[Issue# 003] The Sentence That Changed Everything

Hey, it’s Mark.

Last time I told you about the night Zig Ziglar walked off a stage in front of ten thousand people and chose one. That one was me, at nineteen years old.

What I didn’t tell you is what he handed me that day. Not the mentorship. Not the trip to Dallas. A sentence.

You have probably heard it. It is the most quoted thing Zig ever said. And here is the strange part, the part I have never really explained to anyone.

You’ve probably built your life around a sentence too, whether you’ve named it or not. For me, it never became a strategy. It just became me.

I did not write it on a note card. I did not build a business plan around it. Something about hearing it at nineteen, from a man who had just chosen me out of a crowd for no reason at all, put it somewhere deeper than my head. And from that point forward I just started doing it. Instinctively. Without deciding to.

What that sentence actually made me.

Here is what I mean. I started noticing people. Not networking with them, noticing them. I would find myself in a room and instead of working it, I would be looking for the one person who needed someone to see them.

And over time I figured out what my actual gift is. It took me most of my life to name it, but it is this: I can see people beyond what they see in themselves. That is the whole thing. Somebody is sitting there with a ceiling over their head that they built themselves, and I can see straight through it, and sometimes if I say the right thing at the right moment, they can see through it too.

I did that as a nineteen-year-old kid running for national office. I did it as a CEO with my teams. I did it as a father with my kids, over and over, for years. And I do it now with the leaders I work with.

I never once thought of it as a technique. It is just what I am pulled toward, because it gives me more joy than my own accomplishments ever have. That is not modesty, it is just the truth about how I am built. Watching somebody become who they actually are does something to me that closing my own deal never did.

Here is why it matters: According the most recent statistics I could find, the APA summary says social anxiety disorder affects about 1 in 10 teens and adults in the U.S. This number is only going to grow higher and higher. You know it.

What can you do to leave your footprint on lowering this number? What can you do to compete with social media, AI…all of this behind screen stuff to connect?

Source: American Psychiatric Association, “Social Anxiety: More Than Just Shy or Self-Conscious,” August 14, 2024.

The pattern I didn’t know I was running.

Once you see it, you can trace it through everything.

There was a night, back when I was National FFA President, when I walked into a room full of sponsors and donors. Presidents of companies. Dignitaries. Politicians. I did not know who most of them were, and I decided it did not matter. I just decided to be completely present. To look people in the eye. To ask real questions and then actually listen to the answers.

At the end of the night, a man walked up to me, opened my suit jacket, slipped a business card into the inside pocket, and said, “Don’t look at it now. I know you have a job to do. When you’re finished, call me.”

That card said Dr. Gary Costley. President, Kellogg’s USA. He mentored me for years. I will tell you that whole story another time, because it deserves its own letter.

There was another moment, a few years later, when I was handed an introduction to read for the President of the United States and it was so lifeless I could not do it. So I rewrote the whole thing myself and sent it to the White House before anyone could stop me. They loved it. I gave it. And months later I was working there. That one deserves its own letter too.

I am not telling you these to impress you. I am telling you because for a long time I thought those were lucky breaks. They were not. They were the sentence, working. Zig had put something in me at nineteen and I had been running it ever since without knowing what it was called.

Kevin Harrington wasn’t luck. He was a pattern that had begun long before I knew his name.

You probably have a version of Mary in your life too, someone who saw the obvious thing you couldn’t.

The day my daughter quoted Zig back to me.

Years later I hit something I did not expect. I was mentoring everyone. My team. My kids. My family. And one day it hit me that I did not have a mentor of my own. Zig had been it, and Zig was gone.

I sat with that and felt genuinely stuck. Where does a grown man go to find a mentor?

My daughter Mary was 14. We were watching Shark Tank together, which had become our thing, and she looked over and asked me what was wrong. I have always had a strict honesty policy with my kids, so I told her the truth. I said I mentor a lot of people, but I do not have anyone mentoring me, and I do not know where to find that.

