Dare to practice

One of my favorite books is The Great Explorers by Helen Wright and Samuel Rapport. The book presents first-person accounts of several explorers, including Roald Amundsen, who led the first explorations to the South Pole and the North Pole.

Amundsen’s diaries detail his focus, planning, training, and serious rehearsals that shatter our silly notions of explorers as impetuous, intuitive, emotional, leap-before-you-look types. For example, as a teen who already knew he wanted to be an arctic explorer, he insisted on sleeping with his bedroom windows open year-round—in Norway—as a way of preparing his body to survive extreme weather.

In his own words, "Whatever I have accomplished in exploration has been the result of lifelong planning, painstaking preparations, and the hardest kind of conscientious work."