#War zone danger for short how to

I left my job and went to Africa and started writing about the places I was in. I realized that we don’t have much time in the world, and if you don’t do exactly what you want to do now, you will never do it. You’re not actually going to be focusing on the things that make you happy, that give you wisdom, that help other people. And at the end of the day, you’re just going to be making money. I thought, “You know, I should be doing that thing that I escaped to do one month out of the year, rather than 11 months a year making money.”Īnd that goes against normal, rational thinking, which is that you need to make money. And I used to take a month off, and picked the most remote place on the planet and went there. A client of mine had bone cancer and was told he only had a few months to live.Īnd I realized that if I didn’t start doing what I really wanted to do, I would end up just being in the middle of something and dying. My father died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which is a debilitating disease, which, you have like six months to get to know your father and talk about life and this and that. In a very short span of time they began to die. And I was in my late 30’s, 40’s.Īlong the way, I had a number of mentors. In my last job, I was paid $500,000 a year by Marvel just to answer the phone. I launched the Upper Deck Trading Card Company. I worked with Steve Jobs on the launch of the Macintosh. But I found I had a talent for marketing and advertising, and I built up an ad agency called Pelton Associates, which I think was #126 on the Inc. I had no university education, I had no formal education. But you know, once you get the “poor guy” mentality, you tend to focus on making money. So I didn’t have a lot of chances to do things. Well, first of all, I was a guy who lived in a car when I was 16, a Rambler station wagon, and I picked fruit.

What was the catalyst? What flicked the switch for you? A lifetime ago, you left your executive job in pursuit of adventure. So, we asked the great man to be our next subject in this month’s Specialist Carry… You weren’t always the war journalist.

#War zone danger for short how to

And he knows that in warzones you hang out with the guy with the grey hair he’s the one who teaches you how to stay alive.Īn intrepid traveler and gnarly human being by anyone’s measure, RYP’s wealth of experience in life, travel and survival is unmatched. He can now tell the size of a cartridge by the sound it makes as it slices the air above his head. In his career, kidnappings and assassination attempts have been a reality. A former marketing exec, turned adventurer, inventor, journalist and author of the New York Times best selling books, The World’s Most Dangerous Places Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror and Come Back Alive, he’s covered 14 wars and visited 130 countries, by last count. Robert Young Pelton has journeyed to more dangerous places than any man on the planet.