#251 You Are One Action Away From The Whole Thing Changing. He Proved It Twice | Mark Pattison, NFL Veteran & Seven Summit Mountaineer

Mark Pattison was drafted by the Raiders in the seventh round, played five years in the NFL, and will not use the word retired. His words for what happened are that he got kicked out and not let back in. What came next is the part of his story he has told least. For two years he had no purpose and no skill he could name other than catching a football. He was in the University of Washington Hall of Fame. He had been in a locker room with Howie Long, Marcus Allen and Jim Plunkett. When it ended he expected his phone to ring off the hook, and not one person called. He took a job waiting tables at the Chart House, where his old teammates came in to eat, and he lasted six months before he decided he hated it enough to do something else. That decision became the sentence he now builds everything on. Action creates reaction. It carried him into a marketing company, then into twelve years at Sports Illustrated, where the business he built went from number 17 in its category to number 1, and then up the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each continent, which he is the only NFL player ever to complete. In this conversation with Bart Berkey, Mark talks about the freshman year that ended his belief that talent was enough, when he was 181 pounds and could not bench his own weight. He talks about the valleys behind the shiny things, including the one made of a divorce and his father's death. He explains the discipline that got him up Everest and the Matterhorn, which is not looking at the mountain at all, only at the next ten steps. Then Bart asks him what he is most proud of that is not shiny, and Mark answers in one line about his two daughters, and it reframes everything he said before it. In this episode: Stepping into the fear, and his own answer to the question this show is named for Why he says retired is the wrong word 181 pounds, and the freshman year that woke him up Two years without purpose, and the phone that never rang Waiting tables at the Chart House while his old teammates came in Action creates reaction, the sentence he built a second career on Sports Illustrated, from number 17 to number 1 Ten more steps, and why he never looks at the summit The one accomplishment he does not consider shiny The one thing he does that Most People Don't ABOUT MARK PATTISON NFL veteran, and the only NFL player to climb the Seven Summits. Winner of a 2022 Sports Emmy for Best Short Documentary for Searching for the Summit. Author of Finding Your Summit: How to Build Resilience and Faith to Conquer Life's Peaks, and host of the Finding Your Summit podcast. Website: https://markpattisonnfl.com Most People Don't... But YOU Do! is hosted by Bart Berkey, who spent 16 years as a global executive with The Ritz-Carlton and now builds HUMANALITY™, a system for making people feel cared for, valued, seen and heard rather than processed. Listen, subscribe and share: https://www.bartaberkey.com/podcast