[ Issue #001 ] Why I Stepped Away... And Why I’m Back

It’s been a long time since you’ve heard from me.

Before I get into anything else, I owe you the real reason why.

A few years ago I was at the highest point I’d ever been. I was the face of the Zig Ziglar Family. I’d just run a challenge that fifty thousand people signed up for.

And I’d just written a book with Kevin Harrington, the original shark from Shark Tank and my mentor, called Mentor to Millions. It hit the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller lists and topped every category on Amazon we’d dared hope for.

I was sitting in the exact spot a lot of people spend their whole lives trying to reach ... perfectly set up to launch everything even bigger. And I was good at it.

But then, about three months later, everything changed.

Something happened within my family. Something I never saw coming and would never wish on anyone. I’m not going to share what it was ... out of love for my family, I can’t, and I won’t.

But it brought me to my knees. The kind of to-my-knees where life goes to a blur and nothing else even registers.

And it made something painfully clear, fast: none of it meant anything.

Not the bestseller lists.

Not the awards.

Not the platform.

Here I was, the guy on stage telling everybody that family comes first, while behind the scenes my own family was walking through the hardest thing we’d ever faced.

THAT’S NOT SUCCESS. I don’t care what the lists say. If your family isn’t safe and whole, you are not winning.

So I did something a lot of people wouldn’t understand.

I stepped away. I had to.

My family comes first, always.

Not retired ... I had plenty left in me.

I just walked away from everything that looked like success but didn’t feel like it anymore. I stopped posting, stopped the podcasts, stopped these emails, pulled back from the whole public-facing world ... at the exact moment everybody says you’re supposed to hit the gas. Because how could I focus on building something out there when the people I loved most needed me right here? I went home.

I had no idea what we were up against, or how long it would take, or whether we’d come out the other side okay.

I just knew that being present with the people who needed me was the only thing that mattered.

For several years that’s all I did. I gave my family the first and best of me instead of whatever was left at the end of the day. For years I’d told audiences that family is the most important thing they’ll ever build.

This was me finally living it instead of just saying it.

I won’t turn this into a proud-dad speech, and I’m not asking for a pat on the back ... but I have to tell you a little, because it’s the whole reason I’m back. My family came through it.

Not perfectly, and not with everything tied up in a bow ... life doesn’t really work that way. But my kids came through it, and we’re still doing the work. The kids, for their part, have gone and built real lives. One is running a real estate business with multiple properties and isn’t even 30. One has a stack of degrees and is now Head of Growth at a company after being its COO. The youngest is in med school. Those are their wins, not mine ... but I got to be there for them, and that’s the part I wouldn’t trade.

And I got to be close for it, because I dove in with my undivided attention, and we grew through what we were going through.

I don’t regret it.

Walking away was the most important thing I’ve ever done ... even though it cost me things I never expected it to cost. It didn’t look like success from the outside, and some of it still doesn’t. But it let me get clear on what actually matters. I traded a few years of the world knowing my name for being fully present with the people who needed me most.

I’d make that same choice again.

And I’m not writing you from some finish line where everything’s perfect now. I’m writing as someone still in it, still doing the work ... just no longer willing to do it quietly.

So now you’re probably wondering: okay Mark, why are you back in my inbox?

THE REAL AND RAW ANSWER

because my kids and my team made me.

Somewhere along the way, the shadows became my new normal. I kept helping people, but quietly, privately ... one handful at a time, with nobody watching ... and I told myself that was enough. And it was good work.

But the people closest to me ... my kids, my team, a few close friends ... kept telling me it wasn’t the whole story. They’d watched what I was made for, and they wouldn’t let me hide it.

Finally they sat me down. And they basically said:

“It’s over. We’re all okay ... better than okay. We are who we are because of you. But you’ve still got a lot left to give, and you’re sitting on all of it, using it for a tiny handful of people, while there are a lot of people out there who need exactly what you have. We don’t need your wisdom to make it anymore. We’re good. But it doesn’t feel right watching you keep it to yourself. Go use it for other people. That’ll make us happy, and we know it’ll make you happy too. Get back in the ring, Dad. It’s your time.”

My own kids called me back out into the world. Not to chase the spotlight ... I’ve never really wanted my name in lights ... but to do the one thing that gives me more joy than anything I’ve ever done for myself: help a small number of people become exactly who they’re meant to be.

And here’s the strange part. When I walked away from chasing impressions and put everything into impact, into the people who actually mattered, I started seeing something I couldn’t see before.

