We spend a lot of time weighing the cost of risking too much. Jimmy Chin has spent most of his life on the harder question, which is what it costs to risk too little, quietly, for twenty or thirty years, until the years are gone.

Jimmy Chin is an Academy Award-winning director, a National Geographic photographer, and a New York Times bestselling author. He made Free Solo, Meru, The Rescue, and Nyad, he skied off the summit of Everest, and he lived out of the back of a Subaru from 21 to 28. Then he turned fifty, started looking at his life in chapters, and went looking for people who could tell him what success meant to them at the start and what it means to them now. Those conversations became his new book, Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters.

Here's what we get into:

• The question Jimmy says he has been asking since he was ten years old, and why the answer keeps moving while the question never does
• What one of the world's great cellists realized in the middle of a technically flawless performance, and where it sent him afterward
• Why the founder of a three-billion-dollar company looked at his own growth numbers and felt sick, and the one sentence of his Jimmy channels at every crossroads
• The difference between a kid wanting a parent alive and a kid wanting a parent to feel alive, and what it takes to hold both at once
• What a seven-year-old said to her father at thirteen thousand feet that he is still thinking about six years later

If you have hit the season where the boxes are checked and the question underneath them has gotten louder, this one is for you.

You can find Jimmy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

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