While biking through the Andes on a 19,000 mile bike ride, David Sacher dreamed up an idea of a 24-hour climbing gym. A place to build community and bring more people to a sport he loves.
When we get out in nature, we can come up with ideas that change the course of our lives. For David Sacher, a 19,000 mile bike ride from the top of North America to the bottom of South America gave him the time and space to dream up his next wild idea. As he pedaled through the Andes mountains, he came up with a business idea: VITAL, a unique 24-hour climbing gym that runs on trust and community. Now, David’s business has grown significantly, and VITAL has several locations across the country.
Connect with David:
Shelby Stanger:
Nature can open up our minds. It allows us to think creatively and let our imaginations run wild. In the fresh air, we can come up with ideas that change the course of our lives. That's exactly what happened to David Sacher. When David was 21 years old, he embarked on a pretty wild adventure. He decided to bike the Pan-American Highway, from the top of North America to the bottom of South America. That's 19,000 miles. Along the way, David was confronted with open landscapes and a lot of time to think. As he pedaled through the Andes Mountains, he was dreaming up his next wild idea, to open Vital, a unique 24-hour climbing gym that runs on trust and community.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. David Sacher grew up here in San Diego. Like me, he found surfing at a young age, and it was his gateway to a world of adventure. He started hiking, biking, and ultimately rock climbing. Outdoor adventure and an active lifestyle became pillars of his adult life. But unlike a lot of adventure athletes, David wasn't always a daredevil.
Shelby Stanger:
David Sacher, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
David Sacher:
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Shelby Stanger:
You have one of the wildest ideas I've heard of. And a wild idea of yours led to, it sounds like, another wild idea that's kind of become your life, Vital Climbing Gym, which I discovered really during the pandemic. So I want to talk all about Vital, but first, I want to go back. Did you grow up outdoorsy? Did your parents tell you you could do whatever you wanted?
David Sacher:
Yeah. It's funny. When I was a little kid, I was extremely, I guess, sensitive, you could say. Like if we go to the beach, I'd be barely getting my toes in the water. Or the joke was always, I could go in the pool and not get wet because like say I was at a place with the water slide or something. I'd go down the water slide and just be so nervous about getting wet, I'd go really slow, barely hit the water in the bottom, and jump right out again. And that applied to everything. I was pretty careful with how I approached life. And it started to change for me when I started surfing, maybe 14, 15, kind of around that age. My brother and I would go before school. We had one of those old Go-peds, and he would drive my older brother. And I would stand on a skateboard and hold a rope behind him, and he'd pull me down to the beach on the Go-ped.
Shelby Stanger:
What's a Go-ped?
David Sacher:
A Go-ped's like-
Shelby Stanger:
like a moped?
David Sacher:
Yeah. Now they're all electric scooters. This is a little gas powered scooter. You stand up. It doesn't go more than 15 miles an hour or whatever. And so even in San Diego, which people think of like Hawaii, if they don't live here, in the wintertime, it's cold. You go out surfing in the morning, especially you're a little 14 year old kid in a bad wetsuit with holes in it, it's freezing cold. And I don't know why I did that because I wasn't having fun. But I think there was some sense of identity. I'd be out there, watch the sunrise, think, wow, look what I'm doing right now. All my friends are asleep, and I'm here watching the sun come up. I caught some waves that were pretty gorgeous. I'm watching the birds do their thing along the water. And Your fingers get so cold, you can't even do up your zipper on your shorts because it's so cold in the wintertime. And suffering through that, I think was the beginning for me to realize, hey, I'm kind of tough. I can do some things.
David Sacher:
And that aspect of my personality kind of started to manifest other places too. I was always the type, I'd go on a hike with friends, and let's say we're hiking up a mountain and the trail kind of goes near the top. I'd see the rock stack that was the actual top of the mountain, like 50 feet away. And I had to go hack through the bushes to find the highest rock and stand on top of the very highest part of the hill, just so I could say I went to the top. And so I was always the type who really wanted to finish things. And I was also intrigued, just so intrigued by the world. I'd see a road kind of go off between two hills, disappear between the trees, and I just had to follow it and see where it went, and just explore. And that was a lot of just simple exploring around where I grew up. But that kind of curiosity, I guess, drove me to do this crazy trip.
