Mark Pattison Finding Your Summit

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, Fluke, Xcelerate event, predictive maintenance, AI diagnostic, reliability, public speaking, Mount Everest, snow blindness, Seven Summits, resilience, faith, John Wooden pyramid, Higher Ground, NFL film.

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Industrial Talk is brought to you by Fluke. We were on site at Flukes Xcelerate event where reliability reimagined came to life from high energy keynotes to hands on predictive maintenance tools to break through AI diagnostic the event delivered

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real world strategies

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teams can use today.

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Xcelerate once again, proved why it is the launch pad for smarter, faster, reliable operations go out to Fluke.com to find out more.

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Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's

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go all right once again. Welcome to industrial talk. Thank you very much for joining the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates you, industry professionals all around the world. You're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate. You're solving problems each and every day. You make the world a

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better place. That's why we celebrate you.

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I'm doing great just coming off the stage. And yeah, I'm all amped up. You should be, because

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it was, it was amperage. It really was, it was a it was a good job.

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Is that a word ampage? It's

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now put it on a bumper sticker. I have no problem doing that. Yeah, yeah. So, how was it? How was it? Did you, did you like that? I mean, did you, did it

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work for you? Yeah, you know what? It's a great question, because I think a lot of people, and I used to be this way back in the day, just the the, you know, the fear of public speaking, of getting up there and resonating and and I, you know, for me, it took me a while to get over that, and the sooner I realized it wasn't about people judging me. It's about me delivering information and and really having a story arc that starts in this case, and you saw it at the top of Mount. Everest, with myself, I was snow blind. I hadn't eaten in three days. I was running low on oxygen. And I'm trying to figure out, like, how am I going to get the hell off this mountain?

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Yeah, I got to tell you. Now you mentioned something, and I have to point it out. You said you got injured. Did you get injured when you were up there? Yeah.

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Well, snow blind is being injured, so essentially, what? What happened when these little ice crystals came? There you go, right? And so this is a climb out of my tent at 26,500, feet. This is in the death zone. That's stupid. It's stupid, stupid high. Well, it is. It's a stupid hype. Maybe I was a stupid Yeah. And so, because it was such this rush, and you saw that picture of our, of our, of our camp, and there's a dead guy laying six feet from me. See that blows my mind? Yeah. I mean, it blew my mind, right? I'm not used to seeing dead people, right? So I'm there, there's a dead guy in my eye is all wiped out. And so immediately, I didn't really realize what it was, too. I thought it was just really irritated. And then it almost when you're snow blind, it looks like you've taken a piece of paper and you've put it up so you can see light. You just can't make out anybody. So it's super irritated. And then the people of the viewer can't really see this. But this nice little, yeah, you know, skin spot that I have is a nice present from Mount Everest. My whole face was like that. My whole face was a big scab on the left side of my face. So I'm dealing with this as I'm going up and haven't eaten, really, in three days. So, you know, with no energy. And you saw those pictures how steep those slopes are. I mean, ridiculous. It was ridiculous.

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Yeah, I don't know how you when you were talking about the temperature right, 90 to below, up at the top there, but at the other base camp, or whatever. The other camp was 30 below, yeah, and then I saw the skin exposed, what? How? I mean, I don't understand, I don't understand, I just don't, and I don't understand how you can consume enough calories to keep you going, because you're not hauling it up there, yeah, you're not, well, I don't get it, yeah.

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And another thing that's really interesting is that, again, I talked about this, is that the higher you get, the your appetite gets suppressed. But the other thing that a lot of people, when you first go over there, I brought like, five pounds of energy bars, yes, pretzels, things you think would taste really tasty when you're you're hungry and. And and you want to fill yourself, but first thing is that you're up so hard high there's like, Snicker bars or power bars, they all turn into little bricks, right? They're frozen. Yeah, you can't chew them. You can't eat them, right? So that's all part of the problem. And then, after you've been especially living at 17,500 feet, which is base camp, just ridiculously high, yeah, and it just, it's really bland food, right? It's not like a burger, right, which I may even have tonight. No, yeah,

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see, I again, it just, it's, it's the logistics, it's the detail associated with trying to figure out how to succeed at getting I mean, there's a lot of pieces and parts. The question I ask you say, here you have this sort of moment in time, and you say, I want to climb these peaks. I want to do the sevens in the seven continents, the highest peaks. I want to do that. Yeah. Who did you tell the WHO to the first person you said, Hey, I'm gonna go do this.

