Nando Parrado's Lesson in Heroism: Surviving The Andes Mountains | The Titan Summit x Robin Sharma

They said that we couldn't have survived more than 36 hours, and we survived 72 days.

The average age on that airplane was 19, 19 years old. I was 20. I got to be 21. On the airplane, the average age was 19. We come from a country where there are no mountains, only beaches. And we survived on the worst place that a human being can survive, on the high summits of the mountains. All the survival experts on this world that we have.

Talked to, they said that we couldn't have survived more than 36 hours. And we survived 72 days and 72 nights over there, 72 years.

How would you have reacted in a situation like this? Would you have found flattering facets of your personality that you didn't know that they existed, and you would have rising to the challenge and survived, or you would have fallen in fear and died the most horrible death that you can imagine? You don't know and you don't want to know. I will tell you about that. If you come back from a survival situation of this magnitude, if you come back, you come back without something that's very dear to you. It can be a finger, a hand, an arm, a leg, a friend, a family member. But most of all, you come back without something that's very, very strongly glued to your psyche. The belief that life will be forever perfect. Forever perfect. Sometimes from the black, something appears and changes your life like that. The clock of life starts when you're born. The hands go forward and you never know when they will stop. For some of my friends, they stopped when they were 17, 19, 21, 23. So it's already too late. So leave your present, because that's the only important thing in life. The future is a foggy thing that you dream, you have a vision, doesn't exist. The past is already gone. The present is the most important part of your life. Why did we survive? A bunch of Uruguayans who had never seen snow before in their lives. And we survived on the worst place that you can survive. Why? I have spoken to the MBA in Harvard Business School, ESSE in Europe, some of the best business schools in the world, some of the best companies in the world. And I looked at people, they do parallel thoughts with what we lived and what they think they should do in companies and the way they should behave in life. And that's seen from the outside. We survived without knowing. If you want, I can tell you we knew what we were doing. We didn't know what we were doing. We were young, we didn't have experience, but we Achieved excellence in each one of those things that you have learned. You go to events like these ones, you go to universities, you read, you learn, you train. How much has those thoughts, those activities, those subjects like leadership, teamwork, strategy, innovation, risk management.

How many times have you heard about those things? We linked them together on an equation that allowed us to have the best business in life. Life to breathe again. If you make a mistake in your work, horrible mistake, you are fired. You can lose your company, you can lose everything that you have, but you're alive. You can work as an Uber driver, you can go and work as a waiter, as a janitor, you can create another company. You're alive. If we made mistakes, we were dead. And you cannot come back from that. It's black. There's no come back from death. There's no way you can come back. Why did we survive? Because we achieved excellence in each one of those things. Plus one more luck. Luck. And you will see how luck influences. Excellent. Every person's life, a very simple thing. All of you, you have done something today that would have allowed you to die or to live over there. I survived the only plane crash in history where there are survivors. I'm a parallel. I fly single engine planes. I love to fly. It's very safe. Pilots make mistakes like lawyers, doctors, carpenters. People make mistakes despite making a huge mistake. We had three impacts, not only one, three impacts. It's the only plane crash in history where there are survivors. When a plane crashes at cruising speed and at cruising altitude, the physical forces unchanged on a crash of that magnitude are non survival. You cannot survive. I will share with you now a small video where you will see scenes of the actual crash, scenes of the movie alive and the actual mountains where we survived.

One of the greatest human survival stories of all time began on Friday, October 13, 1972, when a charter plane carrying a rugby team from the South American country of Uruguay vanished over the remote snow covered Andes Mountains for 72 days. The world thought they were dead. But what 16 survivors endured was worse than death.

It was a story of survival. It was a fantastic physical effort to get out of there and to fight every single day against the cold, the hunger, the fear, everything. So I think it's, I feel it's a great story of survival.

Nando Parrado was only 21 when he caught the plane which was taking his team to play a rematch in Chile. Parrado was one of Uruguay's top rugby players and his mother and sister went with him for the journey.

The pilot had radioed that he was over Chile. It was a fatal navigational error. Believing he had already crossed the range, he descended into the clouds and emerged in the middle of the mountains.

I could hear the engines pitching up in revs. Trying to get some power of those engines and the front part of the plane lifting up a little bit. And then the moment of impact.

The plane had come down into the most extensive mountain range in the world. Rescue teams from three countries searched, but the roof of the plane was white and the mountains were covered with the heaviest snowfalls in 50 years. After 10 days, the search was abandoned.

They had crashed at over 11,000ft. At night, temperatures dropped to 30 degrees below zero. They couldn't survive on just a few bars of chocolate.

Nor could they have imagined the nightmare they would face two and a half weeks into their ordeal.

One of the most important things that I remember, also that they were very hard, was the avalanche that came into the plane about two and a half weeks after we crashed. We were already settled inside the plane. One night we had already gone into sleep and we were sleeping in the positions I just described like this. About two hours after we had gone into the plane and some of the guys were already sleeping, a very big avalanche came through the wall.

Through this flag of suitcases, and it covered the st. The fuselage completely up to this, to this hand. So you can imagine our. Our heads were like here and there, and we were completely covered with snow and we couldn't move.

Serpina, shine the light over here.

They started looking for the heads and the mouths of the guys who were sleeping, not for the bodies.

But three of them tried to reach the broken tail of the plane, which had landed in a valley to the east. They nearly died in the attempt.

While they waited for warmer weather, Nando selected two expeditionaries to accompany him in a daring attempt to escape the Andes. The boys knew they would have to organize themselves properly to climb out. They also knew that once they began, there was no turning back.

You stop here, you die. That's the only difference. You stop, you're dead. You stop, you're dead. So I kept going and going and going. Seven and a half days after we started, seven and a half days, the snow went. Now we started walking on shade rock, loose rock, like that. My rugby boots were already destroyed and my life depended on my shoes. How can you walk barefoot there? You die. You bleed, you die. So I was looking to my shoes. I said, okay, if they break, I take out my shirt and I'll mend it. So I looked at my shoes Come on, don't break now. Don't break now. Come and go. And my life was my shoes. My shoes were my life. And we kept going and going and going. Eight and a half days afterwards, we found a river. We found a river. Water flows to the oceans. Let's follow the river. So we started following the river. We. We followed the river. One of the climbers from National Geographic broke his wrist. And he went to my home. Afterwards. I had a barbecue for them. We got together and he said, nando. He embraced me. I said, nando, no way. There's absolutely no way a human being could have done what you did. There's no way. No equipment, no ropes, no crampons, no gloves, no hats, nothing. How did you do it? You know how you did it, because of your ignorance. Had you known what you were going to do, you wouldn't have even started one step. You never knew what you were going to do. And that is also a fantastic thing for life. If you know what you're going to start and you will know the result. Everything will be so fantastically easy. So we kept going. Ten and a half days afterwards. Ten days and a half. Roberto was almost dead. He couldn't walk. I lost £90. £90 I lost. At the end of the day, we saw a peasant on a horse on the other side. We are here. This is the river. These are the valleys. These are the high mountains that we cross. They are there. I said, no, that's 70, 80 kilometers away from here. El Sosniado, that's Argentina. There's no way a human being could have crossed that on foot like that. They are there.