Shelby Stanger:
When David was in college, he met a guy his age who biked the Pan-American Highway. The story inspired David to try it himself. After graduating from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in 2009, David hit the road. He started in the Northernmost part of North America, in Prudhoe, Alaska. Over the next seven months, he biked his way to the Southernmost point of South America on an island called Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you get the idea to do this? There's a lot of things you could have done when you graduated college. You could have just got a job. You went to school where most people become engineers.
David Sacher:
Yeah. And knew that after college, I would have a window to do something before my career started, before family started, before life really started in earnest, before I became an adult. I actually had a friend in college, a guy named Emmanuel, who had done the same ride. He was from Argentina, and he was going to school where I was, at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. And I knew he had done this ride. I was talking to him about it. And I was thinking about it for days afterwards, like, wow, that's really a wild thing to do. I would love to do something like that. But what could I do? That sounds like a really great idea. What on earth could I do that would be of that scale of adventure? And I was like, well, I don't need to reinvent the wheel here. That sounds pretty cool. I'm inspired to do that thing.
Shelby Stanger:
Did he show you pictures, because this is the age, like 2009, there wasn't Instagram.
David Sacher:
Yeah, it's worth remembering kind of what the technology was like at that time.
Shelby Stanger:
You heard about it at a party, right?
David Sacher:
Yeah. I think I met Emmanuel at a party, and I had heard about him before, and so I took the opportunity to chat with him. And of course, we chatted a bunch about it before I started the trip. I heard from his experience and got his advice and everything. But you're right. The technology at that time was different. I had an iPhone, an early iPhone. I don't know if it was like an iPhone 2 or something. So I could take grainy pictures. Wifi was scarce, but you could find it. Even sending an email from a truck stop with Wifi somewhere in Northern Canada, I felt like I was living in the future. And so I would send an email to my mom or something and think I was just doing the coolest thing ever to have any contact, but that would be from not having contact for weeks. But at that time, not having too much tech support was a really great part of the adventure, and I wouldn't want to change a thing now. I wish I had better pictures, but other than that, I liked being somewhat disconnected.
David Sacher:
The one other thing I had, I should mention, was a satellite tracker. It's called a SPOT. It's a little orange device. And so every night when I would stop, I'd push this little button on my SPOT and leave it out with a clear view of the night sky for 15 minutes and hope that it would send a signal to a satellite, which would then update my location on this map so my family, friends could see where I was.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, that's smart, for safety.
David Sacher:
It was for safety. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
So you graduate from college, you have this wild idea, and you're like, okay, I'm going to do it. But had you even ridden a bike before, seriously?
David Sacher:
A little bit. I had inherited a mountain bike from a friend, and I used to go scrap around kind of inland San Diego in the brush out there, for a few hours after school or whatever. So I had ridden a little bit, but I had never done a long trip. I didn't know biking as a sport per se. I'd never been serious or mentored in how to bike well or how to bike camp or anything like that. So I emailed a bunch of companies trying to get financial support for the ride and get discounts on gear and stuff. And so this company, Co-Motion, that makes touring bikes gave me a good deal on a touring bike when I told them what I was going to do, kind of this super burly, steel frame bike with mounts for saddle bags. And I got that shortly before the trip and rode it a little bit, not that much.
Shelby Stanger:
And you never wrote it fully loaded.
David Sacher:
I had never ridden it fully loaded, so that's actually a funny story. When I first got started on the ride, I had way more gear than I ended with, probably doubled the amount of weight. I think I was well over 100 pounds, and just stacked up on the back with food and water and tents and a camp chair and all this nonsense that I didn't need. And the road for the first 500 miles, so it's the whole north half of Alaska, north of Fairbanks, so basically up to the ocean in the north, is a gravel road. And so I start trying to ride this bike for the first time, fully loaded, after coming out of a little hotel room up there, and sink right into the gravel and pretty much tip over. And there's huge trucks going by because it's just a little oil town with nothing but just giant semi trucks on the road. So I almost ate it and then had to kind of get my wits about me and set off on the trip with this bike that I'd really never ridden before.
Shelby Stanger:
And then set up camp every night.
