#010 - Cory Richards - I Risked My Life In Order to Save It. What I Learned About Creativity, Belonging, and Living a Meaningful Life.

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If you have yet to subscribe to the show, please do so now. It is massively supportive in our ability to keep bringing you powerful conversations. Thank you for all your love!Cory Richards is a National Geographic photographer, world class mountaineer, and the first and only American to summit an 8000 meter peak in winter without supplemental oxygen. He was diagnosed bipolar at 15, dropped out of high school, placed in a psychiatric unit, and put on the street with nothing. He went on to build one of the most celebrated careers in adventure photography the world has ever seen. He also almost lost everything multiple times along the way. And a month and a half before this conversation, he didn't leave his bed for days.Is this a meditation on madness? A masterclass on creativity? A loving interrogation of every label, diagnosis, and story you have ever told yourself about who you are? For me, it was all three.One line in particular has not left me since we recorded this. Cory said that being buried and being planted are often the same thing. Sit with that for a moment.There is wisdom in abundance here, folks. I am grateful to Cory for his radical honesty, for the poetic precision with which he sees the world, and for being willing to go to places in this conversation that he told me he has never gone publicly before.Get ready to hear about why the wellness industry is in Cory's words also quite sick, what your diagnosis is actually giving you and what it is quietly taking away, why you cannot optimize your way out of a lonely life, what belonging really means and why most of what we call belonging is just manipulation with better branding, the story behind the avalanche selfie on the cover of National Geographic and what Cory has never said about it until now, why certainty kills creativity, where God lives in a life like Cory's, and the only thing in the human experience without a duality - love.I left this conversation with eyes more acutely attuned to the color of everything.It was a gift for me. I hope it serve