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Who was that person? Well, his name is Hugh millin, and Hugh, and another interesting, sad story with him is that he was he he and I played together in high school. He was my quarterback at the University of Washington Huskies. Yep. He got drafted by the Rams in the fourth round, I believe third or fourth round.

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That's when they were St Louis, right?

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No, were they still la Yeah, they were. I

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stopped falling so, I mean, there's just not that many guys out there that have gone to high school, played in college, and both made it into the NFL, you know, in that kind of sense. But when I was going through this tough time, I'm not divorced, but and remarried, I might add. But at the time when I was going through this tough period, and you know, it's, it's, it's not fun, I came up with this. And so I called him up, and he was working on a radio show up in Seattle. And so we sat down, we're at a little Thai food place, and I go, I know you're not going to really understand this, but this is what I'm doing. And so I, you know, like, I'm 50 years old, yeah? And he was like, you know, I know you're kind of going through this middle like crisis, but maybe if you bought a Corvette or something, or, you know, there's just pain, yeah, there's, there's, like, a better way that you can go through this midlife crisis and take on the Seven Summits and so, I mean, he was always supportive, super cool. He actually write, writes the the Ford in my new book I just put out, yeah, finding your Summit. Yeah. But it was just really interesting to read, recount his story, because I didn't write it. He wrote it, you know, part of this book. So, yeah. So that's what happened. That's a guy I told you.

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That's a guy I told I just can imagine sitting, being a being a fly on the wall, and it's like, what kind of thinking is just something else, man, yeah. So take us through this. Is, this is sort of an interesting because I'm thinking, I'm not going to do it. Just between you and me. Yeah, I'm watching, I'm looking at those stunning pictures from your presentation. And all I said, Yep. Thumbs up. Good for him. It just looked grueling, yeah. And it was, yeah. How did you you're saying, Okay, I want to do this. And so you, you start to train. Did you know how to train? No. So you now, you got to learn how to train, yeah. So you now you're training, yeah. And then all of a sudden, you think, Okay, this I'm training.

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I still didn't, even though I was starting to get into it, I still didn't really know how to train.

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So Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna touch on that. And in a jet second, yeah,

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when did you

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realize you said, Okay, I'm ready. You didn't, you didn't go to, Everest, you didn't go to, I mean, you probably said, Okay, I'm gonna manage this. I'm gonna go to this peak, yeah, tell me about that. Tell you it's like, all of a sudden, yeah, I guess I'm ready.

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Yeah. I think everyone I was ready as I could be in that particular moment, in that particular year, there's when I, when I first got into this, and you're asking this question. It's a great question, like, what's the roadmap? Like, how do you get

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that? I don't know. I don't didn't, I

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didn't know either. Yeah. And so I called up a professional mountain guide service guy that I knew that that got it up at Mount Rainier, and they do expeditions all over the world. And then, so I was, yeah, I was actually in Washington, DC, when I made that call. And and I go, how do you do this? I'm asking the same question. I'm you asking this

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guy, it's just spinning through my head. I've got a what is it

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don't even know if there's a peak in Australia. It's like, I would call

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to be down in Australia. Oh, yeah. So here you are. You're, when did you realize, okay, I'm going down, I'm training, and I realize I'm I have deficiencies here. I'm doing okay here, and I'm

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assessing you've got to be assessing your

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your skills. Now you're saying, Okay, I've got to up my game. Yeah, I'm gonna, I've been down to Australia, and I've done the easy peaks. Now I've got to start up in my game.

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Yeah, did you

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sort of find a trainer to help you? Because you have a photo, you have a picture of you doing whatever on that thing,

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it's what 30 below, or whatever it is. And of course, you got the wind component to it. That's not good. That's bad. Were you? Were you dating Darcy at the time? Yeah, what did Darcy think about all this there?

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She didn't know about all this. Now she does. Now she does, and she shut down any term, any you know, like k2 and things that would be in the next progression.

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So here you are. You pretty much reached your zenith, yeah. I mean, Everest, okay, you got it, yeah. And you've achieved the the Seven Summits. Cool, very cool. Yeah. And now, what? What are you gonna do? How do you? How do you top that? How do you, how do you say, Hey, I'm Mark What? I'm gonna swim the English Channel or

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something like that. I was thinking more like an astronaut, right? There's a lot of space travel going on right now. We could just jump on right Amazon thing and yeah, just take you the next rock. Yeah.

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Just go, go talk to beezo in and get on in there.

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Well, Fluke must have some tie with their, you know, reliable systems.

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You would think, yeah,

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seven Summit.

