Athlete, mountaineer and author Mark Pattison shares lessons on setting and achieving audacious goals
Mark Pattison has stood at the precipice and walked away. Or rather, he walked down.
Following a time in his life where he was struggling, the former NFL wide receiver found purpose and focus by setting himself the goal of climbing the “seven summits,” the seven highest peaks on each continent.
He accomplished the feat in 2021 by summiting Mount Everest in Nepal. He’d intended to double down on this achievement by continuing on to climb Mount Lhotse, the world’s fourth highest peak, which shares an approach with Everest, on the same trip. Only a handful of people have done the consecutive Everest-Lhotse climb.
But things didn’t go as planned.
“I was literally the last guy off the mountain,” he said describing the descent after summiting Everest.
His guide was 300 feet ahead of him and Pattison was staring straight across at Lhotse. He had “10 toes on the edge,” he said. He wasn’t even sure he could make it to Camp IV, the first camp after the summit.
The ascent had been brutal. His climbing group hit a cyclone at Camp III, he was snow blind—a painful condition described as being like having a sunburned eye—and he’d lost 35 pounds. Although he’d trained for two years to summit Everest—he added the goal of summiting Lhotse after the COVID-19 pandemic grounded him for a year and he needed extra motivation to keep training—he was in rough shape. But over the course of a decade working to achieve his singular goal, he had learned that sometimes it’s best to reset.
His successes, the “pretty shiny” things, draw people in, he said, “but the bumps bond us together.”
Now a leadership and consulting coach, Pattison has codified the system he learned from coaches and guides to navigate “bumps”—he’s renamed it the summit system—which he’ll talk about at a free event at The Community Library today, Wednesday, at 5:30 p.m. Registration is recommended to attend in-person—visit thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/16430622—or join online for the livestream.
Original media distribution published through ACCESS Newswire and syndicated on MTExpress.