"Edmund Hillary: "Strong motivation is the most important factor to get you to the top"

I have always searched for adventures and new challenges in my life. If things go too smoothly and I am not learning anything new anymore, I get bored. After turning 40, I woke up to reality and realized that twenty years of my life had passed by, as I had been busy building a successful career in finance and banking. For the past ten years I had been working for one of the world’s largest banks, where my responsibilities covered legal matters and cooperation with authorities in the Nordic countries. My days were filled with travelling and international cooperation and as a drawback I was working long hours and had a lot of responsibilities. I spent innumerable hours at airports, in phone conferences and in different meetings, where I often kept thinking that there must be more to life. After the glamour had faded, the independent job, the status and the financial compensation were no longer enough to keep up my motivation. I felt like I was wasting my days and my life doing things that I neither really enjoyed doing nor did I always respect the values of. The meaning of my life was missing, the heart was somewhere else and the intensive work pace took its toll. Finally I made my decision. I did what I believe many dream of but for some reason they are too scared or they just are not able to: I quit my job to change the course of my life.

 Brave step

I had always dreamt of travelling to all the interesting places in the world, when I would have the time and the chance. I had also dreamt that then I would be able to do all the things I felt were important to me: the things I had dreamt since I was a little girl, things that would not be done for money. I also started to exercise more than I ever had and to live healthier than ever before. I spent the beginning of the year travelling, doing sports and taking it easy. Every now and then I would come back to Finland and take part in different types of voluntary work including schooling myself to be a team leader in oil destruction operations and photographing the events of an environmental organization. The freedom and the healthy living worked their magic; I noticed that my creativity was stimulated for the first time in years and I began craving for new inspiration. Out of this feeling of being at ease arose a sudden urge to challenge myself to try to reach the top of the world’s highest mountain.

To the top

The spark for climbing ignited on my trip to Borneo in 1997, when on the spur of the moment I wanted to climb to the top of Mt. Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Southeast Asia. It was beautiful and peaceful on the top, and for the first time I felt that though the journey there was hard it had very much a symbolic meaning to it. After I got excited over climbing I kept mountaineering mainly in the Alps. I also trained myself on the glacier travel course of the Airborne Ranger Club of Finland and made myself familiar with rock, wall and ice climbing. I followed the mountains and all the different sports around the world and I toured all the continents hiking, rafting, canoeing, doing yoga or paragliding. I will be getting ready for the upcoming challenge by climbing to the top of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas, in January 2010. At the end of March 2010, I will begin my journey to the top of the world.

From dreams to reality

The largest project of my life has required a lot of work on many different fields. Taking care of the practicalities, raising the funds and organizing the whole project has taken a lot of time as well as courage to seize the new challenges. Although I alone made the decision to push my boundaries, it would not be possible to succeed in this kind of a project alone, without the support from the like-minded cooperative partners. It has been great to see that as a result of my daring choices and standing behind them, I have already at this point of my journey come across many positive, incredible and even unbelievably lucky happenings, people and coincidences. Exactly what I had wished to gain from this change of life.

I once started climbing because I was so afraid of heights that I got dizzy looking down from a balcony. It bothered me so much that I decided to face my fear eye to eye. Nowadays I live according to my guidelines: I respect my values and chase my dreams even though they seem to be out of reach. I live my life enjoying every second of it but I keep in mind my responsibilities for both my surroundings and myself, as well. I am already anxious to see where the road takes me. Indeed, if a road is too easy, I tend to get bored.