David Sacher:
Yeah. So I camped, I don't know the exact number, but the vast majority of the time I camped. I had a tent with me, a sleeping bag. Yeah. I stayed in a few hotels in Latin America. The hotels were a downgrade from camping because you pay $4 or $5 for a hotel somewhere in Central America. But the hotels were real smelly. You'd have a thread bare sheet with stains all over it. I had one room, a room like I could show you a picture of, it was pretty wild. There was a giant tarantula right above the bed. And I'd get in late at night, and I'm like, oh, I'm too tired. What do I do? There's this huge tarantula. I have my flip flops, and I'm just like, I don't know what else to do. So I just smacked the tarantula against the wall, right above the bed. And you know how big tarantulas are.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, they're huge. Was it so bloody?
David Sacher:
Smacking any spider is kind of not something I want to do anyways, but then a tarantula is like throwing a water balloon at the wall above your bed. And so that was kind of the hotel scene. But I did that a lot because in Central South America, it's cheap. You want to be able to rinse off because you're covered in diesel fumes and your skin is kind of turning black from all the exhaust and stuff. And you're so sweaty because it's humid down there and you've got bugs stuck all over you and everything. So you really want to rinse. That's number one. And it's also fairly developed, the road down there. And so trying to find a place that has some food, and then just kind of a safe feeling place to sleep where you're not kind of trespassing on somebody's land. A lot of times you end up in these cheap hotels. But other than that, South America, all of Canada, North America, Alaska, it's all camping all the way. And that was pretty wild.
Shelby Stanger:
The Pan-American Highway runs about 19,000 miles long. David said that this trip didn't necessarily require a lot of skill or expertise. Instead, he said it was endurance and grit that got him through. Putting in that many miles, an average of about 90 a day for seven months, can be really tough on your body. Before the trip, David had struggled with some pretty severe knee pain, but he was determined to stick to his plans.
Shelby Stanger:
A quick question. When you were biking, you recently got knee surgery right before you went on your trip?
David Sacher:
Yeah. That was one of the reasons I didn't train, either is because I had gone on, again, this old mountain bike I had in college. It was a 30 mile bike ride. I could barely walk for a week afterwards. I was limping because my knee just did not agree with it. So I recovered like a week or two, didn't really do anything. Went on another one, similar distance, 20 miles or something, which is nothing. And the same thing happened, so I was like, uh-oh. I got a real knee problem. I had seen some specialists. Nobody quite knew what was going on with me. You know, I was a young healthy guy. But for whatever reason, my knee doesn't like biking. So there was a good surgeon. He suggested trying something. He said he was not super confident that it would work, but it was worth a try. And I don't even remember exactly what he did, cut a little piece of my meniscus off or something.
Shelby Stanger:
Did you have a meniscus tear?
David Sacher:
No, no, no. I was healthy per se, but biking really hurt my knee, my right knee. And so he did this little procedure, and he was like, "Oh, don't go biking 100 miles," or something like that. And I was like, "Well, in three weeks, I'm leaving on this bike tour." I didn't tell that to him. And so I had this little surgery, was still recovering, had ridden after the surgery, maybe a total of 10 or 12 miles before I started on the bike tour. And so then I'm like, okay, let's see how this goes. And I start to ride. And then by the end of the first day, both my knees were just flared up. And that persisted extremely painfully all the way until Guatemala. But all of North America, all of Canada, all of Alaska, I could barely get in and out of my tent. If I had to stop for traffic lights ...
Shelby Stanger:
Did you ice it? I'm so confused. You didn't have ice on your bike.
David Sacher:
Well, no. I mean Alaska and Canada, I would sometimes go in the icy creek and put my knees in there or whatever. But no, I was just kind of hobbling around. And it was like, the pain was bad, and I didn't want to have to deal with it. But then I was also kind of torturing myself the whole time with these thoughts, like, am I ruining my knees? Am I ever going to recover from this? Am I just so foolish to do this to my one precious body, to rip it apart like this? Again, fortunately it went away in Guatemala.
Shelby Stanger:
Your mom sent you a care package with orthotics, right?
David Sacher:
Yeah. That might have been the silver bullet is I met up with my aunt and uncle who lived in Central America. My mom had sent them a care package, and there were these little shoe inserts that I put in the front of my bike shoes. How much can an insert do? It changes the angle of your toes by a millimeter, two millimeters, something like that. But I had taken a week off with them, and then I put these little inserts in, and then I cruised. And my knees are still great today. I do a lot of running, and every day I walk around or lift up my kids or something. I'm stoked to have knees that work great.
Shelby Stanger:
It's been a while since you've done that.
David Sacher:
Yeah, like 12 years.
