[ Issue #002 ] Ten Thousand People. He Chose One.

Hey, it's Mark.

When I sent that first letter, I wasn't sure who'd write back. I'd been gone a long time. And then my inbox filled up with the most human stuff I've read in years. I'll tell you more about that another time. It deserves its own letter.

But it got me thinking about a night a long time ago that shaped everything about how I see people. I've never really told this story in an email before.

I was a young man, and I had just given the biggest speech of my life. Over ten thousand people in the room. I walked off stage, and a man I'd never met, but knew exactly who he was, walked up, put his arm around me, and said:

"Son, I'd like to spend time with you. I want to mentor you. I want to invest in you."

Then he walked out and gave what is still the best speech I have ever heard in my life. His name was Zig Ziglar.

Now, I wasn't hard to find that day. I'd just been elected National FFA President, so I was up on that program for a reason. But that's exactly what got me. He didn't have to seek me out. A man who had just held ten thousand people in the palm of his hand could have walked straight to his car. Instead he chose to stop, and put his arm around one young man, and invest in him.

He flew me to Dallas. He poured into me. And it changed the entire direction of my life.

What never left me was this: it wasn't that he found me. It's that, out of ten thousand, he chose to.

He'd just held ten thousand people. Then he chose one.

That's the whole philosophy Zig lived by, and he said it plainer than I ever could:

"You can have everything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want."

Everybody quotes that line BUT almost nobody actually does it.

Because doing it doesn't scale, and everything we're taught to want is SCALE.

Here's what nobody tells you about that quote. It's not a strategy for reaching more people. It's permission to stop trying to. Zig didn't grow his impact by finding a way to mentor ten thousand of us. He grew it by being fully present for one, over and over, one at a time, for the rest of his life.

That's not how anyone teaches success anymore.

Today the entire game is reach: bigger stage, bigger list, bigger following. We've been trained to believe the one is a waste of time you take away from the ten thousand. Zig proved the opposite. The one is the whole business model. Everything else is just the room it happens to occur in.

That gift rewired something in me. I've had the chance to speak to over a million people, all over the world, and I love the stage. But the truth is, the whole time I'm up there, I'm really only looking for one thing : That one person. The one Zig found in the crowd. And it always shows up, sometimes backstage, sometimes in an email weeks later, if you're actually looking for it.

Not long after that lesson took hold, it showed up again, on the other side of the world.

"The Question That Stopped Me Cold"

A few years ago I was the main speaker for three days in Hungary. Five hundred first time entrepreneurs, there to learn how to build a business.

On the last day, they surprised me and brought my kids up on stage. And one of my kids said something I'll never forget: "I used to hate that my dad was an entrepreneur. But now that I see he made our family his most valuable business, I don't want him to do anything else in the world."

When it was over, a man came up to me with tears running down his face.

He said, "I'm a first time entrepreneur. I'm terrified I'm going to be gone all the time, working so hard that my kids end up resenting me for it. What would I have to do for one of my kids to someday say what yours just said?"

And I dropped everything. I took him off to the side, and we spent an hour, not on work life balance, but on work life integration. On how to pull your family into your business instead of choosing between them. On how to get into proximity with the people who matter most while you build.

He did what we talked about. And years later, I can tell you: he and his kids are thriving, and he has a relationship with them most entrepreneurs only dream about.

Here's the strange part. I could not tell you a single other thing I said on that stage in Hungary. I can't tell you what was in my slides. But I can tell you every detail of that one conversation off to the side.

Because Zig taught me the thing I most want to give you today: you don't have to reach the ten thousand. If you go all in on the one, really in, close, no agenda, you've made the difference you were put here to make.

You don't have to reach the ten thousand.

Go all in on the one.

So, one small question.

Who is the one person in your life right now who needs you to come find them in the crowd? Not the ten thousand. The one.

Send me an email and tell me who came to mind. I read every single one.

It's good to be back.

Mark

P.S. As you read this, I'm on a plane, headed 2,500 miles to meet up with a friend, a man who stood by me during some of the hardest days I mentioned in that first letter.

From there, I'm going to another country, to wish a friend a happy birthday in person, someone else who was there when it counted.

I've decided to spend this next year traveling as far as I have to, to get inside the six foot circle of the people who showed up for me when I needed them most. And to say thank you to their faces.

Turns out that's the whole point of everything I've been writing to you about.

Time to live it.