Sir Ranulph Fiennes: 10 lessons from the world’s greatest living explorer

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has been a regular guest in the Guinness Book of World Records over the last 50 years. He was the first person to visit both the North and South Poles by surface means. And he was the first to completely cross Antarctica on foot. Julius Baer had the pleasure to talk to Sir Ranulph during its Annual Intermediaries Conference Europe in Barcelona.

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00:00 Lesson #1: Becoming an explorer
01:16 Lesson #2: Entering uncharted territory
03:09 Lesson #3: Fighting the elements
04:04 Lesson #4: Preparing for the worst case
05:02 Lesson #5: Dealing with setbacks
06:26 Lesson #6: Getting fit for an expedition
07:32 Lesson #7: Picking the right people
08:48 Lesson #8: Raising funds
09:55 Lesson #9: Resisting climate change
10:47 Lesson#10: Keeping the fire burning

Lesson #1: Becoming an explorer

I would love to say that anybody can be an explorer. That’s not the case, however. You have to examine very carefully if the project is genuinely difficult. Many expeditions do this, do that, but if you look at them carefully, they are not difficult, they are not genuine explorations. It has to take more than crossing from one side of Barcelona to the other side of Barcelona.

Lesson #2: Entering uncharted territory

You always go for breaking a world record because that’s how you get the big sponsors.

Lesson #3: Fighting the elements

In a polar expedition you’re fighting the ice, you’re fighting the wind, you’re fighting the moon, which is changing the tides, and so on, and the best you can do is getting a meteorological forecast. You may have to wait because if the tide comes up, the ice on top will crack up. You can’t do it when it’s dark because then you cannot use your experience of knowing which ice is old ice.

Lesson #4: Preparing for the worst case

If you encounter very bad polar weather – in the Arctic and the Antarctic there is no meteorological forecasting, so we don’t know what the weather is going to be – and you set out in the Arctic Ocean and find that the ice is breaking up, you must be prepared for it.

Lesson #5: Dealing with setbacks

Unexplored situations usually result in setbacks, and when that happens, you have to say, “If I carry on, there’s going to be death, so we will go back and try again next year” – everything is seasonal, so if you’re there in July, you may have to wait until next July.

Lesson #6: Getting fit for an expedition

Preparing for an expedition has both mental and physical aspects. Mentally, you need to look very, very carefully at the project, learn from other people’s mistakes. Physically, it gets more difficult the older you get. You have to spend more time training, but you also have to make a living – nobody pays you a penny for the preparations – planning the expedition, organising it, getting the sponsors.

Lesson #7: Picking the right people

You have to choose your team very well. I get applications from people but I don’t pay them to come along, there’s no financial gain to be had. So I start off with people who are looking at it from the right angle, people who have already looked at polar exploration work and who know that they’re going into a dangerous situation.

Lesson #8: Raising funds

Doing expeditions is very expensive and you therefore require the ability to raise money by persuading people that they will get what they want so that they give you what you want. It’s quid pro quo at all times.

Lesson #9: Resisting climate change

Climate change in Antarctica does not affect us because you have 4,000-metre mountains and then you have 1 kilometre of ice on top of the mountains. So even though the ice is getting less, you don’t see it because there’s so much of it.

Lesson#10: Keeping the fire burning

Thinking about stopping is thinking about dying. So I would only want to stop if I’m forced to do so by something going wrong with my body.

#RanulphFiennes

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