My Amazing Race

By Phil Keoghan, Los Angeles, California

As appeared in

“Congratulations, you’re the first team to arrive.”

I’ve said that a few hundred times over the last 14 seasons of The Amazing Race, but it never gets old, especially when a team has that wonderful look of anticipation—not knowing if they beat the others yet or not.

The Amazing Race is all about people being pushed outside their comfort zone and completing every imaginable challenge.

It’s about ordinary people taking part in an extraordinary situation, being a fish out of water and taking part in a life-changing experience.

I call my personal philosophy NOW (No Opportunity Wasted). NOW means taking risks and living each day as if it were your best. Sometimes that requires doing things that are uncomfortable, but in the end, it’s what really makes you feel inspired about life.

Look for solutions, not excuses.
I learned about living life to the fullest from my parents. Life always felt like an adventure growing up.

When I was six we moved to Antigua, a small island in the Caribbean, only 108 square miles. My father, a plant scientist, was employed to set up a legume project, testing plants they could adapt to the harsh growing conditions and helping local farmers establish sustainable plants.

My mother was a schoolteacher and also gave piano lessons at home. At one point she had more than 100 students! Resources on the island were limited so my parents had to be resourceful and imaginative.

I remember my mother was asked to teach a typing class on the far side of the island. There were no typewriters at that particular school so my mom simply borrowed the machines from her school, transported them over to the other school, taught her class and then lugged them back again. She did this for an entire year so that typing could be taught to as many students as possible. Mom was a doer.

Ditto Dad. When we arrived on the island he was given the use of an old building inside the gates of an abandoned sugarcane factory.

After establishing some electricity and running water, he set about finding a propagation area for his plants. The place was pretty rundown. There were piles of old steel, tin roofing and a number of flatbed railway carriages that sat on a network of train tracks.

Dad quickly realized that these carriages were at a perfect working height to set up seedlings. They could be pushed to a watering area or shaded areas and, best of all, would cost him nothing.

As the famous New Zealand nuclear physicist, Sir Ernest Rutherford, once said, “We didn’t have money, so we had to think.” The most resourceful people I’ve met around the world are usually the ones who have the least.

I just finished one of the biggest challenges of my life—riding my bicycle across the U.S. to help raise money for MS research.

Because we are in tough economic times I had to be resourceful at every turn, and believe me there were many, many turns on this 3,500-mile ride!

There’s no doubt that the lessons my parents taught me have helped me out in life.

Live life to the fullest.
At 19, I had an experience that changed my life forever—I almost died while working as a scuba diver on a New Zealand adventure show.

I found myself deep in the bowels of a sunken ship. I had entered the ship with a dive buddy and followed him through the twisted, murky corridors.