Shelby Stanger:
Over a decade. Yeah. What sticks out? Because that was such a wild idea, I doubt you'll ever do that again.
David Sacher:
Yeah. Hopefully not. Sometimes I have nightmares I do it again, and then you're stuck somewhere in the desert in Peru or something and trying to find your way out. It's kind of like after you graduate from high school, you still have nightmares about doing your homework, that kind of thing.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. It's one of those things to do once, and you're like, I don't ever have to do it again. But I'm so glad I did it.
David Sacher:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
What sticks out, and what do you think you really learned from that trip?
David Sacher:
Yeah. I wrote at the time that I was forming a diamond in my soul. And I know that sounds kind of cheesy, but that's how I thought about it. Incredible heat and pressure is really intense, and you have something that you carry with you forever that's untarnishable. And it's kind of small and precious in that now, it's just a memory. And it's something that doesn't come up every day and most people don't even know about me. But it's extremely valuable to me. It's extremely precious. And I feel very grateful to have it as part of my life.
David Sacher:
As far as things you learn, I could list things, like concrete things that you learn. But I think a better way to think about it is it's less about what you learn and more about who you are or who you become. And I think that knowing that you're the kind of person who can do difficult things is really important for how you view yourself and also for how other people want to interact with you. If people hear that about me, they instantly are curious. They're intrigued. They want to know me better. Or in the case of starting my own business, I said, "Hey, I'm going to start this business." And the comment I got was, "Well, I know if you say you're going to do something, you're the kind of person who's going to do it."
Shelby Stanger:
One of my favorite parts about David's story is that he made a decision to be the type of person who does hard things. He doesn't wait until he's the best or the fastest or an expert to go after what he wants. When we come back, David talks about how he came up with a wild idea to start Vital, which is one of the only 24 hour climbing gyms in the nation. He also talks about how he built a business on trusting people and the life lessons he's learned from climbing.
Shelby Stanger:
David Sacher was on the Pan-American Highway for seven months. During the ride, he was on a pretty tight budget, camping or staying in the cheapest hotels, biking as transportation, and pinching pennies everywhere he went. Between this financial pressure and the natural stress of being a recent college graduate, David started thinking about how he was going to support himself when he got back to California. Was he going to pursue a career? Where was he going to live? The long days on the road provided space for him to come up with his next wild idea.
Shelby Stanger:
So you're doing this ride, which feels deeply fulfilling. But in the back of your head, as all people who do grand adventures do, there's always this idea of, okay, when I finish this, that'll be great. But then, if you don't have something already in place, you have this big what's next.
David Sacher:
Yeah, totally. I remember towards, I think it was like the last year of college for me, I was stressed most of the time. Every day, I was thinking about this for some period of the day, what I would do for a career, what I would do when I got back from my bike ride. And that was a heavy cognitive burden. And for most of the bike trip, I thought about that fairly obsessively. What do I do when I get back? And I always told myself that the period after my bike tour, one year, two years, five years ... I didn't know what it would be. But I told myself that the period after my bike tour would be the toughest period of my life because I would be trying to restart myself or to start myself. I really wouldn't have entered the world as an adult until I could take care of myself.
David Sacher:
Towards the end of the ride, the last maybe 10 days or something like that, southern end of South America, kind of open plains of Argentina, gorgeous place, I was pushing really hard to get to the end. And I was so frustrated because it was so windy, and despite my efforts, I would get very little results for it. And I found that to be incredibly frustrating. And so while I was riding, I would just kind of try to have pleasant daydreams. I would try to zone out, try to kind of go to your happy place, one of those kinds of things. And I'd think about what is my happy place? Where do I want to be right now? If I could be anywhere, what would it be like?
David Sacher:
And thinking about it in that way, as opposed to thinking about what do I do for money, what do I do for money, thinking about where's my happy place, I had this idea to have a little climbing gym back in Leucadia or in North County, San Diego, right where I grew up, by the beach, small little place, climbing walls. I like to climb. Have a little barbecue out front, 24 hours. People could hang out and climb. And I was like, that sounds pretty great. Go home, open a little climbing gym, put a little barbecue out front, have your friends come by and hang out and climb. And that was the idea. And I remember thinking, will that actually work? Could something like that pay for itself? Could it make any money? Could it be a business?
