Customers shouldn't just think of your business as a place to buy a product or use a service - it should be a fun place to be.

First and foremost, any business proposal I like must sound fun.

We had an electrical fault about 500 miles into the trip and lost more than half our fuel. We had a fire on the roof. And missed Los Angeles by 3,500 miles at the end of the trip and ending up in the arctic in a snowstorm.

I have always lived my life by thriving on opportunity and adventure. Some of the best ideas come out of the blue, and you have to keep an open mind to see their virtue.

I have always looked on my businesses not just as money-making machines, but as adventures that can, I hope, make people better off.

I think the most important thing is that in the last seven days we've just had the greatest adventure of our lifetimes.

Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn't you have fun at work?

We went all the way down the Himalayan chain for a day and a half. That was magnificent, except the Chinese told us they were going to shoot us down if we came out the far end. So I spent a lot of my time contacting former Prime Minister Tony Blair begging him to tell the Chinese we were coming in this direction by mistake and could he please say we have no nasty motives for flying into their territory.

I've used the Phoenix Centrifuge to replicate what the body's going to go through on the flight up. I've also done some gravity tests with ZERO-G [a charter-flight service in Arlington, Va., that uses modified Boeing 727s to simulate weightlessness], which went great.