At the age of 25, my ultimate pie-in-the-sky childhood dream came true. Mine wasn’t a walk on the moon or to win an Oscar. No, I wanted to starve for 39 days and poop in the ocean on national television.

I wanted to get on the TV show “Survivor,” and I wanted to win it. This was an entirely unrealistic dream, or so it seemed. I could barely qualify for the B-minus mile time in gym class, and that was with cutting corners. I am short, out of shape, and I don’t even know how to set up a tent, let alone build a shelter and catch my own food. But I loved the show, and I dreamed of playing the world’s greatest game.

I watched my first episode of “Survivor” when I was 9 years old, and from there it became a family tradition on Thursday nights. I made fantasy leagues for my family and played “Survivor” games online. I would come home from middle school and vote out strangers in chat rooms on the internet. I even hosted a game of “Survivor” for my friends on a backpacking trip in the seventh grade. Two of them cried when they got voted out. It was amazing. It became a part of our family so much so that even when I went off to college, my parents knew I would call at least once a week because, well, we had a “Survivor” episode to discuss. And yet, even though “Survivor” was my dream, I didn’t have the confidence to apply for the show until I was 22 years old. I always thought that, with tens of thousands of applicants a year, the chances of a normal guy like me getting on the show were too low to be worth it.

It ended up taking me three years and five audition videos to get on the show, but it took me four years from when I was eligible just to hit record for the first time. That first audition video caught the eye of somebody in casting, who then called me and said they were doing something a little bit differently this time. They were casting for a family season of the show. They wanted to know if any of my family members might want to apply with me. This is how you find out how much your family really loves you. I went home right away and begged my family to audition with me. Somehow, my mom and my brother both agreed.

My mom could not walk down the street without striking up a conversation with a neighbor. She could not go to the grocery store without making a new friend. My parents unwittingly gave me the key to winning “Survivor” by showing me the power of relationships. My dad, a successful businessman, always taught me that your relationships matter more than your pitch. Your pitch might make one sale, but your reputation will make 1,000. Do right by people, and they do right by you. And if you really care about people, you will listen. And, if you listen well, you will understand what they need. No one in the history of “Survivor” has ever won the game without making friends along the way. If they don’t like you, they will have a much harder time trusting you, and you won’t be able to win their votes in the end.

My mom and I nearly got on “Survivor” that year together. At the time, at 58 years old, she would have been the third oldest woman in the history of the show. She passed every physical health check needed to go on this incredibly grilling adventure. She worked out every day, ate healthy and never smoked. So, you can imagine our incredible shock when just a couple of years later, my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I have to admit that I had a lot of misconceptions about lung cancer. I didn’t think someone as healthy as my mom could get it. But the truth is, lung cancer kills more men and women than the next top three cancer killers combined. And yet it gets a small fraction of the research funding as compared to other cancers. It is a brutal disease, but my mom faced it like she did everything else in her life: with a smile on her face.

So, when the call finally came for me to go on “Survivor,” there was no doubt in her mind what I should do. She wanted me to go. So, I went and played “Survivor” during the scariest time of any of our lives. But in many ways, that was the point. Coming face-to-face with mortality shows us why it is so important to live as big and as boldly as we possibly can. I needed to go because we needed something to look forward to, some hope on the horizon that we could point to and say, “This is why we fight. This is why we live, for incredible moments just like this one, where one of us goes on our favorite show.” It doesn’t get better than that.

I was not always on the right side of the numbers in the game, but I was laser-focused on finding my path to day 39. I did that by remembering what my parents taught me my entire life: Make friends. Focus on relationships and your reputation as good, decent and trustworthy. If you have ever watched competitive reality TV, you have probably heard somebody say, “I’m not here to make friends.” On “Survivor,” in sales, in life, that is fine; but you are going to lose. Every single day out there, I could feel my mom pushing me forward and pushing me to make deeper, more real connections and relationships.