David Sacher:
And I had bike brain. I was addled and could barely do the math. And so I'm trying to think, well, how much is a membership, and how much is rent? And I can't really make sense of it. I'm like, yeah, it'll probably work. So then when I got back, I had that in mind, and I started to work on it pretty much right away. And I was really lucky, lucky across the board, but I was really lucky because it came together fairly quickly and it worked. And I had my closest friend join me as my business partner. And we opened the first gym in Carlsbad, and it was really close to that vision that I had on the ride. There was a barbecue out front, and friends would come up. We'd hang out, listen to music, climb. And we were off to the races. We were going at that point.
Shelby Stanger:
With help from his business partner, Nam Phan, David turned his idea into a real, thriving business. Their goal was to make Vital a place to gather with friends and do something physical. In order to do that, they needed to create a community built on kindness and trust. Vital relies on an honor system for things like shoe rentals and snacks, and it's open 24 hours a day. Why 24 hours?
David Sacher:
I got into climbing more seriously in college. There was a climbing gym in town called The Pad, and they were a 24 hour co-op. There was no staff ever. It was in a storage unit, super garage gym status. And if you sent them an email and paid them, they emailed you back a door code, and you could go in there and climb at any time. So again, all my ideas are just taken from other people who have had great ideas. And they were really supportive in helping me get the gym started, some phone calls with them about how to do it and how to set it up and everything. So those guys are great. So I was inspired by that gym.
David Sacher:
Our gym was a little different in that it was like a normal gym during the day, and then at night, we'd lock the door unless you had the door code. And you could still plug in your phone, flip on the lights at night, which many people did come in at 2:00 or 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning if they couldn't sleep or just wanted to go hang with their friends or whatever. It's really fun. It's great vibes. It's a cool thing to do. And we were nervous about it, of course. You leave your gym open 24/7, somebody could come in and do God knows what to the place. But we have found that when you become a member of a gym like that, when you become a member of Vital, it's your space. And so it's like, are you going to go into your own place and tear it apart? I hope not. Who are you going to harm if you come in and rip apart the gym yourself? It's here for you. And so why would you rip apart your own living room?
David Sacher:
And of course, you have to have some rules in place. You can't just have chaos, or things don't work at all. If no customer ever paid, you couldn't have a gym in the first place. But one of the things that I think is that perfect enforcement can cause way more harm than it solves. So you might have a rule breaker, and then you have this policy that you implement because of the one rule breaker that makes things worse for everybody. And it would be better to have one rule breaker, which you don't want to have somebody who's being rude or disrespectful or not following the social norms. That's a bummer. You don't want to have that. But you don't want to then let that person ruin it for everybody. And so at Vital, we have a lot of stuff that's just really open and trusting. And we try to create an atmosphere where it's not us versus the customer, but we're all just trying to be in this space together, having a good time.
Shelby Stanger:
So when you first started the one gym in Carlsbad, to start a business, you need money. You need a business plan. You need to also feed yourself and house yourself. How did you make it work? Did you borrow money? Where did you sleep?
David Sacher:
Yeah. When I came back from the bike tour, I had zero cash. I don't remember how much it actually was, but probably a couple hundred bucks or something. We started the business with a loan from my brother for two grand or something, which we used to write and print business plans, which we then sent to everybody else we knew. And we're getting investments for $3,000, $5,000, kind of like slowly stacking it up. We had an estimate for what we thought the gym would cost, and it ended up costing about three times that.
David Sacher:
And we didn't have any way to raise that amount of money, but we just kind of kept at it and kept asking and kept trying to hold to the vision that we wanted to create, and without, well, let's not build a climbing wall in our climbing gym to save money. It's like, no, you've got to build the gym you need. And we were fortunate to just barely raise the money as we needed it, as we went. And so got the gym open. Felt like a miracle. It probably was. And then pretty much from the time we had the foam flooring show up at the gym, we were sleeping in the gym. So all the foam is stacked up on the floor, and we're there working, putting it all in ourselves until like 1:00 in the morning or whatever, then just sleeping on the foam flooring. And then we did that all the way until grand opening day. And then we were a 24 hour gym.
David Sacher:
We don't know what's going to happen. So we're there the first day, the first night after grand opening. People start to go home, 10 or 11 or whatever. And we have a couple sofas in the gym. And we were like, well, we should sleep here, just to make sure that nobody comes in at night and steals the computer or something. So my business partner and I slept on the sofas because we wanted to see what happened at the gym, keep it safe, that kind of thing. And then about a week or two in, we had some extra foam flooring scraps and threw them behind the climbing wall and started sleeping back there. And so we saved on rent for a long time by crashing behind the wall of the 24 hour gym.
