Well I've always felt that it's far more important to set your sights high, you know, aim for something high and even fail on it if necessary.

To me that's always been more impressive than someone who doesn't ask for very much and achieves it.

I mean there's not a great deal of satisfaction that in my view.

No one set his sights higher than Sir Edmund Hillary did,

certainly not in the literal sense.

Sir Edmund and his climbing partner, Tenzing Norgae,

were the first people, of course, to set foot on the summit of Mount Everest.

That was in 1953.

Hillary, who died in 2008, is still a legend, though in life he was a modest guy, a former

beekeeper who loved to walk.

When he began his be called simply Ed.

Well, I think the press and the public have created an image of Ed Hillary Hero and Explorer which simply doesn't exist.

They have painted a picture of me, you know, as a heroic type, full of enormous courage,

tremendous strength, undying enthusiasm and all the rest of it.

Well, it's all really just, it's just a story really that's been written up in the newspapers.

I'm a person, as I've said of modest abilities with a good deal of

determination and I do quite a lot of planning ahead and with careful planning and good motivation I think you can often achieve things

that other much more talented people would probably do much more easily.

But then a lot of these very talented people

are not strongly motivated to carry out the things perhaps as I've been involved in.

We've got Sir Edmund Hillary and the world's greatest living mountaineer

Reinhalt Messner on this episode of What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, perseverance, and scaling

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