Probably because I’d been too busy trying to be the guy I thought I was supposed to be. What I started seeing wasn’t small. It’s three forces, all hitting at once, and I’m watching them reshape the people and the businesses around me ... in a lot of cases before they’ve even put words to it.

And I’ve got a strong suspicion that what I’m seeing up close is showing up in a much bigger way out in the world. So let me walk you through these three forces ... and as I do, I want to invite you to notice where they might be showing up in your own life. Let’s dive in.

1) The Me-to-We Pendulum Is Swinging Back ... and people don’t know how to make the turn.

People are swinging back from “me” to “we,” and they don’t know how. What do I mean by that exactly?

Let me explain.

A few years ago I got to spend several hours with a man named Roy Williams, the author of a book called Pendulum.

He broke down something that has stuck with me ever since.

The idea is this: about every 40 years, society swings between two extremes. For a few decades we get more and more focused on “me” ... on the individual. Then the pendulum swings back the other way, toward “we” ... toward the group, the community, the team.

A full swing and back takes about 80 years. And the turns, when they come, are rough. Right now we are living through one of those turns, swinging out of the most “me” era in modern history back toward “we.” And people are struggling to figure out what to do with it.

And I feel it everywhere I go. In every room I walk into there’s this hunger for real connection, real community, the kind that seemed to vanish overnight about six years ago.

People are starving for it. They just have no idea how to get it back.

And this isn’t just a feeling I have. It turns out you can measure it now.

Back in 2003, the average American spent about an hour a day, face to face, with friends. By 2020 that was down to about 20 minutes.

We cut two-thirds of our in-person time with friends out of our lives in one generation. We’re now alone close to seven hours a day, and home almost nine.

We didn’t just drift apart. We tore down the places where closeness used to happen. The front porch. The diner. The bowling league. The church basement. Even the bar ... four out of ten people now order alcohol delivered for a night in instead.

We swapped the room full of people for a screen and a delivery app, and then we wonder why we feel so alone.

It got bad enough that in 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, put out an 81-page report calling loneliness a national epidemic, and said it does about as much damage to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

When the government writes 81 pages about people not being close enough to each other, it’s real.

Here’s the trap, though.

It’s almost like we’ve forgotten how to be together in person. We’re used to ordering off the internet, used to food at the doorstep, used to all this time alone. And being alone has become the easy option ... the convenient option ... the default.

BUT at the end of the day it leaves us empty. So we’re caught in this tension: we want to be more together, and yet the sheer convenience of being alone keeps pulling us apart. Which brings me to the second force.

2) The Impression-to-Impact Shift ... we’ve been chasing the wrong one.

For more than ten years now the world has rewarded one thing above everything else. Impressions. Followers. Likes. Reach. The keynote. The numbers on the dashboard.

Here’s how far it goes. Ask kids today what they want to be when they grow up, and they’re about three times more likely to say “influencer” than “astronaut.” A generation ago kids wanted to explore the universe. Now they want to be watched.

And don’t write that off as just kids. 57% of Gen Z and 41% of all adults say they’d take the influencer job if they could. One study found 60% of people between 45 and 60 (people who should know better) would quit their job tomorrow to be a full-time content creator.

But here’s the part that should stop you cold.

About half of all those creators make $15,000 a year or less.

The single most wanted job in the country, the one that looks like success, pays most of the people doing it almost nothing. I can’t think of a cleaner example of chasing the impression of something instead of chasing the real thing.

People are trying to look impressive instead of actually making an impact.

And quietly, the most successful people I know are asking a completely different set of questions, ones that no number on a dashboard can answer:

Am I actually making a difference to the people who matter most to me? Will anybody remember me in 20 years for anything that actually mattered? Am I making a real impact on the world?

Impact is what we’re starving for.

Impressions are what we got sold. And the gap between those two is where a very specific kind of pain lives.

I know exactly how wide that gap is, because I lived that pain. I had every impression a person could want ... bestseller lists, media, a platform ... and in a single afternoon I found out that none of it could touch the one thing that mattered most to me. So I climbed out of that gap and I went home. Literally.

3) The Transparency Tax ... it’s gotten even lonelier at the top than it already was.

Everybody’s lonelier than they used to be. But if you’re a leader ... a founder, a CEO at the top of your game ... it’s gotten even worse. For two reasons.

