Overcoming Inertia — Part Two
Kim Slade — Unknown Epic
I originally wrote these posts as a personal journal. Following the form of being completely honest about what, how and more importantly why we started Unknown Epic, I decided to share them.
In the first Overcoming Inertia post I talked about how Unknown Epic came to be, what we set out to do, and our first adventure. I wrote this, the second part of our story on the plane as we took off for our second adventure. It picks up where Part One left off. We had got our first team to the top of a mountain...
So this time around it was all a lot smoother. No smashing of heads on tables and we are actually buzzing more for this second Forgotten Valleys Expedition. September has been a pivotal month. The start was frantic and stressed with an amazing but tarnished sense of achievement. It was more like a sigh of relief than a champagne moment. We had done it. What was just a flicker of a dream almost a year ago to the day had become a reality, we reached the summit just moments before sunrise with our first Unknown Epic team. Although, it didn’t quite have the tribal victory dance I had envisaged. Instead a couple of the team were shivering and others were in a crumpled heap. Had we pushed them to far? Was it not as awesome in others eyes as it was in mine? A core pillar of Unknown Epic is to help people make a positive change in themselves. Had we done this? I was also very aware of my own mistakes during the first outing as a team leader.
These questions and thoughts played on my mind as I tried to absorb the moment and the achievement overall.
During the days following, our morale dipped massively. Jake and I knew some of the lads didn’t enjoy it as much as we’d hoped, we realised we were not going to make profits anytime soon, and the thought of the same level of preparation and stress before every trip was worrying. We sat looking at the sea deflated, trying and failing to bring ourselves out of this dip.
At what could only be described as the perfect moment we receive this message from one of the lads:
It’s funny how the universe/lord/synchronicity/coincidence work. From that moment we were back on the up. We realised that for the lads, their achievements were taking a while to sink in and it was transformational for some.
“I looked at the pictures and realised, shit that’s us, we did that!”
“Would just like to say a big thank you. Unknown Epic has smashed boundaries I never would have thought possible, this strange sense of achievement is priceless.”
Other messages and feedback started to come in. We had people quitting smoking and others with a new found sense of motivation they couldn’t explain. That’s the mountains for you. Time in nature has a funny indescribable way of clearing your mind so that the good ‘to do one day’ stuff drifts to the surface.
Next weekend was The Happy Startup School Summer Camp. All I can say about that weekend is WOW. Read about that in Jakes post — Happy Camping after this.
So Summer Camp “picked me up shook me out and spun me around, turned me into someone new”. It came in perfect timing, as did that message. Not only for us as a new business but actually more so as individuals, preparing us for the bigger long term journey ahead. Still on the rise we signed up our first Netwalking subscription the next week. Now here we are, another week after, sitting on the plane on our way back to the Forgotten Valleys feeling great. Yesterday’s prep was 10x easier than the last trip and although we only have two guest team members and stand to make a loss, we are full of positivity for the future of Unknown Epic and life in general.
Now read Overcoming Inertia — Part Three, to see how we felt in the moment we returned home from this second Forgotten Valleys Expedition
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