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Erik Weihenmayer on Living Life With No Barriers
Weihenmayer discusses climbing Everest blind and his No Barriers philosophy.
Quick facts
MemoirOn my shelf
Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Man’s Journey to Climb Farther than the Eye Can See
Weihenmayer’s bestselling debut memoir traces his path from a degenerative eye disorder that left him fully blind by age thirteen to his quest to climb the Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent, culminating in his 2001 ascent of Mount Everest — the first blind person ever to reach the top.
This is the foundational Weihenmayer book, later adapted into a feature film, and it’s notable for refusing the easy inspirational frame: he’s specific about the training, the setbacks, and the family dynamics (a mother praying for a miracle, a father pushing him toward the mountain) that got him there, rather than presenting the climb as pure triumph.
Self-Help · Psychology
The Adversity Advantage: Turning Everyday Struggles Into Everyday Greatness
Co-written with psychologist Dr. Paul Stoltz, this book extracts the lessons of Weihenmayer’s climbing career into a practical framework for handling adversity in ordinary life, using his own experiences on Everest and other peaks as case studies alongside Stoltz’s research into resilience.
Where Touch the Top of the World tells the story, The Adversity Advantage tries to systematize what can actually be learned from it. It’s more prescriptive and self-help-oriented than his memoirs, aimed squarely at readers who want application rather than narrative.
Memoir · Adventure
No Barriers: A Blind Man’s Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon
Weihenmayer’s second memoir picks up after Everest, following his shift from mountaineering to whitewater kayaking and the 2014 expedition in which he and blinded Navy veteran Lonnie Bedwell kayaked all 277 miles of the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River — one of the most demanding whitewater stretches in the world.
No Barriers is a more reflective book than his debut, written after two decades of adventure and the founding of his No Barriers organization, and it spends real time on what happens after the summit: how you keep finding purpose once you’ve already done the thing everyone said was impossible.
Nature · Contemplation
Seeing Silence: The Beauty of the World’s Most Quiet Places
Weihenmayer turns his attention to silence and quiet as sensory experiences worth seeking out deliberately, drawing on his decades of listening to the natural world — mountain wind, canyon acoustics, desert stillness — as someone for whom sound has always carried more information than sight.
A quieter, more meditative book than his adventure memoirs, this one uses Weihenmayer’s blindness not as an obstacle to overcome but as a genuine advantage in perceiving something sighted people usually miss. It’s the clearest expression yet of how his relationship to his own blindness has evolved over two decades of public writing about it.
Frequently asked questions about Erik Weihenmayer’s books
From the bookshelf
“The world's a challenging place, and blindness is no more significant a challenge than the challenges every person on the planet faces.”
— Erik Weihenmayer
For more writers who turn adversity into a genuine way of seeing, browse the full shelf.
