Death by a Thousand Cuts
Halfway through life, I’ve started to think a lot about death. It seems a heavy topic to raise at the start of a new year but, tell me, when is a good time?
Death has come knocking on the door of family, friends, and clients. It’s made me think we don’t talk about it enough. Death seems to arrive like the most shocking, unexpected, and unwanted of guests.
The past two years, it has been unrelenting, starting with my brother-in-law, Mark Stevens. Looking back, he was always curious about death. He wrote manuscripts with death as a theme. Even on his first date with my sister, he took her to a cemetery in Oxford to look at old tombstones. I would have run a mile. But she stayed and they connected over the lives they imagined marked on those stones. They went on to have one of the greatest love stories I’ve seen so far.
Mark was one of the healthiest people I knew. He ate salad most days, hardly drank, never smoked, and yet myeloma came and eventually took his life four days before my 50th birthday.
The party that had been planned weeks in advance went on because Mark would have wanted it to. As everyone toasted champagne to 50 years of me, I was reminded that none of us are here forever and, like my brother-in-law, my days are marked.
So, let them be marked by more of the stuff that matters.
The No-Name-Tags-Necessary Workshop
Like most of Gen X, my education has been geared toward working for others, not myself. This is why I call myself the most reluctant entrepreneur.
So, at the start of the Markd Global journey, we brought together what we thought would be the toughest crowd, six male leaders to prove that we could make a business out of purpose. Purpose, especially now, can feel like an overused word, intangible, ethereal, and even fluffy, yet shown to have a powerful personal and business case.
I believed then, as I do now, that purpose is the Principal P in business and life. I wanted our company to create an experience that could open hearts, minds, and business models to make our troubled world a better place. If I was going to be an entrepreneur, this felt like the noblest path to take.
The leaders we gathered, including my brother-in-law, were diverse and successful with one thing in common – they were all called Mark. We called it the no-name-tags-necessary workshop, an intentional icebreaker to open up male leaders to purpose and making their mark in their spheres of influence.
It worked. I had never seen professional men who hardly knew each other be so authentic.
Breathe in the Wonder of the World
One of the leaders in the room was Mark Cushway. He had been living with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) for most of his life. Referred to me by a close friend, Mark had sold his share of a successful business, received life-saving new lungs, and wanted to work out what was next in work, family, and life.
He was in my mind a perfect client. The exercise that challenged Mark most during what later became PX™ – The Purpose Experience – was having a longer-term vision for his life. He broke down when I asked him for his 10-year vision.
“I can’t see a future with me in it,” I remember him saying.
As one of the longest-living CF survivors, he had been burdened by the insidiousness of a disease that impacted his lungs and every organ in his body which had limited having a vision for his own life. I found it fascinating that the company he co-founded with his previous business partner had been insightfully called mivision.
It was also apparent that living one breath at a time had given Mark an extraordinary gift to be truly present in every situation. He would breathe in the colours, sounds, and smells of a moment that most of us miss or take for granted. The source of his pain was his platform.
“But what would you do if you had 10 years?” I asked.
The words came out of him like they had always been there. He wanted to start a new business, write a book, share his story with a broader audience, run a marathon – even half, travel with family, build true friendships, and have lots of people in his home. And mostly see his wife and daughter – Leigh and Em– be all they could be.
I watched Mark over the next six years – through his Facebook updates, CF and men’s health advocacy, heartfelt videos, and amazing Instagram minimalist photography (followed by more than 48K people) – do all these things. He started a successful business, drafted a book, wrote a play and saw it performed, and made a tree change to Mudgee, a town in Australia’s wine country. He was a born communicator making his mark on the world with a momentum that had not been there before. Mark was led by purpose.
Then in October last year, we Facetimed, and he announced a new battle to overcome. It wasn’t CF now but a rare but aggressive cancer that had penetrated his transplanted lungs. Hope had always been Mark’s highest-order value and it was the word of the moment.
“The doctors tell me one thing, but no one can take my hope away,” he said.
We made plans to meet in Australia in December as I wanted to interview Mark for this blog and a new podcast. However, I didn’t get to see him as he passed on 2nd December 2024 in the presence of his beloved wife, Leigh. He was 62 years old and one of the longest survivors of CF. A beautiful article was written by Mark in his final days and published in one of Australia’s leading newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, imploring his daughter to “breathe in the wonder of the world”.
I believe he was imploring us too.
The article will be published in the mivision website from Feb 2025.
Making Your Mark
We learn so much from the leaders we work with, as they hopefully do from our team at Markd Global. In retelling the stories of Mark Stevens and Mark Cushway, who were there at the beginning of our journey, we honour their legacy at the start of this brand-new year.
They remind us that death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we still live. I believe purpose is found in a part of us that never dies. Maybe that’s why we struggle with death so much because we are born with eternity in our hearts. Death is not the end of our story, just a part.
And a new year presents an opportunity to write a new 365-page chapter with more of the stuff that matters.
I didn’t get to connect with Mark Cushway as I had hoped in Australia, but I did get to reconnect with our team to refine our purpose of “Unleashing purpose to make your mark.”
Being named Mark isn’t a prerequisite to work with us by any means, but if your parents did name you Mark and you want to unleash your purpose in 2025 and beyond, reach out at hello@markdglobal.com.