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How it started
Just look at this chap in the picture, he didn’t stand a chance! My childhood was not straightforward. I grew up in Portsmouth on the south coast of England as an only child. I lived with my mum after my father left when I was five. My mum was an endlessly kind and caring woman but not without her own demons, suffering from alcoholism. I won’t go into it much, but it was a struggle at times! This spilt over into a challenging time for me at school, where I failed academically. I was not helped by being dyslexic and came bottom of the year. Bullying was predictable for this overweight lad, and I was nicknamed bum! Even one of my teachers once remarked:
“The only way that Tom Williams would ever get to university is if he climbed through the bathroom window, and then he would probably get stuck!“
Let’s be honest. You would not have bet on ‘bum’, this little fat fella who was bottom of the year, to succeed. To be honest, I’m still not quite sure how it all turned around for me.
However, I would not change any of it! I believe that just the right level of adversity helped me develop resilience, patience, and tolerance, which would later serve me well.
I proved that teacher wrong, scraping my way into university via clearing to study Geography. Yet, my poor academic performance continued to plague me, in the first two years I scraped by with the minimum pass mark of 40%. I still thought of myself as a failure. However, in my third year, I met my first big life-changing crossroad and things changed.
Mapping coral in Honduras – A flicker of self-belief
My university housemate Simon was heading to Fiji to map coral reefs. As a die-hard Attenborough fan with a love for the oceans, this sounded like a dream. I asked to join Simon and he was having none of it. So, i contacted the company Coral Cay Conservation and joined their coral mapping project in Roatan, Honduras. For my third year of University, I had to learn almost every marine species in the Caribbean and dive twice a day, six times a week. I clocked my first dive and finished with over 200 dives, became a divemaster at aged 20. For the first time in my life, I had found something I was good at and passionate about. I returned to the UK with newfound confidence and self-belief that maybe I was maybe not a failure. I passed that final year with 87% and gained a 2.1 in my degree.
Getting a ‘proper’ job and North Pole adventures
Upon graduating from university, I took the path most of us take, the one society congratulates and that pleases our parents. I went to a job fair and managed to land a job for a software company in sales. It was a decent job, but it left me feeling dead inside. I dreamed of travel, escape, and nature. I remember at one of my lowest moments, commuting from Maidenhead to London, contemplating crashing my car into the central reservation, I don’t think to completely kill myself, but just enough to get a few weeks in the hospital to draw breath. These were not the thoughts of a fulfilled man.
Several weeks later, putting away pints with my friend Paul, he told me he was planning to walk to the North Pole in an amateur race called the ‘Polar Challenge’. This was just what I was looking for—an adventure on the horizon. Something to prevent my identity from being pigeonholed as a software salesman in Maidenhead. The next morning, I awoke exceptionally hungover, and my phone reminded me, ‘Walk to the North Pole’. I signed up. For two years, we trained, and raised sponsorships, hosting 25 fundraising events. Myself and my teammates (Ru and Steph) raised £50,000 for Mencap, a charity that helps those with a learning disability. Eventually, we were standing at the start line. I will write a whole separate blog about this race, but the outcome is what people really care about. We won the race by 2 days and missed the world record by 2 hours. We are still the fastest ever mixed team.
The time we lived in Chile
That same year I walked to the north pole, 2010, I left my job, met my wife Eleanor, moved to Chile, and joined a superyacht sailing from Vancouver to Chile (via the Galapagos and Easter Island). It was a vintage year that I will be hard pushed to ever eclipse.
I arrived in Chile speaking no Spanish and needing money, so I landed the only job I could find in English, selling pensions and investments to expats. I was back working for ‘the man’. At least this time the weather was good, and I had more free time for hiking and kayaking. But once more, the hat did not fit. I was left with a strong feeling that there was more to life, and this was not it.
I dreamt of creating a company that gave me the freedom to live out adventures in nature and meet like-minded people.
My mother passed away before her 60th birthday when I was 34. When she passed, it gave me a profound sense of mortality, and the reality of it reinforced that ‘life is not a dress rehearsal’, you only get one shot at this.
Now
I needed to find something fulfilling that would give me a sense of adventure and purpose, as well as paying the bills. With zero bushcraft experience, I settled on the idea of creating a desert island survival company. desertislandsurvival.com was born. I went on a few bushcraft courses and started developing my skills, and before I knew it, I had rented an island in Panama and invited some friends for a pilot expedition. It was a hit, and in 2016 my baby was born. My son Edward, that is, but I also founded Desert Island Survival!
Fast forward to today, and we now run over 20 expeditions a year in Tonga, the Philippines, Panama, Indonesia, Sweden and Botswana, and have a team of instructors. I pinch myself that it is truly my business.
In 2019, my family and I went nomadic, moving first to Thailand, living in Chiang Mai and Koh Lanta. We then moved to Mexico and Majorca before settling in Lisbon, Portugal. We are infatuated with Lisbon and can see us living for many more years. They say it’s the city where nomads come to die, and I can see why.
Just after arriving in Lisbon, my biggest opportunity to date arrived. A chance to appear on the TV show Alone. Surviving in the Canadian wilderness for as long as possible, solo, with only a handful of survival items. So, without hesitation, I put down my machete, picked up an axe for the very first time and flew to Canada. After only 35 days, I was shocked to find out that I was the last person in the wilderness and had won the competition.