Shelby Stanger:
But what would happen if someone came in and turned on all the lights? Would you wake up?
David Sacher:
That happened all the time. Yeah. It was horrible.
Shelby Stanger:
So how did you sleep?
David Sacher:
Very badly. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Did anybody see you and freak out?
David Sacher:
It's kind of one of those open secrets at a certain point. We're kind of the OG members. We'd come out in the morning, super bleary eyed, like after a terrible night's sleep of somebody playing their death metal at 2:00 in the morning or whatever, at max volume, with the lights on. And we were like, okay, that was a bad night. And we had a lot of bad nights.
Shelby Stanger:
And you didn't tell them, "Hey dude, I'm sleeping in here?"
David Sacher:
We would sometimes trip the breaker behind the wall if it was especially painful. And then we'd make them think that they blew out the system or something, but we'd just trip that breaker and turn off the music because it was too painful sometimes.
Shelby Stanger:
So funny. Okay. I really am curious about ... There's two things that are really important to you, inclusivity and community. Talk to me about what that means to you, because those words are thrown around a lot today, but this is a word that you had since 2009. You were like, I want to be inclusive and I want to foster community with this climbing gym.
David Sacher:
Yeah. We are in the climbing industry. We're not making paper or logging or ... I don't know, just like making bolts or something. We're making a climbing gym. It should be fun. If we can't make climbing fun, or if we succeed at making a climbing gym an unhappy place to be, shame on us. We have every reason to have Vital be a fun place to work, to be a fun place to hang out and climb and be with your friends. And so a lot of what we think about is how do you do that? What makes a place have a bad vibe? What makes a place have a great vibe? And we just try to be really careful about doing things that make people love being there. That's everything from how we design and build the spaces, to the policies we have or the policies we don't have, like try not to have too many rules. For example, there's a million things, but we don't have a script for our desk staff. You don't want to have any candid, framed lines where you say this or that. Just have a genuine interaction with people and talk to them and be nice and get to know them and treat them well, and they'll probably do the same for you. And that should be great.
David Sacher:
So across the board, being a 24 hour climbing gym, it's definitely our responsibility to make it a positive contribution to the world. People need good things to do in life, and there's a lot of them out there. But sometimes, if you live in a certain place for a long time, you can think, what do I do today? I can do this again. I can do that again. And there's not that many options for people to socialize that don't involve eating or drinking. Eating or drinking is great. I'm a person. I like to eat and drink. But it's really good to have a place you can go to be together that's active, that's intrinsically social. Climbing supports a really encouraging environment because everybody pushes themselves hard when they climb. And everybody fails when they climb. And so being in an environment where everybody's trying and striving and failing creates this super supportive culture.
David Sacher:
Climbing is very much a problem solving game. You can try a problem five times and be strong enough to do it, but you didn't succeed at climbing the climb, simply because you didn't have the right puzzle pieces in place. You moved the wrong way. You had your wrist at the wrong angle. You had your weighting wrong. You did the wrong sequence, whatever it is. So it's this extremely intellectual problem to solve, and you get better at solving it with practice.
David Sacher:
But one of the things that I found interesting about climbing when I was first learning is you can look at a wall or be on a wall, so you're part way up a wall, and the next five feet seem unsolvable. You don't know where the handholds are. It looks very difficult. You're in a precarious position already. And you move your feet a little bit, and you get maybe eight or 12 inches higher. And suddenly, you see the next movement, and it's there in front of you. And so you move again. And then you get another six or 12 inches higher, and you see the next move. And so that method of problem solving really applies to a lot of areas of life, to include starting a business or going on a grand adventure. It's like, you can't see the end from here at all. You can't see every step from here at all. But if you can get yourself six or 12 inches higher, at that point, you'll see the next move, and then the next one and the next one.
Shelby Stanger:
David Sacher, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights about adventure and business. I loved hearing your story and your perspective on building a business by trusting people. And thank you for Vital Climbing Gym, because it has been my savior during the pandemic and so much more. If you want to learn more about Vital, you can check out their website, vitalclimbinggym.com. That's V-I-T-A-L climbing gym.
Shelby Stanger:
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative, and our senior producer is Chelsea Davis. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow this show, rate it and review it wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.