Episode 68 | Practice What You Preach - Jake Thompson

Every year, thousands of people stand on stages and tell others how to overcome adversity.Jake Thompson is one of them.As a keynote speaker, author, and the voice behind Compete Every Day, Jake has spent years teaching people to embrace discomfort, honor their commitments, and become the kind of person who keeps showing up when things get hard.But there's a big difference between teaching those principles... and living them.Just seven and a half weeks after knee surgery, with business thriving and life going well, Jake chose to do something that made absolutely no sense to most people. He left to participate in 29029 Snowbasin.Thirteen climbs. Almost 30 miles all uphill. Twenty-nine thousand and twenty-nine feet of vertical gain—the height of Mount Everest.And somewhere on those climbs, the speaker became the student.Every ascent came with a perfectly reasonable excuse to quit. Every lap forced him to confront the same lessons he has spent years teaching audiences around the world. Discipline over motivation. Commitment over comfort. Action over excuses.After the event, Jake wrote something in a LinkedIn post that sums up his journey. "My worth was never going to be decided by a red hat or a missed cutoff. Only by what I left in the arena."What happens when life hands you a microphone... and then hands you a mountain?When your message is no longer something you speak, but something you have to prove.