FindingLife on Mt. Everest

Every mountain has two summits. One is made of rock and ice. The other lives inside us. Most people spend their lives chasing the first and never reach the second. This is the story of what happens when you finally do: when the pursuit of something higher becomes purpose, and the hope you find at the top becomes the service you offer to others.

In Elia’s Saikaly’s early years, life was turbulent and unsettled. He spent time in a group home and a reform school, growing up largely outside the system, and by his teens was heading down the wrong path, with little reason to believe in a different future. That chapter might have defined him. Instead, a chance encounter with a world champion strongman changed the trajectory of his life. Under that mentorship, Elia discovered the power of discipline, visualization, recovery, and mindset, the same principles that drive elite performance in any arena. By seventeen, he had broken a world record in powerlifting. The strength he built then, in body and mind, was his first proof that struggle could be transformed, and it would one day help him endure the storms of the world’s highest peaks.

A single phone call set the rest in motion. Invited to join a Canadian expedition to Mount Everest, Elia had never slept in a tent. His role was to film Dr. Sean Egan, a sixty-three-year-old professor attempting to become the oldest Canadian to summit the world’s tallest mountain. Sean never made it home. His death became a defining moment, and a calling.

Determined to honour his friend’s legacy, Elia returned to Everest to finish what Sean had started. He invested everything, his savings, his reputation, his heart, and still fell short, forced to turn back just 500 feet from the summit by unstable weather. Battered but unwilling to give up, he transformed that failure into fuel and created FindingLife: an initiative that virtually brought more than twenty thousand Canadian students to the top of the world, teaching that true success is not about achievement but alignment.

Inspired by the mission, those students went on to fundraise for a well in Nepal, turning loss into tangible impact, and proving that purpose, once found, multiplies.

Elia teaches that the greatest climb is not up a mountain, but toward our truest self. Through breathtaking visuals and powerful storytelling, he shows audiences that each of us has a mountain to climb, and that the most meaningful ascent begins the moment we stop chasing the summit and start finding meaning in the climb itself.