The Mt. Everest Diet is not about losing weight. That’s inevitable on a trip like this. You’re burning through thousands of calories a day and it’s hard to consume enough calories to keep up. The Mt. Everest Diet is about losing all of the psychological baggage we all carry  on a daily basis.

That requires thought. Which requires focus. Which requires time. I don’t know if it’s the same as meditation, but it seems as if they are in the same arena. Maybe the lack of oxygen at 17,000 feet helped, but it was one of the only times in my life that I had real clarity.

That’s the most important thing that happened to me on this journey. To break it down to its most basic elements, I had days of quiet and was able to think clearly for the first time in years. I thought about how blessed I was. I thought about so many things that happened in the past and the future.

I thought about life and love and what’s truly important. I thought about the good times and the bad times. But, no matter what I thought about, I kept coming back to one simple question – What do you want?

It seems like a harmless question. We ask some form of it everyday. What do you want for dinner? What do you want to play? What do you want to do this weekend? What do you want for Christmas? Easy, right? What do you want? How hard could it be to answer such a simple question? It’s only four words long. What do you want?

What do I want? Well, I want lots of things. I want to be rich and respected and to be loved. I want a big tv and a nice car. I want my kids to live long lives full of incredible experiences and passion. I want to win an Academy Award. I want seat warmers in my truck. I want a pool table. I want… well, I want to not want some of these things.

I mean, I wish I was a little more noble and a lot less selfish. Why didn’t I mention I wanted world peace? What about ending starvation around the world? Why did I want a big tv and nice car before I wanted my kids leading full passionate lives? Does that make me a bad person? What’s wrong with me?

Even my list of what I want is noisy. It’s all over the place. How can I get where I want to go if I can’t even clearly define what it is I want when I get there? So, I started by doing what I asked you to do in the last blog, I started to organize my wants.

The first category was easy, it’s all the material stuff I wanted and it’s much longer than I listed here. I want lots and lots of stuff. Is that bad? I don’t know. Part of me thinks that it’s selfish but the other part of me thinks that I should experience all that the world has to offer.

The second category was a little more difficult. ‘Rich’ is based on my career success, ‘loved and respected’ is not really up to me but how others perceive me, my ‘kids leading amazing lives’ is up to my wife and I and an ‘Academy Award’ is another career thing. At the end of the day, all of these are effected by the success of my career. If you think about it, even the material things are based on my career. If I’m successful, I can buy whatever I want.

I realized that the question ‘what do you want’ is really not about all of these things, it’s about ‘what do you want to do with your life’. At the end of the day, our lives come down to only two main questions; What do you want to do with your life? Who do you want to spend it with?

By sheer luck, I hit the jackpot with my wife (that is a story for another day) and my children amaze me on a daily basis. I can’t imagine spending my life with anyone better. In terms of my career, even though I’d had some small successes here and there, I don’t know that I was pursuing my true goals. I mean, I was peripherally involved with what I wanted to be doing but I wasn’t actually doing it.

The only way I can help my children lead meaningful passionate lives is if I lead a meaningful passionate life. The only way I can ever make great money is to work hard and let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to work hard at something you are passionate about than something that is just a paycheck.

What do you want? That’s all we have to figure out. Because once we can make that one decision, we actually have a destination. A place to strive for. A goal. Once this decision is made, all we have to do is take steps toward that destination. Just one step at a time.

Another thought that I had on this journey is that I always knew what I wanted. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know. I was probably seven-years-old when I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to make movies. Is that a viable career option? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail miserably?

All of these doubts weighed heavily on me. When it was time to declare my major in college, I chose pre-med. Now, why would I do that when I know deep down that I want to make movies? Looking back, I think I chose that major because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I don’t remember my parents forcing me into that. I don’t even remember really thinking about it that much. I was scared to pursue my passion and took the safe route.

After a brutal first semester, it was clear to me that I was not going to be a doctor, so I finally made the wise decision to change my major to… engineering. What? I’m a creative person and I chose a major that is all math and physics. Why would I do such a thing? Again, I thought that was a safe choice. Looking back on it now, I feel like I wasted years of my life because I was afraid to choose my passion.

It was three long years later that I finally changed my major to something I was interested in. I didn’t make that decision on my own. It was my father who asked me how my classes were going and I said I was taking a cool film elective. He looked confused and asked how my other classes were and I said I was taking an interesting journalism elective. Then he looked even more confused and asked how my engineering classes were going and, as a joke, I said, “Do you mean which one do I hate the most?” It was then that my father said one simple sentence that changed my life forever. He said, “Son, if you don’t like it now then how are you going to like it for the rest of your life?”

What a beautifully simple thought. It wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t overthought. It was so obvious. How could I have not known that?

“If you don’t like it now then how are
you going to like it for the rest of your life?” 

That one basic sentence clarified my life for me but it was only the first step. I knew what I didn’t like but it was a whole different conversation to figure out what I did want to do with the rest of my life.

I believe that we all already know what we want to do, we’re just afraid of saying it out loud. If we say it, then there is expectation. Plus, it’s no longer neatly tucked away as a back up plan. We can’t think that we’ll do it one day because everyone else knows and expects us to do it today. The reason it was scary to me was because I was worried about failure. What would I do if I pursued my dream and failed?

I had the support of my father and the experience of making a couple of mistakes trying to do what I thought everyone else wanted me to do to help guide me. I tried doing it the way I thought the universe wanted me to but now it was time for me to do it the way I wanted to. I chose to pursue my passion. I am so blessed to have a father who is more interested in me being happy than worrying about what anyone might think about it.

Please understand that once you make a decision like this, God will keep testing you every so often just to make sure you’re on the right path. I went to film school, made a movie and owned my own production company and was making a documentary in Nepal following an amazing man, Jamie Clarke, summit Mt. Everest. Not bad for little ole me but I realized that I was still avoiding making another movie.

So, it was on the Himalayan mountains that I decided that I was going to make another movie. Not just any movie, the one that I wrote as my thesis script for my masters degree. The interesting part of this is that it was not a commercial movie. It was more about me stretching my creative muscles and making something just for the sake of making it. I remember that part of my pitch to investors was that this movie is probably never going to make a dime, which explains why I didn’t get any investors.

I made the decision to do what I wanted in October of 2009 and in January of 2010, I called action on the first day of filming. In less than three months we were making the movie. So many things had to fall into place for that to happen. The most important of which was to actually decide to do it. After that, everything is just logistics. I mentioned it to my friend, who had always loved the script and he was on board. I reached out to some former students who started working for free on it to help me break it down.

We were rolling with little money and a gigantic goal but roll we did. When we didn’t have money to fly an actor in, someone donated their frequent flier miles. When we didn’t get the location we wanted, someone scouted one that was much better. When we couldn’t afford to feed the cast and crew, family members of the crew cooked for us all. It was a magical experience and one that I am so proud of. It all happened because I made one simple decision.

Universal Truth #2

When you find your true purpose in life,
the universe will conspire to see that you succeed.

So, please take all of those items you listed in part one of this exercise and distill it down to answer the question of what you truly want to do with your life, your goal. Then make the second list, which is the steps it will take for you to accomplish that goal. And finally, once you know the steps you need to take, don’t be afraid and simply take the first step. The rest will begin to take care of itself.