I grew up in public housing, living on food stamps for the first ten years of my life.

That’s not where most finance executives start their story. But it’s where mine begins — and it shaped everything that came after.

Growing up with very little taught me something early that took many of my peers decades to figure out: money and happiness are not the same thing. I was poor, but I wasn’t miserable. What I lacked wasn’t joy — it was opportunity. And those are very different things.

When my family moved out of public housing, I saw for the first time how wide the world actually was. The people I’d grown up around weren’t less capable or less driven — they just couldn’t see what I could suddenly see. Opportunity changes everything.

I almost didn’t go to college. It wasn’t really on my radar. Then my 11th grade counselor sat me down, told me to take the PSAT, and said he thought I could do more. That one conversation changed my life. I joined the US Army under the college fund program, spent a year and a half in South Korea, and came home with the means and the motivation to make something of it.

I went on to earn an accounting degree from the University of Georgia, an MBA in finance from Georgia State — at night, while working — and my CPA. I built a career in corporate finance, including time at Turner Broadcasting, doing work I genuinely love: understanding how money moves, and how to use it as a force for good in the world.

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And then I had children.

Watching them stand at the edge of their own futures — thinking about what they wanted to do, who they wanted to become — made me stop and ask a question I had never really asked myself: Why do we work?

Not how. Not how much. Why.

That question is what this site is about. Not hustle culture. Not climbing for its own sake. But the deeper thing underneath all of it — purpose, meaning, and what it actually looks like to show up fully in your work, your health, your relationships, and your faith.

I’m still in corporate finance. I still love what I do. But I’ve learned that a career can be both successful and purposeful — and that the two aren’t in conflict if you know what you’re working for.

That’s the conversation I want to have here. I’m glad you found it.

— Mark