At times in life, it can be hard to remember that we are not alone in facing our fears or experiencing setbacks or just being sad. Even on “Survivor,” when I was going through the hardest time of my life while playing one of the world’s most cutthroat games, thousands of miles from home, I was not alone. Another contestant, Jay, had a sick mom at home too. And he was out there to make her proud and to make her life better, just like I was. After 35 days of keeping the truth about what was going on at home with my mom from my tribe, I opened up to Jay, despite the fact that we were rivals in the game and attempting to vote each other out. I knew that he could use that information against me, but I trusted that he would not because I knew that he got it. And the love that we both had for our mothers went beyond the game. We cried together on a hammock that day, and even after I voted him out the next night, we remained brothers. He voted for me to win the game, and he was one of the first people I called after my mom passed away.

We do not have to face life’s greatest challenges alone. One of the most common traits of resilient people is that they surround themselves with a strong support system. The study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that a mountain seems less steep when you are climbing it with a close friend. There are people in your life who will lift you up when you fall, who will make you strong when you feel weak, but it is up to you to find that tribe. If your friends or your colleagues don’t make you feel that way, well, maybe it is time to find some new ones, or make sure you are making your friends feel as valuable and supported as you would want to feel. After all, if you are not there like that for anybody else, how can you expect them to be there for you?

Ultimately, I made it to the end of the game by finding my tribe within the tribe and building very strong bonds. I won “Survivor” in a unanimous jury vote. It was the ultimate childhood dream come true. I wanted nothing more than to share that win with my family, especially with my mom. I wanted to hand that million-dollar check to her in the audience at the live finale seven months later. But that is where the real challenges began. I raced home as quickly as I could after filming in Fiji wrapped and went straight to my mom. Just two days before, as I was making my case to the jury at the final tribal council, my mom was still walking around the block. She was still living as bold and as bright as ever. When I got home, I spent an hour talking to my mom. She was fully awake, fully with me, and my whole family was there. She couldn’t believe it was really me at first. I was 20 pounds lighter with a full beard, and I was a few shades darker. I told her that I loved her over and over again. And as her breath began to pick up speed, and I realized what was happening, I told her that I won “Survivor.” Seconds later, my mom passed away.

My absolute biggest dream came true, followed by my absolute worst nightmare. It was, and still is in many ways, surreal. My mom had not just waited for me to come home. She had thrived every single day that I was away. I know that because I watched 11 videos that she filmed for me as each corresponding episode aired. And she was as full of joy and life and laughter as I had ever seen her. This is a voicemail she left for me just a few days before I came home, a few days before she passed away:

Susie Klein: Can’t wait for you to come home. I’m shaking with excitement and joy and passion and energy to have you back in my life. So, I just wanted to get this first message right away on your phone. I love you so much. It’s a good day. It’s been great. Things are going well. Things are looking up. It’s all looking up. Hoping you’re coming home in good spirits. I love you so, Adam.

Things are looking up. They always were for my mom. It is how she chose to view the world. I did not know at the time, but my mom had stopped treatment while I was away because the cancer was not responding to it. It was the same as every other treatment that we tried. My dad considered pulling me from the game as I had asked him to do if anything went wrong. But when he ran the idea by my mom, she wouldn’t have it. She never saw herself as sick, and pulling me didn’t line up with her optimistic worldview. My dad spoke to production, and they decided together that as long as I was still in the game, I would stay, but they had a helicopter waiting for me at every tribal council in case I was voted out, so I could return home immediately.

Because of this, my mom knew that every day I didn’t come home was another day that I was still chasing that shared family dream. In that way, and with my brother bringing back stories from the loved one’s visit, while she didn’t get to watch the episodes as I originally imagined, she got to live the “Survivor” dream right alongside me. I set out to bring her joy, and I did that. My mom was my best friend, and knowing that she was happy does not make the grief of losing her any easier. It is the hardest thing any of us ever experienced. Yet we had a choice to make: We could let that grief destroy us, or we could try to turn our sorrow into something positive. So, we went to work to launch a campaign: the Live Like Susie campaign to raise money for woefully underfunded lung cancer research and inspire people to live life as fully as my mom always did.

Within a year, we had raised over $500,000 for the cause and extended my mom’s impact on the world.

Adam Klein’s life experiences and youthful perspective continue to inform vibrant messages of resiliency, pursuing one's passions, living fully and challenging conventional notions of success. He has achieved his childhood dream of winning the Emmy Award-winning show Survivor, turned pain into power by becoming a leading advocate for battling lung cancer, and managed a network of homeless shelters after graduating from Stanford.