Before his presentation, Warren sat down with The Herald for a question-and-answer session.
Herald: How did you go about compiling Lessons From Everest? How did you narrow it down to seven lessons?
I like the number seven because it's a very spiritual number and if you look at all the major religions the seven just keeps popping up. (Those lessons) were seven that were just super meaningful for me on this climb and I suspect that they can be meaningful for anybody, not just climbing. My hope for this whole book is that — nobody's going to climb Mount Everest; only us knuckleheads climb Mount Everest — but everybody has great difficulties or goals or things throughout their lives and my hope is that these seven lessons that really were sunk home for me on the second climb can be meaningful to people overcoming difficulties in their own lives. I just wanted to share. I had some music in me and I wanted to get it out.
Could you talk a little about what led to your passion for climbing?
Well, I started when I was very, very young. My parents were very outdoorsy and are still very outdoorsy. Summers and school vacations we got into the pick-up truck as a family and drove to New Hampshire and Maine and hiked and camped. And then one summer, which really got me enthralled with the outdoors, was for a whole two months when we got in that pick up truck. We visited a lot of national parks across the country and did a lot of hiking, and not technical climbing … but just a lot of backpacking. It was fantastic and I was totally hooked. And then going on to college and then to graduate school to become a chiropractor, I was just starting my practice here in Rhode Island. I was unable to really have a lot of time except for one three-day weekend per year where I went backpacking with a friend up north. I was always an endurance athlete, always a runner, a triathlete. In the early 1990's I just kind of got the yen for more technical climbing, especially with a book that came out in 1996 called "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer, talking about Mount Everest. There seem to be two types of people: the people who have read that book and are horrified by it ... and the other people like me who probably have serious psychosis and are like "Wow, that's cool." Not that I had a goal in 1996 of trying to climb Mount Everest, but I knew then that I was going to do some climbing. So the next logical thing for me was I went up to Mount Washington. And then I decided to go to Mount Rainier. And there I set a goal that once a year I would climb one big mountain in the world. And I was still not thinking about Mount Everest at all. Then Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa… Denali in Alaska ... Yosemite National Park … the Rockies and Wyoming … back to Denali and Alaska and was able to get to the top. I still knew I didn't have the stuff for Everest yet. I went down to Argentina, ... to Acancagua, … and then set the goal to climb Everest the next year. The whole endeavor is about two and a half months … and I did not make that in 2007, but realized there were some lessons I needed to learn and understand about myself, changed all those, and went back in 2008 and I was lucky enough to get to the top, becoming the only Rhode Islander who's ever been to the top.
Do you think the youth of today don't move their bodies enough?
It's not limited to young people. Sadly, the younger generation may just be the first generation in the last dozen or so that does not outlive their parents because they don't move enough. The world's different now, and everybody is wired. It's very simple that people need to move. In order for the body to work properly, the body has to move. Your mind has to move. Your mind has to constantly do new things and bite off more than it can chew and chew it, in order to be healthy. The brain is created that way. The body is created that way. People may know that innately, but doing it and knowing it are two different things so it's part of my mission to get people moving. Body and mind.
Would you describe yourself as adventurous?
Yeah, I would definitely describe myself as adventurous, but I would not describe myself as a thrill-seeker. It was never a draw for me to be an adrenaline-junkie. What is always a draw is to push to the limits. Now, (how) do you know where your potential is until you really get up close to it? I know I pushed it as much as I could push it. Both physically and mentally. And that was glorious to be able to do that, and to survive and tell the tale in that aspect of my life. But how do I know what my potential is being a health-care practitioner? Being a business man? Being a father? Being a good mate? How do you know? So I've always been enthralled with that as an open-ended question and because you wear a lot of hats in life and you have to pay attention to those if you want to grow in all those dimensions.
Do you have any advice for your audience?
Yeah. Find your own Everest. Determine what your own Everest is ... If you don't take precautions and you overestimate your abilities, Mother Nature can smite you down at will. And I knew that I was nothing more than a bug on the side of Mother Nature on Mount Everest ... I never conquered any mountain that I climbed. I was just allowed to climb. And if it was not right, if the weather was not good, if the wind was too high, if I didn't have a good feeling, if I was exhausted, turn my little rear end, go home, and climb another day. And that's advice that I will give to people who are interested in climbing. But the main thing for humanity is move your mind, move your body, determine what your own mission is, what I term "your own Everest," and put your passion into achieving that.
Who or what motivates you in life?
I get motivated from people that work hard at whatever their vocation is. They have a definite mission. Bill Gates doesn't have to work a day in his life but he works every day. I'm impressed by that. There are people who create things, who build companies, who achieve things, who start movements because of sheer passion, not because there's any logic in it, and succeed. That's pretty motivating.