She did not hesitate. She said, “Dad, ask Kevin Harrington.”

I laughed at her. Out loud. I explained that Kevin had built more than twenty companies, that he was on television, that he was in demand all over the world, and that a man like that would not have time for someone like me.

And my fourteen-year-old looked at me and said, “But Dad, he goes on TV to help entrepreneurs just like you. Why wouldn’t he help you? Doesn’t Zig Ziglar say you can have anything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want?”

The student was already teaching.

Here is the part most people would leave out.

I told her I would look into it. And I said it knowing full well that I never would. I lied to my daughter, because I was a realist, and realists know that Kevin Harrington does not mentor guys like me.

Months later, the CEO of the Ziglar organization called me about a project. He said he wanted me to work with one of their advisors, someone I might have heard of. I asked who. He said, “Kevin Harrington. He’s on Shark Tank.”

I started laughing out loud on the phone. I had to explain to the man that I was not laughing at him.

I am a religious man. But I will tell you, if I had not been, that moment might have made me one.

And then Mary named my book.

Here is the part I still cannot get over.

Kevin and I started talking regularly, often at my kitchen table, with Mary sitting right beside me listening to every word. She was sixteen by then. During one of those calls she started smacking my arm, whispering that she wanted to talk to him. I told her absolutely not. She put her hands together like she was praying and mouthed the word please.

Kevin heard the commotion and asked if everything was okay. I apologized and said my daughter was sitting here and she was a bit of a fan.

He said, “Put her on the phone.”

Her eyes went wide and she shook her head at me, panicking, whispering, “What am I supposed to say?” I told her she had better figure it out, and I handed her the phone.

She asked him why he left Shark Tank. And Kevin told a sixteen-year-old girl the truth: that a lot of the entrepreneurs who came on the show did not need his money, they needed his help, and the show was not built for that. He said he could do more for people outside the program than inside it. He said his real desire was to be a mentor to millions.

That is where the title of our book came from. A sixteen-year-old asked the question nobody else had thought to ask.

And I sat at my own kitchen table and watched the thing I have believed my whole life happen right in front of me. Zig mentored me. Zig also mentored Kevin. Zig died, and then Zig’s own organization put Kevin in my path. And the person who saw it coming before I did was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been close enough to me, for long enough, to have caught what Zig gave me and hand it back when I needed it.

Who’s been that person for you?

Which brings me to now.

I moved my whole family into a hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a season, just to be near Kevin. Distance was not just inconvenient, it was the deciding factor. This is Proximity in its most literal form, and it built the relationship before anything else did. Social science backs this up: an MIT study found that 41 percent of people named their next-door neighbor as a close friend, compared to 22 percent for someone two doors away, and only 10 percent for someone at the end of the hall. Because I knew by then what I know now: if someone is going to have an impact on you or you impact them - you have to get close enough for it to happen.

Source: Psychology Town, “How Proximity Shapes Relationships: The Role of Propinquity in Interpersonal Attraction,” last updated November 9, 2025.

So here is where I have landed, at this point in my life.

This was never a moment for me. It is a mission. I did not choose it at nineteen, it chose me, and I have spent almost forty years running it without fully understanding what it was. Now I see it clearly. I get more joy out of helping someone become who they were made to be than I have ever gotten from anything I built for myself.

For years I have done that quietly, for a very small number of people, with nobody watching. No title. No invoice. I never named it and I never sold it. Some of them are running companies you would recognize.

And what I want to do with whatever time I have left is more of that. With whoever is in proximity to me.

So here is my one question.

Is there someone in your life who sees you beyond what you see in yourself?

Hit reply and tell me. I am not selling anything today. I am genuinely trying to find out who is out there.

I will have more to say about that next time.

It’s good to be back.

Mark

P.S.I am still on the road, still working my way through the list of people who showed up for me when it counted. Two down. A lot to go. It turns out that when you actually go sit across from someone and say thank you to their face, it does something to both of you that a text message never will. Highly recommend it.