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Summits, Seven Summits. S Sorry, summit got

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it, yeah? All spelled out, yeah, and essentially, what it is is, it's bringing, tying in the aspirational, which is climbing, which I'll have to do, bringing people in, 150 people, aspiring, you know, leaders that want to be out there to I've got a bunch of superstar people like Muriel Hemingway, this former NFL quarterback, I've got a Top Gun pilot, I've got a singer songwriter who's had 10 top 10 hits. You know, I've got all these people that have said, Yeah, I'd love to be right. So they're going to inspire people and also have that give back part of what we were talking about in there at the beach. You know, where we can, there's a, there's a nonprofit there called Higher Ground, where, when this is going to come in, it's going to benefit and help other people.

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Okay, you need to explain a little bit about higher ground?

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Yeah, higher ground is a organization based out of sommeli, Idaho. They actually have multiple locations throughout the country. And essentially what their, their main focus is really about empowerment and their, their the main focus is with military people and and second responders, or first responders, right? And so so much is about when, when you and they're all good, but the different foundations that are out there about, you know, raising money to solve and cure cancer or something, all very noble, yeah. And this is for those military in particular, people in the first responders that have had accidents where either they have PS, PTSD, they've maybe lost a limb because they stepped on right, something like that, and and their life has dramatically changed. So much about for them is the confidence to be able to go back out into the world. And so by bringing them into place, like Sun Valley, we take them out fly fishing, we have them ski down. And these, you know, these different apparatus type machines or whatever, on the skis, you know, on the mountain, there's river rafting. I mean, I've done a bunch of this

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stuff. Is this new?

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Have, have now, they've been around. They've been around for a while.

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No, no, no, no, no. Not the but the organization, yeah. So they and and, how do they? How do they track success? These are, these are challenging, yeah,

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issues, yeah. I mean, so the first thing is, like, all these things, all these organizations, is they need to raise funds and awareness. Yeah, right. So that's number one. So they live and breathe by the money that comes in the door. Yeah, right, all donations. So they throw a bunch of nonprofit, you know, golf tournaments, and they have, they have a big speaker every year that comes in and you pay, and it's catered, and it's nice and it's very expensive, but that's what they try to do to raise money. And then, in terms of your other question, how do you like equate success for somebody? I think that I don't know the exact answer, but they bring them in, and they give them the opportunity to participate, and then hopefully, you know, they follow up. And there's something on the other side. I don't know the exact answer to that, but I think that's it. But when I was looking for something to to align myself and some of the things I was doing. It just, you know, the higher ground is metaphorical in terms of, you know, the things I've done absolutely and, you know, why can't you include somebody like my daughter, who has epilepsy, in that fight to raise more money for awareness, and a lot of it for her was her confidence was shattered when people are calling her stupid and an idiot and things like that. So, brutal,

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yeah, brutal, okay, shift gears real quick, because I need to understand the premise behind your book, as I show in the video. There it is his book, generally speaking, what are we talking about here? How to build resilience, faith. Talk to us

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doesn't even matter anymore, right? It just, it, just do it. It's just, it's, I lost count long ago. And it really doesn't matter,

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you know, just a lot of it's about taking reps, and I can tell from the way that you've interacted here, yeah. But anyways, you know, I've been able to accomplish a lot of things that a lot of people would think are fairly shiny, but, you know, I think more important is that I've also been in a lot of valleys. So it's, it's, you know, there's a lot of peaks out there, but there's also a lot of valleys. And so the real question is, like, how you climb out of those things, and I talk about with faith and resilience. So you need to have the resilience to hang in there and not flip and quit, right? And keep going. And where we talked about 10 more steps, step more steps, which has really become a mantra for a lot of things I've done, but you have to have the faith. And another thing that we didn't talk about is, you know, faith comes to me in a lot of different flavors, and it does this system work the pyramid of success that we talked about? Am I going to have faith in that system, that if I do this, I'm going to put myself in the best position to win a higher level faith of that was I'm now, let's go back to Everest. I'll make this quick.

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No, take your time. I'm

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right underneath the balcony, which is a 27,500

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hand language, sort of weak, and, you know,

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wow, yeah, he off. He goes, No way. I'm telling you today, I don't think that was real.

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Shut up.

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That is cool. So I don't know if that was an angel. I don't know if that was my imagination, but what it did is it got me back up my feet, and magically, that Sherpa stopped and waited for me to slide down on my ass, 300 300 yards to ultimately meet up with him. And then he gave me another Oh, now I'd ultimately run out O's again that night. That was about three o'clock. I'd run out of Oz again at nine o'clock that night, and they wouldn't replenish me after I paid because I was supposed to climb Lozi, which I needed another exactly, that's right, the next day. So again, you asked the question about faith, yeah, and I split it up, and you need the faith of a system. And then there's the faith of I think I actually had an angel come to my rescue.