First, once you become the most successful person in your friend group, the people you’d normally lean on start leaning on you instead. You become everyone else’s answer, and you’re left with nobody to ask for help.

Second, there’s a tax that tends to hit leaders hardest. I call it the Transparency Tax. Here’s what it means.

When you’re a leader, you can’t just come out and say “I don’t know how to solve this.” You can’t say it to your board ... they appointed you to run the thing. You can’t say it to your team ... they’re looking to you to be the one who knows. And you can’t say it publicly, because it can change how people see your company, and if you’re public it can move markets.

So you’re forced to fake having it all together ... even when your world is quietly falling apart. It’s the real version of “fake it till you make it,” and it is exhausting.

Let me give you a number from my own life that makes this real.

As part of the work I do, I sit on a handful of corporate boards. Before COVID, those boards met in person, every single quarter. Do the math on just four of them. Four boards, eight people each, four times a year. That’s 128 in-person connections over a 12-month period ... 128 times I was in a room, face to face, with serious people who actually understood the weight I was carrying.

Then COVID hit, and each of those boards changed the bylaws so we didn’t have to meet in person anymore. And once we made that change, we never went back. Not even once. Today those same boards meet entirely on video, and plenty of companies like it that way because it’s cheaper. No flights. No hotels. No dinners that actually get people together, breaking bread, face to face.

So take a look at that number.

128 connections a year, in a room ... now down to zero. And that’s happening in boardrooms across America and across the world. The boardroom used to be one of the last places people at the top got their tank filled back up by being around people like them. Today that gas station is closed. In my own life, I’ve gone from eight boards down to four, partly because the video version feels so empty there’s nothing in it that fills my tank.

Now take my one little story and multiply it by millions of leaders around the world. That’s why the people who look like they have it all, the ones who feel like they have to have it all together, have never felt more alone. Because they are more alone.

I’ve got a client (I’ll keep him anonymous) who by every outside measure is successful beyond anyone’s definition of success. He’s at the top of his world in every category. He has everything. And he is, hands down, the loneliest person in my life right now. Not because nobody’s around him. Because he can’t tell a single one of them where he’s really struggling, since his whole position depends on looking like he’s got it all figured out.

And here’s where it all comes together. Look at these three forces at the same time. We’re aching to move from “me” to “we,” but we don’t have the circumstances to make the move. We’ve been sold the chase for impressions, when what we really want is impact. And it’s never been lonelier to be a leader at the top.

Now look at the solution being handed to us for all three ... and notice that it arguably makes the problem worse. When a leader hits a wall today, where does he go? More and more, the answer we’re being sold is: go to a chatbot. Go to ChatGPT. Go to Claude.

ChatGPT has something like 800 million people a week using it now, and one of the most common things they use it for is therapy and companionship. Companion apps are up 700% in just the last three years.

We’re handing the most human thing there is ... the need to actually be known by someone ... over to software. Because at least the software won’t judge us.

The kind of closeness that used to hold people up ... the porch, the boardroom, the long dinner, the friend who knew the real you ... has quietly disappeared. And nobody has mapped the way back.

So here’s the real question.

If we’re all aching to come back together, but we’re coming out of a decade ... maybe several ... that rewarded us for performing instead of connecting, and if those of us who are leaders, the ones with the most to lose by admitting we’re disconnected, are actually the loneliest of all ... then the question is simple.

Where do we go from here? Three forces, all hitting at once. Everybody feels the distance. Almost nobody knows how to close it.

It’s a thread I’ve been pulling for the last three years. And I think I’ve landed on something very few people have ... a way forward that takes us off the path most of us already sense isn’t the right one.

That’s what I want to get into in the next issue. Because I think the usual answer to all of this isn’t just wrong ... it’s actually making things worse. And I’ll show you exactly what I mean.

But for now, I just want to hear from you. I’m honestly curious ... does any of what I’ve laid out here match what you’re seeing out there?

Have you felt one of these forces in your own life lately? The hunger for real community. The emptiness of chasing impressions on social media and beyond. Or that quiet loneliness of being the person everyone else turns to ... the one who can’t exactly raise a hand and ask for help.

If any of that rings true, hit reply and tell me what resonated. I read every email I get, and it would mean the world to hear from you.

It’s good to be back.

Mark

P.S. I almost didn’t write this. Coming back after being gone this long feels a little like walking back into a party you left without saying goodbye. But my kids were right. Keeping this to myself doesn’t sit right anymore. So here I am. More soon.