My name is Olin Patterson. I am 27 years old and live in Long Beach, California.
I am huge fan of yours and for the last few years have utilized some of your techniques to automate much of my income. This allows me to focus on my passion of running a charity I co-founded called ISLA, which stands for the International Surf Lifesaving Association.
There are three things I am going to learn this year:
1.) Learn and master Spanish. Ive studied and lived in Argentina, done countless trips to Latin America for my charity ISLA, but have struggled with fully mastering it. This year I am going to make it happen!
2.) I am an avid hiker and have done hikes and mountains all over the world.. I recently discovered Rock Climbing and Im obsessed! I want to learn and train to climb the Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, California. The climb is considered the world class holy grail of Rock Climbing.
3.) I want to learn product development. Im attempting my first shot at this now, and am having four engineering courses at a local university design and fabricate my first idea. Next year I plan to present to over 300 potential buyers around the world and just spend the year learning everything there is to know about logistics, sales, manufacturing.. etc.
The brick and mortar sealed the small one bedroom house from the hostile weather
old mason and medicine jars
The abandoned mine
Its been forever since I have blogged, but I have stayed busy doing as much adventuring as possible.
A few weeks ago a good friend of mine and myself ventured out into the great Southwest Desert to hunt down this turn of the century abandoned mine and small one bedroom abode. We left early in the morning after sleeping on the side of the interstate and basically bouldered our way to a coordinate point I had in my GPS. After several hours and lots of cactus pricks, we came upon this amazing piece of history. A perfectly perserved home built into a partial cave with brick and mortar pieced to protect the shelter from the elements. The inside still had firewood prepped for the space heater that rest near the bed and mason jars on the shelves. About a quarter mile from the home we came across the incredibly eerie mine. I can’t imagine a life of solitude of living in such a place, let alone with working in the confines and danger of a desert mine.
We enjoyed a nice lunch in the solitude and headed back down to the interstate by sunset. It was an incredible hike!
In a few short years, the International Surf Lifesaving Association went from a small idea we spent a summer working on in the confines of my sailboat, to a dynamic organization that has ongoing relationships across the United States and in five countries around the world. We hope to continue to grow and be a dynamic force in providing medical supplies and a world class volunteer force of lifeguards to areas of the world in need.
In the past couple months our teams have been in Ecuador and Nicaragua and have returned from enormously successful trips. As the busy season for lifeguarding comes to Southern California, ISLA will be focusing it’s resources on providing community service to those in need in our own community.
This month is Pay it Forward month and in an effort to be able to continue to supply resources to programs within our own community, ISLA has put together a short video in hopes of winning $7000 dollars by ABC’s Pay it Forward Contest to continue their efforts of serving Southern California.
I had my eye on Visualade for the past couple years and always have been in love with the work they do and the incredible designs they continuously produce. It had always been a dream to work at a firm like visualade and something I had in the back of my mind for many months.
After a few great referrals from a dear friend of mine, a couple months of getting together with some of the people at the firm, and finally being able to meet the entire team through some interviews – I got a letter one day offering me a position… I was ecstatic, thrilled and very nervous about the opening, but accepted the opportunity as a dream come true.
I’m three weeks into my tenure at visualade, and so far its going great. I am constantly blown away at their grasp of web and the interactive technology that’s hidden behind their award-winning design. I am constantly on my feet learning so many new things, and the best part is that it is only a ten minute walk down beautiful Broadway Avenue in downtown Long Beach to get to work.
I look forward to many great things at the company and towards the relationships I am building with this amazing group of people. I see some big opportunities in the very near future… Now I just hope they like me enough to keep me!
Check out visualade and be ready for great things ahead.
A nice walk to work.
Oh Yeah, and stay in the loop by joining Visualade on Facebook and Twitter… or by following them on LinkedIn.
Tim Cully on the Mt. Baldy summit.
Above the tree line – felt like the moon.
Devil’s Backbone.
A quick video I took to show the view from the Summit.
I decided to make an attempt to hike the 10,064 ft summit of Mt. Baldy (formally known as Mount San Antonio) at about 9 pm the previous evening. I made a phone call to my good friend Tim Cully to send out an invite and by 11 pm, I had a confirmed party of 2, my bag packed and a 5am wake up call all set for the Mt Baldy ascension.
It rained on the way to the trail head the following morning. Fortunately, at an elevation of about 5000 feet on the mountain road, we burst through the clouds into a gorgeous Spring day. It was as though this perfect day was awaiting us all along and my worries and anticipations lost themselves in that bed of clouds behind us. I knew nothing would deter us in our quest for the summit.
We started our hike from the Monker Flats campground. There, we took an old road up to the lodge of a now seasonally deserted Mt. Baldy Ski Resort before finally reaching the trail at Devil’s Backbone. By this point we were about 8500 feet high and the remaining Spring snow was becoming more and more of a concern as we hiked along ridge lines – one slip would surely be fatal. At one point the ice build up was too much of a risk and we had to find our own way along the backbone to avoid the northern facing ice that perched mercilessly over 1000 foot canyons.
By early afternoon, and a huge ice detour later, we were scrambling up the moon-scape dome of Mt Baldy and making our final steps to the 10,064 foot summit. From on top of the Mountain you can see the entire range of the San Gabriels, San Jacinto (elevation 10,834 ft) and San Gregonio (elevation 11,505 ft) – which both along with Mt Baldy make up the three highest peaks in Southern California.
We made a make shift day camp in one of the several man made rock barricades that exist on the summit to protect ourselves from the relentless wind and enjoyed a lunch of cheese, crackers and beef jerky… before heading back down the mountain.
In all, the 13 mile hike took us about 7 hours to complete with an elevation gain of 4300 ft to a summit of 10,064. It was an incredible experience and one I would recommend to anyone who has some time to enjoy this grand structure so close to home. While up on the summit, Tim and myself decided to make an attempt to climb Mount San Jacinto and Mount San Gregonio in the coming months as well.
This is an excerpt I took from Timothy Ferris’s book The Four Hour Work Week. I love this book and have consulted it often. I am sharing this page verbatim, but think it is an awesome opinion to service, and encourage anyone to check out the book:
Service for the Right Reasons: To save the whales, or kill them and feed the children?
“One would expect me to mention service in this chapter, and here it is. Like all before it, the twist is a bit different.
Service to me is simple: doing something that improves life besides your own. This is not the same as philanthropy. Philanthropy is the altruistic concern for the well-being of mankind – human life. Human life has long been focused on the exclusion of the environment and the rest of the food chain, hence our current race to imminent extinction. Serves us right. The world does not exist solely for the betterment and multiplication of mankind.
Before I start chaining myself to trees and saving the dart frogs, though, I shall take my own advice: Do not become a cause snob. How can you help starving children in Africa when there are starving children in Los Angeles? How can you save whales when homeless people are freezing to death? How does doing volunteer research on coral destruction help those people who need help now?
Everything out there needs help, so don’t get baited into ‘my cause can beat up your cause’ arguments with no right answer. There are no qualitative or quantitative comparisons that make sense. The truth is this: Those thousands of lives you save could contribute to a famine that kills millions, or that one bush in Bolivia you protect could hold the cure for cancer. The down-stream effects are unknown. Do your best and hope for the best. If you are improving the world – however you define that – consider your job well done.
Service isn’t limited to saving lives or the environment either. It can also improve your life. If you are a musician and put a smile on the faces of others, view that as service. If you are a mentor and change the life of one child for the better, the world has been improved. Improving the quality of life in the world is no fashion inferior to adding more lives.
Service is an attitude. Find the cause or vehicle that interests you most and make not apologies.”