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That's cool, pretty cool, right? Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I'm a big faith guy. I really that, and it doesn't surprise me. So you get there, you're scooting down on your tush, and you get to the point where you get your your Sherpa, get some O's, and then you're ready to and does your body respond quickly? It's like, oh gosh, thank you for the O's.

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You wouldn't I? Like, I had no idea. Like, I Yeah, so put me, it was the first time I'd ever experienced oxygen when you need it like that. Yeah. And prior to that, I'd be like, in your seat, like, what's it really do? It's amazing. It's just, it's like, you, you get inflated. No, yeah, like you get inflated. You what a feeling. Yeah, it warms your body, too. No one, yeah, when you have those O's coming in, it warms your body. Your circulation is rolling again. It's just like, it expands you, like a balloon. That's pretty cool.

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Yeah, that's pretty cool. Tell now, now this book, it's coming in at number one,

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and it just, here's the question

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I asked so you showed the John Wooden pyramid? Yeah, it's pretty extensive, yeah, and it's great. It's sort of like you got a bunch of platitudes, real good ones. Don't get me wrong. How did you

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take that pyramid

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and put it into action? Because I see it, I'm going, Yeah, okay, be resilient. What is that? I mean, well, how do you train to be resilient? I don't understand.

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Well, there's a couple things. Is that that pyramid, this is the one thing to I probably should have done a better job explaining. But that was John wooden's original pyramid. And when my head coach, Don James at the University of Washington applied it to us, there is different words that were in there. So the bottom layer, for me, were bigger, faster, strong of those things. But as you got further up, it was like we need to pass for 200 plus yards per game, and we need to score 37 point. Like, more pinpointing down, yes, right, based on what you're doing, yeah. And that's how for me, you know, it was different. But the two things at the very top, like, if you truly believe that actually, let me answer answer a different way. There was a gal that came up to me that works for Fluke afterwards, and she goes, you know, how do you have the faith to go about doing this? And, you know, so on, so forth. Same question, I said, I do it. I don't get caught up in the top of the pyramid. That's the ultimate prize, but it's the daily discipline of being on it and training and doing what you got to do to reach that ultimate goal, and then having the faith that if you do that, just staying in the moment, that that can bring you amazing results. And don't get again. Don't be results oriented, to be process driven,

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yeah, and, and the results will just happen as a result of your discipline and perseverance in those elements on a daily basis. That makes sense.

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there's a risk component to it.

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because of covid, right? Yeah, it's done.

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So you can't, you can't,

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you have to continue. Well, no,

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So here. So, so, of course, I'm thinking about I haul my little Tiki equipment around. Did NFL films saying, Okay, let's go. Let's follow mark.

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Let's go. Let's go to Kathmandu.

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Let's haul this equipment to Kathmandu.

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That's a, that's a really good question. So, so ends up, what happened is, they got all the permits, they're all ready to do that. And then right before it was getting about March and there was an outbreak of covid in India, which was creeping across the board. And, you know, Nepal, if you can appreciate, yeah, it's a third world country, and you've got no barriers to protect anybody. Nobody's on right the mask land as you as you're coming in to Kathmandu, there's a river. I can't remember the name of the river, but there's an incendiary and they're burning human being. You can see the ashes going up right there. Yeah, it was crazy, yeah. But so they so NFL security restricted, and permit would not allow them to send a film crew to Nepal. So they flew back over again in March, early March, and they gave me about 10 GoPros and batteries, and they just put them all over. And one of the things that you actually see in that movie is that I didn't realize it was happening at the time, but when on my first rotation, I was at Everspace camp, I'd gone up to camp two, and now we're coming back down. We're in that Kumba ice fall, yeah, which looks treacherous, yeah, it's ugly. It's ugly, yeah, and I end up falling backwards because I was worn this really heavy pack, and I just, I was going down a ladder, and I got, I end up falling backwards, down, upside down, right, down that ladder, rip my whole back out and went head first. Just backwards into a crevasse 20 feet down, and I walked out of it, and the whole thing is captured on film. Shut up. Yeah, shut up. I'm not going to shut up, because I'm telling you it's true.

