But he explains that when going on his polar expeditions there is a line he would draw between what is daring and what is reckless. The key is keeping well away from this line, while still embracing the spirit of discovery. “Recklessness avoidance is our business.”
He says. “Our rule was simple – avoid the fine line. The fine line can lead to failure very easily. It is better to look at our predecessors’ reasons for failing, for example to break a world record, and see where they have taken a risk and failed.”
By doing careful and meticulous research of his predecessors’ failures, Sir Ranulph says he would then use this information to consider the challenge in a different way, and consider alternative approaches that could remove this risk from the equation.
“Although you want to go north, perhaps first of all going west or east, and then going north, is the best way to achieve this,” he adds. “In doing so, we find a way of not facing the same risk as our predecessors in the first place, and the avoidance of the fine line is complete, rather than partial.”
And Sir Ranulph brings this attitude to any challenge that seems insurmountable, revealing his teams would make a point of evolving their methods over repeat attempts in order to reach a goal.
“If you take our journey to the North Pole in the 80s, we went on maybe four or five separate expeditions, learning from the previous one the best methods of travelling over sea and ice for the 1,000 miles necessary to break the record and beat our rivals, the Norwegians,” he says.
“We would change our next attempt every time. Even if every attempt at going by land to the North Pole had been made in the past from Canada or North America, we would get onto Putin and ask if we could have permission to do a British attempt from Siberia. We would look at it from every angle when apparently it’s insurmountable.”
It comes down to being on a constant journey of learning from what went wrong on previous occasions, and fixing those wrongs to do things better – something there is certainly a lot of potential for across the world of (re)insurance.
But to do this also requires another important quality – resilience.
Sir Ranulph’s life is certainly one of resilience and bouncing back from set-backs to succeed in your goals. Just as we were initially turned away on our first attempt to become a broker at Lloyd’s, Sir Ranulph initially failed in his attempt to climb Everest – in fact he failed on his first two attempts.
The first, in 2005, was due to suffering an angina attack at 28,500 feet – just 300m from the summit, having attempted the feat on the more difficult Tibetan ascent.
He came back in 2008, this time scaling the easier Nepalese side, but was again unsuccessful just five hours from the top.
It was only on the third attempt, in 2009 at the age of 65, that he was successful, becoming the first British OAP to reach the summit. He credits this in large part to recruiting Sherpa Thundu to help guide him up the mountain on this occasion, and the innovative ways of thinking about the challenge he brought to the party.
“Sherpa Thundu was known to treat the people he guides not like they normally do as a tourist, but as a human with failures,” Sir Ranulph says. “He had worked out what I was doing wrong, so that by the time we got up to 28,500 feet he knew my every failure and told me what to do and what not to do, and it was very easy, and I couldn’t work out why I had failed the previous two times.”
