This week’s conversation is with Andrew Zimmern, a four-time James Beard Award-winning TV personality, chef, writer and teacher.

Andrew is regarded as one of the most versatile and knowledgeable personalities in the food world. As the creator, executive producer and host of the Bizarre Foods franchise on Travel Channel, The Zimmern List and Andrew Zimmern’s Driven by Food, he has explored culture through food in more than 170 countries.

He has built a multi-faceted empire that promotes impactful ways to think about, create and live with food.

On the surface Andrew is wildly successful – he’s highly ambitious and has an insatiable curiosity for life but in this conversation he pulls back the curtain and we get to learn about a different side of him.

Andrew’s affinity for risk taking led him down a path that almost cost him his life.

And that is at the heart of what this conversation is all about.

Andrew holds nothing back.

The pain he endured, what he ultimately learned about himself, and how it’s impacted the work he does today.

We all have challenges we’re dealing with—whether it be issues at work, your personal life, addiction, searching for purpose, and I truly believe this conversation has something to offer for everyone.

“I define success by not being a slave to the idea that I have to have a certain amount of money or notoriety to be happy.”

In This Episode:

• How he cam to be highly ambitious
• The internal struggle he has between wanting to experience the most out of life and getting enough sleep
• Why he strives to be an extraordinary “doer”
• His prime driver in life: an insatiable curiosity
• The ramifications of being an alcoholic and drug abuser in the 1980s
• Why he’s at his best as a visual thinker
• The plight he faces as a risk taker.. trying to accurately assess when is right time to take risk
• The lowest points he faced in his life due to his risk taking … homeless, trying to take his own life, petty theft, and drug addiction
• Checking himself into rehab, learning the power of gratitude and to believe in a higher power
• How his mindset shifted to showing dignity and respect for others
• Why vulnerability is so important to him
• How his views on success have changed
• What mastery comes down to