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Does anybody say hey, I'm going to go to Everest? Does anybody just say get out without a scrape. Or does everybody, I mean, you've, you've enumerated all of the things that you had to deal with. Does anybody outside of the Sherpas ever go

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get away without any scrapes?

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I think they do. And you know, I would, I'll tell you what I this is. This is my wish list. You know, you asked earlier in the conversation about, is there something that, you know, like, what now? Yeah, what? I would love to go back and climb lotsy, okay, because I think I could do it a lot better. Now it's the fourth highest man in the world, yeah, but I don't want to spend two months to do one day that makes sense.

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Yeah, crystal clear, yeah, I'm not gonna argue with that. I don't,

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you know, we talked about long term surfing. I don't want to go suffer for too much. You know, I like, I'm six three, and, you know, I'm in shape, and I lost 35 pounds the day that we left Kathmandu. We're staying at this hotel called the Yak and Yeti, right? And, yeah, Yak and Yeti and, and so yeah and, and they, the New York Times was doing a storm, right again, redirecting stuff back to million, doing the story. I mean, the first NFL players gonna complete this all this time, and they take a picture of me right out by the pool, and I'm, like, wearing this, this t shirt, and I'm all yacked up, ready to go right and and so when I came off the mountain finally, and that was a whole nother like that could be a movie in itself, I came off the mountain, and now I'm back at the Yak and Yeti And I was texting this guy who I did train with. You know, that's the picture that you saw there. Yeah, and I've been training with this pretty hard. It's called hardcore fitness. So, you know, it was hardcore. And he goes, You gotta take a picture. So I do a selfie and, and I never do like, I'm taking off the shirt photos ever on Instagram. And, yeah, that's up. But I took the picture that before, I took the picture after, with no shirt, and I looked like, you know those, you know, those guys back in World War Two and the Nazi camps, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was awful. It was awful. It just showed what the only there was, like one sentence, this is what a mountain can do to somebody. Wow. You know, my face is all ripped out. It's all these scabs. You know, that's just a little remnant, but the whole thing was a scab. Yeah, you know, couldn't see hairs everywhere, you know.

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Now, everybody should do it. I mean, you'll love

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way out. No way. Okay, so somebody's saying, I want to find your book, go out to Amazon, finding your summit out there. Yep, sure it is. So if somebody wants to connect with you in some way, shape or form, and say, hey, I want to fund your next

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expedition, how would

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they get a hold of you? Mark Pattison, nfl.com NFL.

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You've got an nfl.com you are. I'm just, I'm a mover in the shaker here. NFL, doctor, winner, winner, chicken dinner, cheese. Yeah. His name is Mark, yeah. You need to connect with him. He had a great, I mean, you can tell, yeah, yeah. I'm speechless. That was a great conversation. Mark. I love it. All right. Once again, we're broadcasting from Xcelerate, brought to you by those wonderful people at Fluke. And of course, e mate, check them out, go out to Fluke.com find out more, and also get his book. Finding the summit. It's out there on Amazon, your Summit. It's got your Summit, not his Summit. It's pretty much his summit, but it's your Summit, too. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

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You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

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Yeah, yep, yeah, I was absolutely engaged in that conversation with Mark Pattison, keynote speaker, former NFL player, as well as just he's climbing mountains. He's climbing mountains everywhere and and he's challenging himself. It was a great event at Xcelerate, but it was just absolutely wonderful to hear Mark's story blended with the world of asset management and reliability. It Yeah, it was good. He could tell I was. Hanging on every word, and the reason I was hanging on there, I can't believe that the human spirit can do something like that, that you can push yourself to that level. It always fascinates me. Always feel like when I come out of those conversations like Scott, you're lazy. But now, yeah, Mark Pattison, all the contact information for Mark will be out there. That was that, that was Xcelerate, and that was brought to you by Fluke and E mate and and, and it was an absolutely wonderful user conference, incredible conversations. And, of course, I talk about AI and how, how that's transforming the industry. Fantastic stuff.

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Mark right there. Mark

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right there, go out, reach out to him. He's a must connect. All right. Industrial talk again, is here for you. This platform is dedicated to your success. That means you need to tell your story. You need to engage the next generation of leaders. You just have to do it. That is a business resilience strategy. All the stuff Mark's talking about, yep, thumbs up. You need to do that too. Tell your story. Industrial talk is here for you, and we make it easy. It's painless. Go out to industrial talk, click Connect. Talk to me. That's who you're gonna go to, all right, be bold, like Mark. Be brave, like like Mark. Dare greatly like Mark. And hang out with Mark, and you will change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation coming from Xcelerate, shortly. So stay tuned.