was able to reach the summit of that mountain 18 months after the accident. Kindness makes the world go around He returned to work last autumn, shooting in Italy. “It was miraculous that we were able to finish. We were filming in the hottest red zone of northern Italy. We were very, very cautious. We had a very small team there. Everything was shut down and we got into the mountains and did it.” I’ve always loved bringing my sons up to embrace risk, embrace danger. I want them to become ninjas at handling everything.”The experience gave me a real fire to go out there once my rehab was done. I remember thinking, ‘If you’ve got the chance, don’t be scared to follow your dreams – just go for it. You might fail big, sure, but you have to try.’” This, I suggest, isn’t a virtue one would normally associate with soldiers or adventurers. “Kindness is king. I think this year has shown us that. There’s no point getting to the top of that mountain in life – whatever that mountain is, whether it’s getting a degree, or starting a business, or whatever – if you’re an arsehole.” Bear is a number one best-selling author, having written over 90 books, selling in excess of 20 million copies worldwide. He is an Honorary Colonel to the Royal Marines Commandos, the youngest ever UK Chief Scout, and the first ever Chief Ambassador to the World Scout Organisation, representing a global family of some 57 million Scouts. Bear says he has always found freedom in the great outdoors – and that when he was a child, he always tried to look for nature in open spaces, even when in a city, he would find a park or a bicycle shed roof. “Nature is often closer to us than we might imagine,” he writes in You Vs The World. It’s okay to be afraid